Appreciation: Fire on the Mountain, a Musical Intervention

Robert Hunter and Mickey Hart collaborated in a poignant plea for Jerry Garcia’s life.

Jerry Garcia, May 1977, Fox Theatre, Atlanta — Photo by Carl Lender (Creative Commons Wikiwand)

The Grateful Dead was the most American of bands. With the divining genii of Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Bobby Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Bill Kreutz­mann, Mickey Hart, Keith and Donna God­shaux, John Perry Barlow, and other mem­bers of the band’s extended family of con­tributors, the Dead drew from the deepest wells of America’s musical ground­waters — certainly from the great aquifers of rhythm & blues, country & western music, Southern soul, classic rock & roll, and country rock, but also directly from the tribu­tary streams of sea shanties, old English ballads and folk songs, African American spirituals, rag­time, Delta blues, country blues, all other blues, jug band music, moun­tain blue­grass, regional folk strains, railroad and worker songs, road­house sounds and biker tunes, Cajun music, reggae, Dixie­land, improvi­sa­tional jazz, Motown, and (even) disco. The band added rye and sour starter and cooked this mash together into a hearty Northern Cali­fornia ferment.

The Dead’s musical mash included many covers of classic or tradi­tional American tunes, like I Know You Rider, Not Fade Away, Morning Dew, Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad, Cold Rain and Snow, Good Lovin’, Big Boss Man, Johnny B. Goode, Big River, Mama Tried, Me and My Uncle, Big Rail­road Blues, Hard To Handle (check out the excellent version on the 1971 live album Ladies and Gentle­men … The Grate­ful Dead), It Hurts Me Too, and Turn on Your Love Light.

But they also pro­duced some of the most original of American songs, with melody lines most often by Garcia or Weir and per­fect time­less lyrics, eco­nomi­cal and jewel-like, usually penned by Hunter but some­times by Bar­low. Songs so wholistically American as Bertha, Cumber­land Blues, Brown-Eyed Women, Jack Straw, Cassidy, Friend of the Devil, Ripple, Box of Rain, Loser, New Speed­way Boogie, It Must Have Been the Roses, Operator, Candy­man, Sugaree, Ramble on Rose, Broke­down Palace, Ten­nes­see Jed, Frank­lin’s Tower, Wharf Rat, Till the Morning Comes, Touch of Grey, Truckin’, and Sugar Mag­nolia.

Two of their early studio albums, American Beauty and Working­man’s Dead, both released in 1970, are close to perfection. And has anyone ever written better song lyrics than the open­ing lines of Barlow’s Cassidy?

I can see where the wolf has slept by the silver stream
I can tell by the mark he left you were in his dream

This complex distilla­tion of musical con­tent and tradi­tions, as rich as it is, does not by itself mea­sure the full genius of the Dead. The total synergy of the band was only realized through live con­cert jam­ming, improvi­sa­tional and always unique, with extended melodic riffs and inter­twined instru­mental seg­ments and spacey transi­tions created organ­ically, instinc­tively, on the spot through a group alchemy of the band, led by subtle onstage tells from Garcia, Lesh, and Weir. When touring, they played upwards of 80 con­certs a year — over their 30-year history from 1965 to 1995, more than 2,300 concerts — nearly all recorded faith­fully, though some­times hap­hazardly, by the band (beginning with its first sound engineer, Ows­ley Stan­ley) and by its friends and followers, with record­ings available through pub­lished albums, boot­leg ver­sions, organ­ized com­pila­tions, and thousands of private unofficial record­ings, many posted and now freely available on www.archive.org.

The alchemy of the Grate­ful Dead’s live stage per­for­mances depended on the spon­taneous func­tioning of a mental network, an inter­con­nec­tion of the band members through coordi­nated patterns deeply imprinted in the neurons of their cere­bral cortices and com­muni­cated through com­mon muscle memories. Among the original core members of the group — Garcia, Weir, Lesh, Hunter, Kreutz­mann, and McKernan — this single-brain net­work first formed organ­ically through numerous all-night unstruc­tured jam sessions they played in black-lit rooms and musty audi­toriums at psychedelic “acid test” parties (including those organized by Ken Kesey and the Merry Prank­sters) on the S.F. Penin­sula and in Marin, Port­land, and Los Angeles in 1965–1966.

Except for Pigpen, who mostly stuck to hard liquor, the active catalyst for the band’s essen­tial live-jamming synergy was lyser­gic acid diethyla­mide. LSD became available in the Bay Area in late 1964 following the expira­tion of the Sandoz patent (Robert Hunter had actually first taken it along with Kesey in 1962 as part of a govern­ment-run experi­ment at Stanford’s VA hospital), and amateur chemist-suppliers — most par­tic­u­larly Ows­ley Stan­ley — soon began manu­fac­turing and dis­tributing acid hits for recrea­tional use. (Cali­fornia didn’t crimi­nalize the sale of LSD until October 1966, and Congress pro­hibited its pos­ses­sion under Federal law beginning in October 1968.) LSD-laced Kool-Aid launched the acid-test cele­brants into a kaleido­scopic mind field of orphic jubi­la­tion, and for the musi­cians who played the back­ground accom­pa­ni­ment to these black-light cele­brations — particularly Jerry, Phil, Bobby, and Bill — it loosed them to wander through unfenced woods of shared sound hallu­ci­na­tions where they merged their urges and talents into new trails and patterns of musical explora­tion none of them had ever experi­enced on their own. This group jam­ming experi­ence imbibed by the core mem­bers of the band in 1965–1966 became the essential psychic glue for the Grate­ful Dead’s concert per­for­mances going forward — from the beginning in the free-and-open street music days of Haight-Ashbury through to the very end of the line for Jerry and the band in 1995.

You can hear the improvi­sa­tional style and free-flow­ing nature of these psyche­delic musical wan­der­ings in many live record­ings of the Dead’s extended con­cert ver­sions of songs and space-jam transi­tions from one song to another, like the Dark Star-St. Stephen combo from the album Live/Dead, recorded at the Fill­more West in San Fran­cisco on February 27, 1969; The Other One from the Skull and Roses album, recorded at the Fillmore East in New York City on April 28, 1971; China Cat Sunflower into I Know You Rider from Europe ’72, recorded live at Olympia Hall, Paris, on May 3, 1972; and, also from Europe ’72, the Epilog and Prelude into Morning Dew, recorded at the Lyceum Theatre in London on May 26, 1972.

The Grateful Dead is forever associated with the legions of harle­quin cele­brants, the Dead­heads, who followed the band from con­cert to con­cert in cult-like fashion, and for some por­tion of these devoted celebrants (though I believe only a minority fraction), LSD was also instru­men­tal to their synesthetic recep­tion and experi­ence of the Dead’s live music. This fact became quite apparent to me in 1977 when I experi­enced my first Grate­ful Dead con­certs while a student at Stan­ford. Though I never touched or took any LSD myself and never saw anyone take acid, I did have Dead­head friends at Stan­ford who said they took it — including one who flashed a little square of blotter paper that supposedly con­tained a hit of LSD. In late December 1977, several of these friends asked me to serve as a desig­nated driver to a series of Dead con­certs at Winter­land Arena up the Penin­sula in San Fran­cisco.

The Grateful Dead played four nights at Winter­land that month, cul­mi­nating in a raucous New Year’s Eve con­cert featuring the loud revving of a big Hell’s Angels chopper onstage, and I attended three of these concerts, December 29, 30, and 31.

Winter­land, the Dead’s favorite home venue and scene of The Band’s Last Waltz on Thanksgiving Day 1976, was a classic old ball­room and former ice rink located in the City’s Western Addi­tion on Steiner Street between Post and Sutter (long since torn down and replaced by an apart­ment complex, 2000 Post). With an open con­crete floor and a generous wrap-around balcony, Winter­land had a capacity of 5,400. It was always “festival seating” for Dead con­certs, and we staked out posi­tions in a long line on the side­walk outside the ball­room, where I well recall Bill Graham, the pro­moter of the con­certs, passing out free buckets of Ken­tucky Fried Chicken to folks waiting in line. I remember we claimed seats in the front center of the balcony opposite the stage, and during the long sets, I had occasion to explore the whole arena, getting up close to the stage at times or taking in the tie-dyed spectacle of whirling Dead­head dancers on the fringes of the floor. What a slice of 70s culture (or counter­culture)! You can get a feel for the experi­ence by watching The Grate­ful Dead Movie, filmed at Winter­land in 1974 and released in the summer of 1977 (getting stoked on the Dead, I caught the movie six times that summer while home in Port­land after my fresh­man year at Stan­ford).

Here’s a photo of me taken in Port­land in the summer of 78:

Photo by Cora Bradbury

One of the friends I drove to the con­certs in December 77 was evi­dently a par­tic­u­larly inten­sive user of acid, and he told me that his body built up some kind of resist­ance to LSD when taken on con­secu­tive days, even though the chemi­cal is such a potent halluci­no­gen. I believe he went to all four nights of those Dead concerts — Tues­day, Thurs­day, Fri­day, and Satur­day — and he told me that by the fourth night, he had to take more than 20 hits of acid to produce the same hallu­ci­no­genic effect that he got from 2 hits on the first night. He acknowledged that all the LSD he had ingested would leave him with long-term linger­ing effects — and I vividly remember one day in the spring of 1978, when we were sitting eating sand­wiches out­doors on campus, he suddenly lapsed into an acid “flash­back” and abruptly excused himself and wan­dered off.

So, while drug use was of course endemic in the culture of many rock & roll bands coming out of the 60s and 70s, it was especially forma­tive in pro­ducing what became the total musical phe­nom­e­non of and around the Grate­ful Dead. And unfortu­nately, LSD, as potent as it was, was not the only narcotic at play in shaping the history of the group. Jerry Garcia and other members of the Dead family smoked pot, popped a variety of ampheta­mines and other pills, and in the early 70s began using cocaine. Jerry was a heavy smoker, too, both of tobacco and weed, and in 1974 he started inhaling smokable heroin (called “Persian”). By 1975 (about the time he was immersed in editing The Grate­ful Dead Movie), Jerry had become addicted to heroin, on top of his serious depend­ency on cocaine.

Jerry’s own heroin addiction coincided with (and perhaps led to) an out­break of heroin use among some of the roadies and other hangers on around the Grate­ful Dead enter­prise, and there developed for the group and within the band’s extended family a wrenching and some­times ripping schism between the old-time acid trippers and the new clutch of heroin users, as chronicled in the excellent 2017 docu­mentary film Long Strange Trip, directed by Amir Bar-Lev.

There could only ever be one Jerry Garcia. He was the lead-guitar impresario without equal, the master tune crafter, the father founder and face of the band — in sum, the prime mover, the spirit center, and creative genius who embodied the Grate­ful Dead. Hundreds of people (not just the imme­diate members of the band and their families) were dependent on Jerry and his musical fortunes as part of the sprawl­ing enter­prise that had grown up around him. Thanks in part to money-losing ventures, grasp­ing busi­ness part­ners, and the band’s hyper-lax approach to intel­lec­tual property, live concert revenues were the princi­pal source of support for the grow­ing multi­tude of dependents. Money gen­er­ated from relent­less con­cert touring — both by the Grate­ful Dead itself and by Jerry’s other bands and con­cert acts — clothed and fed this extended tribe (and funded Jerry’s drug habits). Jerry felt acutely respon­sible for sus­tain­ing the life and energy of the tribe, and he drove himself to keep it all in motion.

By the middle of the 1970s, however, Jerry’s heroin addic­tion was threatening to destroy his life and collapse the entire world struc­ture of the Grate­ful Dead. It was already obvious by the time I started going to Dead con­certs in late 1977, and it became even more evi­dent at con­certs I attended in 1978 (when he was only in his mid-30s), that Jerry’s health was suffer­ing, his vitality was in rapid decline, and it was affecting the group’s per­formances: he often slurred or forgot lyrics, his voice was some­times very weak, his hair was turn­ing gray and he was gaining weight, and his guitar playing was incon­sistent in quality, at times only a dull echo of the spon­taneous bril­liance and ring­ing clarity heard in recordings from the band’s hey­days from 1969 to 1972. For the last two decades of Jerry’s touring career, con­certgoers (other than those too drugged out them­selves to care much) entered the arena each night hoping against hope that Jerry would be look­ing and sound­ing a little better and that his play­ing would be strong and lucid, at least in por­tions.

I believe it was in response to this swelling health crisis for Jerry Garcia and the band that Mickey Hart and Robert Hunter came together to com­pose the finished ver­sion of the song Fire on the Mountain.

Mickey Hart, the Grate­ful Dead’s second drummer and percussion specialist, was (and remains) one of the most com­mitted and accom­plished scholars, teachers, and per­formers of the drum­ming arts of the world.

Mickey Hart — Photo by David Gans from DeadNews

Mickey first laid down the mes­merizing pul­sating soul-stirring drum­beat and per­cus­sive con­tinuo for Fire on the Mountain in an earlier proto form, recorded (with Jerry on guitar) in the barn studio on Mickey’s ranch in Novato, Cali­fornia in 1972–1974, along with a chanted, rap-like pre­cursor (most likely penned by Hunter) of the chorus and por­tions of the verses. Robert Hunter then reworked the lyrics, and he and Mickey put the finish­ing touches on the song, probably at Mickey’s ranch in late 1976 or early 77.

The Grateful Dead debuted Fire on the Mountain at Winter­land Arena on March 18, 1977, and they per­formed it in concert 253 times between 77 and 1995, usually paired with Scarlet Begonias in the combo Dead­heads call “Scarlet Fire.” The song was included on the Dead’s studio album Shake­down Street, released in November 1978. One live ver­sion often cited for its excellent guitar riffs, building to a great crescendo, is from the legen­dary Barton Hall concert at Cornell Uni­ver­sity, May 8, 1977; unfortu­nately, how­ever (as happened all too frequently), Jerry garbled the lyrics and omitted one verse in the Barton Hall version. Among my favorite record­ings is the more relaxed three-verse ver­sion per­formed at Winter­land on October 22, 1978, included in the Com­plete Road Trips com­pi­la­tion.

Hunter has said that the song’s chorus (“Fire, fire on the mountain”) was originally inspired by an approach­ing wild­fire that burned several properties near Mickey’s ranch while Hunter was staying there. The “fire on the mountain” word theme, of course, is found in several tradi­tional American folk songs. And the fact that por­tions of the lyrics were penned in 72 or 73 certainly shows that the song first sprang from inspira­tions unrelated to Jerry’s heroin addic­tion. But whatever the initial moti­va­tions for the song, when Hunter was revising and polish­ing the lyrics and he and Hart were work­ing to complete the song by early 1977, the crisis that was unfold­ing in the Grate­ful Dead’s world because of Jerry’s addic­tion must have imbued the song with deeper meaning, new urgency, and heavy poignancy.

For the Dead, Jerry Garcia certainly was “the Mountain” — the moun­tain top, the Moses of the Mountain for the tribe. (Perhaps coinci­dentally, back when the members of the band were living at what I think of as the “broke­down palace,” the old Victorian row­house at 710 Ashbury Street, Jerry’s girlfriend at the time, Merry Prankster Carolyn Adams, was known as “Mountain Girl.”) By 1977, Jerry’s heroin addic­tion surely struck Robert Hunter and others as the rolling flames of a fearful fire, threaten­ing to rage over and con­sume the mountain for those who loved and depended on Jerry. Years later, indeed, Hunter was quoted as saying, “All I can say is it more or less ruined every­thing, having Jerry be a junkie.”

The song’s first verse speaks to the “Long distance runner” who’s “playing cold music on the bar room floor/ Drowned in your laughter and dead to the core,” and it warns, “There’s a dragon with matches loose on the town/ Take a whole pail of water just to cool him down.” Except for the sig­nifi­cant change to “Long distance runner,” which replaced the original phrase “Wrong way Billy,” these par­ticu­lar words were first written years before; nevertheless, they, too, must have taken on a new sadder meaning for Hunter and Hart in 1977. In its finished form, I’m con­vinced the song is now addressed to Jerry: He’s the long-distance runner who’s trying to spread joy and laughter by staying in motion, playing his music day in and day out in an unrelent­ing con­cert schedule, while his addic­tion is killing him at his core. And heroin obviously had become the dragon threaten­ing Jerry and the band: in street slang, smoking “Persian” — inhaling the fumes of heroin heated on tin foil — was known as “chasing the dragon.” These new meanings had to be top of mind for Hunter and Hart in 77.

Significantly, the second and third verses of the finished song are not found in the earlier versions; they appear to have been written by Hunter when Jerry was in the grip of his addic­tion, and their rele­vance to Jerry’s health crisis is clear to me. Here’s the second verse:

Almost aflame, still you don’t feel the heat
Takes all you got just to stay on the beat
You say it’s a living, we all gotta eat
But you’re here alone there’s no one to compete
If mercy’s in business, I wish it for you
More than just ashes when your dreams come true

Jerry was “aflame” with his addic­tion, even though he pretended not to feel it, and the rest of the band could see he was struggling with all he had every night to perform up to his standards and “stay on the beat.” Jerry insisted on con­tinuing the grueling concert schedule because it provided “a living” for the Dead’s entire extended tribal enter­prise, and they “all gotta eat.” But Hunter was urging Jerry to cool down and take care of his own health first, because he was in a league of his own — there was no one who could take his place if he flamed out, no one who could fill the role he filled for the world and for the Dead family. And, in some­thing like a prayer, Hunter was wishing for mercy for Jerry and for the fulfill­ment of his dreams, free from the toxic ashes of burnt heroin.

The third verse brings the mean­ing home:

Long distance runner what you holdin’ out for?
Caught in slow motion in your dash to the door
The flame from your stage has now spread to the floor
You gave all you had, why you wanna give more?
The more that you give, the more it will take
To the thin line beyond which you really can’t fake

Jerry’s heroin addic­tion had spread out like a wild­fire to other factions of the extended Dead tribe and was con­suming many lives beyond his own. And Jerry could not keep the family enter­prise sustained or get it back on track by giving more to his per­formances — the more he would throw himself into the grind, the more it would con­sume him, and at some point soon, he would inevitably cross the line into self-destruc­tion, where he would lose all remaining ability to “fake” it, any last hope or delusion of keeping up the charade.

How poignant, and what a sorrow Hunter must have felt and expressed through these words! The friend­ship between Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter was the oldest and longest creative relation­ship at the heart of the Grate­ful Dead: They first became friends on the S.F. Penin­sula in 1961, and they remained close friends and col­labo­rators until Jerry’s death.

Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter in 1962 — Photo by Jerry Melrose from JamBase

I wonder whether Jerry con­sciously under­stood and felt the per­sonal plea that Hunter and Mickey Hart were making to him when he sang the words of Fire on the Mountain so many times onstage? I have to believe that at some level in his psyche, he did absorb the truth and urgency of the message the song carried for him. If Hunter and Hart had been open and heavy-handed about the song’s real meaning, Jerry probably would have out­wardly recoiled from the song, and might even have refused to play it. But it was never Robert Hunter’s way to go into detail about the meaning of any of his song lyrics; he let the songs do their own speak­ing and deliver their own force. Maybe Hunter and Hart didn’t even pri­vately discuss between them­selves the full weight of feeling the song had taken on.

Sadly, in any event, Fire on the Mountain did not fulfill what I con­ceive to be its hoped-for prophecy — Jerry’s heroin addic­tion con­tinued to burn and con­sume him after this attempt at a musical “inter­vention.” Eight years later, in January 1985, things had gotten so dire that Hunter and other mem­bers of the group mounted an honest-to-good­ness in-person inter­vention, which Jerry initially resisted. Follow­ing a drug arrest, he agreed to seek treat­ment in 1985, but then relapsed, and after recover­ing from a near-death diabetic coma in July 1986, he struggled up and down, off and on, with addic­tion for the rest of his days, finally, when it was too late, check­ing him­self into a treat­ment center, where he died follow­ing a heart attack in August 1995.

* * *

In our own way, each of us stands on the mountain top of our indi­vidual existence, and most of us have others in our lives who rely on us to bring a degree of suste­nance and joy to their world. If you’re reading this post and you think you may have a drug problem, PLEASE, PLEASE seek the pro­fes­sional help that’s avail­able to you and reach out to your truest friends and per­sonal support net­work. And if you’re a close friend of some­one suffer­ing from addic­tion, be an active agent to help your friend find support, assistance, and treat­ment. You are unique, and uniquely important to the world, but you’re not alone. Don’t let the fire con­sume your mountain!