A Long Strange Trip (23 page)

Early in September, artists Alton Kelley and his partner Stanley “Mouse” Miller went to the stacks of the San Francisco Public Library in search of inspiration. They had a second commission from Chet Helms to do a poster for the Avalon, and they wanted it to be good; after all, they’d misspelled Grateful Dead (“Greatful”) on their first effort, which depicted a member of the undead called Frankenstein’s monster. They were an interesting pair. Mouse had grown up in Detroit, first pinstriping cars and then airbrushing T-shirts for the hot-rod scene. Arriving in San Francisco on the night of the Trips Festival, he’d walked into Longshoremen’s Hall and found a new home. He was quiet and smiling, in contrast to his more extroverted friend. Raised in Maine, Kelley had hitchhiked to North Beach and the Coexistence Bagel Shop in 1959 at the age of nineteen. He’d run pot from Mexico up and down the coast and been part of the scene at the Red Dog Saloon before producing the first Family Dog posters. At first, Kelley did the layout and Mouse the lettering, but as they went along, they worked up designs together, trading licks like musicians. At the very beginning of the ballroom scene, Wes Wilson had drawn posters for both Bill and Chet, but in June Graham had insisted that he work exclusively for the Fillmore, and Kelley/Mouse succeeded him at the Avalon. Their artistic influences were varied, but started with psychedelics, popular entertainment, and the earthy bohemian style embodied by Wally Hedrick and the eclectic “funk” assemblage art of the fifties. Mostly, they did what they liked, since there were no rules. They created, Mouse said, “20th century teenage hip Americana . . . electrical age folk art.”

Looking for stimulation and/or a piece to begin a collage, they haunted the public library’s stacks, and one afternoon they came across the classic 1859 edition of
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,
translated from the Persian by Edward FitzGerald, with graphics by Edmund Sullivan. They opened it, and found the twenty-sixth quatrain.

Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the Wise
To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

They barely noticed the marvelous poetry. Next to it was Sullivan’s wonderful work, a skeleton crowned in roses, and they surged with inspiration. “Look at this, Stanley,” whispered Kelley. “Is that the Grateful Dead or is that the Grateful Dead?” They did a bigger drawing of the image, which was in the public domain, worked up lettering and a ribbon border around it, and it became an Avalon poster.

At first, Garcia didn’t realize that it was taken from
The Rubáiyát;
he only knew it was “brilliant.” The Grateful Dead had its first great visual metaphor. Flowers and bones, grateful and dead. Now it was possible to see it.

13

The Hippest City Hall Ever (9/30/66–10/31/66)

The Dead’s sojourn at Camp Lagunitas was pretty much idyllic, until the shit almost literally hit the fan. The septic system backed up, and as usual there were noise complaints, so they moved again, this time into San Francisco, where late in September they settled at Rifkin’s rooming house at 710 Ashbury Street. For the first month, Phil, Florence, Jerry, and his then girlfriend, Guido, shared a room. There was a Chinese paper screen for privacy, but Garcia’s snores were profound and not about to be blocked by something so flimsy. With relief, Phil and Billy and their ladies soon moved to an apartment a couple of blocks up the hill on Belvedere Street. Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, Danny, Rock, and Tangerine were the main complement at 710, but at least one or two visitors were usually around.

Home at last. In L.A. they’d flopped on the floor, and both their Marin stays had had the feeling of summer camp. This was the real thing. They were a family, and they settled down. Danny was a nurturing presence. Jerry was the generally benign, occasionally grumpy paterfamilias. Weir, of course, was the kid. Pigpen was the crusty uncle. Everyone who lived there, and this included several more people over the coming eighteen months, made their living from the band, and all contributed to its needs. Once, Florence did some bookkeeping and asked to be paid. Rifkin was dumbfounded. “Nobody gets paid. How ridiculous.” Life was communal, but utterly without ideology; they lived together because it was all they could afford. It was also fun. Life at 710 wasn’t exactly conventional, but it wasn’t as outrageous as some might imagine. Although there were exceptions, they generally went to bed early. Garcia was usually up at 6:30, and after coffee, he had a guitar in his hand for the rest of the day.

The living room centered on a large desk, once Rakow’s, which was the band office. They never quite got around to buying chairs, so Rock and Danny would each sit on it, playing good cop, bad cop games with promoters. “I’d be the hippie and be sweet and nice to everybody,” said Rock, although his routine often concluded, “. . . but I don’t know what my partner, Danny, will say.” Danny had a halo of curls that made him resemble, at least to one friend, Beardsley’s David, and Rock looked to some like an Apache with his headband. They were synced up, and very tight. At one point the two managers even had shares equal to that of band members of whatever the Dead made, but Kreutzmann’s father, an attorney, got them to drop it. It didn’t matter. They were on a mission, and they, too, were true believers. They wanted to get the band exposed to more people, not as a means of making money, but to influence the times. Their goal was “to create events,” Rifkin would say, “not to manage the band, but they were a vehicle that was part of something going on that made events. All of a sudden, you had all these people kinda like us—psychedelic radicals. It was fun to be together, do stuff together—flash the straight world, that kind of thing.” The desk was never locked, and for that matter, neither was the front door, so whatever paperwork filled the desk was available to the entire Haight-Ashbury. At times, a good chunk of the neighborhood seemed to pass through the house, usually through the front door, except for Willy the Doorman, who tended to use the front window if it was open.

Seven-ten was a creative center for what was in the fall of 1966 a charming neighborhood. In the early 1950s, urban renewal had razed much of the nearby Western Addition, and the mostly black evictees had spread into the Haight, which also had a sizable Russian immigrant population. The result was an integrated community that in the late fifties welcomed refugees from North Beach fleeing too much media and tourist attention. The Haight was inexpensive, and the combination of older Beats and San Francisco State students, who had good transit service to school, added up to a very hip community. Early in 1966 the city’s voters rejected a freeway that would have destroyed the Haight, and it stayed popular. Something special grew there, a new attitude. There was “a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was
right,”
wrote the journalist Hunter Thompson, “that . . . our energy would simply
prevail.”
America had once been about freedom and possibility, and now it was choked in bureaucracy. Dropping out had become a most reasonable social statement. Yet the Haight was the sort of neighborhood in which poet Michael McClure could give his eleven-year-old daughter a dime to go down to the Psychedelic Shop in utter security to buy a bead or stick of incense. And the Shop was joined by other stores, like the I and Thou bookstore and In Gear, whose owner, Hyla Strauch, lived down the street from 710.

On September 20, just before the Dead moved to Ashbury Street, the neighborhood raised a metaphorical but ineluctably colorful flag with the first edition of the
Oracle.
The local poet Allen Cohen, one of Rifkin’s pals, had dreamed of a newspaper covered with rainbows being read all over the world. He’d gone to Ron Thelin of the Psychedelic Shop, who pledged to help finance it. “The
Oracle
is an attempt,” Cohen wrote in the first issue, “to create an open voice for those involved in a ‘life of art,’ as Dr. Timothy Leary calls it . . . a cybernetic/chemical revolution.” It wasn’t really a newspaper but a psychedelic magazine, one that broke normally linear columns into sensuous shapes and used split-fountain, varicolored printing to make each page beautiful as well as informative. They wanted it to have, Allen said, a “direct effect on consciousness.” It was another link in the chain of a conscious bohemian tradition, and in the end, the most influential and stimulating piece in the
Oracle
would be the “House Boat Interview” with elders Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Timothy Leary.

As with any family, there was a wide range of interests and behaviors at 710. Weir had found his intake of LSD very difficult. It had left him quite dazed at times, running into mike stands onstage or sitting isolated in a corner at Olompali. When he began to hallucinate aurally, he concluded that he needed no chemical assistance to get any dreamier, and he ceased deliberate use of LSD on August 1, 1966, the one-year anniversary of his first trip. Although he’d get the occasional accidental or intentional dose in the future, his psychedelic career was done. He embraced a vegetarian diet, initially a macrobiotic one, and his early experiments in the kitchen produced exploding rice pots and boiled-over miso soup. He also, his housemates noticed, had a serious problem with flatulence. By way of contrast, Pigpen preferred whiskey, bad wine, and hot links. Though a gentle soul, he tended to sit up late in his room behind the kitchen, drinking and singing with Janis Joplin or some other blues-inclined friend, or perhaps more quietly writing Beat-influenced poetry.

We’ll talk and screech madly through the night
in heated arguments about the Witch doctors of Africa
as versus
the Hindus of India and Voodoo men of the West Indies.
We’ll howl through eons
whilst Charlie Mingus puts it down . . .
Why doesn’t the middle class put up?
because they’ve got their all holy standards warped!

That fall he also met the love of his life, Veronica “Vee” Barnard. A traditionally raised young black woman, Vee had left her strict Seventh-Day Adventist household in Vallejo to sample the San Francisco scene, where she bumped into Pigpen on Haight Street at the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse. He invited her to a party at Olompali, and they began keeping company. Sometime that fall, Vee lost her roommate and asked Pig for a place to stay. When she overheard him say, “My old lady’s moving in,” she knew she wasn’t going anywhere. Their lives were generally homebound, Pig sitting in his little red chair, receiving guests like Janis, Elvin Bishop, Vince Guaraldi, and John Lee Hooker. He was a regular customer at the A-1 Deli on Haight Street for his daily bottle of booze, but otherwise he left home only for band business or after midnight for a run to Leonard’s Hickory Pit Barbecue on Fillmore. When he didn’t make music, he read—science fiction mostly, Ray Bradbury like everyone at 710, fantasy stuff like Doc Savage, and English history and Arthurian legends.

Seven-ten’s visitors tended to be charming. LuVell Benford was a tall, striking black man from Oakland, a businessman with a most enlightened air about him, whom Weir first recalled seeing at Olompali riding a white BMW motorcycle with white saddlebags, a big white cowboy hat on his head. He was noticeably warm and generous, more monklike than any trader could reasonably be. Another regular for a time was Michael McClure, at eighteen the youngest of the Beat poets at the seminal 1955 Six Gallery reading that introduced “Howl” to the world, and now a young elder statesman who lived a couple of blocks away on Downey Street. In 1965 he’d noticed a gaggle of longhairs rehearsing in a house on his block, and came to find out that they were called the Charlatans. One night at a party at 710, he got to talking with Garcia, and they naturally contemplated collaborating on a song. He brought Garcia a stanza of his poem “Love Lion,” and though Jerry looked a little doubtful, he set to work, picking out a “beautiful, beautiful tune.” But, McClure realized later, “it didn’t look like a song on a page to him. My work is all over the page, centered, and then off-centered—I think that was throwing him. Because he wanted something that, like Dylan’s work, was countable and repetitive. At least he did in those days. We worked back and forth, he suggested, I made some changes, he suggested . . . I would say we were halfway through.” Unfortunately, when McClure called him about finishing, Garcia let the energy dribble away, and Michael let it go.

Sometimes their visitors came for simpler reasons. Mary Ann Pollar, a friend of Garcia’s from Berkeley folk days, recalled coming to 710 to cook paella for everyone and having a delightful time. The string of beads Rock gave her was a gift she’d cherish. Sometimes their visitors stayed. The whole household took in a little boy named Jason McGee because his mother, they thought, was unable to care for him.

A day or two after they got to 710 in late September, Phil Lesh was walking down Haight Street when a jeep filled with National Guardsmen armed with loaded, bayonet-tipped rifles roared past and a police sergeant said to him, “You guys, get the fuck out of here.” A police officer in the black neighborhood of Hunter’s Point had shot a young man, and the black men of San Francisco had had enough. The result was six days of curfews and the guard in the streets.

Among other reactions, certain members of the Mime Troupe decided that formal street theater was an insufficient response to times as stark as these. They were also reacting to what they perceived as the softness of the
Oracle
’s psychedelic chat and the swelling tide of consumerism on Haight Street. They seceded from the Troupe and formed, insofar as an intellectually antiorganization group can be said to form at all, the Diggers. Their central members were Emmett Grogan, Peter Berg, Kent Minault, and Peter Cohon (later Coyote). Though they would rapidly become known for feeding the hippies of the Haight and other hungry people, they were by no means a hip Salvation Army. They were, wrote Peter Coyote, later nationally known as an actor, “far more dangerous than that. It was a radical anarchist group that was really about authenticity and autonomy . . . Because we knew the real problem was the culture. The problem wasn’t capitalism. The problem wasn’t Communism. The problem was the
culture.”
They took as their central tenet the idea of “free,” and for a while they made it work. The one thing that the endlessly flexible and adaptive American culture could not absorb or co-opt was something, anything, that didn’t involve profit. The Diggers were mostly actors, and now they became what Berg called “life actors,” people who consciously choose their roles in life and help others break out of their imposed roles. “The antidote to [societal] conditioning,” Coyote wrote, “was personal authenticity: honoring one’s inner directives and dreams by living in accord with them, no matter the consequences.”

Early in October the Diggers circulated through the Haight a broadside signed by the alias “George Metesky,” the New York City “mad bomber.” It preached the “Ideology of Failure.” “To show love is to fail. To love to fail is the Ideology of Failure. Show Love. Do your thing. Do it for FREE. Do it for Love. We can’t fail. And Mr. Jones will never know what’s happening here.” Their message was freedom—freedom from money, and freedom from fame, which they interpreted as anonymity, so that all Diggers were George Metesky. Shortly after, they began their free food program, scrounging and stealing supplies from wholesalers, cooking it in someone’s apartment, and serving it on the Panhandle, a block-wide extension of Golden Gate Park that marked the northern border of the Haight. Before the hungry got their food, they stepped through an open wooden square, the “Free Frame of Reference,” because, as John Cage said, if you put a frame on something, it’s art. The Diggers embodied brilliant social criticism and frequently wonderful street theater, though they were handicapped by various lunacies. They were extremely macho, wanting to “measure ourselves against the toughest of the tough,” by which Coyote meant the Freedom Riders. Unfortunately, these nonviolent but truly tough heroes were soon replaced as role models by the Hell’s Angels, whose toughness boiled down to plain old excesses of physical intimidation and bodily abuse. The Diggers’ later notion of heroin use as a heroic challenge to the state was only sad.

The initial encounter of the Diggers and the Dead was not propitious. The band was playing a show at the giant former ice-skating rink called Winterland, a couple of blocks away from the Fillmore, for promoters who everyone assumed were mob-affiliated. As the Dead pulled up in Rakow’s Cadillac, they ran into a Digger picket line with drums, tambourines, and music, and were handed a broadside. “It’s yours. You want to dance, dance in the street. You don’t need to buy it back.” Rifkin and Coyote began a serious argument, and even the old communist Rifkin reached the point of spluttering, “Money is sacred.” They did the gig, but the Diggers had created a new notion of what was hip, and the Dead had to answer the challenge. A few days later Emmett Grogan and Peter Berg visited 710. Grogan was a former burglar from Brooklyn who was authentically charismatic, “a mature street person at a time when there were so many novices,” said Bill Graham, who knew whereof he spoke.