Fact #92336

Dan Healy (Grateful Dead sound crew) : It was time for The Dead to do another album, so they were going back into the studio. By then, eight-tracks had just come out and there weren't any in San Francisco but there were in LA. The band decided to go to LA to record an album, again with Warner Brothers and Dave Hassinger. By then, I was travelling with them and doing sound at live gigs, so I went to LA with the band.

Jerry Garcia : We had laid down the first part of The Other One, the slow part, and a basic for New Potato Caboose. We were working on Born Cross-Eyed. That's as much as we had gotten done. At that point, we were going about it almost straight... then we went to New York to try some studios there.

Dan Healy : What we were going to do was go back east to do some work in recording studios while we were playing there. We went back to New York city and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel for a month or two. We were playing gigs at nights, and recording in the studio. Century Sound was one and Olmstead was the other. They were eight-track studios which was state of the art in those days.

Bob Weir : Hassinger wanted to get the record done within the budget, et cetera, like any good producer should.

Dan Healy : The whole matter of having to compromise the music to fit within the production ideas of Dave Hassinger and the record industry was really hanging everybody up a lot. So there got to be friction between the band and Hassinger.

Tom Constanten (keyboardist) : On Anthem, I played prepared piano ... you put things like screws, coins or clothes pins inside the piaNo Strings to make them sound different. I did one effect where I took a dime-store gyroscope, gave it a good spin, and put that up against the sounding board of the piano. It sounded like a chain-saw being taken to the piano. Dave Hassinger cleared his seat by a foot and a half when he heard it being done.

Bob Weir : I had a song called Born Cross-Eyed... I was describing how I envisioned the song, and Healy and Hassinger were hassling over something. The song got quiet at one point, and so I announced, 'Right here, I want the sound of thick air.'

Dave Hassinger threw up his hands and said 'Thick air! He wants the sound of thick air,' over and over again as he walks out of the studio.

Dan Healy : He jumped up, freaked out, and stomped out of the studio. Everybody just sat there. We were left there, halfway through finishing the record.

Jerry Garcia : We got him uptight - because we were being so weird and he was only human after all and didn't really have to go through all that, so he decided not to go through it and we decided, "Well, we can do it ourselves."

Tom Constanten : One of my other favourite effects was obtained by using coins. At that time, I used dimes... then there's a sound like woodblocks that comes from combs stuck on the piano's higher strings. Another I liked was clothespins on the lowest strings,played either with the keys or on a string directly.

Dan Healy : We decided that we could collect a bunch of live tapes... We collected about ten gigs worth of tapes... they were all recorded on different machines in different cities. the speeds were all weird and different and variable... we got back into the studio and it turned out that there wasn't one performance that played all the way through and did anything. We decided that what we would do was just devise a way to be able to play them all by aligning and starting two different performances in the same place...

Jerry Garcia : We weren't making a record in the normal sense; we were making a collage... So we just worked and worked, mostly Phil and I, for months ... we worked a lot in San Francisco. We assembled live tapes, and we went through the most complex operations that you can go through in a recording studio.

Phil Lesh : We worked for about six months at Columbus Recorders, smoking a lot of pot and putting all these two-track tapes of gigs together. We used stuff from the Great Northwest tour with Quicksilver, where we played our asses off.

Jerry Garcia : We had an engineer, Dan Healy, who is like a real good, fast on his feet, able to come up with crazy things engineer. And we worked and we assembled an enormous amount of stuff, and since it was all multi-track, it all just piled up. With Anthem of the Sun, after an enormously complex period of time, we actually assembled the material that was on the master tape.

Phil Lesh : We lost generation upon generation from overdubbing; that's why it's so funky sounding. But that adds to that sort of pillow of sound.

Jerry Garcia : Then we went through the mixing thing, which really became a performance, so Anthem of the Sun is really the performance of an eight-track tape. Phil and I performed it and it would be like four hands, and sometimes Healy would have a hand in. We'd be there hovering around the boards in these various places at Criteria Studio, Miami, and in New York. We selected, from various performances we did, the performance which seemed the most spaced, and we did that all the way through. So there's a spaced record if there is one .

Tom Constanten : The final part was an overlay of several live performances, when it gets that incredible depth; it's a remarkable effect. So they wanted to take that up and swirl it into an explosion, and out of the ashes of that would stealthily enter the warm misty waves of new Potato Caboose.

Jerry Garcia : We were thinking more in terms of a whole record, and we were also interested in doing something that was far out. For our own amusement - that thing of being able to do a record and really go away with it - reallv lose yourself.

Bob Weir : The names of the songs on the first part of side one were all just made up for publishing purposes. TC made up most of those names ... at points where we could say it had clearly changed. Otherwise we would only have gotten publishing money for one song.

Dan Healy : We were hopelessly overdue to the record company, because they had frameworks they like to see projects get done in.

Jerry Garcia : They were foolish enough to let us execute a contract in which we had no limit as to studio time. Before that, they were used to dealing with conventional acts where nobody ever spent more than two weeks making a record.
(Source : not known)