Sometimes only distance can make you realize how much something means to you. Or, as Dorothy said in The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.”
Home, in my case, was a variety of places: Rucka Rucka, a friend’s apartment, a hotel room, even the backseat of my car, where I spent many nights during my first couple years in the Bay Area. Mainly, though, it was wherever the Grateful Dead happened to be hanging out. As much as I enjoyed that life, however, there were times when I grew frustrated at having no money, no tangible career path, no bed to call my own.
Once, when Heard went back up to Oregon for a while, he gave me permission to borrow his clothes, and I gladly took him up on the offer. Before going out one evening I put on what I thought was Heard’s leather coat, and when I stuffed my hands in the pocket I was shocked to discover a huge wad of bills. I had no idea how Heard had managed to get his hands on so much cash, and quite frankly I didn’t want to know. I knew only that I was dead broke and hungry, and I figured Heard wouldn’t mind if I took out a small loan. So I peeled off a single fifty-dollar bill, which I replaced a few days later. I later discovered that neither the money nor the coat belonged to Heard—in fact the coat was the property of John McIntire, and the money belonged to the Dead. John had seen me in that coat, and he knew I could have walked off with a big chunk of cash. But I hadn’t, and he later told me he was impressed by my honesty.
More important to me, for a while anyway, was the generosity extended by Dan Healy, a brilliant technician and electronics wizard who was something of a guru to all of us on the Dead crew. Some of the other guys, Bob Matthews in particular, had sort of a snotty attitude about the technical aspects of the business, as if they were engineers and we were merely hired hands—they were the brains, we were the brawn. (Although I should point out that Bob was a true brother who once bailed me out of jail when I got arrested for having some outstanding traffic tickets.) Healy wasn’t like that. He took pleasure not only in doing his work, but in sharing his knowledge with others who seemed genuinely interested in learning. He was a teacher, in the truest sense of the word. Dan was the first person who showed me how to work a Fender amp. He taught me about electricity and building and buying speaker cabinets. I admired and liked Healy, so when he went off for a while too work with a band called Quicksilver Messenger Service, I was only too happy to join him (it happened when one of their roadies took off his clothes at a show at Winterland, lay down naked on the stage, and then walked off, never to be seen again). The pay was minimal and sporadic, but the compensation included free room and board, which sounded pretty good to me at the time.
Quicksilver was a Bay Area band that had been formed in 1965 by a folk singer and songwriter named Dino Valenti, but did not release its first album until 1968. By that time Valenti had left the band and been imprisoned on a drug charge. By 1970, when Healy and I went to work for Quicksilver, Valenti had returned and taken over the reins of the band that was rightfully his. I’d gotten to know some of the guys in Quicksilver, because our paths often crossed in the studio (just as they crossed with other San Francisco artists, such as Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane), and so I thought I knew what I was getting into. But I really didn’t. My frame of reference was the Grateful Dead, and I quickly discovered that no other band operated in such a democratic fashion. Certainly not Quicksilver, which at the time I arrived was Dino Valenti’s personal fiefdom.
Dino had been a carny, and it showed in just about everything he did. A nice way of putting it would be to say that he had a dynamic personality; another way of putting it would be to say that he was something of an asshole. Regardless, I wasn’t accustomed to working for someone who treated people the way Dino did. Let me give you an example. I lived at the rehearsal hall where the band practiced and stored its gear. My primary job was to drive a truck for the band, to shepherd equipment and instruments wherever they were needed. I’d been there only a few days when I got a strange call from Dino.
“Come over right now,” he said, “and bring me some wood.”
“Wood?”
“Yeah, I want to make a fire in my house.”
He hung up, leaving me standing there, dumbfounded, with the receiver dangling from my hand. Suddenly I had no idea what my job was. I had hoped to be a stagehand, to learn more about music and equipment—about the business of rock ’n’ roll—by working alongside Dan Healy. Instead, apparently, I was some sort of servant.
Bring me some wood?
Not wanting to get fired in the first week on the job, I went out and picked up some firewood and drove to Dino’s house in the middle of the night. I rang the doorbell and waited nearly ten minutes for someone to answer. When the door opened I was treated to the sight of Dino, stark naked except for the gold chain around his neck, holding a glass of wine in his hand.
“Come in, Steve,” he said, gesturing with his free hand.
As I crossed the threshold I could see that Dino wasn’t alone. Far from it. Behind him were two stunningly curvaceous and beautiful blonde women who looked to be in their early twenties. They, too, had shed their clothes, and now they were leaning on each other, smiling, stroking each other’s hair. I’d been around musicians long enough by now to know that attractive women were one of the perks—maybe the best perk—but I was still taken aback. For one thing, these were not your garden-variety, run-of-the-mill groupies. These were the type of women you’d see in Playboy—flawless, airbrushed women. A fantasy come to life. Not only that, but it was abundantly clear to me from the looks on their faces, and the look on Dino’s face, that this display of flesh was primarily for my amusement. I’ll be honest—for the first thirty seconds or so I harbored some small hope that I was about to be invited into an orgy. But as Dino began ordering me around—“Set the wood down over there. The matches are on the mantel. Come on, man, it’s cold in here, get the fire going!”—it became abundantly clear that their exhibitionism was designed primarily to cause me discomfort. They wanted to watch me squirm. They wanted to tease and to taunt me, and send me home blue-balled and baffled.
When the door closed behind me and I heard the girls laughing, I knew all I needed to know about Dino Valenti, and I found myself wondering, What have I gotten myself into?
My initial assessment of Dino was confirmed on a daily basis. He was a talented but extremely unusual man who craved nothing so much as power. A true megalomaniac, he made a practice of berating the people in his circle: bandmates, crew, management, girlfriends, everyone. He seemed to enjoy torturing people, making their lives miserable. I couldn’t believe what a bad decision I’d made, and I wondered what I would do when the inevitable happened and Quicksilver fell apart; actually, I wondered if I’d even last long enough to see the band unravel.
By the fall of 1970, Quicksilver Messenger Service was in turmoil. John Cipollina, the band’s guitar player, declared his dissatisfaction with Dino and announced that he was going to quit. Then Healy began getting into arguments with Dino, and finally he quit. Well, once Dan left there was no way in hell I was going to stay. By December I was preparing to move back into my car. Things were so bad with Dino that even being homeless and jobless was preferable to working for Quicksilver.
Fortunately, the Grateful Dead came to my rescue again. On what turned out to be my last day of work for Quicksilver, I took a ride with Rex Jackson down to El Monte, where the Dead were playing a show. The band and crew were staying together at the Tropicana, one of the all-time great rock ’n’ roll hotels, a legendary place that catered to virtually every big band that passed through Los Angeles. There seemed to be almost no rules at the Tropicana: bad behavior, the hallmark of the working band, was not only tolerated, but encouraged. Jackson and I got to our room and did what we always did: we made it ours. This was something that Bear had started, back in the days when he traveled with the band. Bear believed that one way you kept your sanity on the road was to transform your surroundings, to rid the hotel room of its sterile atmosphere and make it feel like home, whatever that meant to you. In Bear’s case—and Jackson followed his example—that meant removing most of the lightbulbs from lamps and lighting a bunch of scented candles, hanging pictures and paintings, laying embroidered cloths and rugs and quilts all over the room. Like Bear, Jackson had this down to a science. He could break a hotel room down and turn it into his own private pad in about ten minutes.
Anyway, we went to the venue and I helped set up for the show (Jackson showed me how to do Billy Kreutzmann’s drums that night). While watching the band I realized how much I missed being around these guys. True, it wasn’t like I never saw them anymore. Quicksilver and the Dead shared some of the same studio space and occasionally, as on this night, I pitched in and helped the crew. But I didn’t really belong there anymore. I had left. And now I wanted nothing more than to come back.
Jackson and I returned to the Tropicana to discover that his room had been gutted. Apparently one of the candles had tipped over and set fire to a quilt, which then ignited the mattress, which then . . . well, you get the picture. Remarkably enough, the fire department had arrived almost instantly and prevented the fire from spreading beyond our room. Even more remarkable was the fact that I don’t even remember anyone getting all that worked up about the whole incident. We had destroyed a room and nearly burned down the hotel, and yet they didn’t even throw us out. It was just another day in the life of the Tropicana Hotel.
We ended up staying with Phil Lesh, the Dead’s bass player. See, that’s the way it was with this band, especially in the early days. These guys opened their hearts and minds and homes to so many people. I’d seen that at Rucka Rucka Ranch, where Bob Weir provided a warm bed and food for just about everyone on the crew at one time or another. Even now Bill Kreutzmann, the band’s drummer, was sharing a place with William “Kid” Candelario, another member of the crew. When I’d been working at the theaters back East I saw a lot of bands, but I never saw any that displayed the generosity and kindness of the Grateful Dead. It changed after a while, of course, as the Dead became a bigger, richer corporate entity, and we all got older and some of the band members started to request their own rooms on the road. At this time, however, it was truly a communal thing between band and crew. There was no separation. Sometimes I’d room with Jackson or Heard; other times I’d stay with Jerry or Phil. It didn’t matter. It was like we were all on some great and mystical journey, the point of which was to get the music out to as many people as we possibly could. And nothing else mattered.
I was thinking all this as I hung out in Phil’s room, smoking a joint, talking with my friends. I wasn’t as upbeat as I usually was, and I guess Phil sensed something was wrong.
“You okay, man?” he asked.
“I’m just having a tough time with Quicksilver.”
Phil smiled. “Dino?”
“Yeah, Dino. He’s too much to handle.”
Phil nodded, took a tug on a joint. “Screw it then. Come work for us.”
Jesus . . . was it that simple? Could I really just walk away from Quicksilver and return to the Grateful Dead, as if I’d never left?
“Seriously, man,” Phil added. “It’s a lifestyle choice: good or bad.”
“Uh-huh.”
“All right then.”
We shook hands. “Thanks,” I said.