Remember when the Grateful Dead ran a music venue? Because I sure don’t. I mean, I remember the basics—kind of—but it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t remember the details because I was a musician, not a nightclub owner. To this day, I just want to play music, not operate a venue. But it is true that the Dead partnered with Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service to take control of a space in San Francisco called the Carousel Ballroom. Yeah, well—that lasted just a number of months. But it’s surprising that it ever happened at all.
The Carousel Ballroom was at the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, on a corner that wasn’t really in any particular neighborhood so much as being the axis between a number of them—the Mission, the Lower Haight, Hayes Valley, Civic Center, SoMa, and downtown were all right there, depending on which way your compass pointed. For many years now, the building has been a Honda dealership. The only music that remains is the radio station that gets played in the background. If that. Twitter’s headquarters is now just down the street and there’s been a basic redecorating of that entire stretch.
During the Carousel Ballroom days, there’s no doubt that the whole area was a bit on the shady side. Also, it wasn’t all that far from the Fillmore or the Avalon and it was in direct competition with both of those rooms. Regardless, I loved the location because it was close enough to the Belvedere house that getting home after a show was never a problem. You could take all the drugs you wanted and still end up in your own bed. Or someone else’s.
A hustler named Ron Rakow, who conned his way into our little circle and who would continue to lead us astray throughout many ventures, somehow convinced all three bands to form a theoretical partnership called Triad, under his stewardship. This was Rakow’s first real leadership role with us. That’s probably why I don’t remember most of it. I mostly remember the music. There was a lot of great music at the Carousel. All three owner-bands obviously played there a lot, along with the usual Bay Area suspects: Santana, Steve Miller, the Charlatans, that whole scene. Our whole scene.
I didn’t really take an active role in the whole Triad enterprise. I just sort of went along with it and was usually told details after the fact. I was hands-off and didn’t sweat the small stuff. At all. But I do remember playing a few really fun gigs at the Carousel, and I also remember seeing some other bands there that really got me off. The business side of it wasn’t that memorable—but watching Janis Joplin take that stage is something I’ll never forget. This one night, I took some PCP and leaned against the back wall, just listening to her—this was with Big Brother—and it was nothing less than incredible. Maybe, on paper, I was some kind of part owner of the Carousel, but during that show, there was no mistaking that Janis Joplin was boss. She owned every one of us in the room that night.
In the very beginning … of our little band, I mean … I suppose you could say that I took on the role of manager for a brief spell, but I don’t even know if we used that word. If so, it was just a name. I didn’t keep a book. I never wrote a thing down. I didn’t really do any business for the band. I just made sure we got paid and then counted and handed out money at the end of the night, when nobody else would do it—or, at least, nobody else that I trusted. Not that I always trusted the people we later hired to do that for us. Turns out, I had good reason to be cautiously suspicious of our managers: we ended up getting burned in a massive way, and we’ll get to that, soon enough.
I never wanted to deal with the business side of things, but I had to deal with the people who did. This one time, in Paris, I fired our tour manager on the spot. I trusted him as a person, but I didn’t trust him to get all of our money from some of the thieves who call themselves promoters. He was a nice guy, bless him, but you don’t always want your manager to be the nice guy. You hire them so that you can be the nice guy instead.
The manager I fired was named Jon McIntire, a real sweet man who we lost not that long ago, darn it. Before he started working for the band, he was a part of the Carousel staff. As with most people who worked there, he got the job because he was one of our friends, and he learned the job on the fly.
As our tour manager, McIntire was supposed to settle with the promoter at the end of the night and get whatever money was called for in the particular contract. After a gig in Paris one year, McIntire wasn’t able to do that. Promoters aren’t always the most honorable guys, especially back then when rock concerts were still like the Wild West and crazy shit could go down at any given moment. Tour managers need to be able to get the band paid, even in situations like when the fucking gig is completely packed, and there are thousands of people there, and the promoter says, “I don’t have any money for you guys.” That was the situation in Paris, and the promoter in question was wearing a sport coat with pockets that were just bulging with money, even as he was telling McIntire that he couldn’t honor the contract, that he had no cash to pay the band.
The way it went that particular time, I had to grab one of our equipment guys—a really big, strong dude—and he and I took the promoter in the back room and locked the door. The equipment guy, Sonny Heard, brandished his brand-new switchblade and then literally grabbed the promoter by the ankles, turned him upside down, and shook all this money out of his pockets. He was completely full of francs. Full of francs and bullshit. He’d made a ton of money off us. We knew how much we had agreed upon, and so we looked in his briefcase—he didn’t dare move—and it was filled with money. So we got paid. That’s why I fired McIntire. Because it was his job to do that and he just didn’t have it in him. I loved him, and everybody else did too, so they all gave me a ration of shit for firing him. I don’t even know if anyone took it seriously because other people remember that McIntire quit after a different night, right around then. I may have been out of line by trying to fire him on the spot, but all I wanted to do was to get the money to the band. We were basically living hand to mouth. You play a gig, you get paid for the gig, you pay your bills. That’s how it worked.
Somebody once told me that Jerry Garcia always felt a special bond with me because of those early days when I looked after the money and made sure everyone got their due. Jerry knew that it was a very important task, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It just wasn’t who he was. It wasn’t who I was either, but it needed to be done, so I just did it. Well, for a minute or two, anyway, very early on, and that was enough for me. After we hired Rock Scully and Danny Rifkin, I never had to deal with that side of things ever again.
But, perhaps because of something to do with those early dealings, Jerry and I had some unspoken trust where if he went a certain way with a decision, I usually did too. He had some great fucking ideas. The generation we came from wasn’t one that communicated very easily on any deep level—at least not verbally. It probably would’ve helped the band if we did, but that’s hindsight.
Instead, Jerry and I learned how to read each other’s faces. When it came to business proposals—and the people putting them forth—we knew what the other one was thinking. In fact, one time, Jerry even joked with me, “Bill, I wish you weren’t so intuitive.”
There was something that Jerry saw in Rakow that he really liked, like maybe his outlaw spirit, but I don’t know why we hired him to handle anything that had to do with our money. I don’t think we ever formally did, actually—I think we just went along with him. He was always scheming, always trying to sell us a used car, metaphorically speaking. Funny enough, he once struck a deal for us that actually involved each of us getting a real car. Fords. Ford Cortinas, to be exact. Not surprisingly, most of those vehicles ended up getting repossessed and the whole thing ended in disaster. Just like most of his deals.
In 1973, Rakow was the man responsible for the Grateful Dead launching its own record label—two of them, in fact. Grateful Dead Records for albums by the band, and Round Records for solo releases and side projects. Just like the Carousel, Rakow had somehow convinced us all to jump on a sinking ship and try to set sail. Turns out, it was a ship of fools. Also, just like the Carousel, running our own record label is a venture that I remember less about than you might think. Again, I was hands-off with that stuff. But I know it almost did us in. To this day, similarly minded bands have looked to it as a lesson in what not to do. Eventually, we got rid of the label and walked away from Rakow. He was a charming snake oil salesman, but you never hand the keys to your business over to a hustler. I think he believed in all of his get-rich-quick schemes, he just didn’t have the know-how to see them through.
Because we were part owners (at least in theory), the Carousel was kind of like our clubhouse during the Spring of 1968. All fun and games. Rakow oversaw a remodelling of the interior, complete with velvet couches that lined the perimeter of the dance floor. It made seeing live music there a whole lot of fun. We had a grand reopening on March 15, on a bill we shared with Jefferson Airplane. By summertime, it became obvious that our little adventure just wasn’t sustainable. Apparently, the terms of the lease alone made it financially impossible to keep the place afloat. It would’ve been tragic to see such a great venue shuttered, but only a masterful businessman would’ve been able to turn it around. Enter Bill Graham, who took over the lease that July and transformed it into the Fillmore West. Out of respect for rock history, he kept the Carousel marquee out front, right where there’s a giant “H” for “Honda” these days. Then he made his own rock history with the place.
The day before Graham officially opened the Fillmore West, he closed the original Fillmore. (The original Fillmore—on the corner of Fillmore and Geary—has since be reopened.) The Fillmore West lasted from July 1968 to July 1971 and it carried on the spirit of the Carousel while turning it into a respectable business. A big difference between Graham and when we ran that room with Rakow was that Graham had the wherewithal and the know-how to get the best acts and promote the shows properly. He also knew across all lines—he knew different musicians from all different worlds and had a knack for bringing them all together. We already talked about this because of the night when I first met Mickey Hart at the Count Basie show.
Graham continued this tradition at the Fillmore West. For the Grateful Dead, that meant—among other things—that we got to play on a bill with Miles Davis. A four-night stand beginning on April 9, 1970. And Graham scheduled Miles as the opener. Naturally, we thought that was totally ludicrous and ass-backwards. “What’s he opening for us for?” This was during his Bitches Brew era, when he had that bitchin’ band that included Chick Corea on keys, Dave Holland on bass, Airto Moreira on percussion and Jack DeJohnette on drums. They blew the house away. It was intimidating because after he finished, as we were picking our jaws off the floor, Graham was like, “Your turn, guys. Get up there! Time’s a-wasting!” We did what we could, and we didn’t play half bad, but we felt sufficiently humbled. (For his part, Miles must’ve been satisfied with these shows because, two years later, he released his set from the second night as a live album called Black Beauty.)
In addition to having a venue that we could essentially run wild in, we also had a new practice space, which we took to with all the fervor and hunger typical of any up-and-coming band our age. At least, any serious one. The new space was called the New Potrero Theater. As the name implies, the theater was in Potrero Hill, an old working-class neighborhood that has since become way more gentrified, probably because it sits on a hill that breaks away from the city’s notorious fog, so you have a lot of sunny days there, year-round. The district has always been family-oriented, with picture-perfect views of the bay and the downtown skyline. At the bottom of the hill, there are a lot of cheap warehouses and industrial spaces that artist types started snatching up, beginning in the 1960s and continuing to this day. Also: O. J. Simpson used to live in the neighborhood, but we never ran into him. At least, as far as I know.
In the Spring of ’68, we rented the theater and went and practiced there every day. Diligently. It was once a classic movie theater, but they ripped out all the seats. It went down a slope to where the screen used to be, and it was kind of run-down, but it was perfect for us. Down on the corner was a hamburger stand, so we became real friendly with those people and ate there quite often.
Mickey was still being worked in and we were coming up with stuff that no other rock band was doing at the time. Really far-out things. We learned a lot of music—and a lot about music—there. That’s when and where I first started believing in our abilities to truly explore different time signatures and play music that was free and far from ordinary. Rhythmically, we started playing around with sevens—we’d never done that before. We got away from being a blues band and started being more of an outsider jam band. That’s really what we did best.
The New Potrero Theater is also where we worked up “The Eleven,” which is significant because that tune, in particular, represents this new kind of thinking beyond boundaries that I’m talking about. Phil wrote the music for “The Eleven,” and Robert Hunter came up with the words. Traditionally, rock music is written in 4/4 time. Four beats per measure, right? You probably know this. It’s the standard. Sometimes you’ll find a 2/4, especially in country music. But for “The Eleven,” we took 12/8 and subtracted an eighth note to make it 11/8—hence the name of the song.
Right after we came out with that, the Allman Brothers did the same thing on the intro to a tune that would become one of their biggest songs—“Whipping Post.” The key is different, the changes are different, and when the vocals kick in, they slide it into a 12/8 blues. But the intro cheats that one beat, too. It’s 11/8. I wonder where that came from? Of course, I can’t say for sure. That’s for their story. Not mine.
In addition to all the shows at the Carousel, the tour with Quicksilver, and the free show on Haight Street that we talked about in chapter 4, another concert from that spring that probably deserves mention is one that took place at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento on March 11, 1968. We had a pretty good band on the bill with us that night. A power trio from England called Cream—Eric Clapton. Jack Bruce. Ginger Baker.
Watching Ginger Baker was always a trip for me, just because of the kind of drummer that he is. And I’ve always loved Eric Clapton’s guitar playing. It was really soulful. The three of those guys were just incredible together and they played some great music.
We were on the same bus back to San Francisco and we stopped at a restaurant, somewhere on the road there, and Clapton sat down at my table. He was a good cat and everything, but I was pretty well awestruck by the guy because I just loved his playing so much. I can’t recall what we talked about, really—it was a casual dinner conversation that took place more than four decades ago—but I can tell you that he was a sharp dresser. Those red shoes really worked for him.
There was also an incident in New York City that I don’t remember all that much about, but, instead, I have these images in my mind that are like postcards from my past. It was a free show that we staged at Columbia University on May 3, 1968. There had been a student strike, politically motivated of course, and the campus was effectively shut down. Police guarded the perimeter, which, naturally, stirred the prankster pot in all of us.
We weren’t political hippies. We were the much more dangerous kind—fun-loving, peace-seeking, do-as-you-wish hippies that just wanted everybody to get on with their getting on, whatever that may be. For us, that meant loading into the back of a bread truck, sneaking onto campus, and staging a bit of a caper—just for kicks. Nothing to it. We set up on the stone steps in front of some university building, as fast as we could so we wouldn’t be shut down, and then we played some music and that was that. It was completely unannounced, guerrilla-style. Nobody was hurt and nobody was arrested, as far as we knew. I do think that we confused some of the students, and I’m not sure how many new fans we picked up that day, exactly—we probably fared better a couple days later when we threw a freebie in Central Park—but at least we all had fun. And we got to pull a fast one on the authorities, which we were always fond of doing.
As for that gig in Central Park, I just remember that Mickey’s lady at the time had a bottle of Methedrine on her. Liquid speed. She administered a shot of it to both Mickey and me—right in the butt—so that we’d get through the gig, because we had been up really late the night before. It worked. We were in the heart of New York, the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, so all of that seemed completely appropriate.
We returned to New York just a month later, on June 14, 1968, for our first run of shows at the newly renamed Fillmore East. On opening night, we were paired with the Jeff Beck Group, a young band from England. It was their American debut and the audience seemed to really love their lead singer. A guy by the name of Rod Stewart.
We played the Fillmore West a bunch that summer, too—both before and after it changed over from the Carousel. We had a few pickup gigs in places like Lake Tahoe and San Diego, as well as a festival in San Jose where we appeared alongside the Doors, the Animals, Ravi Shankar, Taj Mahal, the Youngbloods, and some others. We also played some festival of some sort in Orange County where we assaulted our friends in Jefferson Airplane with cream pies. Each man had a mark and mine was their bassist, Jack Cassidy. I got him good, man, but he didn’t like it one bit. He was so pissed off at me that I still don’t know if he’s ever forgiven me for it. I’m sure you have, Jack.
I bet you the cream pies were Mickey’s idea, because he loved that tactic. He even got me once, on a birthday, but I didn’t mind—I like pie.
Our second album, Anthem of the Sun, was finally released in mid-summer—July 18, 1968—and then, about a month later, the band went through a rather uncomfortable period that included two distinct attempted lineup changes. “Attempted” being the key word in both of those instances.
First, there was a meeting in which some members of the band tried to fire Bobby and Pigpen. I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t give it credence and I didn’t play into it. But Phil had really been on Bobby’s case for whatever reason; he didn’t think Bobby could keep up with the band’s growth, or he didn’t fit into his idea of where it was going, or whatever. Phil may have also thought that Bobby was partying too much, or drinking too much, or having too much fun. I just remember him really being on Bobby’s case all the time. It seemed personal.
I was getting as high and having as much fun as anybody, so I wasn’t about to point any fingers. In any case, Phil must’ve been really bothered by something and he brought Jerry into it. Now, Jerry was the most non-confrontational person in the band, so that didn’t quite work. Management was briefed on the situation and they called a meeting and we all sat around and kind of skirted the issue. Nobody could actually come right out and fire them, outright. Things were said … but, in the end, nothing was decided and it didn’t last, that’s for sure.
Bobby and Pigpen didn’t stop showing up and nobody turned them away. Their persistence paid off and, if anything, their determination to succeed led to greater contributions to the band. In Bobby’s case, especially, he made himself irreplaceable. It was the best possible resolution to that whole conflict.
Some people will find this interesting so I’ll mention it: There was chatter in our ranks about approaching another guitarist in our scene—David Nelson—to possibly take over Bobby’s spot, should it open up. It was brief and just talk and I didn’t feel any of that because I didn’t play into it. I didn’t think that either Bobby or Pigpen should leave and I was glad when they didn’t.
The other nonbinding, attempted lineup change that happened that year was also instigated by Phil. It may have been related to his reasons for wanting to get rid of Pigpen. Since that wasn’t going to happen, Phil came up with a different solution. Remember, this was during the Grateful Dead’s most experimental phase where we really got Out There every night. Pigpen was a straight blues guy. He formed the group because he wanted a blues band. His rave-ups were a hallmark of the early Grateful Dead and, as a frontman, his command of an audience was second to none. But with Mickey now in the band, and with our forward motion into all these new, complex song forms, we were getting into territory that Pigpen just wasn’t suited for, as a bluesman. He was in over his head. We all were.
But Phil had some history with an old friend of his, a keyboard player named Tom Constanten (aka “T.C.”), who, in theory, had the chops to accompany us on these weird musical journeys through other dimensions. Phil had already invited him into the studio with us to record some trippy keyboard bits for Anthem of the Sun, and that worked out just fine.
There may have been a band discussion about it or it may have just been a few people in the band, or it may have just been at Phil’s directive—nobody seems to recall—but beginning on November 23, 1968, at the Memorial Auditorium in Athens, Ohio, T.C. started playing with us, live. He and Pigpen shared organ duties and it also freed Pigpen up to just sing and rave and wail away on harp and percussion.
There are conflicting views about T.C.’s official role but, in my mind, he was never a card-carrying member of the Grateful Dead. He just didn’t fit the template. He was a transitional player for us, someone who was able to provide the keyboard parts that Pigpen couldn’t and someone who showed us that that role did, in fact, need to be filled. But it wasn’t going to be T.C. All in all, he would play with the Grateful Dead for just over a year—his tenure ended on January 30, 1970. There was no big blowup or anything; no showdown. He just left. We felt no animosity toward him and I hope he didn’t feel any toward us—it just wasn’t the right fit.
I got along really well with T.C., as I did with most people, and I thought he was a cool enough guy. However, he had this thing where, for whatever reason, he would perform at rehearsals pretty darn well, but then, when we’d be in front of an audience, it was like he froze or something. He just couldn’t let go. When things got strange and strayed from form, he couldn’t trust the music to lead, with the faith that it would all go somewhere wonderful and then somehow we’d be able to bring it all back home. That’s what jamming is all about. That’s what the Grateful Dead was all about. If you can’t do that, you can’t be in the band.
That said, I used to like getting drunk with T.C. on airplane flights. We’d drink cocktails and he’d loosen up. There’s no mistaking that he was a strange dude. I don’t remember ever taking acid with him but he was the straightest far-out character I’d ever met, to the point of being awkward, and he often seemed uncomfortable in his own skin. But he was smart as hell. He understood music theory and, in theory, he had a solid foundation for all the avant-garde stuff that we were getting into. But comprehending the concepts and being able to play the parts isn’t enough to make you a good musician. You also have to have that feeling—you have to get in contact with who you are inside, somehow, and let it connect to the music and then the music will connect to the audience. That’s how I see it, anyhow. I sometimes wanted to tell T.C., “Forget everything you know; forget what you learned in school. Forget yourself.”
I also found it interesting that T.C. was a Scientologist. He often seemed unresolved to me, and I wondered if his religion was partially to blame for that. Scientology can browbeat you, giving you the feeling that you’re not good enough so you need to be audited and you need to clean up, or whatever their trip is. If God really is an outer space man, then so be it. But auditing just sounded like punishment to me.
It’s not Scientology that I have a problem with, though. It’s all religions. All organized religions, anyway. Some have said that the Grateful Dead was a religion but what they mean by that is simply that it was a spiritual experience for them and certain things about it became rituals in which they would get some kind of fulfillment in their lives—be it the act of filling out mail-order ticket forms, or of traveling thousands of miles to ring in the New Year with us, or of dancing all freaky in an arena concourse while we played to the tide. But, despite the analogy, the Grateful Dead were never an organized religion. We offered an alternative to all that noise.
I want to make it clear that we were not a cult. Jerry Garcia was not the messiah. We weren’t gods. We were there every night for the same reason the Deadheads were. We wanted the music to take us to a place of transcendence and elegance. We wanted to reach that group consciousness so that we could realize that there was something that was bigger than us—and whatever it was, we all were an equal part of it, from the guys sweating it out onstage to the girls in line for the bathroom. We are all the same and we are all just a bunch of atoms. As I’ve said many times before, I was actually the first Deadhead, going all the way back to that night in 1965 when I saw Jerry play banjo at the Tangent.
Feeling IT: I love the Deadheads just as much as they love us. (Jay Blakesberg)
Back to the plot, shall we? After all, this is an action tale, and a lot of big moments were just around the corner for us, from Woodstock to Altamont. But first, another thing that happened during 1968 that had a significant impact on the band, both in the immediate and in the long term, is that we all began migrating to Marin County. One by one we left the city and one by one we left each other to find spaces of our own. Most of the effects of the move out of the city and away from each other were subtle but they were also myriad and insidious. Our days of being a San Francisco band ended in the Spring of 1968. After that, we were a Marin County band. Again.
We loved Marin during our stays in Olompali and Lagunitas and so when everybody started moving up there, I found a place in San Rafael on Lucas Valley Road. It was right across the street, basically, from where George Lucas eventually built Skywalker Ranch. This was way before he was there—the name of the street is just one more weird coincidence. I moved into that house with Susila and the way the Grateful Dead had our finances set up back then, the band covered rent. So it was great.
Bobby remembers living at that house with us for a little while but I don’t. He’s probably right. He probably did. I was so happy all the time and in love with the band and in love with Susila, that I wouldn’t have noticed a detail like that. Phil was in Fairfax and Jerry was someplace with Mountain Girl. Mickey found a ranch in Novato.
Even though we were scattered around a rural county, we were still friends and would still hang out. My place on Lucas Valley Road was tucked away from other houses, so some of the guys would come over and we’d do stupid things, usually involving guns or firecrackers, and drugs or alcohol. Take your pick. Mix and match.
In the summer one time, when the wild oat grass was tall, Jerry and Bobby came by. We taped cherry bombs to old LPs that weren’t any good, threading the fuse through the hole. You know where this is going. We lit them and threw them like Frisbees over the field, down the hill. When the inevitable flames broke out, we ran like all hell to get the hose and we managed to put out the fire by the skin of our teeth. There were other days like that, too. Plenty of them.
I enjoyed living there but then the damnedest thing happened. We were making our third record, Aoxomoxoa, and we were down in a studio in San Mateo, which is a town in the South Bay—about an hour from my place in San Rafael, on the opposite side of San Francisco. We were recording studio tracks that I’m not even sure if we ended up using, but we may have. (We ended up recording that album twice, as you’ll read about in the next chapter). Anyway, I got this message that I had just gotten busted for marijuana and I said, “Shit! That’s now the second time I’ve gotten busted when I wasn’t even there.” Except when 710 got raided, I wasn’t actually busted. This time, I was. I just wasn’t around when the police swarmed the house and raided it. Unfortunately, Susila was home and she was arrested and taken down to the station and thrown in jail. She was pregnant with Justin.
This time we weren’t busted just for possession. I had pot plants on the property. I was trying to grow my own, so I had a small outdoor grow down behind the house, about 100 yards down the hill, facing north and everything. What happened was, the landlord who rented to us was this really uptight motherfucker—I don’t even think he wanted to rent to us in the first place, but he did. He came over one day and it happened to be the same day that, like an idiot, I’d left the garden hose running down there to water the plants. The landlord was the kind of guy who, once he saw the hose, decided he needed to check it out. He followed it to the end, discovered the plants, then ratted me out to the police. Goes to show, you don’t ever know. Right?
Well, that was the end of that. The pot wasn’t even any good anyway. It was never going to yield anything too kind or dank. I didn’t know a thing about growing weed. I don’t think I even knew the difference between male plants and female plants. I probably would’ve raised a male, thinking, “Oh, this is cool,” not knowing any better.
But anyway, that happened there and I got a spanking for it. They put me in jail for ten days in Marin County for that one. They made Susila serve time, too, separately, right after she gave birth to Justin. We had to take him over to his grandmother’s so he wouldn’t be taken to family services or something. To her immense credit, Susila is able to laugh it off now, remarking that at least the jail was in the new Hall of Justice building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Almost two decades later, the Grateful Dead would record our bestselling album in that same complex. (In the Dark was recorded at the Marin Veteran’s Auditorium, which is part of the Marin County Civic Center complex that Frank Lloyd Wright designed.)
There’s another twist to this. Right before I went to serve, I had been busted again—oops—this time in New Orleans, with the whole band. The New Orleans incident happened in January 1970. I did my time for the Lucas Valley grow just a couple weeks after that, because I remember the fucking prosecution said, “You know, Mr. Kreutzmann was just arrested for marijuana possession in New Orleans.”
So what if I was? I hadn’t been tried on that charge yet and, in this country, you’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. Granted, I was guilty. Of course I had marijuana on me, and with me, and certainly in me during our stay in New Orleans. Still, what happened that time was such a setup, such a scam, such complete nonsense.
We were playing our first shows in New Orleans and, usually, no matter how late it is, you can’t sleep for hours after playing a gig. So you go out and you look for more trouble—you look for a reward. You just played this great concert, you’re feeling great, you want to go out and celebrate. I’m always one to celebrate. So after one of those gigs in New Orleans, Mickey and I went out together after the show. We went nightclubbing on Bourbon Street, checking things out and having fun. When we walked back into the hotel, I remember looking around and I knew something was amiss. I said, “Hart, how come all these guys are standing around this lobby, in suits? It’s four in the morning. They’re not tourists. What the fuck is going on?” He said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, Bill.”
We went into one of our rooms—I forget whose, exactly—and naturally we started smoking some pot. It wasn’t seeded or stemmed, so we used the drawer to clean it—it was probably a couple ounces. Pretty soon there was a knock at the front door. Since this was in the French Quarter, there was also a back door, which, naturally, I started going for. But the cops were there already, too. We were surrounded. Oddly enough, they were rather nice to us, despite the circumstance. They didn’t beat us up or do anything weird to us and they were actually quite polite throughout the whole ordeal. They booked Owsley that night and it turned out that’s who they really wanted—they knew he was the big gun and they were after him. It actually ended his career with the Grateful Dead, a second (but not final) time.
Eventually, they dropped the charges for everyone but Owsley, even though I don’t think they caught him with anything big. He never traveled heavy, as far as I know. We didn’t go back to New Orleans for a long time after that, although I never took that bust personally—they knew the Grateful Dead were coming to town, they knew the Grateful Dead meant drugs, and they were right. It’s simple. To this very day in New Orleans, marijuana is a big no-no. You can’t smoke a joint on Bourbon Street and expect to get away with it.
My thing, and it’s important that I talk about this, is that I think you should be able to smoke a joint on Bourbon Street. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I think pot should be legalized in this country. It’s time for the prohibition to end. I follow this stuff closely and I applaud all the states that support medical marijuana. I live in Hawaii and I have my card.
Listen, the medical benefits of cannabis are no joke. For instance, I know firsthand that smoking cannabis is extremely effective for treating a staggering variety of ailments, from nausea to insomnia. It’s also a proven pain reliever. Furthermore, cannabis can now be made into a medical preparation using strains that are very high in CBDs and low in THC, which means there’s no psychoactive effect; it’s medicine. It can be given to kids instead of prescribing them harsher and more dangerous pharmaceutical drugs such as Ritalin. And it’s significantly more effective.
Medical marijuana laws are not just a loophole to get high. Of course, I also like to get high just to get high, and I feel strongly that recreational use should be legal. If anything, it’s a crime that it’s not. As for the recent wins in Colorado and Washington, well, you can bet those states are going to see my dollars. Good-hearted Americans have used the democratic process in two states to say, hey, stop wasting my tax dollars prosecuting something that is more harmless than alcohol. Instead, tax it and regulate it and generate millions of dollars in state revenue at a time when we need that most. More states will soon follow. Hopefully by the time you read this.
Whether you smoke it, vaporize it, eat it, or even use it as a salve, there’s nothing wrong with cannabis—if anything, there are a number of things right with it. I’m not afraid to say that. So, for the record, the drummer from the Grateful Dead smokes weed and thinks it should be legal—is that any surprise?