A Long Strange Trip (39 page)

Early in October they experimented with the “Barbed Wire Whipping Party In the Razor Blade Forest,” which Garcia called “one of our better atrocities,” a “little exercise in audio brutality” that was much “too weird to use.” Sitting around a tank or two of nitrous oxide one day at Pacific Recording, they all donned earphones and inserted hoses from the tank into their mouths. All sound was fed through a multichannel delay, so whatever was said would come back many times. Betty Cantor gave them each a mike, and Hunter read, “Last week I went to Mars and talked to God and he told me to tell you to hang tight and don’t worry, the solution to everything is death!” Behind that, everybody else was chanting “push it and pull it,” “meat, meat, gimme my meat,” and so on, to the sixteenth power.

Also in early October the band discovered, probably unconsciously, how they would be able to fire Weir and Pigpen—and it would not involve firing. Instead, they would start an additional band, in which the other four musicians, plus occasional guests, would play free-form, instrumental-only music. On October 8, Mickey Hart and the Hartbeats—Hart, Kreutzmann, Garcia, and Lesh—began a three-night run at the Matrix. The audience was tiny, and those few brave souls were about to get a shock. The stage at the Matrix was in the middle of a narrow, not terribly long room, so that the distance from amplifiers to brick wall was less than twenty feet. “We were just scalping them,” Hart said. “We were giving them a lobotomy, and they couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t get up, and they thought they’d die.” On the third night the Hartbeats were joined by Jack Casady and Elvin “Pigboy” Bishop, who played the blues in the middle of musical madness. It was satisfying, and Hartbeats gigs would continue to alternate with Grateful Dead shows throughout the fall of 1968, but it was musically inchoate and never did find a center.

Establishing the Hartbeats was a major step toward rebalancing the good ship Grateful Dead, and there were others. After the closing of the Carousel, Bert Kanegson had gone to Hawaii, where he’d gotten a call from Vee telling him that the band was breaking up and to come home. Upon his arrival in late August, he found 710 deserted. Danny was traveling, Rakow had gone off to find a more successful hustle, and the Grateful Dead “office,” the giant desk, was stored in Brian Rohan’s basement. The Potrero Theater was not only a dump, it was a silly location for a band that now mostly lived in Marin County, and Bert went in search of a replacement. Early in September he found a building renting for $600 a month near Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin, just south of Novato, roughly seven miles from their old refuge at Olompali. The band, crew, equipment, and Bear moved in, with Bert around, as he put it, to “keep an eye on Bear.” Rock and McIntire operated out of the office on Union Street. The Dead owed Bill Graham $12,000 for a bailout loan, and they worked off their debt in a couple of ways. That month Bill opened the Millard booking agency, and the Dead joined Santana, Cold Blood, and It’s a Beautiful Day on the roster. The agency itself moved into the offices at Union and Fillmore, and for the first time, the Dead were formally connected with Graham, just seven months after being his prime competitor.

Graham’s putative other rival, the Avalon, was going out of business. Between 1966 and 1967 the Family Dog had made and spent a million dollars, but by 1968 sales were off. Chet Helms was not a businessman but the de facto director of an environmental theater, and there was no doubt that some employees took advantage of his utter lack of financial controls. The Avalon had always had an ungodly number of guests, and probably 30 percent of the audience never paid. At the end of September the Dog lost its dance permit due to some clearly fabricated noise complaints, and the venue would close at the end of the year. In mid-October the Dead played their first shows there in a year and a half as a kind gesture to Chet, and as a good-bye.

Bob Weir’s twenty-first birthday, October 16, 1968, followed the last Avalon run by three days, and he would not forget it. As the day dawned, he was unemployed, without transportation, and living in Bill Kreutzmann’s garage on Lucas Valley Road, between San Rafael and Novato. Worse, Bill was preparing to move, so Weir was about to be homeless. Pigpen called and invited him to come into San Francisco for his first legal drink. He hitched to Highway 101 and began walking backward down the shoulder, thumb out, guitar over his shoulder. The oncoming headlights were in his eyes and he could see very little, and nothing at all of the construction ditch that he proceeded to tumble into, nor the foot of water that recent rains had left at the bottom of the hole. It might have been the bottom of his life, and he reacted characteristically. He managed a rueful laugh, crawled out of the hole, made it to the bar by closing, and got through his awful day. When Kreutzmann moved, Weir took a room at the Hamilton Air Force Base warehouse, where he spent most of his time practicing hard and “trying to stay out of the way.” He briefly entertained vague plans to move to New Mexico, but they stayed vague.

Pigpen, the other firee, had other things to occupy his time. That month Vee had experienced a blinding headache that turned out to be a stroke. After her surgery the band gathered around in support, and Jerry and Bobby came to her hospital room with guitars and encouraged her with a duo performance. Pig was her therapist through her recovery, and a good one, firmly making her do necessary things rather than doing what was easy. “You can do it, babe, you can do it.” At first she wore a wig to conceal her scalp, which had been shaved for surgery, but Pig took her to Fillmore Street, showed her women with short hair, and convinced her to put it away.

Late in November the Grateful Dead, six strong, set off on a tour of the Midwest that began at Veterans Hall in Columbus, Ohio. Only a couple of hundred people attended, and most seemed to be from Ohio University, in Athens. Since the next night was open, the Dead spontaneously went to Athens to play. It was incredibly gratifying to pull off a show in one day, find a ripe audience, and leave them “hanging from the walls,” as Lesh put it.

The evening’s other interesting aspect was the arrival of a new band member, Phil’s pal Tom “T.C.” Constanten, who had completed his service in the air force, leaving behind a buried computer program timed to run six weeks after his departure that would type out a rising middle finger followed by the abbreviation USAF. Later, T.C. would ruminate that his presence in the band would be “unwitting glue to divert attention to allow [Weir and Pigpen] to solidify their positions.” It was understood that Pig and Weir were out, and T.C. fit the new structure better, but nothing else seemed terribly clear. “It amazed everybody,” T.C. recalled, “that anything happened, because there was so much sniping going on. There was always some sort of simmer.” With T.C. on keyboards, Pig was “relegated,” in Jon McIntire’s words, to conga drums. From Mickey Hart’s corner, this was all one of Phil’s “intellectual trips.” Lesh had discussed adding T.C. with Garcia, but neither Mickey nor Weir recalled knowing of it in advance. For Mickey, T.C. “never fit in. He couldn’t let go. He thought too much . . . everybody else was strange, but I knew their strangeness. I couldn’t connect” with T.C.’s particularly intellectual strangeness. Weir more or less agreed. “He, like I, had to invent his own style—but he didn’t. He had no roots in African American music. I couldn’t quote the popular modes either, but I ultimately invented something.” T.C.’s problem, as T.C. saw it, would largely be one of amplification. Onstage he had two Leslie speakers, and he wanted four, because Garcia’s guitar could be louder in his microphones than he was.

Shortly before Christmas, Rock and Riester and a gang of friends took off on one of the greater Dead scene’s more bizarre adventures, the London Run, a jaunt to London that became a mission—although a mission to
what
was never entirely clear. There was some razzmatazz about turning on the Beatles, and a further tap dance about dealing with the Dead’s European publishing business, but that, obviously, did not require an entourage. Ken Kesey, who came along, called it “a kind of cultural lend-lease, heads across the water and all that.”

The genesis of the London Run was the free show in Central Park the previous summer, when a woman named Cookie Eisenberg came, listened, and soon became Mickey Hart’s lover. Cookie had connections to Billy Hitchcock and the world of Millbrook, but to this point her life was sufficiently conventional that she was part owner of a travel agency. One of the other actors in this piece of theater was Bob Borden, of all things an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who had fallen under the Dead’s spell. Borden didn’t handle being high very well, and eventually broke down entirely. For the London Run, he contributed his American Express card, which ran through Cookie’s agency and yielded three first-class tickets to London. According to Rifkin, who was already in London, the tickets were intended to take himself, Borden, and Rock to Switzerland to purchase LSD, to Morocco to put it into capsules, and then home.

Somewhere in there, in the nature of a highly elaborate Grateful Dead plot, the three first-class became five coach tickets, to take Rock, two Hell’s Angels, and two Diggers to London. “I was a bit of a rake in those days,” Rock said later. Somehow they wheedled more funds out of Bill Graham, and at the end of the very complicated day, thirteen of the oddest people in San Francisco left for London. The two Angels were Frisco Pete Knell and Billy “Sweet William” Fritsch, a former sailor and at one time a San Francisco criminal nicknamed the Panama Hat Bandit. The Diggers were Peter Coyote and Paula McCoy, ex-wife of Don and the doyenne of the Digger salon at 715 Ashbury Street, who liked to wear boots with a mink coat and nothing else. There was Peter “Monk” Zimmels, a former nuclear weapons officer in the U.S. Navy who’d deserted the service and adopted monk’s garb as a disguise—and then became a real monk. Minutes before their flight was to leave New York, two more partners in crime came aboard: Ken Kesey and Frankie Azzara, a go-go dancer who’d formerly dated Hart, and would later be Weir’s lover for some years, but who on this trip would briefly go to work for George Harrison. Hitchhiking along somehow, because members of the Grateful Dead family simply could not consort with the Beatles without her, was Beatlemaniac Sue Swanson, along with her infant son, Josh.

At length, the group arrived at Apple, the Beatles’ headquarters, a white Georgian town house on Savile Row that resembled an embassy except for the young women, “apple scruffs,” who patrolled the sidewalk hoping for a Beatle sighting. Derek Taylor had returned from Monterey to work for the Beatles, and he was a charming and tolerant man. “Derek, Adolf Hitler is in reception.” “Oh, Christ, not that asshole again. Okay, send him up.” After Adolf the San Francisco contingent, which would shortly end up with tattoos reading “Pleasure Crew,” was tolerably easy to handle. Derek gave them a room where some of them stayed, while others joined Mouse and Bob Seidemann, who were living in London and had an apartment. The most commonly told tale of their trip was of the ill-fated Apple Christmas party, at which John Lennon made his entrance as Santa Claus at the precise moment that an Apple publicist reproved Frisco Pete for his premature raid on the buffet and earned himself a fat lip. But there was a much better story. That week the Rolling Stones filmed the
Rock and Roll Circus,
a TV show that involved them and most of the top stars of English rock. Jagger didn’t like the results, and it was not then released. Sue Swanson and her baby attended, and during a pause in recording late in the night, she asked a cameraman where she might change Josh’s diaper. “Go through that door and ask the guy in the brown jacket.” A paragon of courtesy, brown-jacketed Mick Jagger walked her into the dressing room and made a space for Josh on a table.

As 1968 neared its end,
Rolling Stone
printed a nude picture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono on its back cover. Columbia Records ran an ad that depicted seven men in jail with the truly stupid caption “But the Man Can’t Bust Our Music.” Riven by internal dissension, Cream disbanded. The top album was the Beatles’
White Album,
with the Stones’
Beggar’s
Banquet
moving up. At a free show at the Fillmore East on the day after Christmas, a local gang of rabble-rousers called Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (UAWMF) attacked Bill Graham, breaking his nose. In Paris, an ongoing argument over the shape of the table stalled peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam. The previous month had seen the election of Richard Nixon as president. The year 1969 was about to arrive with a harsh momentum. The ugliness of the year would drive the Dead ever more inward, and their music-making would benefit.

Over the course of the fall, the recording of the Dead’s third album had gone so remarkably well that it could almost be described as efficient. Since the songs were primarily by Garcia, the minimal participation of Weir and particularly Pigpen in the recording process was not disastrous. Then, around Christmas, Ampex installed Prototype #2 at the studio, one of the first two sixteen-track recording machines in the world. The company had built the first successful videotape recorder in the mid-fifties, and now it had combined audio heads with the videotape transport to produce true multitrack recording. The band came in, fooled with it for a couple of hours, and said, “Fuck it, we’re redoing the album.” Poor Joe Smith.

Two days after Christmas, the band hit the road. “The road is life,” some rocker said, some swing musician said, some minstrel show performer, some troubador. Making a living in the performing arts requires travel. The Dead hadn’t exactly resolved their membership crisis, and as late as December there was talk of David Nelson replacing Weir, but it was far too late for any personnel changes. The Hartbeats “never really worked right,” thought Lesh. “It wasn’t working right with [Pig and Weir], and it wasn’t without them.” Though no one ever openly said a word, they rescinded the firing and backed into the right decision as usual. They had their band, and they had material to play, and now they went on the road, playing more than one hundred shows a year for the next several years.