The Grateful Dead song that made their producer leave in a huff: “Oh man, we drove them mad”
Of all the historic counter-culture scenes, which one boasts the most iconic relationship with music? Perhaps it’s the Greenwich Village Folk scene of the early 1960s, or maybe the gritty emergence of Britpop in Manchester during the ’90s. Notably, one particular chapter in history arguably gets overlooked, for its political influence on the world perhaps supersedes the artistic brilliance that was born from it: ‘60s San Francisco and the ‘Summer of Love’ movement. One band that encapsulated the free-spirited psychedelia of that time were the Grateful Dead.
After signing to Warner Bros Records in 1967, the Dead barrelled through mainstream music, injecting a swirling sense of technicolour and a debaucherous attitude that helped define the mythology of rock and roll hedonism. While their debut album was produced without too much dissension, their iconic sophomore album, Anthem Of The Sun, brought carnage in its wake.
The album was recorded over seven months, an arduous process that aimed to capture the energetic and experimental atmosphere of their psychedelic live shows. While the band was signed by Warner Bros in a bid to capture the hippy zeitgeist, managing the band’s studio time was somewhat of a departure for the label, who were used to a slicker, more commercial process.
“Oh man, we drove them mad” Mickey Hart recalled in the documentary Long Strange Trip. He continued, “They would send us letters saying things like, ‘You’re over budget here, over time. You guys are crazy.’ And then we would grade them and send it back to them.”
Staff engineer David Hassinger was tasked with commandeering the recording of the album and was pushed to his limits on multiple occasions. However, on the album’s third track, ‘Born Cross-Eyed’, he hit somewhat of a breaking point.
The track is one of the Grateful Dead’s more conventional songs that hinges on established tropes of blues rock to exercise their experimentations into harmonies and rhythmic pauses. It was the latter stylistic choice that pushed Hassinger to the edge, according to David Dodd. The band’s founding member Bob Weir had continuously asked for Hassinger to make the pauses sound like “thick air”. An arbitrary piece of creative direction that forced Hassinger to reportedly storm out of the studio shouting, “Thick air! He wants thick air!” on his way out.
The event was one of plenty that ultimately ended in Hassinger’s departure from the process, as his more straight-laced musical outlooks didn’t marry with the structurally loose Grateful Dead.
While Hassinger is listed as the album’s producer in the liner notes, the final sequencing and editing of the album was mainly handled by Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Dan Healy. Word of the Grateful Dead’s chaotic recording style must have circulated because their 1969 follow-up album Aoxomoxoa listed the band themselves as sole producers on the record.
