The Scene
Most big cities are gray—out of necessity. Who can imagine an all-red city? The gray stuff is cheap and unjarring; cement is light gray, asphalt is dark gray, buildings are constructed in shades of gray in between, and most of the inhabitants are wearing muted colors so as not to offend at the workplace—browns, navy blues, dark greens, grays and beiges. City people don't talk to each other because everybody is a stranger; their faces look preoccupied with some kind of struggle, and their speedy pace suggests, usually rightly, that they're five minutes late to wherever they're going.
Big cities look like that now. They looked like that in the sixties, too.
In 1965, though, on the corner of one of those gray streets, Geary and Fillmore in San Francisco, the color scheme seemed to be changing. …
Imagine it's Saturday night, and there's a line of what looks like a bunch of young multicolored circus freaks waiting to go into one of those gray buildings, the Fillmore Auditorium. It's hard to tell the girls from the boys. No one is wearing a suit, the crowd is animated, and everybody is talking to each other, even though they may have just met for the first time. The only visible sign of color on the outside of the building, besides the clothing, is a poster drawn in Day-Glo swirls. It reads, Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Moby Grape, and The Great Society.
Jerry, Darby, the rest of the guys from The Great Society, and I play the Fillmore quite a lot, opening for some of the more popular groups like Jefferson Airplane. Before a performance, we stuff our gear into a station wagon, haul it up to the backstage area, and some of the kids come around from the line in front of the building to chat with us as we go in through the side entrance. There are no metal detectors, no security guards, no backstage passes, no VIPs at all. Everybody is “us.”
When the door to the building opens, the last of the gray vanishes. At the top of the steps that lead to Fillmore's main hall is a wall of bright, intensely colored posters. They're so numerous, the wall itself is invisible. Art Nouveau has influenced these elaborate, colorful portraits of ladies with winding garlands of flowers in their hands, pointing to the elongated letters that spell out the names of the bands. The now familiar rose-crowned Grateful Dead skull can be seen on one poster, on another is the sepia-toned, oval-framed, Old West photo of The Charlatans. And in front of the wall stands a young man with long hair, blowing bubbles toward no one in particular.
As you walk onto the dance floor, you have the feeling you've just entered seven different centuries all thrown together in one room. The interior of the building is turn-of-the-century rococo, and a man in red briefs and silver body paint is handing out East Indian incense. A girl in full Renaissance drag is spinning around by herself listening to some Baroque music in her head, while several people in jeans and American Indian headbands are sitting in a circle on the floor smoking weed. Close by, a good-looking man in a three-musketeer costume is placing ashtrays on the cheap fifties Formica tables that circle the edge of the room. Over in the corner, people are stripping off their clothes, and while the acid is taking effect, they're getting body-painted so they'll glow in the dark as the night progresses. As for the ones who remain fully dressed, the predominant look for the boys is Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western or just T-shirts and jeans—but the flashing black lights make all the clothes, even the more normal outfits, look irradiated.
Rather than work for a big concessions company, the hawkers are self-employed, peddling their own handmade beads, vests, hats, drawings, and a variety of leather items. They don't yell at anyone; easy bartering is expected. There's no curtain on the stage, so people are moving equipment and wires around in full view of the audience. Sometimes they just stop what they're doing and jump off the riser to hang out for a minute with someone on the dance floor. Sometimes there are chairs, and sometimes there aren't, so people sit, dance, or lie down on the floor. Electronics and Indians, disco balls and medieval flutes. Day-Glo space colors and Botticelli sprites. The howl of an amplifier and the tinkling of ankle bracelets.
This is not Kansas, Dorothy.
But this is Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Oz, Long John Silver, Stranger in a Strange Land, Naked Lunch, and Be Here Now. This is the American dream (for a few hours), with no color barriers, no ethnic rivalry, no dress code, no moral imperatives, no political hustling, and only one keeper—the show's intense but smiling dark-haired promoter, Bill Graham.
For everyone to be able to step out of the gray and into the circus, there has to be a human switchboard. That's Bill, the one who calls the shots so the carnival can explode into life. He's running around talking to fifteen people at once, pointing and yelling, laughing and frowning, one hand on his hip, the other on his forehead, eyebrows furled, when he suddenly spins around and yells up to the balcony, “Tell Garcia he can't do another goddamned three-hour set next week or the cops are going to shut some barred doors on my ass!”
Bill's shouting at Jerry Garcia, or his angry hurling of chairs, or his being upset with Paul Kantner for being the unruly lion in the center ring is all taken in stride. Someone has to make sure the Fillmore stays friendly with city regulations or they'll close it down. Someone has to make phone calls and weasel the suits into thinking it's a “clean” venue for young people. Someone has to organize the flying objects into a business that eliminates the GRAY—that's Bill.
We do the experimenting, and he gives everyone the space to enjoy it.
By the time the Fillmore was in full swing, most of the musicians had moved out of San Francisco to live in Marin County. In juxtaposition to the crowded gray city, just twenty minutes north across the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin was a flourishing community full of fish restaurants, town halls, yacht clubs, cowboys, big sprawling farms, rich-guy enclaves, and small bookstores/bars for the resident artists. The Grateful Dead had a ranch in Marin where the various members of the music scene liked to gather, and I remember seeing Pigpen leaning on the ranch gate when we drove up the dusty road and parked up near the barn for one of their famous parties.
Pigpen, aka Ron McKernan, The Dead's first keyboard player, had a brief affair with Janis Joplin and was, in fact, the one who introduced her to Southern Comfort. Not as easy to get to know as other members of the band, he'd nod without saying anything, but he wasn't stupid or shy. Pigpen was just a quiet man who felt and looked more comfortable in this country setting than he ever did in the city.
Paul Kantner, me, Jerry Garcia, and Bill Graham organizing the flying objects. (John Olson, Life magazine © Time Inc.)
The Dead ranch had a big swimming pool, and on this particular day, Jerry Garcia was unintentionally holding court near the trunk of one of the old trees down by the diving board. Wherever he was, a small group of people would gather to talk about anything and everything. Even in his twenties, he projected the wise old rascal image of an Eastern guru. As we moved closer, a sixteen-year-old girl ran by, laughing and waving hello.
No clothes, no makeup, no problem.
That was Girl, so nicknamed by her family because she was the only girl in a family of eight kids. Children and adults leaped in and out of the pool while watermelon, chips, and dips were spread out on the long worn-out picnic tables and thin streams of smoke rose up from the barbecue pits. Dogs, horses, guitar music, wheat-gold hills, and blue sky—the Novato farmland. It looked like the northern branch of the Hotel California, the mythical subject of the not-yet-written hit song by the Eagles.
I was curious about a cluster of people over by the barn. They were standing in a loose circle watching some guy bend and turn, snarl and laugh, his whole body in constant motion. As I got closer, I could hear what he was saying—but could I understand it? Phil Lesh, the bass player for The Dead, was standing in the circle with his arms crossed and a grin on his face, just watching this ball of energy go through his routine. I looked at Phil and there must have been a question mark stamped on my forehead, because he leaned over and said, “That's Neal Cassady, and if you stand here long enough, you'll catch up with all seven of the conversations he's having with himself.”
Neal, the lead character in poet Jack Kerouac's On the Road, was one of the Merry Pranksters, a group of people based in Santa Cruz who'd traveled the country in search of everything in a graffiti-covered bus called Furthur. He and Ken Kesey (author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, inspired by his twenty-dollar-a-day job as LSD guinea pig for the CIA), Jerry Garcia and his wife, Mountain Girl, and several other happy, eccentric freaks put on some of the best musical gatherings.
Everyone comes, anything goes, and the music drives the action.
When the bus, Furthur, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, a bystander was reported to have said, “Larry, Kesey and Garcia aren't heroes, they're criminals. And that's not a bus, it's a hearse!” Echoing what is probably “popular” opinion, there'll always be people who are afraid of living and afraid of dying. And there are always more of them than there are risk-takers, the people who bring innovation into every area, with or without drugs. Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist, once said, “Living in San Francisco in the sixties was like being in Paris in the twenties.” Kesey added, “The sixties aren't over until the fat lady gets high.”
The musical events inspired by the Pranksters were called Trips Festivals, and they couldn't be managed by “regular” promoters; they were too purposefully fragmented and spontaneously erratic to fall into a classic “party” or “concert” category. We knew when and where they were going to happen, but after that, it was shifting chaos and Wavy Gravy party games. Wavy Gravy, aka the clown saint, who was also one of the Merry Pranksters, literally dressed in a clown outfit, complete with the big red nose, the wig, the painted lips, and the huge ears. Wavy was integral to all our concerts and events, the only clown I ever saw who was conscious, at each moment, of everything that was going on. He had a unique ability to show people the humor in all things and, most of all, in themselves. A gentle, funny, and helpful man, he was always around in a tent or a trailer, providing people with a place to come and relieve themselves of their seriousness. Wavy Gravy reminded you that you didn't have to be an adult; five minutes with Wavy and he could loosen up the strings and have you laughing at life in the most beautiful and disarming way.
Most of the early gatherings (often called happenings) were spontaneous and chaotic. There was an anything-goes kind of atmosphere—that is, until various business-oriented types saw there was money to be made by opening more halls and exposing the paying public to more controlled versions of the first rock parties. That was when the Avalon, the Carousel Ballroom, and even some of the “straight” concert halls started bringing in four- or five-group lineups featuring the Bay Area's young electric bands. As a member of The Great Society and later Jefferson Airplane I played them all, but Society, Airplane, and others like The Dead were still just local bands until the record companies read about “the new Flower Power explosion” in San Francisco. Free publicity, although somewhat too cutesy, was popping up in the national magazines like Time and Life. We'd dose the young reporters with acid until they thought a whole new world was emerging on the West Coast.
Maybe it was.