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management thing. He’s taken charge. We’ve given him the power to do what we want to.” Garcia added, somewhat less optimistically, “Right now, things are looking good. But the whole thing about money is still something weird.”
    Since then the situation with Lenny had only grown stranger. “He looked like the straightest white man you ever saw,” says a member of the Dead world at the time, “but he had a good goddamn rap. Some people, you can’t read truth or falsity in their face.” Jon McIntire, another member of the Dead organization, was suspicious of Lenny, as was Ram Rod. Garcia would tell McIntire, “I believe what people tell me.” But not everyone was convinced. Mountain Girl once said to Hunter, “Why can’t you just trust Lenny? We need a manager who understands business.” Hunter reacted with what Mountain Girl recalls as “utter scorn at my naiveté and unwarranted confidence.”
    For the first time the air was filled with the promise of more income. Feeling guilty after the Altamont debacle, Garcia had asked Cutler to be the Dead’s tour manager; Cutler accepted and soon realized the band needed to play more gigs than ever to shore up their finances. Throughout 1969 they would make only a few thousand dollars a show: $5,000 for two nights at the Fillmore West; $7,500 for two nights at the Pavilion in Flushing, Queens; and $1,059.50 for appearing on Hugh Hefner’s TV series Playboy After Dark . “They knew that if they didn’t start to make serious money, the Dead would cease to exist,” says Cutler. “Every penny counted. We were living on $10-a-day per diems.”
    It would take Cutler months to get the Dead out of hock. Until then, when the musicians would ask where the money was, Lenny would tell them their “old ladies” had spent it, which wasn’t the case. When some in the organization asked Lenny to show them the books, he hesitated, then eventually turned over ledgers with entries that had clearly been erased and written over. (Lesh and Mickey Hart also confronted him at a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant and realized he also had two different sets ofbooks.) When questioned, Lenny had a habit of veering into extended Bible talk, almost as a way of zoning them out. The thought of dealing forcefully with Lenny Hart didn’t sit right with any of them—Garcia and Weir especially were not the most confrontational—but something had to give.
    At the same time, other parts of their operation were to some degree or another in jeopardy. Owsley Stanley, their acid-king soundman and quality-control inspiration, would soon find himself behind bars after the New Orleans bust. Those close to Garcia were beginning to notice that he could unexpectedly fall into grumpy, blackened moods. When Garcia came home at night he’d frequently grumble to Mountain Girl about one thing or another having to do with the band, then ask when dinner would be ready. Although Mountain Girl didn’t know it then, later she wondered whether this was the beginning of what she calls Garcia’s “secret drug life.” Cocaine was already on the scene; in fact, the band would give it a plug in “Casey Jones,” another new song they’d record for the new album. No one considered the drug even vaguely addictive.

    Three months after “Dire Wolf” was cut, a few Deadheads managed to slither in backstage at a show at Temple University in Philadelphia. No one knew how, but in the early days of rock ’n’ roll security, crashers were always possible. One of the fans found Garcia and asked what the band was working on, and Garcia boasted about the new album they’d just finished, Workingman’s Dead . “I like it better than any album we’ve done,” he told them.
    â€œThat’s all we do, is sit around and get smashed and listen to that album,” the fan said.
    Even