The Ghost Of Pigpen

Ron “Pigpen” McKernan died March 8, 1973. He was twenty-seven years old. The Grateful Dead spent the next twenty-two years trying to leave his ghost behind. The setlist data says they failed — seven hundred and ninety-one times.

That’s not metaphor. From 1973 through 1979, zero performances of Pigpen’s narrow blues-and-R&B basket — Smokestack Lightnin’, Turn On Your Lovelight, Little Red Rooster, Wang Dang Doodle. From 1980 through 1995: seven hundred and ninety-one performances. Including the second song of their final show at Soldier Field on July 9, 1995.

This is the case that the Grateful Dead spent twenty-two years trying to escape Pigpen’s blues vocabulary — and failed. Not as nostalgia. As structural fact.

Keith Godchaux’s piano couldn’t hold those songs. The blues idiom needed a Hammond organ — Pigpen’s instrument, the sound that Howlin’ Wolf and Chess Records had built the foundation on. When Brent Mydland arrived at Spartan Stadium on April 22, 1979 with a Hammond B-3, the door reopened. By 1984 the flood was on. By 1995 the band couldn’t frame either set of their last show without returning to Pigpen’s musical world.

Featuring Jerry Garcia on what the band lost, Bob Weir’s “good friend of mine” line in Good Lovin’, Betty Cantor-Jackson hearing the Leslie speaker on the 1974 Winterland tapes, and what Howlin’ Wolf and Chess Records had to do with the way the Grateful Dead actually formed.