A Long Strange Trip (20 page)

Rock and Danny had a third friend. One of the odder touches of the early Grateful Dead was their tendency to appear at places in a Cadillac convertible, which many would incorrectly recall as a limousine. The car was owned by a friend of Rifkin and Scully’s named Cadillac Ron Rakow, a former stock trader who’d been brought West to advise a woman named Natalie Morman on financial matters. Late in 1965 he arrived in San Francisco with his wife and two children, checking into the Hilton Hotel. Within a few days he’d encountered rock and roll and an attractive friend of Natalie’s named Lydia d’Fonsecca, which caused him to run out on his wife, children, and the hotel bill. Rakow was a stereotypical hustler, always looking for an interesting financial proposition, even as LSD brought him into a rather different culture. When he saw Danny Rifkin profit on the Coca-Cola concession on January 8, he insisted on participating in the next California Hall gig, where he took on the hot dog sales. What he had not yet learned was that tripping people rarely ate, and it was one gamble he lost on, although he and Lydia got to eat the unsold stock. With Lydia as his secretary, he took over a glossy-looking office at Van Ness and Lombard in San Francisco, but it was a dubious enterprise. Danny and Rock, inured to conventional business ethics, once spent the night helping him forge signatures on real estate documents, and on another occasion found it hilarious when he asked them to leave by the window so that an arriving visitor wouldn’t see them. At any rate, he had the Cadillac. He was also a very fine amateur photographer, and he began to hang around the Dead’s scene.

Owsley’s primary official responsibility was as soundman, and he had serious ambitions for making technology serve music. At the Trips Festival he’d been struck by the thought that, once upon a time, the “pinnacle of technology” on planet earth had been a musical instrument, namely the pipe organ in the era of Mozart. Whatever was presently at the technological pinnacle almost certainly served war, and he wanted to reverse the trend. Shortly before he’d met the Dead, he’d purchased a new home hi-fi. It was inordinately powerful, with an eighty-watt McIntosh amplifier and Voice of the Theater A-7 speakers. His hi-fi became the Grateful Dead’s sound system. Unfortunately, it was not made for knockabout touring, and proved delicate and undependable.

Though Owsley had experience in various facets of electronics, he was not a design engineer, so before they left Berkeley he’d found a hard science assistant, Tim Scully (no relation to Rock). In the seventh grade Tim had won a science fair by designing a primitive computer, and his prize had been a tour of the Berkeley radiation lab. A job there later fostered a heroic ambition to change mercury into gold with a linear accelerator—twentieth-century alchemy. Early in 1965 he took LSD, and his life was transformed. He had long thought that technology could solve social problems, and now he was certain that LSD was the answer. Seeking to spread the word, he tracked down the source of his dose. When Bear learned of Tim’s technical skills, he concluded that they made a nearly perfect match. In the parlance of the era, Scully was a “nerd.” His father had taught him to avoid anything that might endanger a security clearance on the way to a Ph.D., so meeting the Dead, Tim thought, was like “running off to join the circus.” Bear brought him to the Trips Festival to see how he’d react. When he reported experiencing “group mind telepathy,” he was welcomed onto the metaphorical bus and soon after left for L.A.

Bear and Tim’s first project was to modify the guitars. The cables that connected the guitars to the amplifiers were high-impedance, which made them pick up noise and limited the clarity of the signal. By installing a transformer, they could use a low-impedance cable and clean up the signal. Then they began to build a panel with gain, tone, and mixing controls, which would allow them to create a stereo mix. They used Sennheiser microphones, quite advanced for the time, recorded everything so that they could critique the performances, and acquired an oscilloscope to monitor the amplifiers’ output.

Unfortunately, their ambitions vastly overshot their knowledge. The equipment was extremely heavy, and the band coined the term “lead sled” to describe the experience of hauling it around. It took considerable time to set up, and once set up, it worked only intermittently. All of them had much to learn about sound systems, but Bear’s intransigent personality made him slow to acknowledge that. Early on, Phil Lesh found himself standing onstage waiting for Bear and Tim to fix something. Never the most patient of men, he looked down at their derrieres and imagined his right foot in a swift kick. There was the band, ready to play, and there was the “crew,” once again soldering a transformer box on his amplifier. Given their psychedelicized mental state, it was not terribly surprising that they weren’t very efficient. The combination of stonedness and Owsley’s demand for perfection at all costs resulted in endless repetition and delay. They’d err, even a little, and then clip out their work and start all over again. Lesh looked on and reflected, “This is the way it’s going to be.”

Though their announced intention in going to L.A. was to “make it in the record business,” they accomplished little in that realm. They had no connections in the music business, so they made no contact with record companies. Their few gigs were independent and promoted with handbills passed out from Rakow’s Cadillac, an effective tactic in San Francisco, which had a specific district to home in on, but not in diffuse L.A. In addition to the Northridge and Watts Acid Tests, the Dead and the Pranksters staged two other acid tests, the Sunset Acid Test at the Empire Studios, and one at the Cathay Theater, the Pico Acid Test. They were not terribly successful. In Kesey’s absence, Ken Babbs had taken over as Chief Prankster, and acid had not put a dent in the authoritarian tendencies he’d absorbed as a Marine Corps helicopter pilot. His reign spread dissension. It was a difficult time. The Pranksters were in the process of leaving L.A. to join Kesey in Mexico, but not everyone would be allowed to go, and Babbs was the decision-maker. Neal, for instance, would be left behind, because his relationship with his current girlfriend, Ann Murphy, was so explosively messy that even the Pranksters couldn’t stand it. As the Pranksters seethed within, there was ongoing friction between Bear and the Pranksters. At the Pico Acid Test, Julius Karpen recalled an argument with Owsley over money, “and
he
[Bear] was on acid.” In fact, the Bear-Prankster dance generally amused the band members, who saw it as charming. Ironically, Owsley’s priority at this time was the Dead and its music, not spreading acid consciousness. Besides, the acid tests were getting harder and harder to bring off, because their utter anarchy scared too many people.

The Dead put on two regular shows in March, one at the Danish Center and one at Trooper’s Hall, producing amusement but no income. As their time in L.A. wound down, the Dead enjoyed one charming incident. Their neighbors had often complained about the volume of their practicing, and one day the lady next door struck back. After a particularly late night of rehearsal, the musicians were awakened early in the morning by a discordant blare from next door. Their neighbor had lined up every noisemaking device in her home—radios, TV, hi-fi, tape recorder—set them at the windows facing the Pink House, and cranked them up. Her error was that they were all making different sounds, and the result was so bizarre it fascinated them. “If they’d all been on one thing, the stock market report, maybe we’d have been bummed,” thought Weir. Instead, they came out to the driveway, took in the situation, laughed, went over, and made friends.

Their real problem was their utter poverty. Bear was a brilliant chemist but not a profit-driven businessman. Where acid was concerned, he was primarily a messianic true believer, giving away at least half of what he made. He had promised the band that he would concentrate on them and their music and not make LSD while he worked for them, and until the pinch came, he honored his pledge. As March rolled into April, they hit a financial crunch, and the only thing he could do was encapsulate his remaining “stash.” Contrary to popular mythology, there were no capping machines or pill presses in the attic. Instead, Bear made up around three thousand hits by hand, making a paste from the crystalline LSD that was rubbed onto titrate boards. It was called Blue Cheer, and he sold it immediately. In the nature of such things, it instantly generated paranoia. The young lady with whom Bear did business happened to brag to mutual friends about her source, and within a few hours of the sale, Bear heard about it. Having sampled the day’s work, one and all became convinced that the police were on the way. They scurried about the house collecting anything illegal, put it in the trunk of the car, and proceeded to drive around L.A. being very stoned and paranoid, acting so weird that even the denizens of Venice Beach asked them to leave. Miraculously, they managed to get home that night in one piece.

The sale of the Blue Cheer was only a stopgap, and they reached financial bottom. At their last show, at Trooper’s Hall, Weir managed to rip out the seat of his pants. Lacking underwear or a replacement for his trousers, he spent the night facing the audience, sidestepping over to Tim Scully to tell him how to adjust his sound. It turned out not to be so bad. That night he also met a
Playboy
Playmate, a cordial redhead, and she didn’t seem to mind the state of his wardrobe. Finally, Rock lined up a booking back home at the Longshoremen’s Hall that would pay them the respectable sum of $375. It required no persuasion for everyone to pack up and flee Los Angeles. They ascended California in a strenuous trip occasioned by malfunctioning vehicles and a heavy deadline, but when they began to hear San Francisco radio stations, they knew they were almost home, and glad of it.

They got to Longshoremen’s Hall, fell out of their cars, and immediately goofed. The sound system was feeding back and squeaking, so they decided to go to someone’s nearby apartment to wait while Bear and Scully worked on it. As Kreutzmann told the story, they got to the apartment, and then Bear was there, too. “He had a baggie full of white caps . . . it was still going to be a half hour, so a number of us popped at least three more. One and then three . . . ‘Hey, you ready to go?’ ‘Okay, you’re on.’ Everything was just melting, man, we were just blown away . . . everything’s doing what I can think of. I learned that one real early. Anything I can think of, I can see it . . . making my own Technicolor movies. We played, I don’t know how long, and we came off the stage, and this black guy [the promoter] walks up to me and says, ‘You know, you guys are all right, you really sound like a black band.’ ” Under the circumstances, it was no surprise that their time sense was seriously warped, and they would all remember that that night’s “Midnight Hour” would stop and start according to the vagaries of the muse. Sick with the flu, Weir played part of the gig while kneeling.

Much had happened in San Francisco’s burgeoning rock community during their absence, with new bands popping up and a new facility to hear them in. The Fillmore Auditorium was clearly the best room in the city, and initially, Bill Graham and the Family Dog, whose name had been appropriated by Chet Helms, shared it. Their contrasting personalities, business practices, and social awareness guaranteed that this would not endure. With his long hair and beard, Helms resembled popular portraits of Jesus, and in truth he was a man with a cause. The grandson of a Baptist minister, preaching the gospel came easy to him, but his sermons were devoted to LSD and dancing. Texas-born, he was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League at the University of Texas, and after visiting San Francisco, he stayed. He got to know the Family Dog people by doing pot business with them, and when Luria went off to Mexico, he simply took over the name. With his friend John Carpenter, a protégé of Tom Donahue’s and the booking agent for the Great Society, he began to put on shows at the Fillmore in cooperation with Graham, who did not have control of the building’s lease. In late March they brought in the Butterfield Blues Band of Chicago. Graham and Helms were already divided by the issue of pot, with Chet heartily in favor and Graham flatly against permitting smoking at the Fillmore. But that weekend they at least agreed on how fantastically the Butterfield Band had played.

On Sunday night Graham set his alarm for 6 A.M., 9 A.M. in New York. Butterfield’s manager was Albert Grossman, who sent Graham to the agent, and after a normal negotiation, they set a price, made a deal for the band’s next appearance in San Francisco, and Bill went back to sleep. Eventually—as with many of the stories of Bill Graham’s earliest days, the facts are in dispute—Chet called and complained. “Hey, man, like you know, that’s not quite fair.” Graham was proud of his response: “I get up early.” True as that was, the issues were considerably more complex. He was in a partnership with Helms at the time, and though it was simply not meant to last, Graham certainly leaped the moral fence. Without Chet and John, he would never have known of Butterfield, nor would the earliest shows have sold so well without their promotional contributions. Bill Graham was tougher and stronger—and more gifted as a promoter—than anyone in the San Francisco rock music business, and he ate his opposition alive. He said he was “trying to be an artist . . . [in the] production end,” and he was absolutely right. In fact, he defined the rock and roll promotion business at its creative peak. That he was at times also a bully and a thief did not erase his achievements.

Born Wolfgang Grajonza in Berlin in 1931, he was sent to a Parisian orphanage ahead of the Nazis in 1939, soon joining sixty-three other children in a terrifying escape from Paris to Lisbon by foot, bus, and train. From Lisbon they traveled to Casablanca, from there to Dakar, then to New York. Only eleven children survived the trip. At that, he was luckier than many of his relatives, some of whom died, or his sister Ester, who endured and somehow survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz. In New York he grew up to be a pugnacious Bronx hustler, interested in sports, Latin dancing, and gambling. He waited tables and ran a gambling sideline in the Catskills, then served in Korea, where he earned one Bronze Star for bravery and two courts-martial for insubordination. He spent the fifties bumming around the United States and Europe, alternating between office jobs and trying to break in as an actor. In the end, he would take his act to the production side. He settled in San Francisco as an office manager for the Allis Chalmers company before quitting to be the business manager of the Mime Troupe, where he could be close to the muse. Then he saw rock and roll and was reborn.