To my great surprise, I found out that my best friend, Bob Weir, from whom I had been disconnected for years, was now a member of the house band of the Western apostasy. One of the straightest guys from Fountain Valley, who was serving as a lieutenant JG in the U.S. Navy, wrote me a letter and said, “I don’t know if you know this, but your friend Bobby Weir has resurfaced and he’s part of this whole shebang.”
In June 1967, the Grateful Dead were going to play their first East Coast gig at the Café au Go Go in New York City, so I went down there to see them and reconnect with Weir. This was also when the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in America. It was a week of great potency, and for me personally it was a very good week to be Zelig.
The first time I saw the Grateful Dead perform, they were playing through Fender Princeton amps in a basement with brick walls in Greenwich Village. I got what they were doing right away. I also got to reconnect with my erstwhile official best friend, Weir, who had been off doing Acid Tests for a while, none of which he had seemed to have completed. His hair was down to his waist, and he had the thousand-yard stare to the max. He was way the fuck out there. He could see all the way to the other end of the cosmos and didn’t have much to say.
I had never met any of the Dead before, but that night I talked a lot with Phil Lesh, whose eloquent and wide-ranging interests impressed me enormously. I actually felt a great deal more immediate compatibility with him than with Weir, who now seemed utterly different to me. I very much wanted to create a relationship with the Dead, but I didn’t know how to go about it. So I began thinking, What can I do for these guys to demonstrate my own mojo so I can be part of their thing?
After the show that night, Weir and I walked around the Village trying to catch up on things. We were sitting underneath the arch in Washington Square at about four-thirty in the morning when this pale green Ford Falcon pulled up, and it was like a thousand clowns got out of the car. Kids from Long Island. Bad kids. About ten of them.
They immediately surrounded us and started dancing around yelling, “Kill the pig! Drink his blood!” Obviously they intended to beat the crap out of us. Weir looked up at them and said, “I sense violence. And you know whenever I feel violence in myself, there’s a song I sing that has always had a calming effect on me. Let me see if you would like to sing it with me.”
These kids were completely blown away. Suddenly, Weir had gone meta on them. This was not a concept on Long Island. He started singing “Hare Krishna,” and they were actually singing it with him, and I was thinking, Jesus, do you suppose this might work? I was singing along literally like my life depended on it. Then, at a certain point, one of the guys went, “Fuck this!” He gave the signal and they went right ahead and beat the crap out of us.
Although I still considered what the Dead were doing to be heresy, I wanted to give them something, so I said, “Look, I happen to know where Timothy Leary lives. How would you like to go up there and see him?”
On the sparkling June morning that I drove the Dead up to Millbrook, I stopped by my favorite record store on West Sixth Street in Greenwich Village and picked up Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I had heard it the night before during intermission at Café au Go Go, and I was thinking, “The Dead are pretty great but Jesus Christ, if you want to hear LSD music, this is it.”
I also picked up Phil Lesh and his amazing date for the weekend, a girl known as Essra Mohawk, whose real name was Sandy Hurvitz. She was a musician who had appeared with the Mothers of Invention and been given the nickname “Uncle Meat” by a member of the band, which was how Frank Zappa would then always introduce her to the audience. She had a smart little mouth on her and was terrific.
My girlfriend, who at the time was going to Bard, was with me. She had been with Bobby and me the night before when we got the shit kicked out of us. I was in such bad shape that she was concerned about my ability to drive, but it was just a beautiful day, and the Taconic State Parkway was never more glorious.
So it was the four of us and Weir and his beautiful, quirky French girlfriend in my car and news was pouring in on the radio about the Six-Day War in the Middle East. I hadn’t been to Millbrook in nearly a year but the guy at the gate recognized me so I just drove right up to the main house and said, “These are my friends, the Grateful Dead.” And they said, “Fine.”
The most significant aspect of our visit was not my offering of the Dead but that I had brought up Sgt. Pepper’s. They had not yet heard the album at Millbrook, and so there was a big ritualistic ceremony to listening. It was one of those sixties scenes where there was a lot of cheap printed Indian cotton around and brass lamps and the smell of incense and patchouli oil and cat piss. After the record was over, Tim Leary stood up and in this incredibly pretentious, sententious mystical voice, said, “My work is finished. Now it’s out.” In a funny way, he was right. Because from that point forward, it was all going to take care of itself.
We all stayed there for several nights, and it was a total collision of two different worlds. At Millbrook, they were still doing the Indian thing and sitting meditation, and the Dead looked at it like, “What is this horseshit?” They had a fine nose for that sort of thing and saw right through it all real fast. Now I saw through it as well, and I was a little embarrassed that I had brought them there.
Mountain Girl had come up with Jerry and the rest of the band separately, and the real point of contact between the Eastern Orthodox and the Western apostasy was when she and Tim talked. In her way, she was quizzing him. Back then, she always interrogated everyone. Mountain Girl was running the dozens on Tim, and he pretty much passed the test. She thought he was a little vague and slipping and sliding, and in those days, Mountain Girl was really hard on slipping and sliding. She has always had an extremely keen nose for bullshit and was a lot tougher on it then than she is now.
I distinctly remember telling Tim about the beating that Weir and I had received in Washington Square Park the night before. We were in the kitchen in Millbrook, and he kept shaking his head in this completely phony, caring way. It was total bullshit and I knew it. It was sort of incumbent on him to tsk-tsk and he was doing a great job of it, but I knew better. I knew he didn’t really give a damn.
Leary had no idea what it was like to get beaten up in Washington Square at four-thirty in the morning. He kept trying to understand what I was saying, but his persona was coming up with, “Why must there be this violence among us? Why can we not rise above these base things?” It was just complete horseshit, and it really did put me off him.
What Millbrook had been for me before was something different from what it now seemed to be. The whole scene was a big disappointment. I saw it all as pretentious and self-serving and basically exploitive. Everyone there was really getting off on the fact that they were hip enough to be using a substance that had the power to irrevocably alter the human brain.
Everyone at Millbrook was in the “prana receptive state” echo chamber, and the Grateful Dead were out to kick ass and have fun. They recognized one another as members of related but entirely different tribes. Unlike the people who lived at Millbrook with Tim Leary, the Dead were saying, “Katy, bar the door. Let’s kick the television. Let’s really kick the shit out of the television! Let’s turn the television into a refrigerator and see if that works.” After that day I turned my back on the Eastern Orthodoxy and began doing my own thing in the Western apostasy, and I had nothing more to do with Tim Leary for years.