Drift off tonight inside a night that went wrong.
On March 24th, 1971, at Winterland in San Francisco, somebody lit a bonfire on the floor of a wooden building. The flames went about eight feet into the air. A seventeen year old called Michael Parish, who had talked his parents into letting him drive up on a school night, walked in, saw it, and thought he'd made a mistake. "Winterland is a big wooden building and this bonfire was going like 8 feet in the air. It was just terrifying actually. Where's the fire marshall and how are they able to do this?"
It was a benefit for the Sufi Choir of San Francisco. Before the Grateful Dead played a note, the audience sat through firewalking ceremonies, a kundalini yoga talk, whirling dervishes, and then the choir itself: 25 voices, no instruments, sacred songs in harmony and counterpoint.
The choir's director had one of the more remarkable careers in American music. Bill Mathieu was writing arrangements for Stan Kenton at 23, then asked for a letter of recommendation and somehow got Duke Ellington to say yes, contributing two arrangements to Ellington's 1960 album Piano in the Background. By 1967 he was done with jazz, moved to San Francisco, and went to see the Grateful Dead. "That band woke me up," he said. "It wasn't that we were listening to the music. We were listening to basically the universe as it was presented to us at that time." He met a 70-year-old teacher named Samuel Lewis, changed his name to Allaudin, and formed a choir.
Then it all went wrong. Mickey Hart, the choir's biggest supporter inside the band, had walked out weeks earlier and wouldn't return until October 1974. The ceremonies ran long: "These holy dudes just didn't know when to stop. Spiritual teaching is not known for its brevity." The crowd began chanting "We want the dead." And after the choir's first song, a microphone died and the entire alto section went inaudible. Allaudin ran to the soundboard, thought he'd fixed it, ran back. It was still dead. "I felt pretty abandoned by the whole thing."
So he turned and waved the Grateful Dead on stage. Garcia, Lesh, Weir and Kreutzmann played three songs with the choir: Shri Ram, the 23rd Psalm, and Hallelujah. For the first two they were careful, almost too careful, and it frustrated him that they wouldn't solo. Then on Hallelujah they found a pocket. "We're all playing together, and it's kind of fun."
