SAN FRANCISCO, OCTOBER 2, 1967
Mountain Girl didn’t give it a second or even third thought when the visitor—let’s call him Snitch—unexpectedly appeared at the front door of 710 Ashbury. Plenty of people, friends and otherwise, had scaled the dozen steps that led to the front door of the Victorian rowhouse in Haight Ashbury. Two years before, college students who’d rented rooms there were trudging up and down with their backpacks. Ever since the Dead had settled into the building in what amounted to a less-than-hostile takeover, Mountain Girl, her long hair now in a short, boyish bob, was more likely to greet local musicians, various Pranksters, and the band’s assorted girlfriends, childhood pals, and business associates. Some might stay a few hours, some a few days; most would make their way there by hitting the intersection of Haight and Ashbury before striding up the sloping Ashbury Street and arriving at the house with the bay window.
Today’s visitor, Snitch, small and curly haired, was an acquaintance of the band’s from the area. In what was another commonplace request at 710, Snitch asked Mountain Girl whether she had any weed, and she didn’t vacillate. “There’s some funky pot in the colander in the kitchen,” she told him. As she would later recall, “I would do that for practically anybody I knew.” She didn’t know Snitch that well, but she accepted him along with others who straggled into what had become the Dead’s combination home, clubhouse, and business office.
The house at 710 wasn’t their first attempt at group living. Less than two months after the last attendees had drifted off into the daylight hours after the Acid Test at the Big Beat nightclub, the Dead and their extended posse had decamped to Los Angeles. Rock Scully was now their comanager along with Scully’s friend and neighbor Danny Rifkin, and both felt the Dead needed time to work on original material, and Los Angeles in early 1966—home to the Byrds, the Turtles, Sonny and Cher, and many others—was a throbbing heart of the music business. “We needed more songs and needed to get tight,” says Scully. “We wanted to go back to San Francisco with more songs.”
With the help of the Pranksters, already ensconced in the area, the Dead and their growing family found a home on the outskirts of Watts. (According to Babbs, the Dead and the Pranksters first shared a house in LA, but it was so packed with people that the Dead got their own place.) Tim Scully, who came along with them, remembers the pink-painted house as once home to a bishop or priest, down to its confessional booth in the living room. Next door was a brothel, and many would later recall the sight of pot growing outside between the whorehouse and the Dead’s house, thanks to customers who tossed seeds out the window of the brothel. Mountain Girl also feels another reason the Dead headed south was to deal with their growing following, even at this early stage. “They were already beginning to attract serious fans, both good and bad, but they hadn’t thought about how they were going to handle people paying attention to them offstage,” she says. “I got the sense they were trying to protect their privacy down there.”
Over the course of roughly two months and several Acid Tests in the LA area, the Dead practiced in their temporary living room. (Not surprisingly, neighbors would sometimes call the cops to complain about the noise.) They learned they could live together in the same house, even if it meant adhering to the all-meat diet that the proudly eccentric Owsley imposed on everyone else. Anyone peering into the refrigerator would be greeted with the sight of slabs of raw beef. Some were disgusted; others didn’t seem to mind. “It got a little old after a while,” says Lesh, “but I had gone through a period where I hadn’t had a lot of meat to eat, so I was happy to have it.” The women in the house didn’t seem as enamored of Owsley as some of the Dead were, but no one had a choice when it came to coping with Owsley’s eccentricities: he actively supported and financed the band, “buying and renting equipment as needed and paying for groceries,” says Tim Scully. Scully also lived in the house, along with various Dead girlfriends and a friend from the Dead’s Palo Alto early days, Don Douglas.
At first Owsley refrained from manufacturing acid in the house, although there was still plenty around; about once a week, according to Douglas, everyone took Owsley’s product en masse. Weir had been irked one night when Owsley exclaimed, “Well, we’re surely doing the devil’s work here!” Weir had to admit that between the chemicals and the loose social arrangements, one had to have a fairly liberal brain to accept it all, but he didn’t fully agree with the devil remark, and he rarely ventured upstairs to Owsley’s lair on the third floor. “Every now and then I’d go up and talk to him about this or that,” he told Rolling Stone in 2011, “but we spent most of the time on the bottom floor rehearsing or hanging. I know he was making stuff and cranking it out, but I don’t know where the apparatus was.”
Their journey to Los Angeles puttered out for several reasons, one of them financial. Owsley soon ran out of money, and according to Tim Scully, Owsley and his cohorts took some of the leftover crystal LSD from a previous lab and sold it. (Lesh would often imagine the dust from Owsley’s hand-pressed Blue Cheer acid drifting down through the ceiling and infusing the music they were making in the living room.) Although the Dead managed to play a few shows in town, locals didn’t know what to make of them, as Bonner learned when she pitched in posting fliers for the LA Acid Tests. As she recalls, “People would say, ‘What is that—Grateful Dead? That’s disturbing!’”
By April, they’d flown back to the Bay Area and, with the help of McGee, relocated en masse to a rented house called Rancho Olompali in Marin County. For six weeks they lived the alternative lifestyle—ingesting acid, taking advantage of the swimming pool, and throwing communal parties. One day their folk-scene friend Jorma Kaukonen, now with Jefferson Airplane, was sitting around with Garcia and another pal, Janis Joplin. “We’re gonna be archetypes,” Garcia told Kaukonen, who found it startling that someone would say that so early in his career; the Dead hadn’t even made a record yet.
For Douglas one memory from the Los Angeles trip would always linger. One night a bunch of them gathered around a Ouija board, and one of the directives spelled out the message that they’d be leaving the stage on July 9. “Everybody seemed to think it meant July 9, 1966,” says Douglas, “and by ‘leaves the stage,’ we thought the group-high thing, like lifting off the stage.” No one thought much of it, especially because they were heading back home to see what the Bay Area now had to offer them.
The sights and sounds of Pigpen alone were enough to help them secure what would become their grandest experiment in all-for-one living. It began with Danny Rifkin, a transplanted New Yorker working as a building super at 710 Ashbury after a brief student career at Berkeley. For him 710 was a college rooming house, but one of his renters was Rock Scully. Because people in town associated the Haight with the crumbling Fillmore district nearby, the area, home to artists and African Americans, was, Scully says, “the best deal in town.” After he’d moved into the building, Scully hit upon the idea of having his new clients, the Dead, relocate to 710 as well. Though he was far from a nondabbler, Rifkin wasn’t overjoyed at the thought of scruffy, revenue-challenged, LSD-imbibing musicians moving into a house for which he was responsible. Eventually he agreed only if Scully became the superintendent and had his name replace Rifkin’s on the lease. Given the relative freedom they’d had at Olompali, few thought anything could go wrong, and Scully’s name was now attached to the paperwork for running the building.
One by one during the fall of 1966 the Dead made their way into 710, and the tenants already there began packing up and leaving. Rattled by the sight of the stout, seemingly gruff Pigpen and the sound of his blues records and guitar playing in the back room, they individually decided it was time to leave. (“Unbeknownst to him, Pig was a big help,” chuckles Scully.) Wherever anyone could find space, they took it. Garcia, Lesh, and McGee, now Lesh’s girlfriend, settled in upstairs, with Scully in a room next to theirs. Rifkin installed himself in the garage apartment, complete with antique lighting from the days when that part of the 1890s house was a horse stable. Weir settled into the living room, which doubled as an office. Sue Swanson, Weir’s friend from high school, crashed sometimes as well. “As people would move out of the rooms, some of us would move in,” Lesh recalled. “We just weaseled our way in and eventually took over.”
Given that the front door was never locked, plenty of other friends made their way into 710 too. (“We’d argue about how many friends could spend the night,” Mountain Girl recalls. “There was no place to sleep.”) One day it was Betty Cantor, a teenager with long, sandy-colored hair who hailed from Martinez, northeast of Berkeley. In love with the new rock ’n’ roll and the culture rising up around it, Cantor had put up posters and worked the concession stand at the Avalon and already had a fine-tuned set of ears for music and sound reproduction. (Later she worked at the Family Dog in Denver after meeting promoter Chet Helms at the Avalon.) In a nearby park, she found herself at 710; one of her friends knew Rock Scully’s brother. As she walked up the front steps, out came Weir, who held the door open while holding a guitar, extending his arm and exclaiming, “Come on in!” It was an especially vivid memory; Weir had, she recalls, “hair down to here and big doe eyes.”
During his own initial visit to 710, about a year after the Dead had moved in, John Perry Barlow wandered upstairs and found Weir lying on a couch. Although Weir’s eyes were open, he seemed to be asleep, Barlow recalls. Next to Weir, shirtless and high on speed, was none other than Neal Cassady, listening to jazz with headphones and scat-singing along with the music as he danced around the couch. (To Barlow it almost seemed as if Weir was conjuring Cassady up from his imagination.) For Weir at least, the disorder of 710 was initially constructive. “It reinforced how to operate in a profound state of flux and chaos,” he told writer David Hajdu. “Haight-Ashbury offered that in copious servings. When we put our instruments down, we still lived in chaos. Our entire lives were about sorting our way through chaos and making little pockets of, I won’t call it order, but little pockets where we could function, and that’s what we ended up doing in our sets too. You know, life imitates art, art imitates life. There was no separation between living and playing for us.”
A more frequent guest at 710 was Laird Grant, Garcia’s carousing buddy. By 1967 Grant had logged time as the band’s first roadie, driving them to bar gigs and helping them set up their sometimes screeching sound systems and instruments. With his scraggly beard and rugged looks, Grant looked the part of a hardened laborer for the Dead, and he had a new nickname to match: to help deflect the wind when he rode his motorcycle, he’d taken to wearing a hat made out of the bottom of a leather purse and folded up Robin Hood–style. “You look like a Barney!” Pigpen chortled when saw Laird wearing it, and Grant was Barney forever after.
Grant’s brief stint with the band ended at the Monterey Pop Festival, a multi-act gathering in June 1967 that found the Dead on a bill that included Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who, the Mamas and the Papas, and Otis Redding. Along with other San Francisco bands, the Dead had to be talked into appearing at the festival, especially because it was run by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and their label head, Lou Adler, both LA pop kingpins who represented everything San Francisco rockers were against. (Scott McKenzie’s comely if hokey summertime hit, “San Francisco [Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair],” was written by his friend Phillips.) At a meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco Phillips and Adler tried to make their case to the local musicians, and for a while relations almost went south. “It was that kind of volatile situation,” admits Adler. But thanks to the intervention of Ralph J. Gleason, the well-regarded San Francisco Chronicle music columnist who wrote favorably about the new Bay Area rock in spite of his inclination toward jazz, the Dead agreed and wound up playing a respectable but far from show-stopping set between career-defining performances by the Who and Jimi Hendrix. Averse to playing too many industry games, they refused to allow their footage to be used in the eventual documentary about the festival. Adler says the Dead did leave with a prize, though: they wound up carting some of the festival’s amps back to their home base. “When I asked for the amps,” Adler says, “Rock Scully said, ‘Why don’t you come up here and get ’em? And be sure to wear flowers in your hair.’”
After seeing Hendrix light his guitar on fire, Grant looked at Garcia and said, “This ain’t fun anymore, man—this is a job.” Garcia just shrugged and told his friend, “Bon voyage,” and Grant was gone the next day. Although he always enjoyed hanging with Garcia and the other members of the Dead, Grant had reasons for leaving the band and the area. To him the situation at 710, especially the out-front pot smoking, was begging for trouble, and given that he’d already logged time behind bars, he wanted nothing to do with a situation that could send him back there. “The philosophy and the freedom of doing things that we set out to do—they were definitely going to have a thumb put on them,” he says. “And I didn’t want to be anywhere near that. I knew what was gonna go down.” Grant jumped onto his bike and rode off to New Mexico before something “strange,” as he calls it, could happen.
On this October morning—and nearly every other one—music crept up on 710 early. As always it would start with Garcia, who would rise at dawn and immediately start practicing scales. By now his hair was long and thick, falling on either side of his head and separated in the middle, deflecting attention from his small chin. To Grant, Garcia’s musical discipline had its roots in his friend’s brief stint in the army seven years before. “After the army he was a little more disciplined,” Grant says. “Prior to that it was, ‘Oh, well, the sun’s up.’” Mountain Girl knew Garcia was talented from the first time she saw him practicing banjo in Palo Alto, but living with him brought his focus into sharp relief. “It took me a while to find out what an obsessive person he was,” she says. “Rehearsing constantly and talking and smoking and practicing.” The two would watch Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner drive by in his Mercedes and want to scream “sell out!” But at the same time, they were envious of the Airplane’s burgeoning fame.
Creatively, the eighteen months since the heyday of the Acid Tests had been a relentless parade of practicing, getting high, scrounging for money, and watching Scully and Rifkin scrounge for gigs and in general attempt to transform the Grateful Dead into a professional enterprise. To Mountain Girl and others, Scully and Rifkin clearly wanted the Dead to make it even as both were learning how to be managers, but Garcia himself was becoming increasingly proud of the band’s abilities. On January 11, 1967, he wrote to a fan who’d sent a letter to him at 710; in it, he summed up each band member’s strengths. Weir was “a hard-working young musician with fantastically good time,” and Garcia described himself as having “spent three years as a bluegrass banjo player. Switched back to electric guitar when the band formed.” Most of their songs were “traditional,” but he added, “We write our own melodies.” He admitted that Lesh had only been playing bass for a year and a half but that he had “absolute pitch.” In an early indication of the direct level of communications that would exist between the Dead and their fans, Garcia criticized the band’s earlier show in Sacramento, calling it “far below standard,” then signed off, “Captain Trips.”
In the middle of 1966 they assembled at yet another studio in San Francisco to cut a single for an indie label, Scorpio, and the time they’d spent wood-shedding in Los Angeles announced itself: Pigpen’s rough-house voice and stabbing organ were both stronger, dominating their makeover of the twenties blues song “Stealin’,” and Garcia’s extended lead on the group-written “You Don’t Have to Ask” showed signs of pushing the boundaries of the traditional guitar solo. They attempted “I Know You Rider” once more, but with a telling change; in a sign of another future direction, the merest hint of a country lick popped up in Garcia’s lead. As with their Autumn Records session the previous fall, though, the recordings still felt embryonic, and only a limited number of copies of a single—“Stealin’” backed with “Don’t Ease Me In”—were released in August.
The Dead had little time to be discouraged—their lives and career would, in fact, change for the better that same month. At the urging of DJ Tom Donahue, Joe Smith, who ran Warner Brothers Records, flew up from Los Angeles to check out the band at the Avalon Ballroom. Having come straight from dinner, neither Smith, in a suit, nor his wife, Donnie, in pearls, were sartorially fit for what they were about to see. “No one my age had ever seen anything like that,” Smith recalls of the music and the fans who sprawled out over the ballroom. “People painting bodies and lying on the floor and smoking, and of course the light shows.” The band was playing, as Smith recalls caustically, “one of their forty-minute drone sets.” The label head was even less enchanted when a guy in the crowd asked his wife to dance: “I said, ‘Oh no, no, no,’ and I sat her down with a security guy.”
Despite his reservations about the band, its approach, and the people they attracted, Smith knew a mushrooming market when he saw it. Warner Brothers and its sister label Reprise, launched earlier by Frank Sinatra, were far from in vogue and needed desperately to catch up. Smith met with Scully, Rifkin, and their newly enlisted lawyer, Brian Rohan, promising them specialized marketing, as if they were a country act—“and they bought it,” Smith says. In the fall a deal was hammered out, giving the band a $10,000 advance and ownership of their song publishing. Scully also negotiated what were called jazz rates—getting paid by the length of the song, not the number of songs on an album—which he’d learned from getting to know musicians like Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond while working as an usher at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
The signing was the culmination of an astonishing nine months in which the Dead had progressed from being the Acid Test house band with hardly any original material and a sound very much in flux to a tighter rock band with a contract at the record company that was home to Frank Sinatra and Peter, Paul & Mary. As Smith admits, the arrangement benefited the label just as much. “That was one of the two or three most important signings in all those years,” he says. “It changed the nature and opinion of the record company. We were out in front. It was important to indicate we were more than Dean Martin and Sinatra—that we were hip.”
In January 1967 the Dead returned to Los Angeles, but under more welcoming circumstances than the year before. The making of their introductory album was scheduled for RCA Studios, where Garcia had helped out the Airplane on their breakthrough, Surrealistic Pillow. They hardly got off to a promising start, though: just before they flew down, Garcia stepped on a nail and had to spend part of the time on the plane and in the studio in a wheelchair. The producer assigned to the task, Dave Hassinger, had an impressive résumé—he’d worked with the Airplane, the Rolling Stones, and others—but the Dead soon realized they wouldn’t have quite the creative control Warners had promised them. “It wasn’t exactly a fun trip,” says Mountain Girl. “The expectations were so widely different. The band wanted to be in-your-face outrageous, and the producer wanted pop that would sell—and who could blame him? There was more discussion than recording. It was pretty uncomfortable.”
To the band’s consternation, guitar solos were edited, and other songs were trimmed; Mountain Girl witnessed more than a few people in the band walking out of the studio in disgust. It didn’t help that band members popped Ritalin and possibly diet pills, according to one source. Speaking to Rolling Stone writer Michael Lydon about it two years later, Garcia remained philosophical about the sessions: “At the time it was unreasonable to do what we do, which would have been one LP, two songs or one song,” he said. “Nobody would have gone for it. So we made the first record of songs we did.”
Despite their frustrations, they managed in just under a week to record and mix a full album that took listeners on an abbreviated but still enlightening trip through their past and into the present. The songs ranged from their Mother McCree repertoire (Jesse Fuller’s “Beat It on Down the Line”) to tracks that recalled their primordial days as a garage band (“Cream Puff War”), the latter driven by Pigpen’s amusement-park organ. There were blues (“Good Morning Little School Girl”) and folk rock (“Cold Rain and Snow,” which found their group harmonies more amply developed). From the drugs they took or the tension between band and producer—or all of the above—the songs had a brittle, jittery energy, as if the Dead were hurtling through their repertoire as quickly as possible. Pigpen’s soul-vamping finale for “Good Morning Little School Girl” leapt out, but it was their charged version of “Viola Lee Blues” that hinted at their future. More freeform and less constrained than the other songs on the album—it ran nine minutes long—it had a swirling, psychotic-breakdown midsection that took its cues from their Acid Test days. “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion),” recorded later in San Francisco when it was clear they needed something approaching a single, was twisted-kicks garage rock with crackling Kreutzmann drums and a sing-along chorus that made a concession to a hook.
As soon as Warner Brothers released the album, The Grateful Dead, in March, the band made it clear that compromise wouldn’t be a regular part of their relationship with the label. Smith, label ad-copy writer Stan Cornyn, and other executives at the company flew up for a long-infamous launch party at Fugazi Hall in the North Beach section of San Francisco. Cornyn walked in to encounter what seemed like a giant tub in the middle of the room, filled with dry ice, water, and half-naked women. “I wasn’t prepared for it, and Joe wasn’t prepared for it,” he recalls. Smith made a toast: “I wanted to say something like, ‘We at Warner Brothers want to welcome the Grateful Dead to the world,’ and Rock or Jerry said, ‘We want to introduce Warner Brothers to the world.’” Everyone laughed, and in late May Warners ponied up enough money to send the band on its first-ever trip to New York, which included shows at the Central Park Bandshell and the Stony Brook campus.
During that trip they settled into Café au Go Go, the hot-spot club on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, for over a week’s worth of shows. Despite its hokey name, the Au Go Go was one of the jewels of the Village; in the previous months it had hosted Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens, Tim Buckley, and the Mothers of Invention (at a small theater upstairs from the club). In the audience to see the Dead one of their nights was Barlow, who by then had moved east and was studying at nearby Wesleyan in Connecticut. Although Barlow and Weir had communicated by mail for a while after their boarding-school days in Colorado, Barlow had lost touch with his friend and only heard later that Weir was in a band called the Grateful Dead.
Now, three years after last seeing each other at school and in Wyoming, Barlow was confronted with a very different Weir at the Au Go Go. The short-haired, somewhat stocky football player of school days had been replaced with a nineteen-year-old who had what Barlow calls a “thousand-yard stare” and longer hair than he’d ever seen on a man. Weir also seemed barely verbal. “He was completely different,” says Barlow, who didn’t know at the time that Weir had been off acid for nearly a year. “He seemed like a complete space cadet.” But given the new direction Weir seemed to have in life, none of those new attributes necessarily seemed like setbacks.
With Snitch trailing her, Mountain Girl made her way to the kitchen of 710, which was painted in green and orange colors that lent it the feel of a pumpkin and avocado patch. As she watched, he grabbed some of the newly strained pot from a colander on the counter (other times they kept it in an empty aluminum pie pan). The colander was the same appliance everyone used to wash their lettuce, and it did double duty of filtering out the seeds from mangy piles of weed. Mountain Girl watched as Snitch rolled a few joints for himself. She didn’t need to reach up to one of the highest shelves in the kitchen cabinet, where, wrapped in waxy cellophane paper, was a squat brick of pot, one of its corners torn off to make the latest batch. The brick looked as if someone had simply yanked the plant out of the ground and crushed it down into a few pounds, seeds, stems, and dirt included.
As Snitch went about his rolling business, Mountain Girl paid only perfunctory notice. She had other things on her mind. That afternoon she and Garcia were planning to take a day trip to a clothing store in Sausalito to buy ribbons; she’d use them to decorate a black velvet shirt for her boyfriend.
In what felt like destiny, Garcia and Mountain Girl had hooked up in the fall of 1966. When Kesey had fled to Mexico earlier that year to avoid jail time for his pot busts, Mountain Girl and other Pranksters followed him down, and they all lived on the beach at Manzanillo Bay for a few months. (During that time Mountain Girl became pregnant with Kesey’s daughter, whom they named Sunshine; according to Mountain Girl, Kesey’s wife, Faye, who was also in Mexico, was accepting of the situation: “She was a kind and forgiving person.”) Everyone but Kesey had to return when their visas ran out, and with that, says Mountain Girl, came “the end of the whole Pranksters trip.” Taking Sunshine with her, she moved back in with her brother in San Francisco, and shortly thereafter she and Garcia became inseparable. By then Garcia’s marriage to Sara Ruppenthal was on its last legs, and Sara’s one visit to 710 didn’t portend a future for them: as she told Garcia biographer Blair Jackson, “It didn’t exactly feel ‘family friendly’ to me.”
Garcia had another short-lived girlfriend when he moved into 710; as McGee recalls, “Jerry went through women until Mountain Girl showed up.” But he and Mountain Girl did seem destined to be a couple. For their first date the couple went Christmas shopping. From a love of pot and psychedelics to the fact that both were young parents, Garcia and Mountain Girl shared many traits. “He had determination and willingness to jump into anything at any time,” she says. “He had extra aliveness. He was not disconnected, ever. The young Jerry was such a character.” To Grant, the ties between his old friend and Mountain Girl was obvious. She liked to be in charge. (During the Trips Festival Stewart Brand watched as Mountain Girl, trying to organize workers who were getting high on nitrous, put her hand on the valve and shut it off.) And at that point in his life Garcia didn’t mind women overseeing him. “Jerry was always one of those guys who drew women to him because he seemed needy,” Grant says. “He never took care of his own shit, and he needed someone else to do that, like, ‘Help me, be my old lady.’”
As free as he wanted his relationship with Mountain Girl to be, though, Garcia still flashed a deeply jealous streak. During one New Jersey trip Barlow had driven them to a Guild guitar factory, Garcia and Mountain Girl in the backseat of his Chevy. At one point Barlow looked in the rearview mirror and had a moment of eye contact with his female passenger. Garcia caught it and subtly made his displeasure known to Barlow. “He was very territorial,” says Barlow. “He didn’t want anyone looking at his woman that way.” Mountain Girl noticed that Garcia would get angry if he saw her talking with other men, even those in the Dead, which to her reflected his roots as a “street guy” from outside San Francisco.
For Mountain Girl life in the Dead household at 710 meant a degree of readjustment. When she was part of the Kesey posse she was not just a free spirit but someone who worked on recording and editing tapes; she didn’t just have gumption but a job. She longed to have a similar role with the Dead, but it wasn’t to be. The house was filled with female friends, including Pigpen’s beloved African American girlfriend, Veronica Barnard, who hailed from nearby Vallejo. Their jobs were to clean the house, including its one and a half bathrooms, and cook the meals, such as Grant’s mouth-watering rice and beans. Mountain Girl and the other women tried to organize a 710-wide cleaning day on Saturdays, but the concept didn’t go over well with the men. She also had to take care of Sunshine because she couldn’t afford a babysitter and was tasked with collecting $15 a week from everyone in the house to take down to Haight Street for food.
The scenario was oddly retro—the bread winners and the stay-at-home moms and girlfriends—but no one seemed to object. “We just hung out together and cracked jokes and watched TV,” Lesh said to David Hajdu. “The women did the cooking and cleaning. All we had to do was get high and play music. It was like paradise.” Mountain Girl accepted her newfound role as, in her words, “a solid citizen” to keep the house running. “It was very traditional,” says Swanson. “We were right on the cusp of [women’s lib]. Me personally, I always thought, ‘Whatever I could do to help was good.’”
Of the men Weir was the only one who didn’t need help with the meals. After giving up LSD the year before (he’d had his mind blown one too many times), he went macrobiotic. Regularly preparing brown paste out of rice, he cooked for what seemed like endless hours and then ate it very slowly, chewing each bite dozens of times. Fellow 710 residents would walk into the kitchen and find him cooking seaweed on the stove. For years afterward the other Dead members would kid Weir about that part of his life. But at least Weir worked hard on healthy habits at that point. Orange juice was a staple of the refrigerator at 710; with all the smoke in the house and trips to equally smoky clubs, everyone was getting sick faster than ever before.
Having finished rolling his joints, Snitch paused. On the way out he turned and asked whether Mountain Girl and Garcia would be around later, and Mountain Girl mentioned they had planned a trip out of town, to Sausalito. Snitch asked when they were leaving, and she told him in a few hours, around 1 p.m. When she later thought back to his questions, she had to wonder why he asked for all those details. Maybe he was being thoughtful, or maybe he was simply afraid of her and Garcia. Given what was about to happen, she later wondered whether he was actually being considerate.
Pigpen was in the john and Weir was upstairs practicing yoga when the pounding at the door began around 3 p.m. In the living room Bob Matthews, who’d become the band’s electronics expert (hence his nickname “Knobs”), had just cracked open a box of new speakers when he looked up and saw them: five agents from the California State Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, along with two city inspectors, barging into 710. “Well, what do we have here?” one of them said to Matthews, peering into his cardboard box. Rifkin was returning to the house from an errand when he saw a man in a suit who growled, “So, you’re Rifkin.”
Leading the charge was Matthew O’Connor, head of the Northern Californian division of the state’s narcotics bureau, a fervent antipot crusader who two months before had told a group at the Hibernian Newman Club that pot was a “dangerous, unpredictable substance” and that he wanted possession to remain a felony, not a misdemeanor. Right behind him at 710 was Jerry (short for Gerrit) Van Raam, a seven-year veteran of the department who’d resigned as a cop after being charged with beating a boy outside a deli. (Van Raam claimed the kid was trying to steal change from him.) Two days after turning in his badge Van Raam was sworn in as a member of the narcotics bureau. On a mission to rid the Haight of illicit drugs, they first hit houses on Haight and Divisadero Streets, but according to O’Connor, 710 kept coming up as what he called “a supply source.”
Sue Swanson was next. Earlier that day she’d been at 710 and had walked down to Haight Street—everyone pounded the pavement because no one at the building had a car—to buy a carton of ice cream. Walking up the stairs of 710 she noticed the door was uncharacteristically locked; on the other side stood an older man in a suit and tie, who opened the door and asked, “Do you live here?” Later Swanson realized she should have said no and walked back down the steps. Instead, in a moment of bravado, she snapped, “And who are you?” The man pulled her inside and escorted her into the kitchen, where she saw Rifkin, Weir, Pigpen, and Matthews, among others, all sitting silently. Around them everyone could hear men clomping up and down the stairs, pulling open file cabinet drawers, and talking.
Next up the front steps was Scully, equally confounded by the sight of a locked front door. At first he thought it meant the band was doing an interview; such requests were coming in more frequently now that they had made an album. But when he saw the same suited officer, Scully realized something more ominous was taking place. When he told them his name, the police recognized it—it was on the lease—and gruffly informed him of the reason for their visit. “What—is someone smoking marijuana?” Scully replied faux innocently, but no one bought it, and he too was hauled into the kitchen.
The cops thought they had them all until they saw McGee coming toward the entrance. Lesh and McGee had only briefly lived at 710 in the same room as Garcia and a girlfriend. The two couples (and Garcia’s waking-the-dead snoring) were separated only by a thin Chinese screen, which McGee says was “not acceptable.” Within a few weeks she, Lesh, and Kreutzmann had found a place together a few blocks away on Belvedere Street. “I just wanted a change of scene,” says Lesh. “It wasn’t like in ’66 when we were all living together. It just changed in some unidentifiable way that made me think, ‘This part of it is over.’ Everybody had girlfriends, and there were too many people in the house and not enough room for your own personal space.”
Because her mail was still being sent to 710, McGee was stopping by the house that day to grab it. On her way up the front steps she saw Swanson, frantically waving to her to go back, but before McGee knew what was happening, she too was asked whether she lived there and then found herself in the kitchen.
As police stood guard, everyone in the pantry was eerily quiet, either silently stewing or simply stunned. McGee was possibly the most anxious: leaning over to Swanson, she whispered that she had a ball of hash in her purse, tucked under her poncho. Swanson said nothing, and they continued listening to the police trample through the building, until Swanson finally said, “Let’s get some ice cream.” Because the cop in the room had his back to them, Swanson and McGee cracked open the freezer, pulled out the dessert, and quickly crumbled McGee’s hash into bowls with the ice cream. They were careful not to open the nearby pantry with the gnarly brick of pot. McGee decided to eat the evidence and dug into the ice cream, which tasted like it was sprinkled with grains of dirt.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, it was time to head to police headquarters. In boy-girl pairs, the busted—Weir, Pigpen, Scully, Rifkin, McGee, Barnard, Matthews, Swanson, and Christine Bennett, girlfriend of the band’s new sound man, Dan Healy—were handcuffed and marched down the steps of 710 as photographers, alerted to the raid by police, snapped away. From Weir’s long, girlish mane to Rifkin’s mushroom head of hair to Pigpen’s untucked shirt and headband, they looked more like scraggly bohos than menaces to society, and Weir, cuffed to McGee, waved flamboyantly to the crowd. (“As they say, just spell the name right,” Weir has joked of the bust.) As Scully and Swanson made their way out, Swanson’s small hand kept sliding in and out of the cuffs, and Scully scolded her, “Just keep your hand in there! Don’t get me in trouble!” Before long they were all sitting crammed into a paddy wagon and were on their way to the police headquarters in the Market District. (For unexplained reasons, five other people in the house—a girl of thirteen and what were later described as “a young man and three other girls”—were set free; Bennett, who was underage, was sent to juvenile hall.)
The shopping trip to Sausalito over, Garcia and Mountain Girl were walking up Ashbury when they heard Marilyn Harris, a neighbor living across the street, summoning them up to her apartment. From the vantage point of her window they watched as their friends were marched down the front steps of 710 and into the wagon. Having been busted before, Mountain Girl wasn’t overly rattled, but it was still disturbing to see their friends, especially dope-averse Pigpen, in the hands of the law. “Oh shit, oh shit,” was all she and Garcia could say to one another. They didn’t have to say much more.
Lesh, Kreutzmann, and their new roommate, a drummer named Mickey Hart, were preparing an early dinner at 17 Belvedere Street when the phone rang. On the line was Mountain Girl, telling Hart a bust was going down at 710 and that none of them should drop by. “She said, ‘Don’t come over,’” Hart recalls. “‘Don’t come over?’ She said it real quick.” Lesh would remember picking up the phone, hearing the news, and immediately redialing the house number to confirm what was happening; when a “very serious, unknown, masculine voice” answered, Lesh received his answer and hung up. The news was out, and Hart found himself in yet another alien situation with a band he’d only just joined.
Hart’s initiation into the fold had been typically loose and laissez-faire. On a night in late September 1967 he’d wandered into the Straight Theater, where it was immediately clear the name was something of a joke (as was the billing on the marquee, which called the event a dance class). Decades earlier the Straight had been the Haight Theater, a movie house on the corner of Haight and Cole streets, but only the shell of the old structure remained. The first two dozen rows of seats on the main floor had been ripped out, a wooden dance floor was installed in their place, and all around Hart were bodies—some dancing, others intermingled. The overwhelming aroma of freshly lit joints wafted over it all. (The show had been billed as a “school of dance” event to avoid having to land a permit for a concert.) Hart made his way to the stage, where his new friend Kreutzmann was playing with his band, the Grateful Dead.
The two drummers had met shortly before, introduced to each other at a Count Basie show—possibly at the Fillmore in August 1967—by someone neither of them knew. (Decades later they would still puzzle at that mysterious stranger who altered both of their lives before disappearing into the night.) Hart and Kreutzmann had different personalities. Hart was brash, wiry, and proactive, with a goatee that gave him the look of a freshly arrived Eastern European immigrant. Kreutzmann was taller, laconic, and laid back, with a page-boy haircut and a grin that always seemed as if he were pulling a practical joke. Yet they shared a love of banging on things, and that first night they ran together around the streets of the Haight, making a percussion racket on anything in sight. “We took two pairs of drumsticks and played the whole city—cars, bumpers, street signs, trash cans,” Hart says. “We were yakking and laughing.” Afterward Kreutzmann invited Hart to jam with his band at a garage rehearsal space, but he never gave Hart the exact address, leaving Hart to wander the neighborhood in vain before heading back to home and work.
Work was Hart Music, an instrument store in a San Francisco suburb run by his father, Lenny. The Harts originally hailed from Brooklyn, and Mickey would long remember his grandmother’s minuscule backyard, what he called “sacred space—because there wasn’t that much space in Brooklyn.” Lenny, who’d won a drum championship at the 1939 New York’s World Fair, had left his wife and their son—born Michael Steven Hartman on September 11, 1943—during his son’s formative years, after which Mickey became obsessed with drumming himself. After high school and during a stint in the Air Force, he learned his father was in California and tracked Lenny down after his Air Force days were over; by then Lenny was running the instrument store, and Mickey went to work for him. (Coincidentally, Hart had met Connie Bonner about two years before, when she and some friends stopped by his place, but the Dead were still in their gestation years.)
In the relatively tight San Francisco music scene of the time Hart had heard about the Dead but hadn’t heard them, and he wasn’t sure what to make of them at first at the Straight Theater. As he watched from close to the stage, the music was overpoweringly loud and deafening—“cacophonous,” he would later call it, “this amazing wall of sound swirling around.” The rumble of Lesh’s bass and a bit of Garcia’s guitar rose up through the murk, but little else did; he couldn’t hear the other guitarist at all, never mind the guy behind the organ. It didn’t sound like anything typically rock ’n’ roll except in its volume, which seemed to overtake the entire theater.
Between sets Hart reacquainted himself with Kreutzmann, who immediately asked his fellow drummer to sit in. Jumping into Kreutzmann’s Mustang, they found a kit and made it back to the Straight in time for the second set. They all launched into “Alligator,” a loose, newly written boogie that featured Pigpen’s voice and allowed for endless improvisation. No matter what Hart was playing, it all seemed like one very long song, tribal and amorphous, firm but nebulous. “It started up,” Hart recalls, “and I was holding on for dear life.” The people splayed about the Straight didn’t seem to notice there was another musician onstage, and they didn’t seem to care whether he knew the song or not; they were too busy screwing, dancing, or both. Dust drifted down from the ceiling, intermingling with the strobe lights and casting surreal shadows across the whole scene. The whole scenario struck Hart as a throwback to Dionysian times.
Finally, after what seemed like a few lifetimes, the music wrapped itself up. No one applauded, and Hart wasn’t sure whether the audience was preparing to boo or throw things at them. Instead, what he heard was the sound of people breathlessly exclaiming, “Aaah!” (Even their reactions to the music weren’t conventional.) Garcia turned to everyone and said, with a smile, “We could take this around the world, man.”
They didn’t immediately know it, but they had just found the final element to their sound and identity. Lesh wasn’t interested in playing conventional bass lines, so the music lacked a bottom end that kept it tethered to the ground. But two drummers would finally help anchor their arrangements. The drums made the songs feel more expansive, grander, and more rubbery—in a strange way, more limber with two percussionists potentially colliding. “Right away, it became obvious that two drummers would really help matters,” Scully recalls. Kreutzmann seemed interested in adding another drummer, but, like Scully, he had financial concerns: How were they going to be able to afford it? Despite his encouraging remark to Hart onstage at the Straight, Garcia was initially reluctant to hire Hart, telling Mountain Girl that Hart’s kit would take up too much space on stage and leave Garcia less room to move around. “But you can’t hear what it’s like in the hall,” she told him.
Hart quit his job at Hart Music, without even telling is father at first, and moved into 17 Belvedere Street, where for a while he slept underneath a set of stairs. Almost immediately rumors began drifting back to 710 that the new member was hypnotizing Kreutzmann. They were partly right: in order to help the two men play in sync, a doctor friend had suggested a mild form of hypnosis. “Bill and I were using it in our practicing in order to get coordination and be able to practice for long periods of time,” Hart says. “At that point only James Brown had two drummers. Owsley said, ‘Why don’t you do that to play like one?’ It was like training: we’re going to play for five hours, but it will seem like twenty-four, and we’re not going to get tired. You play with your right hand and I’ll play with the left hand. We split the body up like that. It was one of the things that really created a bond with me and Bill.” Word filtered back to 710 that they’d also tried to hypnotize Pigpen, who ended up walking through a door instead. “Mickey had a bumpy entry into our world,” says Mountain Girl. “There was quite a lot of discussion about whether he had hypnotized Bill into letting him join the band—that maybe it was a trick. Mickey said nothing like that ever happened, but I don’t think any of us really believed it.”
In the end the music—and the fire blazing within them to improve and expand on it—won out, and Hart became a member of the Dead. In time his hustling quality and energy appealed to Garcia, who was equally driven but more passive about success. “They wanted to be a big-time rock band, and they had serious competition from bands like Cream,” says Mountain Girl. “And they felt they needed a bigger sound to get bigger.” To the thrill of some and the uncertainty of others, the Dead were now six.
At the police station the arrested suspects arrived, took seats on benches, and waited for their paperwork to be processed and for their legal team to arrive. Her hash high having kicked in, McGee had to be propped up between Swanson and Grant. “I was melting onto the floor, and they were holding me up,” McGee says. “It was probably a near-lethal dose of hash. To this day I don’t eat vanilla ice cream.” O’Connor and the other lawmen presented their case—boasting to the press that they’d confiscated “over a pound of marijuana and hash”—and that they were “processing some marijuana in the kitchen.” (In that regard he was right.) Not all of them knew who they’d arrested: “Hey, have you guys heard of a group called the Grateful Dead?” asked one of the sergeants when he returned home that night to his family.
In a sense their time at Olompali had been a pyrrhic victory; it made them seem as if they could live in whatever way they wanted. “We were living in a bubble,” admits Swanson. “We were all into flaunting the life we’d grown up in. We felt untouchable in a way.” But the word was out on them even outside the city. The previous summer Weir’s Menlo School for Boys classmate Michael Wanger heard that a nearby band called the Warlocks had changed their name to the Grateful Dead, but he didn’t know Weir and Garcia were members until someone filled him in. Although he’d lost touch with Weir, Wanger still went to see the Dead, largely because of a warning he’d heard from a friend: “If you want to see them, better see ’em fast because they’re way involved in the drug scene and they’re going to be arrested soon.”
At the police station Pigpen was particularly rattled. “What are they gonna do—are we gonna have to go to jail?” he lamented to Scully, who told him to cool it and said they’d be out on bail soon enough. Ironically, it would be Pigpen’s face that would be plastered on the front page of the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle. Pigpen was still more of a drinker than a doper. He seemed to spend much of his time in his room, playing blues records and harmonica, only drinking late at night, out of sight of the others in the house. On the road he and Grant would usually be paired off as roommates because, Grant says, “we both stank of alcohol.” Together they’d drink a quart of 100-proof Southern Comfort every day, but Pigpen generally steered away from pot. (Grant would also watch as one lovely or another would brush out Pigpen’s long hair with his whale-bone brush.) But as the jail incident revealed, Pigpen was also easily spooked. During the Dead’s earlier trip to New York all the traffic rattled him, especially when he found himself in a truck speeding up to Central Park, and bees rattled him too. During their time in Los Angeles he and Swanson shared a room, platonically, and Pigpen lulled her to sleep in her own bed by reciting recordings of Lord Buckley, the quasi-beat, boho-spewing comedian and monologist.
Back on Ashbury Street, the press and media now dispersed and onto their next assignments, Garcia and Mountain Girl made the decision to venture across to their home. To make sure all was clear, they called first; when no one answered they crossed the street and made their way into 710. The place was eerily quiet, and Mountain Girl rushed into the kitchen to see if the colander with pot was gone. Not surprisingly, it was, but to their shock, the brick of wrapped pot in the cabinet was untouched. All seemed intact, but not enough to make them want to stay much longer; after forty-five minutes Garcia and Mountain Girl left their home, unsure of its—and their—future.
By the time everyone was booked—for either drug possession or a charge related to it—six hours had passed and night had fallen. By chance Rohan and a fellow lawyer, Michael Stepanian, had a makeshift office at 710 for HALO (Haight Ashbury Legal Organization), which came to the aid of runaways, drug bustees, and other in-need local clients. Their secretary, Antoinette “Toni” Kaufman, was also arrested in the bust. Police found pot in the couch in their office but only dusted their file cabinets. At the police station Stepanian was impressed with the proactive attitude of those who’d just been arrested: they announced they’d stand together and not blame anyone else for what had happened. “They said, ‘We’re going to get through this case, we’re going to have some fun, but we’re not going to act like jerks,’” Stepanian recalls. “And I said, ‘Fine, that’s a great attitude.’ There was no panic.”
At Barrish Bail Bonds, right across from the San Francisco Hall of Justice, owner Jerry Barrish, who had a reputation for coming to the aid of antiwar protestors, students, and the underground, gave them $500 each for their bail and didn’t demand immediate repayment. Later they learned more about what had happened: Snitch had been threatened by police for alleged offenses if he didn’t cooperate with them, and he had little choice but to turn them in. Soon after Mountain Girl handed him the pot, he turned it over to the authorities. For decades after, Weir would have the feeling that the band had been set up, the pot planted.
Those who were already living or crashing at 710, like Rifkin, Swanson, and Weir, made their way back to the building. “It was odd,” says Swanson. “It was like coming home after your house had been robbed.” Again they congregated in the kitchen, and the first order of business was disposing of the craggy brick of pot still partially tucked away in the kitchen cabinet. “We got that out of the house immediately,” says Mountain Girl. “There was a great cleanout.” One rumor had it that it was transported across the street to the neighboring apartment where Garcia and Mountain Girl had holed up during the raid; at the very least it was out of their home in case the police returned.
In the hours and days that followed, everyone attempted to resume as normal a life as possible, but a lingering sense of paranoia and apprehension settled over the building for the first time. The vibe, as Mountain Girl recalls it, was “a lot more edgy. It was, ‘Cool it for a while.’” They didn’t quit smoking, of course; they simply reverted to doing it in the upstairs parlor, out of street-level sight, not leaving any extra pot or roach clips lying around. “Before that, we had joints hanging out of our mouths all day long,” says Scully. “They’d go out like a stogie and just hang there. But we got a lot more careful.”
When the raid was in progress someone had tipped the nearby offices of a new magazine about to launch, Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner, the twenty-one-year-old who was its founding editor, had his own personal history with the Dead. He’d dropped by one of the Acid Tests—watching them play in the large bay window at Big Nig’s house—and had written about the Trips Festival in his column for UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, The Daily Californian. Wenner had loved the Dead’s first album; in Swanson’s memory Warner Brothers sent out a copy of Rolling Stone’s imminent first issue to everyone in the band’s fan club.
When Wenner heard about the arrests he immediately dispatched his chief photographer, Baron Wolman, to shoot the band and friends at the bail bonds office. Although he knew it was a major story, for both the city and the local music community, Wenner scoffed at the raid itself. “It was more like the Keystone Kops raiding the Dead,” he says. “The Dead were just laughing about it.”
The arrests and their lingering, sour aftertaste didn’t drive them out of the Haight immediately, but it was the most distressingly apparent sign that the neighborhood—and their time in it—was coming to an end only about a year after they’d all moved into 710. “It was one more stick on the bonfire that was consuming the Haight,” says Mountain Girl of the bust. “It was making it less than fun. Jerry and I both felt pretty uncomfortable being there.” The Summer of Love media hype had been eye-rolling enough, as were bad-trip faux-psychedelic pop hits like the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints.” (Granted, the Strawberry Alarm Clock wasn’t that different from the alternate names the Dead had kicked around before stumbling upon their ultimate moniker.) The sightseeing buses that began driving though the Haight were amusing at first. The Dead and their camp made absurd fun out of the tourists gaping at their home: Pigpen mooned one bus, and at the band’s urging during a visit Warner’s Joe Smith ran up to the top of the street and whistled when a bus approached so that everyone at 710 could hide, depriving bus riders of any sightings.
The bust was far from such goofy fun; instead, it was proof that the eyes of part of the world were now upon them. “It was a reminder that what you did was illegal in nature and there were consequences involved in that,” says Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady, who rolled the joints at a 710 Thanksgiving dinner in 1966. It was also another sign that a darker side of the Haight was revealing itself. Runaways were showing up more regularly, people were tripping and stepping out of top-floor apartments and splattering themselves on to the sidewalks, and harder drugs were dirtying up the neighborhood. The latter problem was more than reinforced to the Dead when they learned of the murder of William Thomas, an African American drug dealer known as Superspade. Scully had known Superspade even before he’d met the Dead. (Scully himself would sell hash periodically to help pay the rent, both at 710 and the house he previously lived in.) With his flamboyant wardrobe, Superspade was one of many local characters, but two months before the bust at 710 his body was found shot, stabbed, and stuffed into a sleeping bag that was hanging off a nearby cliff. Shortly before that grisly discovery another local dealer, known as Shob, was stabbed to death a dozen times with a butcher knife, and part of his right arm was hacked off.
The Haight was on the periphery of a high-crime area, and some thought Superspade simply wasn’t being discreet enough (he had a tendency to flash wads of bills in public) and had probably found himself in a turf war. Either way, his brutal killing was a sign that the dealers in the Haight had become murderously territorial, each fighting to make as much money as possible over the dazed teenagers burrowing into the Haight in the wake of the Summer of Love. “Superspade was a really calm, really nice dealer who we trusted,” says Hart. “No one would want to kill him. When that happened, that put a big shock in me. The mood on the street was turning ugly. People were getting stoned for no reason and people were going because it was an ‘attraction,’ like Disneyland. The world was closing in on us.”
They had to start thinking about leaving, and the signs were already in the air that it was happening. At Scully’s invitation, Stan Cornyn of Warner Brothers had flown up from Los Angeles for a meeting at 710, and Cornyn was finally able to walk up the fabled front steps he’d been hearing about. Someone let him in, and he took a seat in the living room and waited. And waited. And waited some more. He sat taking in the sights, especially a black-and-white photo of a naked girl facing a naked boy. “Hippies—wow!” Cornyn thought. “It was so much nicer than what I was doing.” But no one ever came out to talk with him, and he was eventually told that maybe they were asleep. Cornyn had no choice but to leave.
Three days after the bust came one of the Dead’s last great escapades at 710. At Gleason’s suggestions, they held a press conference at their ransacked home. Beforehand Rifkin expressed what he wanted to say to his former UCLA classmate Harry Shearer (later an actor and comedian known for his work on The Simpsons, This Is Spinal Tap, and Saturday Night Live), and Shearer, who would often visit 710 on weekends, helped Rifkin write it out. Flanked by the band members, Garcia smiling gently, Rifkin called pot “the least harmful chemical used for pleasure and life enhancement,” decried pot laws as “seriously out of touch with reality,” and derided the media’s image of the “drug-oriented hippie. The mass media created the so-called hippie scene. . . . The law creates a mythical danger and calls it a felony. The result is a series of lies and myths that prop each other up. Behind all the myths is the reality. The Grateful Dead are people engaged in constructive, creative effort in the musical field, and this house is where we work as well as our residence.”
A bowl of whipped cream, a spoon jammed into it, was placed in front of Rifkin, but it wasn’t meant for any sudden attack of the munchies. The band decided that the first reporter who asked, “How long did it take to grow your hair?” would get pied. Luckily, no one was brave enough to toss out that question, and the dessert remained untouched. Among those at the event were Rolling Stone photographer Baron Wolman. At thirty, Wolman was older than most of the subjects he’d begun shooting for the nascent magazine, and he never got high (he preferred the roller derby over acid). But he had a way of putting his subjects at ease (the ever-caustic Grace Slick would happily pose for him in a Girl Scout uniform), and he respected the new style of rock ’n’ roll. Even with his innate bedside manner, Wolman found himself in a challenging situation at 710. He watched the press conference, and the band seemed, in his mind, “weirdly elated—they were so high, on a natural high, over the message they were giving.” Because Rolling Stone didn’t yet exist and he had no business cards, Wolman had to convince Scully, Rifkin, and the band of his legitimacy.
For his photo shoot Wolman asked for a group pose, but between their energy and agitation, it was hard to corral them all. After the conference was over the band—with Sue Swanson and Veronica Barnard yapping away in a nearby window—was asked to gather on the stoop, and Wolman sensed his one chance had arrived. Kreutzmann flashed a middle finger, and Pigpen and Garcia goofed around with an antique Winchester rifle that Scully had found on a trip to Mendocino. The gun was so broken it couldn’t have fired even if it had ammo, but Wolman was still unnerved. “I was slightly worried they were going to do me bodily harm,” he recalls. “Had I been close to them and part of that coterie, I would’ve been much more comfortable with what was going on. But I was happy to shoot them on the stoop and get the fuck out of there before I got killed.”
As Wenner had predicted, the bust didn’t amount to much in any legal sense of the word. In the end Scully and Matthews pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “maintaining a residence where marijuana was used” and were fined $200 each, while Pigpen and Weir were each fined $100 for being in a place where the drug was used. “The DA said, ‘Look, how about if you guys plead to the lowest possible health and safety-code regulation it could possibly be?’” recalls Stepanian. “I said to them, ‘What do you think about paying a fine?’ They said, ‘No jail? Fine.’ Here’s a hundred bucks—see ya later, good-bye.” All were put on probation. It was time to leave the Haight and strike out elsewhere in search of new homes and adventures. But as their defiant pose on the stoop showed, that bust and its aftermath came with an unexpected bonus: it proved that, though they weren’t above the law, they might be able to live just outside it—and endure.