A Long Strange Trip (18 page)

Sometime before the Muir Beach Acid Test, a friend of Owsley’s had taken him to La Honda to meet Kesey, and their encounter was a revelation to Bear. Owsley thought he’d understood psychedelics, but this was another level of experience. Then he went to Muir Beach, where he was completely overwhelmed and terrified, primarily by “Garcia’s guitar, which seemed to come out of the universe and try to eat me alive.” It occurred to him that there was a metaphorical barrier in the mind, like the literal hymen of a virgin woman, and that the Prankster group mind psychedelic experience tore through it. “I let totally go, went off into the universe, and there was no one running my body, which was running around doing crazy goofy things because I had left. I had gone off into a part of the universe that was just a spiral, and every so often I would be presented with some fantastic scene.” Kesey, the Pranksters, and the Grateful Dead had gotten into his head, and he would have to come to grips with this, and to dominate it. The whole point of the acid test, it seemed to Bear, was to “expose you right down to your infinite detail, exposing you to forces of the universe that [Kesey and the Pranksters] didn’t thoroughly understand.” All the demons and spirits that are part of mythology and part of alchemical lore were “part of that real other reality which you fall right into with things like the acid test . . . They had discovered on their own the secret rituals of the ancient witchcraft rites and alchemical rites of human history that had been lost, suppressed by the Christian church among other things.” Bear, too, would help them take it to another level.

Leaning on the top rail of a driftwood fence outside the lodge at dawn, Garcia, Kesey, and Babbs chatted about the glorious futures they saw arising from their experiences. “Just like the big time,” thought Babbs. “It is, it is the big time! Why, we could cut a chart-busting record tofuckin
-morrow!”
“Hey, we taped tonight’s show,” said Kesey. “We could
release
a record tomorrow.” Alone among them, Garcia stayed grounded. “Yeah, right. And a year from tomorrow be recording a ‘Things Go Better with Coke’ commercial.”

The acid tests had a much more enduring legacy than this momentary megalomania, for they would serve as the template that permanently defined the Grateful Dead’s view of its audience. The bond between virtually all theatrical or musical performers and their audience is romantic; the artist seeks love, the audience gives it. The Grateful Dead certainly sought to entertain and move its audience, but the root basis of their relationship was that of a partnership of equals, of companions in an odyssey. Ironically enough, these young people, in both the band and the audience, would go on to achieve an incredibly mature bond. The only parallel in American music might be the relationship of certain jazz musicians to their audience. Coltrane had truly left his mark.

As the year turned over into 1966, the Dead enjoyed a special Neal Cassady road adventure, taking the acid test to Portland, Oregon. The main road from the Bay Area to Portland crosses a shoulder of Mount Shasta and then the Siskiyou mountain range, and in January it is no casual drive. The bus broke down in far northern California, and they proceeded to take psychic hostages at a gas station, intimidating the locals with Dead-Prankster flash. They rented a U-Haul truck and stuffed the Dead, the Pranksters, their equipment, and a generator into the back for a ride without chains on a road coated by black ice and effectively closed by a blizzard to all vehicles driven by sane people. “You did this?” someone asked Kreutzmann, incredulous. “Shit yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed it.” Because of the generator, they had an intercom to the cab, which resulted in an expedition with Cassadyan commentary. When Lesh fell out for a nap, Pigpen took the shotgun seat, tranquilly watching I-5 flow by at 70 mph as they passed the occasional truck still out, but seeing damn little else in the near-zero visibility. The radio was playing as loud as possible, the raving went on nonstop. No problem: Neal was driving.

Compared to that, the Portland Acid Test was unsurprisingly anticlimactic, although Weir had an extraordinary personal experience. At some point in the evening, he suddenly felt as though he couldn’t play a wrong note. “I felt golden,” he said, as his hands played effortlessly without him in control, or needing to be. It was a humbling and joyful moment. The next morning was just the opposite. They were rehearsing on headphones, and M.G. and George Walker, the Prankster technicians, began feeding them a delayed sound signal. For the longest time, Weir couldn’t get anything right, and blamed himself.

On returning to the Bay Area, they had a couple of gigs at the Matrix, where the Airplane had begun. It was a tiny bar with a capacity of perhaps one hundred, so small that the lighting booth was built over the toilet fixtures. There were noise complaints even without performers, and then the Dead moved in. Lacking a permit, the Matrix could not allow dancing, so it was not a particularly comfortable show. Nonetheless, Garcia loved it, because they were only a few blocks from the bay, and it was possible to hear the foghorns. In addition to Chuck Berry, the jug material, Pig’s blues tunes, and the originals, they’d added a couple of covers—Bobby Bland’s “(Turn on Your) Lovelight” and the Olympics/Young Rascals’ “Good Lovin’ ”—and three more originals: “You Can’t Catch Me,” “The Monster,” and “Otis on a Shakedown Cruise.”

Came Saturday, January 8, and things got a little complicated in San Francisco’s rock world. The Dead were playing an acid test at the Fillmore. Over at Longshoremen’s Hall, radio station KYA was sponsoring a “teen dance” with the Vejtables. And the Family Dog had revived itself to put on the Jefferson Airplane and the Charlatans at California Hall on Polk Street, a Heidelberg castle look-alike which had been Das Deutsche Haus until World War I. Luria Castell had returned from her vacation in Mexico and was living at a boarding house at 710 Ashbury Street in the Haight-Ashbury, where the house manager was a semistudent named Danny Rifkin. Rifkin was working at the post office, and with free rent, his $200 in savings “seemed to be gobs,” so he gladly lent it to Luria for the show. He also helped her put up posters promoting the gig, and was rewarded with the Coca-Cola concession. His friend Rock Scully, also an S.F. State student, was now the Charlatans’ manager, so he, too, was part of that night’s show. When they learned about the acid test from Kesey, who had visited a State philosophy class, they decided to combine forces, and agreed that tickets to each show were good for both. They had even planned a shuttle bus between buildings—the Dead had mentioned it the night before at the Matrix—but it fell through. The California Hall show was a success, although Rifkin actually made more on the Cokes than Luria did on the entire show, because the poster artist, George Hunter of the Charlatans, had put the Coke logo on the poster, and Rifkin got a tremendous discount when he went to the bottling plant to stock up. What happened after the show, however, was more important. Danny and Rock went to the Fillmore.

Ralph Gleason’s column reported that the people at the Fillmore were “like the backstage crowd at the California Hall dance.” There were the usual costumes, strobe lights, balloons, TV cameras, electronic equipment, and so forth. Paul Foster now had a white mechanic’s suit with a black cross on the front and a message that read “Please Don’t Believe in Magic” on the back. There were giant Frisbees, and girls with four-inch eyelashes. Sara Garcia’s job was to draw designs on everyone’s hand as a method for marking people as having paid. At concerts later, it would be a split-second process with an ink stamp, but at the acid test, Sara would do a reading of the person and then translate it into an elaborate design.

The evening passed through the usual divine madness. Brian Rohan, a local attorney and an old University of Oregon friend of Kesey’s, had put up the seventy-five dollars for the hall rental and was mortified when the show started late. For some reason, the spiked Kool-Aid, complete with a dry-ice float, didn’t come out until nearly 10 P.M., and the band didn’t go on until 11:30. It was Rock Scully’s first Grateful Dead show, and he would be impressed. “An hour or so into the set and something very odd starts to happen. It’s the room, doctor. The room is
breathing.
Breathing deeply, like a great sonic lung from which all sounds originate and which demands all the oxygen in the world. We inhale and exhale with it as if to the great collective heartbeat of an invisible whale. We are all under the hypnotic spell of this ghostly pulse.” John Warnecke, a close friend of Kreutzmann’s, ascended into the heavens and found himself in sync with the drums at the same time that he found himself in front of the power controls for the entire hall. He began to flash the switches in time to the beat, which proved somewhat disconcerting to the rest of the conclave. In time, Billy came and settled John down near the drums.

It was the ending that everyone would recall. Around 2 A.M. the police came by to close the show, although in the absence of alcohol they lacked any legal authority to do so. Their first question was the usual “Who’s in charge here?” Since the idea of anyone being in charge at an acid test was among the funniest thoughts imaginable, various participants began chanting, “Hug the heat.” There wasn’t a shred of paranoia in the room that night, and to Garcia the cops were “buffoons, dog police.” An officer came out onstage and motioned for the band to stop, and was duly ignored. The cops grew perplexed. Everyone was acting weird, but confusingly so. “They’re pretty fast for drunks,” they thought. “Pretty quick-witted, too.” They tried to use the house P.A. to announce closing, but their voices came out sounding peculiar, particularly after Warnecke offered them a little Kool-Aid. They began to pull power cords out of the wall, and M.G. followed them and plugged things back in. At length the band stopped playing and the police dutifully began shooing everyone out, although it was a slow process.

It occurred to Lesh and Weir that when a TV station goes off the air, it plays “The Star-Spangled Banner,” so they began an
a cappella
duet. Spotting a twenty-foot ladder, and always part monkey, Weir swarmed up to continue his end of the duet from on high. A too-many-donuts cop eyed the rickety thing and decided on discretion, refusing to follow Weir and merely barking, “Come on down off that ladder, kid.”

“No.”

“Come down or you’re gonna really be in trouble.”

“Now I’m really not gonna come down.”

Eventually, the officer gave up. But there was another bit of fallout from the Fillmore Acid Test. Since the benefit on December 10, Bill Graham had coveted the Fillmore as a dance hall, and he was working on his game plan. Bill Kreutzmann, the most practical member of the Dead, and therefore the de facto business manager, had gone through Graham to get the building for the acid test. One of the side aspects of the evening had been the spontaneous repainting of the Fillmore’s bathrooms. And so on the day after the test, leaseholder Charles Sullivan came in to find his sleek chrome and black and yellow replaced with electric Day-Glo pastels. He was disturbed. Bill Graham grew disturbed, and decided to share his feelings with Kreutzmann. It was by no means the last time the Dead would disturb Bill Graham.

Graham mollified Sullivan, the initiation passed quickly, and the Dead joined the Great Society and other bands in yet another Mime Troupe benefit on January 14, Graham’s swan song with the troupe. The Dead also played that week at the Matrix. All of it, however, was only a buildup to the “big show,” which had been in the planning for some time and scheduled for late in January, the Trips Festival. The previous summer, Ramon Sender of the Tape Music Center had broached an idea to the light artist Tony Martin about some sort of “crazy ceremonial.” Tony suggested talking to Stewart Brand, the anthropologist. In December, Prankster Mike Hagen visited Brand and began, as Brand put it, “blathering how there was going to be [i.e., should be] an acid test at Longshoremen’s Hall or some such high-viz venue in San Francisco. I knew there was no way the Pranksters could actually bring off the preparation for such an ambitious occasion, but it seemed eminently worth doing, so I just picked up the phone and started doing it.” It was to be a mixed-media event, an “electronic circus,” a synthesis of all the various vectors of artistic change zipping around the Bay Area into one combined event. Years before, Kesey had posited a “Neon Renaissance” that connected the work of Ornette Coleman, the Bay Area choreographer Ann Halprin, Lenny Bruce, William Burroughs, and Jerry’s old art teacher, Wally Hedrick. With a little discreet chemical help, it could happen. They’d selected the entire third weekend of January as the time and Longshoremen’s Hall as the place. Rock bands would also be a part of the action. At first Ramon thought of inviting the Charlatans, but they’d rented space at the Tape Music Center and damaged the ceiling. In the end, the rock component would be the Dead and a new band, Big Brother and the Holding Company.

The buildup to the Trips Festival was a rich stew. The organizers were media-savvy, and as early as January 9 an
Examiner
piece on Marshall McLuhan had a plug for the festival. On the eighteenth the
Chronicle
ran an article called “Glorious Electricity,” which revealed that “in his infinite wisdom the Almighty is vouchsafing visions in certain people in our midst along side which the rapturous transports of sweet old St. Theresa are but early Milton Berle shows on a ten inch screen.” The psychedelic underground was beginning to surface. On January 16 Kesey went to court to resolve a pot bust at La Honda from the previous April, receiving six months on a work farm and six months probation, but was set free on bail pending appeal. On the nineteenth, just two days before the festival was due to begin, Kesey and Mountain Girl were smoking a joint on the roof of Stewart Brand’s North Beach apartment and managed to get arrested, making the front pages of every afternoon paper in the Bay Area. Out on bail once again, thanks to their very good attorney, Brian Rohan, Kesey and Mountain Girl helped hype the festival with a ceremony in downtown San Francisco’s Union Square, releasing balloons that read “Now” and playing on Ron Boise’s
Thunder Machine,
a sculpture of metal, wires, and springs. Kesey’s white Levi’s carried a message: one side of his derriere read “Hot,” one “Cold”; the middle was marked “Tibet.”