A Long Strange Trip (31 page)

18

Dark Anthem (9/16/67–12/31/67)

One day at dawn in August 1967, Robert Hunter set out hitchhik-ing from near Taos, heading home to San Francisco. Thin and worn, he looked not unlike Don Quixote. He was not in the best of shape, having come to New Mexico some weeks before to get away from the methedrine he was ingesting too much of back in Palo Alto. Like Sherlock Holmes, he craved mental stimulation, and speed led him to poetry that would endure. Unfortunately, the physical consequences of speed had left him with a bad case of hepatitis and the nickname “Yellow Angel.” His monthlong sojourn in Santa Fe had sorted out his problem with methedrine, but it was not otherwise serene. There were various disasters involving housing, the breakup of a long-term relationship with his lover, Judy, and an excess of drinking to ease the methedrine withdrawal. In his own words, he was a “lost puppy” after the breakup with Judy, but an hour after their final denouement, his friend Carl Moore showed up and took him to Carl’s place in San Cristobal, on the road to Taos.

He stayed there a week, and during that time he heard from Garcia, who informed him that the band was working with his lyrics on a song called “Alligator” and that he should join them. One night in San Cristobal he took LSD, and in the morning set out for San Francisco with twenty dollars in his pocket and a brain full of what he later realized were the fumes of borderline lunacy. It would take him several weeks to get home. Wobbling through a phantasmic mindscape, it would seem to him that he lived the entirety of Kerouac’s
On the Road
during the journey. He began by wearing a hole in his boots while walking in the wrong direction across the Rio Grande. He tried to sleep under a train trestle one night but was routed by a blizzard of mosquitoes. Still pointed in the wrong direction, he caught a ride in a truck hauling carnival equipment to Denver, Neal Cassady’s old hometown, where he wandered for days in a purgatory of confusion. One morning he saw the Dead’s first album in a supermarket cutout rack, which reminded him that he was supposed to be going to San Francisco. He set out once again, and by Nevada he was down to his last dime, which he naturally put in a slot machine, winning enough to call the band and let them know he was coming.

On his arrival in San Francisco, Phil picked him up and took him to Rio Nido on the Russian River, where they had a weekend’s worth of gigs at the Dance Hall, a funky shack hanging over the water that held perhaps two hundred people. That afternoon, Hunter sat recovering from the road on the lawn outside the little joint, and listened to them rehearse a new song. Garcia had come up with the first lick, which was a modal development of a simple figure with a line against it. It was a song made to go anywhere. It came from nowhere and from many places, from several psyches, from the larger collective unconscious. Hunter understood instantly, and began to scribble lyrics. He had only been working with poetry for a year, having been inspired by Lew Welch, a young Beat poet who was part of Gary Snyder’s circle, but he had always been what he called “the most lucid hallucinator in the group,” and now his practice bore fruit. In addition to “Alligator,” he had sent them some other work, including one particularly abstract hallucination that began, “Look for a while at the china cat sunflower,” ran through material that would appear in future songs, asked, “Ever been to see a comical collection of gears, grinding out galactical illusions of years?” and returned to the “china cat sunflower.” At Rio Nido, even though he was treating a transcendental experience, he kept his language and images crystalline, even paying formal tribute to so classic a poem as T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Shall we go, then, you and I.” In a little while, he ran into the shack and handed Garcia the lyrics.

Dark star crashes
pouring its light
into ashes

Reason tatters
the forces tear loose
from the axis

Searchlight casting
for faults in the
clouds of delusion

Shall we go,
you and I
while we can?
Through
the transitive nightfall
of diamonds

Jerry smiled. “Yeah, that scans, that works.” Hunter felt so good that he reached up and started swinging from the rafters, giving himself a ripe splinter. As he listened to them apply his words to the music, he knew he had found his life’s work. A few days later he was sitting in Golden Gate Park working on the second verse and a hippie passed by, noticed him writing, and handed him a joint with the comment “Maybe this will make things easier for you.” Hunter lit it and replied, “Thanks a lot, man.” He toked and added, “In case anything ever comes of it, this is called ‘Dark Star.’ ” The Dead had found their fulcrumatic song; “Dark Star” was to be their magic carpet, a vehicle that allowed them to approach music as an unfolding dance. “Caution” had been that sort of song, but “Dark Star” was simply much better and more beautiful. The Dead had also found their voice.

After a foray to Colorado to christen the Family Dog’s new branch establishment, the Denver Dog, the band returned to San Francisco to help open, at long last, the Straight Theater, on Haight Street, just three blocks from 710. The event was a hoot and a half. The young men who had worked to create the Straight Theater were not without connections, but they had faced tough opposition from the police and community business types, especially one Matthew Boxer, the executive manager of the San Francisco Council of District Merchants, who felt threatened by a third ballroom in the city. Ironically, the Diggers also opposed the Straight, claiming it would “rip off the people.” “Ridiculous,” said Hillel Resner, one of the organizers. “We
were
the people.”

The Straight had opened in June and had put on several concerts, but couldn’t get a dance permit. In September, the organizers went to the Board of Permit Appeals, where Dame Judith Anderson, among others, testified on their behalf. Even with such distinguished support, they were rejected. Then one of the theater’s organizers, Luther Green, got terribly clever. The City of San Francisco did not require permits for dance
schools.
For September 29 and 30, the Straight announced, the Dead would play for dance lessons. “Learn body movement, muscle tone, physical exercises, expanded space perception—this and whatever else not listed here to happen at Straight Dance Lessons.” With TV cameras and attorney Terence Hallinan in the lobby looking on, and a big blowup of the Declaration of Independence hanging on the wall behind him, Lieutenant James Ludlow of the SFPD decided to do nothing. The “registration fee” was $2.50, and “dance students” filled out membership cards at a table. The joke of the night was, “Do I get a student discount?” On the stage, an associate of Ann Halprin’s named Peter Weiss began the class: “What I would like everyone to do is close your eyes and relax, and note how you breathe and how your heart is pumping.” The Dead ripped into “Dancing in the Streets,” and class was in session. The city briefly considered requiring all schools to get permits, until the Arthur Murray people growled, and the idea was shelved. In the end, the Straight Theater never did get a permit.

It was a busy pair of gigs. On the second night, Kreutzmann had a guest, a drummer he’d met named Mickey Hart. At intermission Bill approached his guest, who was thrilled by the cacophony, and said, “You wanna sit in?” “Sure, but I don’t have any drums.” They jumped into Kreutzmann’s Mustang, went somewhere and rustled up a kit, and were ready for the second set. Hart took a seat next to Kreutzmann, the band went into “Alligator,” and sometime later—Mickey would recall it as two hours—they finished the song, and the band included six people. They hadn’t particularly realized they were one piece shy, but they were certainly smart enough to know when it had arrived. Few more concentrated lives are recorded in the annals of music.

Michael Steven Hartman, who had followed his father’s lead and changed his name when he got out of the service, because “Hartman” was “too German; ‘Hart’ was American,” was born to two drummers. His father, Lenny, had been world senior solo rudimental (marching band style) drum champion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and Mickey’s mother, Leah, had been sufficiently skilled a drummer to join with Lenny as part of their courting process to win the newly created world mixed-doubles championship there. Their son would devote his very soul to the art.

Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in 1943, Mickey was raised by his mother, a gown maker and bookkeeper, after his father deserted them. Leah would wait until Mickey was eleven to remarry, but none of his stepfathers would ever please him. A hyperactive child, he was bright but had great trouble focusing at school and demanded that his grandmother wait for him in the street, where he could see her. Ethel Tessel was sufficiently doting to do just that. At age ten he saw a picture of his father in a movie theater newsreel item about the 1939 world’s fair, and at home he discovered his legacy, a drum pad and a pair of snakewood sticks. Leah would hide them and he’d find them, retreating to a closet to practice. When she realized he was serious, she began to give him lessons. “From the age of ten,” he wrote, “all I did was drum. Obsessively. Passionately. Painfully.” He did not read for pleasure, and rarely socialized. Once a year, he would go with his beloved grandparents on a two-week summer vacation. Sam Tessel was a cabbie, but he enjoyed taking mobile holidays, and they would drive around the United States, young Mickey standing between the two front seats behind the meter, seeing Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore, and other American holy places.

When he began high school, the family moved to Cedarhurst, on Long Island, and he kept drumming. After all, “Only the drum gave me the feeling of power and uniqueness that is so important to teenagers. When I had my drum, I was the prince of noise, the loudest thing in the room.” That feeling would never change. He found an encouraging teacher, Arthur Jones, and eventually won the first chair in the All State Band. Leaving high school in his senior year, he joined the air force, “ ’cause that’s where the great drummers were.” While in the service, he came across a brochure for Remo Drumheads, and in the ad was a picture of his father. Transferred to a base in Southern California, he went to see the owner of the company, Remo Belli, who observed, “I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.” Remo went on to tell him that Lenny Hart was now an executive of a savings and loan in the San Fernando Valley. Mickey was overjoyed at finding his father but was soon assigned to a base in Spain, whereupon Lenny vanished again. In Europe, Mickey competed at a high level in judo, drove rally races, and drummed, in small combos, a marching band, and what-have-you.

On his release from the air force, he once again found his father through Remo Belli. When they met, Lenny invited him to join in the running of a drum store, Hart Music, in San Carlos, a suburb south of San Francisco. Soon after, Mickey experienced LSD for the first time, sitting in the store watching all the drums around him come alive. His visions inspired in him the idea of painting psychedelic designs on the heads of bass drums. Somehow, Lenny claimed the creation as his own, and there was trouble between them. Just about this time, Mickey went to see the Count Basie Orchestra at the Fillmore, and a stranger remarked to him, “See that guy? He’s the drummer for the Dead. You gotta meet him.” Having performed his introduction, the anonymous benefactor vanished. Billy suggested a visit to the Matrix to see Big Brother, where Mickey was fascinated when Jim Gurley wrapped his arms around his amp, squeezed it, shook it, and finally dropped it. Sonny Payne, Count Basie’s drummer and Mickey’s friend, had followed them over to the club, but the volume was too much for him, and he left the scene to the two young men. “Too loud” had never entered Mickey Hart’s vocabulary, and he was enraptured. That night he and Kreutzmann wandered around the city in Bill’s Mustang, playing on cars, garbage cans, and light posts, literally “playing the city.” Billy invited him to drop by the Dead’s rehearsal room, but Mickey couldn’t find it. A month later Kreutzmann called again to tell him of the Straight Theater gig, and this time Mickey made it.

The first set fascinated him, not least by its loudness, and playing in the second set was heaven, like being “whipped into a jet stream,” he said. Afterward he felt clean, as though he’d had a long hot shower. Once invited to join the band, Mickey went back to San Carlos and threw the store keys into the street out front, not even going in to say good-bye to Lenny. He moved into a closet at Billy and Phil’s place on Belvedere Street, and the drummers began to study together. Mickey used self-hypnosis, which he’d learned from a book, as part of his regimen, and he shared this technique with Kreutzmann. “We are going to become one, to synchronize our beats. We’ll be able to play fast. We’re not going to become tired.” They would drum with one arm around the other, each contributing one arm. They would check each other’s pulse, so that they could lock into their heartbeats as a rhythm yoga. Hart was, and would remain, obsessive, intense, and verbally dominant, and this made Kreutzmann’s lover, Susila, very uncomfortable. Billy pushed Mickey to make the hypnosis a parlor trick by hypnotizing Pigpen, and it worked, which convinced Susila that Hart was a Svengali, out to control Kreutzmann’s mind. Mickey’s motives were undoubtedly pure, but it was easy to be spooked by his driven methods. Garcia and Lesh were enthusiastic about his impact on the band, and it had been Kreutzmann’s idea in the first place. Pigpen said little. Weir didn’t think they needed another drummer, and wasn’t sure a new guy could catch on, or whether there was room on the stage or in the music for more, but given everyone else’s enthusiasm, felt “I didn’t have a vote.” It took him perhaps two weeks to understand his error.

Their ensuing musical ferment was briefly interrupted. There was a man who was a habitué of Kesey’s scene at La Honda and a friend of the band’s. He was also, it developed, a child molester, and the police threatened him with a long stay at the hospital for the criminally insane in Napa unless he rolled over and helped them make some showy marijuana arrests. Roll he did, and in the course of the afternoon of October 2, 1967, he led the police to four homes in the Haight-Ashbury. One of them was 710. He’d stopped by and asked if he could roll a joint, and made sure that Jerry and M.G., of whom he was especially fond, were on their way out. Shortly thereafter, as Weir meditated in the attic, the chief of the State Narcotics Bureau, Matthew O’Connor, state agent Jerry Van Ramm, and the head of the SFPD Narcotics Squad, Norbert “the Nark” Currie, led a detachment of police into the house while reporters and TV crews watched from the street. “That’s what ya get for dealing the killer weed,” snickered Van Ramm, and off to jail went nonsmokers Pigpen and Bobby, plus Bob Matthews, Rock, Danny, Sue Swanson, Florence, Vee, Toni Kaufman (the daughter of Beat poet Bob Kaufman, there to work for HALO), and Christine Bennett, by now Dan Healy’s lover.