A Long Strange Trip (19 page)

The Trips Festival began on Friday the twenty-first, with Brand’s “America Needs Indians” slide show, the Open Theater, a comedy troupe called the Congress of Wonders, the Jazz Mice, liquid projections, and so forth. The Dead went to get a feel for the place. The night was not without its amusements. Vera Mae Frederickson, an assistant at the Lowe Anthropology Museum at U.C. Berkeley, was part of Brand’s scene. She took part as an 1870 acculturated Apache, complete with a tepee on the floor. A Hell’s Angel approached her and said, “Well, I’m an Angel, and we all get along real well with oppressed people.” When he offered her a joint, he was welcomed right into the tent.

Saturday offered work from the Tape Music Center, the Acid Test (i.e., Kesey and the Pranksters), Ann Halprin’s Dancer’s Workshop, the Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. There were five screens on the walls, a center platform with projectors, and a pair of traffic lights blinking away. The Beat poet Michael McClure read, avant-garde filmmakers John Korty and Bruce Conner showed their work, Kesey emceed, and all hell broke delightfully loose. Up on the scaffolding, Stewart Brand felt “the pure juiciness” of being in the middle of “a sea of high weirdness, with a full sense of initiation and none whatever of control— that combination was tonic.” Some bits of theater—a shadow play on his tepee, for instance—failed, Brand recalled, and other parts worked incredibly. He’d hired a world-class gymnast, Dan Millman, to dive off the balcony onto a trampoline under a strobe light. “In his ski mask he did Olympic-quality flips and spins and visions of flashing human flight that ignited psychedelic dazzlement in all who saw him. I imagine that most remember him as hallucinogenic rather than real. His act was utterly in the midst—it was never advertised, announced, or reported. Seeming spontaneous, its impact helped inspire an evening of, and a generation of, boundless spontaneity.”

“By Saturday I felt as though I was a priestess,” said Sara. She had always been a dancer, and now costumes were part of the event, fantasy clothing. She wore sleazy tight neon green leopard-print satin bell-bottoms and declared that the “whole room just went into orbit.” Kesey was at an overhead projector in the middle of the room, writing messages to one and all, she said, and “you’d look up and see your thoughts magically on the ceiling. Everyone was so open, ready to go on.” Hunter had momentarily been a bit uncomfortable, lost in some dreary rut, and then looked up to see Kesey’s message, “Outside is inside, how does it look?” and instantly, his mood rose and everything was great. “Lights flashing . . . everything would be demolished, spilled, broken, affected, and after that another thing would happen, maybe smoothing out the chaos,” said Garcia. “What you said might come out a minute later on a tape loop in some other part of the place . . . Thousands of people, man, all helplessly stoned, all finding themselves in a roomful of other thousands of people, none of whom any of them were afraid of. It was magic, far out, beautiful magic.” Another time, he added, “It was open, a tapestry, a mandala—it was whatever you made it . . . the quest is to extend the limit, to go as far as you can go. In the Acid Test that meant to do away with old forms . . . everybody was creating . . . [there was a] willingness for everybody to be constantly on the lookout for something new.”

There were simply more tripping people in one room—between three thousand and five thousand—than anyone had ever seen before. “Nobody knew there were so many freaks,” said Lesh. “Nobody could have guessed that you could give thousands of people acid in one room and not have it blow up from the psychic energy. My main visual image was the sea of people, with waves rippling through it. It was a higher stage than we were used to. There was an incredible variety of dress, color, and lighting. Waves of light, waves of light which turned out to be people. It reminded me of the Boccioni painting
The City Rises—
he was a Futurist—this picture of a team of horses pulling construction gear in turn-of-the-century Milan. The energy and light of it, people became light, the light solidified into people. My other image of that night was that the cords of our equipment were literally jumping out of the wall sockets, there was so much energy.”

And it was the Dead that played to it, although Big Brother briefly preceded them. Big Brother was a new band whose bassist, Peter Albin, was their old friend from the Boar’s Head. It had begun as a group of jammers at 1090 Page Street, where Chet Helms, the pot dealer, organized parties. He’d introduced guitarist Jim Gurley, a friend of his from Detroit, to the jam scene, and they’d taken shape as a band. But the night of the festival was part of their first week of existence, and they weren’t ready. The Dead, thought Ramon Sender, more or less gently pushed them off the stage, and the night did indeed go into orbit: “It was obvious that the Dead had what the audience wanted,” said Sender, “and they played the shit out of their instruments.” “It was music,” Lesh added, “that was seriously intended to get you high. Not deadpan but high farce . . . and it was music that actually changed people’s personalities. It was warping.” The fact that the building was concrete and sounded awful actually helped, reverberating the sound through everyone, pounding the music into their bones. Someone dosed some ice cream and encouraged the security guards to partake. Soon, the doors were open to all. An ordinary citizen/tourist had just flown in from Southeast Asia, heard the music, and wandered in. Eventually, he asked Sara Garcia what was going on. Being that sort of soul, she tried to tell him: “Oh, this is where we’re just brothers and sisters and join God here on earth.” It really did feel heavenly.

One of the physiological limits of LSD is that one tends to react less intensely by the third night in a row. Sunday the twenty-third was subdued, as tiredness set in. The idea for the evening was to take the various elements of the first two nights, have everybody do everything at once, and have a cosmic pinball machine choose, randomly, what everyone would hear. It didn’t work, and for the Grateful Dead there was a more significant problem. At some point in the evening, Kesey wrote on his overhead projector, “Garcia, plug in.” Jerry looked down at his guitar only to discover that the bridge was flattened and the strings had rolled up the neck; it required serious surgery. A man carrying a clipboard and wearing a cardigan sweater that would have been appropriate on a golf course ran up. “What’s the matter?” he said. Garcia was stoned and having a good time, and, after all, this was an acid test; he was free to play or not play. “Well, my guitar . . . ,” he said vaguely, shrugging. The stranger, Bill Graham—to this point, his contacts with the band had been with Lesh and Kreutzmann, and Garcia was, after all, quite stoned—sat down and frantically began trying to fix the guitar, a task for which he was heroically unqualified. But his desire to be helpful would leave an indelible impression on Garcia. “It was so sweet—I loved Bill from then on. I’ll always love him for that. What does he know about a guitar? He was so earnest, there in the midst of total chaos. It was just the nicest gesture.”

In the week before the festival, with the energy mushrooming and then Kesey being arrested, the de facto producers, Ramon Sender and Stewart Brand, grew a little nervous and decided they needed someone to help manage the event. They called Graham, then in the process of leaving the Mime Troupe and striking out on his own, and offered him the job. He said sure, asking for a percentage, which would turn out to be $800, his first paying job as a producer. Running about the Trips Festival with his watch and clipboard, he tried to create order out of chaos and not surprisingly failed. He also annoyed some of the participants. Weir’s memory of that night was “Who’s this asshole with the clipboard?” This was a not-uncommon reaction. When Graham found Kesey, wearing a space suit complete with spherical helmet, letting in some Hell’s Angels by a side door, he confronted him, screaming, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Kesey simply closed his bubble helmet.

The media response to the Trips Festival was fairly predictable. The
Examiner
story patronizingly reported that the supposed orgy had gone silent when interrupted by an announcement of a missing child. “In the clutch, the mantle [of social responsibility] fell back into place.” In the
Chronicle,
Ralph Gleason criticized the production for failing to deliver all the things it promised, dismissed Friday and Sunday as bores, and held that the success of Saturday night was directly related to the rock music. The
Daily Cal
’s rock critic, “Mr. Jones” ( Jann Wenner), agreed. “The Acid Test is at its best as a dance, but once the music stops, it becomes very dull.” Both
Newsweek
and
Time
covered the event, and the latter was particularly feeble. “Happenings Are Happening” reported that “a woman in a negligee was bombarded with raw eggs,” that “a stark-naked Negro beat the drums,” and that “pounding music exploded in the eardrums and blurred reason.” Nonetheless, it was the first pebble of what would become a landslide of national media coverage of San Francisco’s rock/psychedelic culture.

The Dead followed up the festival with more work at the Matrix, and also a small acid test at Sound City, a studio in the South of Market neighborhood. Ray Andersen, the Matrix soundman, was at Sound City, and recalled that Kreutzmann and his wife were fighting, that Bear was irritating everyone not in the Dead and seemed primarily concerned with making sure that the man who owned the studio did not get a copy of anything recorded. Garcia went around saying, “Cut out this craziness, we’re going to play again.” And Lesh spent the best part of the evening sitting with Owsley, with whom he fell in love. “Hanging around with him was like being in a science-fiction movie,” Lesh said, and Phil was a sci-fi fan. In a sense, he felt he already knew Bear, since any artist puts his self into his art, and by now they knew Owsley’s art quite well. Phil had asked Owsley if he’d like to be their manager. “No, I wouldn’t like that.” “How about soundman, we need one of those.” “Well, I don’t know anything about that, either, but I guess I could probably learn. It sounds like more fun.” Bear was on the bus.

And the bus was pulling out. Late in January the Pranksters met, and Kesey asked a Ouija board for advice regarding his legal problems. The message he gleaned was: leave. Being a novelist, he was constitutionally unable to do it simply, so he concocted a fake suicide. A friend took a Prankster truck up the coast and left it near Eureka, along with a pair of Kesey’s shoes and a note that read in part, “Ocean ocean I’ll beat you in the end,” while Kesey headed for Mexico. Bereft of their leader, the Pranksters decided to follow, with a stop in Los Angeles. Now rehearsing with their new soundman at a Berkeley club called the Questing Beast, the Dead were inclined to join them in Los Angeles, with vague plans to investigate the music business headquartered there. Bear didn’t particularly like it, but he was overruled, and they decided to go. Just as they were leaving town, Phil drove past the Fillmore Auditorium, now run by Bill Graham, and read the marquee: “Jefferson Airplane, with sights and sounds of the Trips Festival.” Since the Airplane hadn’t even been part of the festival, he was annoyed. “Asshole,” he thought. “Now who’s gonna reap the harvest of what the acid test has sown? The Jefferson Airplane and Bill Graham? Who’s gonna clean up now?”

11

Hollywood and Home Again (2/6/66–5/1/66)

Owsley had other business, so the band flew to L.A. without him. They were met at the airport by his friend Jean Mayo Millay, a scholarly schoolteacher who’d made a documentary movie called The Psychedelic Experience and consequently met Tim Leary, Dick Alpert, and Bear. Though she was intellectually up on LSD, Jean was relatively conservative, and she was nonplussed at her first sight of the Dead as they came crashing down the airport stairs, Phil riding the banister, all of them now quite longhaired, Pigpen just plain frightening. “A motlier crew I had never seen.” That night, February 6, there was a small acid test at the Northridge Unitarian Church, out in the San Fernando Valley. Paul Sawyer, the minister, had met Kesey at an Esalen conference and was happy to welcome the remaining Pranksters. “Great to see you. We’ve got a great place for you to hide the bus,” he told Julius Karpen, a new Prankster. “We don’t hide,” replied Julius.

On February 12, the Pranksters and the Dead threw the Watts Acid Test at a dirty, dusty warehouse in Compton, and for various reasons it became legendary. Apparently, two people independently arranged the Kool-Aid that night, and it was a very strong dose. It was hot in the warehouse, so everyone was thirsty, and there was only one thing to drink. There was also the Bear factor. His sound system was essentially experimental and usually caused long delays in the setup process. This was the case at Watts, and everyone got terrifically high while waiting for the band to play. Even the band got weirded out, and Kreutzmann recalled it as the first time that he ever felt uncomfortable playing while high. It certainly did not help that the test seemed to become the evening’s most popular topic on the Los Angeles Police Department’s radio system, and there were a considerable number of police cars around. When the police entered, they displayed the traditional charm of the LAPD, shining flashlights in people’s faces. Naturally, at least one participant obliged them with a rant: “I’m so high, I am so far out. Where I am, my consciousness is so far beyond anything you can comprehend.” Though undoubtedly true, it was hardly diplomatic.

The Pranksters went into survival mode, taking an occasional breather outside on the railroad tracks. Mike Hagen, who was part jack-rabbit, leaped over a six-foot fence in back of the building and landed in a garbage can. Everyone laughed, until he looked up and saw police everywhere. Paul Foster, his face painted half black and half silver, was arrested, which would inspire the infamous “Blue Boy” episode of everyone’s favorite advertisement for the LAPD,
Dragnet.
Eventually, the warehouse was surrounded by wooden sawhorses. Outside the sawhorses was a ring of helmeted men holding billy clubs.

In these circumstances, it was not surprising that there was a significant freak-out in Watts. A young lady had a fight with her boyfriend, Ray, who stalked off. Lost in the ozone, she began to wail, “Ray? Ray? Who cares? Who cares?” Babbs decided to involve everyone, and put a microphone in front of her face with the comment “Freak freely.” Of course, her cries ran into a figure-eight time-delay loop, which only succeeded in further disorienting her. It fell to new Prankster Hugh Romney to comfort her, which he was magnificently equipped to do. Romney had been the poetry director of the Gaslight Cafe in New York, and for a while his roommate in his apartment upstairs had been Bob Dylan, who’d written “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” on Hugh’s typewriter. Romney had read his poetry as an opening act for Thelonious Monk, worked in improvisational comedy with the Committee in San Francisco, and then had come to Los Angeles, where he was at that time working with brain-damaged children. Hugh took over with the “Who cares?” lady, and then he got some help from the stage.

A cappella,
Pigpen began to sing. “I wanna know, do you feel good? . . . I wanna know, can you find yo’ mind?” The audience responded
“Oh, yes,”
and Pig—possibly the only person in the room not tripping— snickered, “If you can, you better get on out of this place.” But the young lady kept on, and Pigpen and Hugh were there for her. “I wanna tell everybody in da house right now—[audience:]
Yeah!—
there’s many many things you got to do one more time
—Yeah!—
You gotta think about yo’ neighbors
—Yeah!—
You got to think about yo’ friends
—Yeah!—
You got to think about yo’ brothers . . . You got to think about everybody that means something . . . I’m talkin’ ’bout somebody who lost a little bit of love
—
Yeah!—
Somebody lost a little bit of friendship!
—Yeah!—
I wanna know, do you know what I’m talking about now?
—Yeah!—
You know what I’m talkin’ about now.” Ray returned from his snit, and the night proceeded from there with more ups than downs. When the test concluded about sunrise, a giggling Neal Cassady took the garbage can of Kool-Aid outside—it was the first time they’d ever had any left over—to pour into a storm drain. As he poured, it began to dawn on an officer that whatever caused the oddness happening that night was literally going down the drain. Just as the thought was fully realized, it was too late.

It had been a harsh and demanding night. Sara and Jerry, who’d been estranged for some weeks, he having taken a lover and she having followed suit, were discussing their daughter Heather’s future when two cops walked in. Sara approached them and asked if she could help them. They wondered aloud what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like this, “and I tried to explain it to them.” After this particularly futile conversation, she and Jerry wandered outside, where George Walker was parking the bus, directed by Neal, who was so remarkably high that no one would let him drive—a virtually unprecedented event. Neal was always both mentally and physically humorous, a combination, Garcia had said, of Lenny Bruce and Buster Keaton, but this morning he surpassed himself on the Keaton side, slooowwwly directing the backing bus into a signpost, which it knocked over. He began to joke with the post physically, acting like a drunk hanging off it, wobbling about. By now it was early Sunday morning, and as two elderly women passed by on their way to church, he mimed hiding the pole behind his back. Afterward, he oh-so-very-slowly drove Garcia home.

When they passed the Watts Towers, a peculiar local artistic monument to junk sculpture, Garcia had an epiphany. The Towers was the work of one person, Simon Rodia, and it was concrete, which is to say material. Early on February 13, Sunday morning coming down, nerves shredded by a grueling night, he gazed at the Towers and came to several conclusions. One was that material artifacts made no sense to him; whatever art he could participate in would have to be intangible, something that left behind only memories. In other words, music. And it had to be a group effort. The individual artist, as epitomized in Rodia or even more extremely in Neal Cassady, wasn’t going to work for Garcia. Neal was his own brilliant, if demented, artist, and his own product as well. But he was also isolated. Something “dynamic” had a chance, Garcia thought, something cooperative but leaderless, and operating in real time, in the present moment. “This isn’t strictly recreational,” he decided. “This is really important. And that’s when I started paying attention.”

The members of the Grateful Dead settled down in Los Angeles to conquer the music business; how, they hadn’t a clue. Someone found them a stucco home off Western Avenue on the outskirts of Watts which would be dubbed the Pink House. On one side was a den of iniquity, variously described as a home for gambling and/or prostitution, and on the other, the home of an elderly woman. It was never clear who complained more about the noise their practicing made. A year later they’d describe their sojourn to friends:

GARCIA:
“And then we went to L.A. and suffered for three months. Didn’t accomplish much. It wasn’t all bad. There were some high lights, some low lights.”
PIG:
“Sitting on the front porch. Riding them little kids’ bicycles.”
GARCIA:
“We had some fun, I must say, come to think of it. Hah. We’ve never failed to have
some
fun.”
PIG:
“Watched a lot of TV.”
GARCIA:
“Watched a lot of TV, ate a lot of steak.”
PIG:
“The only good thing about L.A. is they’ve got about a thousand television stations.”
GARCIA:
“. . . nothing much else going on. We stayed in the house there, afraid to go out on the streets.”

The Pink House was a bizarre place. There was no furniture other than a few mattresses and cartons, although Weir somehow managed to procure a brass bed for himself and his girlfriend, Barbara Lee. Instruments and equipment filled the living room, their bedrooms were on the second floor, and Owsley had the whole top floor. But the twistiest aspect of the Pink House was the cuisine. As a young man, Bear had been overweight, but in his twenties he’d come across a book on the Eskimo all-meat diet. It worked for him, and he espoused it with the same fervor he used for LSD. Bear ate meat. Bear ate
only
meat. Since he was their patron and their sole source of income, controlling the money and LSD, and since he theorized that meat generated the most calories for the dollar and was therefore financially efficient, there was nothing in the house to eat but meat and milk. They ate standing up in the kitchen, cutting off steaks from a side of beef and frying them.

The women involved were less than impressed. Sara, already living apart from Garcia, felt that the band was “in captivity,” that the house felt “perverse, evil.” Bear was “obviously a wizard, obviously a madman,” but . . . Brenda Kreutzmann would recall having to fight hard to get oatmeal for her baby, Stacey. What women did do at the Pink House was laundry. One run to the Laundromat involved thirty-seven washing machine loads. Sara had finally become Wendy to the Lost Boys, but fairly soon she decided that she’d rather be Peter Pan. Early on, she and Garcia had a last talk, after which she and toddler Heather returned to the Bay Area. The other women visitors were equally skeptical. Phil’s girlfriend, Florence Jean Nathan, came to join them and remembered a night in which Bear had decided that all would take LSD. Phil was tired, and declined. Somewhat later, Bear charged in. “The band is my body. You are my left leg. My left leg is asleep. You must get high.” With a sigh, Phil got up and got high.

Not that they were puppets. Aside from searching out an alternative diet with clandestine visits to Canter’s, the famed L.A. deli, the members of the family could always float a dissenting viewpoint about Owsley, or anything else, for that matter. Brenda Kreutzmann, for instance, mocked his short stature and penchant for patchouli, high-heeled boots, and excessively trendy taste in clothing, calling him a “hippie Sonny Bono.” Within the band, Bob Weir kept his own counsel on Bear. “He had Phil’s mind, so much that Jerry wasn’t about to fight it,” recalled Weir. “And if Jerry wasn’t about to fight it, then I wasn’t about to fight it. Billy couldn’t give a shit. Billy saw, ‘Here’s this guy with some bucks, and he’s going to bankroll us.’ Made sense to Billy. I’m thinkin’, we could go out and play strip bars, we can do that. But the older guys want to go with this Bearzeebub guy. As far as I was concerned, Owsley was the devil. I’d just as soon have him living on the top floor than not know where he is.”

One of Weir’s essential memories of Owsley involved his nickname. Owsley would have it that “Bear” came from his teen years, but to Weir it involved the considerable volume Bear lent to his carnal pursuits. When Weir would have to ascend to Bear’s third-floor lair to tell him there was a phone call, he would hear from the other side of the door a “combination of a flying saucer invasion and some sort of demonic hoedown” that would leave him “dumbstruck.”

Bear had two other significant effects on the band at this time, one technological, the other business-oriented. Even before they’d left San Francisco, he’d invited Rock Scully, the manager of the Charlatans, to assume management of the band. Scully agreed, asking if he could bring along his partner, Danny Rifkin. Scully had only a limited knowledge of the music business, but he had nerve and vision, and just as the band slowly learned how to play, he slowly learned how to promote. He’d grown up in Carmel, part of the bohemian artistic scene that included Henry Miller and Ansel Adams. His stepfather, Milton Mayer of the War Resisters League (WRL), had a show on NBC radio called
Voices of Europe,
and Rock had spent some of his childhood holding Milton’s tape recorder, meeting Bertrand Russell among others.

After studying with Kurt Adler at the University of Vienna, Rock graduated in 1963 from a Quaker school in Indiana, Earlham College. He entered San Francisco State to work on a graduate degree, mixing a WRL-inspired antiwar social consciousness with the psychedelics he’d discovered in Europe. His income came from dealing pot in five-dollar matchboxes and ten-dollar “lids” in Prince Albert tobacco cans. He also got to know people like Luria Castell through a series of civil rights demonstrations that had begun at State and spread across the city to Auto Row and the Sheraton Hotel. Running backstage errands at the Monterey Jazz Festival had been his first introduction to the music business, and on January 8 he’d left the Family Dog show at California Hall and gone to the Fillmore Acid Test, where he “had the distinct sensation that the roof was lifting off. I was totally taken aback.” He told Bear that he thought the Dead “were extraordinarily ugly and would probably never make it commercially, but I’d never heard a more amazing band musically.” When his thesis was rejected at State, he had the perfect excuse to get on the bus, and moved to Los Angeles.

Danny Rifkin, his partner, was a little more cautious and first came to the Pink House as a visitor, then instantly became an integral part of the band’s gathering momentum. On his initial visit, everyone took LSD together, and another guest, a marine just about to leave for Vietnam, grew terrified. Rifkin’s compassion for the marine made Weir “fall in love with Danny the day I met him. He entered my whole world at the top rung of the ladder.” Simple trustworthiness was sufficient for Weir at that point, since the two new managers had succeeded Hank Harrison, who’d gotten them the gig on Broadway just three months before. But Hank was patently a “shuck and jivester,” thought Weir, while Rifkin’s essential righteousness was equally obvious. Appropriately, Rifkin’s first ambition had been that of a street youth worker. Now he had some other youths to try to help. Born and raised in New York City, an official red diaper baby—his parents were members of the Communist Party—he learned social responsibility from his father, a printer and later writer and teacher. The family moved to Los Angeles, and Danny briefly attended UCLA, then Berkeley, then flunked out and moved to the Haight-Ashbury. He became the building manager at 710 Ashbury and so met first Rock and then Luria Castell, and his circle of acquaintances at his post office job included Tom Constanten, Phil Lesh, and Steve Reich, among other familiar names. In later years he would quote a friend that it was “not a small world, but a big family.”