A Long Strange Trip (32 page)

Danny arrived in the middle of the proceedings and was greeted with “Oh, so you’re Rifkin.” He sat on his desk and called Brian Rohan, who would almost beat the arrestees to the Hall of Justice. Florence was a little behind Danny and got halfway up the stairs when she saw Weir trying to wave her off as a stranger came toward her, but it was a bit too late. Told to sit in the kitchen, she dug a three-gram ball of hash out of her purse, threw it on some ice cream, and downed it. At the Hall of Justice, Jerry Van Ramm was dancing what the prisoners thought of as a little Hitlerite victory jig as he crowed, “I got ’em, I got ’em.” The denizens of 710 were certainly not alone. It seemed that day as though half of the Haight-Ashbury was in jail. Claiming that “an investigation kept turning up the address of 710 Ashbury as a supply source,” O’Connor went on to say that police had found a pound of pot and some hashish. They also confiscated Pigpen’s entirely legal .32 Beretta. Bail was set at $550 each, and they were all processed out quickly, except for the minors, Christine Bennett and Sue Swanson. Florence, who kept sliding off the bench in the fingerprint room, was so stoned that she couldn’t speak for four days, but was otherwise fine. After his release, Danny went to the cupboard where the stash had been, and discovered a virtually intact kilo brick (2.2 pounds) that the police had managed to overlook. Someone hadn’t missed a hundred-dollar bill in the office desk, however.

The best part of the day was the quick thinking of their neighbor Marilyn Harris, who saved Jerry and M.G. from arrest. Marilyn had been confined to her bed for the previous two weeks by a bout of hepatitis, and the family at 710 had pitched in to care for her during her recovery, complete with a sign-up sheet in the kitchen to cover every chore, from meals to chamber pot. Pig would turn off her lights at the end of the day. Sitting in a chair by the window, Marilyn watched the bust go down, and kept her eyes open, realizing that there were still officers in the house even after the paddy wagon departed. When Jerry and M.G. showed up, she shouted down, “I never thought you’d get here. Bring the groceries up, I’m starving. Just do what I say!” They listened, and escaped detention.

The
Chronicle
’s coverage described the Dead’s “way out 13 room pad” and mentioned the Straight Theater School of Dance gigs, which may well have had something to do with the timing of the bust. The Dead responded with a press conference on October 5. They tried to address the issue soberly, though the media could hardly accept the notion, as the release put it, that the law against the killer weed was “a lie,” that hippies were “a myth,” and that the bust was “annoying.” “I think they’re just harassing people with long hair,” observed Rifkin, while serving coffee with whipped cream and homemade cookies. Because Danny had difficulties with writing, their statement was drafted by his college buddy Harry Shearer (who many years later, would be part of the comedic rock band Spinal Tap). With the other HALO attorney, Michael Stepanian, at his side, Rifkin argued that “almost anyone who has ever studied marijuana seriously and objectively has agreed that, physically and psychologically, marijuana is the least harmful chemical used for pleasure and life-enhancement . . . The president of a company that makes defective automobiles which leads to thousands of deaths . . . [gets] a minor fine . . . A person convicted for possession of marijuana can be sentenced to up to 30 years in jail . . . the law is so seriously out of touch with reality . . . The law creates a mythical danger and calls it a felony. The people who enforce the law use it almost exclusively against individuals who threaten their ideas of the way people should look and act.”

“How long did it take to grow your hair that long, Danny?” came one media question.

“We’ve always figured,” replied Danny, “that if we ever held a press conference, the first reporter who asked a stupid question would get a cream pie in his face, and you’re him.” The other reporters cheered, but then Rifkin’s compassion took over, and they spared the lunkhead.

The police then ratcheted up the pressure. In the two weeks after the bust at 710, the police leaned on the Matrix for noise complaints, swept Haight Street for truants and arrested thirty-two, and then arrested adults at a conference on runaways at the Straight Theater because there was a nude dance. All charges were dropped a few weeks later.
San Francisco
Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen spoke for many San Franciscans when he wrote, “But if [hippiedom] needed a raison d’etre . . . it has been provided, ironically, by its unbelievably foamy-mouthed critics. In the face of the hippies’ implied disdain, a truly well-established society would not have lost its poise . . . in such lamentable fashion.”

The rose that was the Haight-Ashbury was shriveling fast. The Psychedelic Shop closed on October 4, staying open all night to give away whatever was left on the shelves. Two days later, one year after the first Haight ceremony, the Diggers, now called the Free City Collective, threw a Death of Hippie Ceremony. “The media cast nets,” they announced, “create bags for the identity-hungry to climb in . . . the FREE MAN vomits his images and laughs in the clouds.” The “funeral notice” read: “HIPPIE. In the Haight-Ashbury district of this city, Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media. Friends are invited to attend services.” The ceremony began in Buena Vista Park with the playing of taps while the participants surrounded a coffin filled with the ashes of hippie detritus and emblazoned with a sign, “Try our friendly lay-away plan.” Marilyn Harris knew someone who worked in a funeral parlor, and acquired the “Funeral” signs that mark cars in such a procession. Having cut off the parlor’s name to protect the guilty, they handed the signs out to passing cars. Led by women mourners in black singing “Get out of my life, why don’t you, babe” and three hooded figures hoisting a silver dollar sign on a stick, a half dozen pallbearers carried the coffin, followed by a hippie on a stretcher with flowers on his chest. They looped through the Haight and ended up back at the Panhandle, where the coffin was burned, drawing the attention of the fire department.

Three literal deaths that month made the news: Woody Guthrie, Che Guevara, and Groovy, a hippie on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who was gruesomely murdered. On October 21, the antiwar movement brought together 100,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and at least 5,000 of those people then marched on the Pentagon, which was encircled by 5,000 troops. The marchers included such “respectable” activists as Dr. Benjamin Spock, John Lewis of SNCC, Noam Chomsky, and Paul Goodman, and somewhat more creative antiwar workers like Jerry Rubin and Michael Bowen, the artist and Be-In sponsor. Financed by Peggy Hitchcock, Bowen planned to dive-bomb the Pentagon with hundreds of pounds of daisies, but when he and his cohorts placed an ad in the
East Village Other
seeking a pilot, the FBI answered it, and they were forced to cancel the airdrop. Instead, the nation saw pictures of young demonstrators placing the flowers in the barrels of the rifles held by the men who blocked their way to the Pentagon. It was an authentic evocation of the cliché “flower power,” though its impact was uncertain. One very real result of the march was that it accelerated the doubts of a man named Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation researcher who was supposed to be figuring out how to win the war. Eventually, he would resolve his doubts by releasing the internal record of war-making decisions called
The Pentagon Papers,
documenting the government’s various lies.

On November 9 the first edition of
Rolling Stone
magazine hit the newsstands, and rock and roll grew up a little.
Crawdaddy!
would always be important, but its appeal was to an intellectual elite. The
Stone
would have a general appeal, and for a long while, it would matter. Jann Wenner, the U.C. Berkeley student who had so disliked Bill Graham, shared with him a driven, workaholic personality that was destined for achievement. He assembled rock critics like Jon Landau and Jonathan Cott, the San Francisco
Newsweek
writer Michael Lydon, his mentor Ralph Gleason, and the photographer Baron Wolman. Later, Lydon would snipe that Wenner began the magazine so he could meet the Beatles, and certainly there was more than a modicum of hero worship and the cult of celebrity in it. But his faith and commitment to rock were unquestioned. “This is not a counterculture paper,” he told Baron Wolman, “this is an industry paper.” Cover the industry it did. The first issue led with a picture of John Lennon from the film
How I Won the War,
a Lydon piece on what happened to the money from the Monterey Pop Festival, and a centerfold article on the bust of 710. An interview with Donovan, a Jon Landau piece on Hendrix and Clapton, and some major record company advertising marked the publication as serious.

That fall the synagogue next door to the Fillmore closed, and the Dead rented it as a rehearsal hall. Stimulated by their new drummer, they settled down to work on material for a second album. The new guy encountered—and passed—his first acid test at his first rehearsal. Hart was drumming away when suddenly a guy began talking to him, “right up in my ear,” a speed rap that, remarkably, could cut through the extremely high volume of the band. He just kept playing, and then asked at a break, “Who’s that?” “Oh, that’s Neal Cassady.” Neal’s practice with Kreutzmann was to shake his arm vigorously and ask, “Are you loose, Bill?” In September they’d recorded at the RCA studio in Los Angeles, but now, in October, the Dead began again. Along with “Alligator,” they were working on another new tune. One day back in April, Weir had heard a Yardbirds song on the radio on his way to a rehearsal, and it pushed some button in the back of his brain. Over the summer, he and Kreutzmann had worked at it. Now, with a second drummer, the song really began to take shape. It remained nameless, but since it was the other new piece in addition to “Alligator,” they kept referring to it as “the other one.”

One of the fundamental rhythms of world music is the clave, the shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits rhythm that came to be identified in rock and roll with the songs “Bo Diddley” and “Not Fade Away,” what Bo Diddley, whose drummer Clifton James had perfected it, called “the sanctified rhythm.” Now the Dead would take it to another level. Two drummers made for two rhythms, and Bo Diddley’s 1-2-3-4 became fours and sixes. “That was the first time that six was ever really swung in rock, was made into a rock and roll groove,” said Hart. “Because I was adding the triple while Billy was playing the shuffle, the backbeat to a sortofakinda shuffle, and I was on the tom-toms, which suggested more of a primitive, primal . . . you had the backbeat, and you also had the rolling 1-2-3-4-5-6 . . . then Bill would stay in fours, and I would play eight in six, or six in eight, and time would be broken and we’d go off . . . So ‘The Other One’ was more than a six, or more than an eight. It was the interlocking parts, and how they went together . . . the phrase was very often never completed. Remember, we were doing a lot of acid then, so linear progression was distorted. So we would just drop the one, we would get lost, we would call it the pulse. We would go on the pulse, so all of a sudden the pulse would lead us to a place, and we were completely lost, we didn’t know where the original one was, so instead of struggling with the one, we would establish a new one, and that was the telepathy that me and Billy had. And they would catch on to our telepathic one, and they would latch on. When the third person went to it, it became legitimate. It would stay illegitimate for a certain amount of time, and we would be able to fly or float on the pulse, and there was no need to sound the one or recognize the one. Sometimes the one was known, and we’d let it go untouched. Other times we all pounced on it and sounded it and made it into a one. Sometimes we would hint at the one and come off it and never do it twice. A new language was being born, a new rhythmic language was being born in the Grateful Dead. That’s the magic of ‘The Other One.’ ” Free of the basic 4/4 box of almost all rock and roll, the now polyrhythmic Dead now had what Hart called a “license to travel.”

Weir began to write lyrics for “The Other One,” which focused on his scuffle with the police that spring. He’d spotted the police searching a car in front of 710, and from the third floor, he put a water balloon in the cop’s ear, “a prettier shot you never saw,” said Lesh later. It had come from nowhere, and the cops were at a loss. But Weir being Weir, he just
had
to go downstairs, walk across the street, and grin, and the cop knew instantly. Due process vanished, and Weir went off to jail, where he absorbed a few punches. “When I woke up this morning, my head was not attached . . . The heat came ’round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day.” Good, good, but not quite there. The tension between the rhythms in “The Other One” made clear why Lesh would call it “a scary song of fun,” and Weir’s lyrics did not yet touch its ominous, powerful potential. Time would reveal more possibilities. October also saw them work on Garcia’s new tune, “Cryptical Envelopment,” an extension of his fuzzily Christian take on “Man of Constant Sorrow.” It was a very long way from Corpus Christi Church for Garcia, but the phrase “He had to die” came from the same eschatological neighborhood.

In November they went to Los Angeles, first to play some shows at the Shrine Auditorium and then to record at American Studios in North Hollywood. They weren’t rookies anymore, and this album would be different, one they would make sure would sound good. The worst thing about the first album had been that they’d learned little about recording, and that was no longer acceptable. They would seize control of the new album’s recording process in order to experiment and learn. Peggy Hitchcock’s family bank owned a castle in L.A. across the street from Bela Lugosi’s house, and though it was devoid of furniture, the band moved in. It was a fairly bizarre environment—which was not inappropriate. M.G. cooked for everyone. Hart and Kreutzmann were at their most intense, taking over one of the many empty rooms as a drum room, using hypnotic techniques and just plain working. Between November 8 and 10 they recorded a mix of material, including Pigpen’s stem-winding show-closer, Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn on Your Lovelight,” “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” “The Other One,” “New Potato Caboose,” and “Alligator-Caution.” On the second night of their run at the Shrine, they brought out “Cryptical Envelopment” and “The Other One” in their first live performances. Uniting these two songs created, as Lesh would say, “a universe” of music. They were growing as a band beyond anything they had ever imagined, and the new material showed it. Their lyrics had been their biggest weakness, but these efforts stayed simple enough to endure, while the music was infinitely more interesting than what they’d written only a year before.