A Long Strange Trip (30 page)

Introduced by Brian Jones, the Jimi Hendrix Experience presented itself to America with a colossal bang. “Killing Floor,” “Foxy Lady,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Hey Joe,” and what Jimi called “the English and American combined anthem,” “Wild Thing,” ripped through the audience. The Experience’s first album, just then arriving in the stores, was superb, and Jimi’s showmanship was unbelievable. All his years of backing up Little Richard and the Isley Brothers paid off; he combined unique guitar playing with moves and style that were simply awesome, and then came his finale: “I just want to grab you, man, and just ummm kiss you, but dig, I just can’t do that . . . so what I want to do, I’m going to sacrifice something right here that I really love . . . don’t get mad, don’t get mad, no.” And with the help of a little lighter fluid, he set his guitar on fire. In a wonderfully superfluous anticlimax, the Mamas and the Papas, who hadn’t performed in three months, came onstage to close the night and the festival.

After all the machinations over film rights, ABC-TV took one look at the Jimi Hendrix footage and lost interest, suddenly realizing it was a family network. Pennebaker’s movie would become a staple on the art-house circuit, and over the years, as half owner, he would profit. Although they violated their promises and Pennebaker did shoot the Grateful Dead for a minute or two, Lou Adler was never able to get the Dead to approve their footage. When he went back to the town of Monterey the next year for permits, he was denied, and he dropped the application.

The Dead would depart Monterey with a considerable stack of purloined amps and speakers and bring them to San Francisco, where they used them as part of the sound system at a summer solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park on June 21. The members of Mad River, a band from Antioch College that had recently moved to Berkeley, got to the park that day and were flabbergasted when Rock offered them some first-rate equipment. Unused to such quality, they got so excited and played so loudly that they drowned out Big Brother, playing at the same time across the way. A few days later Julius went by 710 and convinced Rock and Danny that it would be bad karma to keep the gear, which they were stashing at the Diggers’ Free Store. After Emmett Grogan wrote a suitably obnoxious letter to Adler telling him that the hippies had taken his equipment and would return it if he would come “and wear some flowers in your hair,” Danny and Grogan returned it to the music store in Monterey where it had been rented, minus one amp, which had disappeared in the process.

But Monterey would be memorable for much more than a movie. “Promoters, hustlers, narks, con men,” wrote Hunter Thompson, “all selling the New Scene to
Time
magazine and the Elks Club. The handlers get rich while the animals either get busted or screwed.” The prize at Monterey was Big Brother, and Albert Grossman grabbed the brass ring, convincing the band to dump Julius and hire him. The other big winner at Monterey was Clive Davis, who went for social reasons and discovered his future. Soon he would sign Big Brother, and later other bands that would become essential to his career as the most successful recording industry executive of his era.

Three weeks later
Time
put hippies on its cover, which was created by the artists of the Group Image collective. The issue quoted the theologian Bishop Pike, who thought that hippies evoked the early Christians, and identified Thoreau, Jesus Christ, Buddha, St. Francis, Gandhi, Huxley, and hobbits as hippie heroes. One of the more interesting aspects of the piece was its coverage of Lou Gottlieb’s Morningstar Ranch, an open commune in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, which was essentially based on the Digger principles of “1. Open Earth 2. Open Air 3. Open Fire 4. Open Water: . . . Exclusive ownership of land is Original Sin.” Like the Haight, it was soon overflowing with bodies, but meantime, people there grew food for the people back in town. The
Time
article also had a picture of the Dead. Awash in a media sea, they had by now concluded that talking to reporters was pretty much a hopeless waste of time. That summer, when future
Washington Post
columnist Nicholas von Hoffman visited, Garcia and Bobby Petersen made a point of bullshitting him. On a visit to Vancouver that month they gave their names to the local newspaper as “Pigpen, Captain Trips, Kid Decibel, Reddy Kilowatt, and Captain Credit.”

On July 24 The Love-Ins, starring James MacArthur and Susan Oliver, opened at theaters across the country. Said Sam Katzman, the producer, “We start off sympathetic with them, making it look glamorous. Then we prove how wrong it is, we expose it.” Outside the world of pop culture, it was racially and politically another “long hot summer.” Newark, New Jersey, went up in flames in July, leaving twenty-six dead and one thousand arrested, followed by Detroit, where forty-three died as order was imposed by 8,000 National Guardsmen and 4,700 U.S. Army paratroopers. John Coltrane, the band’s musical hero, died on July 17.

Life at 710 was sufficiently hectic that horrible summer of love that the band at least briefly decided to move to New Mexico. Sue Swanson, Kreutzmann’s new lady friend, Susila, M.G., and Vee went as scouts. Since their van was stocked with a coffee can full of hash and Acapulco Gold, they enjoyed their trip. They camped near the Four Corners and even found a lovely place near Taos, but were unable to pin down a lease. They also found themselves running out of money and were forced to wire home for more. At some point Vee grew suspicious when the band didn’t seem all that thrilled with what the scouts had found, and concluded that they “had just wanted us out of the house.” They returned home in time to join the band on a special jaunt.

Bill Graham had decided to take “the San Francisco Scene”—the Airplane, the Dead, and Head Lights—to the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto for a week. The O’Keefe Centre was Toronto’s Carnegie Hall, a high-end room built for classical music that was not ready for dancing, an issue that would consume a lot of energy for the Dead and other bands over the next few years. After the show on opening night, Graham had the bands play again as a gift for the O’Keefe’s employees. It established a good relationship, and after that it was only the newspaper writers who had any problem. To the
Globe and Mail
the Dead were “simian.” “Not volume, not intensity, but noise . . . like a jet taking off in your inner ear, while the mad scientist was perversely scraping your nerves to shreds.” Most of the other reviews focused on the hit-making Airplane, which was perhaps just as well. For Garcia, they were terrible shows in which everyone played badly, there was a buzz in the sound system that was louder than the music, the band was in complete turmoil, and he was ready to fire Weir for his insensate playing.

Life in the other band may have been worse. By now at least comparatively wealthy from
Surrealistic Pillow,
the Airplane was doing its best to experience every problem of success, rock star category, by (a) lavishing money on their latest recording project,
After Bathing at Baxter’s,
and (b) spending the rest of their energy on internal bickering. Jack and Jorma picked on Marty’s show business pretensions, the lovers Grace and Spencer squared off against the world, and Paul managed somehow to dominate everyone from the middle.

Their Toronto hotel, the Royal York, was pleasant enough. The two bands took over one entire floor, and madras bedspreads, candles, incense, and Persian carpets made things more homey. Almost everyone on the trip would recall the hotel’s specialty, hot apple pie with apricot brandy sauce. Jerry and M.G. and Jorma and his wife, Margaretta, took a side trip to Niagara Falls together, but, Jorma said, “it was just classic. Each couple fought the entire way.” There was another regret to the week. Out in the audience one night was a woman to whom the Dead would owe much over the years, the author of “Morning Dew,” Bonnie Dobson. She was too shy to come backstage, and the band never knew of her visit.

After their last night in Toronto, the two bands climbed into a bus for a ride to Montreal, where they would play two more shows. Jack Casady had rigged speakers in the back, M.G.’s golden-haired daughter, Sunshine, crawled up and down the aisle, and the bus was blue with pot smoke, so that even Bill Graham developed a contact high. In Montreal they played a free show downtown on a postage-stamp-size stage in front of what the
Montreal Gazette
said was “25,000 hippies, teenyboppers, adults and squares [for] Montreal’s first large-scale love-in.” Then they played another free show, at the Youth Pavilion on the Expo ’67 site. It was a futuristic setting, with a monorail snaking through a geodesic dome, and it was perhaps a little intimidating. Everyone except Weir and Pig dropped acid, and as the Airplane’s road manager, Bill Thompson, recalled it, Rock and Danny vanished, and he worked for both bands that day. Unfortunately, the Expo police got nervous. As the audience began to dance, the cops lined up in front of the stage, arms locked, putting off the band no end. From the back of the stage Graham was hyperactively telling them to “stop playing so exciting,” exactly the wrong thing to say. “That’s what we’re here for,” thought Garcia. “That’s what the crowd is here for, nobody’s gonna get hurt, it was all little girls anyway.” It was a most unsatisfactory day.

The Dead were not without a sense of drama. When they got downtown after the Expo show, they twisted Graham’s tail by abruptly announcing that they were getting off the bus. No one would later recall what the alternative was, but members of the Airplane plaintively inquired, “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” The Dead didn’t have a gig for another ten days, had very little money, and were in a foreign country. They did have a couple of aces in the hole. One was their favorite scammer, Ron Rakow. The year before, when they’d separated from Owsley, Rakow had lent them some money, knowing he’d never get it back, which would make him, he thought, “a patron, entitled to respect.” He’d become involved with an investment called Circlephonics, a revolutionary new loudspeaker design, and raised around $40,000 from investors. Nothing came of it, recalled his lady friend, Lydia. In Montreal, however, Rakow was running around with another woman friend, and she was the other ace in the hole. Her name was Peggy Hitchcock, and with her help they rented a couple of cars, loaded up, and drove to her estate, Millbrook, which was certainly a nice hideout, although it seemed to Rifkin, at least, that the residents generally saw the Dead as invading barbarians, there to “smoke their dope and fuck their women.”

Soon enough, the band was off to New York, for the first of a series of odd and interesting gigs. On August 10 they played on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel for the Diggers’ Trip Without a Ticket, a party Grogan had arranged in an effort to hustle some funds from avant-garde New Yorkers like their hostess, Shirley Clark, the director of the play
The Connection,
and Andy Warhol, who was one of the guests. From Manhattan the Dead headed west, and after a couple of paying gigs played free at West Park, in Ann Arbor, as part of Warner Bros.’ promotion of the album. It was just a month after the Detroit riots, so their timing was distinctly problematic, particularly when someone used an American flag to wipe the stage dry. More appropriately, Garcia and Rock Scully went off to hang out and inhale nitrous oxide with John Sinclair, a poet, jazz critic, marijuana activist, and sponsor of Detroit’s MC [Motor City] 5.

It should have been nice to get home, but it wasn’t. The Haight’s atmosphere was poisoned. The main local headlines concerned an acid dealer named John Kent Carter, whose body had been found minus an arm, presumably because that arm had been handcuffed to a briefcase full of cash or merchandise. The Dead were to play on August 20 at a gathering on beautiful, holy Mount Tamalpais, but when they got to the mountaintop, they discovered that there was no power, and the event turned into what Rifkin would call “a bongofest.” On August 22 the band members were unanimously embarrassed by their first nationwide TV appearance, on ABC’s
The Hippie Temptation.
As Harry Reasoner sanctimoniously intoned, “at their best they are trying for a kind of group sainthood . . . saints running in groups are likely to be ludicrous,” Garcia reminded himself—again!, and not for the last time—of the futility of talking to the press. A few days later they learned that their good friend Chocolate George had died in a car accident.

In a one-night repeat of the Toronto run, Graham took the Airplane and Dead to the Hollywood Bowl in mid-September. Garcia would have better memories of the Bowl than Toronto, however. Over Labor Day, they’d gone up to Rio Nido, a small resort town north of San Francisco in the redwoods on the Russian River, for a couple of gigs. One night they played a blistering thirty-one-minute “Midnight Hour” that even the critical Phil Lesh would treasure many years later. And in the afternoons, they’d begun working on a new, as-yet-untitled song. Since their mood was always based on the last show, there was still hope.

17

Interlude: The Crew

Imagine an extreme in male bonding, on the order of the front four of an NFL defense, or perhaps some elite military unit. In the world of the Grateful Dead, it is the crew, one of the most remarkable elements in the band’s saga. The history of rock will record that Dead crew chief Lawrence “Ram Rod” Shurtliff was undoubtedly the longest-term employee of any group ever, and many of his companions stayed nearly as long. Their bond was sufficient that when Mickey Hart fired Steve Parish as his drum roadie, Ram Rod—for the good of the crew as a whole— swapped his longtime role as Jerry Garcia’s guitar roadie with Steve and went to work for the far more demanding Hart. The record will also show that the Dead’s crew was undoubtedly the only road crew ever to have its own charter plane, a Learjet. The crew had better pay, better working conditions, and more influence on the band’s decisions—their dislike for the demands of crossing borders had much to do with the rarity of Dead visits to Canada or Europe—than any employees of any music group ever. They were not employees, really, but de facto band members. Jerry Garcia’s role as the leader who wouldn’t lead extended maximally to the people who helped his band to play. Without them, no stage, and therefore no music. This was a two-pronged responsibility: not only did the crew set up the stage and hand it over to the band members so that they could play, but during performances, it devolved upon them, like it or not, to maintain order on the stage. This made for the occasional rub.

The Dead’s stage was not a conventional performance space. It was their living room. They did not trot out onstage with a show; they made music that defined their lives and shared it with friends. So the stage was not separate from everyday life; it was where they lived. Which was why the playing area had no theatrical decorations, and why dozens of people—friends, family, women friends for the night or a lifetime—had access to the stage during a performance. This made for complications. As sound crew member Dennis “Wizard” Leonard once remarked, “The stage is a very fragile bubble. Music reflects consciousness, and the crew was responsible for protecting that bubble, and that consciousness.” It was a profound responsibility, and they took it quite seriously. There really was an occasion in which a young woman stumbled, kicked out a plug, and plunged one entire side of the stage into darkness. Another time, a completely crazed young man leaped onstage from an overhanging balcony, shouting, “Fuck me, Garcia, fuck me.” Handicapped by their unwillingness to hit him, it took three roadies twenty minutes to wrestle him off the stage, although no one in front of the stage ever saw the struggle. One night early in Steve Parish’s career, a naked man leaped onstage, fell on a power box, and crushed a connection, rendering it useless. At six foot five and 250-plus pounds, Parish was a most imposing figure and was able to hustle him off so quickly that Garcia never saw the man. He looked up and yelled, “What happened to all my stuff?” Parish said, “This naked guy just came running up—”
“What
naked guy?” Parish smiled. “[ Jerry] thought we were nuts.”

The Grateful Dead scene was a horizontal, not vertical, hierarchy, with the band at the center. The crew was the next layer out. More than a million people occupied the succeeding layers, and the social pressure they generated led to what could at times be a very difficult attitude. As Joe Winslow was warned when he joined the crew, “Everyone is gonna be your fuckin’ friend.” There hadn’t been any “idols” in his hometown of Pendleton, Oregon, and he realized later the crew role left him with a considerably swelled head for a good while. In the interim, the combination of male bonding and road stress was a killer. “The road turns you into gristle,” he said. “If you’re looking for comfort,” Garcia told an interviewer, “join a club or something. The Grateful Dead is not where you’re going to find comfort. In fact, if anything, you’ll catch a lot of shit. And if you don’t get it from the band, you’ll get it from the roadies. They’re merciless. They’ll just gnaw you like a dog. They’ll tear your flesh off. They can be extremely painful.” Aside from verbal abuse, the crew fraternity practiced hazing as an art form, of which the sine qua non was being seized and held down by two or three members and then being mummified in gaffer’s tape. The skilled application of the hotfoot made it inadvisable to fall asleep around them. Heaven help the visitor who got to the stage on a day when Parish and his brother-in-crewness Kidd Candelario were particularly bored. The destruction of one’s shirt was a minimum price.

Though they were not infrequently sexist and/or difficult, the woman they worked with for twenty years, lighting designer Candace Brightman, took a benign, if qualified, view of them as coworkers. “I didn’t have trouble because I forgot that I was a woman . . . You see, I liked playing that game. I was always ready for a little [metaphorical] fisticuffs.” Going on to describe a passing quarrel with Dan Healy, she remarked that she was “elated” when the gauntlet was flung down. “I don’t have any normal fear for those people [guys who think women can’t work]. One time Steve banged my head into the drum kit a number of times, and I ruined it by breaking out laughing. I love a certain amount of lighthearted physical violence. I know this sounds a little sick, but . . . you had to be kind of thick-skinned around my house, growing up.”

The band’s unwillingness to be authority figures had consequences. “[The crew] became so powerful,” said Mickey Hart, “and we just said whatever. That was one of our big downfalls, not taking a stand with the crew. They didn’t want to work, and we said, okay, whatever. It was one of the stupidest things we’ve ever done, letting the crew run the show . . . Rifkin and Ram Rod were the great spirit of the Grateful Dead, the real souls, but some of the other guys had other agendas, partying animals . . . We let it go down. It was our cross to bear. We spotted it. We thought it was endearing and cute, letting the quippies run the show. That’s what I thought. What an odd thing. Everything else is so odd, why shouldn’t this be odd? Maybe they’re protecting us from some evil . . . I liked all of them. I got along with Heard. Even Candelario, before he turned into a monster . . . Me me me. He wouldn’t step outside of his area code to help. I noticed that once. Something happened on the stage, and he stood there.” The tolerance of the band could be abused, as when a crew member insisted that caterers bring him a thousand-dollar bottle of brandy to take home, and another crew member demanded an equally expensive gift, which turned out to be a fishing rod. But in the end, if there was a truly legitimate criticism to put to the crew, it was their treatment of each other, which was as testosterone-driven as everything else, and especially of production manager Robbie Taylor, who bore the brunt of being the efficient, meticulous front man who had to deliver the stage to the band while placating periodically foul-tempered coworkers.

The crew generally showed another, more noble face. In 1982 the prime minister of Jamaica arrived to address the crowd at the World Music Festival, and the captain of his bodyguards ordered the stage cleared. The Uzis his men carried were very shiny, but the captain was informed by the Dead’s crew that when their equipment was on the stage, they did not leave. The prime minister spoke with the Dead’s crew behind him.

There were always grumbles from people who thought they should be onstage and weren’t, a completely futile exercise when one remembers that Garcia once chuckled that Parish had ordered Jerry’s own brother, Tiff, offstage. But in later years there was only one real challenge to the crew’s primacy, and their reaction to it was brilliant. Various members of the crew, primarily Parish, made a habit of reading over the guest list for tickets and passes and occasionally amending it, removing people’s names from the backstage-pass column, and sometimes, if the person had annoyed them, entirely from the list. Their premise was that these people were generally guests of office staff who were not present to supervise them. One person was brave enough to protest, and that was Eileen Law, the angel and guardian of the Dead Heads. One too many of her guests had not received their promised tickets, much less backstage passes, and she raised the point at a company meeting. A thin-skinned bunch, the crew was mightily offended at being challenged, and at the next concert, they brilliantly confused the issue by quitting
all
their security functions. Though Law’s objections had focused solely on the guest list, the crew members abdicated their essential stage-guarding functions, in fact inviting backstage passersby onstage to watch the show. When a complete stranger wandered so far out on the playing area that she blocked Phil Lesh’s sight line of Harry Popick, the monitor mixer, Lesh grew enraged, berating Parish and gripping Steve’s massive arm with his bass-playing fingers of steel hard enough to leave five vividly distinct bruises. The stage was cleared of strangers, and no one ever felt like messing with the crew again on the subject.

The crew developed an extraordinary tradition. It began with Laird Grant, Garcia’s junior high school friend and their first roadie. “For sure he could fix the snakes of wirings at the acid tests, with a gas hose in his mouth and a chick humping on his left leg,” wrote one observer, and the elements of functioning in the middle of sex, drugs, and rock and roll never changed. Laird quit in 1967, and five months later Ram Rod became the rock of the band for its career. Quiet, ethical, the soul of decency, he was always the One. Rex Jackson came the next year, a brashly confident man who had a certain glow about him. He had “a drive to express some spark,” thought Joe Winslow, but was “frustrated in how to do it.” A little larger than life, Rex was, as one band member noticed, better-looking than anyone in the band, and his eventual loss was a grievous one. The crew member who would be most visible and last the longest, after Ram Rod, was Steve Parish, a New Yorker who met the band in 1969, and eventually came to define the crew to many. “We knew we were a vanguard,” he said. The band and crew were so close that a number of times, after long periods of sleep deprivation on the road, they would finally get to a hotel and a decent quantity of sleep and find, comparing notes the next day, that their dreams were remarkably similar.

As Parish also put it, “We’re part of the Dead. You really put your whole heart into the system, right from the vibration of a guitar string out to the back of the hall.” Larger than life both literally and metaphorically, Parish is loud, theatrical, demonstrative, and utterly committed to the band. A splendid example of that took place on December 27, 1989, when the Oakland branch of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, commonly called the IA (and also known as IATSE), contemplated a strike against Bill Graham Presents (BGP), to be carried out on the first night of a Dead new year’s run at Oakland Coliseum. The Dead’s crew were also IA members, both because it smoothed their relations with stagehands across the country and because they anticipated needing such credentials whenever the band got around to retiring. The Oakland branch of the IA had not had a contract with Bill Graham Presents for eighteen months, and they had finally decided to strike BGP because they thought the Dead’s crew would back them. Certainly, they knew that BGP would gladly have sacrificed any given show to crush the union, even though the Oakland hands were getting five dollars an hour less than the San Francisco local.

By early afternoon of the twenty-seventh, the first show of the run, negotiations were at a stalemate, and the Dead’s staff walked out of the building. Truck driver Mike Fischer was ordered to move the truck off the ramp and into the parking lot, which he proceeded to do with Bill Graham pleading/screaming at him to stop. Bill could tolerate much in life, but not losing a Grateful Dead New Year’s run. His argument to the band that he was saving them money was useless; the band never minded paying good wages for good work. At this point Parish went to Graham and told him that he was betraying the Dead and its audience, and he had to negotiate. Calls to band members and manager Danny Rifkin indicated their support. Graham was not quite good enough a poker player to wait out the Dead’s bluff, if bluff it was, and he folded. The final twist came when the IA members refused to trust Graham without a signed contract. By then it was 3 P.M., two hours late for load-in, and for the second time, Parish went crazy-as-a-fox berserk. Fischer brought the truck back, and Steve began to unload it by himself. Twenty-one IA stagehands looked at each other, shrugged, and went back to work.