Laurence Shurtliff came by the name Ram Rod honestly, getting it from Neal Cassady in Mexico. After being released from MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Oregon, where he had been serving time for stealing a bottle of whiskey out of a rancher’s pickup, Larry, Johnny Hagen, and another friend lit out in a ’53 Chevy to catch up with Ken Kesey and the Pranksters in Baja. Shortly after their arrival, Larry, announcing that he was “Ramon Rodriguez-Rodriguez, the famous Mexican guide,” proceeded to shove seven people into a Volkswagen Beetle. And for that, Cassady bestowed the name Ram Rod.
At the end of that Mexico trip, just before Ram Rod got in the car to leave, Kesey took him aside and told him, “You go to the Grateful Dead and tell them Kesey sent you.” When he arrived in San Francisco, Ram Rod went straight to the Dead’s communal house at 710 Ashbury. As Mickey recalled, “He pulled up on a Harley. He was wearing a chain with a lock around his waist. He said, ‘Name’s Ram Rod. Kesey sent me. I hear you need a good man.’”
Since that fateful day, Ram Rod has been with the Dead. Or, as Bobby explained, “When he did join up, it was like he had always been there. I won’t say he was the missing piece, because I don’t think he was missing. He just wasn’t there. But then he was there. And he always will be. He was a huge part of what the Grateful Dead was about.”
In the beginning, Ram Rod served as a regular roadie. But he quickly moved on to crew chief and equipment manager, particularly looking after Jerry’s and Bobby’s guitars. However, in the late 70s, in what Steve Parish considers a truly selfless move, Ram Rod agreed to switch duties with him, taking over care of Mickey’s drums.
It was also in the late 70s that the Grateful Dead elected Ram Rod as the president of their board of directors when they formally incorporated. Ram Rod continued to serve in that capacity until Jerry’s passing. As Dennis McNally has said, in this role, Ram Rod provided “the last essential piece in the early Dead’s evolution.”
From the ranching country of Pendleton, Oregon, Ram Rod was tough, preternaturally calm, and, in the words of Jerry, the band’s “highwater integrity marker.” In fact, it was Ram Rod who figured out that Lenny Hart was ripping off the band.
For his part, Bobby thought Ram Rod “brought cowboy simple. I don’t want to call it an aesthetic. And boy, did that ever work for us! Cowboy simple, to be New Agey about it, was sort of an American Zen. He was unflappable and not given to excesses of any sort. He was up to the job, no matter what.”
And the job being the Grateful Dead, completing it often necessitated simple decisive action, whether it was when Mickey was freaking out, too high to play and Ram Rod duct taped him to his drum stool or when a pile of cocaine spilled onto the carpeted floor at Front Street and Ram Rod pulled out a buck knife, cut out the swatch of carpet, and slapped it on the table so the band and crew could have at it.
Without Ram Rod, it is hard to imagine the Grateful Dead. He was, as Bobby said, the “heart and soul of the organization.”
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