A Long Strange Trip (15 page)

In his wife’s words “a piano player in the whorehouse of life,” Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue was more than three hundred pounds of charm and love of music. He’d begun his career as a disc jockey in Philadelphia, been run out of town by the late-fifties payola scandals, and settled in San Francisco at KYA. Soon he and his fellow D.J. and partner, Bobby Mitchell, had expanded into a variety of businesses, including a radio tip sheet, band management, show promotion, a psychedelic nightclub called Mother’s, and, finally, a record label called Autumn Records. With the help of a gifted record producer, Sylvester “Sly” Stewart, they’d scored hits with local musicians Bobby Freeman (“C’mon and Swim”) and the Beau Brummels (“Laugh, Laugh”). On November 3 Autumn Records auditioned the Warlocks, who were calling themselves the Emergency Crew for the day. The session took place at Golden State Recorders, a cheap studio down by the train station south of Market Street, and it was not a priority event, since they had only an engineer, and no producer. They recorded six tracks as a sample, or demo, of their work, including Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” the traditional “I Know You Rider,” and four originals: “Caution,” “I Can’t Come Down,” “Mindbender” (aka “Confusion’s Prince”), and “The Only Time Is Now.” They had been playing together for only five months, and the tape showed it. It was poorly recorded, and only Garcia’s strong leads and Pig’s vocals were clearly audible. Lesh’s bass skills were still primitive, and Kreutzmann and Weir were rarely present in the mix. Their originals were pop-oriented, and showed that they listened to the Beatles as well as the Stones. They had the right mood and feeling, but lacked pop hooks, and they simply weren’t very good. The tunes were not especially original, the best being “The Only Time Is Now,” written by Garcia and sung by Lesh. “Oh I come to you a ragged and open stranger / And you come to me an angel of the night / so I’ll dance and we will sing but it doesn’t mean a thing / To remember that the only time is now.”

As Garcia would concede later, “I’m really a jive lyricist. My lyrics come from right now—put pencil on paper, and what comes out, if it fits, it fits. I didn’t think about them, I just made the first, obvious choices and never rewrote. It took me a long time to sing them out, because they embarrassed me.” “I Can’t Come Down” was in many ways worse because it was more ambitious, a clear pilfering from Dylan: “With secret smiles like a Cheshire cat and leather wings like a vampire bat / I fly away to my cold water flat and eat my way through a bowl of fat.” Donahue liked the Warlocks, but his partner was ill and the record company was already foundering, and nothing came of their demo. For Weir, the day’s most arresting moment came when he wandered next door, to a room where another band’s gear was stored. They had Fender Showman amps, and he craved one to replace his mere Fender Bandmaster amp. Amp lust was a popular emotion in young musicians.

Through November they remained a regular fledgling rock band. Phil’s friend Hank Harrison became their manager for about a week, and got them a gig at Pierre’s, a strip joint on San Francisco’s Broadway. By then, Broadway was the legendary home of Carol Doda, who the year before had become famous by having her breasts enlarged and going to work as a go-go dancer in a topless Rudi Gernreich bathing suit. Before that, the street had been known as the home of the Jazz Workshop, where Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, and Horace Silver played after the Blackhawk closed in 1963. Earlier in 1965, Lenny Bruce had broken both ankles after taking a dive out the window of his room at the Swiss American Hotel, just up Broadway from Pierre’s. It was an altogether odd street, and Pierre’s fit in. The club was six times as long as it was wide, which made it small. It was high-ceilinged, and all bricks and concrete, so it sounded awful. The audience asked the Warlocks to turn down, but to no effect. There were two topless go-go dancers, one nice, one not. As Lesh put it, “We’d play for twenty minutes and the chick would come out and she’d be onstage a total of five minutes and it would take her four minutes to get her jacket off, so out of every thirty-minute set, when they changed the audience over, you got one minute of tit.” Their old friend Peter Albin came to see them and noticed some sailors behaving with the usual testosterone-induced blindness until the dancer left, and the navy boys found themselves staring fixedly at Garcia’s hands.

The Warlocks were excited that month by their first national publicity, even if it came as a gift from a buddy. Garcia’s New York bluegrass friend, David Grisman, had come out that summer to visit Eric Thompson and had seen the Warlocks play. On his return he mentioned them to his friend Israel Young, whose November “Frets and Frails” column in the prestigious folk magazine
Sing Out!
reported, “David Grisman found the Warlocks to be the best rock-and-roll group he heard in California. He especially liked a song written by their lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia, titled ‘Bending Your Mind.’ ” It was a good start, Garcia said, because the readership of
Sing Out!
was an elite.

Another first that month was a photo session. Their photographer, Herb Greene, was a friend they’d met through his wife, Maruska, who was a seamstress at the Mime Troupe and knew Phil. It was his first music shoot, too; his usual subjects were fashion models at the I. Magnin store. The Warlocks briefly dreamed of Beatle-type suits but couldn’t afford them and decided to appropriate some of the striped French sailor sweaters that the Spoonful had taken to wearing. They also went to Flagg Brothers, a surplus store on Market Street, to buy black, pointy-toed boots with a zipper up the back—Beatle boots. Greene took them to some old army artillery positions under the Golden Gate Bridge at Fort Point in the Presidio and lifted the visual motif from
Help!,
the recently released second Beatle movie. The results were charming, although the Warlocks lacked the good looks of the originals. They bought a new, just-like-the-Beatles Vox organ at Swain’s in Palo Alto, and eventually managed to pay for it. Since Mr. Swain had once been a professional children’s social worker and made a practice of employing juvenile delinquents as clerks, there was a measure of tolerance that they could count on.

On November 6, two rock and roll currents collided in San Francisco. At Longshoremen’s Hall, the Family Dog put on a dance featuring a band from Los Angeles led by Frank Zappa, while the Mime Troupe was sponsoring a benefit at their loft on Howard Street, near the
San Francisco
Chronicle
building. The Family Dog event was a mess. Gangs of teenagers from the nearby housing projects had found out about the dances, and the hall had far too many doors to make it securable. Luria found herself flailing at two boys who were fighting, shouting, “How dare you fuck up my dance!” By now the musicians’ union had taken notice of the Dog’s activities, even if the city never got around to it, asking the hall why it was housing a nonunion event. Shortly after, Luria decided to take a little vacation in Mexico.

The people at the Howard Street loft had a better time. The brain-child of Bill Graham, the troupe’s business manager, the Appeal was designed to raise money to defend the Mime Troupe’s leader, Ronnie Davis, who’d been found guilty on November 1 of performing in the park without a permit. Graham’s main act was the Jefferson Airplane, a band he knew of only because they rehearsed at the Mime Troupe’s warehouse. The show also boasted a New York band called the Fugs, a guitarist named Sandy Bull, the satirical troupe the Committee, and poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, whom Graham knew from New York’s 92nd Street YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) readings. Bill knew nothing of rock and had no background in promotion, but his instincts were superb. He decorated the dumpy warehouse by hanging bunches of fruit and chewing gum from the rafters, and greeted patrons with gifts of what one participant recalled were “coins and raisins and whistles and clicking noisemakers and little mirrors all individually wrapped in Christmas gift papers.” The door charge was on a sliding scale, from those making $100,000, who paid forty-eight dollars—several people did so—to those with a part-time job paying less than twenty dollars weekly, who could “come on in” gratis. For most, the charge was a dollar. Graham stocked egg rolls and fried chicken for two hundred, which was the audience he expected, and at three in the morning was still bringing people up in the elevator. When police took notice of the gross violation of capacity, he told them, “Frank [Sinatra]’s flying in,” and they left him alone. Appeal I ended at 6 A.M. with Ginsberg leading chants; it had raised more than $4,000 and triggered a collective social orgasm. As Graham pulled up to the warehouse at the beginning of the evening after taking a dinner break, he’d seen the line around the block and yelped, “This is the business of the future.” So it was.

The following week the Warlocks, or at least Weir, Kreutzmann, Lesh, and Garcia, met to consider a problem. Phil Lesh had been thumbing through a record rack and came across a single put out by another group called the Warlocks, probably not the New York City band that featured Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker (later this band would find a new moniker in the title of a sadomasochistic novel and became the Velvet Underground), but most likely a Texas band that included guitarists who would become known as ZZ Top. The San Franciscans decided they needed a new name, and they began to evaluate possibilities. Kreutzmann lobbied for a black club band name, like the “Vikings” or the “Crusaders.” Garcia wanted to be whimsical and threw out “Mythical Ethical Icicle Tricycle.” Weir suggested “His Own Sweet Advocates,” his softened version of the term “devil’s advocate.” Finally, on November 12, a cold gray windy day, the four of them gathered at Lesh’s house on High Street. Garcia had smoked DMT before coming over, but the others were sober. Garcia and Lesh sat on the couch as Weir and Kreutzmann hovered behind them. They paged through a
Bartlett’s,
read out a thousand possibilities, rejected them all. Then Garcia opened Phil’s girlfriend Ruth’s Funk and Wagnall’s New Practical Standard Dictionary (1956), shook it open, and stabbed it with his finger. “Everything else on the page went blank,” he later said, “diffuse, just sorta
oozed
away, and there was GRATEFUL DEAD, big black letters edged all around in gold, man, blasting out at me, such a stunning combination.” “Hey, man. How about the Grateful Dead?” Lesh began to jump up and down, shouting, “That’s it! That’s it!” Weir didn’t like it, thinking it morbid. “It held us back for years and years,” he would say much later. As soon as he thought about it, even Garcia found it “kinda creepy.” Hanging out at Swain’s Music Store, Jerry asked Evie, a clerk there, how to spell “grateful.” “However you spell it,” she sniffed, “you’ll never make it with that name.”

Innocent as babes, they had connected with a motif that twined itself throughout human history. The definition in the dictionary referred specifically to the nineteenth-century musicologist Francis Child’s term for a type of ballad. The grateful dead ballad or folktale concerns a hero who comes upon a corpse being refused a proper burial because it owes a debt. The hero resolves the debt and thus the corpse’s destiny without expectation of reward, often with his last penny. Soon he meets a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task, who, of course, turns out to be the spirit of the corpse he aided. This motif is found in almost every culture since the ancient Egyptians. Unknowingly, the Warlocks had plunked themselves into a universal cultural thread woven into the matrix of all human experience. The term “grateful dead” is about karma, and asserts that acting from soul and the heart guarantees that righteousness will result. It is about honor, compassion, and keeping promises. It precedes and suggests “Cast thy bread upon the waters,” and “No man is an island,” and “What goes around comes around.” The very fact of a good-time rock band selecting a name that involved death created a gap that automatically separated the sheep from the goats. You had to be at least a little bent just to appreciate it. It confused some and appalled others—and what could be better for a rock band? It implied layers and layers of depth, unique among all rock band names in that era, and suggested that something very powerful indeed happened on High Street that day. In the end, they did not choose their name. It chose them.

9

Interlude: Albert Hofmann’s Discovery

(THE PSYCHEDELIC WORLD)

Following close behind survival and procreation, the pursuit of spiritual transcendence seems to be a universal human need. The three-hundredths-of-a-second neural gap between reality and our apprehension of it dooms us to see our lives in images forever newly obsolete and to grasp only the tiniest fraction of what is available. It is the chasm that Plato described as the difference between shadow and fact. The methods chosen for the pursuit, from the Roman Catholic mass to whatever the Dionysians used to the raptures of southern Pentecostalists induced by gospel music to LSD-25, are merely a matter of cultural taste. Lumping LSD and other psychedelics, including the milder marijuana, with other drugs is simply ignorant, and largely reflects Western cultural shibboleths about the loss of control and fear of sensuality. The Dead and their peers in the Haight, unlike the lawmakers and their supporting cast of medical opinion makers, actually chose to investigate psychedelics in an empirical, if informal, way. They sought what T. S. Eliot called in “The Dry Salvages” “the primitive terror,” the place where a foundering Western civilization might be renewed.

The Grateful Dead were always about music, not drugs, and if there is an alpha element to their gestalt, it is improvisation, as a social as well as musical technique. If the Dead’s social and intellectual structure was, in Robert Hunter’s words, a reflection of Jerry Garcia’s mind, that structure began with a healthy skepticism directed at all cant, all received wisdom, all assumptions. From that clean slate came improvisation. But after improvisation, the single largest element in the Dead’s
weltanschauung
was their pursuit of group mind under the influence of LSD, which in its celebration of the moment, of be-here-nowness, confirmed improvisation as a life- as well as musical performance-guiding choice. Much of what followed, whether we are discussing Dead philosophy, the psychedelic experience, or improvisational music, was frequently beyond words, so that any formula created would be long after the event. In point of fact, almost any analysis of this experience is potentially antithetical to the essence of the experience itself. Yet a consideration of this alternative universe is worth the effort, if only to lessen the fears of those trapped by the “Just Say No” nonsense. It is worth noting that much of the legal furor over drugs in the United States in the last century or so has a racial and/or social basis. As opium became connected with the “yellow peril,” it became demonized. When marijuana was associated with African American jazz musicians, despite the benign conclusions of the La Guardia Commission’s report, ditto, and so forth. A little dispassionate thinking seems called for.

Looking back, the critic Paul Williams theorized that the variations in critical receptivity to the Dead’s music were based on one’s openness to the psychedelic experience. Those who got high understood, and those who didn’t, didn’t. This would suggest to some that “you can’t like this music without being stoned,” which would obviously imply a very limited music. On the other hand, one might argue that while choosing to not ingest psychedelics is an inarguable right, being so emotionally constituted as to be unable to experience the psychedelic world is at least equally limiting.

On April 16, 1943, Albert Hofmann touched his hand to his mouth and accidentally absorbed some of the twenty-fifth version of LSD he had produced—the first twenty-four derivations showed no great value— and discovered that the most remarkably tiny dosage had a powerful psychic impact. As LSD use spread, several conclusions about it emerged. Put simply, it seemed that evolutionary survival needs had required the limiting of the mind’s capacity for sensory input, and LSD reopened the valve. For a few hours, reality became a flood instead of a trickle. Haight Street philosopher Stephen Gaskin quoted a critic as saying, “Acid lowers your powers of discrimination until everything seems important.” On the contrary, Gaskin replied: “No. Acid
raises
your powers of
integration
until everything
is
important.” “It’s a language, that’s all, without words—just the images themselves,” wrote Art Kleps, an early associate of LSD researcher Timothy Leary, and one of the few to consider LSD in Western philosophical terms. LSD, he argued, lays waste to supernaturalism, since, ironically, much of the LSD experience lies in the realm of the absurd, and there is “no room for the absurd in the cosmologies of the occultists and supernaturalists.” The simple materialism of the lower reaches of scientific thought also had to go: “It is materialism that is destroyed by these overwhelming demonstrations of the limitless power of the imagination, not, necessarily, as those who like to disparage nihilism and solipsism assume, empiricism, logic, or honor. It is not one’s experience or character that is intimidated, but only certain abstract concepts about the organization of experience.”

Very few things come out of
every
acid trip. As Garcia remarked, “When LSD hit the streets finally, that was like, ‘You’re looking for more? Here it is. This is more. This is more than you can imagine’ . . . [Acid trips] have that way of being individual . . . people don’t experience exactly the same effects. They experience themselves, and sometimes it turns out to be utterly delightful, sometimes it turns out to be a total bummer, but either way, you’ve got more of it to work with when you’ve taken psychedelics and seen the bigger picture, you know? . . . after that, for me, in my life, there was no turning back. There was no back, not just a turning back, but the idea of backness was gone. It was like all directions were forward from there . . . conventional wisdom won’t accept this subjective of an overview.”

Most people come out of LSD trips believing in the oneness of all life, the interconnectedness of things, and from that, the philosophically disposed frequently hit on Jungian synchronicity, the notion that things can be connected on a non-cause-and-effect basis, as in dreams. “If one’s thesis is that ordinary life is a dream,” wrote Art Kleps, “then anything that can happen in a dream in sleep can happen in waking life also, without disproving the thesis. If you can see that, you can see everything.”

After synchronicity, the essentially mental (solipsistic) nature of reality suggested a second realm of thought, that of alchemy. Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the finest large-scale producer of LSD in the world, was the Dead’s best-known alchemist. But after Bear, the Dead’s favorite mental divertissement was the psychedelic adventures and theorizing of Terence and Dennis McKenna. Sometime in the middle 1970s, Alan Trist went to the bookstore, bought about ten copies of their
The Invisible Landscape,
and handed them around to the attendees at a band meeting. The McKennas’ work theorizes that evolution will accelerate and end in the year 2012. Garcia loved it as a mental exercise, finding it “incredibly optimistic.”

Terence McKenna’s
True Hallucinations
describes the journey that led to the theory. In February 1971, the McKennas traveled to La Chorrera, Colombia, in the Amazonian jungle, where they ingested
Stropharia
mushrooms that “spun a myth and issued a prophecy, in quite specific detail, of a planet-saving global shift of consciousness.” Said shift was to take place on December 22, 2012, the end of the world in the Mayan calendar. The book describes a sort of sci-fi vision of a shamanic quest, wherein they would pass the doorway of death and find as living men “a kind of hyperspatial astral projection that allows the hyper-organ, consciousness, to instantly manifest itself at any point in the space-time matrix, or at all points simultaneously.” In other words, they sought “a modern transdimensional alchemical philosopher’s stone.” This is a worthy twentieth-century version of Faust’s quest. In the end, Terence concluded that time is a bumpy, not continuous, thing, and further developed the notion of the time wave, “a kind of mathematical mandala describing the organization of time and space.” “The timewave theory is like the score of the biocosmic symphony.” This is the Dead’s kind of thinking, bold and fascinating, off the wall but a good deal further along than “Gee, I’m ripped.” The book served as a creative source of conversation for years.

A related meditation on the metaphysical implications of the psychedelic experience was Robert Anton Wilson’s satirical
Illuminati
series. Wilson began with the Bavarian Illuminati, who supposedly secretly ruled the world, and before he was done touched on the territory occupied by the collector of inexplicable events Charles Fort, the satanist Aleister Crowley, the occult, cattle mutilations, crop circles, UFOs, Bell’s theorem, which posits the underlying unity of all physical phenomena, the metaphysical paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, and—for no entirely clear reason— the number 23. He also posited a philosophy that worshiped chaos, “Discordianism,” which held meta-beliefs called
catma
(as opposed to dogma). Garcia particularly cherished catma as a concept; it is a delicious pun.

LSD was, in the Dead world, a catalyst. For Lesh the highest he would ever get was during the Dead’s 1966 sojourn in Los Angeles, when he and his lover, Florence, Garcia and his lover, Diane Zellman, and a friend called “Heddie the Witch” went to a canyon on Mount Wilson and experienced telepathy. Information came in extraordinarily fast bursts, ten minutes of material exploding into each brain in a few moments. It would be the closest Lesh would ever feel to Garcia off the stage, and it staggered him. They were well and truly connected. And then a test rocket at the nearby Rocketdyne facility exploded through the sky, severing their gestalt. It was, Garcia said, “a reality butt splice.” Suddenly, their trip was over. “Sorry, kids. Go home.”

To Kreutzmann, LSD “wasn’t a drug, it was an endless roller-coaster ride, and I guess if you had any percentage of imagination . . . you wanted to get on this roller coaster and ride on it, because pretty soon it went over this big hill and it didn’t stay on this track. Pretty soon it went through the whole amusement park and then it cruised the waves for a little while, went up and down the boardwalk, and then it went out to everywhere, right? So we were not afraid, is what I’m saying. And we’d get back.”