PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, DECEMBER 18, 1965
Connie Bonner saw the look on Phil Lesh’s face when she told him. He didn’t seem to either believe or grasp it, and why should he? Here they were, a week before Christmas, gathered with friends, strangers, and random street people inside a large, darkened building in an industrial wasteland off Highway 101 in Palo Alto. Disembodied speaking voices were echoing around the room. A strobe light was making anyone dancing look as if they were in stop motion. People were growing spacier by the minute, especially once they began dipping their paper cups into the plastic bins filled with liquid. And now here was Bonner, along with her friend and fellow Warlocks devotee Sue Swanson, telling Lesh that George Harrison had walked through the front door.
Peering out through his waterfall of blond hair, Lesh paused for a moment to digest the news. To learn about an Acid Test was one thing; to know where it was and how to get there was another. The following week the building would officially open as the Big Beat—“the Peninsula’s Most Popular Go-Go Spot,” as a local newspaper ad announced. But right now it was just an empty hall that had been rented for the night by the Merry Pranksters, the festive, nonconformist freaks and creative types who’d been gathering around Ken Kesey. The fanciful Acid Test fliers, crammed with wildly varying typefaces and illustrations, listed neither date nor address, simply an exhortation to come “this Saturday night.” And even if a Beatle happened to know about all this, how would he know who the Warlocks were? They’d just made their first recordings the month before, but none had been released nor might they ever be. They’d changed their name to something far more macabre than the Warlocks, but the new name turned off so many of their friends that it could have easily kept George Harrison away too.
As dubious as Bonner’s sighting was, something about it was strangely plausible. As the Kesey crowd knew, almost anything could happen at an Acid Test. You never knew who’d you see there, what wired-on-something idea they’d have for the night, or what condition they’d be in by the time the sun rose in the morning. And as the Warlocks, now the Grateful Dead, were about to learn on this late December night, you never knew which future comrades, lovers, and inspired crazies would show up and ingratiate themselves into your world.
Try as they might, the Warlocks couldn’t quite pull off the role of eager-to-please rock ’n’ roll band. They were either too loud, too unattractive, or too raucous for someone or another’s tastes. Herb Greene, a local photographer who would soon become one of the foremost chroniclers of the emerging Bay Area music world, was among the first to recognize the Warlocks’ innate wooliness. About a month before the December Acid Test in Palo Alto they had convened for an auspicious event, their first photo shoot. Greene, who’d worked as a stage manager for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, had met Lesh through that group and would be the man behind the camera.
Cavorting and indulging in funny, Beatle-inspired faces and poses under the Golden Gate Bridge, the Warlocks tried to make like a friendly, accessible band for local teenagers. But collectively they weren’t the most handsome or restrained guys on the planet. A short time later they were invited over to Greene’s home to inspect the photos, and Greene would never forget the clamor as they barged in and ran up the stairs. “It was a thundering herd,” he says. “They were the rudest, loudest people. Pigpen was the first one up the stairs, galloping, and he’s terrifying looking.” When he saw Greene, Pigpen said, “You got any juice?” Greene told him he had apple juice in his refrigerator, but Pigpen meant Thunderbird, the cheap white wine known as one of the best ways to get a quick buzz.
With Lesh now installed as their bass player and Garcia teaching guitar at another store now that the Dana Morgan Music Shop was no longer an option, the Warlocks had begun poking their way around the world of show business. Rock ’n’ roll wasn’t quite respectable—many still considered it a fad—but so many kids were forming bands and trying to write their own material that the dream of making it didn’t seem that absurd, even for a months-old combo like the Warlocks. Garcia was relentless in pushing them to rehearse, including at least once in the backyard of the Swanson family house. Garcia brought his young daughter, Heather, and Kreutzmann his daughter, Stacy, and the kids cavorted in the pool. But the sound of the band practicing was so obtrusive that the neighbor next door complained that his own child couldn’t take a nap. (Swanson never told her father about the Warlocks’ takeover of their yard and pool cabana, which was probably for the best.) Meanwhile one friend or another, from Bob Matthews to a pal of Lesh’s named Hank Harrison, took a stab at managing them and booking them into whatever venues would have them.
During the summer and into the fall of 1965 those venues mostly amounted to bars, dives, and a strip club or two, but somehow that suited the Warlocks. They weren’t polished, musically or physically, and some of them still didn’t know that many chords. A few weeks after Lesh had joined up with them the band was booked into Frenchy’s, a teen hangout in nearby Haywood. During his school years Lesh had played trumpet and violin onstage; now he was faced with the idea of mastering a new instrument, electric bass, and shaking loose any of the classical-music formality he’d accumulated. “The only thing I can remember is how stiff I felt,” he recalls of that show. “I didn’t feel I had the groove. And I didn’t know what the other guys were going to be doing.” When the Warlocks returned for a second night they were told they’d been replaced by an accordion, bass, and clarinet trio, the polar opposite of what the Warlocks were trying to accomplish. “That was such a moment,” he says. “I can’t even remember what we did the first night that would have thrown up the red flag.”
Whether they wanted to or not, the Warlocks threw up plenty of such flags. From Quicksilver Messenger Service to the Beau Brummels (who managed to land in the Top Twenty early in 1965 with “Laugh Laugh”), one-time folkies were plugging in around the Bay Area; another new band, Jefferson Airplane, featured Jorma Kaukonen, who’d shared the stage at the Tangent with Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Next to them, the Warlocks were motlier and, with the exception of Weir, prematurely hardened. Onstage they wore mismatched striped shirts and vests; combined with Lesh’s, Garcia’s, and Pigpen’s mushrooms of hair, they sometimes resembled better-dressed versions of cavemen.
In September the Warlocks were awarded a genuine prize for any upcoming band: a week of gigs at the In Room, a bar in Belmont, that wound up stretching to over a month. Starting with its awkward name, the In Room was such a wrong-side-of-the-tracks place that it was actually located near railroad tracks. Six nights a week, with Sundays off, the Warlocks played to a small and often indifferent crowd of boozers, men and women on the prowl, and what Weir would call “wooly freaks.” Attendance was low, especially at the start: Tom Constanten, Lesh’s music-college and Las Vegas friend, took a weekend leave from the Air Force, where he was now serving, and realized he was one of the only people there. But the gigs amounted to extended paid wood-shedding: playing covers of songs both rock (“Gloria”) and R&B (“In the Midnight Hour”), they learned how to lock in together, even how to hold their electric guitars and bass the right ways onstage. “With the Warlocks, we were just trying to work up a lot of tunes—the more tunes the better—and become a proficient rock ’n’ roll band, so we could get work,” Weir recalled to Hajdu. “When we got a steady gig at the In Room, practice makes perfect, I gotta tell you.”
Still, the Warlocks couldn’t simply grin, bob their heads, and play polite covers to whoever showed up at the In Room. Even when they launched into a rendition of a hit people would recognize, they’d forget the words or simply devise new ones on the spot: “Hey, you, get the fuck off my cow,” went one of their additions to the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud.” (“It was actually pretty funny,” says Greene, who checked out their set one night.) On their night off they’d take acid—or, at least, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir would, as Pigpen was averse to it and Kreutzmann was, for the time being, abstaining. By then some of the Warlocks had already tried the legal, odorless, and colorless hallucinogen discovered by Dr. Albert Hofmann in Switzerland about three decades before: Lesh during his pre-Warlocks days at his apartment in San Francisco, Garcia earlier in 1965 with a group that included his wife, Sara (both freaked out after they’d taken it). “LSD gave us an insight, because once you’re in that state of profound disorientation, you play stuff out of muscle memory that you’re used to playing,” Weir added. “We were taking acid every week for a couple of months, and I think we learned what we were going to learn with that method in that couple of months. We learned in that time an important lesson, to try to step back from what it is you’re playing—not be there, to step back and let the song be itself.”
To Sam Salvo, a bartender at the In Room, it would have been best if the Warlocks had stepped as far back as possible. The band was, in his words, “getting high smoking weed”—still a fairly foreign sight in public in the middle of the sixties—and when they were high they “talked of LSD,” he said. Weir would later claim he took more than enough acid—“I think I overdosed myself,” he has said—right before an In Room show. He was so discombobulated that the other Warlocks kept an eye on him all night to see whether he’d make it through; somehow he did.
With or without pharmaceuticals—and most of the time they didn’t play high at the In Room—the Warlocks found their music slowly edging out into another, stranger zone. To Salvo the band sounded “loud and outrageous,” and he wasn’t off beam. Because their repertoire was fairly limited at this time, stretching the songs out made it easier to fill up their sets, and one night they extended “In the Midnight Hour” to about forty-five minutes. The one song they wrote together during their stint at the In Room hinted at life after a cover band. A rumble-seat of a song, “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” inspired by a sign in the area, was loose and darker, driven by Pigpen’s harmonica and Kreutzmann’s astonishingly limber, jazz-rooted syncopation. Around this time they also began jamming on “Viola Lee Blues,” a bound-for-prison jug-band song from the twenties that the Dead played with sharp, cutting chords, more a strut than a plea bargain. For Lesh, the moment the band stretched it out at a rehearsal, playing what he calls “that crazy windup,” was a major musical breakthrough, hinting at what they could do.
In November they lost their gig at the In Room; the owners had had enough of them and their eccentric take on rock ’n’ roll. (Garcia later told a friend that another turnoff was the arrival of an intimidating guy who told them they had to join “da union” if they wanted to keep their night job.) But beginning earlier that year they were far more welcome somewhere else in the area: Ken Kesey’s house in La Honda. One or another of them had met the writer during the early Palo Alto days, when Kesey, then a Stanford graduate student, lived in a cottage on Perry Lane in the town’s undersized boho section. When Lesh would party next door to Kesey’s, at the home of another Stanford graduate student and professor, Vic Lovell, Kesey would “come over from next door and throw us all out,” Lesh would later recall. The scene at the Chateau, where Garcia, Hunter, Lesh, and others had crashed on and off, wasn’t particularly appealing to Kesey, a commanding figure whose stocky build reflected his days as a college wrestler and football player in Oregon. Since that time Kesey had become a celebrated literary hero due to the 1962 publication of his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; thanks to its success he’d earned enough to buy a home that looked like an oversized two-bedroom log cabin tucked into the redwoods near the Santa Cruz mountains.
Kesey’s next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, wasn’t as much of a sensation as his first, but further adventures lay ahead: in 1964 he and the other members of his loose-knit, acid-enhanced gang, officially dubbed the Merry Band of Pranksters (shortened to Merry Pranksters), had driven a multicolored bus across the country, filming all the way. Their encounters with the straight world could be hilarious; once, when they pulled into a gas station, people ran out to check out the hand-painted International Harvester bus, dubbed “Furthur.” The Pranksters—who counted among them Ken Babbs, a gregarious, rubber-faced writer who’d met Kesey in 1958 and had just finished a tour of duty in Vietnam—would pretend to be fictional characters, complete with made-up dialogue. The footage had the makings of a unique full-length feature film. “No one had ever done anything like that before,” Babbs says, “a combination of documentary and made-up stuff. We were real serious about it.”
Anyone who wanted to see bits of the unfinished movie had to show up at one of the Saturday night parties Kesey began throwing at his house. LSD was always on the menu: Kesey had his first taste of it when Stanford asked for paid volunteers to test hallucinogenics for the army, for $75 a session, at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. A group of Hells Angels pulled into a Kesey bash for the first time that August, and partygoers routinely began staying until 4 a.m.—not the best situation for Kesey’s wife, Faye, and their young children nor for Kesey, who often had to clean up for days afterward. The Pranksters needed a bigger space, and what would be seen as the first attempt at an Acid Test took place in November at Babbs’s home in Soquel. Garcia, Lesh, and Weir were there, as were Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, along with Neal Cassady, the fast-talking whirligig of a man who’d been the real-life inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. With his waist-long hair, Orlovsky looked so foreign to them that Swanson, who also partook, asked him what happened if we went to a shoe store—meaning how would regular people deal with him. “He just looked at me like, ‘Who is this kid?’” she recalls. Lesh, tripping hard, bashed away on Kesey’s guitar. (According to Dead historian Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip, Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s lifelong lover, would forever be envious of Weir after Weir sat next to Ginsberg that night.)
When the Pranksters still couldn’t find a hall to rent, a second, larger gathering was firmed up at the San Jose home of a local African American legend with the politically incorrect nickname Big Nig. There the Warlocks, some of whom had met with Kesey right after the party at Babbs’s house and asked to play, set up in a large bay window; Babbs would always remember how heavy Pigpen’s organ was and how difficult it was to haul it through the front door of the house. Tripping and listening to rock ’n’ roll were two of the basic tenets of an Acid Test, but so was a type of underground marketing. When it came to the Pranksters’ still-uncompleted road-trip movie, reality set in. “We thought, maybe it wasn’t going to come out in theaters as a big two-hour movie,” Babbs says. Instead of attempting to sell it to a Hollywood studio, maybe they could rent out spaces and show the footage in the middle of Acid Tests.
Parts of the movie were likely shown at the next Acid Test, on December 11 in a lodge at Muir Beach, a cove just south of Muir Woods. Then another Prankster cohort, Page Browning, heard about a nightclub in Palo Alto set to open just before Christmas that would be empty the night of Saturday, December 18. The owner, an area restaurateur named Yvonne Modica, was fifty-one years old but very young at heart, and she agreed to rent the space to Kesey and the Pranksters for a small fee. As with the cabin at Muir Beach, the Pranksters made sure to avoid telling Modica exactly what was planned—what happened at the Acid Tests would stay at the Acid Tests. But everyone knew intrinsically that the one local band bold enough to brave it all—and play music that would somehow fit in with the proceedings—was the Warlocks. Once more they crammed into Kreutzmann’s station wagon, the band’s transportation mode of necessity, and headed for a gig not too far from Magoo’s.
Lesh had invited his striking new female acquaintance, Florence Nathan (later rechristened Rosie McGee), who agreed to meet him there. Driving to the address on the far side of town, McGee arrived at a wide, squat A-frame building that, she recalls, looked like “one of those strip clubs in the nasty part of town.” The building was so ordinary it was hard to tell what might be happening inside. “It could have been anything,” she says, “and anything could be going on in there.” She parked and ventured inside.
Before the paying customers began arriving at the Big Beat, the Acid Test needed to be set up, and Mountain Girl was happy to volunteer. Having flown back to the East Coast to visit her parents for Thanksgiving, she’d missed the previous Acid Test. But now she was back in the Peninsula and ready to serve in Kesey’s army. The place would be filled with tape recorders, movie projectors, and other electronics gear, and Mountain Girl, who was learning how to edit and archive film, signed up for the task. Given all the equipment she’d have to oversee, she only took one sip of the acid-dosed Kool-Aid that would be distributed for the night. There was work to do, and she needed to be as straight and proactive as possible.
Born Carolyn Adams in May 1946 and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, Mountain Girl was made to be a Prankster. Weeks before her high school graduation she’d been kicked out of school for venturing into the boys’ locker room to sneak a peek at the mysterious new Nautilus machine installed there. “I had never seen anything like it,” she says. “I had no idea what it was. It looked like an alien machine from outer space.” She popped into the locker area for less than a minute, but a janitor saw her and reported her, and she was out. (“They had been waiting for something,” she says, given her past indiscretions at school.) Her older brother, a graduate student at Stanford, invited her to fly out and live with him, and Adams arrived in Palo Alto in the summer of 1963. By September, at age seventeen, she’d found a job at Stanford’s organic chemistry lab and begun killing time at the local coffeehouses and clubs like St. Michael’s Alley and the Tangent—the same places as Garcia and his gang, although their paths had yet to cross.
At St. Michael’s Alley Adams met Cassady; the Furthur bus had just arrived back in town, and Cassady was in search of Benzedrine. “You want to go for a ride?” he asked her, and Adams, no longer working at the lab and dealing with what she calls “some personal struggles” that included breaking up with her boyfriend, went along, saying, “What the hell.” With his brain-on-overdrive charm, Cassady was hard to turn down. At dawn the two wound up at Kesey’s place, the iconic Furthur bus parked in the driveway and Kesey hard at work on its wiring. Adams was immediately smitten with the bus. Having been a monitor in grade school, she was familiar with school transportation, and this overhauled vehicle, outfitted with bunks by the previous owner, was “the most fascinating object I’d ever seen,” she says. She spent several hours examining it and all its finger-painted characters and symbols.
Tall, strapping, outgoing, and headstrong—or, in the words of Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “big . . . and loud and sloppy”—Adams had a warm, earthy aura and easily ingratiated herself into the Merry Pranksters’ world. Soon she was helping catalog the seemingly endless amount of film shot on the Furthur bus trip. (She was less than taken with Big Nig’s nickname at the second Acid Test: “I could never say that name. The guy might have called himself that, but Kesey had a conservative streak.”) She lived here and there—in a tent in the area, on the boat of another Prankster, Mike Hagen, even briefly squatting in a house in La Honda. When Cassady found out her name was Carolyn, also his wife’s name, he stopped hitting on Adams, but she wouldn’t be Carolyn for long. One day she visited Hagen in the ramshackle home he called the Screw Shack. Asking her where she lived, she pointed up to the mountain, where she was crashing in a cabin. “Oh, so you’re Mountain Girl,” he said. Adams wasn’t thrilled with the name—“oh, great,” she thought to herself—but it stuck, and from then on she would be Mountain Girl, or MG to her friends.
Showing their movie was one of the Pranksters’ goals for the Acid Tests, but they also wanted to transform the parties into a type of living, breathing, heaving performance art. At the Big Beat they’d be placing microphones on the floor and encouraging everyone to walk up to them and scream or talk into the mics. The recordings would then be broadcast during the evening, and part of Mountain Girl’s job that night would be to continually circle around the room, setting up the projectors, tape decks, and microphones, using masking tape and glue to repair them if they broke down. In what Mountain Girl called “a gift from the gods,” her brother hauled in a strobe light on loan from Stanford. Acid Test cards—which asked those who entered to write down their address, eye and hair color, and weight—were also printed up and handed out.
Last but extremely far from least were the small buckets the size of household waste-paper baskets, each containing Kool-Aid dosed with LSD. Kesey would long brag about all the acid he purloined from the VA hospital during his stint there; he said he snatched it right out of a desk. But Babbs would also say the acid at the Tests didn’t come from the Pranksters. According to others, it arrived by way of people with connections at Stanford who’d obtained some of Dr. Hofmann’s stash. Mountain Girl also heard some of it came to the school by way of the CIA: word had it that the government had shipped the drug to hookers in San Francisco for testing and, in some way, for spying on businessmen who were availing themselves of the prostitutes.
When Mountain Girl first saw Garcia hanging around Kesey’s place in La Honda, she immediately recognized him from around town. She’d seen him at the Tangent; hearing someone play banjo as she bicycled past, she parked her bike, went upstairs to the second-floor performance space, and came across a hairy guy diligently working on what sounded like a complicated banjo tune. He was clearly diligent, playing the melody over and over, but he was also imposing in the same way others felt about him—he was, she recalls, “scowling horribly.” A few weeks later she returned to the Tangent—or possibly stopped into another area spot—to catch a set by Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. And there he was again, this time part of that ragtag jug-band ensemble, all of them playing, singing, and joking onstage. She found the group highly entertaining—it took her back to her own folk-singing days during high school on the other side the country—but didn’t introduce herself to him or anyone else in the band.
To Mountain Girl the Warlocks always seemed game when it came to adventures with Kesey. They’d arrive in time to help everyone set up the Acid Tests, bringing along their own, better gear, as the Pranksters’ speakers and equipment weren’t up to snuff for a rock ’n’ roll band. Along with everyone else on the scene, she’d also heard that the Warlocks were now going by a very different name, thanks in part to their first shot at the record business.
For a few hours on November 3, about a month before the Big Beat Acid Test, the Warlocks had auditioned for Autumn Records, the company co-run by rotund and influential San Francisco DJ Tom Donahue. At Golden State Recorders in San Francisco they put their music on tape for perhaps the first time. The tape revealed how much the Warlocks were still in the midst of figuring out who they were and how they should sound. On two songs—a cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” with a lead vocal by Lesh, and a group-written ballad, “The Only Time Is Now”—they made like a proficient folk-rock band, even down to the use of a de rigueur tambourine. On “Mindbender” and “Can’t Come Down” they showed how much they could be a conventional organ-driven garage rock band. Their sense of dynamics was already evident in the way they stripped down and then built up their rhythms toward the end of “Early Morning Rain.” “We knew instinctively that with all this stuff converging it would take some time to sort it out,” Weir told Hajdu, “but once we started getting stuff sorted out, it would be meaningful—meaningful to us and we hoped meaningful to others.” But on those and other songs, like the traditional “I Know You Rider,” the guitars were timid and the harmonies underdeveloped; Garcia’s attempt at a solo in “Mindbender” was halting. As Paul Curcio of the Mojo Men, who was at the session, recalls, “They came in and scared the hell out of everyone. No one had ever seen a band that grungy.”
They didn’t get a record deal—the label wound up passing—but one career-altering change did emerge from it all. Flipping through vinyl at a record store in town, Lesh had come across a 45-rpm single credited to the Warlocks, so a new name was needed, fast. At Autumn, they dubbed themselves the Emergency Crew. Even they must have sensed what a terrible band name that was, as a little over a week later the band, along with friends Swanson, Bonner, Matthews, and Grant, congregated at Lesh’s apartment to finalize a new one. After Garcia (and maybe others) had smoked DMT, a hallucinogenic far stronger than LSD, Lesh began flipping through his copy of Bartlett’s Quotations for inspiration. A slew of silly names were tossed out, none deemed acceptable. Finally, according to Matthews, Garcia said, “We aren’t able to find a name, so maybe a name will find us.” With that he flipped open a copy of a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary on a book stand, ran his finger down the page, stopped and read it. And there it was, “The Grateful Dead,” a folk tale about a heroic figure who encounters people “refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts.” After giving “his last penny” to them so that the corpse can be properly disposed of, the hero leaves and later meets a fellow traveler who comes to his aid—and who winds up being the ghost or reanimated body the hero had saved.
The story was appropriately creepy, as much in the tradition of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone as one of the death-haunted Child folk ballads of the 1800s that Garcia loved so much. But for a band that would never be terribly genteel with each other, the name was fitting, and to Garcia, everything else on the page disappeared in favor of what he called “a stunning combination of words.” From the tone in Garcia’s voice, Lesh sensed his friend loved the name and bounced up and down in agreement. “I was so excited,” he says. “It had so much resonance.” Reactions from everyone else in the room were varied: “We all looked at each other and said, ‘How morbid,’” recalls Matthews. Weir and Pigpen were particularly unimpressed, but according to Lesh, their opinions took a backseat to his and Garcia’s. “We just went ahead and said, ‘Sorry, guys, but this is it,’” Lesh says. “At least I did. I went ahead like it was an accomplished fact, and I just kept calling us the Grateful Dead. It just became our name.”
When Mountain Girl heard about the change she too was taken aback. “I said, ‘The Grateful Dead—what kind of a name is that?’” she recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s not very attractive!’ But ‘The Warlocks’ wasn’t very attractive either.” As the Warlocks began arriving at the Big Beat she saw that the name wasn’t the only alteration. She’d seen them at the party at Big Nig’s house, but tonight she was able to better focus on them and notice how different they both sounded and looked compared to the Mother McCree’s era. She took note of the new drummer and the new bass player, how impossibly young Weir looked, how long Pigpen’s hair was, and how wild Garcia’s was. (Garcia would later recall they wore loud-colored shirts and pants.) It was, she says, “a complete transformation.” And she had to admit that, in their way, they were pretty cute.
The feeling was apparently mutual on Garcia’s part. One day at Kesey’s La Honda home Garcia was hanging with Denise Kaufman, now one of the female Pranksters, nicknamed Mary Microgram. Although Garcia was married, Kaufman couldn’t help but notice how Mountain Girl grabbed his attention when she walked by. “I’d give up music to be with Mountain Girl,” Garcia said. As Kaufman says, “On a deep psychic level I could see him totally connecting.”
As Bonner soon realized, George Harrison had just walked through the front door of the Big Beat to see her friends’ band, and Lesh went back to playing. But there was no denying that the guy who’d wandered in sported a variation on a Beatle haircut—long and straight, with bangs—and the same sharp sense of fashion. Walking over to Bonner and Swanson, he said, “Do you know these guys? Will you introduce me?” Swanson said sure, when the time came.
Only twenty-four, Rock Scully had already lived a multinational, psychedelicized life. Born in Seattle and named after his grandfather, young Rock had at age seven moved with his mother, Jane, to Chicago, where his stepfather, left-leaning newspaper columnist and author Milton Mayer, worked and wrote. The couple wound up dragging Rock along with them on transcontinental trips to tape interviews for the radio show Voices of Europe. (Jane Scully, a civil libertarian herself, coproduced the show with her husband.) During his high school and college years Rock bounced back and forth between schools in Europe (Germany and Switzerland) and the States. Between his parents’ progressive views and his own experience in Germany, where he saw the landscape scars of World War II, he became an avid peace activist—and happy tripper. In school in Switzerland he placed a small amount of mescaline sulfate on his tongue and began experiencing less-than-normal sensations. “I’d bend my arm and hear my shirt,” he says. “It was so loud it startled me.”
Eventually making his way back to California, Scully settled into San Francisco State, where he considering pursuing the academic life while getting his graduate degree, but the entertainment world tugged at him. In college in Europe he’d met a student whose parents owned a nightclub, and back home he’d worked as an usher at the Monterey Jazz Festival. By 1964 he’d grown out his hair and was making a living selling pot and helping out the Charlatans, a pioneering psychedelic-folk band that came together a year before the Warlocks. By the time Scully arrived at the Big Beat he’d also inherited the Charlatans’ fashion sense, a blend of Victorian and Old West couture.
Scully almost hadn’t made it to Palo Alto. When he heard who was playing he grumbled that he’d already seen the Warlocks, although exactly when he had would be up for debate decades later. It’s possible Scully first caught them at a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe eight days before the Big Beat. Other possibilities—or reports of him seeing the band when not totally stoned—place it after the Big Beat. In some tellings Scully saw the band at the Acid Test at the Fillmore on January 8, the same night he promoted a Family Dog show at California Hall featuring the Jefferson Airplane and the Charlatans. As many would point out, Scully’s memory banks could be problematic, but Scully would always insist he was at the Big Beat, and several witnesses place him there as well.
Whatever the case, the Warlocks hadn’t initially wowed Scully, so when he heard they were playing an Acid Test at a space in Palo Alto, he wasn’t inclined to haul down from his apartment in San Francisco on a Saturday night. But a friend of his insisted, telling Scully they needed a manager. When Scully countered that he could promote their shows, the friend replied, “No, you don’t want to be a promoter—promoters steal from bands and lie to them! You don’t want to do that to musicians. You want to be on their side.” Eventually Scully wound up inside the mysterious strip mall–like structure on the outskirts of Palo Alto, all thanks to his friend Owsley’s advice.
Few would doubt Owsley Stanley’s powers of persuasion, his ability to convince anyone in his vicinity to accompany him on whatever mission he was on. Small but well built, a sprout of curls atop his head, Stanley—or Owsley, as everyone called him—cultivated an air of gnomish mystery. His given name was a tribute to the middle name of his grandfather, A. O. Stanley, who’d been elected governor of Kentucky in 1915 and then became a US senator ten years later. (Once, as senator, Stanley heard that a judge who’d been protecting an accused black man was being threatened by a mob; leaving a legislative session, he took a train to the town and told the rabble they’d have to hang him first.) Owsley attended public high school in Virginia. His nickname, Bear, derived from his excessive body hair. A gadgets freak from an early age, Owsley had taken a stab at engineering school before signing up for the Air Force; that stint was followed by jobs at electronic companies and at TV and radio stations. Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis he’d moved to Berkeley, where he discovered LSD and decided to make his own. With a fellow student and future lover, he began making speed in order to raise the cash to make LSD. By 1965 a good-sized number of capsules of his stash were available for consumption; one ended up on the tongue of none other than Kesey, who became an instant devotee and made Owsley’s LSD part of his Acid Tests.
Mountain Girl’s early memories of Owsley would involve, she says, “his little leather hat and his permed hair, and he reeked of patchouli.” Chemistry was only one of Owsley’s obsessions; women were another. As Scully observed early on, Owsley was also an incessant flirt. “At these dance concerts he’d corner girls and say, ‘Hi, I’m Owsley—do you know who I am?’” he recalls. “He had that wizard thing about him. He wasn’t shy about introducing himself. And if they didn’t know who he was, he would tell them.” His other infatuation was sound that was as pure as possible, especially at a time when “PA systems” at concerts were practically a joke; thanks to the absence of monitors, bands couldn’t even hear themselves sing. “He said he’d done acid one time and saw sound,” says Sam Cutler, who met Owsley years later. “He saw what sound was doing, and it kind of revolutionized his whole take on what should be done with it. When the Bear got interested in something, he was absolutely relentless.”
Now thirty, Owsley had arrived in the Dead universe by way of one of Kesey’s house parties; he’d then attended the Acid Test a week prior to Palo Alto in the lodge in Muir Beach. (“Find It, Fool!” read the poster, again failing to give a location.) As auspicious debuts in the Dead world went, few would top Owsley’s night at Muir Beach. As the Dead were playing he began freaking out from a combination of the music—Garcia’s guitar in particular, which he found monstrously frightening in his state of mind—and the acid he’d taken. Discombobulated, Owsley jumped into his car and drove into a ditch, and a friend dragged him out to safety.
When Owsley and Lesh eventually met, Lesh was instantly intrigued. “He just looked like a man who knew something I wanted to know,” he says. “His reputation had preceded him, as had his product. We’d had occasion to try his product.” (Lesh’s personal favorite of Owsley’s stash was White Lightning: “It was what they said it was—it opened you right up, and you could see how everything fit together, how all the colors fit together.”) The two became immediate cronies in sonic quality and psychedelics. Lesh mentioned to him that the band needed a manager and that Owsley could be that person. Owsley immediately rejected the idea, but the job of sound man, another opening in the Dead world, appealed to him. Owsley didn’t know any rock ’n’ roll managers, but he knew of Scully from his work with the Family Dog, the loose-knit coalition putting on rock ’n’ roll dance concerts around town, and soon tracked Scully down at his home.
Scully would have vivid memories of driving down to the Big Beat with Owsley in the latter’s mini sports car. Owsley himself would say in interviews that he hadn’t attended the December 18 Acid Test, and more people remember Scully there than Owsley. Whatever happened exactly, Scully arrived with a mission: to see the Warlocks—now named the Grateful Dead—without being as stoned as when he’d caught them the first time. To ensure he had a few brain cells for the night, he only took half a tab of Owsley acid.
Ed Levin, who drummed in a local band called the Vipers and had popped into the Big Beat, heard what he called “weird amplified voices” all around him: “Where is Pigpen?” they said, over and over. The Dead couldn’t begin playing until the man who sang many of their songs could be found, and eventually he straggled in from the parking lot. Onstage the night didn’t grow any easier for Pigpen. “It wasn’t a job, ya dig?” Garcia would later say. “It was the Acid Test.” For Pigpen, who didn’t take acid, the night could still be challenging. Thanks to the strobe lighting, he could barely see the keys on his organ.
That wouldn’t be the only distraction as the Dead began playing. Glancing around the space, Garcia saw Kesey writing messages that were then projected onto a wall. Looking closer, he realized Kesey was writing about what he was witnessing in that moment around him. Meanwhile a voice booming over the sound system chronicled every move Kesey was making. At another point the Pranksters took up positions behind their gear at the other end of the room and began bashing away on their own version of music. Babbs had played trombone in high school, but that training was about as close as the Pranksters came to actual musicianship; with Kesey on guitar and Paula Sundsten (also known as “Gretchen Fetchin’”) on keyboard, their half-musical commotion was so ramshackle, it made the Dead sound like a tight, professional R&B and blues cover band.
The night was quickly becoming both musical and sensory overload. Everyone who walked in and paid the $1 admission was given a paper cup for continuing dips into the dosed liquid. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” people nearby were saying cheekily. (When he heard about these nights later, Weir’s boarding school friend John Perry Barlow was appalled: “What we heard was that it sounded like drug abuse,” he says. “Mixing up a bathtub full of Kool-Aid and serving it to anyone who wanted it, and they could come back for seconds? Crazy.”) If the music wasn’t interesting, anyone could walk over to one of the microphones set up around the room and talk, scream, or babble into it. “We didn’t all hold hands and close our eyes and do those things,” says Babbs. “We’d participate.”
When the music or other activities halted, everyone was free to watch a ten-minute slide-show presentation, “America Needs Indians,” compiled by Stewart Brand, a twenty-seven-year-old ex-army officer. (Not long after, he became best known as the author of the Whole Earth Catalog.) A former resident of Perry Lane in Palo Alto while studying at Stanford, Brand served two years active duty before immersing himself in photography, Native American research, and environmental pursuits. Tapping into the country’s slowly emerging interest in Native American history, Brand’s presentation combined photographs he’d taken on reservations with historical shots of Native Americans. That night his slide show was greeted with what he calls “a mixture of mild enthusiasm and indifference.” If interest in that wore off, people could watch Neal Cassady and his hammers in the middle of the floor. Looking for something to do while he talked, the ambidextrous Cassady, whose sinewy torso could gyrate like a spinning top, had developed a knack for flipping and catching a tiny sledgehammer using both hands and balancing the hammer on the tip of his finger. To Scully, watching on the sidelines, it was “the most bizarre thing” but nonetheless captivating.
At various times that night footage of the Pranksters’ bus trip was screened on a wall. On another Babbs showed The Frogman Prince, his homemade take on a monster movie inspired by both his time in the army and the sight of divers in California waters. Set to Del Shannon’s “Keep Searchin’,” the odd little movie featured a military frogman in a wetsuit and mask emerging from the water, meeting a lovely surfer girl, and kissing her; shedding his wetsuit, he turned into a handsome sort of prince. The mini-movie had little connection with anything else taking place inside the Big Beat, but distractions were as much a part of the experience as the Test itself. “It got pretty boring after a while,” Brand says, “and then what do you do to relieve the boredom?” Roy Sebern, the artist who’d painted “Furthur” on Kesey’s bus, ran into the men’s room, grabbed a batch of paper towels, tore them up, and tossed them into the strobe, resulting in what Brand recalls as “this amazing blizzard snowstorm effect.” People gathered around and sat in a circle and watched it; it was as entrancing as anything else they witnessed that evening.
In that context the Dead were far from the main attraction, which may have been for the best. Kaufman, who partook of the evening, remembers them playing a soulful set that included “In the Midnight Hour,” a staple of the Warlocks’ bar repertoire. To Scully they were “sloppy as hell. They’d get into a blues song and stay in the blues groove forever.” Still, Scully found them hard to dismiss; they were charismatic in an antistar way, and every so often the music would take shape: Garcia’s guitar would emit some strange, exciting sound, or what Scully calls “something cohesive” would emanate from the whole band. The music felt tight one moment, loose the next—not ideal for a record company, perhaps, but perfect for the context of the night. “You couldn’t put your finger on it, but it was different from what was going on at the time,” says Babbs. “They’d play for however long, and the songs were long. A lot of it was made up on the spot, and that was the beauty of it. They were perfect.”
Whether the music had a steady, tick-tock consistency or not, some of the hundred or so people roaming around inside the Big Beat were dancing. One was Lesh’s new female friend, Rosie McGee. Born in Paris, McGee had relocated with her family to San Francisco when she was young. By the strangest of coincidences, she’d been working as a secretary at Autumn Records the day the Dead had their audition, although she barely remembered them, given how quickly the recording had gone down. Always a stylish dresser, she’d been sent home one day from her job in an ad agency when she wore knee-high go-go boots to work; her bosses deemed it unprofessional attire. In contrast, the world of the Dead and the Acid Tests offered her a sense of liberation and community.
Before she’d left for the Big Beat, McGee made Lesh promise to stay with her all night; she didn’t want to be left to her own stoned devices, and he agreed. Certainly Lesh was unlike anyone McGee had known. In honor of the stick figure created by the advertising world to market the electricity industry, he’d been dubbed Reddy Kilowatt, and to McGee the nickname more than fit Lesh. With his jittery energy, he walked in a staccato manner (years later she’d be reminded of him when watching Kramer on Seinfeld), and he didn’t seem to climb out of her car so much as jump out of it. “He was very electric, very kinetic, like he’d stuck his finger in a socket sometimes,” she says. “He was not a laid-back kind of guy. He was always jumping up, that live-wire stuff.”
By comparison, Garcia struck her as laid back and slower moving, yet the two men seemed to complement each other. More than once McGee saw Lesh and Garcia huddle and plunge into deep conversations about an arcane music topic, leaving everyone around them puzzled. “Everyone else would think, ‘What the hell are they talking about?’” McGee says. “But they would really be into some sort of exploratory discussion. They were both fearless, and it was all just one big experiment.”
For the Dead that night momentous things would occur even when they weren’t playing. At one point in the evening they took a break—whatever that meant in the context of an Acid Test, which never had anything resembling a schedule—and made their way to the bar. With that Scully made his move, walking over and introducing himself. He said their mutual acquaintance Owsley had suggested he become their manager. They responded with varying degrees of skepticism and bemusement—“smart-alecky,” Scully says—but Garcia shook Scully’s hand in what struck Scully as a genuine way. The surly looking organist, whom Scully soon learned was nicknamed Pigpen, told Scully he thought “Rock” was a “cool handle.” Nothing would be firmly decided on for a few months, but the basis of a working relationship was struck.
During one of the night’s breaks Garcia went outside with Kaufman for a time out from the craziness inside. Soon after, the police arrived. Because Kesey had been busted for pot at La Honda the previous April, no one wanted to attract any unwarranted attention. According to Mountain Girl, the Kool-Aid being dispensed was intentionally low dose. “We weren’t trying to create too big of a stir,” she says. “You had to drink five or six cups to really launch.”
Garcia and Kaufman watched as the squad car pulled into the Big Beat parking lot and a policeman stepped out and headed their way. “You could tell he was walking over with an attitude,” Kaufman says. “He had a serious law-enforcement vibe.”
Anyone else might have acted uptight or defensive, but Garcia radiated the opposite attitude; the people-handling skills he’d learned—perhaps from watching his mother working at her bar—rose to the fore. As Kaufman watched, Garcia charmed the cop in only a few sentences, and the officer, suddenly less agro than he’d first been, simply said, “Uh, okay,” returned to his car and drove away. Reflecting back on Garcia’s modus operandi, Kaufman says, “It was like watching someone do this beautiful martial-arts move where someone comes in with an energy and you dance with it and turn it around and off it goes.” When the cop drove off, all Kaufman could say to Garcia was, “How did you do that?”
Garcia had one last, enduring gesture. As the cop was leaving, Garcia took off the hat he was wearing and genially said, “Trips, captain,” which Kaufman interpreted as shorthand for “Have a good trip.” (According to Kaufman, the often-reported legend in which Garcia said “Tips, captain”—meaning a tip of the hat—is incorrect.) Back inside the Big Beat, Kaufman relayed the story to Kesey, who so loved Garcia’s comment that he flipped the words around and came up with Garcia’s new nom de Prankster, Captain Trips. (Everyone had a nickname: Babbs, for instance, was “Intrepid Traveler.”) In the course of two breaks the Dead had a potential manager and a nickname for one of their front men.
As dawn approached, the Acid Test at the Big Beat began gravitating back down to earth. The Warlocks and the Pranksters started packing their instruments, movie projectors, strobe lighting, and whatever else they’d each dragged along. Everyone, even those still flying on the unorthodox Kool-Aid, straggled into the chilly night to make their way back home.
The Acid Tests had few rules, but one of them decreed that everyone had to stay put until the Test ended in the early morning hours. Prolonging the communal group vibe was one reason—it was comforting to find so many similarly minded oddballs in the Palo Alto area—but personal safety was equally tantamount. “It was not good to be high and out wandering by yourself,” says Babbs. “You wanted to stay in the scene where it was safe, with the people who were with you.” In her car, McGee, along with Lesh, both still tripping, turned on the heater and watched the ice crystals on the windshield melt—which, in their state, seemed like the most mesmerizing thing they’d ever seen.
The Acid Test at the Big Beat would be neither the last nor largest of those gatherings. In the months ahead others would be held in San Francisco, Portland, and down in Los Angeles. The setups would be similar. Once sound systems, projectors, microphones, and whatever else were installed, everyone was told to leave the building, re-enter, and pay the admission. Each Acid Test would add its own lore and yarns to the legend: dazed Testers wandering out into the streets of LA, huge garbage cans filled with dosed Kool-Aid, Lesh and Owsley conspiring about sound systems, Garcia and Mountain Girl sweeping up, Pigpen uncharacteristically asking Swanson to dance. Delays would be added to the tape recorders to make people’s recorded voices reverberate more around the rooms. In late January 1966 about ten thousand people would gravitate to the Trips Festival, a three-day-long, acid-driven freak-out at San Francisco’s Longshoremen’s Hall that presented some of the Big Beat contingent—the Pranksters, the Dead—along with poets, dancers, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, pre-Janis Joplin. No one, least of all anyone in the mainstream media, had witnessed anything like it. Far more than any of the earlier Acid Tests, the Trips Festival confirmed the existence of a growing movement. “In the Peninsula the people interested in something like that would be a few dozen or people who knew each other,” says Brand, who co-organized the Trips Festival. “But no one knew there were thousands of hippies.”
Compared to that gathering, the Big Beat Acid Test felt more like a test run than a major happening. “It was lighthearted fun that night,” Mountain Girl recalls. “Nothing too heavy happened.” She was right—no arrests, no overdoses, no violence, no calamities—but something did take place that night, a coming-together of disparate people, media, and chemicals that signaled a series of new beginnings for the Dead. By the time many of the band members drove off in Kreutzmann’s station wagon, other aspects of their world had begun taking shape. They’d met not only their future manager but in the house were two women who’d play leading roles in their lives, McGee and Mountain Girl. (When McGee arrived at Lesh’s home she discovered he had a girlfriend—who didn’t seem to remotely mind when McGee and Lesh kept walking into their own private back room.) Other attendees included Hugh Romney, the activist, satirist, and counterculture clown known as Wavy Gravy, and Annette Flowers, who would later work for the Dead’s publishing company.
The Acid Tests were also where the Dead began finding their collective musical voice. They’d already begun reaching for the outer limits at bars like the In Room, but those gigs were straight-laced compared to the ones at the Acid Tests, where a song could last five minutes or fifty. Neither traditional rock ’n’ roll nor copy-cat blues or R&B, the sound was morphing into a mélange of it all, heavily dosed with free-form improvising. “We played with a certain kind of freedom you rarely get as a musician,” Garcia later told TV interviewer Tom Snyder about the Acid Test experiences. If Owsley was indeed at the Big Beat, as Scully recalls, they also spent additional quality time with the mad genius who would make a body-slam impact on their sound, finances, and sensibility. “He kept talking to me about how the better sound was low impedance,” Lesh says of conversations the two had at one Acid Test. “While we were waiting to start playing, it was all very loose. We were all peaking and ready to play. Bear and Tim Scully [Owsley’s electronics-whiz friend] are down there on their hands and knees soldering a box to make it work with the system. It was like a bunch of guys watching someone work on a car.” When the system finally was up and blasting, Lesh was impressed with the bass, but the Dead only played for a few minutes and then, according to Lesh, Garcia “decided he wanted to go do something” and they stopped. But within a few months they would be playing through Owsley’s sound system.
“Can YOU Pass the Acid Test?” read the fliers passed around by the Pranksters. Whether the locale was Muir Beach, Palo Alto, or southern California, the Acid Tests were endurance tests of sorts: if you were strong, wily, and open-minded enough, you could make it to dawn. (“It was pretty scary if you weren’t expecting any of that stuff,” says Tim Scully, unrelated to Rock, who helped Owsley by building a mixing board, finding speakers, and ensuring the Dead’s instruments didn’t emit odious hums and noises.) The same mentality would now extend to the Dead. Theirs was an increasingly demanding world, one that would take stamina, thick skin, and the proper constitution to survive. “The Acid Test was the prototype for our whole basic trip,” Garcia later told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner. He was right, and in more ways than he probably foresaw.