ONE MORNING AT the beginning of April ’66 we throw the I Ching. We get “Crossing the Great Water,” the gist ofwhich is: “Time to get outta town, boys.” What can we do, the hexagram has spoken! Admittedly, there are also more mundane considerations. . . . The visit from those two cops is still hanging in the air. They’ve seen strange and unaccountable things; it’s only a matter of time before they come around again. And then there’s the little matter of Captain Alfred W. Trembly, intrepid LAPD narcotics chief, who has discovered that Owsley recently bought five hundred grams of lysergic acid from the Cyclo Chemical Corporation in L.A. Enough —in the cops’ typically inflated calculations —to make some ten million hits of LSD. LSD isn’t even illegal yet, but once those statistics hit the press all hell breaks loose. Things are hotting up in Tinseltown; better hit the road before an incensed citizenry arrives outside our house with flaming torches and a hank of rope.
We load the instruments and the tabbing machine in Laird’s van, leave everything else behind, and head back up to San Francisco. There, we plan to continue this experiment in communal living. For one thing, it’s crucial to my blueprint for the Dead. Didn’t the Beatles all live together in Hamburg? Didn’t Keith, Mick, and Brian share a grungy flat together in Edith Grove? If it knit those pimply lads into rock’s premier blitzkrieg units, think what it can do for a band that is already fused into the group mind through ritual ingestion of massive quantities of LSD.
Shortly before we left for L.A. I had found the ideal place for us and proceeded to move in there myself. 710 Ashbury is one of those high-ceilinged, crumbling old Victorian mansions the Haight is full of. Once homes to railroad magnates and robber barons, now crash pads for the hippie Anschluss. Big bay windows, billowing like sails into the street, and a stoop worthy of Henry James: gingerbreaded porch, stained glass in the entry, a front door the Bank of England would be proud of.
At this point 710 is a boardinghouse managed by Danny & Rifkin Shortly after I move in, Danny and I embark on an ill-fated LSD-mahng venture which almost immediately uh, crumbles. But one good thing does come of this sugar cube madness. In the middle of our doomed enterprise, I have a revelation that this is the place, the cosmogonic point of origin from which the band will launch itself.
“Doesn’t this place have Grateful Dead written all over it?” I ask Rifkin, who rolls his eyes in a there-he-goes-again way.
“We just move everybody in here, and then we can easily —”
“Hey now, wait a fucking minute, ol’ buddy, before you embark on a grand unified theory of the universe. In case you didn’t notice, there are seven other people living here. What about them?”
“What about them?” I say with the ruthlessness of the true visionary.
I can see he is a nonbeliever so I deputize him co-manager of the Grateful Dead, adding the obligatory tag: “Insofar as the little fuckers can be managed.” In return, Danny makes me co-manager of 710 Ashbury. Titles are flying! We give the lodgers thirty days’ notice, but the endemic inertia of the Haight weighs heavily against us. I know we are in for the long haul.
By the time we get back from L.A. only four boarders have been persuaded to leave. The remaining stragglers —the unreason able three —will not be budged. There’s the chemically deranged poet who will later jump off the Golden Gate Bridge (high on Valium and so loose he survives), the recluse whom no one ever sees, and, most bizarre of all, the normal person who gets up every morning and goes to work. How unreasonable! Moreover, she is demanding a rational explanation ofwhy she should move out to make room for a bunch of shiftless, dope-smoking beatniks. She seems to have no clue about the overarching cosmic plan and the part the Grateful Dead will play in it.
Desperate measures are needed. We install Pigpen as our beachhead. Pig moves into the back room right behind the kitchen. He uses it as his living room, the lair of the beast. It is not a pretty sight. Early in the morning he’s there frying up terrible stuff, and late at night he’s still there, playing his harp and howling the blues. To come down first thing in the morning and be greeted by the sight of Pig in his godawful bathrobe surrounded by greasy dishes, cigarette butts and crumpled beer cans must be a bit daunting, at least we hope so.
The battle is a long one, but Pig manages to push everyone out except the recluse. The “kitchen campaign” doesn’t work on the recluse for the simple reason that the guy never leaves his room. So Pig starts blaring his raunchy old blues records day in, day out. Magnum force Chicago blues. And finally one day, with Howlin’ Wolf rattling the windows and Little Willie John shuddering the steam pipes, the last remaining holdout wobbles down the steps and is gone. But not till around August.
In the meantime, I am scouting out other possibilities, somewhere outside the city where we can rehearse undisturbed: Big Sur, New Mexico, and, closer to home, Marin County just across the bridge from San Francisco. We need a place where we can all live together until 710 is free of boarders.
Out near Novato in northern Marin County, I find Rancho Olompali. A Spanish colonial ranch built on the site of an old Indian village. Perfect! Olompali is where the one and only war of the Bear Flag Republic was fought, a little Indian uprising that lasted about four days and was put down by the cavalry. Later on, a wealthy Spaniard had built a huge stucco house around the old Indian adobe, and put in a swimming pool and a big bunkhouse for the ranch hands, which looks perfect for a set of apartments. By the time I get back from a trip to New Mexico, the band and girlfriends, Rifkin, and the Dead extended family have already moved in.
My first day at Olompali is instant immersion in the communal lunacy. In New Mexico you drive seventy-five miles just to do your laundry, you’re lucky if you see two people all day, and suddenly this!
Sue Swanson and Connie, the original teenybopper Deadheads, are lying on the grass screaming at the top of their lungs at invisible aircraft flying inches above their heads. These girls are only about fifteen years old and they’ve taken acid every day for a year. Their favorite thing to do is to go out to the San Francisco airport and lie down at the end of the runway and let the planes fly over them.
Half the people lolling on the lawn in front of the big house are naked and everybody is stoned or tripping. They’re watching the afternoon show —Neal Cassady dancing in circles all over the lawn, juggling his hammer, talking that talk and malng no sense at all. With his short hair, khaki pants, and Boy Scout belt he is such a bizarre sight that it’s only natural Gus, my friend from Taos, gets the wrong impression: “Fucking hell, Rock, I think they dosed the neighbor!”
It’s dusk and people start drifting into the house. The day is turning strange. Odd scenes start appearing. Up in Weir’s room there’s a woman sitting transfixed on the floor, holding her newborn baby who is beet red and whimpering. Whatever it is she’s going through, she’s too spaced out to deal with it and we’re too stoned to help.
Outside, people are yelling. We run downstairs. A h d has fallen in the pool and almost drowned. Someone gives him CPR and he’s all right but it’s a terrifying few minutes.
Back in the house I peek in the living room. Jerry is sitting on the floor with his back to the door moving his fingers very slowly over the old adobe wall. The house had been built around the original Indian adobe and in the new walls there is a glass door that you can open up and see the foundations of the house. You can put your hand in and feel the original adobe walls and that’s what Jerry is doing (veeery slowly). Total immersion.
I hear Owsley’s voice. He’s up in the big round room with the fireplace. It looks toward the pool. You can see all the way to the East Bay from this room. Owsley’s expounding. It’s twilight, people drift in from outside, sit on the floor, and roll joints.
After an hour or so —and Owsley still droning on —people start leaving and there’s just the core group left. Out of the blue Weir begins sobbing uncontrollably, I don’t know why. He doesn’t know why. He’s just touched in some way. He’s just a kid, barely eighteen. I am finding it hard to be there. All this interior mental stuff. I go outside again and walk up the hill and play with Lady, the family dog. Her big sparkling eyes.
Down below I see Jerry sitting cross-legged in the same position as he had been in his room, but now facing the old oak tree that stands between the big house and the dormitories.
I met the Dead on acid, and on acid I made an immediate connection with Garcia. Jerry was always great on acid. Very mellow, profound, funny. I’d never seen him freaked behind acid at an Acid Test or anywhere else, but today he is agitated. At first I think he’s just more loaded than he has ever been —which may be true -but it is also the place.
It is a wonderful old tree that the Tamal Indians had obviously cooked in. It is hollow. There are remnants of adobe bricks in there and a kiln. The tree had died and they had built a clay oven inside it. Baked their bread in it. And the smoke filtered up through the hollowed-out branches.
All the color has gone out ofJerry’s face, his eyes are fearful and anxious. He looks like a ghost himself. People are wondering what’s with Jerry, going over to him and saying “Uh, hello? Everything okay in there, man?” But he isn’t answering. He just sits there in front of the tree, mesmerized.
Eventually a terrified Jerry comes inside and, without speaking to any of us, proceeds to crawl under the dining room table. Not the best place to hide, especially from ghosts! We talk him into coming out and after a while he tells us the story. Seems that down in that lower living room, the room where he spends most of his time playing guitar, he made contact with . . . a Tamal Indian medicine man. And this Shaman was accusing him of ancient outrages perpetrated by the Spaniards against his tribe.
“You, Garcia, descendant of conquistadors, murderer of my brothers, usurper of our sacred land! Yes, you. Our blood is on your hands, our bones will rise up and pursue you to the ends of the earth. There is nowhere you can hide from us, no one who will give you sanctuary for the crimes committed by your forefathers!”
The adobe was the longhouse of the Tamal Indians, and circled around it were the tepees and lean-tos of the tribe. There are Indian artifacts all around us. The place is saturated with their vibes, and LSD does make one extremely, um, porous. So at some point Garcia must have gotten a whiff of these Native American ghosts. And when it’s no longer that easy to distinguish yourself from the chair you’re sitting on, everything becomes animated. The living and the dead mingle, and it’s hard to tell which is which.
Summer of 1966 is when the sixties start rolling. Up until now it was all Pop, but suddenly up and down the coast it is one big endless party. Something is happening, something is growing out there. There are people living in tepees up in Shasta and down in Big Sur. The Psychedelic Rangers, the first hybrid pot growers in California, have a commune down in Carmel and all these little high school girls like Tangerine and Girl Freiberg and Martha Wax are dropping out of high school and running away to move down there and hang with them. They hold big harvest parties with congas and bongos and red mountain wine and all-night pot-smoking and dancing around bonfires after the first rains. The seeds of things to come, dress rehearsal for the Summer of Love. The undressed rehearsal.
Even we had no idea people were gonna get that loose. None of us had been in this situation before. The sun’s hot, there’s a swimming pool, there’s trees to cover us, and everybody’s high on mescaline and grass and LSD. There are tepees pitched on the hill, tribal drums are beating through the woods, live music playing on the lawn . . . and greased watermelons in the pool!
At Olompali all our gear is set up on a flat stage on the grass in front of the big house and anybody can play at any time. Big Brother and the Charlatans and the Grateful Dead and the Quicksilver Messenger Service are all hanging out and playing together. Totally disorganized because everybody is so high, wandering off and tripping. Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann are riding horseback up into the hills, Bobby Weir’s hooking up with the peyote ceremony that’s going on in the back of the property (which is huge, it backs onto state land). People get lost for days. Whoever is around plays. David Freiberg gets up and plays with Garcia, Janis Joplin sashays up and sings with Pigpen.
And soon news of these parties and the scene around San Francisco reaches the ears of the Europeans, whose heads are always close to the ground for the sound of anything new and outrageous coming out of the U.S.A. So they start getting on planes and trains and coming to see what it is all about. These guys have an almost anthropological interest in us! They count on the U.S.A. for periodic eruptions of uncouth and bizarre behavior, unthinkable acts and savage teen rites. Unremitting surrealism is what we’re renowned for over there.
We hear that a crew from the BBC is coming to visit us. “We’d like to film one of your psychedelic parties. We’ve heard they’re quite wild,” the man says. “Do you think we might be lucky enough to catch one?” Sure thing, squire, I’ll just round up some local savages and get them into war paint. The BBC’s idea of a hlppie party is outlandish dress, a bit of weirdness, a talk with the Grateful Dead or Big Brother, and what’s it all about, Alfie?
They are greeted by a bunch of Hell’s Angels insolently lounging at the entrance. The Angels are watching the gate and, given their peculiarly inverted sense of decorum, they don’t like the cut of these guys’ jibs. The guys from the BBC talk hnny, and they’re wearing funny-looking clothes. They’re clearly full-blown squares of the first rank, a species closely related to lawyers and bankers. Foolishly they pull out their credentials, but the Angels aren’t interested in any stinking badges. They make them get out of their clean little Hertz rent-a-van and walk the quarter mile or so in the blazing sun, carting all their shit.
When they get down to the house they’re already twisted and twitchy, huddled down in the driveway in their Carnaby Street outfits—bell-bottoms, desert boots and dueling shirts —sweating and exasperated. They’re taking in the local color, hippies dressed like light-opera pirates and hussars, pantomime outlaws and cowboys and Indians and galoots —jolly nice! —but wherever they point their cameras there are a few extras who aren’t quite fitting in. Like the stark-naked hippie chicks. Everywhere they turn there are people in the nude jumping in the swimming pool, naked couples making love on the grass and kissing in the trees. Kissing the trees, actually.
The BBC crew makes a strategic retreat to the house. They’ve stopped shooting. They’re signaling to me with comical urgency.
“You know, Mr. Scully, this really won’t do,” they intone in their best colonial manner. I’m fucking with them, saying, “What is it, exactly, that won’t do?”
“Well . . . there’s all these, uh . . . naked people. They don’t have halter tops and some of them aren’t even wearing bathing suits! You’re going to have to tell everybody to put their clothes on, that’s all there is to it.’’
I tell them, okay, I’ll make an announcement.
“I don’t know if any ofyou have noticed but the British Broadcasting Company is here,” I say over the PA system. “They’re here to make a documentary about us but they have one request. They want you all to put your clothes back on.”
“Screw the BBC!”
“Fuck the documentary!”
“Did he say to put our clothes on?”
“Nah man, you must be high or something!”
The BBC throw up their hands.
“But they’re hippies,” I explain. “Isn’t this what you guys came to see?“
“Yes, of course, but perhaps we could make a compromise, Mr. Scully. What if the girls put on panties and halter tops. Do you think we could accomplish that?”
“I doubt it.”
“Look here, I’ve got an idea. What if all the people without clothes on just got in the pool?”
“Now that we might be able to do.”
Soon most of the offending pubes and boobs are underwater, but they still want ths one to stand over here and that one to stand over there.
“Look, I don’t want to be rude but this isn’t a Navaho reservation and I’m not staging a rain dance for a package tour. They’re hppies, they do what the hell they want. If you don’t mind, I’ve got to get on with my day! I’m trying to get the band set up.”
At this they perk right up.
“Oh really? There’s going to be music?”
Well, of course. It’s not just fornication. But as soon as the first strums out of Garcia’s guitar come through the amplifiers, all the naked people get out of the pool and go over to the stage. There goes the shot!
This is clearly a case for a token adult. Perhaps our dauntless criminal attorney, Brian Rohan. “Let me get my lawyer,” I tell them. I find Rohan, who is almost naked himself at this point. He’s down to his shorts and he’s ready to take them off at a moment’s notice because he’s a very horny Irishman (friend of KeseyS and all that) and he’s been to all the Acid Tests and so on.
“Maybe you ought to put on a shirt or something, Brian, and go talk to the BBC.”
“Talk to the BBC? Ooooooo, man!” His eyes light up. You can see the dollar signs click into place the way they do when some demented money-making scheme comes to Scrooge McDuck. He’s into the action, the commissions, the German rights for chrissakes! He is also high as a frigging kite.
“Rock . . .remind me, Rock, of. . .what to . . .”
“They’re about to pack up their equipment and walk away. Brian, see ifyou can convince them to do the shoot andjust keep the tits out of the frame, if that’s what they’re worried about.’
But I see at once as I peer into his dilated pupils that this is something too bizarre for him to comprehend.
“What?! Get rid of the tits? Get rid of the tits? Why would they want to do that?”
On the weekends we go into town and play. The Grateful Dead are still very much a dance band. They are young and bouncy and playing basic pumping R&B numbers, along with some of the new tunes from L.A. And there are plenty of places to play. The Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms have been in full swing since the last Trips Festival in January. Bill Graham and Chet Helms have essentially taken over the Acid Test/Trips Festival concept and institutionalized it. Every Friday and Saturday night they’ve got a mini Trips Festival going on. Weekend dance parties with a bunch of different groups booked —a name band from out of town along with a bunch of local bands on the bill. We play for Chet one weekend and for Bill the next. The weekend dance concerts have everything the Acid Tests had: light shows, strobes, face painting.
A typical set might include “Viola Lee Blues,” “Stealin’,” “I Know You Rider,” “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” “Big Boss Man,” “Don’t Ease Me In,” “Next Time You See Me,” and “It Hurts Me Too.” Mostly traditional and blues and folk songs with an occasional contemporary hit like “In the Midnight Hour,” or an original like “Cream Puff War.”
Over the summer of 1966 the Haight, like some nursery of alien pods, grows and grows. Every day new people arrive to await the coming of the Age of Aquarius: peace, love, music, drugs, and obscure publications. To some extent the news is spread by word of mouth, but what really stokes the Haight is FM radio. Our parents watch TV, everybody else listens to top forty AM. FM radio is the kids’ channel. FM comes in around ’65 and by the spring of ’66 it is going full swing. We are growing up (sort of) and the music is getting better all the time. Radio is no longer churning out musical wallpaper. FM is out there in the far reaches of the night beaming all these great sounds.
Without FM we wouldn’t have heard the Yardbirds, Them, the Stones, Dylan, Stax-Volt, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, along with the crypto stoned commentary. The Dead are a second-generation sixties band —they do covers of Stones covers —and this is their lifeline. We stay up late to tune in.
Without FM, there wouldn’t be an audience large enough to sustain the Dead. Radio is our tribal drum, it’s how we find out what is happening. Overnight, radio can spread the word over several hundred square miles. People pile into VW buses and head down the road to the latest tribal gathering.
The other source of news is Ralph J. Gleason. Everybody reads his columns in the Chronicle about upcoming events or some festival he’s attended. Every day the Chronicle goes out allover Northern California, from Monterey to the Oregon border.
In July our first single comes out on a small local label, Scorpio Records: “Don’t Ease Me In” with “Stealin’” on the B side, both recorded in John Estribow’s attic. Estribow was a friend of the band who had a small label with almost zero distribution. Traditional blues songs that pre-date our L.A. sojourn. We do quite a few demos in ’66 (the above plus “Otis on a Shakedown Cruise,” an original rocker, and the old country traditional, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”). We owe these demos to Dan Healy, a friend of ours who is a technology wizard and has done amazing things for Quicksilver.
Healy works at a place called Commercial Recorders, in a turn-of-the-century firehouse on Natoma Street. The studio is closed at night but Healy sneaks the band in to make tapes. In the beginning I assume Healy is managing the place and what a nice guy he is for not charging us. For a while even Healy thinks he is getting away with it, but it turns out that the owner knows about us all the time. He’d come in at nine o’clock in the morning and couldn’t see across the room for the cigarette smoke. The place was still humming. But the owner —Lloyd Pratt, a jazz bass player —never said a word to us, not once, bless his heart.
It is at Commercial that the Dead make demos of many of the songs that will appear on our first album, The Grateftrl Dead. A few arrangements of traditional tunes, two or three of our own songs, and that’s pretty much it. All the folky tunes left over from the Mother McCree’s jug-band era are now replaced.
Dan Healy also has the midnight-to-six shift at KMPX, and often plays the single and the demos. KMPX does not have a very strong signal at the time —the police band probably has more listeners —but this is the onset of our music being played in the middle of the night.
Suddenly antennae begin twitching in glass and steel skyscrapers in L.A. Corporate dogs are sent out to sniff around. Talent scouts in sharkslun suits, getting on planes and showing up at the ballrooms. All of the major record labels virtually overnight establish branch offices in San Francisco. And we begin to attract serious attention from the L.A.pack.Tom Donahue —later the counterculture deejay at KMPX—talks Warner Brothers into checking us out. Tom is a successful Bay area promoter who put on the last Beatle concert in San Francisco at Candlestick Park in ’64. He has his own label, Autumn Records, and manages a Beatle clone group, the Beau Brummels. Garcia has done session work for Autumn Records (including Bobby Freeman’s single “Do You Wanna Dance?”) so Tom already knows him. Tom is still very much part of the straight music scene, but this is all about to change . . . we’ve recently dosed him!
The band is eager to take the next step —an album! —and so we hustle up more demos. Coast Recording, on Bush Street, is a big, boomy place, a former church at which Bing Crosby once recorded. There we do a bunch of demos including “Early Morning Rain” (with Phil singing lead), “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” and a take of “Otis on a Shakedown Cruise.”
Our sessions at Coast come to an abrupt end when the studio manager walks in one day and sees an American flag draped over Pig’s organ. This is around the time when the Stars and Stripes ceases to be merely a flag and becomes both the sacred insignia of the right and the fashion statement of the left. He has an absolute fit, screaming, “Go back where you came from, you hippie scum!”
Tom Donahue is making trips down to Warner Brothers himself on behalf of Autumn Records, and mentions us to them. We are a little wary of getting involved with a major label, but over the next few months we warm up to the idea. Then Warner starts sending people to come and hear us.
Early summer of ’66 some executives from Burbank make several trips to San Francisco to see us play. They are as straight as TV. After-shave and ties and jackets. It’s like dealing with aliens. They all have the same uniform, the spooky Southern California leisure wear that is affected by most of the industry at the time: V-neck velour sweaters with high collars (and golf slacks, bright yellow and orange and black). Very slick, cheery, ultra-tanned faces, and all topped off with the de rigueur Jay Sebring haircut, a type of razor cut so immaculate it looks sprayed into place. These record execs look like golfers without the spikes on their shoes. The spikes are in their teeth! Out for us! Out for blood!
You can put your finger on them anywhere. Up in the balcony at the Avalon you certainly can’t miss them. They are basically indistinguishable from your average narc. They regard the scene unfolding below them with a mixture of horror and fascination. They’ve never seen anything like it. Tripping and crazy dancing, everybody high, openly smoking pot. They have armious, fearful faces. They’ve been briefed through little interoffice memos. BE AWARE AT ALL TIMES WHILE ATTENDING CONCERTS. UNSCRUPULOUS PERSONS MAY ATTEMPT TO SPIKE YOUR DRINKS WITH MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CONDITION, DRINK OUT OF AN OPENED CAN OF ANYTHING.
These guys are highly skeptical of the whole thing. Tom Donahue can talk their talk, but —once having introduced us —even he is having a hard time convincing these guys that what they’re witnessing isn’t just a temporary aberration. He’s telling them “Outside of the Airplane, they’re the biggest draw in the Haight. They’re the band of the hour.” At least they like that band-of-the-hour stuff (they can use it at board meetings).
Tom is foisting newspaper clippings on them, news service reports. There it is in black and white: polls, radio stats, box-office receipts, stuff they can understand. “Take my word for it, these guys are not going to go away,” he is saying. And by now the number-crunchers up at Warner Brothers already know the demographics: the exploding FM radio scene, the bell-bottom sales . . .and paisley’s up 300 percent since the last quarter.
They hear it, but they can’t quite grasp it. We don’t look or sound like anything they’ve ever seen (or want to see). They are confused. Rockabilly, novelty, folk-rock, bubblegum, Hispanic Beatle groups, no problem. The British invasion was no exception to this formula. After all, Brit managers like Andrew Oldham and kit Lambert are Denmark Street hustlers who had modeled themselves on the American formula.
But it seems that the Lord of Forms has decreed that a precedent must exist for everything that can possibly rear its pimply little head. For as long as anyone can remember —since Elvis at least —no act has shown up that doesn’t in one way or another fit into the scheme. The second law states that you can only be successful in the music business by dealing with the record company supergiants who, long ago, have worked all this out. Say you are Sonny and Cher and you have a hit. It is the record company that arranges everything: does the publicity, sets up the appearances at the radio stations, books what shows you’ll be on. You get a fifteen-minute set and then off—followed by other acts sponsored by the label, everybody using the same backup band. It is all geared to make money for the promoters and the record companies and very little for the musicians. We have no intention of fitting into any of these molds.
Midsummer, we leave Olompali and move to Camp Lagunitas near Fairfax in West Marin. There’ve been too many people coming out on the weekends to use our swimming pool! We need a place we can all hide out together.
Lagunitas is an old summer camp with a little red main house, cookhouse, bunkhouse, and showers. Perfect for us. There is a whole wall lined with bunk beds. At night we walk with the ghosts ofall those past campers. We are like giants in kiddieland. Pigpen lives in a one-room cabin that sits on stilts right behind the cookhouse, Rifkin lives underneath the cookhouse in a cave with parsley growing outside, and the rest of us live in the main house. We behave just like campers. We all eat together in the cookhouse and sleep in the bunkhouse. In the pool all day, a little bit of rehearsal at night. On nights we have gigs, we head for San Francisco and play the old Fillmore or the Avalon, trading off each weekend with Quicksilver or Big Brother. The competition is great for us. We go home thinking, God, we’ve never played so good.
Janis Joplin and Big Brother are living up the hill, and Janis comes down through the woods and sings with Pigpen on the upright in the cookhouse. They drink Southern Comfort and play “Walk Right In” through the night air.
Quicksilver lives nearby in Olema. We have this crazy rivalry going with Quicksilver. So one day we all get dressed up like Indians, Garcia too, and raid their house. Just a friendly game of cowboys and Indians. The first raid we make on their house we get a big surprise because their guitarist, John Cipollina, keeps a pet wolf. Wolves are very possessive about their turf and they will attack. They also like to wander off and kill sheep. In sheep herding country like this, that wolf caused a lot of trouble.
The raids go on back and forth all summer, and on one of our forays we get into Quicksilver’s kitchen and take their pot. This is war! To get even they decide to get us during our encore at the Fillmore. Their plan is to come onstage with all their antique guns, tie up everybody in the group, corral them in the middle of the stage, take their instruments and play the old Hank Williams song “Kaw-liga.”
There they are out in front of the Fillmore waiting for us to do our encore so they can put their plan into action when some old lady sees all these guns coming out of the trunk of David Freiberg’s car and guys carrying rifles running down the alley and up the back stairs of the Fillmore. She thinks they’re terrorists and calls the police. The police swoop down, there is a big melee in front of the Fillmore, and they all get arrested, which is not all that funny for David Freiberg, Quicksilver’s guitar player, who has a prior from the Lovin’ Spoonful pot bust a year earlier.
From the time we start talking to Warner Brothers until we finally sign takes about eight months. Joe Smith, the president of Warner Records, comes to see us himself — with bodyguards! Outside of the Jefferson Airplane we are the only Haight-Ashbury band being offered a contract by a major record company. But compared to the Dead, the Airplane are a commercial rock ’n’ roll band (a category we don’t exactly fit into). It’s terra incognita. We are blazing a trail for those still to come! Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen, Quicksilver,Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish.
It soon becomes apparent that no one has ever before questioned the system. Royalty rates since time immemorial have been carved in solid vinyl. The big boys are horrified by our demands.
”What? You wish to alter the sacred scrolls?”
Hell yeah, we wish to alter the world! They eventually give in, probably out of sheer fatigue. The key issue is artistic control. The labels don’t want to hear about it. We get Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley two San Francisco poster artists, to do the cover. The big boys never allow anyone to do that. Plus we own the publishing, which the boys have never before given up, plus the mechanicals of the album. Revolutionary stuff for Burbank.
Even our lawyer, Brian Rohan, is telling us there is no way you are going to get this. This is their bread and butter. They don’t give this stuff away, ever. We’ll see. . . .
What the San Francisco bands achieve, they do by hanging together. In the end we raise the royalty rates for musicians probably ten points in those years. It eventually goes from 5 percent to 15 percent, and some go to 18 and up. Publishing for groups used to be twelve cents a side, and basically you had to have six songs to get the twelve cents. The Dead, however, are doing seven-minute songs, eighteen-minute songs, one whole side of the album. Nurse!
The standard song length in those days was three minutes. Most groups made three-minute songs so that there would be twelve songs on an album and the band would get royalties for each of those cuts. But what if you have only two tracks on the whole album? Or, in the case of Quicksilver Messenger Service, one track on the whole album? Side One of their first album consisted of one long, extended jam on Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love.” In order to get the royalties due they had to make up arbitrary divisions: Who Do You Love, and then, of course, Who Did You Love,Why Do You Love,When Do You Love, How Do You Love, Should You Love? (They get publishing for the phony divisions, as does Bo Diddley.) The most valuable information on how to deal with this quandary comes from jazz musicians like Thelonius Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Mingus —because tracks on jazz records are traditionally much longer. So I go to see the jazz wizards and I ask them: “How do you do it? You guys are putting seven- to twelve-minute tracks on an album —how do you get paid behind that?” And they say, “Hey, brother, get hip to our trip.You rock ’n’ rollers get paid by the cut. We get paid by the minute.”
Okay, now that we have an album it is time to take our first official group photograph. The whole-group-leaping-in-the-air Beatlemania pose is out, and the chiaroscuro portraits of the Rolling Stones wouldn’t work for us either. Bob Seidemann, a photographer from New York who lives in the Haight, comes up with a great idea for a picture. He wants to go out to the suburbs and shoot it in one of the new developments.
We drive out to Daly City. All you see for miles and miles are streets winding up in endless crescent moon terraces past row on row of ticky-tacky houses. Fifties and sixties pastel-colored tract houses marching up the hill in neat little rows. The whole place looks deserted,like houses built to test the impact of a bomb.There is no traffic whatsoever. Everybody has a garage, so you don’t even see any cars on the street.
The band members in cowboy hats, headbands, Levi’s and Beatle boots are posed ominously in a semicircle in the middle of the street like five gunslingers at high noon. Stark, sinisterly Illuminated faces against dark clothing. In front of each of them is a hippie kneeling on the asphalt holding up a mirror to catch the sun rising in the east. The mirrors reflect a small eerie circle of light on the band’s faces. It’s straight out of a Roger Corman “aliens invade the suburbs” drive-in movie.
It is about ten o’clock in the morning when we get there. The husbands have gone to work, the housewives are watching soap operas and talking on the phone when . . .hey, what was that? Faces start appearing at windows. Crabbed, angry, confused faces in shower caps and rollers. Pointing.
“Officer, there is something very peculiar going on in the middle of our little street. Please get out here quick, and bring all the firepower you can get!”
At first, the police figure it’s just some housewife on the wrong medication, but after a dozen very agitated tract-dwellers have called in about hairy degenerates doing it in the road, the cops are finally forced to check it out. They get out of their squad cars hoisting up their pants with that serioso cop look, prepared for the worst. When they see what it is —a photo shoot —they start laughing. As we begin to pack up we hear one officers explain that it is nothing to get upset about. Just a publicity shoot for StarTvek, ma’am.
By fall of 1966 we’re back from Lagunitas and nearly the whole band has moved into 710. It is at this moment —take note, ye Dead-base scribes! —that the First Great Psychedelic Age begins. Not the Broadway Age ofAquarius with show tunes, but the Merry Prankster, rock ’n’ roll, Haight-Ashbury version. If there ever is a Haight-Ash-bury theme park —and I’m betting there wlll be —it’ll have 710 as its epicenter. Deadland! It will always be 1967, the streets filled with Hell’s Angels, hippie chicks, patchouli, communes, and antiwar demonstrations. Everywhere, like little Latin Santa Clauses, there’ll be Jerry Garcia impersonators in black T-shirts and motorcycle boots, smoking joints and dispensing Cheech and Chong-like koans. And outside the gates of Deadland, the evil empire of the UnDead: the uncool, unhip, unhigh ones of the straight world.
At 710 we have the whole house to ourselves, but everybody is still piled on top of everybody else. There isn’t a nook, cranny, or ratty armchair that someone hasn’t claimed for a bed. The front room downstairs is an office during the day and a bedroom at night. Weir sleeps there in the bay window, stretched out in an easy chair. Bob Matthews, who is also helping with our sound, is in the other one. These chairs don’t recline so you have to stretch out stiff as a dead gunslinger to get any sleep. Rifkin is still in 710A in the basement, someone is crashing in the bay window upstairs, Pigpen’s room is right behind the kitchen. Garcia’s is the room at the top of the stairs, mine is the closet next to it. Up in the attic is Neal Cassady. He has a hammock slung from the rafters and a couple of planks laid down so you can walk without falling between the floor joists. Plus there’s the various people just crashing here and there. There’d be Sue Swanson and Connie sleeping on the floor and Gary Jackson, one of the early high-tech guitar guys, under the kitchen table.
“Uh, they’re fumigating my house, man, okay if I just crash?” You wake up in the morning never knowing what is going to happen. Some freak shoving a bottle of water in your face more often than not dosed with LSD, and away you go, with no way to claim your day.
Even with the whole house finally to ourselves we can’t fit everybody into 710 Ashbury, so Lesh and Kreutzmann live in another house up the street. And we have no sooner settled in than we are on the verge of losing the place. Because in the early days, before they begin to hassle us about dope, it is the sanitary conditions they nail us for. The tidy police are on their way and the place is a disaster area. The kitchen is a shambles. The freezer’s been so permanently ice-bound that the latch that closes it no longer works. The old restaurant stove is so encased with grease and grime it looks like a rusty Balkan freighter in dry dock. The bathroom is a Sargasso Sea of moldy towels and dirty clothes, the bedroom’s strewn with empty Spaghetti-O cans, wine bottles, and stale donuts. Old carpets and crumbling plaster, glass everywhere from broken windows (when someone forgot their key), and the ceiling is caving in from the attic. Nothing in the place has been upgraded for a hundred years. It still has working gas jets. It is so far off code finding infractions will be easy. We are sitting ducks.
I am yelling at Garcia and Pigpen to get the place cleaned up before the Health Department gets here. I’m pleading with them, cajoling them, threatening them with total doom (like our parents would). “If we get busted we’re gonna lose the house, and if we lose the house we won’t have any place to live and then . . .” Out of the corner of my eye I see Jerry, leaning on the bannister, eyeing me intently. It isn’t that he has any intention of doing anything, he’s just spellbound by my jeremiad. He’s got an idea.
“Say, maaan,” says Jerry, “why don’t we just tell them the truth?”
“Which is?”
“We’re time-traveling gunslingers from the planet Zircon and our transporter beam ran out of, you know, aludium fozdex, so we’re stuck here. . . . ”
Meanwhile out on the porch my girlfriend Tangerine is trying to tell the Health Department guys that the reason the place is such a mess is because we’re, uh, renovating.
“And officer, have you ever had your kitchen redone? Well then, you know how it just takes forever to get the house back in order. . . .” She is practically in tears, caught without her house clean in front of such important people. Sheepishly they back down the stairs, mumbling apologies.
It’s hard on women at 710 Ashbury and one after another they leave. At first Tangerine, bless her heart, tries to make 710 into a real home, cooking meals, putting flowers on the table. A heroic endeavor, but hopeless. Trying to cook beef Stroganoff for twelve guys who would be just as happy with ice cream straight from the container. Or Parmesan cheese straight from the container, for that matter. Nobody’s helping her with the dishes or the laundry or doing any cleaning whatsoever. She gets everything straightened up, then sometime after noon Pigpen comes down and makes his breakfast and there goes the kitchen.
And all this is compounded by spontaneous DMT-inspired reconfigurations of the furniture. There’s something about coming down on DMT that makes you want to arrange the view for the next hit. Entire afternoons are spent taking every stick of furniture in the room and piling it up against one wall in an effort to find a satisfactory geometric pattern, then take another hit, fall back on a pile of pillows, and critique our design, making little adjustments along the way.
The setting can be critical with DMT. Eric Jacobson from Buddah Records flips out badly one day at the Charlatans’ house simply because of the way the place is decorated. Come to think of it, it does seem like a truly horrible place to freak out in. Fdled with fun-house gewgaws, grotesque Victoriana, Mickey Mouse alarm clocks, and other demented trivia. It’s heavily draped, like a big tent -that Victorian swamp look favored in the Haight. Jacobson thinks he’s dying. Thinks he’s died and gone to hell! First the stuffed owl is threatening him, then he is humiliated by a Shirley Temple figurine. We try to reassure him that although he is a scheming, no-good mother, we would never stoop to anything so diabolical as to enlist the furnishings.
Our threads mainly come from the Goodwill.But as we get a bit of a reputation, the boutique owners start laying stuff on us. Like Peggy Casserta, who also wrote the irreproachably trashy memoir Going Down with Janis. Which begins with the immortal words: “I was stark naked, stoned out of my mind on heroin and the girl lying between my legs giving me head was Janis Joplin.” Peggy’s store, Mnsidika, is our principal source of sharp clothing, and we in turn are her walking display. The more expensive stuff like leather jackets are on loan. For a week at a time they grace the backs of the Grateful Dead and then they go back in the window. The Dead have never been considered clothes horses even by their most ardent fans, but Weir is definitely into this trip and Lesh too, for that matter.
Bobby Bols has the shoe store next to Mnsidika and he lets us have shoes at cost plus 10 percent. Beatle boots with Italian heels and a little zipper on the side are the things to have. They have soles like glass, so slippery you could slide and slip from our front steps to the corner of Waller —it is all downhill —and then with a skip launch yourself over to the next block and all the way to Haight Street. Six or eight slups past Page and you’re in the Panhandle.
It’s a struggle making the rent and paying the bills, but we’re surviving (and nobody has a day job). We do the occasional oddball function like the North Face Ski Shop with Hell’s Angels as the doormen, but most of our gigs are stills at the Fillmore or the Avalon.
The room where Weir and Matthews sleep is also our office. They wake up to me on the phone booking gigs. Anyone who happens to be around joins in the decisions but, let’s face it, they aren’t all that difficult to make. We take almost any gig we’re offered. With the money we’re getting —three hundred to four hundred a night if we’re lucky —we can’t go much out of the Bay area. Out-of-town gigs are few and far between. Rifkin and I have worked out a good cop/bad cop routine for dealing with promoters. I soften them up and then Danny nails them.
A key gig is the long-planned Acid Test Graduation Ceremony. Kesey has been in Mexico much of the year, a fugitive from the FBI and the San Francisco police after faking his suicide. He obviously isn’t going to be able to attend any kind of Acid Test in the flesh. The moment he walks onstage there are going to be a dozen guys in shiny black shoes and white socks just waiting to nab him. Std, it is a tempting scenario for a Prankster: to tweak their noses in plain view of a thousand freaks high on acid. How to pull it off? Kesey gets this wild idea. He will be there and he will not be there. A sort of lysergic transubstantiation. The perfect McLuhanesque fake-out. And where better to pull off his Houdini hoax than at San Francisco State College —Acid U. itself! Plans are laid. Word goes out, handbills get passed, posters go up. It’s going to be the social event of the season!
Now he makes plans to get back into the States. A typical over-the-top Ken Kesey movie. Drunk cowboy singer (Jim Englund Jr., out of Las Vegas) has been boozing it up in Mexico all night, gets rolled outside the cantina (hence no I.D.) and comes across the border early in the morning. Kesey rents a horse, douses himself with gin, ingesting quite a bit of it along the way, and comes weaving across the Browns-ville bridge, playing his souvenir guitar and singing old Gene Autry songs. Dressed up as foolish as a dude rancher —cowboy hat, buck skin jacket, shiny red dude boots —and stinking of booze. The customs guys don’t even ask him to get off his horse, they just wave him on through. He is obviously American, and you don’t need a driver’s license to ride horseback. He just rolls off on the other side,gives a kid a few bucks to take the horse back, gets on a Greyhound to Salt Lake City, and then flies into San Francisco airport right under the noses of the carabinieri.
Meanwhile, we begin setting up the Trips Festival in the Commons at San Francisco State. A big cavernous cafeteria. We take all the tables and pile them up,fold the chairs and stack them in a corner,put up big screens, hang banners, and build a mini-tower in the middle of the floor. An industrial-strength Acid Test.
Everyone jamming, hammering, cabling, constant soldering going on. We get a bunch of big square boxes and pile them up and put TVs on top of them. Live cameras placed around the room. There’s one on the band and one showing people dancing and another one right at the door so you can see who’s coming in. Strobes, liquid lights, plus there are the slides playing all over the walls. The Dead set up in the corner right on the inside of the big glass doors as you walk in. No stage, we just set up on the floor.
Even the narcs have dressed up for the occasion in their Ironsides-goes-to-the-hippie-club outfits. But where’s the Cat in the Hat? The instructions are: Bring a portable radio with you. You can’t get in without one. The emcee then tells everybody to tune into KSFS, the San Francisco State station, and when you tune in —there’s Kesey! He’s broadcasting from some unknown location —only a couple of buildings away —but it’s as if he’s in the room. The Shadow knows! He is calling the shots like your favorite zonked-out sports broadcaster, walking around the Olympics and doing a running commentary on all the events. “If you’ll just proceed to stage right you’ll find Mr. Neal Cassady juggling his world-renowned hammer. . . . If you are wondering what all that equipment is in the center of the floor, so am I. The TVs were donated by Owsley Stanley.”
Everything is going along magically. We finish our first set and are all hanging out backstage when I see Pigpen acting very strangely indeed. He moves jerkily across the room, dragging his feet along like a seaweed-encrusted crab, his face a mask of pure terror.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, mon Pig?”
“Rock, I can’t walk.”
“Pig, my good man, you are walking.” Albeit at sporadic intervals. “Get a grip, sir!”
“Fuck me, man, I no longer have legs, you know, in the usual sense of the word.”
“Listen, Pig, I had a dog once had the same thing and y’know what it turned out to be? Eating too many nachos.” I’m saying anything, whatever comes into my mind, trying to figure out what’s going on, when I notice his face is all flushed and rosy and his eyes are huge. Big brown eyes —all pupil —that have expanded all the way out to the edges.
“I think the man’s been dosed,” Laird whispers to me. No kidding. That open can ofbeer that’s always standing on top of Pig’s Vox organ must have been too much of a temptation for someone. Just strolled by and added a wee bit of liquid acid to the beer, that’s all. No harm meant! Pig makes it through the first set okay, but during the break he begins to fall apart. Pig’s never taken acid before! Terrified ofthe stuff, actually. Won’t even smoke grass, so he is absolutely freaked. Now he is convinced that something is desperately wrong with him; he thinks he needs medical attention. Amputation maybe.
He’s telling me his legs are loose, about to fall off, but meanwhile he’s standing there in front of me steady as can be.
He puts his arm on my shoulder and we walk out to the parking lot. I help him into Laird’s truck and we drive back to 710 Ashbury. I keep talking to him.
But once in front of 710 he’s perplexed as ever.
“Where are we?” he asks, pale as a ghost, “and who are you?”
“Pigpen, my friend, this is 710 Ashbury, famed in song and story and ancient lore. Don’t you recognize the ancestral castle?”
He doesn’t, and what’s more he’s very hesitant about those steps. Even to me they are beginning to look a little . . . sacrificial. Like the steps up to the Temple of the Jaguar.
“Where is everybody? And what the hell’s that thing slithering down the wall?”
“Everybody is out at San Francisco State. Remember? The gig?” And what was that thing, anyway?
In the kitchen he snaps to, realizes he’s home. Momentarily. I start turning on lights, which comes as a major revelation to him.
“Damn that’s wicked stuff! How’d you do that?”
This must be what electricity would look like to someone from the Stone Age. Industrial magic! I turn on the radio hanging in the Kitchen, and there’s Kesey’s voice coming over the speaker. From the look on Pig’s face I realize a disembodied Kesey coming through the airwaves isn’t helping. I put on an Otis Redding album and help Pigpen into the bedroom and get him to lie down, put his legs up. He’s still pampering those pesky legs of his that won’t work.
I leave Otis on and go and find his girlfriend’s phone number. Veronica is a big black nurse you’d think could handle anything, but when I tell her that Pigpen has been dosed she becomes very alarmed. Pigpen is a very predictable guy when straight, but Pig on acid is a daunting image. What could he not turn into?
I put Pig on the phone but he’s making no sense whatsoever.
“That boy talkin’ nothin’but trash, Rock. What the hell you fellahs up to over there anyhow?”
I am high myself and I have to do some fast talking to get her to come over. She’s still dubious.
“He’s not gonna die on me or something?”
“Veronica, please! He walked out of San Francisco State, he walked up the stairs at 710. I do not see any need for medical attention” (not the kind of attention the band is looking forjust now).
As soon as Veronica shows up he calms down. By the time I leave they’re fucking, so I know he’s going to be all right.
I have to get back to San Francisco State. I have Laird’s equipment truck, which the band needs to bring the equipment home in. I get out there in time for the last song, “Alice D. Mdlionaire,” based on that wonderful headline in the San Francisco Chronicle when Owsley got busted the first time. The headline read: “LSD Millionaire Arrested.”
Owsley is in his element, dancing to a song about him by hisband, and everyone tripping on his acid. There’s Mountain Girl right up front, boogying her ass off. She’s an R . Crumb hippie-chick vision, swinging her bright orange bleached hair, her baby girl, Sunshine, her kid with Kesey, bouncing in the basket on her back and just beaming at Jerry. She’d been with Kesey but she saw Jerry play and she just fell hard!
For a while there is a concerted effort to share the housekeeping chores at 710. Tangerine has a plan. On Saturday mornings I’ll wake everyone up early and try to get them to clean the house. It’s a good idea, but it’ll never work. Everybody has a story.
“Any other day, man. I’d love to help out but . . .”
“C’mon, Rock, it’s Saturday!”
But it’s more than endemic shirking. 710 Ashbury has become the Haight’s unofficial community center and Saturday is a heavy visiting day. By ten o’clock there are a dozen freaks hanging out on the steps. Just the nature of the neighborhood (which is fiercely social) works against any sort of order ever being maintained. Nonstop visiting goes on from eight in the morning until four the next morning. By the time twenty or thirty hippies have trudged through the front door loohng to meet the Dead, the place is demolished. There is no normal home life whatsoever. Tangerine finally issues an ultimatum. “It’s either me or them, Rock.”
Kesey is getting back together with his wife, Faye. Mountain Girl picks up with Jerry and moves in. The day she shows up is the very day Tangerine is moving out. As soon as Mountain Girl walks in the front door, Tange says, “Oh, another woman. I’m so glad to see another lady around here. I’m going. Good luck!” Mountain Girl is thinking, ”Oh, she’s so nice. I wonder why she’s leaving?” She puts out her hand to shake hands and Tangerine gives her a vacuum cleaner. ”Here’s the vacuum. Here’s the dustpan. I’ve got to get going.”
With Mountain Girl, a new order begins at 710. She’s the only girl who could ever hang in here. She’s strong willed and smart and very funny. You have to be on your toes around her. She has survived La Honda, the Prankster bus trip across the country, and having been Kesey’s old lady. With her arrival, things at 710 straighten up immediately.
She’s strong, like a crew boss, and what she says happens. She has a biting, scary wit that can just shrivel you up if you get on her wrong side. If Mountain Girl is angry with you, there is nothing worse —she just won’t let up. She is energetic and hefty enough to embarrass us into vacuuming. She was a Prankster and used to everybody taking responsibility. If you see a mess, clean it up, doesn’t matter if it’s yours or not. The house runs on her rules, and she is big enough to back it up. A very scary lady!
With Mountain Girl, you don’t repeat your mistakes. When she’s pissed off you can hear her mule skinner’s voice down the block. And when you hear it,you thank your lucky stars you are not the object of its wrath.
“What the fuck is this?” Oh God, it’s that voice. Mama Bear is home and finds Goldilocks sleeping in her bed. No amount of fine foot-work will get Jerry out of this one, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try.
“This is, uh. . . . Hey, do you two guys know each other?"
“Cut the crap, Jerry. What the fuck is this chick doing in my bed?”
Jerry is stalling, trying to sound reasonable. “Mountain Girl, please, just let me explain. What’re you going to believe, what you see or, uh, what I’m going to tell you? I mean. . . .You know, it all started . . .” But this is something not even the resourceful Garcia can talk his way out of. Bumbling sweet reasonableness will not save his ass this time. This is the unreasonable situation, par excellence.
“What is there to explain, motherfucker? You’re a dead man.”