"Double Elvis.
Discrason and is a production of Double Elvis.
“The stories about the grateful dead, in their early days as a band, specifically about”
their harmonica player, Pig Pen, are insane. A band known for their drug use, Pig Pen did not get high. His bandmates would smoke grass, and he would drink booze. His bandmates would drop LSD, and he would drink more booze. His bandmates would play improvisational electric music, and Pig Pen would play the blues.
Ron Pig Pen, McCurney, was obsessed with the blues. He was one of the band's strongest links to the traditional American music they loved. In part, because Pig Pen was committed to living the life of his blues musician heroes. Part of this meant dedicating himself to the canon of pre-imposed war black American music, but it also meant the steady diet of cheap, highly potent alcohol known as rock-cut supplemented
with even cheaper barbecue and hot links. A diet that did a minute at the age of 27. A prior to that, Pig Pen made great music. That music you heard at the top of the show. That wasn't great music.
That was a preset loop from my mellow tron, called mellow open door blues MK1. I played you that loop, because I can't afford the rights to Mrs. Brown you've got a lovely daughter by Herman's Herman's.
“And why would I play you that specific slice of peacock cheese could I afford it?”
Because that was the number one song in America, on May 5th, 1965, and that was the
day the warlocks played Magu's Pizza Parlor in Manmo Park, California, taking the first step
for what would become one of the most culturally influential bands of all time, the grateful dead. On this episode, grass, LSD, rock-cut blues, the end of Pig Pen, the beginning of the grateful dead. Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, were sitting in the back of a car the belong to a friend of Bob's.
They were getting high on one of Neil Cassidy's joints. Cassidy, the inspiration for Jack Kerrowax, Dean Moriarty character, and his groundbreaking novel on the road, was a hero to all of them.
“Smoking his dope was seen as a privilege.”
Jerry and Bob had just played their second show in their new electric band The Warlocks.
Phil had just seen the first rock-and-roll show of his young life. He was a friend, a fellow musician, but not part of their band. Yeah. His mind was blown, and the energy of it all was unlike anything he'd ever experienced. It was a different type of gas from the sig of the newly electric Bob Dylan's explosive
lyrics that Phil heard on the radio, the postal truck he delivered mail from. In different still from the energy of the Beatles backbeat and clanging electric guitars he watched on his television set on the Ed Sullivan show for a far. Up close and personal, live electric music was something else entirely. It was enough to set you brain on fire.
Smoking Cassidy's dope, they were all on a post show high, and the performance was a success, sure, but that didn't matter. But made the moment special was that they felt an unspoken connection to something they held in the highest esteem, tradition. Specifically the tradition of American music.
That night, May 12th, 1965, the goose pizza parlor and menlo park just south of San Francisco. The Warlocks burned a joint up with Chuck Berry, Alan Wolf, and Freddie King covers. Jumped up blues numbers played with the energy of pent up white teenagers, desperate to shake some action. While Garcia weir, their drummer Bill Kurtzman, and basis at the time, Dana Morgan, didn't
arrive at rock and roll from Dylan and the Beatles as so many of their peers would. They instead arrived on the proper course of rock and roll lineage. Just as Dylan and Lenin and McCartney had, be a bluesy country, and for Garcia and company via bluegrass and jug band music as well, music that predated and informed and led to the creation of rock and roll.
Prior to the formation of the Warlocks, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and a long li...
put in time with Jerry's jug band mother McCree's uptown jug champions.
“Jug band music was traditional black party music, a genre that dated back to the early”
1900s. It's originators, the Memphis jug band, Gus Cannon's jug stalkers, and the Dixievan jug blowers, traditionally featured in a ray of acoustic and makeshift instruments, swash tub bass, juice harm, harmonic a washboard, stovetops, acoustic guitar, piano and of course, the jug, stone wearer glass, and bloated two by its player to create a deep, wild
buzzing sound. Jug bands were hopped up, energetic, intended to drive the party. Jug band music directly influenced to English skiffle groups of the 1950s and went on
to influence the Beatles.
And of course, jug band influence can be heard in the American blues, bluegrass and folk that ran from Ma Rainy to Bill Monroe to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan.
“Nick could now, in 1965, be heard in the music of the Warlocks as well.”
They're set that night was modern by bluegrass and jug band music standards. They played dillins that's all over now, baby blue, rufus Thomas is walking the dog and sling harpo as I'm a king beam on others, but it was all part of the same tradition. A tradition that Jerry Garcia, Bob weir and their early bandmates were now a part of. The tradition of old weir to America.
Dylan rufus slim, their songs were part of the deeper lineage, a history of music that linked all the way back to traditional slave chants and field haulers, music that after the Civil War evolved into traditional ballots and breakdowns of a bad, bad man. Staggerly the loner of the Pimp, the end of Billy Lyons. Railroad Bill feared by breakmen everywhere, train robber extraordinaire, Tom Devil creeping
up into unsuspecting girl's beds under the cover of night, and Willy Brennan, the highway
“robber, bold, gay of English descent from out on the moor.”
These men were legends, folk heroes, desperate to survive their own demons in an America that didn't want them, an America that shut them out because of the color of their skin, the class they were born out of, and their refusal and/or inability to conform to the standards of civilized society. Their legends were born of murder, robbery, bootlegging, and other violent acts of rebelliousness.
The mythology of these men detailed half a centuries worth of ruff and routy ways and song. Their casualties, among them in their like, little sady who caught a bullet from a 44-smokeless, by Ola Lee whose fate inspired violence worthy of a life sentence. And the Knoxville girl, the victim of an unexpected delved flagged from a blunt stick to the skull by her psychotic lover, who then drugged by her golden curls down to the river side,
and proceeded a beater to death, outlawed scoundrels, men who were in league with the devil. It is perhaps this story tellers good fortune that those three qualifiers all make up the old English origin of the word Warlock, but it is merely the humorous coincidence of cosmic Americana, minus the Tolkien magic Warlocks are bad men. Just the same as Outlaw's scoundrels, rounders, and ramblers.
They're all part of the same musical alchemy that runs from Tommy Johnson to Led Zeppelin to Jeffrey Lee to Slayer to Jack White. What's the actual difference? They are threaded by the same spirit, the sorcerer's alchemy, their musical alchemy, the pharmaceutical alchemy, white lightning, refer the opium gong, junkheads, moochers, sniffers
and hoochie cootchers, the men with the jive, preacher drank some ginger, said it was 'cause of the flu, that old man's been lying, he's got the jake leg too, tell it to me, tell it to me, drink corn liquor, let the cocaine be, cocaine is going to kill my honny dead, drugs, liquor, magic murder, killers, thieves, loose women and other sort of characters, old, weird, America, this was the tradition of the Warlocks, this was the tradition of
the music they played that night at Maguys, weird, and they didn't mind, it suited them just fine, because 22-year-old Jerry Garcia, 17-year-old Bob Weird, 19-year-old Bill Cretzman in 25-year-old Phil Lesh, were all weird as fuck, at a time when other kids their age were taken solely by mop tops, beach, blanket, bingo, and the ensuing spaceries, these kids were by comparison, into some weird shit, mainly music from way off the grid.
Garcia were this jug band and bluegrass obsession, weird with this Garcia obsession,
Cretzman's New Orleans and R&B obsession, and Lesh by the time he attended his first
rock show that night was already deeply obsessed with classical avant-garde composition,
As weird as they all were, they're all still just kids, kids from diverse bac...
working, middle and upper-class socioeconomic backgrounds, they were children of the straight
“world, no matter how much they fancy themselves otherwise, and they were approached to”
the music they were into at that young age, was more scholarly than hand to mom, none of them lived the tragic lives of the anti-heroes portrayed in the folk songs they loved and performed in the influence them. They mind what they could from those men, from the myths and the legends of folk, but otherwise they lived relatively straight lives, how the allies that were quickly falling under
the dominant influence of cannabis and LSD experimentation, but nonetheless straight in comparison to stagger me in railroad bill. In the members of the warlocks, despite their youth, knew that by the rights of tradition because of who they were as people in the nature of the music they played, that they were indebted to tragic old weird Americana, but the warlocks were looking to learn and
play music, not dire and up in jail, all but one of them. Whereas pigpen, someone asked from the back seat, inquiring about the fifth missing member of the warlocks, Ron McCurney, aka Blue Ron because of his obsession with the blues, aka pigpen because of his funk, aka pig because his bandmates were not with other sense of humor or brevity.
The answer came from in-between hits of Cassidy's grass, oh pig, he's probably down by the train tracks drinking junk.
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“Save, you can do it with your own business.”
Now, let's go. The bread truck barreled down the side of the mountain above Palo Alto. It's driver, Tony, a black man who'd rather do without a stop by the white buzz. He's suspected we're on his tail and in a mark car. Pushed his truck to the edge of the speed limit.
He believed his truck to have magical powers, so he named it the seventh son. In the truck lived up to its name. It had survived this run before down the mountain side from the bootleg room, Mahonda, filled to the brim with as much high power to legal hooch, Tony, and his partner could afford. Whiskey had only a $1.50 a gallon.
It was worth the risk. His partner and crime had faithful the truck, and in Tony behind the wheel, Down shifting and makeshift Jake Briggs to save dough on worn pads for the bread truck. No doubt. More dough, more whiskey.
Tony was smart. And so was his partner. Pick that. They'd make it down without incident and take some of their stats. Out to the railroad yard and post up by the tracks with pigs harmonica.
Tony's acoustic, drink junk and play the blues. Drinking quote unquote "junk" was a reference to the type of alcohol pigpin. Harmonica player for the warlocks preferred. The lowest quality booze in wine, he could get his hands on. Bootleg whiskey, white port and lemon juice, sweet wine, known as ombre, and of course, night train.
This constituted most of pigpin's diet. The other part was filled by hot drinks, pigs feet, and cheap barbecue. Food and drink that he knew is heroes to blues many worship, lightening Hopkins, Teabone Walker, howling wolf, lived off of pure rock gut. Didn't matter.
It was part of the life, like the bootlegging and hanging out by the tracks playing music. As was everything about pigpin, particularly the way he looked. Unlike the rest of the warlocks, pig did not look at all, like any one or anything, even remotely connected to the straight world. He wore greasy denim, so greasy his jeans stiffened.
The grease on his jeans was second only to the tremendous amount of grease in his black hair.
Leather jacket, a bike chain, from a Harley, permanently bolted onto his wrist in a big bad boyle marking his chin.
He was the wild one without Brando's physical attractiveness.
And he could have cared less. Little Walter was an archetype, not little richer.
“Blue and lonesome and funky like Fred McDowell's slide,”
and funky also like the filthy peanut's character he drew his nickname from. Unlike his bandmates in the warlocks, pigpin wasn't interested in smoking grass or expanding his mind with LSD or really anything that preoccupied the imagination of middle class. Pigpin was almost solely interested in blues. He grew up with it. His old man was a buggy wuggy pianist who later turned in his heavy-right hand
for a gig as a rhythm and blues DJ for the Bay Area's KRE radio station. The old man spun records under the name "Cool Breeze" and his son, young Ron, was knocked out by those records. He made the short leap backward from Elvis Presley to Art The Cutto. Elvis was cool, but barely rated amongst the originals. For every white version of a rhythm and blues song,
“be it Elvis Presley or Pat Boone or later the Beatles or Bob Dylan,”
there was almost always a more interesting, authentic black version of the song.
And thus, one of the earliest versions of white America's concept of hipness took root in Pigpin. To be hip in the early 1960s for young white musicians, meant you were into the blues and that you identified with the plight of black Americans. It was the same as it was for the beats in the '50s whose own hipness equation was answered by the sub-cultress affinity for early jazz, specifically 'B' musicians.
So as a young white teenager who was in almost nothing but blues music, Pigpin when he wasn't hanging in playing with the warlocks, hung out almost exclusively with Tani, a black man and black pop-bladed east-power out to blues, blues, nothing else. The real roadyard, it was rhythm, not just romance. The sound of the big trains tracked Pigpin's harmonica, his vocal and Tani's acoustic guitar.
“The world was suddenly smaller, and the magic of history was suddenly less esoteric.”
Alongside those old frets, Pigpin rooted himself into his own place in time. He felt connected at one with the tragic and cosmic continuum of old weird America. The Pullman Porter saw the fellow black man working his way through the private rail car he was assigned to, and knew immediately that death had blown in through his door. He lowered his gaze, went about his business waiting on his wealthy passengers and ignored the man.
The man was moving quickly toward the front of the train, brazenly with the sidearm of the open, down by his right thigh, all casual. It went on seeing a couple of his determined stride, the passengers were numb the wiser, so they were allowed to live along with the Porter for now. The Porter knew who he was, railroad bill of course. He of the vendetta against the big railroads, he was the only black man not wearing a Pullman uniform,
who was either stupid enough or brave enough to enter the white's only first-class train car in 1895.
But the oppulent Pullman cabin wasn't his final destination. He was headed to the jackpot, the freight car, because that was where the loot was. Sheriff McMillan, Stinson, Stewart, they all met the demise of the other end of railroad bills rifle, and so too would whoever stood in his way on this day. Railroad bill made his way into the freight car, and there were two Pinkerton's armed guard.
Bill immediately shot one and then instructed the other to open the safe. He did as he was told, and then filled Bill's gunny sack with all the cash and gold and silver bullion that would fit. When he was done, railroad billed dispassionately empty to another blast from his rifle right into. He reloaded and made his way to the engine car at the front. He ordered the breakman to halt the steam-driven locomotive.
His loaded shotgun pointed into his face made it clear, railroad bill was not fucking around. The breakman gripped the heavy brake levers pulled on the safety trigger and heaved the levers down with all his might. Nest the train slowed, railroad bill made his way to the sideboard of the engine car, jumped into the night, fleeing away from the train with the loot and bolstering the myth of railroad bill in the process, a myth that would echo down to the ages and out of pigs' harmonic gun decades later.
The train barrel through the yard, the fire and the trash can burn passively, warm northern California spring air, a bottle of night train between them on the ground. Tony beat down a crude rhythm on his acoustic to the one to the five again and again. He added time perfectly with the rhythm of the old train, snaking its way past them. Pigpen blue and his heart came up for air after his solo and leaned into the lyrics.
railroad billed, standing on the hill, he never worked and he never will.
Ride, ride, build, ride. Sounded about right to pigpen. We'll be right back after this world, world, world.
Mama, how do you feel the great love of all?
Hmm, do you feel it? Salt and so creamy.
Hey! We can give Papa creamy his...
“Nutella, your fan mama's son Papa believed. No Nutella is Nutella.”
The bartender Larry took his eye out and placed it on the bar. It was glass of course. Like the many tumblers in Martini glass is stacked into various towers behind the stick. There are hardly any pine glasses or stemwear. Be a rewind, we're really served. This was a booze joint. When Larry took his eye out, met the joint was jumping, which tonight it most certainly was. The in-room, a singles joint for the recently divorced stopover place for flight attendants and a must stop for traveling salesmen between San Francisco and Palo Alto.
The bar was where you went if you were middle-aged, horny and hadn't quite given up yet on your chances of getting laid. Plus reds on pitch black interior, the in-room was decided the adult, and it was also part of the west coast, small the mid-sized circuit rooms for touring artists, Marvin Gaye, Jackie to Shannon and the coasters, where they all put in work on their paths up and down the coast. Someone decided the warlock should be the house band, warm up for the headliners, and keep the joint buzzing in the booze flowing.
“Five-fifty minutes sets a night, six nights a week. It was real work, five sets a night, and by the estimation of all in the band, the pig pen, the only way to work through it was while experimenting with their new favorite pastime LSD.”
The drug had recently made its way to the west coast via Ken Keesie's Mary Pranksters, and during the warlocks early days everything about LSD appealed to them, especially as it pertained to the musicianship.
Finding themselves as a band and learning how to write their first songs.
Regarsia LSD combined with electric music was total freedom. It was a liberation from the demanding rigidity of bluegrass precision playing, and he carried the clarity of his banjo playing along for the trip, while the rest of the group melted their own influences. Classical avant-garde, R&B, rock, and the blues with Garcia's bluegrass. The parts have been fused into one hole by the spark of acid and electric instrumentation.
Out behind the inn room, railroad tracks weave their way north and south, while the band performed they could hear the passing trains. They latched into the rhythm, the pig pen rode that old Tommy Rail at his harmonica, and sometimes with his organ while Garcia LSD cuts away the weird channel their latest obsession.
“Another train entirely jazz-althos saxophonist John Coltrin, who had been dominating their collective musical imagination.”
Train as he was referred to, provided a vision of improvisation for Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesch. Train would vamp on one chord, which from a practical standpoint for Lesch would literally just begun the play's instrument, the electric bass guitar, made all the sense in the world. And trains genius wasn't that he as a soloist would improvise. It was that he would allow his highly qualified side men to improvise along with him.
The root chord vamping along was their platform, the song's melody, they're through line. And their own creative imagination was the steam powering their life performances far the fuck out, down previously on her track before inevitably returning back to the station from their trip together as one after achieving dizzying heights of collective improvisation.
It was during this heavy time at the end room where the warlocks wrote their first song. Of course, it was called caution.
Do not stop on the tracks. Garcia Lesch, we're a Christmasman, they knew they were on to something they all did, except Pigpan. Pig, as the only non-LSD grass devotee, hung back and waited for his moment. When it would arrive, he'd dig into the parts of the set where the bands improvisation took the back seat to more traditional blues numbers, aimed at making sure the crowd was still there with them.
Holling wools version of Little Red Rooster, Jr. Wells version of Good Morning with a school girl. Pigpan's beloved blues have been reduced to becoming the functionary bridge between the traditional music they first inspired the group. With this new weird Americana, the Griffle Dead were outcommitting at the in-room back in 1965. For Pigpan, this trip was getting strange, and it was only about to get stranger. They needed a new band name.
A downtown New York art band had beat them to the vinyl press with the name "The Warlocks". Though they too would eventually abandon the moniker for another name. They've held it on their own. They needed a new band name. A downtown New York art band had beat them to the vinyl press with the name "The Warlocks".
Though they too would eventually abandon the moniker for another name. They've held it on the ground. But at the time for Garcia and Co, a new name was needed.
They were at Phil Lesch's house bandying about potential band names, all of w...
Garcia grabbed Lesch's dictionary, closed his eyes, opened it to a random page, pointed with his index finger, opened his eyes,
and there it was in black and white. The grateful dead.
“Without even knowing the meaning, the juxtaposition of those two words immediately spoke to the group.”
And when they read the meaning of the phrase, it was sealed. The grateful dead is a folk tale about a hero who comes upon a dead man, a dead man who left nothing behind, who has no family to pay for his funeral. The hero expecting nothing in return pays the dead man's funeral death. Later the hero comes upon some impossible task, where upon the dead man,
from beyond the grave grateful for the dead the hero paid for him,
comes to the hero's assistance, helping him overcome his impossible task, i.e. the grateful dead.
It's a story about karma about paying it forward about a generosity of spirit that was evident in the band's hip origins, demonstrated in their improvisational playing style and in their personalities. The name was perfect. So, too, was the newly-christened grateful dead's timing.
“The West Coast, San Francisco, in particular, was undergoing an evolution from its beatific in Bohemian subculture into the big bang of the hippie movement.”
A movement that would not only dominate the rest of the '60s, but also go on to be the single most influential cultural movement this country has ever seen. Ken Keesie's acid tennis were sweeping the subculture on the West Coast. These were the days before LSD was officially made illegal, and that Keesie's tripped out parties up and down the coastline. In rooms painted fluorescent and lit by strobe lights, black lights, and flooded with visuals from video loops on repeat,
and with the new psychedelia being improvised by the grateful dead as Keesie's acid test house band.
The crowd was eclectic turned on in strange. Hip college kids left over beats from the beginning of the decade, Hell's Angels poets, whoever was as Keesie in his band of traveling Mary Prankster's categorized as being "on the bus." A phrase they coined while traveling the states in '65 and '66 in an effort to spread the gospel of LSD. The acid test were mostly West Coast, localized version of Keesie's roving tour.
The acid test were meant to enlighten the nation in subvert square society. It was a wild scene to say the least.
“For Keesie and the rest of his married pranksters, the idea was simple, spread the message.”
Get on the bus, bring the trip to wherever the people demanded, and in February 1966 that meant Watts Los Angeles. The acid party was about to hit the road, and so too was its house band, the grateful dead. Someone had found an old rundown warehouse in Compton, Keesie thought it'd perfect. Worked out that the acid test was coming to LA. Hundreds of Kees looking to get turned on showed up, and the acid mixed with cool aid and served as punch was particularly strong that evening.
LA Compton Watts, this was not San Francisco, not the hate, not even the in-room and far the fuck away from the goose. This was dark. Maybe it was the potency of the LSD that nighter, the set that the band was putting out there. Death had no mercy in this land, banging powerfully through the band's new sound system. Designed by Chief Head and LSD chemist Augusta Sassi Stanley.
Maybe it was the scores of LAPD circling the warehouse with its curious young partygoers, wild eyed and manic. Young women with their skirts too short, talking gibberish, young men with their hair too long, talking jive. LAPD cruiser circled the warehouse. Welcome to the show, the only show in town. The long-haired freaky people of the god knows what in that warehouse.
The cops were all tuned into the same radio frequency in their cars. Their windows opened the clap back from the patrolmen squawking into and out of the radios, escaping out into the Irving Nighttime air, creating a literal feedback leap of ignorance and squared on. Inside the band played on. Normally the acid test gigs were free, but something about that night had the band on the run.
Frustrated by their inability to lock in, scared like the crowd of the cops lurking outside with the Billy Clubs, their guns and their punitive discriminatory, very unhypidious about justice. The dead merged on stage. Pigpen was apart from the band. Drunk, not stoned, and unable to latch on to whatever his bandmates were feeling to latch on to themselves.
A woman in the audience began to freak out, too much acid. And the band stopped playing, and then Pigpen heard it. Through all the madness, familiarity. Sound again of a passing freight train up behind the warehouse. He looked into the crowd, saw the woman freaking out, saw the men trying to cool her out, saw them fail.
He caught her eye and grabbed the mic on its stand, and in time with the rhyt...
that Pigpen blew her off and sang out.
"I wanna know, do you feel dry?"
“The woman was struck silently, the crowd began to come to focus on the Pigpen.”
Again, a little bit louder now. "I wanna know, you feel dry?" She mowed the murder, yes. The constrated pig, the train carried on, and so did Pigpen. "I wanna know, do you find your mind?"
The crowd freak out, checking, colluded, responded, immunity with Billy S. "I wanna know, do you feel good?" In this time, the crowd was raptured, so yes. "Give me a hug, yes." "I said, I wanna know, do you feel good?"
"Pigpen." "Pigpen."
"I don't want to tell anyone that."
"There's many things you've got to do in one more time."
“"You've got to think about your neighbors."”
"You've got to think about your friends." "You've got to think about your brothers." "You've got to think about your sisters." "And everybody that means something." "You then pointed to the freak out of chick."
"Who's by now in raptured with his sermon and blurt it out." "Somebody in the law." "Somebody in the law's a little bit of stench." "If I want to know, do you know what I'm talking about?" "I said, I wanna know."
"You know what I'm talking about."
"Now tell me one more time. Do you feel good?" "Then if you can, you would get all the bottom of this place." "Because shit's about to get me."
“"And with that, pigpen walked off stage and into the L.A. air."”
"By now, the cops had the warehouse surrounded." "They'd play saw horses around the eggs, it's to corrode the kids as they split." "Pig was dejected and the gig was a bust and the party was a bust and now if he was in careful, he might very well get busted." "As he made his way up back, out towards the tracks, he came upon Ken Keesie wrestling with a giant barrel of red glowing cool in." "And there were numerous cops shuffling about wondering what he was up to."
Keesie bent down by the sewer drain on the side of the road, pulling the barrel down with him and emptying its contents out and into the drain. Thus getting rid of the remaining batch of L.S.D., literally right under the noices of the cops. Pigpen could not believe how strange the trip had become. And just a year later, his band, the band he'd started with his close friend Jerry Garcia would go on to sign to Warner Brothers records. They'd record numerous albums, two of them great, working man's dead in American beauty.
And those two albums being the ones that he'd closest to the band's old, weird Americana roots. Ironically, in an effort to write a pop hit for Warner Brothers because the bulk of the material on their other releases was, like the Watts acid test too far out for the record-buying public, and admittedly too far out for Pigpen as well. He was like an American Brian Jones, not recognizing the value of the very band he and his hipness essentially created, because he was too fucked up. And by the time 1973 rolled around, everything had changed.
The hate community was scattered, all that money had changed, everybody. Janis was gone, oh, deed three years earlier. She and Pig used to split half a gallon of Southern comfort every night, they were together during their on-again-off-again relationship. They used to make so much noise and Pig's bedroom that band members used harder drugs, wondered how they could ball all night while so gone on booze.
It seemed like an eternity ago. The band was now settled into something resembling a professional groove, writing music regularly, recording it, and then going out on the road, promoted like professional musicians. They even succumbed to traditional promotional tactics at the behest of Warner Brothers. Weird is fucked from or sure, but nonetheless part of the music industry machine, on the same.
They weren't part of the straightforward, far from it, but they were now part of the music machine, whether they liked it or not. And despite their far-out asset inspired oral explorations on record and on tour, the new weird America, the grateful dead were creating and living it. They were a world apart from the old weird America that inspired them in the beginning.
Traditional American music was tragic. The grateful dead were becoming an institution, beloved, lovable, tripped out teddy bears, a far cry from the bad men that inspired the ballads and break down to the warlocks, railroad bill, Willie Brennan, and staggered Lee. But the grateful dead were still indebted to that tradition,
and the bill was about to come to. Tragedy was the currency. Death was at the dead's door, and death had no mercy in this land. July 1972, pigpens drinking its spun out of control one to many times. He wasn't quite out of the band, but he wasn't quite in it either.
The dead were touring, but he couldn't keep up anymore. His drinking was so bad that physically he had flare-ups of internal needing and his playing suffered greatly. At a time when the band was exploring the further regions of improvisation,
His place in the band was suspect to save the least.
Rock Scully, the band's manager, called him out on tour for falling asleep on stage.
“And after that, pigpens was forced to take some time off to try to regain his health.”
The band was certain he would recover, but pigpens knew better. He was in his marron county apartment, fixed in the die. He'd separated himself from his girlfriend, his family, his band, telling them, "I don't want you around when I die."
On March 8, 1973, pigpens, in the throes of an internal hemorrhage from Cerroces of the liver,
a similar cause of that, the killed Jerry Garcia's hero Jack Caroher.
“They back in his bed and contemplated the new set of lyrics he was working on.”
Seems like all my yesterdays are filled with pain. There's nothing but darkness tomorrow. If you're going to do like you say you do, if you're going to change your mind and walk away,
don't make me live in this pain no longer.
You know I'm getting weaker, not stronger. When he closed his eyes out last time, he knew when he was doing. He knew where he was going, and he knew why. It was tragic, and necessary as the dead had come to. Ron Pigpens MacKernan generously paid it, and his band, the dead, would forever be grateful.
Tragedy of the fallen, their very own bad man had broken down. And now the ballad of Pigpens will forever be son as an integral piece of the grateful bed's origin story. Rooting the lore of the band firmly in the tradition of old weird America.
“His tombstone says, once and forever remember of the grateful dead.”
He died at 27, and that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly, and has produced in partnership with double eldest credits for this episode. Can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com.
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Visit disgracelandpod.com/membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, tick, talk, Twitter, and Facebook at disgracelandpod. And on YouTube at youtube.com/@disgracelandpod. Rock a roll-back. He's a bad bad man.
