They lived in a boarding house in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district during the fabled Summer of Love in 1967, as drummer Bill Kreutzmann recalled in a 2015 article for the San Francisco Chronicle.That era in the band's history was riddled with countless incidents, both delightful and madcapped. “It’s versions like this that make me think the band must have even surprised themselves. Gissen was a Berkeley transfer student, a former Mount Holyoke lit major attracted to the wild scene burgeoning on the opposite coast. I'd get in there and say 'Don't you ever talk like that around my crew.' There was a very puritanical streak to Deadheads that held great pride in the fact that they didn't wear costumes; it was all about the music." Spouses and ex-spouses, and children – like Jerry Garcia's daughter Trixie – make up most of the female representation in the movie. It was fun. (Considering how connected so many old-school affiliates seem to remain today, the term seems presciently accurate.) Brightman continued to work in lighting design for Dead-related projects and, between 2004-2008, for the jamband Widespread Panic. “From the smoothness of the opening section of the song to the meltdown, drum-and-bass duet, and its rising-from-the-ashes triumphant return to light, this ‘Dark Star’ is one of the most deep and joyous journeys the Dead ever took.” Running time: 31:40. A 1973 Rolling Stone article about the burgeoning Grateful Dead business empire reveals the beginnings of the patchwork quilt of band-related cottage industries Rhoney Gissen Stanley remembered. Her fascination with how things worked helped her breeze through the available math and science classes at her Martinez, Calif. high school to the point that, she said, "they ran out of things for me to do, so they let me go over to the college to play at the lab.". Once, a company in Atlanta refused to rent gear to her. This recording begins mournfully. Grateful Dead 3/18/90 Hartford Civic Center JUST A LITTLE LIGHT. 8. The poster for the Grateful Dead’s Feb. 27, 1969, concert at the Fillmore West Ballroom in San Francisco. 10. hide caption. Garcia’s mother took him to see “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” when he was 6 years old, he once said in an interview. "Like, someone would say [about a female crew member] 'If she wasn't so ugly, I'd f*** her brains out.' "Bobby [Weir] opened it up, he had his guitar on him, and he just ushered me in," she remembers. There are versions of it that sound a lot like a half-hour of musique concrete, or as my mother described it, “like someone left the vacuum cleaner on.”. "If I wanted to hear them play loud on TV, then I better make sure it works. She also has an ongoing gig with the Chris Robinson Brotherhood and its associated projects, whose jam/Americana fandom overlaps heavily with Deadheads, recording their live shows as "Betty's Blends." I couldn't tell him, because that would not go, because I was a girl... [I would] play a dumb blonde and ask stupid questions and get them to understand their own self." After the lyric, in most performances, the song turns catty-wompus. Stephen.” You never know what you’ll get. 3. By the time Cantor was researching it, the pendulum of official opinion was already starting its swing backward; in 1966, California and Nevada became the first states to criminalize possession of the drug, and a federal ban would follow two years later. "There was so much voodoo going on with the flower children, 'What sign are you' or, 'Let's throw the I Ching,'" she tells me. Donna, who grew up near Florence, Ala. (the site of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, of which she is an inductee) worked as a teen backup vocalist on sessions in Muscle Shoals, recording behind Percy Sledge, Elvis and Cher, among others, at the famed studio there before falling in with the Dead — to whose fans she would eventually become a topic of endless argument. Fillmore East, New York City, Sept. 19, 1970. She enjoyed a lot of it. Fans have set up a crowdfunding account for her treatment. That's corroborated by the detailed 1994 reference text Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads. Usually, the thing that has changed between each listening is me. "The women formed a community, and that community still exists. Brent Mydland joined the band as keyboardist in 1979 and gave the Dead a jolt of new energy. I was just watching the footage from Buffalo 89' (What A Fucking Year!) Now and again I imagine a world in which Jerry Garcia is alive once more, and the band comes together, to finish what they started that night, and we are all young again. She began traveling regularly, sitting in on seminars about chemistry and metallurgy in Berkeley and San Francisco in the '60s — a place where lots of other young people were also investigating, in lots of different ways, how the universe fit together. When they split, she felt alienated and frozen out, as … Mydland spent most of his childhood living in Antioch, California, an hour east of San Francisco. Both liked to stretch tunes out into long improvisations; both had band members (John Cale and Phil Lesh, respectively) with roots in avant-garde music. 7. There is electronic weeping. She remembers sometimes pretending not to be in charge, in order to make her job go more smoothly with venue staff – although still, her tools might get stolen or her ladder moved when she was hanging lights, sometimes by her own team. "And I ended up at 710 Ashbury Street," she says — the Victorian house where members of the Grateful Dead and associates lived together, like turned-on, tuned-in fraternity brothers, in 1966 and '67. "I wish to God they didn't have that crew. "They were the victims of stock mid-century American male privilege and attitude. "Their subsequent romance," longtime band publicist and historian Dennis McNally writes, "did not obscure the fact that she turned into a good engineer as well as an ace hot-dog salesperson.". brent mydland rules, reigns, and lives forever. Cantor was on the board, Brightman directed the lights, Cargill and Gissen had made the dope and set up the revolutionary sound system (under Owsley's stewardship) and back at the office, several departments boasted reasonable gender parity. Of the nearly 250 times the band played the song live, no two versions are the same. “Dry your eyes on the wind,” he sang. “. His observation comes in a mini-chapter titled "Interlude/Intermission: 'Waits Backstage While I Sing to You,'" a reference to the American Beauty track "Sugar Magnolia," that ode to the capable and patient band girlfriend ("takes the wheel when I'm seeing double / pays my ticket when I speed") usually assumed to have been inspired by Frankie Weir. Still, McNally makes clear, it was no gender-neutral utopia. ... We lost Brent [Mydland… ", Brightman and Cantor-Jackson traveled together on tour for years and were friends, though the nature of their different jobs meant their work didn't overlap very much. This week's archival GD Hour podcast continues the interview with legendary GD roadie Steve Parish upon the publication of his memoir, Home Before Daylight. Women, the gist of the chapter seems to be, were full-fledged karass members on their own Grateful Dead path — divorces, breakups and job changes notwithstanding. He started piano lessons at age 6 and had formal classical lessons through his junior year in high school. It was the day after the death of Jimi Hendrix. And yet, Mr. Mydland has one bad night (in actuality, one bad song), and the vultures swoop in for the kill. “On a hot, sunny day near Eugene, Ore., playing in a field to their tribe, the Dead played a ‘Dark Star’ that is about as dynamic as they ever got with this song in this era,” Mr. Lemieux said. Her husband Rex had been killed in a car wreck in 1976, and at some point after that, she dated Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland. The Rolling Stone piece describes that community with the term karass, a Kurt Vonnegut coinage from his 1963 sci-fi novel Cat's Cradle — from which the band got the name of its music-publishing company, Ice-Nine — meaning a group of otherwise-unrelated people who are destined to go through life linked to one another. People tended to look for Cantor-Jackson more often, so when they had the T-shirts made with her face on them, she says, "Candace's said 'No I'm Not,' and mine said 'Yes I Am.'". A Rolling Stone feature on her from 2014 begins with this apologetic lede: "Donna Jean Godchaux knows what you're thinking, especially if you're a Deadhead: That her voice wasn't always spot-on.". That was my first sense that there are things in this world that are really weird, and there are people who are concerned with them. Weir … And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com. Feb 10, 2020 - Explore Michal Strickland's board "Brent Mydland" on Pinterest. Plus, they just didn't like being in the studio. Garcia sings only the first of the two verses, leaving the song forever unfinished. In a particularly bitter twist of irony, it was announced in early 2018 that Brightman — who had carefully, delightedly crafted the way bands were seen for more than 40 years — is losing her vision to age-related macular degeneration. In her 2012 book Owsley and Me: My LSD Family, Gissen (now known as Rhoney Gissen Stanley after taking on Bear's last name, though the two never married) writes about how the Dead provided a backdrop and a context for her own personal awakening: expanding her mind, questioning her assumptions and becoming confident in making her own choices — including the choice to leave the group's immediate orbit in the early 1970s, once she had a young son to care for. "A lot of women were unable to come into their own until they actually left the scene," she continues, although many formed what she called "cottage industries" that orbited the band: travel agencies, fashion design, poster art, ticketing, newsletters — and many also stayed in touch, even after leaving the active scene. It's a mediocre album. Bob Dylan once described folk music this way: “It’s the only music where it isn’t simple. Running time 32:09. Still, Donna Godchaux has so far gone down in history, in part, as the sort of Skyler White of Dead fandom: a female flashpoint of complaints. "But Brent had a deeply self-destructive streak. The band had the right level of weirdness to keep her entertained — and she figures she had whatever strangely calibrated formula of personality it took to thrive in their singular company. Fillmore West, San Francisco, Feb. 27, 1969. There are a lot of strange things to uncover in “Dark Star”; ghosts and chaos and watermelons and clocks may be the least of them. It’s that uncertainty that I’ve always loved best in the composition, its sense of infinite possibility. The SetList Program allows you to search through the Grateful Dead's setlists for shows between 1965 and 1995. She had her own team on the road – which often included other women – but other tech staff were definitely of the "spandex in the morning" variety, and it pissed her off. Fillmore East, New York City, Feb. 13, 1970. (Which, admittedly, Brightman — who still sounds actively mischievous, close to 50 years after taking a job, in part, because of its potential for absurdity — thinks was kind of funny: "Actually, I think that's hilarious," she says. 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