A Long Strange Trip (24 page)

At 710, Grogan mesmerized Rifkin and Garcia with stories of organizing black people and the Mafia to pick up the garbage during the recent New York City sanitation strike. He came on like a “Robin Hood superhero,” thought Rifkin, and soon became “one of my most revered dudes, teaching me another level of sophistication—lying,” he said with a laugh. Grogan finished his persuasive rave with a suggestion: “Why don’t you guys play free?” The Diggers would organize a flatbed truck to act as stage and acquire permits from the city. Simple home extension cords strung from someone’s apartment over the street to a light pole could deliver power to the Panhandle. And suddenly, there
was
dancing in the streets. Free was “social acid,” and it worked.

The Digger-Dead relationship wasn’t always smooth. Coyote would sense a tension generated by the fact that the Dead had some (if very little) money, while the Diggers had none. “Of all the bands,” Coyote said later, “the Dead were the most intellectual, they were the most cutting-edge, they were the ones we were really close to; but it was like siblings.” Weir appreciated the Digger ideology, but sensed a “vindictive” streak in Grogan that put him off. “There was an edge to him that I didn’t care for, and he didn’t like me because I didn’t follow him. But Danny wrapped Emmett’s rap in compassion and made it palatable to us. We understood it as promotion, but the point of everything was to make enough money so we could play for free.” The Dead existed to play, and now they could do it three blocks from home. It became an absolutely essential part of their cosmology; other bands played free, but none took it to heart the way the Dead did.

In part, that was because playing in the Panhandle was just an extension of living in the neighborhood. Their across-the-street third-floor neighbor, Marilyn Harris, was impressed by that. A Daly City schoolteacher, Marilyn was no hippie, but had lived in the Haight for a couple of years and watched it change. “It happened in the shops” at first, she noticed, “and then when the music went into the parks.” Marilyn thought highly of the Diggers and gave a major portion of her time to working on the free food project, but she felt that Peter and Emmett “assumed that no one else knew what they knew.” In contrast, “one of the things that the Dead pulled off, which was actually remarkable, was to not get involved with being the center of the universe. There wasn’t a lot of ego around them. They didn’t act as though they had just created the Second Coming.” They were just neighbors, if a little eccentric.

Pigpen was especially fond of Marilyn and not always comfortable with the ongoing intensity of life at 710, so he would occasionally put on his bathrobe, walk across the street, and ask if he could use her shower. Other times, Marilyn might be correcting papers, and he’d come over and sit with her, sipping away on a bottle. It was also true that life on Ashbury Street could get distinctly odd. One rainy night Marilyn was seeing off her boyfriend, who happened to be wearing a trench coat. Suddenly, she heard a “ping,” followed by another, and realized that someone was shooting at her with a pellet gun. LuVell and Pigpen, both inebriated, had succumbed to paranoia and assumed that anyone on Ashbury Street in a trench coat must be the law. Another time, Glenn McKay, then doing light shows for the Airplane, decided to play a joke on the Dead. Glenn had moved into 715 Ashbury, across the street from 710. He projected a film of fire on the front of 710, then had Gut, a Hell’s Angel who was everyone’s friend, run into the street shouting “Fire, fire!” The occupants of 710 came flying onto Ashbury Street, got the joke, and enjoyed themselves.

Good neighbors or not, they were first a band, and a certain kind of professionalism came with the territory. Money was not a major goal, but getting better as musicians was. Garcia was profoundly concerned with legitimately earning their fee by putting on a good show, and belabored Rock, the world’s least punctual human, with the importance of the band being on time. Then there was Weir, whom LSD had rendered temporarily immobile onstage. “Garcia would hammer me and hammer me, calling me the ‘wooden guitar player. You’ve gotta fuckin’ move,’ ” said Weir, although he noticed Garcia was much more diplomatic on the subject of musical development. In his typically quirky fashion, Weir addressed that issue by studying the great jazz pianist McCoy Tyner rather than any guitarist. As a band, they began to submit to conventional promotional practices, including interviews and photo sessions. One of their first group interviews had appeared that summer in a Haight Street fan magazine called
Mojo Navigator,
and revealed them as casual and utterly open, Garcia shushing Weir at will, and with a trademark group humor they’d always reserve for the media, this time in a prolonged riff on Pigpen’s age and appearance. In September they were part of
I.D., the Band Book,
a listing of Bay Area bands that included lots of the never-to-be-famous, suburban Beatles imitators like the Baytovens, Jack and the Rippers, and the London Taxi Cab, but also their peers, Quicksilver, the Charlatans, and Big Brother. Their own ad cited Kesey’s description of them as “the faster than light drive,” and listed their management as Frontage Road, Ltd., a joke based on the fact, as Rifkin put it, that “wherever you go, there’s a frontage road—and we didn’t even have a car.”

I.D.
also ran an ad for the clothing store Mnasidika with the Dead as models. The embarrassingly stiff portrait made it clear their futures would lie elsewhere. They would never like posing for pictures, even when it was a new experience, although one set of sessions at least became classic, well worth their investment of time. Their friend Herb Greene’s roommate was studying Egyptology at S.F. State and had illustrated their kitchen wall with hieroglyphics. Over time, Herb would shoot almost every prominent person in the local music scene in front of that wall, but he and his wife, Maruska, would especially recall the Dead’s visit. The sound from the stairs was like an earthquake. First through the door was Pigpen, who said to Maruska, “Got any juice [as in alcohol]?” “I think I’ve got some orange juice,” she said, and took him back to the kitchen.

Early in October, Stewart Brand produced a second, somewhat more modest, Trips Festival, in the cafeteria at San Francisco State. For a price of one dollar (two for nonstudents), participants had “enter” stamped on their foreheads as they passed through an archway at the commons. Called Whatever It Is?, the event offered, in addition to the Dead, the Only Alternative (with Mimi Fariña), a Bill Ham light show, the Mime Troupe, the Congress of Wonders, Ann Halprin’s Dancers Workshop, and so forth. It ran from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning and had the dazzling elements of an acid test, but set in an extremely dramatic context. After eight months in Mexico, Ken Kesey had returned to the Bay Area, and he made an appearance at the State acid test by remote control, broadcasting into the event from the safety of the campus radio station. Another subplot was the tension one new Prankster, Larry Shurtliff, sensed between some Pranksters and some Dead members, though when Page Browning arrived, he and Pigpen hugged warmly. There was at least one other warm greeting, between Garcia and Mountain Girl. As a performance, the State test was a lost opportunity for the Dead, because they were without their anchor. Someone had dosed Pigpen, totally incapacitating him. Rock took him home, but Pig’s lover, Vee, was pissed: “You’re the manager, you can’t let this happen.” The show finally began around midnight, and given Pig’s absence, the music lacked energy and focus, although the audience was treated to Garcia playing organ behind Kesey.

The rest of the Dead’s week was busy. On October 6 the State of California made LSD illegal, and
Oracle
editor Allen Cohen and artist Michael Bowen, a Timothy Leary associate, decided to respond with a celebration rather than a protest. Their Love Pageant Rally parade down Haight Street, which included the fugitive Kesey in a cowboy suit, attracted hundreds to the Panhandle, where the Dead and Big Brother played. It was one of the first of their free performances there, and it delighted the band. Out in the street, playing was “pure,” Jerry realized. “You weren’t posing for a picture in some magazine of the future.” Laird Grant, their equipment guy, was the only one with reservations. The occasional street person just had to get onstage, and it was up to Laird to keep him off, establishing early on a gruff reputation for the Dead’s road crew.

October passed: the Dead opened for the Butterfield Blues Band and the Airplane at Winterland, played at the Mount Tamalpais Peace Festival, at Stanford, in Sausalito, at the Avalon for the Family Dog’s one-year anniversary, at a high school in suburban Walnut Creek, and with Lightnin’ Hopkins at the Fillmore, a doubly significant occasion for Pigpen, who revered the blues singer and was nervously proud to share the stage with the master. It was at these shows that the Dead unveiled their first exercise in merchandising, the Pigpen T-shirt, made by Kelley/Mouse and sold in three colors for $2.50 at the Pacific Ocean Trading Company, POTCO, on Haight Street. The Dead also served as entertainment at the opening of the North Face Ski Shop in a tiny hole in the wall next to the Condor Club, the North Beach topless joint where Carol Doda’s breasts were on display. Over the next few years, North Face would become a fabulously successful chain, as would its successor company, Esprit, but at this time founders Doug and Suzie Tompkins were so poor that they made ends meet by stealing electricity from their next-door neighbor. The event included Mimi Fariña as a skiwear model and Joan Baez as a guest attraction. Two Hell’s Angels acted as security to the invitation-only crowd. Afterward, the store owners took the Dead and the Angels to a local restaurant for dinner, where a slightly sozzled local attorney bought wine for the party. “He was really delighted,” said Garcia, “as an old San Franciscan, because of the fact that, at least, there was this little thing he could talk about or look at, somebody was taking a fucking chance on the streets.”

As the month came to an end, taking a chance became a major issue. After appearing on television to boast of rubbing “salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds,” Ken Kesey had been apprehended after a chance sighting on the Bayshore Freeway on October 8. He faced three felony charges, including the La Honda possession rap, the San Francisco possession charge, and unlawful flight. His attorneys got the last charge dropped and Kesey free on $35,000 bail, then worked out a deal with the judge to moderate any possible sentence if Kesey would persuade youth to go “beyond acid” at some sort of Prankster Acid Graduation Ceremony, to be held under Bill Graham’s auspices at Winterland on Halloween with, of course, the Grateful Dead.

There were a number of problems with this. Along with Quicksilver, the Dead already had a booking for that night at California Hall with a promoter named Bob McKendricks. McKendricks called Quicksilver’s manager, Ron Polte, and said, “The Dead are pulling out, are you firm? I just saw a poster that says you guys are playing Winterland for Kesey.” Polte flipped and called Garcia, who said that they’d play both gigs. Ron replied, “That’s not right. The guy [McKendricks] will lose his ass. Where are our ethics?” Then his old Chicago friend, Prankster Julius Karpen, brought him disturbing news, a rumor that spread instantly throughout the Haight: that the Graduation Ceremony would be Kesey’s last and greatest prank, with LSD being introduced into the water system at Winterland. Polte began to work on Graham, who’d only that year gotten his own dance hall permit. If the rumor came true, Graham’s career in San Francisco was over. Then Polte and Karpen met with Danny Rifkin and Kesey’s attorney, Brian Rohan, at 710. At first Danny tried to change Polte’s mind, but Julius began to express his concerns. As Rifkin remembered it, it seemed to him that Julius had almost been held prisoner by the Pranksters. “It was like they were dosing him every day, and he didn’t want to be [dosed], and he said, ‘These people will stop at nothing, and they’ll put it in the water supply.’ ‘Julius, is this serious?’ ‘Yes.’ ” As it happened, Rifkin loved being dosed, but disapproved of dosing, and had never entirely approved of Kesey, whom he felt was a “power tripper.” Danny was the moral center of the Dead’s scene, and when he changed his mind, so did the band. The Dead would play on Halloween at California Hall with Quicksilver. The Acid Graduation Ceremony was held at a warehouse South of Market for a small group of people, and Kesey would then face a few months at a work farm for his legal problems.

Considering these issues seven years later, Garcia dismissed the pro-and anti-nature of the graduation ceremony as moot. “That whole [acid test] scene was over. It had already caused what it was going to cause and those waves are still spreading out now.” As Lesh said, “We were always more aware of ourselves as a unit, as a band, than as representatives of the culture, or any other abstract—that’s why we didn’t stick with the acid tests, because we wanted to be the Grateful Dead and not the acid test house band . . . I remember that being an unspoken but totally conscious thought.” Afterward Karpen compared it all to a snake molting, a mitosis. The scene would go on, if somewhat more discreetly.

14

The San Francisco Scene (11/1/66–1/29/67)

What was happening socially in San Francisco was an extension of the bohemian tradition in which, as Dan Healy later put it, rock music had become the “agreed medium.” For the musicians, the focus would be on making a statement, rather than addressing tradition or form. The statement was at root a cry for freedom and the need for a spiritual rebirth. “There is no new morality,” wrote journalists David Felton and David Dalton a bit later, “as
Time
and
Life
would have us believe, but a growing awareness that the old morality has not been practiced for some time. The right to pursue different goals, to be free of social and economic oppression, the right to live in peace and equity with our brothers—this is Founding Fathers stuff.” Succeeding revisionist rock historians, wrote the estimable critic Robert Christgau, would be “anxious to believe that the sixties were an aberration rather than an aborted spiritual necessity.”

All the people who didn’t fit in anywhere else came to San Francisco, where they could be “out of step together,” said Spencer Dryden, the Airplane’s new drummer. It was “the longest party I ever went to,” thought Alton Kelley, “unselfconscious, completely on the natch.” Acid and fellowship melted intellectual and sexual shackles, and much that had been proscribed was suddenly attractive. Because of LSD, it was especially visual and aural. It was a dance scene, and the Dead was a dance band, then and forever. Naturally, it happened in San Francisco, the home of the mental frontier, too individualistic and idiosyncratic to be an industry town like Los Angeles, and among other distinctions, a more beautiful city much closer to nature, and with far better-tempered cops than its southern neighbor. “Everybody looked like a rock star,” wrote reporter Michael Lydon, “and rock stars began to look and act and live like people, not gods on the make. The way to go big time was to encourage more people to join the community or to make their own.”

The many bands were affiliated by friendship, but their musical approaches were wildly divergent. For instance, the Jefferson Airplane’s superbly crafted songs and glamorous lead singers were a world apart from the Grateful Dead. The noted producer David Rubinson would identify a few general characteristics of the San Francisco sound, including multi-guitar voicings based on folk guitar styles, eclecticism, an ensemble orientation, and “no reliance on outsiders or overdubs, no use of strings or brass.” But after that, each band created as it chose. That past summer of 1966, Marty Balin had told Ralph Gleason that he thought it was time for the Airplane to move to L.A., “ ’cause we know we need that hit record. ’Cause nobody’ll really give you a break without it.” The Dead loved the Airplane, but always felt that
they,
the Airplane, had it together, while the Dead were just stoned hippies, one step away from a banana peel.

So it was deliciously ironic that Garcia helped the members of the Airplane attain their first great success. Early in November he went to Los Angeles to assist them with recording their second album,
Surrealistic
Pillow.
The producer, Rick Jarrard, later denied Garcia’s influence, leading Jorma Kaukonen to speculate that they had possibly smuggled Jerry in after hours to evade the union rules at RCA. Studio logs confirmed that Garcia played the high electric lead on “Today” and acoustic guitar on “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” “My Best Friend,” and “Coming Back to Me.” He also set the arrangement for “Somebody to Love,” adding chords to the less interesting song Grace had brought from the Great Society. It would be the Airplane’s first hit single. Recorded in only thirteen days at a cost of $8,000, the album became a classic. Garcia even named it. Trying to describe the songs, he said, “it’s as surrealistic as a pillow.” In thanks, although the Airplane did not list him with specific song credits, they acknowledged him as their “Musical and Spiritual Advisor,” a private joke that would unfortunately further an unwanted reputation for profundity that never did quite go away. Oddly, his impact on Jorma
was
rather spiritual. Though they were in theory rival guitarslingers, they were old friends and had little real sense of competition. Jorma had been a solo musician for a long time, and felt that Garcia taught him and the Airplane a sense of how to interact as a band. Of course, the Airplane’s internal dynamics, which were always high on the Richter scale in terms of friction, might not commend Garcia’s advice. But one thing he said privately to Jorma did stick: “It’s not what you play, it’s what you don’t play that counts.” It wasn’t a terribly original thought, but then, good advice rarely is.

Always slightly skeptical about outside institutions, the Dead did not pursue a record deal with quite the avidity of most young bands. Garcia, in particular, had an acute appreciation for the way the record companies had defrauded rhythm and blues musicians in the recent past. Yet, eyes wide open, and with a little help from a trusted friend, they were prepared to follow the conventional process. The friend was Tom Donahue, who had by now folded Autumn Records but was still a D.J. and still a proponent of the Dead. One of Tom’s old pals was a man named Joe Smith, then president of Warner Bros. In August Tom had gotten Joe to attend a gig at the Avalon. Joe was a Yale graduate, and dressed like it. He and his strikingly elegant wife, Donnie, had dinner at Ernie’s, an appropriately posh restaurant, and then went over to the Avalon, where Joe had his mind seriously roiled, if not blown. “Tom,” he said, “I don’t think Jack Warner will ever understand this. I don’t know if I understand it myself, but I really feel like they’re good.” He sat and talked with the band at intermission. Although he mostly met with suspicion, the band agreed they wanted to record, and when they returned to the stage, Joe shook hands with Rock and Danny.

In the coming decades, Warner Bros. would become a musical mega-corporation. This was not yet the case in 1966. Warner’s had begun in 1958, and was first known for albums by Connie Stevens, the Everly Brothers, Bob Newhart, and Allen Sherman. In an attempt to entice Frank Sinatra into Warner Bros. Pictures, the record company acquired his personal label, Reprise, and got Reprise President Morris “Mo” Ostin in the bargain. Mo had been an accountant but he wasn’t a bean counter, and he took as his business model the cinema mogul Irving Thalberg, who let his directors direct. Mo’s protégé was A&R man Lenny Waronker, who would bring superb players like Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks into the company’s circle as studio musicians. Still, in the summer of 1966 Warner’s most profitable acts ranged from Dean Martin, Trini Lopez, and Petula Clark to Peter, Paul and Mary. Then Stan Cornyn, who would dub himself Warner’s “official speller” because he wrote the liner notes, was asked by Warner Pictures to write a screenplay about the San Francisco Beat scene. He strolled Grant Avenue and saw some Kelley and Mouse posters and grew fascinated. Cornyn and Tom Donahue convinced Joe Smith to sample the San Francisco rock music scene. Quickly concluding that it was musically genuine, Joe told his boss, Mike Maitland, that for $100,000 they could sign every band, and at least some of them would be profitable. Maitland would not okay such a large sum. After all, Warner Bros. was then located in two thousand square feet of dumpy space above the old film company machine shop, with linoleum on the floors and used, scrambled furniture. This was not the big time—yet.

When they learned that Joe Smith wanted to offer them a contract, the Dead turned to the only lawyer they trusted, even though he knew nothing about the music business. Having saved Kesey from prison, Brian Rohan certainly had credentials as a first-rate defense attorney. More important, he was a brother. A San Franciscan, he had briefly attended the University of Oregon, where in 1958 he’d met Kesey and Prankster Mike Hagen. A feisty Irish drinker, he was no hippie, but his lifelong hatred of bullies made him a good attorney, and he was in the right place, having joined the San Francisco firm of the legendary socialist, atheist, and all-around noble rabble-rouser Vincent Hallinan. In 1965 Rohan bumped into Hagen, and soon after became Kesey’s counsel. Rock and Danny asked him to conduct the negotiations, and when he demurred, they pointed out, “We like you, we trust you, and we think we can get straight answers from you.” The three of them tried to educate themselves, talking with Ron Polte about how to avoid being screwed, and through him with Paul Butterfield. Rohan also called his law school friend Mike Maloney, Dave Brubeck’s attorney, who told him, “Brian, keep the publishing. If they got kids, give up the kids, kids cost money. Keep the publishing. That’s all you have to remember in this business.”

Rohan met with Joe Smith, and between August and October, they worked out a deal. It gave the Dead creative freedom, and what would turn out to be an effectively unlimited budget for studio time, although the costs would be deducted from their royalties, as custom dictated. There was also a commitment to promote the album. But contrary to legend, it was not an especially remarkable deal. Their publishing rates were based on time rather than on a per-song basis (“jazz rates”—thus an album with a few long songs rather than many short ones was not discriminated against), but that was not new. They kept their publishing, something the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan had failed to do, but this had more to do with Warner Bros.’ weakness and Rohan’s honesty than their own shrewdness. According to Joe Smith, he never asked the Dead or any other band for publishing, because “I was totally unaware of the value of publishing.” Though that seems hard to believe, their contract, dated September 30, 1966, and revised in December, did not mention publishing and boiled down to a $10,000 advance and an 8 percent royalty. A fair part of the advance went to buy Kreutzmann a new car to replace the Pontiac station wagon that had been consumed by its service as the band’s equipment transport. Of course, the Mustang he selected was of no use to the band, but a combination of his insistence, the band’s inertia, and the fact that Garcia didn’t care where the money went put Bill behind the wheel.

The deal did Warner Bros. a lot of good. The Grateful Dead was Warner’s first rock band, and they instantly raised Warner’s hipness quotient. Over the next few years, it would earn a legitimate reputation as an artist-friendly company. From Rifkin’s point of view, Smith “was straight, but he wasn’t an asshole. He never quite got us, but he knew we were part of what was happening. Warner Bros. was really nice. They didn’t have a clue—and we had an attitude because they were corporate. But they were pretty decent people. They were kinda lame—college newspaper kind of people.” Lame or no, Warner’s would certainly get an education over the next few years. In Rock Scully’s eyes, they were a little more problematic. “It’s like dealing with aliens. They all have the same uniform, the spooky Southern California leisure wear that is affected by most of the industry at the time: V-neck velour sweaters with high collars . . . Very slick, cheery, ultra-tanned faces, and all topped off with the de rigueur Jay Sebring haircut, a type of razor cut so immaculate it looks sprayed into place. These record execs look like golfers without the spikes on their shoes. The spikes are in their teeth! Out for us! Out for blood!” At first, the band’s name alone, much less the possibility of actually meeting Pigpen, was enough to intimidate most of the staff. At one early meeting, Cornyn recalled, the band expressed some concerns regarding Kreutzmann. Stan piped up, “You know, we could get a studio drummer.” In the silence that followed, “they kind of stared at me,” and his words melted away into silence.

Shortly after they signed their contract, the band had a side adventure in recording, spending a couple of days with the distinguished jazz vocalist Jon Hendricks, who’d been commissioned to produce the sound track of a radical film about the Vietnam Day Committee’s antiwar demonstrations called
Sons and Daughters.
Hendricks had grown up in Ohio, five doors down from Art Tatum, then formed the preeminent jazz vocal group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. He was a genuine hero, and the Dead leaped at the chance to work with him. Weir was not familiar with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and Garcia and Lesh gave him an education. The session was hard for him, and he felt considerable pressure. Hendricks enjoyed himself: “Pigpen was the one that I was told I was going to have so much trouble from. He was like a child, he was very sweet.” Jon had heard of Jerry, and said much later that Garcia had the respect of some of the local jazz musicians. The band as a whole “seemed to feel like they were in training. And I didn’t realize it myself until about the end of the first day. They didn’t seem to want any latitude at all. Garcia said, ‘Look, anything you want us to do, just let us know. And we’ll do it.’ And when it got to the singing, Pigpen was brilliant on the vocals.”

Interestingly, when the film was being prepared for showing, the Dead asked that their name be removed from the credits. To Rifkin, they were about music, not politics. Weir remembered, “We were getting a lot of heat then.” The FBI had a tendency to stop by 710 looking for Bear or other well-known “underground” people, and “they knew our names . . . As far as we were concerned,” Weir continued, “the war was their business—the people who were fighting it. We wanted nothing to do with it, and that was that. We weren’t into protesting it—we were realistic enough to realize that there was nothing we could do that was going to change anything. In our hearts, we were against it.” The Dead’s attitude about politics would stay consistent, if unique. They probably did more benefits than any band ever, and frequently for explicitly political groups, but they’d sign nothing. They put their time where their beliefs were, but not their mouths. It was a policy designed to make “Grateful Dead” something separate, above life’s daily shuffle. “It’s our responsibility to keep ourselves free of those connotations,” said Garcia years later. “I want the Grateful Dead experience to be one of those things that doesn’t have a hook. We’re all very antiauthoritarian. There’s nothing that we believe so uniformly and so totally that we could use the Grateful Dead to advertise it.”