So Many Roads Read Online Free PDF

though the album wasn’t in stores yet, Garcia let that odd comment slide—he was growing accustomed to remarks like that fromtheir budding fan base—and amiably replied, with a smile, “We get smashed and make ’em.”
    Sometimes they did; the nitrous tanks at Pacific High were testament to those habits. But something rare and miraculous was happening with these new songs. Everyone in the Dead had complaints about their first three studio albums: too rushed, too overproduced, way too expensive. It was impossible to satisfy them all at once. As they began filing into Pacific High, though, the mood was uncommonly optimistic. “We had pushed the envelope in experimental,” Hart says. “We had to simplify. That’s why that record was acoustic. There wasn’t a lot of percussion. Bill and I played it very straight. Maracas, congas—light stuff.” Garcia would be singing all but one of the songs, and he was eager to, in his words, “boogie” and not be bogged down in the tape-montage experimentation that ran through their last two albums.
    From its inception the new album was mapped out. Bob Matthews, who had introduced Garcia and Weir before the Dead was even a glimmer in anyone’s imagination, would be engineering, along with Betty Cantor. Matthews taped the band working on the songs, put the material in what he thought was a proper sequence, then gave a copy to each band member, who practiced the songs in that order. Omitted at the onset was “Mason’s Children,” another song about death and collapse, this one swathed in campfire harmonies and a folk-rock bounce. (Like “New Speedway Boogie,” it had been written directly after Altamont.) “It was a no-brainer,” says Matthews. “It didn’t fit. That was by agreement.”
    Hunter and Garcia had crafted indelible songs before, yet something about these new ones, many written at the Larkspur house, had a special cohesiveness, a sustained vision. They were littered with images of hard-working, hard-living Americana types—the miners in “Cumberland Blues,” the jack-hammering highway worker in “Easy Wind,” thecareening conductor in “Casey Jones”—along with a mysterious character, “Black Peter.” “Dire Wolf” was set in “Fennario,” an imaginary burgh overrun with the creatures. Like classic folk songs, the tunes were both down to earth and mythical. Tapping into themes of community, terror, darkness, woozy love, and trains, the songs felt more universal and timeless than anything they’d done before.
    By early 1970 less electric, more organic-sounding records were in vogue, as opposed to the post– Sgt. Pepper approach of extravagant sonic creations. Hunter was particularly taken with the music of the Band, but according to Cutler, financial considerations also played a part in their change of direction. Having put themselves in the hole during the making of Aoxomoxoa , the Dead simply couldn’t spend indiscriminately, at least not for a long time. “Garcia and I analyzed what they’d done in the past and why it wasn’t successful and what could be done about that,” says Cutler. “I kept banging on Jerry and saying, ‘Do your album in one bang. Minimal recording cost. Do the two-week album. Just get in there.’ And that’s what they did.”
    As they began to record in February, the preproduction work paid off. The sessions began around the time of “Dire Wolf,” paused for more touring, resumed in early March, and wrapped up around March 16. They bore down on two songs in particular. “Uncle John’s Band” had started life as a long band jam on a cassette given to Hunter; he then fashioned lyrics about the band and its scene that were the most hopeful he’d written. (“Goddamn, Uncle John’s mad!” went his first line, perhaps a nod to