New Riders of the Purple Sage: "People Used To Think Of Us As A Toy Band"
This article originally appeared on Hit Parader, September 1974
BUDDY CAGE, steel guitar player for the New Riders and Marmaduke the singer were having a disagreement. "Those are a pretty weird bunch of folks," said Cage, "the people who would come to see us but wouldn't come to see the Dead." Marmaduke shook his head and refused to agree. "I don't know. There are some folks who just like the countryish thing and don't like the Dead's spaceout thing so much." Cage nodded. It was the most minor of disagreements. The New Riders were in a good mood. Their new album The Adventures Of Panama Red, had sold 180,000 in a couple of months, better than their last two albums and equal to the first.
The next night they were going to break the all-time gross receipts record at the New York Academy Of Music, and they knew it. And perhaps most important, they were well on their way toward finishing their next album, a live album recorded on a sixteen track tape machine that was following them around the country on this tour — they would be one step ahead of their obligations to the record company when the tour was over — a most comfortable feeling all told.
Yet in the midst of all the mellowness the riddle of the New Riders still linger even among themselves. Do they really exist as their own entity? Commercially the answer is a definitive yes. Artistically the answer is yes, but the definition is only now becoming clear.
Being the opening band for the Grateful Dead for two years was unquestionably a blessing that any band would be thankful for. Yet, like the son of a famous man, a perennial opening band for superstars inevitably undergoes an image identity crisis. In the case of the New Riders, this crisis was not too serious when they branched out on their own because, after all, it was Marmaduke who influenced Jerry Garcia to learn to play steel guitar. But music is one thing and rock and roll is another and the New Riders, no dummies, know it.
"People used to think of us as that toy band that goes on before the Dead," laughs Cage, "it really used to be funny when we would play with them because we're all about the same height so when we were on nobody would notice how tall we were and then the Dead would come on — each of whom is at least five or six inches taller and they would just look like these giants." Guitarist Dave Nelson added smiling, "Kids would see us backstage and say, 'Oh, you're those guys, those little New Riders."
"The Rolling Stones tried to do a country and western song with 'Honky Tonk Woman', and 'Dead Flowers', says Marmaduke, "but we've got a much more country and western sound basically than that because we're into it all the time. In the first place my concept was the best bits of country and western and blugrass singing. But we keep a very strong rock and roll beat to what we do."
Cage believes the New Riders "have a different ideology than Nashville country. "We aren't that staid unchanging thing. We're always searching for new sounds and structural ways of growing. Sometimes I'll come up with something that I can't use now and six months later, I'll figure out a way to put it into a new song. West coast country music has taken country and expanded on it."
It was in the late sixties when Dead moved to Marin County, and Marmaduke and Nelson lived in Whiskey Gulch, Palo Alto. It was Dead lyricist Bob Hunter who brought Jerry Garcia to hear Marmaduke play and the rest was history. The name New Riders of the Purple Sage comes from a science fiction story and Nelson says the name is numerologically compatible with the name New Delhi River Band which Nelson had belonged to before.
Originally Garcia played steel and Phil Lesh, bass; the Riders have always had five members whatever the fluid personnel changes. Cage came to them from Toronto, and Dave Torbert, the current bassist was a beach bum on Oahu's northern shore. He too had been in the New Delhi River Band and returned to the west coast at the right time to become one of the New Riders. Spencer Dryden the New Riders drummer had, of course, been the original drummer for the Jefferson Airplane.
All of the songs on the first New Riders album were written by Marmaduke who at the time seemed headed for personal stardom. Rather intentionally he has receded and remained one member of a band. "I don't like the responsibility that comes with being something more than I'm ready for. What we do is to be a band and it takes all five of us to make it work, and I'm just trying to do well — I'm not trying to be a superstar or anything like that. Even that business of signing autographs — writing my name down on a piece of paper — I'll do it when people ask me — but it seems very silly.
"I like to rave and talk and carry on — but what I have to say is not that cosmically far out. We're just playing music that's entertaining. We're trying to make people feel good." As for the songs, Marmaduke points out that "the first album had a lot of songs of mine that had been around for awhile — a lifetime worth of songs. But I'm not that prolific a scribbler of tunes. I like to sit back and sing a song for awhile after I've written it rather than hurry to write another one. On the Panama Red, album, I wrote two songs — one of them angry ('One Too Many Stories') and one of them happy ('You Should Have Seen Me Runnin'') and that's enough for that album." Nelson, Dryden, and Torbert all contributed songs to the album as well, as did Robert Hunter.
Although the New Riders aren't as blatantly "cosmic" as the Dead are, their west coast vibes make them susceptible to peculiar reactions from their audience. Their fan mail is not exactly typical of the normal country music band. "We got a nine page letter from this guy who nobody in the band knows and was writing like he knows us for years.
He started out with 'well I just got into town today,' and kept on like that with all kinds of symbolic cosmic stuff mixed in," laughs Nelson, "and then there was another one that was almost illegible that said "watched it last night but I'm writing this in the dark and I'm stoned too — love." But they still don't get the intense kind of mail that the Dead get.
"Lesh got one the other day that's got to be the new new journalism filled with all sorts of double and quadruple word meanings and cross references. He brought it over to our office for interpretation." Another fan asked for complete itinerary information so he could go to every concert and he failed to leave an address — just his own personal logo as if he expected the information telepathically. Most of the time, however, says the down to earth Marmaduke, fan mail consists of requests for photos or copies of bad reviews.
The New Riders recorded all of their most recent American tour on a 16 track machine and their next album, due out this Spring will be a live album from those efforts. They are trying to include as much pure live stuff as possible without vocal overdubs. They are currently in the studio working on yet another album with the goal of "keeping a couple of steps ahead of our obligations to the record company."
Marmaduke, unlike the rest of the members of the band, loves to watch television news, an aspect of his personality that has never been revealed in his lyrics. "In San Francisco, the three network news shows are broadcast one after the other so if you're a real news freak like me, you can watch it for an hour and a half and then you can see the NET news for another half hour.
"News freaks are rare birds, but I'm one of them." Other television is less interesting to the group although they all share a love for Mason Reese, the seven year old boy in many commercials whose face looks like that of an old man.
The New Riders live in Marin County and their office is in San Rafael, just a few blocks from the street where the film American Graffiti was filmed. "We ride up and down that street every day," says Marmaduke of the hustling, cruising avenue — "that's something you have to be able to do if you're a New Rider — you can't survive any other way."
