by David Browne
Still, the Warlocks couldn’t simply grin, bob their heads, and play polite covers to whoever showed up at the In Room. Even when they launched into a rendition of a hit people would recognize, they’d forget the words or simply devise new ones on the spot: “Hey, you, get the fuck off my cow,” went one of their additions to the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud.” (“It was actually pretty funny,” says Greene, who checked out their set one night.) On their night off they’d take acid—or, at least, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir would, as Pigpen was averse to it and Kreutzmann was, for the time being, abstaining. By then some of the Warlocks had already tried the legal, odorless, and colorless hallucinogen discovered by Dr. Albert Hofmann in Switzerland about three decades before: Lesh during his pre-Warlocks days at his apartment in San Francisco, Garcia earlier in 1965 with a group that included his wife, Sara (both freaked out after they’d taken it). “LSD gave us an insight, because once you’re in that state of profound disorientation, you play stuff out of muscle memory that you’re used to playing,” Weir added. “We were taking acid every week for a couple of months, and I think we learned what we were going to learn with that method in that couple of months. We learned in that time an important lesson, to try to step back from what it is you’re playing—not be there, to step back and let the song be itself.”
To Sam Salvo, a bartender at the In Room, it would have been best if the Warlocks had stepped as far back as possible. The band was, in his words, “getting high smoking weed”—still a fairly foreign sight in public in the middle of the sixties—and when they were high they “talked of LSD,” he said. Weir would later claim he took more than enough acid—“I think I overdosed myself,” he has said—right before an In Room show. He was so discombobulated that the other Warlocks kept an eye on him all night to see whether he’d make it through; somehow he did.
With or without pharmaceuticals—and most of the time they didn’t play high at the In Room—the Warlocks found their music slowly edging out into another, stranger zone. To Salvo the band sounded “loud and outrageous,” and he wasn’t off beam. Because their repertoire was fairly limited at this time, stretching the songs out made it easier to fill up their sets, and one night they extended “In the Midnight Hour” to about forty-five minutes. The one song they wrote together during their stint at the In Room hinted at life after a cover band. A rumble-seat of a song, “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” inspired by a sign in the area, was loose and darker, driven by Pigpen’s harmonica and Kreutzmann’s astonishingly limber, jazz-rooted syncopation. Around this time they also began jamming on “Viola Lee Blues,” a bound-for-prison jug-band song from the twenties that the Dead played with sharp, cutting chords, more a strut than a plea bargain. For Lesh, the moment the band stretched it out at a rehearsal, playing what he calls “that crazy windup,” was a major musical breakthrough, hinting at what they could do.
In November they lost their gig at the In Room; the owners had had enough of them and their eccentric take on rock ’n’ roll. (Garcia later told a friend that another turnoff was the arrival of an intimidating guy who told them they had to join “da union” if they wanted to keep their night job.) But beginning earlier that year they were far more welcome somewhere else in the area: Ken Kesey’s house in La Honda. One or another of them had met the writer during the early Palo Alto days, when Kesey, then a Stanford graduate student, lived in a cottage on Perry Lane in the town’s undersized boho section. When Lesh would party next door to Kesey’s, at the home of another Stanford graduate student and professor, Vic Lovell, Kesey would “come over from next door and throw us all out,” Lesh would later recall. The scene at the Chateau, where Garcia, Hunter, Lesh, and others had crashed on and off, wasn’t particularly appealing to Kesey, a commanding figure whose stocky build reflected his days as a college wrestler and football player in Oregon. Since that time Kesey had become a celebrated literary hero due to the 1962 publication of his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; thanks to its success he’d earned enough to buy a home that looked like an oversized two-bedroom log cabin tucked into the redwoods near the Santa Cruz mountains.
Kesey’s next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, wasn’t as much of a sensation as his first, but further adventures lay ahead: in 1964 he and the other members of his loose-knit, acid-enhanced gang, officially dubbed the Merry Band of Pranksters (shortened to Merry Pranksters), had driven a multicolored bus across the country, filming all the way. Their encounters with the straight world could be hilarious; once, when they pulled into a gas station, people ran out to check out the hand-painted International Harvester bus, dubbed “Furthur.” The Pranksters—who counted among them Ken Babbs, a gregarious, rubber-faced writer who’d met Kesey in 1958 and had just finished a tour of duty in Vietnam—would pretend to be fictional characters, complete with made-up dialogue. The footage had the makings of a unique full-length feature film. “No one had ever done anything like that before,” Babbs says, “a combination of documentary and made-up stuff. We were real serious about it.”
Anyone who wanted to see bits of the unfinished movie had to show up at one of the Saturday night parties Kesey began throwing at his house. LSD was always on the menu: Kesey had his first taste of it when Stanford asked for paid volunteers to test hallucinogenics for the army, for $75 a session, at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. A group of Hells Angels pulled into a Kesey bash for the first time that August, and partygoers routinely began staying until 4 a.m.—not the best situation for Kesey’s wife, Faye, and their young children nor for Kesey, who often had to clean up for days afterward. The Pranksters needed a bigger space, and what would be seen as the first attempt at an Acid Test took place in November at Babbs’s home in Soquel. Garcia, Lesh, and Weir were there, as were Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, along with Neal Cassady, the fast-talking whirligig of a man who’d been the real-life inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. With his waist-long hair, Orlovsky looked so foreign to them that Swanson, who also partook, asked him what happened if we went to a shoe store—meaning how would regular people deal with him. “He just looked at me like, ‘Who is this kid?’” she recalls. Lesh, tripping hard, bashed away on Kesey’s guitar. (According to Dead historian Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip, Orlovsky, Ginsberg’s lifelong lover, would forever be envious of Weir after Weir sat next to Ginsberg that night.)
When the Pranksters still couldn’t find a hall to rent, a second, larger gathering was firmed up at the San Jose home of a local African American legend with the politically incorrect nickname Big Nig. There the Warlocks, some of whom had met with Kesey right after the party at Babbs’s house and asked to play, set up in a large bay window; Babbs would always remember how heavy Pigpen’s organ was and how difficult it was to haul it through the front door of the house. Tripping and listening to rock ’n’ roll were two of the basic tenets of an Acid Test, but so was a type of underground marketing. When it came to the Pranksters’ still-uncompleted road-trip movie, reality set in. “We thought, maybe it wasn’t going to come out in theaters as a big two-hour movie,” Babbs says. Instead of attempting to sell it to a Hollywood studio, maybe they could rent out spaces and show the footage in the middle of Acid Tests.
Parts of the movie were likely shown at the next Acid Test, on December 11 in a lodge at Muir Beach, a cove just south of Muir Woods. Then another Prankster cohort, Page Browning, heard about a nightclub in Palo Alto set to open just before Christmas that would be empty the night of Saturday, December 18. The owner, an area restaurateur named Yvonne Modica, was fifty-one years old but very young at heart, and she agreed to rent the space to Kesey and the Pranksters for a small fee. As with the cabin at Muir Beach, the Pranksters made sure to avoid telling Modica exactly what was planned—what happened at the Acid Tests would stay at the Acid Tests. But everyone knew intrinsically that the one local band bold enough to brave it all—and play music that would somehow fit in with the proceedings—was the Warlocks. Once more they
crammed into Kreutzmann’s station wagon, the band’s transportation mode of necessity, and headed for a gig not too far from Magoo’s.
Lesh had invited his striking new female acquaintance, Florence Nathan (later rechristened Rosie McGee), who agreed to meet him there. Driving to the address on the far side of town, McGee arrived at a wide, squat A-frame building that, she recalls, looked like “one of those strip clubs in the nasty part of town.” The building was so ordinary it was hard to tell what might be happening inside. “It could have been anything,” she says, “and anything could be going on in there.” She parked and ventured inside.
Before the paying customers began arriving at the Big Beat, the Acid Test needed to be set up, and Mountain Girl was happy to volunteer. Having flown back to the East Coast to visit her parents for Thanksgiving, she’d missed the previous Acid Test. But now she was back in the Peninsula and ready to serve in Kesey’s army. The place would be filled with tape recorders, movie projectors, and other electronics gear, and Mountain Girl, who was learning how to edit and archive film, signed up for the task. Given all the equipment she’d have to oversee, she only took one sip of the acid-dosed Kool-Aid that would be distributed for the night. There was work to do, and she needed to be as straight and proactive as possible.
Born Carolyn Adams in May 1946 and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, Mountain Girl was made to be a Prankster. Weeks before her high school graduation she’d been kicked out of school for venturing into the boys’ locker room to sneak a peek at the mysterious new Nautilus machine installed there. “I had never seen anything like it,” she says. “I had no idea what it was. It looked like an alien machine from outer space.” She popped into the locker area for less than a minute, but a janitor saw her and reported her, and she was out. (“They had been waiting for something,” she says, given her past indiscretions at school.) Her older brother, a graduate student at Stanford, invited her to fly out and live with him, and Adams arrived in Palo Alto in the summer of 1963. By September, at age seventeen, she’d found a job at Stanford’s organic chemistry lab and begun killing time at the local coffeehouses and clubs like St. Michael’s Alley and the Tangent—the same places as Garcia and his gang, although their paths had yet to cross.
At St. Michael’s Alley Adams met Cassady; the Furthur bus had just arrived back in town, and Cassady was in search of Benzedrine. “You want to go for a ride?” he asked her, and Adams, no longer working at the lab and dealing with what she calls “some personal struggles” that included breaking up with her boyfriend, went along, saying, “What the hell.” With his brain-on-overdrive charm, Cassady was hard to turn down. At dawn the two wound up at Kesey’s place, the iconic Furthur bus parked in the driveway and Kesey hard at work on its wiring. Adams was immediately smitten with the bus. Having been a monitor in grade school, she was familiar with school transportation, and this overhauled vehicle, outfitted with bunks by the previous owner, was “the most fascinating object I’d ever seen,” she says. She spent several hours examining it and all its finger-painted characters and symbols.
Tall, strapping, outgoing, and headstrong—or, in the words of Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “big . . . and loud and sloppy”—Adams had a warm, earthy aura and easily ingratiated herself into the Merry Pranksters’ world. Soon she was helping catalog the seemingly endless amount of film shot on the Furthur bus trip. (She was less than taken with Big Nig’s nickname at the second Acid Test: “I could never say that name. The guy might have called himself that, but Kesey had a conservative streak.”) She lived here and there—in a tent in the area, on the boat of another Prankster, Mike Hagen, even briefly squatting in a house in La Honda. When Cassady found out her name was Carolyn, also his wife’s name, he stopped hitting on Adams, but she wouldn’t be Carolyn for long. One day she visited Hagen in the ramshackle home he called the Screw Shack. Asking her where she lived, she pointed up to the mountain, where she was crashing in a cabin. “Oh, so you’re Mountain Girl,” he said. Adams wasn’t thrilled with the name—“oh, great,” she thought to herself—but it stuck, and from then on she would be Mountain Girl, or MG to her friends.
Showing their movie was one of the Pranksters’ goals for the Acid Tests, but they also wanted to transform the parties into a type of living, breathing, heaving performance art. At the Big Beat they’d be placing microphones on the floor and encouraging everyone to walk up to them and scream or talk into the mics. The recordings would then be broadcast during the evening, and part of Mountain Girl’s job that night would be to continually circle around the room, setting up the projectors, tape decks, and microphones, using masking tape and glue to repair them if they broke down. In what Mountain Girl called “a gift from the gods,” her brother hauled in a strobe light on loan from Stanford. Acid Test cards—which asked those who entered to write down their address, eye and hair color, and weight—were also printed up and handed out.
Last but extremely far from least were the small buckets the size of household waste-paper baskets, each containing Kool-Aid dosed with LSD. Kesey would long brag about all the acid he purloined from the VA hospital during his stint there; he said he snatched it right out of a desk. But Babbs would also say the acid at the Tests didn’t come from the Pranksters. According to others, it arrived by way of people with connections at Stanford who’d obtained some of Dr. Hofmann’s stash. Mountain Girl also heard some of it came to the school by way of the CIA: word had it that the government had shipped the drug to hookers in San Francisco for testing and, in some way, for spying on businessmen who were availing themselves of the prostitutes.
When Mountain Girl first saw Garcia hanging around Kesey’s place in La Honda, she immediately recognized him from around town. She’d seen him at the Tangent; hearing someone play banjo as she bicycled past, she parked her bike, went upstairs to the second-floor performance space, and came across a hairy guy diligently working on what sounded like a complicated banjo tune. He was clearly diligent, playing the melody over and over, but he was also imposing in the same way others felt about him—he was, she recalls, “scowling horribly.” A few weeks later she returned to the Tangent—or possibly stopped into another area spot—to catch a set by Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. And there he was again, this time part of that ragtag jug-band ensemble, all of them playing, singing, and joking onstage. She found the group highly entertaining—it took her back to her own folk-singing days during high school on the other side the country—but didn’t introduce herself to him or anyone else in the band.
To Mountain Girl the Warlocks always seemed game when it came to adventures with Kesey. They’d arrive in time to help everyone set up the Acid Tests, bringing along their own, better gear, as the Pranksters’ speakers and equipment weren’t up to snuff for a rock ’n’ roll band. Along with everyone else on the scene, she’d also heard that the Warlocks were now going by a very different name, thanks in part to their first shot at the record business.
For a few hours on November 3, about a month before the Big Beat Acid Test, the Warlocks had auditioned for Autumn Records, the company co-run by rotund and influential San Francisco DJ Tom Donahue. At Golden State Recorders in San Francisco they put their music on tape for perhaps the first time. The tape revealed how much the Warlocks were still in the midst of figuring out who they were and how they should sound. On two songs—a cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” with a lead vocal by Lesh, and a group-written ballad, “The Only Time Is Now”—they made like a proficient folk-rock band, even down to the use of a de rigueur tambourine. On “Mindbender” and “Can’t Come Down” they showed how much they could be a conventional organ-driven garage rock band. Their sense of dynamics was already evident in the way they stripped down and then built up their rhythms toward the end of “Early Morning Rain.” “We knew instinctively that with all this stuff converging it would take some time to sort it out,” Weir told Hajdu, “but once we started getting stuff sorted out, it would be meaningful—mea
ningful to us and we hoped meaningful to others.” But on those and other songs, like the traditional “I Know You Rider,” the guitars were timid and the harmonies underdeveloped; Garcia’s attempt at a solo in “Mindbender” was halting. As Paul Curcio of the Mojo Men, who was at the session, recalls, “They came in and scared the hell out of everyone. No one had ever seen a band that grungy.”
They didn’t get a record deal—the label wound up passing—but one career-altering change did emerge from it all. Flipping through vinyl at a record store in town, Lesh had come across a 45-rpm single credited to the Warlocks, so a new name was needed, fast. At Autumn, they dubbed themselves the Emergency Crew. Even they must have sensed what a terrible band name that was, as a little over a week later the band, along with friends Swanson, Bonner, Matthews, and Grant, congregated at Lesh’s apartment to finalize a new one. After Garcia (and maybe others) had smoked DMT, a hallucinogenic far stronger than LSD, Lesh began flipping through his copy of Bartlett’s Quotations for inspiration. A slew of silly names were tossed out, none deemed acceptable. Finally, according to Matthews, Garcia said, “We aren’t able to find a name, so maybe a name will find us.” With that he flipped open a copy of a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary on a book stand, ran his finger down the page, stopped and read it. And there it was, “The Grateful Dead,” a folk tale about a heroic figure who encounters people “refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts.” After giving “his last penny” to them so that the corpse can be properly disposed of, the hero leaves and later meets a fellow traveler who comes to his aid—and who winds up being the ghost or reanimated body the hero had saved.