Stu and I took a bus from the San Francisco airport to the Grateful Dead’s office in San Rafael. When we arrived, the only person in the building was John McIntire, the band’s manager. I later discovered that this was a particularly weird and uncomfortable period in the business life of the Dead (which was always somewhat turbulent). The previous manager, who was the father of Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, had recently departed, allegedly taking with him a sizable chunk of the band’s money. McIntire, though, was a good-hearted and level-headed man, intellectual and eclectic in his tastes, open to new ideas and experiences. He seemed unfazed by my arrival and said I could find the band and the crew at a club called the Family Dog, located on the Great Highway in San Francisco.
Stu and I went straight to the Family Dog to watch the Dead play. After the show, exhausted from a long day of travel, I went home with Ramrod and his girlfriend Frances, and they were quick to open their lives and hearts to me, which I found rather extraordinary. Ramrod was no more than five-foot-seven but with strong, calloused hands, the hands of a working man. He had blond, bushy hair and often wore cowboy boots and a poncho, remnants of his days growing up in the high desert of Eastern Oregon. Like a lot of the guys who worked on the Dead crew over the years, he had a crusty exterior, but he was capable of immense compassion. Ramrod, for whatever reason, took me under his wing. Maybe it was because I was five years younger than him, and he saw me as some sort of younger brother. I don’t really know. I know only that I owe just about everything to him.
Ramrod was living at the time with a man named Augustus Owsley Stanley, a brilliant sound technician who had worked for the band but whose primary focus now was avoiding jail time. “Bear,” as he was known to just about everyone, was one of the great acid kings of the 1960s, a genius who had become adept at manufacturing LSD at a time when it was not only legal, but downright fashionable. Times were changing, though, and the attitude toward LSD, at least among law enforcement officials, was evolving rapidly, which was bad news for Bear. As a result, he was a bit paranoid; understandably, he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of strangers hanging out at his home. Bear trusted Ramrod completely, but when he got up the next morning and found me sleeping on his floor, he was more than a little agitated.
Bear had a beautiful, rambling home in the Oakland hills, with lots of land and a neighbor whose pet cougar wailed incessantly. To me, a kid from New York, it seemed like a fairly weird setup, but then, Bear was an unusual man. In the coming months we became very good friends, but at that moment he wasn’t happy to have me in his house. I can still see him looking up at me, this big rangy kid from the East, and shaking his head.
“This ain’t good, man,” he said to Ramrod. “Not good at all.”
Despite his trepidation Bear let me hang out at his place for another day. Then Ramrod took me to where Sonny Heard was staying, Rucka Rucka Ranch, a communal compound in Marin County where Dead guitarist Bob Weir lived. Rucka Rucka wasn’t really a ranch, although there were horses and some other animals there. It took its silly, sophomoric name (I believe Ramrod was responsible) from something you’d say when you walked up to a girl and gave her breast a little tweak, imaginary or otherwise: “Rucka Rucka!” It was a real hippie place, and it represented my introduction to the Grateful Dead scene and the Grateful Dead family, where roadies and children and wives and girlfriends and groupies all lived together with the band. Life there was remarkably open and free, like the Summer of Love in full bloom. We had a lot of fun, to say the least, and I realized quickly that I had somehow found a life that millions of young people dreamed about; I had stumbled upon the World of the Lost Boys, and I never wanted to leave.
The guys from Pendleton, Oregon, all a little older than me, but still young enough to have a real taste for the wild life, were the primary source of my education. They’d come a few years earlier, through Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and their cowboy attitude and image had a real influence on the band. Jackson would call me a “New Yawker,” in kind of a sarcastic way, and occasionally he’d give me shit about my “New York attitude.” Really, though, he was very curious about New York, which must have seemed as strange and distant to him as Pendleton did to me. Pendleton was a Western town, as opposed to a Pacific town. It had a great cowboy heritage and its citizens rightly considered themselves to be strong, hard-working people. Interestingly, Jackson, Heard, and Ramrod didn’t even live in Pendleton; they lived in a little town called Hermiston, which was sort of across the tracks from Pendleton and was known to be even smaller and harder. So these guys had grown up tough together. They’d been high school buddies. Jackson and Ramrod had even spent time in reform school together—six months for stealing a bottle of liquor from a farmhand’s truck. Not much of an offense, really, but they’d run into a hard-ass judge who wanted to make an example out of them. The same thing had nearly happened to me, but my father had gotten me off the hook. Jackson and Ramrod weren’t so lucky.
Anyway, the agenda at Rucka Rucka was mainly this: have fun—from the time we woke up in the morning until the sun set . . . and afterward. Not that we didn’t work. On a typical day Heard, Jackson, and I would get up around 9 A.M., and we’d begin loading this old silver Metro with gear. Ramrod would show up about ten o’clock, and we’d jump in the truck, all four of us, and drive to the studio, where we’d help the band set up. When we were at Rucka Rucka, though, we’d mainly do country boy things, which was all new to me. These guys fashioned themselves as real cowboys, and they loved teaching me about life in the wide open spaces, a side of life I barely knew existed. If not for my love of books and movies, through which I’d at least gotten a glimpse of Western life, I’d have been totally out of it.
Sometimes we’d go into town and buy a bunch of ammo and get all these guns and start shooting at cans. Some of the band guys would join in this, too, most notably Jerry Garcia and Pigpen McKernan. They’d bring their little handguns and we’d have a shootout. We considered safety to be a primary factor, but the truth was, target practice was rarely conducted without copious amounts of pot, so I suppose there was some risk involved. But it sure did make for an interesting time. One day, for example, we were hanging around, having a big Western-style shootout, and one of the guns we were using was a huge Blackhawk .44 magnum, a double-action six-shooter owned by Jackson that was very much like the kind of gun used in the old West. Bob Weir was sitting on a step, holding the gun, waiting for his turn to shoot, talking with Heard and Jackson, when all of a sudden—like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon—the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun began to rumble. Then a gopher poked his head out of the earth, just inches from the barrel, and looked right up at Weir. It was the strangest and funniest thing, but it also said a lot about the kind of guy Weir is. The gun was loaded and ready to go—all he had to do was cock and pull the trigger. But Bobby is a very gentle soul, incapable of hurting anyone or anything, so he just sat there and smiled at the gopher.
They watched each other for more than a minute, until finally Heard couldn’t stand it any longer.
“What the fuck is this?!” he yelled. Then he reached over, took the gun from Bobby, and stuck it down the hole, just as the gopher disappeared.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
The ground blew apart, sending chunks of dirt and stone in all direction—but no gopher guts. The little guy apparently got away, much to Weir’s delight and Heard’s dismay.
Bobby loved animals. He owned a horse named Apache Chipper, a big Appaloosa that lived in a stall right behind the bunk I shared with Heard. Every morning this horse would wake us up in violent fashion, kicking the walls of the barn and farting as loudly as he could. Outside, in the corral, he’d run around in tight circles, snorting and bucking and spitting at anyone who dared to get near him. This was an uncut stallion, a true wild horse. I’d never seen anything like it. The only horses I’d seen were the chunky, bow-legged kind that hauled carriages filled with tourists around Central Park and dumped steaming piles of crap on the New York streets. Bobby would occasionally get up on Apache Chipper, but you could see right away it was not man riding horse, but rather, horse taking man for a ride. This was a powerful, nasty animal, with strong, muscular legs and a thick, straight back. I rarely had the nerve to go near him. He’d kick down walls, fences, anything that got in his way. I’d try to mend them and Apache Chipper would look at me as I hammered and it was like he was laughing at me: I’m gonna knock that shit down as soon as you’re through, man. So don’t even bother.
I swear, sometimes he’d walk over and just lean on the fence with his body, right after I’d finished repairing it. I was in awe of that damn horse, and I was afraid of him. In fact, about the only person at Rucka Rucka who didn’t fear Apache Chipper was Jackson. He was an honest-to-God cowboy whose father had been a horse trader. I’d watch with wonder as Jackson would grab this powerful horse by the reins and take complete command of it. It was fascinating. With his boots, his buckskin shirt and Stetson hat, his steel blue eyes, his strength, his confidence, his ability to communicate with that horse . . . Jackson looked like Wild Bill Hickok.
Hanging out with Jackson and the other Pendleton boys at Rucka Rucka was like being transported to another era. We all had long hair, we smoked a ton of dope, we did what we wanted. It was a world in which the norm included Heard sucking down a six-pack of Olympia beer every day at four, like clockwork, just shotgunning the whole thing in a matter of seconds; and Jackson leading tours of the best burger joints in town, wolfing his down in a single bite, then, just for fun, grabbing yours and squeezing all the juice out before handing back to you a mangled patty in the shape of his fist. Around these boys you constantly had to be on your toes, for they’d always be pranking you, hot-footing you, literally ripping the shirt off your back.
There were few rules or regulations at Rucka Rucka. It was the kind of place where you’d wake up in the morning to find a billy goat standing on the hood of your car, pissing all over your windshield. There was a peacock at Rucka Rucka that attacked Heard every morning, for no particular reason that I could ascertain, although Heard’s response, which usually involved a baseball bat and a storm of feathers, probably didn’t help matters any. For a guy who grew up in the country and lived on a ranch, Heard wasn’t great with animals He had a dog named Irene, but the dog hated him, because Heard had a nasty habit of kicking the mutt whenever it got in his way.
“Sonny Boy,” I’d say. “Why are you kicking that poor dog?”
“Because I named him after my mother and it just makes me feel good,” Heard would respond. True or not, it was a great answer.
There were strong women in our circle, too, women like Bob Weir’s girlfriend, Frankie, who kept order on the ranch and who made sure we all stayed in line. And a lifelong friend and employee of the band Eileen Law, who was pregnant the summer I arrived. I held Eileen’s hand while she was in labor, as Frankie helped the doctor deliver a little girl named Cassidy while Bobby played guitar. My mind was blown by the sight of this little child, so frail and helpless and beautiful, and by the courage of Eileen and the support of her friends. It was such a magical moment, such a burst of life and energy. I’d never seen anything like it. Cassidy became part of the family, too, and has been such her entire life. She’s married to Cameron Sears, who became a Grateful Dead manager, and they have a child of their own.
Even though the other band members all had their own homes, Rucka Rucka was for a time the social center of the Grateful Dead. If nothing was happening as far as work or rehearsals, people would just stop by and hang out. They stayed for a few hours or a few days. Whatever. It was at the ranch that I first got to know Jerry a little bit. Jerry liked to joke about my East Coast heritage. “Look at you,” he’d say. “Hanging out with the crew. You’re our New York karma, man.” The fact that Jerry would talk me up once in a while helped break down the barriers that naturally arose between me and the predominantly West Coast crew and band. He took a liking to me right away, maybe because I had a good and sometimes dark sense of humor, and I shared his fascination with the strange and the bizarre. And, of course, we both had a fondness for marijuana. I remember sitting around with Jerry and a few of the guys one day shortly after I arrived from New York, talking about pot smoking, sharing our various views and expertise, when Jerry pulled out a little machine and showed me how to make a perfect cigarette, one that bore a striking resemblance to an unfiltered Camel, which was the brand favored by just about all of us. I was amazed. Here was a joint that could pass for a cigarette, and thus could be taken and toked almost anywhere, which was precisely the point.
I don’t want to give the impression that we did nothing but sit around and get high all day. The truth is, although we were high a lot of the time—drugs were a communal experience and an integral part of the Grateful Dead family—we also managed to get quite a lot of work done. In hindsight, I realize that my first year or two with the Grateful Dead was a time of transition for the band, as well for me. They’d been around for five years already, and they were finally becoming more than just a group of guys who loved to hang out together and play music, although they still were that, to be sure. By 1970, the Grateful Dead had become something more, something they had never really explicitly aspired to be: a hard-working, professional, career-oriented band, a band that had a chance to do what only the greatest bands do—make money and sell records without losing its identity and its integrity along the way.