Photos: Susana Millman, Jay Blakesberg
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In mid-July, a GoFundMe campaign was created to support the financial and medical needs of pioneering Grateful Dead lighting director Candace Brightman. The beloved crew member first gained renown through her role as house LD at Bill Graham’s fabled Fillmore East in 1968.
Her entry point to that role took place earlier in the year when Brightman, a recent college graduate who was working at Bloomingdale’s, saw an ad calling for a lighting designer at the Anderson Theater on the Lower East Side. She assumed the venue was producing plays and was surprised to discover that it was hosting rock concerts. On the day that lighting director Chip Monck had agreed to offer introductory tutelage, Monck was a no-show, leaving Brightman to fend for herself. she acquitted herself admirably and soon moved to the nearby Fillmore.
Four years later, Jerry Garcia invited her to take on the role of LD for the Grateful Dead after watching her artistry during a John McLaughlin show in Buffalo, N.Y, where he and Howard Wales had opened. Garcia had previously seen her in action not only at the Fillmore, but also at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., where Brightman had designed the lighting. Her initial travels with the band included the Grateful Dead’s storied Europe ‘72 tour.
Brightman remained the Dead’s lighting designer through Garcia’s passing (with a brief hiatus), and she was one of the first women in the concert industry to occupy such a role. She continued to work with the band members over the years to follow—while also taking on other gigs, including the ‘96 Olympics in Atlanta—and helped oversee the lighting at Fare Thee Well.
In Brightman’s honor, three fellow Grateful Dead alums have shared their thoughts on her career: longtime front-of-house engineer Dan Healy, production electrician/light operator Danny English and publicist Dennis McNally.
[Earlier this week, Candace responded to the GoFundMe, stating in part, “The money you all contributed has been a huge relief. We have no pension or health care. Dumb. But the love, wow gorgeous! Mahalo. You’ve changed our life in a wonderful way. My vision went way downhill a few weeks ago. I’m not freaked. I live to laugh…”]
DAN HEALY: Candace had a way of moving the audience the whole evening. She would start with something and by two thirds of the way through, she would have the audience in the palm of her hand. What she did wasn’t contrived. She didn’t do a lot of flashy stuff to get everybody crazy. When the music started, it was like a jam session for her. She would do it without ever getting to a point where it became hokey or it was done just for the purpose of eliciting a reaction. I’ve seen that from plenty of people who do lights for some famous bands. Poor lights can make the audience angry or irritable. She had a way of putting everybody at ease and putting everybody in a musical mood and a musical mode. It just worked. Candace didn’t do it as a form of manipulation, it just came out of her because she was so in love with what she did and in love with the prospects of what her art could do, that when left to her own devices, she did it. She opened her heart and put not just her hands but her whole self into it.
DENNIS MCNALLY: There was the time where she asked for a bigger budget at a band meeting and Jerry said, “I have no idea why anybody wants to watch us. It’s probably her. So give her the money.”
She bought into the Grateful Dead ethic of continuous exploration, while always striving to be better. Just as Healy experimented with sound, she did the exact same thing. There were lights called Panaspots that could move and change color. They were more expensive, and she convinced the band to expand her palette.
DANNY ENGLISH: One of our goals was to enhance, but certainly not overshadow the music. Plus, with the Grateful Dead, you can get it wrong very often. In other words, you think there’s a big moment coming up? Well, there’s not. Or all of a sudden, you’re flatfooted and there is a big moment that happens and you’re not there. So we were always on our toes, ready to try and finesse ourselves into the scene of what was happening.
The First Days
DE: Candace had been away from the Dead for a year or so. I’m not exactly sure what that length of time was, but Jerry had asked her to come back because he was unhappy with what was going on with the lighting of the show. She said, “I’ll come back, but I get to decide the lighting company that I want to hire.” Jerry said sure, so she called up Morpheus, where I worked, because she heard a lot about us. The owner was like, “I can’t deal with a bunch of hippies. I don’t know who this lady is, but go meet her at The Greek Theatre and figure out how to do this show.” So I went up there, met Candace and I realized that she wasn’t some hippie chick out of the crowd. My job was to be the production electrician. I was the guy that came in with the gear, got it all set up and Candace operated the lighting board. That’s how I started with the Dead in ‘82.
A Dream of My Own
DH: We played in lots of sports arenas in those days. We called them hockey halls, and they were not known for their acoustics or their physical appearances. You want to transform them into dream spaces and that’s a long stretch from sports arenas with scoreboards and basketball-hoop machines hanging from the ceiling. Trying to transfer one of those places into a dream space was not easy.
We used to hang lots of drapes around the room, and Candace would come up with lights so that you could be in the middle of a show, and you could forget that you were in a sports arena. It was like you were in a fantasy paradise or a paradise fantasy. She could make it a fantasy.
Things Went Down We Don’t Understand
DM: In October of ‘78, after Egypt, they played five nights at Winterland. I was there, and one night, they brought a slideshow which was literally, “What we did on our summer vacation.” When they went into “Eyes of the World,” the lyrics were: “Sometimes we ride on our horses” and there was a picture of Mickey on some Arabian stallion racing around the sand dunes, exactly in sync as though it were planned. Next they went: “Sometimes we walk along alone,” and the next picture was Jerry on the top of the pyramid watching the sunrise. Then, finally: “Sometimes the songs we hear are just songs of our own,” and it was the band on stage. It was something to behold.
Three or four years later, I met Candace, mentioned all that and I said, “You couldn’t have programmed that.” She said, “Of course, I couldn’t. I didn’t know what song they were going to play.” So there’s Grateful Dead synchronicity for you.
Light the Song with Sense and Color
DH: We were playing one night at Madison Square Garden, and we used to rock that joint to the rafters. Well, one night, during one of Garcia’s slow songs, Candace turned the stage to blood. It was like blood was running off the stage. Then, within a split second, she turned it to ice. Everybody in the audience witnessed it.
DE: She really had a sense for lighting and how she wanted to do it. It was a little bit against the norm at that time. Generally, in those days, it was all about red, blue, amber, green washes—think about Queen from the ‘80s, that’s the kind of lighting that was going on at that time. Candace was more into UV-type lighting, countered with some light pink from the other side with all these different angles.
Full of Hope, Full of Grace
DM: For a long time, she was the only woman in the traveling party, and nobody will ever accuse the Grateful Dead Road crew of wokeness as far as treatment of women. I did witness it once, glaringly, where she had these gizmos that she put on the musicians’ belts that were some kind of sensor that would make the lights follow them. They had to be put in and turned on and I remember Kidd [Candelario] giving her a hard time about it—“I don’t want to have to do that. It’s another thing I have to do”—and she just coped with it impeccably.
I can only imagine what it was like, particularly back when everybody was coked out in the ‘70s. Tempers were obviously going to be frequently short, and she just floated through all that.
DH: Gender was totally, completely irrelevant. If you were good at what you did, it didn’t matter who you were or what you were. It was about looking at the art; it wasn’t about looking at any other aspects of it. So Candace had as good a chance as any guy—probably better because of who she was and what she could do.
When we’d go into places, we would sometimes have trouble with the union guys setting stuff up, or with people having a hard time because we wanted to do things differently than everybody else did. That was one of the things that we would always run into—“None of the other bands do this. Why do you want to do that?” The answer was: “Because we’ve found that we need to do that.”
She was persistent and she was a very special person. She exuded that. When you were around her, she was very calm and very laid back. She wasn’t a real reactionary person, and she would persistently win hearts.
DE: She was very good at telling it like it is—“Hey, this is what I need from you guys, and this is what I expect.” There might be some grumbling, but it always went her way. I think that everyone knew what was up. Of course, by the time I got there, Candace had been around quite a while, so she was a known quantity.
Everybody Is Playing in the Heart of Gold Band
DM: I remember, once I was in a car with Candace and this woman, Ruth, who was a big Deadhead. We were going from Portland, Maine, to Providence in a rental car for some reason. This was after a show and Ruth was this dancer who was talking about how she’d had a bad night that night and felt like she threw the band off. I didn’t dismiss her Deadhead belief that she was a part of the show, but I did say that it was less likely to affect the room than if Candace or Healy had a bad night.
But Candace reproved me and said, “Nope, it’s absolutely true. Everybody contributes to the vibe of the night.” She was very sensitive to that, and she very much bought into the group mind, but not in any sappy manner. Candace absolutely checked me and gave me a lesson in a very appropriate way.
A Band Beyond Description
DE: Candace and I were always bouncing around ideas, and we wore communication headsets during the show. We could talk about stuff—“Hey, let’s do the blue thing and try and get them to this angle.” We’d make these presets during the day so we could try them out. I remember, one day she said, “For ‘Playing in the Band,’ at the end of the song, I want the lights to sort of travel to the audience and go right through the back door.” I was like, “I don’t think they’re going to leave the truss, but yeah, let’s do that.” [Laughs.]
Every day, we tried to come up with a new idea or something different. There was a lot of programming every day. Long after Candace had retired, that’s how I continued to approach it. I was doing The Dead tour in ‘09 and every single day, I would get a setlist and I would work on the show. I remember Robbie [Taylor] saying to me: “I told Bob, the earlier you get the setlist out, the better the lighting is going to be for the show.” That’s because as soon as I had it, I could work on transitions. Of course, back in the day with Jerry, there was no setlist. So we were totally on the fly, but we got really good at guessing what the next song was going to be, just based on their communication.
There were a lot of great moments. When they brought back “St. Stephen” at the Garden, what an electric moment that was. Our whole thing was we tried to meet the moment of what was going on. That was our desire—to be ready to meet the moment.
DH: She would come in early, she’d spend hours programming the lights and she would do it differently every night. It wasn’t like the same old stuff from the night before. It was always something new and refreshing. And she would also write that stuff on the spot, on the fly.
When moving lights came out, she was one of the only people to use them. Now everybody does it. There was a period of time when a lot of the sentiment was, “Oh, man, who needs that?” It’s like any new idea, like horseless carriages— “Who needs automobiles? We’ve got these horse-drawn buggies, we’re fine.”
Technology always has to wade its way through the social aspects, but she was on the leading edge of that stuff. She was the one who got the lights and put them immediately to work. She always had a handful of spot operators in the room, but there were things that you couldn’t call on a spot operator to do because of the articulation of the equipment. So she had those people and she used them, but there were also certain lighting aspects where she wanted movement that only the mechanical devices would offer to her. So she filled that void by using movable lights.
The Hardest Days
DE: For the first couple of years, if all the moving lights still worked at the end of the show, that was a red-letter day. Things broke. Every day was a struggle to keep things in good order and make each show happen. So you’re trying to cover for it—you might turn the opposite one off so it doesn’t look like something’s wrong. The way that Candace’s lighting worked, a lot of times it was asymmetrical, so it wasn’t as hard to do as it might be. But we’d be making adjustments during the show, just keeping it rolling.
We always did our best to do the best job we could—the show’s the thing. It was like the moment of truth every night when the house lights would go out. Every night was a whole new thing. The best thing about the band was you didn’t know what you were going to get. We didn’t know what song they were going to play and we didn’t know how they were going to play it. Was it going to start big? Were they going to meander into it? The best part of it all was doing the show, and we took it very seriously.
Move Me Brightly
DE: I would say that she was definitely a pioneer of rock-and-roll lighting in a way that others at the time were not. She had original ideas, and she put those into play. Even though sometimes our budgets weren’t along the lines of a Van Halen, the originality of what she came up with was beautiful. We used to get together before each year kicked off and she’d say, “OK, this is the truss design I have in mind this year.” She’d want to change the shape of the trusses over the stage and the way the lights were hanging. It was always very original and very interesting. I tried to emulate that originality as I went forward doing my thing years later.
DH: I had the honor of standing next to her for 40 years. There was nothing like it. Every once in a while—it didn’t happen all the time—there would be a night when everything was working good, everybody was playing well and the whole thing was coming together. It was a great night, and there would be a moment in the music when Candace would look over at me and I’d look over at her, and we both knew that the whole place was completely locked in. We didn’t talk about it, but she would look over at me and nod, and I’d look over at her and nod back.
One of the ways that I’ve described it is there have been times in the music when between the notes, you could hear a pin drop. That’s almost like saying the sound of one hand clapping, but the audience was so united—there was such oneness—that in between notes it was dead silence. The attention was so acute that there wasn’t general noise in between stuff. There was space around everything. Anybody who cared enough about that to be dialed in could experience it. We had a certain communication going and there were people in the audience who would look at me and go, “Hey, man, is this really happening?” I’d go, “Yeah, it’s happening.” It was a magnificent human experience, and Candace was one of the main enablers of that.
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