Pigpen Wasn’t Crazy. He Was the Point.

In late January 1969, Led Zeppelin came to San Francisco to play their first run at the Fillmore West. Between shows they walked into Herb Greene’s photo studio for a session. The Grateful Dead were already there. The two bands had been booked into the same room on the same afternoon. The Dead were on a break from sessions for Aoxomoxoa, the album that almost broke them, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan had a pistol.

What happened next is the only meeting the Dead and Led Zeppelin would ever have. Pigpen pulled the gun and started firing. Tom Constanten, who was sitting next to him, later wrote that “Pigpen made Led Zeppelin awfully nervous with his six-shooter once at a photo session, drawing a bead on weather vanes and cupolas visible from” the studio window. Bill Kreutzmann, recalling the same afternoon in Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead, called the moment comical and ironic given everything that would come out about Zeppelin’s touring behavior in the years that followed. Greene’s account is on the record at his gallery: there was no warmth between the two bands, no curiosity, no real conversation. Garcia did not want to talk to Page. As one San Francisco rock historian put it, the Dead barely registered who Zeppelin were, and Zeppelin barely registered the Dead.

It is a great anecdote. But it is not the most interesting thing about that afternoon. The most interesting thing is what was happening to Pigpen behind the gun.

The man behind the pistol was being pushed out of his own band

By January 1969, Pigpen had stopped playing organ on most Grateful Dead shows. Tom Constanten — an avant-garde keyboardist whose Air Force discharge had finally come through on November 22, 1968 — was now the official keyboard player. Ralph Gleason wrote it down plainly in early 1969: “Pigpen no longer plays the organ. Tom Constanten does that while Pig stands behind a conga drum.” Manager Jon McIntire was less measured: “I think his reaction was denial. Pigpen was relegated to the congas at that point, and it was really humiliating and he was really hurt, but he couldn’t show it, couldn’t talk about it.” Constanten himself disagreed years later, telling interviewers he never thought Pigpen felt threatened by him. The accounts conflict. Both can be true at once.

What is not in dispute is that the Dead came close to firing Pigpen and Bob Weir both during the Aoxomoxoa sessions in the fall of 1968. Aoxomoxoa would eventually be released on June 20, 1969, but its production was a disaster. The band burned through close to two hundred thousand dollars of Warner Bros. money on a sixteen-track sprawl that Garcia would later admit was “self-consciously weird.” In Garcia’s own words, recorded later in his life: “If we had paid more attention to Pigpen, [the album] probably would have been better.” The fall of 1968 included a stretch where Garcia, Lesh, and the drummers entered the studio without Pigpen or Weir at all and invited David Nelson to jam as a possible replacement guitarist. The firing of Pigpen and Weir lasted about two weeks. Then it quietly reversed.

The financial picture for Pigpen specifically was even worse. Dennis McNally documents in A Long Strange Trip that in the fall of 1969, just before a San Francisco show, sheriffs walked onstage and physically repossessed Pigpen’s Hammond B-3 organ to settle a twelve-hundred-dollar unpaid bill from the music store. Garcia had told a reporter only two years earlier that Pigpen “listens to Jimmy Smith more on the organ than anybody else.” By 1969 he could not always afford to keep the instrument on the bandstand.

The man being pushed out was also playing everywhere else

Here is the part of the Pigpen story that the “he was sidelined” narrative misses entirely. While the Dead were drifting toward Constanten’s formal training, Pigpen was the most-requested sit-in keyboardist in the Bay Area.

On December 27, 1968, Pigpen sat in with Big Mama Thornton and James Cotton. Downbeat’s reviewer wrote: “Behind Miss Thornton, Pigpen comped and comped and comped — almost no solos.” Two weeks later, on January 13, 1969 — the same week as the Herb Greene incident — he sat in on piano with Fleetwood Mac at a studio jam in Novato. Fleetwood Mac’s sound engineer Dinky Dawson called it “fantastic rhythmic piano playing.” In April 1970 Pigpen sat in with Eric Burdon & War on congas at the Family Dog. Later that same month he sat in with John Hammond on harmonica and guitar at Mammoth Gardens.

This is not the schedule of a man who had lost his place. It is the schedule of a man whose own band could not figure out what to do with him while every other band in San Francisco knew exactly what he was for. Pigpen was a working blues musician trapped in a band that was no longer making blues records.

Two philosophies of rock, one room, one afternoon

That is the context in which the gun went off. On one side of the room was a band that, by the end of its run, would refuse to record live shows for fans, would have manager Peter Grant physically destroy bootleg tape decks at concerts, would play almost the same setlist arc night after night across multi-year tours, and would build a stadium-sized spectacle around precision and repetition. On the other side was a band that would eventually make tape trading not just legal but central, would build the largest publicly accessible archive of any rock band in history, would play roughly 2,318 shows over thirty years, and would never repeat a setlist twice.

The conventional wisdom about that day is that the dangerous one was Pigpen with the pistol. The actual record suggests the dangerous philosophy was the one Zeppelin walked in with. The Dead built a system that could regenerate around its own losses. Zeppelin built a sealed object that depended on the four men holding it up.

The legacy test the Dead kept passing and Zeppelin couldn’t

When John Bonham died on September 25, 1980, the surviving members of Led Zeppelin announced on December 4, 1980 that they could not continue. The band was over. There would be a one-night Live Aid reunion in 1985, an Atlantic Records anniversary set in 1988, and a single 2007 reunion show at the O2 in London — but no tour, no continuation, no ecosystem. Zeppelin was a fixed configuration. When the configuration broke, the band ended.

The Dead absorbed losses that would have broken any other band on the planet. Pigpen died on March 8, 1973. Keith Godchaux died in 1980. Brent Mydland died in 1990. Garcia died in 1995. Phil Lesh died in 2024. The band — or rather, the system the band created — kept going. Bob Weir is still on the road. Dead & Company sold out a thirty-show residency at the Las Vegas Sphere in 2024, twenty-nine years after Garcia. The Wall of Sound was retired in 1974. The model that replaced it — a band that survives because it taught its audience to be the band — was the model that won.

That is what the gun in Herb Greene’s studio actually meant. Two bands, two completely different theories of what rock and roll was supposed to be, in the same room on the same January afternoon in 1969. One walked out and went on to define stadium rock for a decade. The other walked out and figured out how to outlive every member it would lose. The man holding the pistol was the most marginalized member of the band that would prove the more durable theory of music. The chaos was not a lack of discipline. The chaos was the design.

Sources & Further Reading

• Bill Kreutzmann with Benjy Eisen, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead (St. Martin’s Press, 2015) — Google Books
• Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (Broadway Books, 2002) — Google Books
• Rock Scully with David Dalton, Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead (Little, Brown, 1996)
• Blair Jackson and David Gans, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead (Flatiron Books, 2015)
• Tom Constanten, Between Rock and Hard Places: A Musical Autobiodyssey (Hulogosi, 1992) — for the “six-shooter” quote
• Ralph J. Gleason, “On the Town,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1969 — the “Pigpen no longer plays the organ” observation
• Herb Greene, photographs and reminiscences — herbgreenefoto.com
• Recording from the same week as the photo session: Grateful Dead, Avalon Ballroom, January 24, 1969 (soundboard) via Archive.org’s Live Music Archive
• The Grateful Dead Archive Online at UC Santa Cruz — primary documents