A Long Strange Trip (43 page)

As the month of March progressed, the Grateful Dead’s business affairs were in a colossal mess. That was, of course, entirely normal, but this time the band actually did something about it. Earlier in the year, Bill Graham had theoretically managed them, but his administration had been short-lived. Briefcase in hand, Graham had arrived at the Novato warehouse, and by the middle of the meeting had come to verbal blows with Bear. As their voices reached critical mass, Bill finally roared, “It’s him or me.” “Bye, Bill.” Art trumped good business every time. He slammed his briefcase shut and stormed out.

Early in April they held another band meeting, and Mickey made a suggestion. The one businessman he knew of was his father, Lenny. Mickey hadn’t seen his father since joining the Dead, and had somehow forgotten how Lenny had magically taken over his son’s idea for psychedelic drumheads. In the interval, Lenny had become a self-ordained fundamentalist minister, which lent a gloss to the persuasive persona he’d always had. Mickey called him, and he came to meet with the band. Mickey introduced him, saying, “All right, we have a problem, and we need someone to help us solve it. Enter Lenny Hart, my father.”

At first Lenny assumed a modest profile and listened. But as the weeks passed, he began to preach an ongoing sermon that various band members recalled as: “I am the Reverend Lenny Hart, and I am here to save the Grateful Dead. You’ve been fucked around. Now, I don’t ask you to believe in Jesus, but believe in me. Fill the vessel. We’re talking about the spirit. Talkin’ about the spirit of God, talkin’ about the spirit of the devil. It’s all the same thing, we’re talking about the spirit.”

At this time, the band’s day-to-day management was Rock Scully and Jon McIntire. Jon had little experience, and Rock was handicapped by extreme personal disorganization. Worse still, he was a brother. The fundamental need in the Grateful Dead was for someone to control spending, and Rock couldn’t say no. “I had no control on them. I mean, if they wanted the money for their gear I gave it to them. I couldn’t keep the money from them—I couldn’t scare them.” The band was sufficiently cynical about money to be open to any “solution.” Phil Lesh later remarked that he “didn’t really care. If [Lenny] could help us out with our management, that was okay with me.” Weir figured Lenny was a hustler, but a hustler for the Dead. Mickey was ecstatic, thinking, “This is great. I’ve got my dad here, I’ve got my dad back. I’ll be able to get some more drumming lessons and the band will be able to make enough money to go on. Yahoo, this is really great.”

Not everyone bought Lenny’s line. McIntire had seen Southern preachers before and had reservations, as did Bear. At an early meeting at Phil’s house, Bear inquired, “We’re doing the devil’s work. Are you sure you want to do this?” Lenny was sure. He asked the band, “Do you want to take the money and run, or is it a lifetime commitment?” They affirmed their commitment. One person soon came to object aloud. Jonathan Riester had gone over to the Fillmore West to pick up a check from Graham, but was told by Bill that Lenny had said only he, Lenny, could handle money. Graham, who knew from con artists, remarked that Lenny was “not right,” and Riester grew doubtful. On the road Lenny showed other flaws, like being unable to count money quickly and efficiently, and Riester’s doubts increased. Feeling displaced by Lenny, he called a band meeting at Lesh’s house and quit. As usual, the band went limp in the face of problems. Jackson and Ram Rod said they were going to quit, too, and Jerry joined them. Riester told Garcia not to be ridiculous and then appealed to the crew’s pride. “You can’t quit. Their show is never any better than how sharp we are at getting it together.” Then Riester left, making the saddest mistake of his life. With his departure, McIntire became road manager, and he had much to learn. Fortunately, his first gig was with Quicksilver, and Ron Polte once more came to the rescue. Having completed his own settlement, he went over Jon’s figures and remarked pointedly, “You’d rather have cash [than a check], wouldn’t you, Jon?”

One of the first fruits of Lenny’s administration was the band’s near-participation in the film
Zachariah,
a bizarre Western with electric guitar-slinging cowboys. Arguing that it would provide good exposure, Lenny briefly convinced them that the idea could fly. In the end, they didn’t trust Hollywood and opted out of the movie, to be replaced by the great jazz drummer Elvin Jones, but before that, Mickey began practicing the art of rolling a cigarette one-handed. They toured the MGM back lot and were fitted for costumes, and then Mickey, the experienced rider, took the band out for lessons at his ranch. At a later lesson, the cinch on Jerry’s horse was insufficiently tight, and when he put his weight on the stirrup, the saddle slooowwwly twisted around, dumping him on his shoulder, which ended his interest in the project. Before that, though, they had a number of wonderful group rides, crossing the road in front of Hart’s and going out behind Burdell Mountain, an outlaw gang hell-bent for leather.

Horses and Mickey’s ranch were a considerable part of their lives that year, and for a good while after. Having grown up in Brooklyn, Mickey had spent time each summer with an aunt who lived in the country. For a kid from Flatbush, it was heaven, and he kept a taste for the outdoors. While selling drums for Lenny, he’d met three young female Beatlemaniacs who wanted drum lessons and who were from the horsey town of Woodside. He became a serious student of riding, eventually competing in show jumping. When he left San Francisco for Marin, he moved first to a home on Ridge Road in Novato. He owned horses, stabling them at Olompali, but it was not terribly convenient and he got a friend, Rhonda Jensen, to seek a better place to rent. The place she discovered, though nicknamed by some the Pondariester after Jonathan, an expert horseman, was instantly Hart’s domain. As far as Mickey was concerned, Riester was his foreman, and it wasn’t long before Mickey was right. Riester soon left.

The ranch—it never did acquire a name—consisted of thirty-two acres off Novato Boulevard, and Mickey was officially a caretaker for the owner, the City of Novato. The rent was $250 a month, and the spread included a house, a barn, and various sheds. Many people lived there over the next few years, but the first wave included Mickey, Riester, and Mickey’s informally adopted “daughters,” the Jensen girls, Rhonda, Sherry, and Vickie. The Jensens had been living at Olompali, part of Don McCoy’s child-based commune. Their mother was Opa Willy, a pot smuggler, and when she failed to return from a business trip to Mexico, Mickey became a substitute parent.

Of course, this was not a conventional ranch. Mickey’s favorite pastime in those days was to return from a gig, dose his horse Snorter and dog Glups with a proportionate quantity of LSD, and go out riding in the hills around home. “[Snorter] was so
there,
he put down so beautifully,” Hart said. “The only thing you’d notice was his hair used to stand up on end. And when you stopped, sometimes he’d roll, like a pussycat.” Other ranch activities included firing guns, which almost everyone owned. As a side effect, Garcia became an adept gunsmith, puttering at home between shows just like his grandfather. On one ceremonial occasion, a friend dropped by with $1,000 worth of ammunition, and the band put a television on a long, long extension cord out by the creekside firing range, waited until the most atrocious possible commercial came on, and executed the offender with an extra-lengthy fusillade. They made so much noise that the police came around—but because of the volume, the officers declined to enter the ranch’s grounds, and after things quieted down, they discreetly left.

The ranch attracted a wide range of souls. In addition to the Dead family, Mickey was particularly close to Sweet William and other Hell’s Angels, who were frequently around. In fact, Angelo, the Richmond Chapter president, would marry Sherry Jensen. Mickey had by now taken up with Cookie Eisenberg, the New York travel agency owner, and through Cookie the Dead had met a new circle of people, extremely wealthy New Yorkers like Roger Lewis, who owned a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and Marina Maguire, the heir to the Thompson submachine gun fortune. Marina owned an apartment in Manhattan so large that she used a small golf cart to get around. She was a hard-core devotee of what can only be described as decadence, and the parties at her place following New York shows were nothing short of drug orgies. The New York scene also introduced them to Loose Bruce Baxter, a Texas heir who would live at the ranch for some time. Periodically, Hart recalled, they’d clean him up and send him to a meeting with his mother so that he could continue getting his $10,000 monthly allowance. On the more sober side, Lydia’s brother Johnny d’Fonsecca, who had been the carpenter at the Carousel, moved himself and his family to the ranch and, working with Dan Healy’s designs, remodeled the barn into a studio and took care of everything else that needed fixing. And there was Rolling Thunder, a Native American from Nevada also known as John Pope, who had come to San Francisco in 1967 guided by a vision that colorfully dressed young white people might prove to be allies to Indians. Rolling Thunder was an authentic healer and a fascinating character, whose flagrant lechery made him all the more interesting. Rock and his new lover, Nicki, were there. So was Kreutzmann, who lived in a fixed-up hay barn out back for a while.

That April the warehouse at Hamilton Air Force Base acquired a new tenant and a name. Bear wanted to build a room that was ideal for studying and making music, and when he described his notion to his friend Bob Thomas, who was there acting as caretaker, Bob remarked, “That’s an alembic,” the place in alchemy where the magical transformation happens. The band wanted to simplify things and separate the sound system and instrument repair functions from their rehearsal space. In his usual catalytic role, Bear brought together Ron Wickersham, who’d left Ampex, and a luthier (maker of stringed instruments) named Rick Turner, and the two of them formed Alembic. They began by dealing with the bass, always a problem in mixing sound—low end gets lost, while the high notes always cut through. Alembic’s home was only a tin-roofed shed at the back of the Dead’s warehouse, but presently it began to produce magic.

In April 1969 the apolitical Dead took off on a tour of colleges, just as the very act of being on campus became a political statement. They played for the University of Arizona Student Peace Association, at the University of Colorado, and outdoors at Washington University in St. Louis, where the issue was not politics but their volume, which generated complaint calls from blocks away. As the band members flew on to the next show, at Purdue, they read of a student strike at Harvard. Anti-ROTC protesters had seized the administration building, and riot police had violently torn through hundreds of students to enter the building and arrest those inside. At Purdue, students were riled over raises in the student fee structure. The campus newspaper reported, “A capacity crowd in the Union Ballroom for a dance featuring the Grateful Dead was informed of [the president’s decision to pass the fee increase on to the students], but leaders averted any disturbances which might have ensued by keeping the band playing.”

Late in May the Dead briefly acquired a special witness, reporter Michael Lydon, whom the band members so trusted that they granted him a remarkable level of access. He rewarded that faith with what Garcia would consider the best journalism ever devoted to the Dead, a major
Rolling Stone
cover story. Lydon’s timing was superb, and he was able to sit in on a band meeting that was a duel of wills between Lenny, whose “Southern preacher thing” disturbed him, and Bear, who was to Lydon “a strange guy,” and in Jerry’s words, “Satan in our midst.” His article detailed inept travel arrangements that had the band driving in two rental cars down to Santa Barbara for a rotten show where the promoter wouldn’t let them use their own sound system. Bear was “flat on his back” out of it, and after playing awhile, Garcia quit. “Sorry,” he shouted, “but we’re gonna split for a while and set up our own P.A. so we can hear what the fuck is happening.” Backstage there was a raging argument. “We should give the money back if we don’t do it righteous.” Jerry was shouting. “Where’s Bear? . . . Listen, man, are you in this group, are you one of us?” Jerry screamed. “Are you gonna set up that P.A.? Their monitors suck. I can’t hear a goddam thing . . . How can I play if I can’t hear the drums?” . . .

“Let’s just go ahead,” said Pigpen. “I can fake it.”

“I can’t,” said Jerry.

“It’s your decision,” said Pig.

“Yeah,” said Phil. “If you and nobody else gives a good goddamn.”

One of the shows Lydon witnessed was a benefit for People’s Park at Winterland. The putatively apolitical Dead were once again in the activist soup, because it was hard to imagine being young and in the Bay Area that month and not having a positive feeling about People’s Park. In April, hundreds of local people had, “in the name of the people,” taken over a vacant lot on Telegraph Avenue owned by the university, cleaned it up, and built a playground. Early on May 15, rifle-carrying California Highway Patrol and Berkeley Police Department officers in flak jackets entered the park, tore down the playground, and put up an eight-foot steel mesh fence. That day six thousand Berkeleyites marched down Telegraph Avenue from campus, and when they approached the park, the police fired on them with double-ought buckshot. For the next three days, demonstrators would gather, then be dispersed and arrested by the National Guard. Late the night of the nineteenth, one of the men shot on the fifteenth, James Rector, died. A rally the next day on campus ended when troops trapped three thousand people and strafed them with tear gas from helicopters. Across the country that same week, New Haven was under siege, as the local African American community demanded attention from the town’s primary industry, Yale. The war had come home.

What music could do in those circumstances seemed difficult to say. That week John Lennon and Yoko Ono were holding a “Bed-In for peace” in Montreal. When asked about Berkeley, Lennon replied, “There’s no cause worth losing your life for . . . Christ you know it ain’t easy, you know how hard it can be man, so what? Everything’s hard—it’s better to have it hard than to not have it at all.” What musicians could do best was play, and the Dead, as always, were there to raise bail money. The People’s Park show itself was awful. The next day Garcia told Lydon, “But, y’know, I dug it, man. I can get behind falling to pieces before an audience sometimes. We’re not
performers;
we are who we are for those moments we’re before the public . . . and that’s not always at the peak.” The times were extreme, and ripe for philosophy. As Lydon listened, Garcia considered good and evil. “They exist together in their little game, each with its special place and special humors. I dig ’em both. What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you’re not getting the whole thing that’s there to be had.”