by David Browne
The story was appropriately creepy, as much in the tradition of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone as one of the death-haunted Child folk ballads of the 1800s that Garcia loved so much. But for a band that would never be terribly genteel with each other, the name was fitting, and to Garcia, everything else on the page disappeared in favor of what he called “a stunning combination of words.” From the tone in Garcia’s voice, Lesh sensed his friend loved the name and bounced up and down in agreement. “I was so excited,” he says. “It had so much resonance.” Reactions from everyone else in the room were varied: “We all looked at each other and said, ‘How morbid,’” recalls Matthews. Weir and Pigpen were particularly unimpressed, but according to Lesh, their opinions took a backseat to his and Garcia’s. “We just went ahead and said, ‘Sorry, guys, but this is it,’” Lesh says. “At least I did. I went ahead like it was an accomplished fact, and I just kept calling us the Grateful Dead. It just became our name.”
When Mountain Girl heard about the change she too was taken aback. “I said, ‘The Grateful Dead—what kind of a name is that?’” she recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s not very attractive!’ But ‘The Warlocks’ wasn’t very attractive either.” As the Warlocks began arriving at the Big Beat she saw that the name wasn’t the only alteration. She’d seen them at the party at Big Nig’s house, but tonight she was able to better focus on them and notice how different they both sounded and looked compared to the Mother McCree’s era. She took note of the new drummer and the new bass player, how impossibly young Weir looked, how long Pigpen’s hair was, and how wild Garcia’s was. (Garcia would later recall they wore loud-colored shirts and pants.) It was, she says, “a complete transformation.” And she had to admit that, in their way, they were pretty cute.
The feeling was apparently mutual on Garcia’s part. One day at Kesey’s La Honda home Garcia was hanging with Denise Kaufman, now one of the female Pranksters, nicknamed Mary Microgram. Although Garcia was married, Kaufman couldn’t help but notice how Mountain Girl grabbed his attention when she walked by. “I’d give up music to be with Mountain Girl,” Garcia said. As Kaufman says, “On a deep psychic level I could see him totally connecting.”
As Bonner soon realized, George Harrison had just walked through the front door of the Big Beat to see her friends’ band, and Lesh went back to playing. But there was no denying that the guy who’d wandered in sported a variation on a Beatle haircut—long and straight, with bangs—and the same sharp sense of fashion. Walking over to Bonner and Swanson, he said, “Do you know these guys? Will you introduce me?” Swanson said sure, when the time came.
Only twenty-four, Rock Scully had already lived a multinational, psychedelicized life. Born in Seattle and named after his grandfather, young Rock had at age seven moved with his mother, Jane, to Chicago, where his stepfather, left-leaning newspaper columnist and author Milton Mayer, worked and wrote. The couple wound up dragging Rock along with them on transcontinental trips to tape interviews for the radio show Voices of Europe. (Jane Scully, a civil libertarian herself, coproduced the show with her husband.) During his high school and college years Rock bounced back and forth between schools in Europe (Germany and Switzerland) and the States. Between his parents’ progressive views and his own experience in Germany, where he saw the landscape scars of World War II, he became an avid peace activist—and happy tripper. In school in Switzerland he placed a small amount of mescaline sulfate on his tongue and began experiencing less-than-normal sensations. “I’d bend my arm and hear my shirt,” he says. “It was so loud it startled me.”
Eventually making his way back to California, Scully settled into San Francisco State, where he considering pursuing the academic life while getting his graduate degree, but the entertainment world tugged at him. In college in Europe he’d met a student whose parents owned a nightclub, and back home he’d worked as an usher at the Monterey Jazz Festival. By 1964 he’d grown out his hair and was making a living selling pot and helping out the Charlatans, a pioneering psychedelic-folk band that came together a year before the Warlocks. By the time Scully arrived at the Big Beat he’d also inherited the Charlatans’ fashion sense, a blend of Victorian and Old West couture.
Scully almost hadn’t made it to Palo Alto. When he heard who was playing he grumbled that he’d already seen the Warlocks, although exactly when he had would be up for debate decades later. It’s possible Scully first caught them at a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe eight days before the Big Beat. Other possibilities—or reports of him seeing the band when not totally stoned—place it after the Big Beat. In some tellings Scully saw the band at the Acid Test at the Fillmore on January 8, the same night he promoted a Family Dog show at California Hall featuring the Jefferson Airplane and the Charlatans. As many would point out, Scully’s memory banks could be problematic, but Scully would always insist he was at the Big Beat, and several witnesses place him there as well.
Whatever the case, the Warlocks hadn’t initially wowed Scully, so when he heard they were playing an Acid Test at a space in Palo Alto, he wasn’t inclined to haul down from his apartment in San Francisco on a Saturday night. But a friend of his insisted, telling Scully they needed a manager. When Scully countered that he could promote their shows, the friend replied, “No, you don’t want to be a promoter—promoters steal from bands and lie to them! You don’t want to do that to musicians. You want to be on their side.” Eventually Scully wound up inside the mysterious strip mall–like structure on the outskirts of Palo Alto, all thanks to his friend Owsley’s advice.
Few would doubt Owsley Stanley’s powers of persuasion, his ability to convince anyone in his vicinity to accompany him on whatever mission he was on. Small but well built, a sprout of curls atop his head, Stanley—or Owsley, as everyone called him—cultivated an air of gnomish mystery. His given name was a tribute to the middle name of his grandfather, A. O. Stanley, who’d been elected governor of Kentucky in 1915 and then became a US senator ten years later. (Once, as senator, Stanley heard that a judge who’d been protecting an accused black man was being threatened by a mob; leaving a legislative session, he took a train to the town and told the rabble they’d have to hang him first.) Owsley attended public high school in Virginia. His nickname, Bear, derived from his excessive body hair. A gadgets freak from an early age, Owsley had taken a stab at engineering school before signing up for the Air Force; that stint was followed by jobs at electronic companies and at TV and radio stations. Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis he’d moved to Berkeley, where he discovered LSD and decided to make his own. With a fellow student and future lover, he began making speed in order to raise the cash to make LSD. By 1965 a good-sized number of capsules of his stash were available for consumption; one ended up on the tongue of none other than Kesey, who became an instant devotee and made Owsley’s LSD part of his Acid Tests.
Mountain Girl’s early memories of Owsley would involve, she says, “his little leather hat and his permed hair, and he reeked of patchouli.” Chemistry was only one of Owsley’s obsessions; women were another. As Scully observed early on, Owsley was also an incessant flirt. “At these dance concerts he’d corner girls and say, ‘Hi, I’m Owsley—do you know who I am?’” he recalls. “He had that wizard thing about him. He wasn’t shy about introducing himself. And if they didn’t know who he was, he would tell them.” His other infatuation was sound that was as pure as possible, especially at a time when “PA systems” at concerts were practically a joke; thanks to the absence of monitors, bands couldn’t even hear themselves sing. “He said he’d done acid one time and saw sound,” says Sam Cutler, who met Owsley years later. “He saw what sound was doing, and it kind of revolutionized his whole take on what should be done with it. When the Bear got interested in something, he was absolutely relentless.”
Now thirty, Owsley had arrived in the Dead universe by way of one of Kesey’s house parties; he’d then attended the Acid Test a week prior to Palo Alto in the lodge in Muir Beach. (“Find It, Fool!
” read the poster, again failing to give a location.) As auspicious debuts in the Dead world went, few would top Owsley’s night at Muir Beach. As the Dead were playing he began freaking out from a combination of the music—Garcia’s guitar in particular, which he found monstrously frightening in his state of mind—and the acid he’d taken. Discombobulated, Owsley jumped into his car and drove into a ditch, and a friend dragged him out to safety.
When Owsley and Lesh eventually met, Lesh was instantly intrigued. “He just looked like a man who knew something I wanted to know,” he says. “His reputation had preceded him, as had his product. We’d had occasion to try his product.” (Lesh’s personal favorite of Owsley’s stash was White Lightning: “It was what they said it was—it opened you right up, and you could see how everything fit together, how all the colors fit together.”) The two became immediate cronies in sonic quality and psychedelics. Lesh mentioned to him that the band needed a manager and that Owsley could be that person. Owsley immediately rejected the idea, but the job of sound man, another opening in the Dead world, appealed to him. Owsley didn’t know any rock ’n’ roll managers, but he knew of Scully from his work with the Family Dog, the loose-knit coalition putting on rock ’n’ roll dance concerts around town, and soon tracked Scully down at his home.
Scully would have vivid memories of driving down to the Big Beat with Owsley in the latter’s mini sports car. Owsley himself would say in interviews that he hadn’t attended the December 18 Acid Test, and more people remember Scully there than Owsley. Whatever happened exactly, Scully arrived with a mission: to see the Warlocks—now named the Grateful Dead—without being as stoned as when he’d caught them the first time. To ensure he had a few brain cells for the night, he only took half a tab of Owsley acid.
Ed Levin, who drummed in a local band called the Vipers and had popped into the Big Beat, heard what he called “weird amplified voices” all around him: “Where is Pigpen?” they said, over and over. The Dead couldn’t begin playing until the man who sang many of their songs could be found, and eventually he straggled in from the parking lot. Onstage the night didn’t grow any easier for Pigpen. “It wasn’t a job, ya dig?” Garcia would later say. “It was the Acid Test.” For Pigpen, who didn’t take acid, the night could still be challenging. Thanks to the strobe lighting, he could barely see the keys on his organ.
That wouldn’t be the only distraction as the Dead began playing. Glancing around the space, Garcia saw Kesey writing messages that were then projected onto a wall. Looking closer, he realized Kesey was writing about what he was witnessing in that moment around him. Meanwhile a voice booming over the sound system chronicled every move Kesey was making. At another point the Pranksters took up positions behind their gear at the other end of the room and began bashing away on their own version of music. Babbs had played trombone in high school, but that training was about as close as the Pranksters came to actual musicianship; with Kesey on guitar and Paula Sundsten (also known as “Gretchen Fetchin’”) on keyboard, their half-musical commotion was so ramshackle, it made the Dead sound like a tight, professional R&B and blues cover band.
The night was quickly becoming both musical and sensory overload. Everyone who walked in and paid the $1 admission was given a paper cup for continuing dips into the dosed liquid. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” people nearby were saying cheekily. (When he heard about these nights later, Weir’s boarding school friend John Perry Barlow was appalled: “What we heard was that it sounded like drug abuse,” he says. “Mixing up a bathtub full of Kool-Aid and serving it to anyone who wanted it, and they could come back for seconds? Crazy.”) If the music wasn’t interesting, anyone could walk over to one of the microphones set up around the room and talk, scream, or babble into it. “We didn’t all hold hands and close our eyes and do those things,” says Babbs. “We’d participate.”
When the music or other activities halted, everyone was free to watch a ten-minute slide-show presentation, “America Needs Indians,” compiled by Stewart Brand, a twenty-seven-year-old ex-army officer. (Not long after, he became best known as the author of the Whole Earth Catalog.) A former resident of Perry Lane in Palo Alto while studying at Stanford, Brand served two years active duty before immersing himself in photography, Native American research, and environmental pursuits. Tapping into the country’s slowly emerging interest in Native American history, Brand’s presentation combined photographs he’d taken on reservations with historical shots of Native Americans. That night his slide show was greeted with what he calls “a mixture of mild enthusiasm and indifference.” If interest in that wore off, people could watch Neal Cassady and his hammers in the middle of the floor. Looking for something to do while he talked, the ambidextrous Cassady, whose sinewy torso could gyrate like a spinning top, had developed a knack for flipping and catching a tiny sledgehammer using both hands and balancing the hammer on the tip of his finger. To Scully, watching on the sidelines, it was “the most bizarre thing” but nonetheless captivating.
At various times that night footage of the Pranksters’ bus trip was screened on a wall. On another Babbs showed The Frogman Prince, his homemade take on a monster movie inspired by both his time in the army and the sight of divers in California waters. Set to Del Shannon’s “Keep Searchin’,” the odd little movie featured a military frogman in a wetsuit and mask emerging from the water, meeting a lovely surfer girl, and kissing her; shedding his wetsuit, he turned into a handsome sort of prince. The mini-movie had little connection with anything else taking place inside the Big Beat, but distractions were as much a part of the experience as the Test itself. “It got pretty boring after a while,” Brand says, “and then what do you do to relieve the boredom?” Roy Sebern, the artist who’d painted “Furthur” on Kesey’s bus, ran into the men’s room, grabbed a batch of paper towels, tore them up, and tossed them into the strobe, resulting in what Brand recalls as “this amazing blizzard snowstorm effect.” People gathered around and sat in a circle and watched it; it was as entrancing as anything else they witnessed that evening.
In that context the Dead were far from the main attraction, which may have been for the best. Kaufman, who partook of the evening, remembers them playing a soulful set that included “In the Midnight Hour,” a staple of the Warlocks’ bar repertoire. To Scully they were “sloppy as hell. They’d get into a blues song and stay in the blues groove forever.” Still, Scully found them hard to dismiss; they were charismatic in an antistar way, and every so often the music would take shape: Garcia’s guitar would emit some strange, exciting sound, or what Scully calls “something cohesive” would emanate from the whole band. The music felt tight one moment, loose the next—not ideal for a record company, perhaps, but perfect for the context of the night. “You couldn’t put your finger on it, but it was different from what was going on at the time,” says Babbs. “They’d play for however long, and the songs were long. A lot of it was made up on the spot, and that was the beauty of it. They were perfect.”
Whether the music had a steady, tick-tock consistency or not, some of the hundred or so people roaming around inside the Big Beat were dancing. One was Lesh’s new female friend, Rosie McGee. Born in Paris, McGee had relocated with her family to San Francisco when she was young. By the strangest of coincidences, she’d been working as a secretary at Autumn Records the day the Dead had their audition, although she barely remembered them, given how quickly the recording had gone down. Always a stylish dresser, she’d been sent home one day from her job in an ad agency when she wore knee-high go-go boots to work; her bosses deemed it unprofessional attire. In contrast, the world of the Dead and the Acid Tests offered her a sense of liberation and community.
Before she’d left for the Big Beat, McGee made Lesh promise to stay with her all night; she didn’t want to be left to her own stoned devices, and he agreed. Certainly Lesh was unlike anyone McGee had known. In honor of the stick figure created by the advertising world to market the electricity industry, he’d been dubbed Reddy Kil
owatt, and to McGee the nickname more than fit Lesh. With his jittery energy, he walked in a staccato manner (years later she’d be reminded of him when watching Kramer on Seinfeld), and he didn’t seem to climb out of her car so much as jump out of it. “He was very electric, very kinetic, like he’d stuck his finger in a socket sometimes,” she says. “He was not a laid-back kind of guy. He was always jumping up, that live-wire stuff.”
By comparison, Garcia struck her as laid back and slower moving, yet the two men seemed to complement each other. More than once McGee saw Lesh and Garcia huddle and plunge into deep conversations about an arcane music topic, leaving everyone around them puzzled. “Everyone else would think, ‘What the hell are they talking about?’” McGee says. “But they would really be into some sort of exploratory discussion. They were both fearless, and it was all just one big experiment.”
For the Dead that night momentous things would occur even when they weren’t playing. At one point in the evening they took a break—whatever that meant in the context of an Acid Test, which never had anything resembling a schedule—and made their way to the bar. With that Scully made his move, walking over and introducing himself. He said their mutual acquaintance Owsley had suggested he become their manager. They responded with varying degrees of skepticism and bemusement—“smart-alecky,” Scully says—but Garcia shook Scully’s hand in what struck Scully as a genuine way. The surly looking organist, whom Scully soon learned was nicknamed Pigpen, told Scully he thought “Rock” was a “cool handle.” Nothing would be firmly decided on for a few months, but the basis of a working relationship was struck.