Mountain Girl and Jerry
Walk into splintered sunlight Inch your way through dead dreams to another land.
—Robert Hunter, “Box of Rain”
We had enough acid to blow the world apart. We were just musicians in this house and we were guinea pigging more or less continuously. Tripping frequently if not constantly. That got good and weird.
—Jerry Garcia, interview with author, 1988
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I had always wanted to do psychedelics. I’d read Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception when I was a teenager and really wanted to expand my consciousness. As far as I knew, it was different than grass. I’d smoked some grass with Hunter and gotten kind of silly and it was okay. But grass made Jerry irresponsible and that was why I didn’t like it.
David Nelson: We all took acid together the first time. Me and Jerry and Sara. We were moving into this place on Gilman Street in Palo Alto. I believe it was probably in the spring of ’65. We’d always been talking about if we could get some LSD. LSD was something in the Sunday supplement of the newspaper in some weird psycho article. The drug that made you go psychotic. People would see lions and tigers and stuff. We all said, “Yeah. I want that! I want that!” I thought, “If I hallucinate, I want to see a full life-size cartoon of Mickey Mouse. I want to see Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Only as life-size cartoons actually walking up to me.” Then somebody said, “I want to see myself. I want to hallucinate and see myself walk in the room!” The only one with personal experience with it was Hunter because he did that Veterans Administration program where you were a guinea pig and they tried you out on mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD. When Hunter told us that in the Wildwood Boys, me and Garcia went, “We’re going for coffee. Come on!” We went down to this coffee shop and sat there and just pumped him. “Tell us all about it. Every detail. Every gory detail.” I remember him telling us about the deificoition plane. He was allowed to have his typewriter so he did some writing on psilocybin or something and came up with this plane of writing or thought that was called the deificoition plane. As far as hallucinations, he said he didn’t see too much except on one occasion he looked around and the seat of this chair that was in the room looked like a mouth and lips and it went “Whoaff!” at him. Another time, he said that he was really getting deep into a nightmare trip where he was being chased by this demon with a dagger. A crystalline dagger that was this long and he was running and couldn’t get away. Finally there was nothing else to do but turn and face the demon. He turned and he grabbed the dagger out of the demon’s hand and stabbed himself in the heart and licked the blood. Me and Garcia went, “Ahhhh, yeah. That’s my man!”
Rick Shubb from Berkeley, a Sandy Rothman friend, a bluegrass guy, who now makes those Shubb capos, had found a place in Palo Alto where we could share the rent. On the first day we were moving into Gilman Street, he said, “I can get LSD.” We went “Okay” and everybody coughed up their money. It was twelve dollars or something that he had to have from each guy. It was Jerry and Sara, me, and eight or nine others. We all dropped acid at the same time for the first time. It was everybody’s first time.
It was white powder in a capsule and it was just amazing. Everybody walked off into their own thing for a while and then came back and we were looking at each other in the mirror and going, “That’s incredible!” It was you but only different. It was like the archetype of you. The basic you coming through. I was saying, “Everybody looks like animals. Like the human version of their animal.” We were saying, “Jerry, you look like a bear, man.” And he did. He looked like a big brown bear. Sara looked like a swan or a goose. At some point, I suddenly thought, “Does anybody know if there’s something we ought to know about this? Some of the dangers? Does anybody know anybody who’s experienced?” I said, “Hunter’s experienced. Let’s go see him. And find out if we should be tipped off to anything.” So we ran over to Hunter’s house. I told him about it and he went, “Oh, are you always in the habit of jumping out of planes without parachutes?” We all looked at one another. “Oh, my God!” He said, “No, no. Relax. Sit down.” So we sat down and he was talking and I remember when he was talking, I stopped listening to what he was saying because he was gesturing with his hands. He went, “And then you get to that point and then it’s peeeuuuuuu!” And he made this gesture. But I saw it in stop motion. He made this fanning motion with his fingers and I saw it click click click click click click click click. Like that photography thing. It was amazing.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Taking acid was wonderful for me. It was like coming home. I just loved it. That first time we took it, I remember Jer and I jointly freaked out in the middle of the night when we were off by ourselves. Big-time freaked out. We drove to Hunter’s and woke him up because he had the Tibetan Book of the Dead. So we figured he would be able to help us. We woke him up and said, “We’re freaking out, man, you gotta help us.” Hunter looked at the book for a while and then he said, “It’s okay.” “It’s okay? It’s okay. It’s okay! Oh, yeah! It’s okay!” What a relief. Everything was okay. That revelation saved our lives.
David Nelson: In the evening, we went and played basketball. We were just fooling around, throwing the ball to one another, not really playing hard or anything. The thing about the basketball and the light was that the ball had a jet trail about six feet long. It made it easier to hit a basket and definitely easier to catch. Because it had this trail you could see like a big pointer. It was like Disneyland. It was the first-time realization that we could go to Disneyland any time, man. It was great. We were all remarking about how there was no hangover. There was this feeling of great energy to stay up and do things without being speeded. Without being like raped. It was really great.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: We had such wonderful times on these early group trips. We just had wonderful wonderful times. They were so magical. This was large amounts of pure pharmaceutical acid. We were having very profound and deep contact, not with spirits but with the basic energetic components of life on earth. I do remember that after the Muir Beach Acid Test, Bob Weir and Jerry and I and maybe Sue Swanson went up on top of Mount Tam and we all had a joint hallucination that scared the shit out of us. Somebody else who was there actually took off and ran across the countryside. We had all seen something in the path. It was probably a gnarled tree branch. But to us, it was a dark malevolent being in the predawn light. We all had the same scare. But usually it was pretty positive. Considering we were taking acid, we did quite well. We had wonderful times. Just so high and delightful.
Suzy Wood: Sara would write to me about acid. “Hitch your scrotum to a star,” she’d say. That was what acid did to you. It was an interesting thought. Considering it was coming from a woman.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: But I don’t have a scrotum. How would I know?
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: Jerry had finally taken acid. That was my attitude. Because I’d already been taking it for a year or so before he was taking it.
Laird Grant: There were parties all the time and then the whole Kesey thing started happening in La Honda. It had been happening down on Homer Lane and Perry Lane in Palo Alto. Sometimes there would be parties in all three places. You’d spend half an hour or an hour here. Then you’d go over to another party. Tripping openly at parties was still six months to a year away. Then it was really secretive. People were feeling, “Should we let other people know about this?” Then the thing was, “Yeah. Everybody should do it.” Which again changed everybody’s life into a whole different larger, stranger circle.
David Nelson: We all actually came in contact with the Kesey bunch there at Gilman Street when Page Browning who also used to hang out at the Chateau but now was living at Perry Lane came by one afternoon and told us about the first bus trip. Garcia was there. He had a ringside seat. Page was actually there to score some pot. Phil Lesh had moved into Gilman Street and Page was a friend of Phil’s from the Chateau days. We used to smoke pot and go to drive-in movies. We started talking and Page said, “Have you heard about the bus?” And I said, “No.” He said, “They painted this bus just like a Jackson Pollock painting and then they got Neal Cassady to drive it.” We were going, “Yeah?” They’d gone east with the goal in mind to meet Kerouac and to get in contact with Timothy Leary and those people at Millbrook and they’d encountered complete stuffiness and snobbiness from the Timothy Leary people. Leary himself wasn’t even there. Jerry was sitting there listening to this and then I remember Page saying, “So what we did was, we went to a nearby Army and Navy store in town and got some surplus smoke bombs, red and green smoke dye marker canisters, and we went and lobbed it over the wall at them.” We were laughing and he told us great stories about this bus trip. About Neal Cassady with headphones on being stopped by cops and the cops just being completely nonplussed and straight people across the nation being totally nonplussed by this outrageous bus and this guy with headphones on driving. “God,” we said. “You mean Neal was taking acid and driving, too?” We were going, “Wow! How do you drive when you’re hallucinating?” And Page said, “We asked him about that too and Neal said, ‘You just pick out the hallucinations from the real stuff. Then you drive right through the hallucinations!’”
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Neal Cassady was a figure who’d sort of appear now and then, take whatever he could find in the medicine cabinet, bend everybody’s minds, and disappear. The Martian policeman.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: I loved Neal, man. He was fabulous. He was always willing to have a toke. He’d say, “I been smoking this shit for fifty years. Still gets me high.”
Jerry Garcia (1988): We loved Cassady. He was the guy, you know? The real thing. The Pranksters were learning from him and we were also learning from him. We were just that much younger. Neal was great. He was just unbelievable. There really has never been anything like him since. He was a true inspiration.
Laird Grant: Kesey moved to La Honda. At that point, everything really kicked into gear. When I look back now at the chronology and the time space that it happened in, there was so much stuff going on at some points, it seems like it had to have taken five years. But it was only a matter of eight to twelve months. Because of the madness. All of a sudden it just exploded. I still say it was the Stanford Research Institute’s fault. They let something out the smokestack. All of us in Palo Alto got contaminated. You look at all the weird and talented people who came out of Palo Alto in comparison to any other town in the U.S., you go, “Wait a second. This is rather strange.”
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I wasn’t involved in the early Kesey stuff. Jerry went up to La Honda and from what I could tell, there was this kind of uneasy alliance. What we’d been doing before was very organic and elemental. Although we might not have spoken of it that way, there was this deeply spiritual aspect to it for us. When we took acid, we started listening to the Beatles. Dylan’s first electric album came out right about then, too. We had been putting him down. But taking acid and listening to that album was incredible. So the resistance to amplified music waned. And there wasn’t a huge market for jug bands.
By this time, we had a little house of our own on Bryant Court in downtown Palo Alto with a white picket fence and a garage out back. Jerry and I had a family scene with him going off to work at Dana Morgan’s and practicing at home. Heather was walking and as she got older, she and Jerry enjoyed playing together, singing, and talking. I was a film major at Stanford by then and I had a social life of my own. I was hanging out with other filmmakers, making little movies. The jug band practiced out in the garage, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
When did we start going our separate ways? There was a theme running through our relationship from the start. Early on, I got preoccupied with pregnancy, motherhood, the family, making ends meet, that sense of responsibility. We didn’t talk about what was bothering us. His real relationships were in the music, not his family. He had this drive to succeed.
Sue Swanson: I went to Menlo-Atherton High School and in my junior year, Bob Weir walked into my world history class. I knew Wendy, his sister, forever and I’d always heard about her weird brother, Bob. But I’d never met him and then this guy walked into the classroom. This was after the first Beatles’ summer and so I was totally into anybody who was into music or long hair and of course Bob was so cute. He overheard me and my friend Sue Ashcroft talking about the Beatles’ concert and how my friend Connie and I had gotten in the garage of their hotel. Weir went, “Are you talking about the Beatles?” That was the first thing he ever said to me. We started talking and he told me that he had this band he was in. At that point, it was Mother McCree’s.
Justin Kreutzmann: My dad told me he didn’t even see the Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Band. He was just into rock ’n’ roll. He played in bands that wore red jackets and did “At the Hop” and the first time he ever played in public was at a party and they did “Johnny B. Goode.” He realized that everybody at the party was dancing and that was when he decided that this would probably be a good thing to do. He was the rock ’n’ roll element and Jerry had the bluegrass and Phil had the orchestrated stuff and Weir had probably a little of everything strange mixed into it. I think Weir’s probably a folkie more than anything else.
Dexter Johnson: Weir came and subbed for Jerry during a lesson once. He didn’t seem like a man to me. He didn’t have a beard, he was clean cut, and he was younger than Jerry. I was probably fifteen and he was seventeen. He wanted to show me some electric stuff. That was not what I wanted to learn. I said, “Well, that’s not what we were working on, you know.” He said, “Well, what are you doing?” If I’m not mistaken, I played “Spike Driver Blues” by Mississippi John Hurt. He just flipped. It was like, “Wow, man. How do you do that?” He wanted me to show it to him. He said, “So what else is Jerry showing you?” Of course I was disappointed. I’d come to learn, not to show. But I showed him how to play it. Then I stopped taking lessons for a month until Jerry came back.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: I’d be out for a couple of months in the Merchant Marine. I’d come back and I’d hear, “Jerry’s doing this. They’re playing this place with these guys.” Sometimes I’d go down and help him schlep their equipment around. They would go try these different coffeehouses in the city. They’d go around and audition and I’d end up talking to the manager or the bartender and they’d be saying, “These guys dress any better?” And I’d say, “Shit, I don’t know. Maybe they have sweatshirts that match. They don’t have any money. They’re all real poor.” Starving artists, you know? They were slovenly. That was the trend at the time. This was pre-Warlocks. After the Warlocks, I seen them once or twice. Then I didn’t see them again for a long time.
David Grisman: I got them their first piece of national press in Sing Out magazine. I was living in Greenwich Village and going to NYU and I worked part-time for a guy named Israel G. Young who had a place called the Folklore Center. Izzy wrote a column called, I believe, “Frets and Frails” for Sing Out magazine, which was sort of a newsy, chatty thing. I came back from California and I told him about this band. I think I even mentioned Jerry. I was taken with the fact that it was like a rock band. It was becoming cool for folk people to get into rock ’n’ roll because of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. We all dug on that and Bob Dylan.
Tom Constanten: I saw one of the Warlocks’ shows at the Inn Room in Redwood City. I think it was a bar in a hotel and I was one of about twelve people in the audience. Let me say charitably that the room could have held more. Jerry was no longer Cesar Romero but Prince Valiant doing “Roly-Poly,” “Do You Believe in Magic?,” and other songs like that. Did people listen? When there are twelve people, you can’t tell. It seemed everybody was listening. It was like one of those Danish film festival theaters. When you’re there and there are six or seven other people in the whole theater, you don’t want to profess too much curiosity about everybody else.
David Grisman: Jerry and those guys were beyond the music even then. They were a bunch of very hip guys. They were all reading The Hobbit and they were doing this communal living that opened my eyes. I dug the music because they were doing bluegrass songs. They were doing Bob Dylan. They were putting this roots music in the context of rock ’n’ roll.
Dexter Johnson: Now the Warlocks were happening. I remember seeing them at some dive over by the railroad tracks playing rhythm and blues. I also remember coming to Dana Morgan’s one afternoon, not for a lesson, but to buy picks or strings and they were practicing and they were doing “Money.” “The best things in life are free....” I didn’t think it was as good as the hit on the radio. I still listened to teenage radio and I was thinking, “Why would he do this?” Jerry could play that banjo so good and he played in those bluegrass bands and I’d gotten to love that. It just seemed bizarre to me that anybody would want to play that electric music if he could play the banjo and guitar and mandolin. I remember being really disappointed that he had any interest at all in playing the electric guitar.
David Nelson: We all knew that he’d played electric guitar on Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance?” Before any of this. Before the folk thing. Before anything. When he was in high school. In a real funky studio. If you listen to that recording, there are no drums. There are cardboard boxes. He was a kid from Balboa High. It was what he used to refer to as his “teenage hoodlum period.” When he got that first electric guitar from his mom in exchange for the accordion. He got that guitar and he was really happy with it and he told me that he just tuned it to one tuning. The solo actually sounds like it could be in that tuning because he said it wasn’t until a couple months later when he found out how to really tune it. It’s very primitive and it’s very much that style of plunging out and jumping in with both feet first. The solo itself is basically two licks used very modestly. Very modestly.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I first met Phil Lesh back at the Chateau when he was a music student. He was this madman coming in with these musical scores where there were great slashes of music going down the paper and all over. He was just so wildly excited about avant garde music, which didn’t seem to have anything to do with what Jerry was doing. Jerry could share his enthusiasm for some of it but it wasn’t his thing.
Peter Albin: Lesh lived down the street with a friend of my brother. I’d go over there and I’d see these charts that Lesh had written. I couldn’t believe this weird shit. Like a symphony for fifty guitars. They were all circular. It was a circular chart. A bizarre-looking thing. How do you read this?
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: I remember going to a couple rehearsals of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Various publications have listed me as a member of that band but I never was. I was at the Warlocks’ first gig at the pizza parlor at Magoo’s. This was when they finally got all their shit together. I think they rehearsed in Dana’s for the first one and then they got this gig at Magoo’s. The thing about Dana was that he had all the stuff to play on so they let him be the bass player. He couldn’t play bass for shit, man. They gave him the best break possible and he just couldn’t do it.
Sue Swanson: I drove Jerry up to the city the day that he went to find Phil to get him to play in the band. We went up in my car. It just wasn’t working with Dana Morgan playing bass. When they fired Dana from the band, it was tough. Jerry’s guitar was from Dana Morgan’s Music. So all of a sudden, he didn’t have an ax. I remember him and his wife Sara sitting there trying to figure it out. “We’ve got two hundred dollars in the bank. How much is this ax? Maybe I can borrow money from my mom....” I’m not sure how but Jerry got the guitar. It was a lousy place to rehearse anyway. The whole room was instruments. There were cymbals all over the place. When they played there, everything played right back at them.
Marshall Leicester: In terms of forming the Warlocks, I especially remember Lesh as being the decisive force in that. It was not so much Lesh himself, although Phil was obviously extremely important, but the moves that got Dana Morgan out of the band. That was the moment at which something which was partly being done as a concession to grownup bourgeois life and the need to make money and all the rest of it turned into the possibility of making something greater. Dana was their original bass player. And when Lesh came along, it was a great deal more than a question of just replacing one musician with a better musician. Because Jerry took a real leap there. I remember some of us chicken bourgeois types being afraid he’d lose his job at Morgan’s by firing his boss’s son. But Lesh was adamant about that. I think some of us went to Phil at one point and said, “Would you back off a little? We’re worried about whether Jerry’s going to be able to survive.” And Lesh said, “No way. I’ve waited too long for this.” Phil was really ambitious and could be really hard-nosed in a way that was always difficult for Jerry. Yet what often looked like a kind of narcissism on Jerry’s part was in fact him being more intense and in a certain way much more ruthless than others. I heard people say that you hadn’t been dropped until you’d been dropped by Garcia. When you became no longer of interest to him because he was moving in a different direction.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: So Phil came down and now the scene shifted to Guitars Unlimited in Menlo Park. Dana Morgan’s was no longer part of the scene. Now Jerry was teaching at Guitars Unlimited. Phil came down one day and I got to meet Phil. They were in the back room at Dana’s and they said, “Here, Phil, here’s a bass.” And Phil said, “What do I do with it?” And I said, “This is the A string, this is the E string and you get to make the E string be the same as the A string by pushing on the fifth fret and then the same tone. The basic beat is boom boom, boom boom and then you need to go up to here, boom boom, boom boom.” I just showed him which string was which and where an E was on the A string. He picked up on that right away.
Jerry Garcia (1988): We were stoned on acid the first time we walked into one of the Family Dog’s first shows at Longshoreman’s Hall when they had the Lovin’ Spoonful. We went in there and looked around and Phil went up to Luria Castel and said, “Lady, what this little séance needs is us.” We thought, “Yeah. We should be here. Hell, yeah. You kiddin’?” It was obvious.
Sue Swanson: The first time I ever got high was when the Lovin’ Spoonful played Longshoreman’s Hall. Garcia put the sugar cube under my tongue and said, “In half an hour, you won’t believe your eyes.” We went somewhere in Larkspur, a place I’ll never find again, and then we ended up going back to Longshoreman’s Hall to see the Lovin’ Spoonful.
Dexter Johnson: Bill Kreutzmann was a drummer in a group called the Legends at Palo Alto High School and they were the best band at the school. I was Social Commissioner at Palo Alto High and I hired them for the opening dance. They were great. All my friends were like, “All, right, man!” Then when I came to school on Monday, there was a note for me to go to the office and I was screwed. Kreutzmann’s band had made the kids dance like they weren’t supposed to. There were no fights or anything but it was some moral issue because they were doing the “Swim.” They were pumping and doing bumps and grinds. It was a white upper middle class thing. We were right next to Stanford University.
Justin Kreutzmann: My dad met Jerry in ’63 before the band started because Jerry answered an ad in the paper put there by my grandfather, Big Bill. He was selling a banjo that we had and my dad answered the door and there was this guy named Jerry Garcia asking to buy this banjo and he bought the banjo and then they both ended up working in Dana Morgan’s music store.
Sue Swanson: Then they started the rock band and they didn’t want to let me watch them. Bobby wouldn’t let me come to the first rehearsal. No one could go. But then he let me go to the second rehearsal and I was the first person that ever got to go to their rehearsal besides them and I never went away. That was it. I’ve always been there. That was why Jerry called me his first fan. This was 1965. I was a junior in high school.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I remember spending some time up at John Dawson’s parents’ house in the hills when they were just getting the band together, playing “Gloria” and some Rolling Stones’ songs. It took some persuasion but Phil was definitely the bass player by then. They also practiced at Sue Swanson’s parents’ place. By now, we had moved to that big old house on Waverly with Hunter and Nelson and Rick Shubb and some other folks. Things were changing.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Pigpen really did have the beatnik edge. Pigpen was the real beatnik. Everybody else was imitation beatniks. Pigpen got brought up on R and B. That was why he was able to play harmonica like a black guy. He’d go hang out in East Palo Alto with black hookers. One time Garcia said, “If you’re going to hang out with Pigpen, you’re taking your life in your hands.” He was hanging some with Pigpen just to see but he was not going to go on Pigpen’s trip because that was a little bit too weird. Pigpen was drinking Ripple. Pigpen was able to buy when he was sixteen because he looked that old. That was what ruined his liver by the time he was twenty-five.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: I was surprised when Jerry first told me he was playing with this electric band. It was like he had really gotten down on the ladder after he got married. They had a baby and he was saying, “I have to make gigs. So this is what I have to do.” And I thought, “Jeez, this banjo player all of a sudden is lowering himself to play in a rock ’n’ roll band?” I was thinking, “Jerry, what’s happened to you?” And he said, “I gotta make a buck. You know?” I could understand it. They were hurting. You do what you have to do to survive.
David Nelson: That place on Gilman Street only lasted about six months and then we had to move out. Rick Shubb scored another house that was just amazing. Right around the corner, there was this place called Waverly on Forest and Waverly. None of us checked it out because we thought, “Oh, we’d never get a place like that. That’d be just too good.” It was this old big Victorian that had round turrets on the corners and this porch with actual pillars and lots and lots of rooms. Jerry and Sara were living there. Me, Hunter, Dave Parker, an occasional ne’er-do-well in the other room or somebody in the attic. But that was the main hard core. I really loved that place. It had a big garden area in back with a huge avocado tree and it had an elevator but the elevator wasn’t working. The place was that big. That was where Jerry was living and where the band was centered.
Peter Albin: I knew that they had gotten together a rock band in the ensuing months and were playing some pizza parlor down at Menlo Park but I never saw them at that point. I saw them at Pierre’s on Broadway in San Francisco. They played behind a stripteaser. It was the funniest fucking show I ever saw. Here were my old friends playing rock ’n’ roll music and “In The Midnight Hour.” Pigpen was playing behind this girl with these tassels. This was an old-fashioned type of stripteaser. It was before totally nude dancing. I was sitting behind three sailors and they were going, “Hey, take it off!” This girl was down to these little things and there were these air holes in the floor. That was real entertaining. The tassels would go up whenever someone pressed a button. Air would shoot up, the tassels would flap, and you’d see the boobies. Can you imagine the Grateful Dead playing behind a stripteaser? But after a while, the sailors’ eyes turned away from the girl and began watching Garcia and the band. The girl was boring. She was just dancing. Her tits were flopping. So what? The band was playing some interesting music. This guy with the one finger missing was doing some incredible shit. Even the sailors appreciated it. Of course, the people I was with, my brother and his friends, they thought it was fantastic.
Justin Kreutzmann: In the ’65 to ’66 period, they just basically wanted to be the Rolling Stones. That was what my dad said. They just wanted to make blues records like the Rolling Stones. He said they used to back up strippers and there was one bar where they had this little drainage ditch in front of the bar. A little dip right there. If the set was really good, the bartender would pour alcohol into it and he’d light it on fire. This whole ring of fire would burn down the bar. What if you were reaching for your glass and you didn’t notice that? Aaahh!
David Nelson: I went up to their Tuesday night audition at the Fillmore. The other bands that were auditioning that same night were the Great Society and the Loading Zone. I remember I took acid that night, too. I walked in real early and nobody was even there. Bill Graham used to put a barrel of apples out. I saw the apples. I thought, “Hmm! Probably for somebody private or something.” I said, “I’m hungry. I’ll steal one anyway.” So I took an apple and I was just biting into it when Bill Graham walked in. I didn’t know who he was. I thought, “I hope he’s a janitor.” I just started cooling it and then he walked by and I looked at him and nodded. He looked and nodded and then he did one of those Bill things. He stopped, did a slow double take, and went, “Uh, who are you? Who are you with?” I said, “Warlocks.” I knew this would make him know I really was with them. Because this was the first night they were auditioning as the Grateful Dead.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: So the acid and the Beatles and Dylan all together and then the Acid Test. The idea of the Acid Test started to really capture our imagination in a big way. There were those Acid Tests in the Palo Alto area. After I plugged into that, I really loved it.
Ken Kesey: When we started doing the Acid Tests out in La Honda, the thing that made them exciting was the fact that they were entertaining but it wasn’t a closed circle. We hadn’t planned our entertainment to the point that everybody knew for sure how it was going to end up. The most bizarre one was when we invited Kenneth Anger and the San Francisco diabolists out for Mother’s Day. We had all taken a lot of acid and were wearing long robes and playing dolorous music up to the trees and we walked them all up to this little amphitheater we’d made in the redwoods where the thunder machine was. We banged and clanged on the thunder machine with the sound system set up so we were getting a nice echo with about three hundred yards between the echo. In the middle was a little spotlight hung about a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet up in a redwood tree so you had no sense of there being any light. It just looked like a glowing stump. The stump was painted gold and sitting on the stump was a golden ax. After banging and clanging, we lowered a bird cage from the redwoods. In the bird cage was a big hen. We got everybody out and spun this little pointer on what was called the “toke board.” We spun it around and whoever it pointed at, it was obvious they were going to take that hen out and chop its head off. The thing pointed at Page Browning. Page went in there and picked the chicken out and the chicken had laid an egg. On the tape we’ve got, you can hear that Herman’s Hermits song, “Stomp That Egg.” “Stomp that egg!” So he got the hen out of there and put its head on the stump and chopped the head off. Page threw the chicken still alive and flopping right into the audience. Feathers and blood and squawking and people jumping and screaming and all these diabolists and Kenneth Anger got up and left. They didn’t think it was funny at all. We thought we were paying them the sort of honor they would expect. We out-eviled them. It all had that acid edge to it of, “This is something that might count.” We might conjure up some eighty-foot demon that roared around. As Stewart Brand said, “There was always a whiff of danger to it.” Those Saturday nights got bigger and bigger till finally La Honda couldn’t hold them and we started branching out with the Dead who had just become the Dead. They’d been the Warlocks till then.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: Actually, Jerry didn’t love that scene up there at Kesey’s right away. It took him a while to fit into it. He was always telling me, “These people are up in the woods getting ripped and doing this....” Like it was beneath him to do that. I said, “Jerry, people do that all over. What’s the big deal? If you want to play with these guys, that’s what you have to do.” I’d lay that kind of trip on him whenever I talked to him about it. I said, “Don’t feel bad about doing that shit.” He didn’t think they were too stable a group and he knew they were party animals. He wasn’t into it. It was a wild scene.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Page Browning was the liaison guy. He said, “I can get you this band. I can get you this band.” We didn’t know who it was. We’d never heard of the Warlocks. It sort of happened while we were concentrating on our weirdness up in the woods. And when we did meet up with the Warlocks, then I realized who it was and I recognized them from the Tangent. By then, they had started to change their haircuts. They were starting to get into these really lame bad haircuts. Bad moustaches and bad haircuts. But they were pretty cute.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: They did that first Acid Test at Kesey’s house probably before it was even named the Acid Test. I didn’t understand what it was about and I was threatened by it. Jerry tried to describe this event to me. It meant a lot to him and it was hard for him to figure out. He was amazed by it. As it turned out, the Hell’s Angels came to that party and I was really glad I hadn’t gone because I was afraid of those guys. The idea of dealing with motorcycle gang members while stoned on acid was not my idea of fun. The new thing was, “Can you pass the Acid Test?” Do you have the resources to open up your nervous system to anything? I wasn’t sure I could. The idea of somebody directing or evaluating people’s trips was pretty scary. Then came the Palo Alto Acid Test and I got to be part of it and see Cassady do his hammer routine which was so amazing that I began to get a sense of this new possibility. Once I started to catch on, I was divided between being the mom and the student and tending the home fires and going off to participate in something extraordinary that had never happened before. There really was a sense of history to it all that was quite exhilarating. I couldn’t stay at home while this was going on.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Ken’s parties were getting bigger and harder to handle and we got busted and the Hell’s Angels were coming and it was just unwieldy and it was getting unruly. But Ken’s dedication to making a place where people could get together to get high was unshakable and I fell right into that and became part and parcel of it and spent all my time splicing film, repairing microphones, plugging stuff in, packing and unpacking, and making little films.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: And there was Carolyn. I was so impressed with her. Patching together the electrical systems. An Amazon. I didn’t know if she liked me but I really admired her. She was gutsy. She said what was on her mind. Like a big kid, a big beautiful girl who had somehow escaped being squelched as a teenager.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I was pretty young and I hadn’t been to college. Ken was a generation older than me. Was there a big initial flash between Jerry and Ken? At that point, I think there was more of a professional rivalry. Jerry was always interested in what Ken was doing but at that time, I think, they all felt kind of over-powered by the Prankster scene. Because it was so well developed and so loony and unpredictable. The Warlocks sort of treated us as the loonies in the band. They thought they could drive through our scene. They were almost voyeuristic. They would come through, perform, and take off again. They didn’t really want us to stick to them. The straight guy was Kreutzmann. He was the guy that organized the gigs and he was kind of the manager. The guy that would get all upset if there wasn’t any money. Still, there was room there to form some friendships. But it was so wacky. Plus, we were going to court all the time.
Jerry Garcia (1988): We were younger than the Pranksters. We were wilder. We weren’t serious college people. We were on the street. It was kind of a more intellectual bent than street kids in the present-day sense. It was street kids in Palo Alto. More Bohemian than anything else. We were definitely Dionysian as opposed to Apollonian. It was like we were celebrating life. And so for us, psychedelics was what we’d always been looking for. Drugs were part of that continuous search for that explosion. The realization of something. When the Pranksters took acid, they fucked with each other really. In a big way. We just got high and went crazy. It was unstructured. But they liked us. Because we were so out there. Our music scared them. It scared them at first but then as soon as they realized it was not going to hurt them, they liked it. Like a scary roller coaster.
Ken Kesey: I never thought of the Dead as kids. From the very first time I met Garcia, I thought of him as a peer. Same way with Phil Lesh. Bob Weir was a kid. But Phil had gone to Juilliard and studied under John Cage and Jerry was just—history had kicked him between the eyes and you could see it all the way back there.
Ken Babbs: We always thought of the Grateful Dead as being the engine that was driving the spaceship that we were traveling on. We talked about being astronauts of inner space. We had to be as well trained, in as good a shape, and as mentally powerful as an astronaut in outer space so as not to be thrown by any of the accidents or the unexpected we’d run into. Once the Grateful Dead got the engine cooked up and running, that became the motor driving the thing. It provided something that kept everything going and then they would do their unexpected things too. They would play what was going on and what was going on was going along with what they were playing. It was really give-and-take. Back-and-forth.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Who’s in charge here? That was the question. Who’s in charge here? And basically the answer was, “You gotta be. Or you’re in big trouble.” So we got in trouble and sometimes learned. The people in Kesey’s scene were all good at something practical and they put it together in amazing ways. That all caught my imagination. Once I got the idea, I liked that a lot.
Owsley Stanley: In December ’65, I really heard the Grateful Dead for the first time. It was at the Fillmore the night before the Muir Beach Acid Test. I was standing in the hall and they were playing and they scared me to death. Garcia’s guitar terrified me. I had never before heard that much power. That much thought. That much emotion. I thought to myself, “These guys could be bigger than the Beatles.” To be perfectly frank, I never thought of Jerry as the center of the band ever in my whole life. He was just another member. All the bands then were tribal and tribal meant you agreed amongst yourselves as to who was momentarily the leader of the team. Musically speaking, they all wound up together because they all liked playing with Jerry. But he never stood up and said, “I’m the band leader and you’re all sidemen.” He was not that way. The thing was, they said they needed a manager. I knew Rock Scully had been involved in the Family Dog. He was the only person I knew who knew anything about business. Later on, he brought in Danny Rifkin. This was a matter of nobody knowing how to do anything. But I had a very strong feeling that musicians were exploited by most managers and record companies to an extent I considered absolutely unbelievable.
Rock Scully: The first time I saw Garcia was at the Fillmore Auditorium. It was kind of an acid test. Danny Rifkin and I were running a show for the Family Dog on the same night at California Hall. We were aghast that the Grateful Dead were playing the same night, but at this point they were just sort of the Acid Test house band. Forsaking our gig, we ran over to the Fillmore to see what the hell was going on. We’d never seen anybody play like that before. Jerry was lifting the roof. Of course, we were slightly stoned. To be frank about it, we were tripping. So it seemed like there was no roof on the house. I’m absolutely sure Jerry was tripping, too. Every now and then, he’d look down at his guitar and I thought he was seeing some kind of monster. He was all surprised. Looking over his hand down the neck of his guitar like “Wait a minute. Where is the end of this thing?”
Actually, Pigpen was the driving force. He had the songs together. He was doing blues like “Little Red Rooster.” Basically, the Dead were a blues band in those days but I could already hear that from his bluegrass and gospel and folksy background, Jerry had come to understand that there was more to add to it than just John Lee Hooker kind of stuff. Having gone from banjo to electric guitar, Jerry was on a new instrument. Suddenly he had all this fluidity. He was reaching into the roots of music we had heard before. He was calling forth Americana.
After the show, I went up to them and said, “Man, you guys were great!” They said, “The sound system sucked. We weren’t that good. We never played that song before.” They’d been a bar band. They’d been playing in pizza pubs. Owsley said to me, “Look. These guys need a manager and I told them I want you to do it. Come on down and see them, they’re playing Saturday night at the Big Beat Club in Palo Alto. I’ll take you.”
The next weekend, Owsley picked me up and drove me down in his little Morris Minor. Here I was with this madman and I decided, “Maybe I’ll just take a half a hit tonight. Instead of a whole one.” Stewart Brand was there and he’d set up a tepee inside the place and it projected light so you could see it from the inside out. The first guy I ran into was Neal Cassady, who took me over to the bar. I was with Owsley so he immediately hit on us. I think he was already dosed but he wanted some more. He could just gobble gobble pills. Immediately, I was getting introduced. Owsley was going, “This is Jerry Garcia.” I said, “I saw you last weekend and I loved it.” He was doing that same thing. “We were shitty and …” This was the first time I really sat down with him and we talked for a while before he was supposed to get up and play. Meanwhile, Kesey had his Prankster band on this other stage at the other end of the A-frame. Playing creative noise.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Somebody played. I’m not sure who it was but it may have been this sort of ragged little punk band that Ken had. He was trying to record a hit record with Neal Cassady and I was the recording tech for this record, and for an isolation booth we had this old Chevy out in the yard. Neal would sit in the Chevy and I’d sit in there with him and it was just absurd. We were doing a bunch of absurd crazy stuff.
Rock Scully: On the other end was all the equipment that Owsley had managed to fashion and piece and string together in some way or another. Pigpen was playing on this spindly old box organ with an aluminum frame. It looked like a TV stand and he didn’t sit down at it. He stood up at it. Up close, this guy was really gnarly. This was before Garcia had his beard. So he was a little frightening looking also. As a child, I think he’d had something and he was a little pockmarked. Plus his hair was starting to grow out and he was having a real bad hair day. He looked like somebody you’d run into in the garment district or the diamond district in Manhattan. Truly. He looked very Jewish. Half of them were underage. Bill Kreutzmann, he was called Bill Summers at the time, he was underage. Weir was definitely underage. But we were all sitting there at this pizza pub bar having beers. I was twenty-two and a graduate student at San Francisco State but we were all kids compared to Kesey. He’d come out of dropping acid in laboratories. He’d already written Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. To me and Garcia, he was famous. We were in awe of the man.
Ken Kesey: With Garcia, it was not a one-way thing. Garcia was as well read as anybody I’d ever met. He understood Martin Buber’s I and Thou and that he was in a relationship with his audience. He was not playing at them. He was playing with them. Anybody who’s been on acid and has felt Garcia reach in there and touch them, all of a sudden they realize, “He’s not only moving my mind. My mind is moving him!” You’d look up there and see Garcia’s face light up as he felt that come back from somebody. It was a rare and marvelous thing. Whereas the Doors were playing at you. John Fogerty was singing at you. When the Dead had a real good audience and the audience began to know it, they were playing the Dead. Which meant the Dead didn’t have to be the leaders. They could let the audience play them.
Rock Scully: The band went on and this fierce-looking biker guy dude, Pigpen, got up there and started belting out these blues. Garcia was also high. His eyes were all dilated. He started to swoop around the room with his picking. He had a good grasp of all this old American music and he wasn’t doing the blues comping thing. He was running all over the place. Pig was trying to be the leader and bring them back. He’d be looking at them like, “Boys …” They were looking at Pig like, “This is our anchor over here!” Pig was their control but everybody followed Jerry. They had to because Jerry was rushing. Especially because he was high on acid. Bill Kreutzmann was trying to keep up with him and Phil had only been on the bass for a couple of weeks so he was doing his best to keep up and make it sound presentable, but in the middle of an Acid Test, it didn’t much matter. It was a lot different than Winterland or the Fillmore. You know how you can sometimes see what people are thinking? Garcia was either thinking that there were insects on his guitar or that it had done a Salvador Dali drip over his wrist and now was melting over his hand. It was a very spacey show and it was really hard to tell if it was over or not. Garcia sort of put down his guitar and everybody kind of ambled off the stage and came back to the beer bar. And that was the end of the set.
Then we talked. I was astounded at what he was doing. I said, “You’re cramming in more notes than I’ve heard anybody jump on before in my life and I’ve been listening to a lot of music.” Working backstage at the Monterey Jazz Festival, I’d listened to Thelonius Monk and Charlie Mingus. Here was this guy who three months ago was playing a banjo. Now he was playing this electric guitar like it was on fire. I also thought, “Man, the guy is ugly. This isn’t going to wash in the Dick Clark world of rock ’n’ roll as we know it.” At this point, we’d had only one example of an ugly rock ’n’ roll band and that was the Rolling Stones. I signed on that night. The next day, I signed out of Family Dog. I sold my share to Chet Helms and said, “I’m not going to be a promoter anymore.” This was after I’d done four shows. Four shows was all I’d done. According to Owsley, I was supposed to be an expert on the business of rock ’n’ roll. Jerry Garcia said to me, “Good luck.”
Ron Rakow: I was in the land loan business. Because the band was playing through home hi-fi gear supplied by this guy named Owsley, Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully came to my office to borrow twelve thousand dollars for new equipment. I’d never seen anything like them. I breathed hard like my father did a year later when he saw me. Danny looked like a lion. His hair was brushed out like an Afro with fourteen-inch hair that went down over his shoulders on the side and in the back. Rock was like Cochise. We started to talk and it turned out Danny had a degree in cultural anthropology. Rock had his master’s and was going toward his Ph.D. in German Renaissance literature. These were brilliant guys. Rock said, “I been studying this music business. There’s going to be a scene in San Francisco around music that’s so big that in five years, there won’t be a physical plant on planet Earth big enough to contain it.” While they were there, my banker showed up. He was my lifeline and I had these two apparitions in my office. I had to ask them to climb out the window to leave. So they climbed out the window.
Ken Kesey: We did a really good Acid Test in Portland, Oregon, that is not well-known but by this time, we were becoming like a really crack terrorist group. We could hit a place, get in there, mess it up, and be gone before people knew what happened. In that one, a guy off the street, a businessman, came in and paid his dollar and got his hit of acid. He had a suit on and an umbrella. At that time, it was still small enough that one person could become the center of attention. He was out there dancing and somebody hit him with a spotlight and he said, “The king walks!” And he began to walk with this umbrella and play with his shadow. “The king dances!” He’d open the umbrella and say, “The king casts a long shadow!” The Dead were watching this and playing to every moment so he became the music that people were playing to. After it was over, we packed up into the Hertz rent-a-van. Because it was so miserable on that floor, we decided to put the equipment on the floor and sleep in the cargo net. Everyone was still wired and that was the most miserable ride in anybody’s history because everybody kept rolling to the bottom like to the toe of a sock. It was the most miserable strange bizarre night. Everybody was so tired. We were laughing to the point where you just didn’t want to laugh anymore. You were sick. You just wanted to cut it off. But you couldn’t. Somebody would be lying there about to get to sleep and somebody would start rolling. Somebody would fart and it would all swell up again. It was just awful. That was when the Dead resolved to get their own vehicle. They split off with us and from then on, they were their own group. They were no longer on the bus. They decided, “We’re going to get our own bus to be on.” Just theirs.
Ron Rakow: Rock said, “Come to a gig.” So I went to the second Mime Troupe Benefit at the Fillmore. I was there because they wanted twelve thousand dollars from me. Behind my back, they called me “Moneybags.” In that scene then, it took like eighty bucks to be “Moneybags.” I was with this beautiful light-colored black girl. We went backstage and got something to drink. All of a sudden, I noticed that every time I talked to her, gray fur grew on her face. And that was just a deposit. I kept getting weirder. I took my coat off and I went in front of the band and laid right down at the feet of Jerry Garcia, who I had met two hours before when I was still cogent. I just laid there, closed my eyes, and he took me out.
They played “Viola Lee Blues” and it had a chaos section in it. My metaphor for the universe was that life was a dance between order and chaos. I thought, “Oh, this is it. Chaos is going to win out. It’s over.” I was lying there waiting for the end. And then bingo, out of the chaos came the blues. When I went into the Fillmore that night, I was Sammy Glick. When I came out, I was “Cadillac Ron.” I went backstage to the dressing room and Garcia was sitting there like Buddha smoking Pall Malls. I grabbed a cigarette and told Jerry I wasn’t taking it to smoke but only for a pause in the conversation. He said to me, “You’re heavy. What do you do beside make money in the real world?”
After the weekend was over, I told Danny and Rock, “As nice as you guys are, as honorable as you are, you’ll never never be able to pay any of this money back. It just won’t happen. But what I can do is give you the twelve thousand dollars. I’ll become a patron and be entitled to respect.” So that was what I did. I gave them the twelve grand.
Laird Grant: I was hustling their equipment in my minivan. A Metromite walk-in van. It had a little teeny four-cylinder Austin engine and it was just like an eight-by-eight. A little bit bigger than a postal truck. We’d stack our PA and everything else into it and a lot of the time the band went along. Usually, Pigpen rode with me anyway. I set their stuff up on some of those Acid Tests and then they went off to L.A. and did the Watts Acid Test.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Kesey and Carolyn had gotten busted. We went to a meeting in Bernal Heights where Kesey asked the Ouija board what he should do and the Ouija board told him to go to Mexico. At that point, Jerry was messing around with somebody else. I was picking up the vibes from that one and I was really pissed. I didn’t like that at all. Except when I was on acid, I was miserable. I wanted something different in the relationship and he was really not available to me. After having been in that primary maternal preoccupation with the baby, I was starting to feel my oats. So I fell in love with a Prankster and left Jerry.
Rock Scully: We decided to get out of town because we didn’t really have enough material. We’d waste ourselves playing around San Francisco with the same songs because they really only had one set together. They could do blues forever but already Garcia was the driving force to get new material together. It was his idea and Owsley’s, out of considerations about his nefarious businesses, that we bail out of town. Jerry was the one who’d clued me to it. I was supposed to get them to a place where they could get more songs together rather than work them to death in pizza pubs. That was when we went to L.A. We got a house big enough for all of us that we could rehearse in off Western Avenue in the middle class section of Watts. Not a stick of furniture in there.
Owsley Stanley: I’ll tell you what living with them was like. If people were on one floor and you were on another and they decided to go somewhere, the next thing you knew the house was empty. There was very little concern for others’ possible interests. We were just sort of all there. It had something to do with the Kesey bunch. There didn’t seem to be much of a family thing in the Kesey scene. It was everybody for themselves. The camaraderie there was kind of gritty. Almost like the Hell’s Angels who’d punch each other out and that made them the best of friends. I never understood that.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Owsley had rented this huge house that had no furniture. So everybody had like little mats on the floor that they slept on. And he had them on a diet of milk and acid and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was the grossest. There was also a lot of DMT around.
Owsley Stanley: It might have been Chicken Delight. Chicken Delight and steak. But it was never my idea to go to L.A. I was against it. The Dead were following the Acid Tests and it seemed to me not such a good idea to do that and it was inconvenient for me but they decided they had to go there. They decided the Acid Test was more important than anything else they were doing. Now, when they worked a regular show in the Bay Area, they only got a hundred and twenty-five dollars. That was twenty-five dollars for each musician. They got paid nothing to do an Acid Test. They had no roadie, they had no manager, they had no sound man, they had nobody because they could barely make enough to cover their expenses. Most of them had day jobs. So then I started thinking, “Maybe this is a good idea.”
Rock Scully: The idea was that I would put together gigs down there for the new material. Jerry had this thing about playing new material in front of live audiences. Which would change how the song developed. This was the only band I know of that has ever done that. The Jefferson Airplane certainly never went out there with anything that they didn’t have down cold. The Dead would play stuff that they didn’t even remember having written that day. They’d go out there and try to remember it. All of them staring at each other bad, saying, “No, wait a minute. We did this.” They would rehearse all week long and I was booking these weekend gigs at Trooper’s Hall on Fairfax. We’d go to Cantor’s Deli every night we could get out of Owsley’s sight because all he wanted us to eat was meat and milk and eggs.
Owsley Stanley: I tried to get people to eat meat because it was cheaper. That was not a good idea. It was okay for me but not for others. Those guys taught me as much as I taught them about getting along with others. I didn’t want to smoke pot. But they kept saying they couldn’t get along with me unless I did.
Rock Scully: We’d rehearse all day long and into the night and there was this black card parlor, not a crooked game but an underground game, next door. So they made noise all night, which was perfect. There were always cars pulling up and people fighting and arguing about hands that they had been dealt. I think this had something to do with how a lot of our songs ended up as gambling songs.
Owsley Stanley: It was a whorehouse. And the whores would complain that our music would drive their johns off. They used to throw pot seeds out the window and we found pot plants growing between the two houses and they weren’t ours. We thought the whorehouse was going to get us busted but we brought the cops on ourselves. Because of the loud music we were playing, they would call them.
Jerry Garcia (1988): We’d met Owsley at the Acid Test and he got fixated on us. “With this rock band, I can rule the world!” So we ended up living with Owsley while he was tabbing up the acid in the place we lived. We had enough acid to blow the world apart. And we were just musicians in this house and we were guinea pigging more or less continuously. Tripping frequently if not constantly. That got good and weird.
Owsley Stanley: It doesn’t take a lot of acid to keep a lot of people high for a long time. One gram is three or four thousand doses. In modern terms, it’s ten thousand doses. Which is a lifetime supply for a band fifty times the size of the Dead. Saying we had a lot doesn’t mean much.
Rock Scully: We were even selling the stuff. It was illegal but we were selling it over at the deli at night. That was where everybody went. Zappa was there and Captain Beefheart and Jim Morrison. We were turning on all these L.A. people in the parking lot.
Owsley Stanley: Number one, Cantor’s Deli doesn’t have a parking lot. There was no parking lot at Cantor’s, there is no parking lot, there never will be. We never met any other musicians when we were down there. This is absolutely false. Just total bullshit. Number two, we never sold acid to anybody anywhere in Los Angeles. Ever. As far as I was concerned, it was a religious thing for me. I never cared about the money. I wasn’t doing it for the money. Money was an embarrassment.
Rock Scully: At that point, Garcia’s thing was actually very down-to-earth. “Let’s get some songs together. Let’s work. Let’s work.” He was very curious as to what I was doing. Did I get the hall? Are the people there? How are we going to get people in the hall? He cared about there being an audience. He didn’t want to play to an empty house and rightfully so.
Owsley Stanley: In L.A., I saw sound coming out of the speakers. One dose of acid, some DMT, and something else, and I thought, “This is important. I’ve got to remember what this is about.” I studied it very intently, which was difficult to do when you were that high. I thought, “This is not what I expected sound to look like.” I never assumed it was some hallucination caused by the drug. The circuits were open full-on. It was real.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Owsley was trying to manage them, making them live on nothing but acid and steak. I was in L.A. too but with the Pranksters. Kesey had already gone on the lam so Babbs was in charge and none of the wives and kids were along. I was the only mother there with a child. I’d bring Heather along to the Acid Tests and make her a little nest someplace off quiet and safe and read her her books and put her to sleep in her little sleeping bag so I could go off and dance in the light show. Poor kid.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry adored Sara. And Heather was such a precious child. They had bought her a bag of junk jewelry at a thrift store or something, a great big box of wonderful rhinestones and pearls and all sorts of cool junk jewelry, and she would just laden herself with it. She would cover herself with this stuff and then walk around and give pieces to people and she gave me this really beautiful rhinestone cross that I used to wear on my Acid Test outfit. I wore it up on my forehead a lot on my swami hat. I had a big froufrou hat that I wore on my head and that was right in the middle of it. I remember being very stoned over at their house and spending quite a bit of time with Heather going through the jewelry piece by piece, commenting on all of them. Sara was there but I was not paying too much attention to Sara because she was in a state of real frustration over Jerry being unable to quit doing what was he was doing. At this point, he and I weren’t talking on any kind of intimate level. He was one of the boys and I loved to go hang out with the boys. Mostly we just bullshitted each other and giggled and talked. It wasn’t personal.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: At one of the Acid Tests in L.A., Jerry and I sort of reconciled a little bit. But it had been clear that our paths were separating and we were going in different directions. When he started the band, he didn’t want me coming to where he was playing. Because then he’d have to worry about me. I would get out there and dance and he wanted me to stay home. He probably didn’t want me knowing what was going on. It probably felt terribly constraining having the old lady there. And I wanted a life of my own. I’d always said I played second fiddle to a banjo. I said that jokingly but there was a lot of pain in it. By the time we started doing the Acid Tests in L.A., I had left him. I gave away all of our stuff. It was a real separation. I even threw away his letters.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: It wasn’t until after the Watts Acid Test that Jerry and I first made contact. The Watts Acid Test was just a hell of a scene. Two separate parties dosed the punch independently so it was stronger than it should have been. There were many overdoses. After it was over, we were in the process of cleaning up the building. We were sweeping the floor. I’d gone back in the janitor closet and found these great big wide brooms and I was wearing my pink-and-yellow-striped tent dress that I’d made for myself during my pregnancy. It was very gaudy and hilarious and I had some funny hat on my head and I was sweeping away.
We were talking and loading stuff on the bus and wrapping up the wires and the sunlight was coming in and Jerry came over and grabbed a broom and helped me sweep. Together, we swept the place out and talked while we were sweeping. We were mostly just bullshitting each other and goofing off and saying funny stuff and commenting on what had been going on. I was eight months pregnant and I didn’t feel really attractive. I felt like one of the guys. I was just there working. So we spent about an hour and a half sweeping together and made friends. And then they drove off in their big car. They had a big car and we had a bus and I didn’t see those guys again for six months. That was April. We came back to see them at San Francisco State in October.
Owsley Stanley: We were having a good time. We’d go to the beach and run around and do our own shows and we did several Acid Tests there. Every so often, we’d get a phone call with a job offer. First, it was the hundred and twenty-five dollars. Then it was one fifty. Then it was one seventy-five. Then it was two hundred. Just at the time when we had absolutely totally run out of money and there was nothing left, Rock went up to San Francisco and hammered out a deal for three hundred and fifty dollars for a show in April ’66 with the Loading Zone at the Longshoreman’s Hall. By being out of town, we got to rehearse and know each other better but we also created a mystique where fans of the band were agitating and calling up the promoters and club owners and saying, “Where the hell is the Grateful Dead?” So they thought, “Maybe they have a better audience than we thought.” That was the start. It was a way of proving that the band could be in control.
Rock Scully: The L.A. thing lasted about six or eight weeks. Then we came back up to San Francisco. Because now we had a couple of sets.
Sue Swanson: I met Bob Dylan at the airport late one night and told him about the Grateful Dead. They were living down in L.A. in that big house. I was with Danny Rifkin. Three o’clock in the morning, we were both coming through the airport and there was Bob Dylan standing there with that manager of his who looked like Ben Franklin. I shouldn’t have done it. You know how friendly he is. He’s so friendly, right? But I walked over to him, waited until he finally looked at me, and said, “Look. I gotta tell you about this incredible band called the Grateful Dead.” He looked at me and said, “Oh, aren’t they the ones that play with the one-handed drummer in the front of the picture of the Taj Mahal?”
Jerry Garcia (1988): We met Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully, who became our early managers. They said, “We have these people in San Francisco who are dying to hear you guys.” So we decided to move back up. Having been out of town, we’d created a little legend for ourselves. When we got back into town, there was already a crowd waiting to see us. After that, we played really regularly in the Bay Area.
Rock Scully: By the time we came back, Chet Helms was taking over the Family Dog. Bill Graham had formalized his Fillmore deal. With the advent of the Fillmore and the Avalon, things started changing in terms of the size of our audience. The scene had fired up just the way we thought it would. Because we had bigger places to play, we had to be more professional. Since Bill Graham and Chet Helms were charging money and people were paying to come and see us, Garcia’s full thrust on this thing was, “This isn’t an Acid Test anymore, boys and girls. They’re paying money to come and see us. We have to put on a show.” He was very professional about it. He was really diligent and he got Phil on the case. Phil was such a perfectionist. But Jerry was the guy who instructed the band that we were now getting into show business and the people were paying money to come and see us so we had to be good. We had to do our best and we had to be on time. He was very specific about that. “Scully. Just get us there on time.” Personally, I was late a lot. As far as the band went, I got them there on time every time. Because of Jerry.
Suzy Wood: In the summer of ’66, we went to Avalon Ballroom to see the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. It was an awful experience. It was a huge crowd. There were too many people and light shows and people smoking joints in the middle of a public place, which was just horrid and weird. San Francisco had become something real real different. We were wending our way through this crowd and we heard this voice say, “Want coffee?” We turned and there was Jerry. His hair was in braids and I was so relieved to see the person we had come to see. He took us to the backstage area. Ron McKernan was back there and I was so glad to see them both in this little back room where we could sit around and talk and joke, and Jerry was just like he always was. When I left, Jerry was leaning against a post.
Laird Grant: When they came back to the Bay Area, they got this place up in Novato, Rancho Olompali. That was when I split from my wife and said, “I’ve got other things to do, dear. I’m joining the band.” I went back as the van master.
Rock Scully: It was the height of our folly. This was a time when girls were taking off their clothes. It was wonderful. It was idyllic and a very happy time.
Eileen Law: Olompali was just a wonderful place to go to hang out. The parties were outrageous. There was this big all-night party when the Hell’s Angels raffled off a motorcycle with Chocolate George. The Angels and their ladies ended up running the place. I grabbed all the kids and put them in a room and we just hung out in there. Danny Rifkin and different people stayed up all night and made sure the house stayed okay.
Jorma Kaukonen: It was a really fun place. To get out of town, go up there, and take a guitar, hang out for a day, two days, whatever. Play, socialize. It didn’t get much better than that. I really didn’t know much about Marin County then because it was like another world, and this was an era when we all had cars that couldn’t be relied upon to go very far. Our world was really proscribed in a lot of ways but they moved out there and they had an empire. When I was living in an apartment in the Western Addition on Divisadero Street, they had a fucking empire and to go visit them was great. I didn’t have to hear the rats in the kitchen. Before we knew what rock star heaven was, they were defining rock star heaven.
Eileen Law: I remember being at an Olompali party when a musician in another band went a little nuts and he had a gun. I guess he thought Garcia was coming on to his girlfriend or something. I’d had an accident a few weeks before where I’d burned my legs so I had to stay in one position out there on the lawn. Garcia was near me and here was this guy with the gun. I kept saying, “Will you please move? Will you move!” Under my breath, I kept going, “Garcia, just move, please. Get out of the way.” I was right in back of him and I couldn’t move because of my legs. Everybody was so high, I don’t think anyone realized how serious the guy was.
Rock Scully: Jerry freaked out there on an overdose of LSD. He blamed it on ghosts of the Tamal Indians. That was the site of the Bear Flag Republic War, which lasted about twelve hours. An uprising that was put down immediately by the cavalry. It was a very quick war. But that land was sacred to the Tamal Indians. One day, I caught Jerry in the old adobe that the house was built around. There was a little trapdoor with a window in it where you could see the original adobe and he was in there feeling around. Feeling the adobe. His hands were all down inside the hole.
He was high and then the next time I saw him, he was out by this giant oak tree that had partially died and it was ancient. The Indians had baked bread in it. They had put clay on the inside of this dead tree. You know how dead trees sort of get hollowed out? They’d used it like a chimney and it was their baking oven. Jerry was out there communicating with that tree. I was looking for him all over the place because I thought something was a little bizarre about his behavior and the next time I saw him, he was under the dining room table all huddled up and shivering. It had been a tough day. Some kid had almost drowned in the pool and things had gone a little haywire. There were about two hundred people there and they had played and David Freiberg had played.
LSD can be a razor-edged kind of deal sometimes. It’s a very chemical psychedelic. It really is. You feel it in your back and your jaws. When you do mescaline or peyote or mushrooms, it’s like you’re sore from smiling. Everything’s got rounded edges. You look at an old Buick and it’s got a friendly face on it instead of being cold steel and iron. But LSD is sort of two-faced. It takes away your defenses and then leaves you vulnerable. At the same time when you start coming off it, everything looks pretty sharp. For instance, if somebody’s lying to you, it’s apparent. Then the world starts looking harsh and cold. The color goes out of it and everything becomes black-and-white. It’s not all that friendly anymore.
I couldn’t get Jerry out from under the table. So I just tried to keep people out of the room to give him space. After everybody left and it had gotten dark, I made a fire in the fireplace. It got to be more organic and the vibes went down. Once the fire got going and most of the people had left and it was back more to a familial thing, he came out. He’d just hidden there. It wasn’t like he was invisible or anything. You could see him. But he felt with this low roof over his head, which was the tabletop, he was okay down there. That was where he’d gone to gain his solace. He came out and sat by the fire. He didn’t say anything for maybe an hour or two. I played some Otis Redding. Music always helped. Then he started to talk about it. I said, “You know, Jerry, I saw you in the wall there and out by the tree.” He said, “I started having feelings about the Spanish coming to California and what happened to the natives that were here and I just felt their ghosts. I felt a ghost and it scared me.”
I got him to talk about it and he started talking about how the Spanish had come into California and kicked the Native Americans’ butts and then how gold had brought in all these other people and he was Spanish so he felt this sort of mea culpa. He felt some guilt and dealt with it and came out of it. Then the color came back into his face. He’d been really pale. Ghostly pale. Scary. That day, this kid had nearly died in the swimming pool and there had been some shockers but it was shocking for me to find Jerry in this state because I’d always leaned on his good vibes which were always there. I could always rely on him to find the positive track. Always.
Without a doubt, he’d always go for the most positive thing. When we’d be walking down these hallways in our minds with all sorts of dark decisions everywhere, I’d run into Garcia and he’d say, “Hey, try this door. Check it out.” I was sure that was why Kesey loved him so much. Jerry never had a bad thought in his head about anybody. I never heard him ever say he hated anyone. He’d get pissed off at people. He was pissed off at Albert Grossman for the way he treated Big Brother. But never hate. Never disgust or hate. He always looked for the positive. That was his major forte, I thought.
That was the only time I ever saw him like that. There was one other time in L.A. when we all dosed and went up around the observatory. Way up on the top of Griffith Park. It was kind of desertlike. Especially in the summertime. It got kind of otherworldly and Jerry felt that an alien ship had landed. Several of us felt an electrical presence. Being that close to some of the power lines across the hills might have had something to do with it but we all got spooked out. That wasn’t real scary because we all shared that. This was something that he went through by himself.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Sunshine was born in Mexico. She was an absolutely precious little blond child. We drove from Texas back to California because someone had put together a scene at San Francisco State. In our absence, San Francisco had changed. We came back and somehow San Francisco felt a little stale. When the band came off stage there, they said, “Oh, we’re so glad to see you guys!” Big hugs all around and it was just a really important moment of contact for Jerry and I. We actually walked off and spent some time together that day. Actually, quite a bit of time. To the point where I left Sunshine on the bus and they had to come looking for me because she was crying and hungry. I just walked off with Jerry and we talked for a long time. I didn’t pursue it at all at that point because we had a lot more stuff ahead of us as the whole Prankster scene began to come apart.
Then I was invited to a party in Lagunitas out in Marin at the boys’ camp. I remember going out there looking for the band but just missing them. I missed them like at four or five different scenes. I never did quite find them. During all that looking for them, I began to realize that it didn’t really have that much to do with the band. I was really looking for Jerry. So then I was having this moment of truth over that. I was thinking, “Oh, man, do I really want to be involved in another group living scene?” And the answer was “Yes. Yes, I do.” It was ever so much more fun than struggling along alone. Soon as I could, I contacted him at 710 Ashbury. I went over there and we got together. It was a wonderful relationship from the very beginning.
Rock Scully: I’d convinced Danny Rifkin to try to remove the lodgers from 710 Ashbury so we’d have a place to move back to from L.A. I’d lived there before with Danny and Danny was the actual official landlord. It was a boarding house. Jerry was a bachelor for the first part of our 710 stay but somewhere along the way, Mountain Girl started coming around to our gigs and just fell for Garcia. She came to 710 and at about that time, my girlfriend Tangerine did this deal on me. “It’s me or them, Rock. I can’t handle this.” She was the only girl in the house and we wouldn’t do the dishes so she had to clean up after us and there were beer cans and dirty towels.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Tangerine was there for a while but she quickly split because she was tired of cooking and cleaning for those guys. But she had whipped them into shape. When I stepped in, they were already pretty domesticated. The house was full of wild crazy people living in chairs and basements and closets. The plaster was falling from the roof and the door was never locked and it was just a wonderful scene. None of them cooked or cleaned. They didn’t know where the grocery store was. I had already lived through the Pranksters and I loved these guys. They were so sweet. You have no idea. Danny Rifkin, Laird Grant, the sweetest people on earth. And they weren’t nearly as cranky as those old Pranksters. They were darling. I came in right when Phil and Billy had both moved out. They had gotten their own place up on Diamond Heights with their girlfriends and they actually had dinner on the table and clean laundry and all that stuff. They had a really solid living scene. Which meant that the scene down at Ashbury Street needed some tending and there was room for me there. It was a great big house and I felt that I was needed. I felt that I was called to do this. I also felt they would let me get away with shit there. In there, I knew I could rule.
Sue Swanson: It was a gathering of a tribe. Palo Alto was a faction. There were people in Berkeley. There were people in L.A. And then slowly but surely, everybody ended up together in the city and it became something else.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Quickly, I got busy and made Jerry a whole bunch of little bit wilder clothes than he’d been wearing. I felt my role there was to keep it together and that felt good to me because I had to keep it together for Sunshine as well as for myself. I did a lot of laundry and I did an awful lot of cooking. There was a stove in that kitchen that if you took your eye off it for ten minutes, something bad would happen. I remember one time I was turning on the gas oven and it burned off all my eyebrows and eyelashes and ruined dinner completely. We spent a lot of time sitting on the steps out in front looking up at the old nunnery up the street. Over on Haight Street, there was a drugstore and a Chinese grocery store where we shopped and the little St. Vincent de Paul store where I bought all my stuff. We had such a beautiful spot to watch the fog come in.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Jerry and I got together another time around Heather’s birthday. She was a little more than two when we split up. He came to her third birthday party at my parents’ house, and we talked then about getting back together. By that time, he was living on Ashbury Street with the band, and he said, “Come back.”
Rock Scully: We weren’t the kind of a band that had this following of groupies or anything like that. With Pigpen in charge of the kitchen and Garcia at the top of the stairs, we were a pretty frightening bunch. It was not like we were mobbed there. It did start up, though. First of all with druggies. Pot dealers. People who wanted to get high. People who wanted to finance it. Six months earlier, we were having dances in these Victorian houses on Page Street. We’d have the band in the kitchen banging on pots. Red Mountain burgundy. That was about it.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I went to visit him there. On some level, we both really wanted to bring the family back together. But there was no privacy at 710 and people were coming in at all hours of the night. There was noise and who knew what was going on. It wasn’t a family. It wasn’t a place where I could do family. Although we both felt the pull to get back together, it just didn’t seem like it would work. By this time, I was singing with the Anonymous Artists of America. We were living up at Rancho Diablo off Skyline Boulevard. There were couples and there were children and there were dogs. We lived in the redwoods and we ate meals together. It was family.
Ken Kesey: We were planning to do this Acid Test Graduation. It happened in a place called the Warehouse. The Dead were supposed to play but because it all got too tacky, they didn’t play and we got a group called the Anonymous Artists to play for the Acid Test Graduation. Which in its way was appropriate because it was the dénouement of something.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: When they let Kesey out of jail, the band I was in, the Triple A, played for the Acid Test Graduation. The Dead was supposed to play but they were worried about jeopardizing their record contract. Because it might be bad for their reputation to be associated with the drug scene. “Cleanliness is next”—that was Kesey’s new motto to impress his parole officer. But in case it didn’t turn out to be too clean, the Dead couldn’t afford to be associated with it. They dropped out at the last moment.
Joe Smith: I was doing some A and R stuff and promotion at Warner’s and Tom Donahue tipped me about the Grateful Dead, who had this very offputting name. I didn’t know much about them. I went up to San Francisco and they were playing the Avalon Ballroom. My wife and I were having dinner at Ernie’s and I was in my Bank of America blue suit with the striped tie. My wife was in her basic black with the pearls and Donahue called. He said, “The band would like to see you now.” I said, “I’m all dressed up.” He said, “It won’t matter. Nobody will notice.” We went over to the Avalon Ballroom and went upstairs. This was something so removed from anything I had ever known or seen in my life before. It was Fellini on stage. People lying on the floor. Body painting. Light shows. Incense. And this droning set from the Dead. One of their eleven-hour shows. With a twenty-nine-minute space guitar solo from Jerry Garcia. As soon as I started talking to them, I got calls from people around the country. “Wow. You’re going to have the Dead? Okay!”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: The focus became the performances and how to get them there. Where to play and how to get some freedom in the system. How to close the street so we could do the gigs in the Panhandle and in the park. The scene was based around the music, which was powerful. They were playing amazing, compelling music. Very compelling.
Sue Swanson: I think we all got twenty-five dollars a week. Jerry got twenty-five dollars a week. I got twenty-five dollars a week. That was the way it was. But there was nothing more fun than just going out, getting in the flatbed truck, getting the generator, and going down to the Panhandle to play. It was the greatest.
Rock Scully: No one was supposed to be in charge. That was one of our rules in those days. That way, they could never put the finger on anybody. When the Grateful Dead started doing free concerts in the park, we never went and got permits or anything. We didn’t get permission to play in the middle of the street on Haight Street. We just did it. One of the ways that we got away with another hour’s worth of music before they finally shut us down was that they could never find out who was in charge.
Mickey Hart: Every time we looked around, somebody was into something. Nobody was saying no. Every day, we were exploring. We’d get up in the morning and say, “What are we going to do? Let’s play free in the park. Rock! Benny! Get the trucks and get the generator! Call Sweet William! Call Badger! Let’s get it on!” We’d get a couple of flatbed trucks and the Hell’s Angels to run the lines to make sure that the cops didn’t pull the plugs. That was the way it worked in those days. We were spontaneous and looked forward to it. The Grateful Dead would play on Haight Street. And when we played, we closed the street down.
Rock Scully: Jerry was such a curious intellect that he always questioned everything. He was reading all the time and asking questions and meeting people and very outgoing that way. The crew wanted to protect him because he’d always say yes to everything. Which was why we did so many benefits for so many years. Garcia would say yes to almost everyone. The Zenefit. HALO, the Haight-Ashbury Legal Organization, and on and on and on and on. Somebody died, we’d do a concert. The Zen Buddhists wanted to take over this piece of property? We’d do that. The creamery was failing in Eugene or Springfield? Let’s go fix that. We got to the place where we were going, “There is really no such thing as a free gig.” We had to drive there, buy the gas, and rent the generator.
Owsley Stanley: On numerous occasions at 710, I would come across this little notebook that Jerry had which was full of doodles. They were just doodles that he would sit down and draw. These intricately drawn beautiful pen-and-ink figures of all the things you would see when you got high on acid. Beautifully detailed interlocking motifs that faded in and out of each other on different levels and mutated and all beautifully done and exquisite. The finest artwork you’ve ever seen. The stuff you could never do once you came down. But he could draw them perfectly.
Ron Rakow: Garcia wanted to go into business with me. I said, “How can I go into business with somebody I can’t even talk to about the business?” He said, “You can talk to me about anything.” I said, “No. The language of business is accounting.” He said, “How hard could it be?” So I brought up a bunch of financial statements and went over them with him and he said, “Oh, this isn’t going to be hard. I’ll get this.” I bought an elementary accounting textbook from the NYU bookstore and sat down with him. Over the course of some months, I taught him about debits, credits, non-cash charges. Assets, liabilities, and net worth. I taught him formal accounting. When we were done, he could analyze a financial statement.
Sue Swanson: Those were glory days, man. Did you ever hear about the Thanksgiving dinner at 710? It was Quicksilver, the Dead, and the Airplane and I’m sure there were other people there as well. At 710, there was a front room, a middle room and then Pig’s room, all with sliding doors. We opened all the sliding doors, even Pig’s room, pushed all his stuff out of the way, got the TV over to the side, and put a table that snaked all the way through. Everybody cooked something. That was the first time I ever baked bread. Jack Casady rolled a joint for each place. Every plate had a joint. What a great night. That was sort of what the place was all about.
Jon Mcintire: My take on what I think was really important about the hippies was not the political stuff but the avowedly apolitical stuff, the more authentic experiments with the new. There was an avowed duty to experience joy and Garcia personified that. The flip side of that was also there because just like when you get close to any family, the surface seems all neat and together, but there are a lot of snakes underneath. You got too close to Garcia and all these positive things that he personified, he was. But there was also a lot of stuff totally contradictory to that. Which he also was.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: We were taking psychedelics and smoking great weed. When I moved into that house, they had a kilo of Acapulco Gold in the kitchen and I had never smoked anything like that in my whole life. It was just fabulous.
Sue Swanson: They were the first couple I had ever been around who were so magically together. He was very affectionate. Very touchy touchy touchy. And Sunshine was this beautiful child. She was the reason I had children. She was blond-haired and blue-eyed. I carried her around and I thought she was mine. I thought, “Gotta have one of these.”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: At the time, Pigpen was very much an enigma to me. I didn’t understand him at all. Jerry seemed really wide open and completely accessible. Pigpen was very mysterious and stayed up all night a lot and drank cheap wine. I didn’t understand that. I don’t think any of us understood how much he was drinking except for the people who drank with him. None of us drank. Are you kidding? It was totally the antithesis to what we were doing.
Jon Mcintire: The most recent musical turn-on for me before the Grateful Dead was Moses and Aaron by Schoenberg. I couldn’t quite get the Dead and then all of a sudden, I was hearing this incredible voice, this amazing sweet voice, and I was trying to figure out where was it coming from and it was Pigpen. He was the only one back then who could sing well. And he was the only one who could really play. Jerry wasn’t that good on the guitar as I remember and as he remembered it, too. We talked about that. And Pigpen really played the organ well and he really sang well because Pigpen came from a blues background from his dad.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: The worst stuff that happened was Pigpen keeping us up all night singing. We’d be stomping on the floor. “Pig! For crying out loud, shut up!” I had a little baby. I was on baby time and we had regular bedtimes. We were down by eleven. Jerry would be out of bed chipper at six-thirty in the morning, practicing. The first thing I’d hear when I woke up would be Jerry plinking away. Plink, Plink, Plink, Plink, Plink. Going a mile a minute and he’d already been up for two hours. Apparently, he didn’t need a lot of sleep. He practiced religiously every day until nearly noon. He had started with the banjo. My feeling about his banjo thing was that he was such a gifted musician that he’d taken his banjo, which was a really clanky, clunky, basically rhythm instrument on which you play these weird patterns, as far as he could go. It had been his mission to excel at the banjo to a point where he was better than everybody else and he was there. He’d nailed that one.
Jon Mcintire: Back when Jerry had really been into the banjo, he told me that he’d considered himself one of the best banjo players in America. In terms of the guitar at that time, which was about 1968 or ’69, he didn’t consider himself to be that good yet. Back then, his playing didn’t stand out for me the way it did later on. It was like they were all learning, and of course Phil really had just barely taken up the bass.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: When he moved on to the electric guitar, that was a whole new instrument. It took him a good deal of time to get proficient with it. He was busy learning in the midst of the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service, all of them claiming to have some musicianship. Jorma Kaukonen was a really strong influence because he was such a good musician as well. There was some rivalry there and Jerry felt the need to really push himself.
Jorma Kaukonen: Jerry was a leader. When I look back on it, I realize that Jerry was always the leader. When he worked with us on Surrealistic Pillow, he really helped discipline us. Because he had come from a band and as a band leader and an arranger, he just really knew what was important. He was really important in the formation of that record and I know that personally he taught me a lot about playing in a band. I remember one evening he said to us, “It’s not what you play. It’s what you don’t play that’s important.” In terms of dynamics and just plain letting the music speak for itself. As a band leader, he was really ahead of the rest of us.
Jon Mcintire: I remember Phil Lesh’s story about the first time he met Garcia. He hated him. “Really?” I said. “Why?” He said, “This guy has too much power.” There was this thing about Garcia that had been there from the get-go. An aura of personal power that could not be explained by any single thing. Although he was extraordinarily lucid when speaking, he didn’t play on that very much. But he just emanated an authority. What was also going on was a redefinition of what cool was. An expansion of what cool was. And Garcia personified that.
Bill Thompson: The Jefferson Airplane were playing the Matrix and two guys came in wearing leather who I thought were Hell’s Angels. Marty Balin started laughing. He said, “Bill, you’re not going to believe it. Those guys have got a band.” It was Pigpen and Jerry Garcia.
Grace Slick: The Grateful Dead looked like they were almost dead. They were only just twenty years old. But a bizarre-looking group of people.
David Freiberg: He sure did help the Airplane with Surrealistic Pillow. I don’t know what that would have been without him. He was on every track, pretty near. I can hear him playing on “Today.” I always thought the sweetness thing that got put on that whole album never would have been there if it wasn’t for him. Because it wasn’t on any other album they ever did.
Jorma Kaukonen: It is Jerry. Absolutely. You bet. It’s Jerry and Marty. I think he might have played rhythm guitar on another track. He’s definitely in the mix and an important part of the band on those tracks. When I got into the Airplane, I didn’t have a clue about what an electric guitar was except that you plugged it in and it was louder. Jerry was way ahead of all of us in that. Jerry was his own electric guitar player from the jump. He was never played like B. B. King, or Freddy King or Chuck Berry. Jerry always had his own thing on the electric guitar.
Sue Swanson: It was never easy. Every day you’d wake up and there was always some kind of psychodrama going on at some level or other. One person was disagreeing with another or they were going to fire Weir. Pig was not playing right or somebody was being a motherfucker or Billy was pulling some maneuver with the money. It was always something. For many years, I lived and breathed by what was happening with them. Those kind of habits die hard.
Jon Mcintire: Neal Cassady was around a lot. Really a lot. He would kind of live up in the attic. There wasn’t really a floor in the attic. There were just boards that were laid down. I remember at one point, Cassady’s foot came through the ceiling. He slipped and his foot came down into Pigpen’s room. I think Neal Cassady just went where the juice was and this was where he felt it. This was the moment of the shift from the beatniks to the hippie movement. The baton was passed on by Neal Cassady directly to the Grateful Dead. You can draw that literal connection because of Neal Cassady.
Jorma Kaukonen: They had a house and they all lived in it. The Airplane lived together later in our career but never in the embryonic state where you were working together, living together, dealing with each other’s day-to-day shit. We did not do that in the beginning. But they did and I think that formed a really important bond in their emerging character. Strictly looking at it as an outsider, their band family almost superseded their personal lives. To really live in a real honest-to-God, no bullshit commune? That’s hard.
Ron Rakow: We were poor for a lot of that time. It wasn’t poor. Poor is when your spirit is beaten down. We were broke. But we were having a great time. One time Garcia said, “I found my guitar. It’s at Dana Morgan’s Music. I can’t buy it, though. I need nine hundred bucks.” I said, “Oh, I got nine hundred bucks. Let’s go get it.” We jumped in my Cadillac and we drove down there with Mountain Girl who was wearing these white Keds tied with thick round wool instead of shoelaces. One was red and one was green. She pushed down the armrest between the seats and put her feet up on it. We got him a black Les Paul Gibson with flat frets. The guitar that’s in the Irving Penn photograph.
Jon Mcintire: The reason they lived in 710 was because it made economic sense to do so. There wasn’t any money. And so yes, there was a commitment to community, to family, to the living situation as a commune, but it wasn’t some sort of political ideal that was being lived out and realized as in, “Ah, yes, we will become a commune.” It was economic necessity and the fact was they were all buddies. Music was always the driving force. As soon as there was the financial wherewithal, their living situation changed.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: The bust really put an end to 710. The bust and that we were busted by a Prankster. We had just gotten some weed and this guy came to the front door and asked me for a joint. He was somebody I was on the bus with. Now this guy was not your up-and-coming Jaycee or anything like that. He was quite a gnarly, weird little guy who’d been in and out of Napa State Hospital, the mental institution. He came in and asked me for a joint. I rolled a joint right out of the strainer on the kitchen sink there and he said, “Oh, wow, thanks a lot. See, I have to leave right now but are you going to be home later on?” I said, “Jerry and I are going over to Sausalito.” We had a car and we were going over to Sausalito to buy stuff at the ribbon store because I was making Jerry a ribbon shirt. So he said, “I guess I won’t see you later then,” and he went outside. He waited for us to leave and then he handed the joint to the narcotics officers who were with him. I think he busted eight houses that day. He had been busted. They had him and they turned him. Because they were going to send him back to Napa if he didn’t do it.
We came back from having our nice day in Sausalito but we didn’t get busted. Because Marilyn, who was Brian Rohan’s girlfriend, lived right across the street from us. She saw us pull up in the car, raced downstairs, and said, “Oh, hi! Come up to my apartment. Come on!” Suddenly, she was so friendly. We said, “Oh, okay.” She got us up to her house and she said, “Look out the window,” and I was going, “Uh-oh.” There were these strange guys coming out of the house carrying stuff. We hung out in her living room watching all this in relative safety as they were taking Pigpen and Weir away in handcuffs. Poor Pigpen, who didn’t smoke weed, got arrested repeatedly for other people’s sins.
After they cleared out of the house, we slipped back over there after dark and looked around. Everybody was gone. That damn kilo of weed was still sitting in the kitchen. They had not found it. It was in the pantry. It was sitting there in its cellophane wrapper dribbling weed on the floor and they had not found it. How this is possible, I don’t know. But they got that colander full of seeds and stems that I had rolled a joint for that guy out of.
Jerry and I were pretty cheerful about not being swept up and it didn’t really turn into anything anyway. But it made us not want to go back to the house. It made it very edgy over there. There was another trip to Los Angeles right after the bust. While we were down in L.A., I was saying things like, “I don’t ever want to move back into that house. I feel really uneasy and unsafe there.” So while we were gone, Rock moved all of our stuff out of our room and moved himself into our room. At that point, we had the big room. When we came back from L.A., we weren’t living there anymore. All our stuff was over in the little room.
Jon Mcintire: The first time I met Mountain Girl was when she and Jerry had moved out of 710 and gone somewhere else but not for very long. Wherever they went didn’t work out. So they were coming to move back into their room. Of course someone else was already in the room and they were kind of storming around, especially MG was kind of storming around, trying to figure out what the fuck to do here. Rock was following after her. Poor guy, he didn’t know they were coming back and so he was saying, “MG, please. Please don’t be mad at me.” And she turned around and said, “No. It’s okay, Rock. I just forgot how quickly things change around here.” Because there was a lot of that in-and-out and back-and-forth with things happening very quickly. But also there was a definite family feeling.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry and I moved into an old motel somewhere down by the beach along the Great Highway. We stayed there for a couple of weeks. I was madly searching for an apartment and I finally found one out in the Richmond District out by the Palace of the Legion of Honor on Thirty-third and Geary. We moved in there with baby Sunshine, who by now could run.
Rock Scully: Jerry didn’t even get busted. He stayed across the street. Marilyn was at 715 and warned him off. He was over there with Richard Brautigan, who wrote that wonderful poem, “The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead.” They were determined to clean up the street but they were dirty about it. They took our money. We had a cashbox, which was what we would use to send Tangerine or Mountain Girl or Bobby Weir or whoever was available to go down to the market to get food. It was like our food drawer and in there was the lease on the place out at Novato and my name was on that lease so they assumed that I was leasing 710 Ashbury as well. After we got through the bust and Owsley got us all bailed out, we went for our arraignment and all the TV crews were down there and they busted me a second time for “running a place where marijuana is smoked.” Like it was some sort of a bordello for marijuana smokers. Like an opium den or something.
Jon Mcintire: They weren’t famous and they didn’t have a lot of money but they were certainly famous in San Francisco. There were giant headlines in the San Francisco Chronicle: GRATEFUL DEAD BUSTED. It was as though the Grateful Dead somehow personified what was going on in San Francisco and that they were San Francisco, and here was this other thing that was also San Francisco personified by the police. A lot of people back then were getting busted. But this was the Grateful Dead and they had that name. That name that, for whatever reason, was absolutely brilliantly chosen.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: Every time someone mentioned the name to me, they told me a different thing. At 710, I clearly remember Jerry telling me that the name, the Grateful Dead, came from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. There was a line in the book, which he had with him at the time and that he showed me, which said, “Osiris, we the grateful dead salute you.” That was definitely what Jerry told me and that was probably in ’67.
Jon Mcintire: They were originally called the Warlocks. It was a goofy sixties kind of name but then another group named the Warlocks came out with an album. The band was at Phil’s house and Garcia was sitting at a table. On the table was the Oxford Companion to Classical Music. Garcia told me he opened up the book at random and there, looking to him like it was written in red, was the term “grateful dead” and it went on to define it as kind of an English folk song about people who were grateful to be released into death. Among the Grateful Dead, no one ever ever talked about the name coming from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Jerry Garcia (1988): Our background was the sort of deeply cynical beatnik space. Which evolved into something nicer with the advent of psychedelics and the good-time mentality of the Haight-Ashbury. There really was a good year in there. Maybe a little more than that. And it was special and exceptional and magical. The fun part was before acid was actually made illegal. Because then you could go out there fearlessly and you weren’t breaking any laws. It was just crazy as hell. And what were they going to do? That was fun. That was like pure fun.
Ron Rakow: When we played at the O’Keefe Center in Toronto in the summer of 1967, the review in the big-time Toronto newspaper was “The Grateful Dead—hirsute simian horrors.” We read the review out loud in a room with everyone there and people started saying, “What does that mean?” Jerry said, “It means we have a lot of hair and we walk on our hind legs.” When I was interviewed in Billboard magazine, I was quoted using the word “exacerbated.” When the Grateful Dead read that article, everybody said, “What the fuck is he talking about?” Garcia just said, “Makes worse.” He had a fabulous vocabulary. He also trained his cat to eat cantaloupe and I have a photograph to prove it. He was a tripster.
Suzy Wood: It wasn’t odd that Jerry was part of it. It was odd that the whole thing was going on. That there was this Haight-Ashbury, hippie, summer of love, flower children huge phenomenon boiling out of Vietnam protests and freedom riders and this whole boiling seething thing was going on all over. That was what was odd to me. Because that was not what had been happening in Palo Alto. But it got huge. The dope-smoking, Diggers, communal living, Avalon Ballroom, acid rock blah blah blah taking LSD. The whole thing was just so enormous and frightening to me. Which was my own personal trip. I was terrified of psychedelics. I thought I would go crazy if I took them. I thought I would never come back.
Eileen Law: In ’67, the Haight started changing. I started seeing bars being put up on windows. Then they advertised it as the place to go and all those songs came out. “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,” and all. When the tour buses started coming around, I believe the people came out of 710 and put mirrors up so that the people on the buses could see themselves.
Sue Swanson: The next thing we knew, there were tour buses coming down Haight Street. Then we were out of there.