A Long Strange Trip (17 page)

They scheduled the next acid test for Saturday, December 11, but before that the Dead had promised to do a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe on Friday the tenth. The overwhelming success of the warehouse benefit had emboldened Bill Graham to seek a larger venue. Acting on a tip from either one of the Family Dog people or Ralph Gleason, he’d booked this event into a San Francisco ballroom called the Fillmore Auditorium, on the second floor at the corner of Fillmore and Geary, in a black neighborhood halfway to the beach. Once called the Majestic Hall, then the Majestic Academy of Dancing, the Fillmore had headlined Ray Charles and Count Basie and was now run by a man named Charles Sullivan. Graham was already ingenious and indefatigable as a promoter. The week before, Bob Dylan had held a press conference at the public TV station KQED to promote his own show, and at one point displayed a poster Graham had given him that announced, “Appeal II, For Continued Artistic Freedom in the Parks.” Appeal II cost $1.50 and featured the Great Society, the Jefferson Airplane, the Mystery Trend, and “Many Other Friends.” The handbill quoted Hamlet regarding the “insolence of office,” promised dancing, and noted that “the place is huge [capacity 1,000], and, like, it’s there. Till dawn, we hope.”

When the Dead arrived, they discovered that Graham had placed an easel on the side of the stage for each act’s picture and name. Bill had asked Lesh, whom he knew from the Mime Troupe, for a picture, but they couldn’t manage to produce one. Worse still, from Bill’s point of view, was their new name, which perplexed, even angered, him. It gave him the creeps, he said, and he demurred at putting it on the easel. It was the beginning of a long series of arguments over many years. Phil replied, “Bill, I’m sorry. This is the decision we’ve made. Here’s what you do. Put ‘formerly the Warlocks’ in the space where the picture would go.” And so he did. It was another tremendously successful event. At 9:30 there was a block-long double line, and it was just as long at 1 A.M. Signs with “Love” in three-foot-tall letters were at each end of the hall. The costumes, Gleason reported, were “Goodwill cum Sherwood Forest,” and in addition to raising $6,000 (which suggested sales of more than four thousand tickets) for the Mime Troupe, everyone had a great time.

The Dead had an even better time at the next night’s acid test, held at the Big Beat club in Palo Alto, on the mudflats down by Highway 101. It was an L-shaped room, and the Dead were at the bend of the L. At one end was the Prankster setup, which looked like a cockpit, with its Day-Glo organ, tape recorders, microphones, and such. It was the first time the Pranksters had donned their quasi-military uniforms, and they looked even stranger as a result. By now, the audience was sufficiently large that they put a liquid form of LSD in a medium, which turned out to be Kool-Aid, both because it was inexpensive—and amusingly cool. As an experiment, Kreutzmann decided not to take LSD that night, though he pretended to, and discovered that it didn’t seem to matter: everybody else was so high he had a terrific time. The Dead’s music was probably not as strange as people recalled it, the context lending it a sheen that was somewhat more exotic than the slightly mutated modal rock and roll they played at the time. The weirdness was in the ears and the situation more than the music itself, which would take a while to evolve.

Once the Dead collected a quorum—“Where’s Pigpen?”—they straggled out to play. The Dead and the Pranksters played at the same time, one band playing, the other, as Kreutzmann said with a chuckle, “kinda playing.” Prankster music was “like pigs being slaughtered, like a parrot-peacock donnybrook,” wrote Paul Foster. “Antimusic, antiplaying,” thought Weir. “Of course, we couldn’t really hear them, since we were louder. We had them outgunned.” Prankster music, Sara explained, “was anybody picking up anything and doing anything they wanted . . . to break down barriers.” As Kesey put it, “Suddenly people were stripped before one another and behold! as we looked on, we all made a great discovery: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than that shining nightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us. We joined hands and danced barefoot amongst the rubble. We had been cleansed, liberated! We would never don the old armors again.”

The glory of an acid test for the Dead was that it wasn’t a show and they weren’t the night’s entertainment.
Everybody
was the show, and Lord knew everybody was entertaining. “Freedom had a lot to do with it,” Garcia said, “and the synergy, the thing of lots of things happening at once. Having no specific focus meant that there was a kind of pattern beyond randomness, that would emerge, and with no order at all, a deeper level of order would surface, something like Mandelbrot equations and chaos theory today. There were no performers and no audience, or rather everybody was both. The performance and the reality outside the performance are one. That’s why I paid to get in.” Another time he said of the acid tests that they were “tremendously funny and good and entertaining—what life should be, really.” The Prankster equipment generated its own magic. “Voices coming out of things that weren’t plugged in and, God . . . sometimes they were like writhing and squirming.” There was a figure-eight tape-lag setup, connecting a speaker with a microphone in front at each end of the room. Thus sound would come out of a speaker, go into a microphone, back into the sound system, into the other speaker, and out. The result would be a continuous echo. What you heard was a matter of synchronicity, the Jungian notion of non-cause-and-effect connections among events, karma, or the luck of the draw. “Either you needed to hear it,” Weir realized, “wanted to hear it, or didn’t want to hear it.”

In addition to the two bands, the night included Stewart Brand, a local anthropologist and friend of Kesey’s who had a multimedia show he took around called “America Needs Indians.” His tepee, which served as the screen for a slide show, was set up at one end of the club. The owners, two conventional middle-aged ladies, hovered, fascinated, at the bar all night. And there were bums and hoboes and truck drivers who’d wandered in off the street, having no idea of what was going on in this utterly surreal environment.

Finally, of course, there was Neal. He had a small sledgehammer that he used as his wizard’s wand, “slinging it around like a fancy gunslinger,” said Sara, “rapping to everyone in the room, seemingly, about what they were thinking, wrapping everybody’s secret trip into this whole eloquent bubble.” “He would pick stuff up off the floor,” recalled one new Prankster, Hugh Romney (later known as Wavy Gravy), “cigarette packs or whatever, and he would read it like Native Americans read meaning in natural things . . . the world as
I-Ching.
” Less romantically, Neal reminded Garcia of “the guy who was out picking pockets while the man on the platform was selling snake oil.” Then Neal joined a group under a strobe light. Roy Sebern, an artist, had brought in a roll of paper towels, and people began to tear them into tiny fragments and throw them into the strobe flash, over and over, until it became what Stewart Brand called a “flickering flashing dazzling snowstorm. Pure magic.” Then it was dawn outside, the equipment stopped humming, and they were done. But Garcia went home with a bonus, although it later became slightly annoying. Ducking out for a breath of air, he’d been standing in the parking lot with Denise Kaufman, a Prankster and later part of the band Ace of Cups, when a police officer came by to check out the scene. After passing the time, he departed, and Garcia tipped his hat with the comment “The tips, Captain.” And up through the vapors of Denise’s mind bubbled the words “Captain Trips.” Garcia had acquired his Prankster nickname.

By now, of course, the Grateful Dead had entirely dropped out of anything remotely resembling the music business. After all, exploring inner space was a great deal more interesting. The next test was scheduled for Stinson Beach, a little town on the coast just north of San Francisco. Somewhat isolated by the extremely twisting road, Stinson seemed a good place, but at the last second the test was moved to a lodge a few miles back up the highway, at Muir Beach. The setting was beautiful, with flowers and a lawn going down to the beach. It turned out to be a fairly weird night, odd even by acid test standards. As Weir put it, they dosed and then went into a horse race to get set up before the LSD came on. Some of them lost the race. Kreutzmann went into a time warp. His acid came on, “all of a sudden, boom, that’s it, set’s over. And I proceeded to tear down my drum set for two hours, and the night was just begun.” The Pranksters were screening part of the film they’d shot on the bus ride, and Babbs was narrating: “Are you in the movie, or are you watching the movie? Are you in the movie, aren’t we all in the movie?” And Kreutzmann got lost in the rap. “I’m watching it, and I realize that I’m as much
that—
there’s no difference. Einstein’s theory again. You’re the same, in our mind it’s the same.” Though it would take a while, he eventually managed to set up his equipment and play.

A young local woman named Goldie Rush had heard about some hippie party at the lodge and came out with a couple of girlfriends to see what was up. Since she didn’t take any acid, she found the goings-on, which seemed to involve much seriousness and lots of fiddling with knobs, quite boring. “Nothing happening,” she thought, and left. Contrarily, it was one of Lesh’s most interesting acid tests. A woman named Florence Nathan, who worked for Tom Donahue, had come to the acid test looking for her friend Lenny Bruce. Lenny not being there, she wandered around, locked eyes with Lesh, and without a word they embraced. It was the beginning of a long-term relationship.

That night the band played the Reverend Gary Davis’s song “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” for the first time, and as Kesey and Babbs stood in front of Lesh, “just sweating like pigs, jaws dropped with raving enthusiasm and affirmation in their faces,” Phil realized that if they could move these legends, “I sort of figured we were onto something.” All that was the least of it. At some time during the night, a man began to freak out. He later said that he was hearing extremely high-pitched screeching sounds from the band, and in his anxiety he responded in kind, by pushing a chair along the floor until it made a similar horrible scraping screech, the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, cubed. Eventually, one of the Pranksters tripled the chair man’s paranoia level by seeing some conventionally dressed people and thinking they were the police. The chair man had a pocketful of LSD, and even though it was still legal, he decided to leave, leaped into his car, and proceeded to crash it, although he emerged unscathed. It was not the easiest of introductions between Owsley “Bear” Stanley and the Grateful Dead, but it didn’t ultimately matter; the man who produced LSD for the Bay Area and the band that played to the experience were destined to unite.

Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III on January 19, 1935, Owsley was named for his grandfather, a U.S. senator from and governor of Kentucky, and the father of the St. Lawrence Seaway. His father was a government bureaucrat whose wartime service had left him with a bad case of alcoholism. The end result, Bear—he said he acquired the nickname when he developed a hairy chest at quite a young age—was a man who combined brilliance and charisma with social dysfunction, a genius who would fascinate the Grateful Dead, but at the same time a southern aristocrat who could, Weir noted, “abuse a waitress like no one else in the world,” a man isolated from others by intelligence and personality to the point of extreme elitism, so that while he was not genteel, he remained gentry. As one of his housemates later said, “If Bear decided that X brand toothpaste was it, you’d better switch to X, or you’d never hear the end of it.” His pursuit of quality was part of his gift to the Grateful Dead, but it came with baggage.

After a dismal high school educational experience epitomized, he said, by getting a D for pointing out that his physics teacher contradicted the textbook, he briefly attended the University of Virginia engineering school, where he discovered that engineers generally sat at desks and used slide rules. He wanted to make things, and over the decade of the fifties he spent time in the air force, where he learned that he was ill suited to take orders as an enlisted man. On his return to civilian life, he had various technical electronics jobs at Rocketdyne and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked at radio and television stations as an announcer and engineer, and studied Russian, ballet, and almost anything else that caught his fancy. In 1963 he moved to Berkeley to take classes and found himself living near campus in a rooming house called the Brown Shoe. He’d tried pot, then grew interested in psychedelics, and one day a friend gave him some authentic Sandoz Laboratory LSD. Since he wanted to take more, he concluded that he’d have to make it himself. His inexhaustible curiosity led him to the U.C. Berkeley chemistry library, and he began serious research. Needing money for the process, he first sold morning glory seeds, then traded some seeds for some amphetamine (“speed”). He needed a scale to weigh the speed and went into the U.C. chemistry building, walked up to a chemistry student named Melissa, and asked to borrow hers. They grew friendly, became lovers, and after a while they began making speed in the laboratory, which gave them enough money to make LSD.

Owsley’s subtle approach to LSD making was unique, and critical to the history of psychedelia, because what he made was an immense quantity of extraordinarily pure LSD. Without him, there simply wouldn’t have been enough acid for the psychedelic scene of the Bay Area in the sixties to have ignited. Owsley had a personality that wanted to dominate, to “gain mastery over” whatever it was that interested him, said Melissa, “to penetrate into things,” as he put it himself. When he was twenty, he’d been very ill and had spent some time analyzing religion, reading everything from the
Book of Mormon
to the texts of High Church Anglicans. It all seemed like the hypocritical work of priests to him. Then he met a lifelong friend, Bob Thomas, who led him to alchemy. Having by now read the Rosicrucians and theosophy, the psychedelic experience made utter sense to him. Alchemy teaches that the universe is a mind, or in the language of quantum physics, a set of vibrations. All reality is a series of standing waves and can be modulated by the mind. Since LSD itself modulated the mind, Owsley assumed that it was profoundly sensitive to the atmosphere in which it was made, and he approached making it as an alchemical act, with a fanatical concern for purity of both heart and chemistry. His standards were so exacting that he rejected a significant proportion of his yield. Between 1965 and 1967 he made about 450 grams of crystalline LSD. A gram produces 3,600 quite strong (250 microgram) doses, so his total was around 1,250,000 hits. He gave away at least half.