DISGRACELAND - The Grateful Dead Pt. 2: The Ballad of Pigpen and Old, Weird America—an Origin Story

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Bootlegging whiskey, acid tests, grass, and songs about murder. The origins of the Grateful Dead are fascinating and not what most people think. Born out of the tradition of “old, weird America”; bluegrass, jug band music and deadly folk tales, the Grateful Dead, as young adults, were into some strange stuff and we are all better for it. The band would go on to create their very own “new, weird America” due in part to the cultural impact they would have over their near 40-year career. But their connection to the traditional music that spawned them was due in large part to their harmonica player, singer, and keyboardist, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who lived “the life” so authentically that he died at the age of just 27. This is the Grateful Dead origin story and the Ballad of Pigpen. To view the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠⁠. This episode was originally published on October 13, 2020. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to exclusive bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ ⁠⁠X⁠⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠ ⁠⁠TikTok  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.

I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of, like, like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay, and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club from Hello Sunshine and IHeart Podcast, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off. Each week I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile. Listen to bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Brought to you by Cotton. of our lives.

Disgrace, and is a production of Double Elvis. Stories about the Grateful Dead, in their early days as a band, specifically about their harmonica player, Pigpen, are insane. A band known for their drug use, Pigpen 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 Pan would play the blues. Ron Pigpen McCurnan was obsessed with the blues.

He was one of the band's strongest links to the traditional American music they loved, in part because Pigpen was committed to living the life of his blues musician heroes. Part of this meant dedicating himself to the canon of pre- and post-war black American music, but it also meant a steady diet of cheap, highly potent alcohol known as rock gut, supplemented with even cheaper barbecue and hot links, a diet that did them in at the age of 27. But prior to that, Pigpen 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 Melotron 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 Hermann'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 Magoo's Pizza Parlor in Menlo 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 Gut, Blues, the end of Pigpen in the beginning of the Grateful Dead. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh were sitting in the back of a car that belonged to a friend of Bob's. They were getting high on one of Neil Cassidy's joints. Cassidy, the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty character and his groundbreaking novel on the road, was a hero to all of them.

Smoking as dope was seen as a privilege. Jerry and Bob had just played their second show and their name. 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 yet. 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 singe of the newly electric Bob Dylan's explosive lyrics that Phil heard on the radio, the postal truck he delivered mail from, and 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 afar. Up close and personal, live, electric music was something else entirely. It was enough to set your 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. What 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 12, 1965, at Magoo's Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park just south of San Francisco, the warlocks burned the join up with Chuck Berry, Howland Wolf, and Freddie King covers, jumped-up blues numbers played with the energy of pent-up white teenagers, desperate to shake some action. But Garcia, we're, their drummer Bill Kurtzman, and bassist 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 chorus of rock and roll lineage, just as Dylan, Lennon, and McCartney had, via blues at 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 list of others put in time with Jerry's jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Jugband music was traditional black party. music, a genre that dated back to the early 1900s. Its originators, the Memphis jug band, Gus Cannon's jug stoppers, and the Dixieland jug blowers, traditionally featured in a array of acoustic and makeshift instruments, wash tub bass, juice harp, harmonica, washboards, stovets, acoustic guitar, piano, and of course the jug, stoneware or glass, and blown into by its

player to create a deep, wild buzzing sound. Jug bands were hopped up, energetic, intended to drive of the party. Jug band music directly influenced the 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 Rainey to Bill Monroe to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan. Nick could now in 1965 be heard in the music of the Warlocks as well. Their set that night was modern by bluegrass and jug band music standards. They played Dylan's It's All Over Now Baby Blue, Rufus Thomas' Walkin' The Dog and Slim Harpo's On the King Bee, among 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 Weird 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 hollers, music that after the Civil War evolved into traditional ballads and breakdowns, about bad, bad men. Staggerly, the loner, the pimp, the end of Billy Lyons. Railroad Bill feared by brakemen everywhere, train robber extraordinaire,

Tom Devil creeping up into unsuspecting girls' beds under the cover a night, and Willie 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 century's worth of rough and rowdy ways and song. Their casualties, among them and their like, Little Sadie, who caught a bullet from a 44 smokeless,

Viola Lee, whose fate inspired violence worthy of a life sentence, and the Knoxville girl, the victim of an unexpected dull thwacked from a blunt stick to the skull by her psychotic lover, who then drug her by her golden curls down to the riverside and proceeded a beater to death, outlaws, scoundrels, men who were in league with the devil. It is perhaps this storyteller's 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 outlaws, scoundrels, rounders, and ramblers. They are 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, reefer, the opium gong, junkheads, moochers, sniffers and hoochie-coachers, the men with the jive. Preacher drank some ginger, said it was because 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 honey 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 Magoos. Weird. And they didn't mind. It suited them just fine. Because 22-year-old Jerry Garcia, 17-year-old Bob Weir, 19-year-old Bill Kruitsman,

and 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 space race, these kids were, by comparison, into some weird shit,

mainly music from way. off the grid. Garcia with his jug band and bluegrass obsession, weir with his Garcia obsession, Cruttsman's New Orleans and R&B obsession, and Lesh, by the time he'd attended his first rock show that night, was already deeply obsessed with classical avant-garde composition. But as weird as they all were,

they're all still just kids. Kids from diverse backgrounds, working middle and upper-class socioeconomic backgrounds, they were children of the straight world, no matter how much they fancied themselves otherwise. And their approach to the music they were into at that young age was more scholarly than hand to mouth. None of them lived the tragic lives of the anti-heroes portrayed in the folk songs

they loved and performed and that influenced them. They mined what they could from those men, from the myths and the legends of folk, but otherwise they lived relatively straight lives, albeit lives that were quickly falling under the dominant influence of cannabis and LSD experimentation, but nonetheless straight in comparison to Staggerly and Railroad Bill. And the members of the Warlocks, despite their youth, knew that by the rights of tradition

and because of who they were as people and 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 die or end up in jail. All but one of them. Whereas Pigpen, someone asked from the backseat, inquiring about the fifth missing member of the warlock. Ron McCurnan, aka Blue Ron because of his obsession with the blues, aka Pigpen because of his funk, aka Pig because his bandmates were not without a 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. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends...

Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed.

I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb.

And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or

addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kimman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over?

Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monjou. Camilla Morone at Carrie Kenny Silver. And more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Just like great shoes, great books take you places. Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.

I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies. I'm Danielle Robay and this is bookmarked by Reese's Book Club from Hello Sunshine and IHeart Podcast, where we dive into the stories that shape us on the page and off. Each week I'm joined by authors, celebs, book talk stars, and more for conversations that will make you laugh, cry, and add way too many books to your TBR pile. Listen to bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Cotton, the fabric of our lives. The bread truck barreled down the side of the mountain above Powell Alto. It's driver, Tani, a black man who'd rather do without a stop by the white buzz he suspected were on his tail.

in an unmarked 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. And the truck lived up to its name. It had survived this run before, down the mountainside from the bootlecker in the Honda, filled to the brim with as much high-powered illegal hooch Tani and his partner could afford. Whiskey had only a dollar-fifty a gallon. It was worth the risk. His partner in crime had faith in the truck and in Tani behind the wheel,

downshifting and makeshift Jake bricks to save dough on worn pads for the bread truck, no doubt. More dough, more whiskey. Tani was smart. And so was his partner, Pigpen. They'd make it down without incident and take some of their stash out to the railroad yard and post up by the tracks with Pigs Harmonica, Tani's acoustic, drink junk, and play the blues. Drinking, quote-unquote, junk was a reference to the type of alcohol Pigpen, harmonica player for the warlocks preferred.

The lowest quality booze and wine he could get his hands on. Bootleg whiskey, white port and lemon juice, a sweet wine known as Ombray and, of course, nitrain. This constituted most of Pigpen's diet, and the other part was filled by hot legs, pigs feet, and cheap barbecue. Food and drink that he knew his heroes, the blues men he worshipped, lightning Hopkins, T-bone Walker, Howling Wolf, lived off of pure rock gut.

Didn't matter. It was part of the life. Like the bootlegging and hanging out. out by the tracks playing music. As was everything about Pigpen, particularly the way he looked. Unlike the rest of the warlocks, Pig did not look at all like anyone 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 and a big bad boil marking his chin. He was the wild one without Brando's physical attractiveness, and he could have cared less. Little Walter was the archetype, not Little Richard. Blue and lonesome and funky like Fred McDowell's slad, and funky also like the filthy peanuts character he drew his nickname from. Unlike his bandmates and the Warlocks, Pigpen wasn't interested in smoking grass or expanding his mind with LSD or really anything that preoccupied the imagination of the middle class.

Pigpen was almost solely interested in the blues. He grew up with it. His old man was a boogie-wogie 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 Arthur Crut up. Elvis was cool but barely raided amongst the originals. For every white version of a rhythm and blues song, be it Elvis Presley or Pap 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 Pigman. 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 hypnotist equation was answered by the subculture's affinity for early jazz, specifically bebop musicians. So as a young white teenager who was into almost nothing but blues music, Pigpen, when he wasn't hanging and playing with the Warlocks, hung out almost exclusively with Tani, a black man in black populated East Palo Alto, blues, booze, nothing else.

The railroad yard, it was rhythm, not just romance. The sound of the big trains tracked Pigpen's harmonica, his vocal in Tani's acoustic guitar. The world was suddenly smaller, and the magic of history was suddenly less esoteric. Alongside those old freights, Pigpen rooted himself into his own place and 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 door. 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 his sidearm out in the open, down by his

right thigh, all casual. It went unseen, coupled with his determined stride, and the passengers were none 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 whites-only first-class train car in 1895. But the opulent 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, Stinsonville, and Stewartville, they all met their demise at the other end of Railroad Bill's 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 Pinkertons on 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 Bill dispassionately emptied another blast from his rifle right into him. He reloaded and made his way to the engine car at the front. He ordered the brakeman to halt the steam-driven locomotive. His loaded shotgun pointed into his face made it clear.

A railroad Bill was not fucking around. The brakeman gripped the heavy brake levers, pulled on the safety trigger, and heaved the levers down with all his might. And as the train slowed, Railroad Bill made his way to the sideboard of the engine car and 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 through the ages and out of Pigs Harmonica decades later. The train barreled through the yard. The fire in the trash can burned passively, warm Northern California, spring air. A bottle of night train between them on the ground.

Tani beat down a crude rhythm on his acoustic, 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 blew into his harp, came up for air after his solo and leaned into the lyrics. Railroad Bill is standing on the hill, and he never worked and he never will.

I'd Bill ride. Sounded about right to Pigpen. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends.

I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no.

I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler,

we have some fantastic guests, like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in.

Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises.

And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham.

So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Madarazzo from Stranger Things. Tana Monsu. Camilla Marone,

Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us.

I'm Millie de Cherko. And I'm Gets. Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the criterion closet? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film grape I got to. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the most. The

moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The bartender, Larry, took his eye out and placed it on the bar. It was glass, of course.

Like the many tumblers and martini glasses stacked into various towers behind the stick. There were hardly any pint glasses or stemware. Beer and wine were rarely served, and this was a booze joint. And when Larry took his eye out, met the joint was jumping, which tonight it most certainly was. The inn room, a singles joint for the recently divorced, a stopover place for flight attendants and a must stop for traveling salesmen between San Francisco and Powell 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. Plush reds on pitch black interior. The in-room was decidedly adult, and it was also part of the West Coast small to mid-sized circuit rooms for touring artists Marvin Gay,

Jackie DeShannon, 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, and the boo is flowing. Five 50-minute sets a night, six nights a week. It was real work, five sets a night. And by the estimation of all in the band but Pigpen, 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 Kesey's merry pranksters. And during the Warlock's early days, everything about LSD appealed to them, especially as it pertained to their musicianship, finding themselves as a band and learning how to write their first songs. For Garcia, LSD combined

with electric music was total first. 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 melded 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. latched into the rhythm, and Pigpen rode that old-timey rail with his harmonica,

and sometimes with his organ while Garcia, Lesh, Crutsman, and Weir channeled their latest obsession. Another train entirely, jazz alto saxophonist John Coltrane, who had been dominating their collective musical imagination. The train, as he was referred to, provided a vision of improvisation for Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh. Train would vamp on one chord, which, from a practical standpoint for Lesh, who had literally just begun the play play his 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 sidemen to improvise along with him. The root chord vamping along was their platform.

The song's melody, their through line, and their own creative imaginations, the steam powering their live performances far the fuck out, down previously on heard 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 heady time at the inn room, where the warlocks wrote their first song. Of course, it was called caution. Do not stop on the tracks.

Garcia, Lesh, We are Crispin, they knew they were on to something. They all did, except Pig Pan. Pig, as the only non-LSD and grass devotee, hung back and waited for his moment. When it would arrive, he'd dig into the parts of the set where the band's improvisation took the back seat to more traditional blues numbers, aimed at making sure the crowd was still there with them. Howling Wolf's version of Little Red Rooster,

Junior Wells version of Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, Pigpen's beloved blues have been reduced to becoming the functionary bridge between the traditional music that first inspired the group, with this new weird Americana, the Grateful Dead were alchemating at the innroom back in 1965. For Pigpen, this trip was getting strange, and it was only about to get started.

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, the Velvet Underground. But at the time for Garcia and Co, a new name was needed. They were at Phil Leshe's house bandying about potential band names, all of which were utterly ridiculous. Garcia grabbed Lesh'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 debt. Later, the hero comes upon some impossible task, whereupon the dead man, from beyond the grave, grateful for the debt 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 time. So too was the newly christened Grateful Dead's timing. The West Coast, San Francisco in particular, was undergoing

an evolution from its beautiful and 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 Kesey's acid tests were sweeping the subculture on the West Coast. These were the days before LSD was officially made illegal, and at Kesey'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 Kesey's Acetest House Band, the crowd was eclectic, turned on and strange. Hip college kids left over beats from the beginning of the decade, Hell's Angels, poets, whoever was as Kesey and his band of traveling Mary Pranksters categorized as being, quote, 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 tests were a mostly West Coast, localized version of Kesey's roving tour. The acid tests were meant to enlighten the nation and subvert square society. It was a wild scene, to say the least. For Kese and the rest of his merry pranksters, the idea was simple. Spread the message, and 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. Someone had found an old rundown warehouse in Compton. Kesey thought it perfect. Word got out that the acid test was coming to L.A.

Hundreds of kids looking to get turned on showed up, and the acid mixed with Kool-Aid and served as punch was particularly strong that evening. L.A., Compton, Watts, This was not San Francisco, not the hate, not even the in-room and far the fuck away from Magoos. This was dark. Maybe it was the potency of the LSD that night or the set that the band was putting out there. Death have no mercy in this land, banging powerfully through the band's new sound system,

designed by chief head and LSD chemist Augustus Osley Stanley. And 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 cruisers circled the warehouse. Welcome to the show, the only show in town. The long-haired freaky people up to God knows what in that warehouse. The cops were all tuned into the same radio frequency in their cars.

Their windows opened, the clapback from the patrolmen squawking into and out of the radios escaping out into the urban nighttime air, creating a literal feedback leap of ignorance and square. him. Inside, the band played on. Normally the acid test gigs were freeing, 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 their billy clubs, their guns, and their punitive, discriminatory, very unhip ideas about justice. The dead lurched on stage. Pigpen was apart from the band, drunk, not stoned, and unable to latch on to whatever his bandmates were failing 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, the sound again of a passing freight train out behind the warehouse. He looked into the crowd and 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 rhythm of the passing. racing out back. Pig pen, blew wrong, sang out, and was struck silent. The crowd began to come to focus on Pigpen. Again, a little bit louder now. Chimal were, yes, looking straight a pig. The train carried on, and so did Pigpen. How a freak-out chick included, responded in unity with, oh yes. I want to know, do you feel good? And this time the crowd was rapturous. Oh yes. Think about your neighbors, you've got to think about your friends, your sisters, and everybody

that means something to me. He then pointed to the freakout chick who was by now enraptured with his sermon and blurted up. And with that, Pigpen walked off stage and into the L.A. air. By now, the cops had the warehouse surrounded. They'd place sawhorses around the exits to corral the kids as they split. Pig was dejected, and the gig was a bust, and the party was a bust, and now if he wasn't careful, he might very well get busted. As he made his way out back out towards the tracks,

he came upon Ken Keezy wrestling with a giant barrel of red glowing. Kool-Aid, and there were numerous cops shuffling about, wondering what he was up to. Kesey 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 LSD, literally right under the noses 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 and American Beauty, and those two albums being the ones that hewed 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 and 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.

Janice was gone, OD'd 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 in Pig's bedroom that band members who used harder drugs wondered how they could ball all night while so gone on boo. 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 to promote it like professional musicians. They even succumb to traditional promotional tactics at the behest of Warner Brothers. Weird as fuck, promo, sure, but nonetheless, part of the music industry machine all the same. They weren't part of the straight world, far from it, but they were now part of the music machine, whether they liked it or not. And despite their far-out acid-inspired oral explorations on record and on tour, the new Weird America the Grateful Dead were creating and living in, 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 breakdowns of the warlocks, Railroad Bill, Willie Brennan, and Stackley. But the Grateful Dead were still indebted to that tradition, and the bill was about to come due. Tragedy was the currency. Death was at the dead's door, and death had no mercy in this land. July, 1972, Pigpen's drinking had spun out of control one too 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 bleeding and his playing suffered greatly. At a time when the band was exploring the further reaches of improvisation, his place in the band was suspect to say the least. Rock Scully, the band's manager, called him out on tour for falling asleep on stage. And after that, Pigpen was forced to take some time off to try to regain his health. The band was certain he would recover, but Pigpen knew better. He was in his Marin County apartment, fixing to 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, Pigpen, in the throes of an internal hemorrhage from cirrhosis of the liver, a similar cause of death that killed Jerry Garcia's hero, Jack Kerouac, lay 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. When he closed his eyes that last time, he knew what he was doing, he knew where he was going, and he knew why. It was tragic and necessary as the debt had come due.

Ron Pigpen McCurton generously paid it, and his band the dead would forever be grateful. tragedy had befallen them. Their very own bad man had broken down. And now the ballad of Pigpen will forever be sun as an integral piece of the Grateful Dead's origin story, rooting the lore of the band firmly in the tradition of old weird America. His tombstone says, once and forever a member of the Grateful Dead.

He died at 27, and that is a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free.

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