Rock Scully

Fired Pigpen, too.

Rock Scully laid it out plain.

The situation as it exists right now depends on four guys.

The weight is on four cats in this band, not six.

And the proof it wasn't a vanity project came in June 1982.

The Grateful Dead and Bobby and the Midnights co-built East Coast Dates, trading headliner status across a three-show Northeast run.

Rock Scully remembered it clearly.

Garcia likes playing the opening set because he can leave early and get high.

He said he never judged him, but the distance was there, and it was chemical, and the distance had consequences.

Rock Scully, the band's manager, described what happened next, and this is the quote that should make you angry.

because of the fact that pigpen never accepted l s d he wasn't part of that consciousness the talk about pigpen was without pigpen what are we going to do well we're going to make room for him here tell him to play quietly here without pigpen they were discussing his future in his own band the band he started the band built on his repertoire the band that still depended on his voice to close every show and he wasn't in the room the acid had created an ingroup pigpen wasn't in it and the in group was making decisions groups talk about their members when their members are not there it is one of the most ordinary things a group of people does and it is almost never done cruelly and almost everybody has been on both sides of it so the conversation the manager described the one where the question was what are we going to do about pigpen where the answer being worked toward was that they would make room for him and have him play quietly in certain places is not a conspiracy it is five or six people who loved somebody trying to solve a problem they did not have the language for in the only way people that age ever manage it which is badly and behind his back none of them was thirty most were in their early twenties the youngest was still a teenager nobody in that conversation had any practice at it I would rather spend this stretch in the room he was in, which is where the good part is anyway.

Lightning Hopkins on the Turntable A man from Centerville, Texas, who had been playing since before the war, mostly alone, mostly with a guitar and nothing else, and who was famous among musicians for a particular kind of difficulty.

It was really heavy, mental stuff, real precise and real structured.

Pigpen's Farfisa organ didn't have a place in that.

neither did his temperament from out in the hallway most of what you would hear is the drums that is how a rehearsal sounds from the wrong side of a door the low end comes through the wall and everything else stays in the room so a person standing in the corridor with their coat still on gets rhythm and almost no melody at all and rhythm was very nearly the whole of it in those months weir described that stretch later without any glamour on it they practised seven days a week many hours a day they were listening to a great deal of north indian classical music and borrowing from its rhythmic structures he called it heavy mental stuff real precise and real structured and every one of those words is a word about work rather than about magic so let it be a working-room records out of their sleeves and leaning against the wall in whatever order somebody last wanted them a turn-table lifted and set down forty times in an afternoon ash trays nobody empties until they have to coffee going cold in the cup of whoever put it down to pick up an instrument and somebody counting out loud and then counting again because a cycle of eleven does not sit in the hand the way four does and the only way to get it is to do it until the body stops arguing that is what this period actually was not a vision arithmetic repeated by young men who had decided to become a different band and were willing to be bored for months to manage it somewhere in all that counting garcia went and talked to him Rock Scully, who was around for it, remembered the shape of the conversation more than its texture.

Jerry said, look, we are going to do this, and we want you to do this, rather than yelling.

But Mickey was the son who'd vouched for his father to his bandmates, and his father had robbed every one of them.

Rock Scully.

Mickey was distraught beyond belief.

He quit because he couldn't face it.

We got to play or not play, depending on how we felt.

That's what Rock Scully, quoting Jerry in his memoir, sharpened into the line that does all the work.

Formlessness and chaos can lead to new forms and new order.

That's not a description of a great show.

They just scaled it up.

Formlessness and chaos can lead to new forms and new order.

That's the line Rock Scully sharpened out of what Garcia had been circling for years, and it's the closest thing this band ever produced to a written constitution.

It's also, if you take it out of the music entirely, a fairly accurate description of how most good things get made.

Meanwhile, Pigpen was secretly taking lessons from John Cipollina's mother, trying to learn the fingerings on the Hammond organ, trying to keep up with a band that was leaving him behind.

Rock Scully, the dead's manager, watched Pigpen sit through those ax-a-moxa sessions, getting more confused and more crushed as the music got more esoteric.

By the end of each session, Scully said, Pig was just done.

So the guy being sidelined by his own band, the one who couldn't keep up with the musical direction Jerry and Phil were chasing, the one secretly taking organ lessons to stay relevant, was also the most dangerous person in that room.

And then Pigpen died alone in Corte Madera on March 8th, 1973.

27 years old, a gastrointestinal hemorrhage, the long consequence of the drinking that had been his refuge as the band left him behind.

Rock Scully said the hardest part was that Pig died alone.

That was one we really beat ourselves up about for a long time.