A Long Strange Trip (53 page)

34

Dreams and All (1/71–7/71)

On the night of February 19, 1971, a man named Malcolm Bessent, a great-nephew of theosophist Annie Besant,
lay sleeping in the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. The Dead were playing at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, about forty-five miles away. Out in the audience at the Capitol, a young man named Ronnie Mastrion, assisting Dr. Stanley Krippner, a noted researcher in the realm of ESP, flipped a coin to determine which of two envelopes holding images he would select. Upon opening one, he put a sequence of slides in a projector, and the audience began to read. “1. You are about to participate in an ESP experiment. 2. In a few seconds you will see a picture. 3. Try using your ESP to ‘send’ this picture to Malcolm Bessent.” In addition to the instruction slides, the band occasionally spoke about the experiment between songs. One of the six pictures that night, called
Seven Spinal Chakras,
showed a man meditating in lotus position, with his chakras vividly illuminated. When awakened, Bessent reported dreaming, “I was very interested in . . . using natural energy . . . thinking about rocket ships . . . an energy box,” and a “spinal column.”

The next night, the audience saw Magritte’s
Philosophy in the Boudoir,
a portrait of a headless woman in a gown, and Bessent dreamed of “a little girl’s doll” and “a stop watch on a cord around my neck.” Dr. Krippner reported that academic peers who evaluated Bessent’s responses gave him high scores four out of six times, a level Krippner found statistically significant. Stanley Krippner was yet another of the fascinating people the Dead had attracted, a distinguished psychologist who was comfortable with the notion of a rational study of “fuzzy” things like ESP, or psychedelics, or both together. Already familiar with the Dead, he had hit it off with Mickey Hart at a birthday party for the distinguished Indian musician Ustad Allarakha. Eventually, Krippner found himself in conversation with Garcia, who wondered about the potential interaction of various altered states of consciousness, for instance sleep and the psychedelic state, and whether or not that could aid sensitivity to ESP. Their conversation yielded the Dream Experiment, which was deemed worthy of publication in a formal, academically refereed journal of psychology.

Life at the Capitol was extremely eventful. In the course of a week’s residence, the Dead helped with a scientific experiment, lost a drummer, added a lyricist, and introduced eight new songs, seven of them original. Mickey Hart had been in a pit of mortal anguish since Lenny’s departure. Self-medication had not helped, and although the band was supportive, his insecurities were exacerbated by what he perceived as Susila Kreutzmann’s suspicion of him. He had never been fond of the road, either. It had been a long time since he’d been able to sleep decently, and by the time the band arrived in Port Chester, he was a complete wreck, plagued by suicidal thoughts and essentially in the middle of a breakdown. Dr. Krippner hypnotized Mickey on the first night so that he could perform, then took Hart to his mother’s place on Long Island. He still couldn’t sleep. At length, Mickey took some medication that would drop an elephant in its tracks, and slept for the better part of three days. When he awoke, he went back to the ranch, where he would essentially take root for the next three years.

Weir and Hunter had been destined not to have a long-term relationship as songwriting partners. Hunter, as Weir’s friend John Perry Barlow put it, was “not just magisterial, he’s irascible, and Weir’s inscrutable.” At Port Chester the band debuted the best of the Weir-Hunter lyric collaborations (although Mickey Hart had written much of the music), “Playing in the Band,” a wonderful vehicle for improvisational jamming that somehow can also rock the house down. Not bad for a song in 10/4 time. “If a man among you / Got no sin upon his hand / Let him cast a stone at me / For playing in the band.’’

Weir had survived years of being the Kid with a stubbornness masked in decency and politeness, and if Phil Lesh couldn’t tell him what to do, neither could Hunter. For some reason, the process of writing “Playing in the Band” had gone reasonably well. This was not true for another song that debuted in Port Chester, “Greatest Story Ever Told.” “Story” was an unlikely song from its inception, which happened to be the rhythm of a pump at Mickey’s ranch. Being Mickey, he made a tape of the sound, and convinced Weir that there was a song to be found. Somewhere in the process of creation, the tempo of “Froggy Went A-Courtin’ ” came into play, and the tune came to Hunter for lyrics, which he duly produced. Trouble broke out when Weir began to mess with the words. “I had no more disregard for Hunter’s first drafts than Garcia did,” he said. “It was just simply that Hunter couldn’t put up with another one [i.e., another collaborator].” In Hunter’s view, Weir wanted lyrics that were “a wash . . . atmospheric . . . leaving only Bobby.” They clashed again over “One More Saturday Night.” Having gotten Hunter’s lyrics, Weir rewrote them— badly, in Hunter’s opinion—and then asked to call the resulting song “U.S. Blues,” which Hunter refused to permit. In the end he declined any association with the song and it was credited to Weir alone. The final straw came over the song that Weir had been working on the previous summer as Eileen Law had given birth. Hunter had produced a piece about gambling he called “Blood Red Diamonds,” and Weir didn’t think it worked for the tune. When he rejected it, Hunter concluded that it was time to move on.

Conveniently, it was just at this time that Weir’s prep school friend Barlow turned up. He was not in good spirits, which made him part of the prevailing atmosphere. Cocaine had become an essential part of the Grateful Dead’s scene. What had once been an occasional lark was now pretty much a daily requirement, and the problem with cocaine is that there is no such thing as “enough,” at least until one has ingested far, far too much. The noted connoisseur of drugs William Burroughs theorized that cocaine acted directly upon the pleasure centers of the brain; whatever its mechanism, its effect on the Dead would be generally negative. Cocaine would erode the band and crew’s senses of humor and good judgment for many years. Barlow had completed college, written half a novel and sold it to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, then taken the advance and gone to India. Now he was living in New York, dealing cocaine, and carrying a gun.

In the course of the week in Port Chester, Rex Jackson, as Barlow put it, “a fundamentally good man, held me upside down and shook me by my boot heels, to try to see if any cocaine would fall out . . . Kreutzmann told me he was going to kill me if I didn’t quit fucking their groupies.” Crew member Sonny Heard dubbed him “Bum Barlow,” which seemed to John to put him as low as he could possibly get. At one point during that week, Barlow and others, said Barlow, went “bopping around shooting cocaine and hanging out at Vassar, the weirdest thing we could think to do . . . Darkness, darkness.” So dark an era, in fact, that six weeks later Marina Maguire, their decadent queen of darkness, the heiress and hostess to so many postshow parties, died in jail in Porterville, California, under mysterious circumstances. She had been arrested, ostensibly because her credit card had expired and the motel she was staying at was suspicious, but more likely because in the process of demanding payment, a motel employee saw a syringe in her possession. Once in jail, she died, supposedly of a ruptured gallbladder incurred during a paroxysm generated by barbiturate withdrawal. Whether her injuries were accidental or deliberately inflicted by the police, Marina died as a consequence of her drug abuse.

Backstage at the Capitol, Hunter and Weir got into an argument about “Sugar Magnolia,” which had evolved in the playing from a sweet country tune to a ripping, show-closing rocker. Furious, Hunter turned to Barlow and said, “Barlow, you wrote poetry in college, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“So you could write songs, probably, huh?”

“Well, maybe. I know they’re different.”

“Take him, he’s yours.”

Hunter even took Barlow aside and gave him a bit of avuncular advice about songwriting: “Remember, every song is a story.” “It was actually,” said Barlow, “the last clear view of Hunter I had, because after that it got so complicated.” The month before, in January 1971, Barlow, Weir, and McIntire had driven around Mexico for a couple of weeks in an elderly Saab that broke down every day about the same time. They visited, among other things, both of the tequila distilleries of Guadalajara on their way to see some old smuggler friends in Michoacan. One morning, his ears full of Mexican radio, Barlow sat in the car while his companions were in a store, and heard Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Barlow was in the grip of an awesome, truly psychedelic tequila hangover, and the song resonated mightily. He began to write something in that vein. Then, after Hunter’s blessing at the Capitol, Barlow got out the Wild Turkey and that week completed the tale, which he called “Mexicali Blues.”

Realizing that he needed to escape New York, Barlow headed for the West Coast in March, not sure whether he’d join Weir in San Francisco or go to Los Angeles to work for Warner Bros. He stopped to visit his family at their Wyoming ranch and found a turbulent situation. His father had suffered a stroke, and his mother was trying to run things from the office, while the foreman was trying to run the ranch “without going into the office.” He was the prodigal son, “hair down to here,” as he put it, and he had no intention of returning to ranch life. But he couldn’t leave his family, already a million dollars in debt in mortgages, in the hole, so he planned to stay a few months to get things in shape. A note above his mother’s desk read, “Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans.” A few months became seventeen years.

The early 1971 songs at the Capitol reflected a modest pendulum swing back to rock and roll in contrast to the tranquil elegance of
American Beauty.
“Sugar Magnolia” had acquired a rock drive, “Playing in the Band” was played at a brisk tempo, Garcia’s new tunes “Bertha” and “Deal” kicked along smartly, and their one new cover song was
the
rock song, “Johnny B. Goode.” With only one drummer and a minimalist keyboard player in Pigpen, the music had simplified, and they laid plans for another live album, to be recorded in April.

In the meantime the band returned home to play some benefits. Their conversation with Huey Newton on the airplane the previous fall had led to a March show at the Oakland Auditorium for the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast Program, which was a very mixed experience. Huey as a person was one thing, and the personal ruled in the world of Grateful Dead. But Panther notions of security led to pat-down searches of everyone in the band and crew, and the evening’s effective boss, Panther Elaine Brown, failed to charm the Dead. Later in the month the Dead played at Winterland for a local Sufi organization, whose leader, Phil Davenport, did work for Ice Nine. But the spring of 1971 would mostly be recalled as the sad period in which both of Weir’s parents died—within weeks of each other, and each on the other’s birthday. Weir would never be terribly adept at acknowledging his pain, and the symmetry of the two deaths moved them, in his mind, from the tragic into the protocosmic, but it was still a painful season.

Using local sound systems had caused many unacceptable problems the previous fall, so early in 1971 the band purchased the Alembic P.A. Consequently, a number of new faces joined the touring party. One of them was a lanky young New Yorker named Steve Parish. He’d read William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
at sixteen, run away at seventeen, and gotten into considerable trouble at eighteen over a spot of illegal business. While dealing with legal exigencies, he answered a summer 1969 advertisement seeking people over six feet tall—he was six five—to work as ushers at the New York State Pavilion in Queens. The Dead were the first band to play at the Pavilion, and Parish quickly became friends with Rex and Ram Rod. After working at the Capitol in Port Chester, he migrated to San Francisco late in the year and was metaphorically adopted by Ram Rod, who among other things taught the New Yorker how to drive and gave him work carrying equipment for some of Jerry’s earliest solo projects. He was living at Rukka Rukka when Cassidy Law was born, and working with Dan Healy for Quicksilver Messenger Service. With the new P.A., the Dead needed more hands, and Parish joined the tour in April.

The crew had always been an essential part of the Grateful Dead, but now it grew considerably in numbers. Bob Matthews mixed the sound and was boss of the P.A. crew, which included Parish, Kidd Candelario, and Sparky Raizene, a burly fellow from Chicago who’d seen the Dead at a show in Wisconsin, talked to the crew, and arrived in San Francisco a week later. Jackson, Heard, and Ram Rod were the Dead’s crew. John Hagen covered the New Riders. Another Oregonian, Joe Winslow, joined the P.A. crew with Parish. The new crew members’ first big tour would hit colleges across Pennsylvania in April. For the first time, the band used buses, which suited Garcia just fine. Anything that kept him out of airports seemed “more like travel and less like matter transmission.” The crew mostly rode the trucks. It was still a time in which most of the band and crew consumed LSD each night, and they saw themselves as part of a group mind. Within the crew in particular, this also translated into sexual sharing of the various willing female followers.

The tour opened in New York City at a new-to-the-Dead venue, the Manhattan Center, and the shows were so oversold that Joe Winslow spent his first night on the road pulling suffocation victims out of the squirming mass of bodies mashed together in front of the stage. The house was obviously oversold to begin with, but there were also dark suspicions that members of the house security force were going around the corner and reselling tickets rather than tearing them up. A visiting reporter from the
New Yorker
remarked that “there was room in some parts of the room for rhythmic breathing [but] dancing was rarely a possibility.” The “balconies looked like the decks of a huge foundering hippie cruise ship.” Despite the crush, the audience was calm, and there was “a pleasant low-key trust around. People lay on the floor, for instance, and were not trampled, and the coat checkroom had no coat checker and was run on sound anarchistic principles.”