Dark Star (12 page)

Ken Kesey:
I never thought of the Dead as kids. From the very first time I met Garcia, I thought of him as a peer. Same way with Phil Lesh. Bob Weir was a kid. But Phil had gone to Juilliard and studied under John Cage and Jerry was just—history had kicked him between the eyes and you could see it all the way back there.

Ken Babbs:
We always thought of the Grateful Dead as being the engine that was driving the spaceship that we were traveling on. We talked about being astronauts of inner space. We had to be as well trained, in as good a shape, and as mentally powerful as an astronaut in outer space so as not to be thrown by any of the accidents or the unexpected we'd run into. Once the Grateful Dead got the engine cooked up and running, that became the motor driving the thing. It provided something that kept everything going and then they would do their unexpected things too. They would play what was going on and what was going on was going along with what they were playing. It was really give-and-take. Back-and-forth.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
Who's in charge here? That was the question. Who's in charge here? And basically the answer was, “You gotta be. Or you're in big trouble.” So we got in trouble and sometimes learned. The people in Kesey's scene were all good at something practical and they put it together in amazing ways. That all caught my imagination. Once I got the idea, I liked that a lot.

Owsley Stanley:
In December '65, I really heard the Grateful Dead for the first time. It was at the Fillmore the night before the Muir Beach Acid Test. I was standing in the hall and they were playing and they scared me to death. Garcia's guitar terrified me. I had never before heard that much power. That much thought. That much emotion. I thought to myself, “These guys could be bigger than the Beatles.” To be perfectly frank, I never thought of Jerry as the center of the band ever in my whole life. He was just another member. All the bands then were tribal and tribal meant you agreed amongst yourselves as to who was momentarily the leader of the team. Musically speaking, they all wound up together because they all liked playing with Jerry. But he never stood up and said, “I'm the band leader and you're all sidemen.” He was not that way. The thing was, they said they needed a manager. I knew Rock Scully had been involved in the Family Dog. He was the only person I knew who knew anything about business. Later on, he brought in Danny Rifkin. This was a matter of nobody knowing how to do anything. But I had a very strong feeling that musicians were exploited by most managers and record companies to an extent I considered absolutely unbelievable.

Rock Scully:
The first time I saw Garcia was at the Fillmore Auditorium. It was kind of an acid test. Danny Rifkin and I were running a show for the Family Dog on the same night at California Hall. We were aghast that the Grateful Dead were playing the same night, but at this point they were just sort of the Acid Test house band. Forsaking our gig, we ran over to the Fillmore to see what the hell was going on. We'd never seen anybody play like that before. Jerry was lifting the roof. Of course, we were slightly stoned. To be frank about it, we were tripping. So it seemed like there was no roof on the house. I'm absolutely sure Jerry was tripping, too. Every now and then, he'd look down at his guitar and I thought he was seeing some kind of monster. He was all surprised. Looking over his hand down the neck of his guitar like “Wait a minute. Where is the end of this thing?”

Actually, Pigpen was the driving force. He had the songs together. He was doing blues like “Little Red Rooster.” Basically, the Dead were a blues band in those days but I could already hear that from his bluegrass and gospel and folksy background, Jerry had come to understand that there was more to add to it than just John Lee Hooker kind of stuff. Having gone from banjo to electric guitar, Jerry was on a new instrument. Suddenly he had all this fluidity. He was reaching into the roots of music we had heard before. He was calling forth Americana.

After the show, I went up to them and said, “Man, you guys were
great
!” They said, “The sound system sucked. We weren't that good. We never played that song before.” They'd been a bar band. They'd been playing in pizza pubs. Owsley said to me, “Look. These guys need a manager and I told them I want you to do it. Come on down and see them, they're playing Saturday night at the Big Beat Club in Palo Alto. I'll take you.”

The next weekend, Owsley picked me up and drove me down in his little Morris Minor. Here I was with this madman and I decided, “Maybe I'll just take a half a hit tonight. Instead of a whole one.” Stewart Brand was there and he'd set up a tepee inside the place and it projected light so you could see it from the inside out. The first guy I ran into was Neal Cassady, who took me over to the bar. I was with Owsley so he immediately hit on us. I think he was already dosed but he wanted some more. He could just gobble gobble pills. Immediately, I was getting introduced. Owsley was going, “This is Jerry Garcia.” I said, “I saw you last weekend and I loved it.” He was doing that same thing. “We were shitty and …” This was the first time I really sat down with him and we talked for a while before he was supposed to get up and play. Meanwhile, Kesey had his Prankster band on this other stage at the other end of the A-frame. Playing creative noise.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Somebody played. I'm not sure who it was but it may have been this sort of ragged little punk band that Ken had. He was trying to record a hit record with Neal Cassady and I was the recording tech for this record, and for an isolation booth we had this old Chevy out in the yard. Neal would sit in the Chevy and I'd sit in there with him and it was just absurd. We were doing a bunch of absurd crazy stuff.

Rock Scully:
On the other end was all the equipment that Owsley had managed to fashion and piece and string together in some way or another. Pigpen was playing on this spindly old box organ with an aluminum frame. It looked like a TV stand and he didn't sit down at it. He stood up at it. Up close, this guy was really gnarly. This was before Garcia had his beard. So he was a little frightening looking also. As a child, I think he'd had something and he was a little pockmarked. Plus his hair was starting to grow out and he was having a real bad hair day. He looked like somebody you'd run into in the garment district or the diamond district in Manhattan. Truly. He looked very Jewish. Half of them were underage. Bill Kreutzmann, he was called Bill Summers at the time, he was underage. Weir was definitely underage. But we were all sitting there at this pizza pub bar having beers. I was twenty-two and a graduate student at San Francisco State but we were all kids compared to Kesey. He'd come out of dropping acid in laboratories. He'd already written
Cuckoo's Nest
and
Sometimes a Great Notion
. To me and Garcia, he was famous. We were in awe of the man.

Ken Kesey:
With Garcia, it was not a one-way thing. Garcia was as well read as anybody I'd ever met. He understood Martin Buber's
I and Thou
and that he was in a relationship with his audience. He was not playing at them. He was playing with them. Anybody who's been on acid and has felt Garcia reach in there and touch them, all of a sudden they realize, “He's not only moving my mind. My mind is moving him!” You'd look up there and see Garcia's face light up as he felt that come back from somebody. It was a rare and marvelous thing. Whereas the Doors were playing at you. John Fogerty was singing at you. When the Dead had a real good audience and the audience began to know it, they were playing the Dead. Which meant the Dead didn't have to be the leaders. They could let the audience play them.

Rock Scully:
The band went on and this fierce-looking biker guy dude, Pigpen, got up there and started belting out these blues. Garcia was also high. His eyes were all dilated. He started to swoop around the room with his picking. He had a good grasp of all this old American music and he wasn't doing the blues comping thing. He was running all over the place. Pig was trying to be the leader and bring them back. He'd be looking at them like, “
Boys
…” They were looking at Pig like, “This is our anchor over here!” Pig was their control but everybody followed Jerry. They had to because Jerry was rushing. Especially because he was high on acid. Bill Kreutzmann was trying to keep up with him and Phil had only been on the bass for a couple of weeks so he was doing his best to keep up and make it sound presentable, but in the middle of an Acid Test, it didn't much matter. It was a lot different than Winterland or the Fillmore. You know how you can sometimes see what people are thinking? Garcia was either thinking that there were insects on his guitar or that it had done a Salvador Dali drip over his wrist and now was melting over his hand. It was a very spacey show and it was really hard to tell if it was over or not. Garcia sort of put down his guitar and everybody kind of ambled off the stage and came back to the beer bar. And that was the end of the set.

Then we talked. I was astounded at what he was doing. I said, “You're cramming in more notes than I've heard anybody jump on before in my life and I've been listening to a lot of music.” Working backstage at the Monterey Jazz Festival, I'd listened to Thelonius Monk and Charlie Mingus. Here was this guy who three months ago was playing a banjo. Now he was playing this electric guitar like it was on fire. I also thought, “Man, the guy is ugly. This isn't going to wash in the Dick Clark world of rock 'n' roll as we know it.” At this point, we'd had only one example of an ugly rock 'n' roll band and that was the Rolling Stones. I signed on that night. The next day, I signed out of Family Dog. I sold my share to Chet Helms and said, “I'm not going to be a promoter anymore.” This was after I'd done four shows. Four shows was all I'd done. According to Owsley, I was supposed to be an expert on the business of rock 'n' roll. Jerry Garcia said to me, “Good luck.”

Ron Rakow:
I was in the land loan business. Because the band was playing through home hi-fi gear supplied by this guy named Owsley, Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully came to my office to borrow twelve thousand dollars for new equipment. I'd never seen anything like them. I breathed hard like my father did a year later when he saw me. Danny looked like a lion. His hair was brushed out like an Afro with fourteen-inch hair that went down over his shoulders on the side and in the back. Rock was like Cochise. We started to talk and it turned out Danny had a degree in cultural anthropology. Rock had his master's and was going toward his Ph.D. in German Renaissance literature. These were brilliant guys. Rock said, “I been studying this music business. There's going to be a scene in San Francisco around music that's so big that in five years, there won't be a physical plant on planet Earth big enough to contain it.” While they were there, my banker showed up. He was my lifeline and I had these two apparitions in my office. I had to ask them to climb out the window to leave. So they climbed out the window.

Ken Kesey:
We did a really good Acid Test in Portland, Oregon, that is not well-known but by this time, we were becoming like a really crack terrorist group. We could hit a place, get in there, mess it up, and be gone before people knew what happened. In that one, a guy off the street, a businessman, came in and paid his dollar and got his hit of acid. He had a suit on and an umbrella. At that time, it was still small enough that one person could become the center of attention. He was out there dancing and somebody hit him with a spotlight and he said, “The king walks!” And he began to walk with this umbrella and play with his shadow. “The king dances!” He'd open the umbrella and say, “The king casts a long shadow!” The Dead were watching this and playing to every moment so he became the music that people were playing to. After it was over, we packed up into the Hertz rent-a-van. Because it was so miserable on that floor, we decided to put the equipment on the floor and sleep in the cargo net. Everyone was still wired and that was the most miserable ride in anybody's history because everybody kept rolling to the bottom like to the toe of a sock. It was the most miserable strange bizarre night. Everybody was so tired. We were laughing to the point where you just didn't want to laugh anymore. You were sick. You just wanted to cut it off. But you couldn't. Somebody would be lying there about to get to sleep and somebody would start rolling. Somebody would fart and it would all swell up again. It was just awful. That was when the Dead resolved to get their own vehicle. They split off with us and from then on, they were their own group. They were no longer on the bus. They decided, “We're going to get our own bus to be on.” Just theirs.

Ron Rakow:
Rock said, “Come to a gig.” So I went to the second Mime Troupe Benefit at the Fillmore. I was there because they wanted twelve thousand dollars from me. Behind my back, they called me “Moneybags.” In that scene then, it took like eighty bucks to be “Moneybags.” I was with this beautiful light-colored black girl. We went backstage and got something to drink. All of a sudden, I noticed that every time I talked to her, gray fur grew on her face. And that was just a deposit. I kept getting weirder. I took my coat off and I went in front of the band and laid right down at the feet of Jerry Garcia, who I had met two hours before when I was still cogent. I just laid there, closed my eyes, and he took me out.

They played “Viola Lee Blues” and it had a chaos section in it. My metaphor for the universe was that life was a dance between order and chaos. I thought, “Oh, this is it. Chaos is going to win out. It's over.” I was lying there waiting for the end. And then bingo, out of the chaos came the blues. When I went into the Fillmore that night, I was Sammy Glick. When I came out, I was “Cadillac Ron.” I went backstage to the dressing room and Garcia was sitting there like Buddha smoking Pall Malls. I grabbed a cigarette and told Jerry I wasn't taking it to smoke but only for a pause in the conversation. He said to me, “You're heavy. What do you do beside make money in the real world?”