ONLY A FEW days ago I was a hapless graduate student throwing the I Ching, casting about aimlessly for something to do with my life. Now, suddenly out of the blue, I’m a manager. But of what? Not exactly a rock band. Remnants, really, of a jug band. Coffeehouse folkies and music students. Just a ragtag, rooty, down-home bunch of people who have never been out of Northern California. Crazy-looking guys, high on acid, who had come together higgledy-piggledy and (like much else to do with the Dead, I would learn) pretty much by default.
Which is part of the enigma of the Dead. It wasn’t all that thought out, to say the least, and it still isn’t to this day. They are as amazed by the phenomenon as you and I.
San Francisco is a genuinely radical place in 1965. We are on a planet where the inhabitants frequent coffeehouses and clubs as places of worship. The hungry i, Vesuvio’s Coffee House, and the City Lights Book Shop are our shrines. Kerouac, Kesey, Corso, Burroughs, and Ginsberg are our holy madmen. We idolize the Beats and Charlie Mingus and the crazy wisdom jazz angels. We zealously listen to smuggled tapes of Lenny Bruce at the Purple Onion.
You can still run into these guys—hipsters,jazz demons,and Beats—and talk to them. Lenny Bruce lives in a funky hotel over City Lights. He is in trouble all the time. People are constantly running around with petitions, saving his ass.
When the Grateful Dead began, San Francisco was still in that transitional period from Beat to Hip. We aspired to the bohemian, outlaw code of the Beats. They smoked grass, ate magic mushrooms, grew beards, and wore Levi’s and plaid flannel shirts. They were into jazz, Zen, and existentialism. So what if they talked to themselves or took speed and drank Hearty Mountain Burgundy! We don’t care, they are on the beam.
But it is not exactly a mutual admiration society. The Beats from North Beach look askance at us hippies. We are on a different wavelength. This has to do with musical tempo and electronics and the changing of an era. Of course, there is one other little factor: the mind-bending drugs.
And as engrossing as the coffeehouses and taking meth and sitting up all night discussing Sartre are, it is a worn groove. We have to find our own scene. We have discussed Sartre to death. It is all too cerebral and talky and dialectical, and with the advent of acid the rational thing is dissolving (fast). You can’t read a book when you’re on acid.
Jerry was born in San Francisco, as were Pigpen and Bob Weir. Phil Lesh was born in Berkeley. We were Bay Area kids proud of the city’s long line of hairy poets and eccentrics.
Garcia had come up through the coffeehouse scene in Palo Alto, a bohemian enclave if ever there was one. His beard is a coffeehouse beard. Bushy, nihilistic, Beat. Occasionally he ventured off to North Beach. That’s where we all hung sooner or later, because that’s where the music was. If you were going to hear jazz, or blues, or folk music, that’s where you went. That’s where we heard Jorma Kaukonen play guitar. Where we caught “this far-out chick from Texas” at the Coffee Gallery down on Grant Street, Lenny Bruce at the hungry i, Charlie Mingus at the Jazz Workshop.
The folk scene wasn’t all music. It primarily revolved around books and ideas. It was a literate scene. Lots of scribbling on napkins and the backs of envelopes and precious little bound books, Mao and Kafka. Jerry’s buddy Bob Hunter was writing poetry and Garcia was learning all the stringed instruments he could get his hands on. Playing the banjo and learning to play the guitar in the coffeehouses of Palo Alto.
The first time I saw Jerry Garcia he was sitting in the Coffee Confusion in the midst of a very agitated discussion about Cuba. Garcia was appalled about the Bay of Pigs. Such things counted in those days. And then the conversation would move on to war per se and what the Greeks thought about it and what the women of Troy did about it. O n and on it would go far into the night. In the background there’d be some chick with incredibly long hair leaning over her dulcimer droning “Down in the mine where the sun never shines. . . .”
None of the band members has moved into San Francisco yet. Bill Kreutzmann is living at his dad’s house, Jerry and Bob Hunter are hanging together in a crash pad in Palo Alto, Phil Lesh is living in Berkeley, and Bobby Weir is living at home in Palo Alto in his parents’ fancy digs. They get together in the coffeehouses of Palo Alto. Magoo’s mainly and down at Kepler’s Bookstore (he’s Joan Baez’s friend) and Dana Morgan’s Music, where Pigpen works and Jerry is giving guitar lessons.
As early as ’63, Jerry was a demon banjo picker, and by the time he and Pig and Weir put the Warlocks together Jerry was an accomplished musician. He is also very knowledgeable about traditional American music: folk, bluegrass, gospel. His dad had been a clarinet player and band leader who died young.
His mother ran a sailor’s bar, south of Market down in the Mission District right next to the Sailors Union of the Pacific. This is their favorite bar. So not only does he come from a musical background, but from an early age he has been exposed to a lot of different scenes, meeting people from around the world. He is well read. The Beats are his guys: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Jerry was fifteen when On the Road came out, and it became his bible, one long be-bop wail to hedonism and transcendence.
At eighteen he enlisted in the army but it would be hard to imagine anyone less suited to military life than Garcia and within six months he was dishonorably discharged. Way to go,Jerry! At this point he considered himself primarily a painter and studied for a while at the Art Institute in San Francisco. But ever since he’d got that Danelectro guitar on his fifteenth birthday he’d been attracted to the folk music scene in the coffeehouses of Palo Alto. Following a car crash in February 1961, Jerry quit art school and began hanging out with the Beats, folk musicians, and proto-hippies at Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park.
And then there is Pigpen (né Ron McKernan). He is a veritable encyclopedia of bluesology. Anybody who has ever picked up a guitar by this time knows yer basic Brit-invasion Chicago blues bag—“Dust My Broom,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”—but Pig knows the arcana. He’d been introduced to esoteric stuff by his father who was one of the first white R&B disc jockeys on a black station. Only in California could you have a white Irish guy named McKernan doing a major shift on KDIA radio over in Oakland and commuting back to the South Bay over the San Mateo Bridge. Pigpen is not only a decent keyboard player—he plays a Vox electric organ standing up—he also has a lot of experience packed into his twenty years. He was an alcoholic by age thirteen.
This is the nucleus: Pig and Jerry. Then there is Bobby Weir, the wide-eyed kid. Jerry is like his big brother. Bobby had a band in high school named the Uncalled Four and spent his last year in school skipping class and teaching himself to play guitar, and now is taking acoustic rhythm guitar lessons from Jerry. He’d got to know Garcia on New Year’s Eve of 1963. Wandering around the streets of Palo Alto with a friend—too young to get into any of the clubs—he heard ferocious banjo-picking coming from the back of Dana Morgan’s Music. It was Jerry who, not realizing it was New Year’s Eve, was still waiting for his students to show up. Weir and his buddy persuaded Jerry to unlock the store. They broke out some guitars, and after playing a couple of hours decided to form a jug band, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, with Pigpen and any number of other people dropping in and out. Bobby, who still couldn’t really play guitar, was on washtub bass.
Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions became very popular on the peninsula folk circuit, but after about six months Pig began urging them to do more blues stuff. When Dana Morgan, the owner of the music store, offered to front them the electric instruments—his son, Dana Morgan Jr., played bass—they became the Warlocks.
Phil Lesh was studying electronic music with Luciano Berio at Mills College, an all-grls school in Oakland. He was into horns and composing and musique concrète. He played trumpet in the Berkeley High School jazz band, but he came to look at music more in terms of charts and scores and cadenzas and adagios. Phil was the engineer for “The Midnight Special,” a folk music program on Berkeley’s KPFA on which Jerry became a regular guest. They became friends. They had many things in common, not the least of which was an enthusiasm for Kerouac and the Beats. Lesh loved Allen Ginsberg’s Howl so much he was in the process of setting it to music. When he joined the Warlocks he took over on bass from Dana Morgan Jr., who was too busy to make the gigs. The thought of lifting up a bass had never crossed his mind. Jerry told him, “You can play the bass.” (That was the only slot left.) He practiced on the bass a week—that’s all it took to get in.
Billy Kreutzmann was not part of the coffeehouse scene. Unlike the other members of the band, he wasn’t somebody Jerry knew socially. They needed a drummer and Jerry found him through the music store. He’d been in a few rock ‘n’ roll bands so he had more of a feel for it than the others. His heroes were jazz drummers like Joe Morello and Elvin Jones.
Rock groups are something new on the scene, a Brit concept, basically, and in 1965 people are just getting used to the idea. Previously considered commercial and crass by the coffeehouse set, rock ‘n’ roll is on its way in. It was only last summer that Dylan had brought the fire down from the mountain when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.
The only thing the Warlocks know how to play electric is the blues. Pigpen stands at that wobbly Vox electric organ on its shaky tubular aluminum legs and bumps his belly up against it and bangs out the blues. That makes Pig the front man. It is all very basic.Every band that doesn’t start out trying to sound like the Beatles is playing Chicago blues: “I woke up the smornin’ dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum.”
But generic as it is, the Dead have a better shot at it than, say, Big Brother. Most Haight bands—like the Charlatans—began with the Look. Like “Does anybody here play?” The music is an afterthought. These guys, on the other hand, are already accomplished musicians. Jerry is teaching guitar, Phil is a music major in college, Bobby is learning guitar from Jerry and teaching it to grade school kids. Kreutzmann has been playing drums since sixth grade. They have also been through a more rigorous apprenticeship than other hippie bands. They’ve played in more demanding places—pizza pubs! Noisy, rowdy, smelly, filthy joints. Far from the hushed, reverential atmosphere of the coffeehouse.
The folky Mother McCree tunes are not going to go down in a tumultuous atmosphere like that. Most of them get thrown out except for the Pigpen stuff, the traditional blues like “Down So Long.” Pig also brings the needed momentum of R&B to the repertoire. In the earliest incarnation of the band (as the Warlocks), Pigpen played a large role because he was the one with the most musical knowledge. He was the Grateful Dead, according to Garcia, according to me. I mean, four sets a night in bars! Who else in the band was going to do it? Pigpen had all that stuff down. In a pizza bar they don’t want to hear a whole set of bluegrass and folk ballads. They want something that’s jumping.
The Dead have to get tight fast. They play four to six sets a night for virtually no money; doing Pigpen blues songs in front of peninsula audiences. Pigpen is turning them on to records as fast as he can, old Kent, Chess Records 78s, teaching them songs like “Parchman Farm”—ancient moss-encrusted Delta blues. The Fillmore Mime Troupe benefit is their first gig as the Grateful Dead. Bill Graham is so appalled by the name that at first he refuses to put it on the poster. He relents, but only after adding “formerly the Warlocks.”
Until 1965, change—when it did come —arrived with glacial slowness. The “sixties” hadn’t begun. People still had black-and-white TVs and AC was hard to get. Your toaster looked like a space ship and your oven was an Oldsmobile. This was the slow time.
We are all young and ready to go crazy, and there never has been a better time for it than the mid-sixties San Francisco. By comparison, the late sixties happen at the speed of light. And when we start taking acid, the fantasies really begin to bloom! Everything erupting all at once. In a matter of six months—with the coming of acid and electric music—our lives are transformed utterly.
The Grateful Dead at this point are barely a group, more a collection of people from different musical backgrounds and with varying levels of competence. Phil Lesh, for instance, is too precise, too well trained in the classical manner and consequently very stiff for a rock ‘n’ roll bass player. He has all this savvy about the music, he can talk circles around Garcia or anybody. He’ll say, “No, no, no, no, wait. If we’re going from a C to a B-flat minor you have to have the correct modulation.” Lesh can chart it all, but he can’t swing. It is probably our biggest problem with the groove.
The bass has to work closely with the drummer’s foot, but Lesh and Kreutzmann are plainly opposite kind of guys. Kreutzmann is this wild, woolly, uneducated, crazy drumming guy—almost like Animal in the Muppets—and Phil has this very filigreed bass-playing style. He’s a highfalutin intellectual kind of a guy who’s liable to turn his back on the audience. But there’s Kreutzmann right in his face going, “Don’t you hear that downbeat, man?” And Phil won’t even look at him (he won’t look at Jerry either). Phil has perfect pitch, but that perfect pitch just doesn’t work with Garcia’s voice. Or with Pigpen’s, for that matter. Sometimes it works with Bobby’s voice, but generally it doesn’t blend in comfortably with the rest of the band.
Meanwhile Bobby Weir can’t come up with a B-minor to save his life, not to mention a B-flat minor. He’s contorting his fingers on the guitar, holding down the E-string while he’s still holding down this other one back up there somewhere—torture!
The members of the Dead are far from being ideally suited to each other. They have to play to each other’s weaknesses. But somehow what comes out is the inimitable sound of Grateful Dead.
My role as manager of the Grateful Dead is at first minimal. Most of our early shows are Acid Tests. We are Kesey’s house band and Kesey gets us the gigs. Now suffice it to say that the Acid Tests are not a demanding atmosphere in which to play. There are so many other things going on at an Acid Test that there is next to no focus on the band. The sets are casual in the extreme. Whenever enough people get up on stage, that’s when they play. Sometimes for five minutes. Sometimes not at all.
At the Acid Tests Pigpen generally starts playing the melody line and everybody joins in. Real simple blues like “Good Morning Little School Girl,” “Viola Lee Blues,” “Caution,” “Beat It on Down the Line.”They put a bunch of songs together in a quick little set and then do an extended jam on something like “Sitting on Top of the World” or “Cold Rain and Snow.” They are already wicked improvisers. A very short song can easily get stretched out interminably. Sometimes they ramble on not knowing how to end it. Soon everybody is off on their own: Weir’s right behind Jerry, following this railway spur off into the wilds of Montana.
When they start to drift off, Pig pulls them back with a few sharp, jabbing chords. But it is unlikely that anyone else ever notices. A dozen other astonishing things are happening at once. Overload is the normal mode of the Acid Tests, and mad scenes are taking place everywhere. It’s an intensely social scene with everyone partying furiously. People wander about and get involved in the phantasmagoria. They aren’t there to hear the band. And then there’s the other band, the Prankster cacophony band, blowing whistles and pipes and clanging away on pots and pans and tin drums. The Acid Tests are a great training ground —after learning to play against all that insanity the Grateful Dead can play anywhere. Nothing will ever faze them again.
We are running on pure high octane optimism and Owsley acid. We are doing a lot of acid. The band (except for Pigpen) usually plays on acid, too. What would be the point of being straight at an Acid Test? Halfway through the evening we usually put out a new trash bucket full of Kool-Aid and acid. The audience drinks it and after a while they feel like we do.
Like everybody else involved with the Acid Tests, we believe LSD is a cosmic truth serum, but after a couple of dozen trips we soon learn that acid is not infallible (especially about stuff like gravity). Flying, although tempting, is not a good idea. If we see someone trying to stand up on the balcony railings or climbing up on a window ledge, we lure them over to the black light corner. “Hey, man, look: space dogs!”
And as interesting as playing music on acid is, there are some serious drawbacks. Sets can go on interminably or end abruptly after a few minutes. It doesn’t take me long to learn the signs. In Garcia’s face I see a sudden, silent intercortical scream building at the back of the eyes and through the telekenetic mind-link I can hear its alien cry: Aaaaaaaaaagh!!! I know they’ve arrived: tiny monkeys, gibbering guitar picks, Barbies with the faces of Mexican santos.
The music takes a sudden lurch. It gets all loose and wobbly. The drummer may be banging away furiously, sweating, trying to keep time, Pig may be hitting the chords—but it’s hopeless. They’ve become a phantom band. The beats are there, but Jerry isn’t. You can see his hands melting before his eyes, his fingers dribbling down his guitar into waxy puddles. At a certain point Jerry stops playing altogether. He holds his hands out in front of him as if folding an invisible newspaper, awestruck by the fact that he has fingers.
Right then I call for a break. I give them Scully Lecture No. 3.
“This is not a rehearsal, guys. You cannot wander offstage in search of a plumed serpent. You cannot just quit after five minutes and lie down on the godforsaken stage. Must finish the set. Must do the songs.”
“Fuck, Rock, lighten up, it’s only an Acid Test, man.”
“It’s not just an Acid Test, it’s a gig. We’re selling tickets, you guys! Must remember: These people paid money to hear you.”
“We’re at a gig?” Smart-ass Weir.
“And just how do you explain the plaid iguanas?” Kreutzmann chimes in.
For years Pig used to tell them: “You guys can get as fucked up as you want, but you just can’t look surprised when something weird starts happening. If they see that, the audience freaks.”
Onstage, Pigpen is the anchor. When things get truly bizarre, they can always look at Pig and know he is straight. Might have had a few drinks, but he is ground base. He is seeing things as they really are. (More or less.)
The quickest way to short-circuit a bummer is to remind yourself you’re just tripping. That lumpy purple barrel you put in your Coke, remember? But sometimes you take so much you can’t remember you took any. So Pigpen will remind you. Just with a look he says: “Those Day-Glo spiders crawling all over your ax are something you took. You’re high, fool.”
The one thing that keeps us from full-blown chaos is that we think of ourselves as “professionals.” Despite everything—through rain, snow, sleet, dark of night, broken fan belts, multi-microgram acid storms, and ongoing insanity—we never miss a show. We are always there on time and never (totally) blow a gig.
And these aren’t wham-bang-thank-you-ma’am sets. These are four-hour shows. Nobody else plays all night. We’ll take a half-hour break, come back and do another hour and a half. Right on till dawn. People come stumbling out of the Avalon or the Fillmore, ready to go out and party some more, planning to hit another club before they go home . . . and it’s daylight outside.
Most of our gigs are very local. Our route includes Palo Alto,Berkeley Marin County, the Haight. While we’re still doing the Acid Tests, I function more as a road manager (and even that is very undemanding). All our gear pretty much fits into Kreutzmann’s Dodge station wagon. The whole thing. Sometimes we have to make a separate trip for his drums. Take them down first, have one of us sit on them while we go back for the rest of the equipment.
The Dead don’t have a pot to piss in, but they have the best amps, guitars, and drums money can buy. Owsley is always laying equipment on the band. He’s our patron. He’s making so much money from making LSD he can afford to bankroll the Dead. He is willing to do it as long as we do it on his terms.
We’re playing music and making mistakes and not being all that graceful about our bungling. A recurring theme of these early shows is the fucking up. But everybody reacts differently. Jerry’s attitude is always “Hey, we messed up, but these things happen. We’ll get it together.”
Just remembering the lyrics is good enough for Bobby. Phil is very touchy about his playing.You can’t praise him, he’s so self-critical. He’s a classically trained musician and holds himself to a higher standard. What would Prokofiev have done if he played bass? At first I say things like “Man, you were so hot tonight!” and he snaps back: “Scully, you’re so full of shit, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Finally I wise up and keep my big mouth shut.
Everything is going along smoothly as we approach the first Trips Festival, a kind of public, larger-scale Acid Test at Longshoremen’s Hall, early 1966. The Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Pranksters and God knows who else in performance. It is the night before the Trips Festival, the Pranksters have been setting up all day, and Stewart Brand suggests they take a break and go up on the roof and smoke a joint. Kesey, typically, has a better idea: to cross over to the roof of the house next door. Unfortunately there are people living under that roof who don’t know them or what they’re doing and the air soon reeks of pot. There is a commotion in the alley. They look down and what do they see but some cops in a squad car pulling up. The cops get out and go in the building next door—which is actually the building they are now on the roof of. But they don’t yet realize this. They’re stoned, after all. They casually discuss the situation.
“Gee, I wonder what they’re doing down there.”
“They can’t be after us. They’re in the wrong building.”
A minute later they turn around to find a dozen cops right behind them on the roof. Kesey freaks big time. He has a prior. He’s out on bail. One of the cops finds the weed. Kesey snatches it out of the cop’s hand and tries to swallow it, almost choking himself to death in the process. When this doesn’t work, he tries to throw it off the roof but the cops grab it. Kesey is wrestling with them and they’re hitting him with their flashlights. Then one of the cops pulls out his gun and says: “Okay, stand clear! I’m going to blow his head off.”
Mountain Girl, Kesey’s girlfriend, is grabbing at the cop’s arm, screaming: “No, no! Don’t shoot him! Peace!” The cops eventually quell him with a couple of good clobbers, but it isn’t easy. They handcuff Kesey and Mountain Girl and take them off to the San Francisco County Jail.
The following day, the day of the Trips Festival, they let him out. This is the Pranksters’ big show. Not only do they have to show up at Longshoremen’s Hall and act like everything is normal, they also have to perform. Great! They drive straight to the Trips Festival from jail, putting their costumes on in the car because by now it’s five o’clock and they’re late setting up. People are beginning to show up. Hundreds of people. Kesey’s bust has got a lot of coverage. It’s made the Trips Festival even hotter.
Kesey, in a gold lamé space suit with helmet, jumps out of the car and runs up the stairs. But here’s this guy at the door with a clipboard and a list who bars his way. He won’t let Kesey in. He’s not on the list!
Where did this deranged control freak come from? He’s shrieking orders and throwing people against the wall. He’s hitting people and uttering dire threats for the tiniest infraction.
It’s Bill Graham! I know him from the Mime Troupe benefits, but most of us have never seen him before. Everybody is going: “Who is this guy?”
Kesey is already tightly wired from spending the night in jail and he’s threatening Graham with mayhem and dismemberment.
“I’ll tear your fucking head off if you put your hand on me again!”
“Go ahead. You’re still not getting in.”
“It’s my show, asshole.”
“Says fucking who? The line forms over there on Geary Street.”
Kesey’s face lights up. He turns to the crowd and shouts, cupping his hands around his mouth:
“My God, it’s Big Nurse!”
Everybody laughs. That terrible, unstoppable cosmic chortle that comes from the other side of the looking glass and says: “It’s all a big fucking joke, man, and it’s unraveling all the time and you are never going to pick up every stitch so just—let go!”
The little fleck of terror at the center of Graham’s eye starts to expand until it’s threatening to engulf the whole scene. A Japanese dwarf in the core of his brain is shouting: CONTROL! CONTROL! But whatever is going on here is so out of control that it’s ludicrous to try to contain it.
The man in the space suit is the prince of disorder. His mood is so infectious even those in the crowd who aren’t high are catching it. It’s powerful stuff and so unstable it’s pulling everyone in its wake like a black hole. It’s scary stuff for a control freak like Bill Graham. He’s met his match in Kesey, a control freak of cosmic proportions. Neither one of them can let go of their bossdom for one second.
It’s a stalemate. Finally Stewart Brand comes out and says:
“They’re okay. That’s Ken Kesey.”
“Kesey,” an exasperated Graham asks, “would you mind telling me what the hell you are doing here?”
Without saying a word Kesey flips the visor of his space helmet down. The audience with the alien is at an end.
Mountain Girl is still livid. “Stewart,” she asks through clenched teeth, “how could you let that moron handle the door?”
And Stewart very meekly says, “Well at least he’s efficient.” He’s right about that!
The irony of the whole thing is that Graham is donating his time.As usual, everything has been left to the last minute. Kesey’s bust has only compounded the situation, and Graham has agreed to help out. What drives Bill Graham crazy is Kesey’s laissez-faire approach to everything. Kesey sets great plans in motion and then disappears, running around being social, making appearances, signing books, attending parties. Meanwhile nothing’s been done. No attention to detail whatsoever. Ken Babbs, the veteran Vietnam chopper pilot and Prankster majordomo, is the one who keeps it together, such as it is. Considerations such as where the electricity is going to come from and how big is the back door and can the Thunder Machine fit through it never cross anybody’s mind until the very moment they’re actually confronted with it. It is so early in everyone’s experience of running these shows that the idea of leaving parking room so that the truck with the band’s equipment can back up to the loading dock is like higher mathematics. And, on this particular occasion, when the truck pulls up to the back entrance of Longshoremen’s Hall it can’t unload. Some stupid jerk has parked his car right in front of the loading dock. It’s my car, actually, and I can’t find the keys.
By the time we get into the hall the Trips Festival is in full swing. We are immediately bombarded from all sides by the familiar Prankster maelstrom of slides, 16mm film, liquid lights, tape recorders all whirring away, all spewing out a phantasmagoric brew of flashing lights, gibbering voices, and roiling chaotic feedback. Kesey has video cameras and video monitors strategically set up around the room so as you walk around you constantly have jarring confrontations with yourself on the screen.
In the middle of the floor is the Thunder Machine, an amorphous metallic sculpture made by Ron Boise. Big metal figures fucking in different positions. The Thunder Machine is huge, like something you’d put in a children’s playground. It’s also a musical instrument.You can get inside it and bang on the different panels with wooden mallets and hammers. It’s like a huge steel drum, so big that six people can play it at once. Like being in the belly of an iron whale.
Everything is designed to envelop and overwhelm. There’s a Moog synthesizer with sound coming out of sixteen phased speakers so the sound rushes 360 degrees around the hall like a sonic demon. There are ices spiked with LSD. A gigantic speaker painted in spectacular Day-Glo colors is set up on the edge of the stage. It is so big that you can get inside it. At the top of the speaker box is a working tweeter and on the bottom is a couch. You climb in, lean back into it, and go, “Whoa!” Terrible speaker, but the effect is fantastic.
Neal Cassady is rapping, doing his cool world bit. Kesey orchestrates these things so that everybody has a chance to get on the mikes. Several delirious hippies have curled up at the base of the microphones like huge molluscs.
Ken Babbs, being master of ceremonies, is issuing orders to the hall on one mike and Kesey is on another mike mixing in the odd random noises while running novel fragments on the overhead projector. Big Brother is on.
After one song Babbs’s voice booms over the PA: “A big hand of applause, ladies and gentlemen, freaks and friends, for Big Brother and the Holding Company. And now a little something from the great Tony Bennett. . . .” Babbs has been babbling all evening about “jungle bunny music” and such. Like a lot of the Pranksters he’s from another generation entirely”Babbs was a marine, for chrissakes—and the thing about acid is that whatever is there is going to bleed through. He’s so out of it that whatever he thinks, he says. Totally unedited mind-gibber.
Chet Helms, who manages Big Brother, leaps up onstage in his afghan coat like a skinny myopic Genghis Khan and grabs one of the microphones:
“Goddammit! Big Brother was brought here to play four songs and they’re going to play four songs. What do you say, audience?”
And everybody, of course, yells “Yeah!”
I know Janis from the Grant Street coffeehouse scene. She was already astonishing back then. She blew the folk madonnas away. In combination with Jim Gurley’s John-Coltrane-on-Mars guitar playing and the buzzy, lysergic sawmill of Big Brother, the effect is operatic. Janis so identifies with the girl in the song that she becomes her: Daisy Mae as Big Mamma Thornton comes to full-blown, Technicolor life, rips a hole in the song and jumps out. When Big Brother finishes their set, Garcia shakes his head in awe.
As we’re talking we look up and see words curling out of the overhead projector. Words writing themselves. Well, how else would they get there? Huge uncial lettering with serifs and loops. But it is not writing the usual Dada utterances:
“JERRY GARCIA, PLUG IN.”
And then, in a flash, it’s gone. The moving finger writes and having writ moves on.
“Fuck, did you just see that?” Jerry asks.
“Unless we’re both receiving the same subliminal telegrams, I’d say it’s time.”
But when Jerry gets up onstage he finds the neck of his guitar has snapped. The bridge has broken off, it’s completely sprung, with strings sticking out everywhere. He cradles it in his arms like a wounded animal. The Dead play about five numbers that ramble on way past midnight.
Around two o’clock, the fire chief—like a character from light opera—shows up. The place is just going nuts, and he marches in with these four fire guys in full regalia—hatohets, firehoses, the whole bit. They look around.A beat as they take in the swelling scene and then it’s “Ooooookay,let’s turn it off now. EVERYBODY OUT! The party’s over, folks.” Permits, warrants, writs, and other fancy legalisms are being bandied about. In the midst of this a voice booms through the auditorium. Some guy has got hold of the microphone, he’s standing up on the balcony going, “I AM LOBAR SPEAKING TO YOU FROM THE FUTURE. . . .”