A Long Strange Trip (21 page)

The dispute over booking the Butterfield Blues Band ended the sharing of the Fillmore, and Chet Helms moved on. But Graham had other problems, primarily with the San Francisco Police Department. On March 14, Ralph Gleason described the “Dance Renaissance at the Fillmore” as “peaceful as a Sunday school picnic and a lot more fun.” Two days later Graham was denied a dance permit, supposedly due to neighborhood objections about trash. He kept operating under Sullivan’s permit, and the
Chronicle
came to his support. “He is ambitious, aggressive, imaginative, responsible, hard working, opinionated,” wrote Gleason’s associate, John Wasserman, “the best entrepreneur, in my opinion, of public entertainment in San Francisco.” The clippings helped, and so did the lawyer he hired. To complicate matters, he was also the target of suspicion from the hip community. At thirty-five, he was older than they were, and even more to the point, he wasn’t stoned. In Berkeley,
Daily Cal
columnist Jann Wenner opined that the “dances are being promoted by a little man named Bill Graham [as] money-making schemes first and foremost. Whatever fun one has is strictly incidental to, almost in spite of, Bill Graham.”

A legendary encounter between Bill and Luria Castell was characteristic. She appeared one night at the Fillmore with what she said were three friends, local musicians. As Bill told it, after a brief conversation with her, he invited her in, and she added, “Wait a minute, I’ve got a friend . . . These are the Charlatans and these are my soul brothers . . . two of Ken Kesey’s people.” Bill concluded, “I became my real self! I yelled ‘fuck you!’ . . . eleven people and it tore me apart but I let ’em in.” Bill never worried about the facts of a good story, and he told this one for the rest of his life, but the clash of styles was unmistakable.

He attributed the police antipathy to the Fillmore to its attracting white youth into a black neighborhood, causing more work. Whatever the reasoning, the police fought his application for a dance permit, collecting signatures of local merchants on a petition of opposition. The most important foe was the Fillmore’s neighbor, the rabbi of the synagogue next door. Having promised not to put on shows during Jewish holidays, Bill won him over. On April 21, the
Chronicle
ran an editorial about the “misdirected and highly unfair malevolence toward the innocent and highly popular entertainment” at the Fillmore. The next day, clipping in hand, two very dumb cops arrived at the Fillmore and arrested fourteen young people for being underage under an obscure ordinance banning people below the age of eighteen from being in a dance hall, even where no alcohol was served. “Why are you arresting me?” asked one of the fourteen kids. “I’m arresting you for being under eighteen and for being in attendance at a public dance.” “But is that illegal?” “I don’t want to tell you right now because there’s a newspaper reporter standing right here.” Only a limited amount of flagrant stupidity can be tolerated in San Francisco, and after enduring the gibes of the entire city, the police dropped the charges. Graham eventually got his permit.

The scene in San Francisco involved a great deal more than just the Fillmore. Over on Haight Street, businesses that would make the neighborhood a center for countercultural activity had begun to open. The most important was Ron and Jay Thelin’s Psychedelic Shop. The Thelins had grown up in an all-American small-town environment in San Luis Obispo, but Ron had always been a rule breaker. Three years in the army in Asia had given him multicultural interests, and after reading Kerouac’s
On the Road,
he’d traveled around the United States. The brothers’ psychedelic journeys made them true believers, and their store was a way of giving people information about the experience, via both reading—they stocked Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, and Timothy Leary—and experience, with rolling papers, roach clips, Lava Lites, color wheels, and music by Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane, and Archie Shepp. Down Haight Street there was also Mnasidika, a hip clothing store owned by Peggy Caserta, the health food store nicknamed Blind Jerry’s, actually Far Fetched Food, and the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse.

There were also plenty of new bands. Quicksilver Messenger Service had begun when Marin County guitarslinger John Cipollina had formed a band with his friend Jimmy Murray to back a folkie named Dino Valenti (real name Chet Powers), but Valenti had been sent to jail for marijuana possession. As Dino went in, their friend David Freiberg, once of the David and Michaela folk duo, came out—he, too, had been arrested for pot possession—and joined them on bass. Cipollina had met Greg Elmore and Gary Duncan, two musicians from Modesto, at the first Longshoremen’s Hall dance back in October. A couple of days later they were all jamming on the Bo Diddley song “Mona.” They chose their name in homage to the fact that they were all Virgos, ruled by the planet Mercury, the speedy messenger of the gods.

Big Brother and the Holding Company was working around town. The Jefferson Airplane had acquired a manager, Matthew Katz, and the first recording contract of any of the San Francisco bands, with RCA. That spring they’d gone to the RCA studios in Hollywood to record their first album, Je ferson Airplane Takes Off. The Charlatans were playing at a Broadway strip joint, the Roaring 20s. And Country Joe and the Fish had added Bruce Barthol on bass, John Gunning on drums, and David Cohen on guitar, and were starting to play rock and roll. Cohen was a bluegrass guitarist and a friend of Garcia’s, so the entire Dead attended their debut as an electric band, at that spring’s Berkeley Folk Festival. Naturally, there were many other bands, most of which didn’t click at all, and at least one, the Sopwith Camel, that had an entirely different ethos and left town for New York intending to cut commercial hits.

The week after the Dead’s return to San Francisco was, at least for Garcia, a “walking horror.” They had sent ahead Phil’s girlfriend, Florence, and Bear’s lover, Melissa, to find some sort of place to live, and the two had succeeded, but the lease did not begin until May 1. The band separated, each member finding a place to stay wherever he could. Garcia passed the week until then “staying with all kinds of strange people and getting really [financially] strung out, walkin’ around.”

It was a very long week.

12

Psychedelic Indians (5/1/66–9/29/66)

Around A.D. 500 the Miwok Indians settled at a site near present-day Novato, north of San Francisco in Marin County, which they called Olompali, meaning either “south village” or “southern people.” It was a salubrious place, sheltered from the cold ocean breezes by the coastal range, carpeted by madrone oaks, and close to the fertile shores of the bay. By 1100 it was a sizable trading village, and in 1300 the general region was probably the most densely populated single place north of the Rio Grande. Even after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, Olompali remained in native hands, and the Miwok leader Camilo Ynitia built a twenty-six-room adobe house there. In 1948 the house was purchased by the University of San Francisco. Up from Los Angeles, Florence and Melissa went to a real estate agent, and with blind, loving good fortune, Florence said, “managed to rent paradise” at the rate of $1,100 for six weeks. Sentimentality would never be a popular emotion in the world of the Grateful Dead, but if ever there was an exception, Olompali was it. They simply loved the place.

The first sign of their luck was Lady, a marvelous black Labrador who adopted them all upon their arrival. They’d gone from Watts to heaven, with a week of independent, separated limbo in between. Their nearest neighbors were miles in any direction. Their home was a large adobe house, cool in the summer heat. To the side was a swimming pool. A mile or two away in one direction, San Francisco Bay shone blue. In the other, the golden hills of California were broken up by the dark oaks. It was authentically beautiful. At the end of the driveway, Highway 101 took them to the city in half an hour. Olompali was freedom. Even if they were broke, they could hunt deer for the cooking pot, and did. Of course, being the Dead, this involved some risks. One night they were practicing, and it went so poorly that Weir grew frustrated and took off up the hill. They called it quits for the evening, at which point Pigpen spotted a deer in the driveway. Bill got out their .22 and then told Pigpen to turn a light on, which would freeze the deer so he could shoot it. Just after he fired, the deer bolted and then they heard Weir, up the hill, cry out. Kreutzmann moaned, “Oh, fuck.” Pigpen ran away and croaked, “You did it.” Fortunately, the bullet landed near but not in Weir, and sure enough, when they found the deer’s corpse a week later, it had been shot through the head.

As soon as they settled in, their thoughts turned to sharing their good fortune, and that meant a party. Life at Olompali always felt like a party, but there were two in particular that no participant would ever forget. For the first one, late in May, they actually mailed out invitations to all their friends, which boiled down to the rock community of San Francisco. It was, Danny Rifkin decided, “an incredibly free, open celebration about nothing special.” The media would identify the next summer, that of 1967, as the “summer of love.” But for the original settlers, the summer of 1966, at Olompali in particular, was as good as it could ever get.

Everybody came to the party. Jorma Kaukonen was, along with the rest of the Jefferson Airplane, on the verge of prosperous stardom. A couple of months later the Airplane would open for a Rolling Stones show at the Cow Palace, sneaking Garcia in as one of their crew. But that summer, record contract or no, Jorma was living in a crummy, rat-infested flat on Divisadero Street. He got to Olompali for the party, and as he approached the house, his jaw dropped. The adobe building looked like a mansion, and the pool was filled with naked maidens. There was an attractive striped awning to the side, and under it was a mountain of Bear’s best and shiniest electronic equipment. There was also a jug with Bear’s best and shiniest chemistry, and it all made for a happy day. Sitting with his old folk music mate Janis Joplin, who’d recently returned from Texas, his bass-playing musical partner Jack Casady, and Garcia, he was dazzled. It was “rock star heaven.” “Who’da thought,” Jorma mused much later, “that playing a coffeehouse could come to this—the magnificence of Olompali . . . Garcia was saying that we were all going to be archetypes of a sort,” and Jorma was laughingly doubting him. “But of course it turned out to be true.”

Though she would not make a general habit of being nude in public—it was just that sort of time and place—one of those nymphs in the pool was Julia Dreyer. The sixth child after five brothers, she’d been nicknamed Girl. The daughter of what she called a “spaced-out intellectual” socialite mother, Girl had grown up in Sausalito, where by the age of fifteen she was running free with the folkies from the Charles Van Dam houseboat, like Dino Valenti and David Crosby. At sixteen she’d run away alone to Mexico for five months, where she’d encountered acid at Timothy Leary’s compound. Threatened with arrest for being underage and on the loose when she returned to San Francisco, she decided to get married in order to stay out of juvenile hall, and chose as her husband the nicest guy in the music scene, David Freiberg of Quicksilver. For her, the hit of the day at the Olompali party was Neal Cassady, there with his hammer and raps. Though clearly a nice person, Weir struck her as an interloper, because of his clean-cut, preppy appearance. Young or not, Julia was quite conscious that something special was going on that day, something innocent, free, and happy. It felt like “a period of grace,” as though “some alien force was moving consciousness along, to benefit mankind. That might sound presumptuous, but we felt it.” It was a positive, loving, and intelligent vision. Another of the wandering young women was Tangerine, a Marin girl who also remembered Neal and his hammer, though to Tangerine he looked so conventional, so “straight,” that she thought he was an accidentally dosed neighbor. She also noticed Rock, who wore Beatle boots, pegged pants, and a collegiate shirt. By the end of the day, they’d fallen in love.

Not everyone was quite so free and easy. George Hunter of the Charlatans fell prey to an insane jealousy of his lover, and came into the middle of the party with a rifle. “Just because Garcia has that aura of being somebody,” thought Kreutzmann, “he was a great target. They weren’t more than twenty yards apart. Streetwise ol’ Jerry just bolted and ran—you couldn’t see no dust.” In the meantime, Weir had stepped in front of George, and eventually talked him out of his gun. Rifkin then talked him down. Brenda Kreutzmann did not fit in at all at Olompali parties, and the nudity upset her. Generally, she stayed in her room.

Among the more neurotic guests were the members of the Great Society, a strange romantic triangle that included Darby Slick, who was in love with his brother Jerry’s wife, Grace. “Grace really couldn’t seem to stand parties,” Darby wrote later. “It was either [drink until] blackout and rage, or split.” As they arrived, Grace saw Pigpen leaning on the gate and the nude Girl running around behind him. Neal was raving, and Phil turned to Grace with the remark “That’s Neal Cassady, and if you stand here long enough, you’ll catch up with all seven of the conversations he’s having with himself.” Though Grace didn’t stay long, she left an indelible mark with her presence. About as beautiful as any woman could be and a graduate of the very social Finch College, she had been a model at I. Magnin, one of the premier San Francisco department stores. She’d grown up not liking the real world very much, and in what she later declared was an “exercise in counterprogramming,” centered her childhood on fantasy costumes for characters like Robin Hood, Snow White, Peter Pan, and Prince Valiant. As an adult, she held the real world at bay with alcohol and sarcasm, and her hero was Lenny Bruce. Not being fond of LSD, Slick did not enjoy the Olompali ambience and left early.

Another guest, Barry Melton, came to check out his old Berkeley friend Bear’s sound system, but it didn’t seem to want to work that day. The police arrived, more likely to check out the bare breasts than the mysterious complaint about some parked cars in the road. Confused by Neal, nudity, and Weir’s ingenuous smile, they did not stay long.

The second party was actually occasioned by a visit from the outside world. The Dead threw it for the benefit of the BBC, which had sent a film crew to San Francisco, gathering up their friends by word of mouth. The Beeb’s stiff upper lip melted at what they saw, and they fled, cameras in hand. Phil felt that “we were on the tip of the arrow of human consciousness flying through time.” The BBC wasn’t arrow-ready.

The rural setting made Olompali a trusted place for psychedelic exploration, although what almost everyone perceived as the shades of the Native Americans that lingered in the adobe walls complicated things, spiritually speaking. Once, Lesh said, he “made contact with the spirits of what I thought were the Olompali Indians. They asked, ‘What are you doing here, white boy?’ ” Nonetheless, Olompali was acid-drenched, and it would be Garcia who would remember his trips in greatest detail. One day he lay down on the grass by the pool, having consumed a mixture of mescaline and some of Owsley’s finest. “I closed my eyes and I had this sensation of perceiving with my eyes closed. It was as though they were open, I still have this field of vision and the field of vision had kind of a pattern in it partly visible and then I had this thing that outside the field of vision was like starting to unravel like an oldtime coffee can, you know that little thing that you spin around and it takes the little strip of metal off. It was like that and it began stripping around the outside of the field of vision until I had a three hundred and sixty degree view, and it revealed this pattern and the pattern said ‘All’ in incredible neon . . . I had one where I thought I died like multiple, it got into this thing of death, kind of the last scene, the last scene of hundreds of lives and thousands of incarnations and insect deaths . . . last frames of my life . . . I run up the stairs and there’s this demon with a spear who gets me right between the eyes. I run up the stairs and there’s this woman with a knife who stabs me in the back. I run up the stairs and there’s this business partner who shoots me . . . there was one time when I thought that everybody on earth had been evacuated in flying saucers and the only people left were these sort of lifeless automatons that were walking around, and there’s that kind of sound of that hollow mocking laughter, when you realize that you’re the butt of the universe’s big joke.”

Even in paradise, they were still a working band. Rock and Danny had retained a room at 710 Ashbury Street as an office, and when necessary they would go into the city. The gigs began to come, first a couple in Berkeley in early May, and then one at the Family Dog’s new location, the Avalon Ballroom, upstairs at Sutter and Van Ness Avenue, in San Francisco. The Avalon was an old swing ballroom once called the Puckett Academy of Dance, with good acoustics, a wonderful sprung wooden dance floor, mirrors, columns, red flocked wallpaper, and lots of gilt. The Dead’s first show there was to raise money for the Straight Theater, a dance hall on Haight Street that some local young people were trying to open. Two weeks later, on May 27, the Dead played their first regular show for the Family Dog.

The differences between the Fillmore and the Avalon were at once glaringly obvious and terribly subtle. For Jerry, they lay between Chet, “who never appeared to be doing anything, as opposed to Bill, who appeared to be doing everything.” The Avalon was “a good old party,” the Fillmore was “the thrill of opening night.” Bill Graham could yell, but he listened equally well, and spent a great deal of time soliciting the local musicians for suggestions as to whom they wanted to see. He also wanted to challenge his audience, and so he booked the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor to open for the British band the Yardbirds, among other interesting combinations. To the Beat poet Michael McClure, the Fillmore sounded better and had a better dance floor, but the Avalon’s superior light shows made him feel “like I was part of a massive work of art.” The first time they played the Avalon, Garcia recalled, the Dead’s speakers were in front of the screen and blocked Bill Ham’s lights. The next day they painted the speakers white.

Chet Helms was a prophet, not a businessman, and life at the Avalon could be disorganized, especially when he got bands to commit to shows without talking to their management. But he had a profound understanding of his audience, and they listened to his message. He saw the scene that was arising in the Haight-Ashbury as primarily one of simple “self-determination,” as young people strove to exchange a spiritually unsatisfying, earth-despoiling straight life for something better. There were some politics involved, an early environmental awareness, a romanticized vision of peasant life and finding roots. But what was going on at his dance hall combined two things—electronics and the need for social ritual. Electronics—the bands and their loud music
—“commands
attention,” as Helms saw it, and made new social rituals all the more powerful. The modern world had blurred the old rites of passage. In a world of birth control pills, for instance, parenthood was not an immediate given. So it was time to develop new rites, and this happened at the ballrooms. In dancing one had a nonverbal method of saturating the senses, participating in a ritual death of an old consciousness to move on to a new one; it was the cult of Dionysus in 1966. Dance enough and one sweats, literally purging and cleansing the body, which is the meaning of the Greek
katharsis.
The result might be
abraxas,
joining the godhead, or
ekstasis,
flight from the body.

Outside the ballrooms, there were other changes in American life that summer. In June, the Supreme Court ruled in
Miranda v. Arizona
that prisoners must actually be warned of their rights. Civil rights leader James Meredith and four friends began a march through Mississippi, and when he was shot and wounded on the second day, it became a “march against fear.” In the North, urban black people reacted more violently, and in July riots ripped through Chicago, Brooklyn, and Cleveland. On August 3 Lenny Bruce died of a heroin overdose, a martyr to years of legal harassment.

In the world of music, the Mamas and the Papas, fine singers from the commercial end of the folk movement, had giant hits with “California Dreamin’ ” in the spring and “Monday, Monday” in the summer.
Time
reported on July 1 that rock lyrics were “no longer down with the P.T.A. and conformism, but—whee! onward with LSD and lechery.” (Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” was supposed to be a pusher.) On July 2, the
Saturday
Evening Post
ran a story called “Daddy Is a Hippy”
(sic),
probably the first national use of the word. On July 29, Bob Dylan went for a ride on his Triumph motorcycle in Woodstock, New York, dumped it, and reportedly broke his neck. On August 5, John Lennon remarked that the Beatles might be “more popular than Jesus.” On the same day, the Beatles released their album
Revolver;
its last song had a remarkable bond with what the San Francisco bands were doing at the same time. Earlier that summer Lennon had stopped by Indica, a store in London much like the Psychedelic Shop, which sold weird art, Beat writing, and other books, including Leary, Metzner, and Alpert’s
The Psychedelic Experience,
which he purchased. Having tripped once and not enjoyed it much, Lennon put into practice the authors’ advice, tried again and had a much better time, and encapsulated it all in “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the final song on their new album.