So Many Roads

by David Browne

  Back on Ashbury Street, the press and media now dispersed and onto their next assignments, Garcia and Mountain Girl made the decision to venture across to their home. To make sure all was clear, they called first; when no one answered they crossed the street and made their way into 710. The place was eerily quiet, and Mountain Girl rushed into the kitchen to see if the colander with pot was gone. Not surprisingly, it was, but to their shock, the brick of wrapped pot in the cabinet was untouched. All seemed intact, but not enough to make them want to stay much longer; after forty-five minutes Garcia and Mountain Girl left their home, unsure of its—and their—future.

  By the time everyone was booked—for either drug possession or a charge related to it—six hours had passed and night had fallen. By chance Rohan and a fellow lawyer, Michael Stepanian, had a makeshift office at 710 for HALO (Haight Ashbury Legal Organization), which came to the aid of runaways, drug bustees, and other in-need local clients. Their secretary, Antoinette “Toni” Kaufman, was also arrested in the bust. Police found pot in the couch in their office but only dusted their file cabinets. At the police station Stepanian was impressed with the proactive attitude of those who’d just been arrested: they announced they’d stand together and not blame anyone else for what had happened. “They said, ‘We’re going to get through this case, we’re going to have some fun, but we’re not going to act like jerks,’” Stepanian recalls. “And I said, ‘Fine, that’s a great attitude.’ There was no panic.”

  At Barrish Bail Bonds, right across from the San Francisco Hall of Justice, owner Jerry Barrish, who had a reputation for coming to the aid of antiwar protestors, students, and the underground, gave them $500 each for their bail and didn’t demand immediate repayment. Later they learned more about what had happened: Snitch had been threatened by police for alleged offenses if he didn’t cooperate with them, and he had little choice but to turn them in. Soon after Mountain Girl handed him the pot, he turned it over to the authorities. For decades after, Weir would have the feeling that the band had been set up, the pot planted.

  Those who were already living or crashing at 710, like Rifkin, Swanson, and Weir, made their way back to the building. “It was odd,” says Swanson. “It was like coming home after your house had been robbed.” Again they congregated in the kitchen, and the first order of business was disposing of the craggy brick of pot still partially tucked away in the kitchen cabinet. “We got that out of the house immediately,” says Mountain Girl. “There was a great cleanout.” One rumor had it that it was transported across the street to the neighboring apartment where Garcia and Mountain Girl had holed up during the raid; at the very least it was out of their home in case the police returned.

  In the hours and days that followed, everyone attempted to resume as normal a life as possible, but a lingering sense of paranoia and apprehension settled over the building for the first time. The vibe, as Mountain Girl recalls it, was “a lot more edgy. It was, ‘Cool it for a while.’” They didn’t quit smoking, of course; they simply reverted to doing it in the upstairs parlor, out of street-level sight, not leaving any extra pot or roach clips lying around. “Before that, we had joints hanging out of our mouths all day long,” says Scully. “They’d go out like a stogie and just hang there. But we got a lot more careful.”

  When the raid was in progress someone had tipped the nearby offices of a new magazine about to launch, Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner, the twenty-one-year-old who was its founding editor, had his own personal history with the Dead. He’d dropped by one of the Acid Tests—watching them play in the large bay window at Big Nig’s house—and had written about the Trips Festival in his column for UC Berkeley’s student newspaper, The Daily Californian. Wenner had loved the Dead’s first album; in Swanson’s memory Warner Brothers sent out a copy of Rolling Stone’s imminent first issue to everyone in the band’s fan club.

  When Wenner heard about the arrests he immediately dispatched his chief photographer, Baron Wolman, to shoot the band and friends at the bail bonds office. Although he knew it was a major story, for both the city and the local music community, Wenner scoffed at the raid itself. “It was more like the Keystone Kops raiding the Dead,” he says. “The Dead were just laughing about it.”

  The arrests and their lingering, sour aftertaste didn’t drive them out of the Haight immediately, but it was the most distressingly apparent sign that the neighborhood—and their time in it—was coming to an end only about a year after they’d all moved into 710. “It was one more stick on the bonfire that was consuming the Haight,” says Mountain Girl of the bust. “It was making it less than fun. Jerry and I both felt pretty uncomfortable being there.” The Summer of Love media hype had been eye-rolling enough, as were bad-trip faux-psychedelic pop hits like the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s “Incense and Peppermints.” (Granted, the Strawberry Alarm Clock wasn’t that different from the alternate names the Dead had kicked around before stumbling upon their ultimate moniker.) The sightseeing buses that began driving though the Haight were amusing at first. The Dead and their camp made absurd fun out of the tourists gaping at their home: Pigpen mooned one bus, and at the band’s urging during a visit Warner’s Joe Smith ran up to the top of the street and whistled when a bus approached so that everyone at 710 could hide, depriving bus riders of any sightings.

  The bust was far from such goofy fun; instead, it was proof that the eyes of part of the world were now upon them. “It was a reminder that what you did was illegal in nature and there were consequences involved in that,” says Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady, who rolled the joints at a 710 Thanksgiving dinner in 1966. It was also another sign that a darker side of the Haight was revealing itself. Runaways were showing up more regularly, people were tripping and stepping out of top-floor apartments and splattering themselves on to the sidewalks, and harder drugs were dirtying up the neighborhood. The latter problem was more than reinforced to the Dead when they learned of the murder of William Thomas, an African American drug dealer known as Superspade. Scully had known Superspade even before he’d met the Dead. (Scully himself would sell hash periodically to help pay the rent, both at 710 and the house he previously lived in.) With his flamboyant wardrobe, Superspade was one of many local characters, but two months before the bust at 710 his body was found shot, stabbed, and stuffed into a sleeping bag that was hanging off a nearby cliff. Shortly before that grisly discovery another local dealer, known as Shob, was stabbed to death a dozen times with a butcher knife, and part of his right arm was hacked off.

  The Haight was on the periphery of a high-crime area, and some thought Superspade simply wasn’t being discreet enough (he had a tendency to flash wads of bills in public) and had probably found himself in a turf war. Either way, his brutal killing was a sign that the dealers in the Haight had become murderously territorial, each fighting to make as much money as possible over the dazed teenagers burrowing into the Haight in the wake of the Summer of Love. “Superspade was a really calm, really nice dealer who we trusted,” says Hart. “No one would want to kill him. When that happened, that put a big shock in me. The mood on the street was turning ugly. People were getting stoned for no reason and people were going because it was an ‘attraction,’ like Disneyland. The world was closing in on us.”

  They had to start thinking about leaving, and the signs were already in the air that it was happening. At Scully’s invitation, Stan Cornyn of Warner Brothers had flown up from Los Angeles for a meeting at 710, and Cornyn was finally able to walk up the fabled front steps he’d been hearing about. Someone let him in, and he took a seat in the living room and waited. And waited. And waited some more. He sat taking in the sights, especially a black-and-white photo of a naked girl facing a naked boy. “Hippies—wow!” Cornyn thought. “It was so much nicer than what I was doing.” But no one ever came out to talk with him, and he was eventually told that maybe they were asleep. Cornyn had no choice but to leave.

  Three days after the bust came one of the Dead’s last great escapades at 710
. At Gleason’s suggestions, they held a press conference at their ransacked home. Beforehand Rifkin expressed what he wanted to say to his former UCLA classmate Harry Shearer (later an actor and comedian known for his work on The Simpsons, This Is Spinal Tap, and Saturday Night Live), and Shearer, who would often visit 710 on weekends, helped Rifkin write it out. Flanked by the band members, Garcia smiling gently, Rifkin called pot “the least harmful chemical used for pleasure and life enhancement,” decried pot laws as “seriously out of touch with reality,” and derided the media’s image of the “drug-oriented hippie. The mass media created the so-called hippie scene. . . . The law creates a mythical danger and calls it a felony. The result is a series of lies and myths that prop each other up. Behind all the myths is the reality. The Grateful Dead are people engaged in constructive, creative effort in the musical field, and this house is where we work as well as our residence.”

  A bowl of whipped cream, a spoon jammed into it, was placed in front of Rifkin, but it wasn’t meant for any sudden attack of the munchies. The band decided that the first reporter who asked, “How long did it take to grow your hair?” would get pied. Luckily, no one was brave enough to toss out that question, and the dessert remained untouched. Among those at the event were Rolling Stone photographer Baron Wolman. At thirty, Wolman was older than most of the subjects he’d begun shooting for the nascent magazine, and he never got high (he preferred the roller derby over acid). But he had a way of putting his subjects at ease (the ever-caustic Grace Slick would happily pose for him in a Girl Scout uniform), and he respected the new style of rock ’n’ roll. Even with his innate bedside manner, Wolman found himself in a challenging situation at 710. He watched the press conference, and the band seemed, in his mind, “weirdly elated—they were so high, on a natural high, over the message they were giving.” Because Rolling Stone didn’t yet exist and he had no business cards, Wolman had to convince Scully, Rifkin, and the band of his legitimacy.

  For his photo shoot Wolman asked for a group pose, but between their energy and agitation, it was hard to corral them all. After the conference was over the band—with Sue Swanson and Veronica Barnard yapping away in a nearby window—was asked to gather on the stoop, and Wolman sensed his one chance had arrived. Kreutzmann flashed a middle finger, and Pigpen and Garcia goofed around with an antique Winchester rifle that Scully had found on a trip to Mendocino. The gun was so broken it couldn’t have fired even if it had ammo, but Wolman was still unnerved. “I was slightly worried they were going to do me bodily harm,” he recalls. “Had I been close to them and part of that coterie, I would’ve been much more comfortable with what was going on. But I was happy to shoot them on the stoop and get the fuck out of there before I got killed.”

  As Wenner had predicted, the bust didn’t amount to much in any legal sense of the word. In the end Scully and Matthews pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of “maintaining a residence where marijuana was used” and were fined $200 each, while Pigpen and Weir were each fined $100 for being in a place where the drug was used. “The DA said, ‘Look, how about if you guys plead to the lowest possible health and safety-code regulation it could possibly be?’” recalls Stepanian. “I said to them, ‘What do you think about paying a fine?’ They said, ‘No jail? Fine.’ Here’s a hundred bucks—see ya later, good-bye.” All were put on probation. It was time to leave the Haight and strike out elsewhere in search of new homes and adventures. But as their defiant pose on the stoop showed, that bust and its aftermath came with an unexpected bonus: it proved that, though they weren’t above the law, they might be able to live just outside it—and endure.

  Stretching out at one of many Family Dog shows.

  © ROBERT ALTMAN/RETNA LTD.

  CHAPTER 5

  SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER 2, 1969

  They’d been playing the song nearly two years, and tonight it started the same as it always had. Lesh played four notes on his bass, and gentle maracas and a caressing organ began poking around him. No matter if you were in the band or in the audience, it was anyone’s guess where it would go from there. Garcia’s instantly recognizable pierce-the-clouds guitar began slithering its way through the swamp, playing off the introductory motif and looking for a way in. It’s as if the players had each joined a conversation at a party but hadn’t yet decided what to say.

  The delicate musical dance, which at times sounded as if the musicians were tuning up, continued for several minutes. Then, three and a half minutes in, the organ, played by the newest addition to the now seven-man Dead, took the reins and played the melody, but not for long. Garcia jacked up his lead line, Lesh joined in with his familiar rumble, and the two instruments began circling each other like two puppies at a dog run. Finding his footing, Garcia unleashed a barrage of stinging-bee notes that all but asserted his dominance. Five minutes in, when most rock ’n’ roll bands would have finished whatever they were playing, the Dead were just warming up.

  The setting for this performance was surreal but fitting. Only a few years before, the hulking building on the Great Highway, the road that ran along the western side of San Francisco, had been home to the world’s largest slot-car raceway. Miniature-car freaks gathered to watch their toy autos careen along an electrical track that stretched out 220 feet. For Garcia the mere sight of Playland at the Beach, where he’d once romped as a teenager, must have brought back memories of another, different lifetime.

  The model car freaks were now gone, and a different type of freak had taken their place. In 1968 promoter Chet Helms, who’d been booking some of the Dead’s shows, reopened the space as a concert hall called the Family Dog on the Great Highway. He proudly called it a “musical environment sensorium,” but the spirit of the previous business lived on. During its slot-car days, everyone knew where the track began and ended, but given its twists, turns, and bends, you couldn’t predict what happened in between: go too fast, and your car would jump the track and wipe out. The song the Dead were now playing, three songs into the set, had its own share of lurches and potential derailments: no one ever knew how long it would last and where it would go before it ended.

  “Dark Star” also embodied the mixture of creative struggles and triumphs they’d endured since the bust at 710 Ashbury. The previous two years had been unpredictable, often discombobulating—a seemingly nonstop series of growing pains. Starting with their look, so much had changed. Their previous image—be it black Beatle-style boots or page-boy haircuts with headbands—were gone, replaced by slightly shorter, scruffier almost-shags. Garcia had grown a beard that lent him the look of a kind-eyed mountain man; whether he liked it or not, it also made him the band’s physical focal point. With their denim, ponchos, and cowboy hats, the Dead now looked more like a gang of bemused hippie ranchers than a blue-collar garage band. The days of communal living in the Haight were also long gone. They’d staggered their way through two more studio albums—and, along the way, clashed with their record company and producer, almost imploded as a band, and added a new member meant to compensate for what some saw as the musical shortcomings of another. They’d put themselves and everyone around them through a trial by fire that threatened to scorch everyone in its path, and yet the Dead seemingly wouldn’t have it any other way.

  “Dark Star” became a turning point for the Dead on several levels. Evolving right before the bust at 710 Ashbury, it marked Robert Hunter’s return to Garcia’s life and the world of the Dead. Tried though he had, the hypersensitive Hunter wasn’t destined to be a member of the Dead (or, for that matter, any band). His earlier attempts to join Garcia’s bluegrass or jug combos hadn’t worked out. When he’d heard the Warlocks had changed their name to the Grateful Dead, he was somewhat appalled, thinking it was a bad name. Embarking on his own idiosyncratic journey, he’d spent time in Los Angeles, an outgrowth of his fascination with a relatively new movement called Scientology that appealed to his spiritual quest. Back in San Francisco Hunter’s wanderings had also led to speed and meth—a journey so dark he
had to remove himself from the scene and relocate to New Mexico. All along Hunter was writing, and one day at 710 Ashbury Garcia received a batch of lyrics in the mail, a collaborative method Hunter would adhere to for decades to come. Never one to have the patience to write his own lyrics, Garcia loved Hunter’s words so much that he asked his friend whether he’d consider returning to San Francisco to become the Dead’s in-house lyricist.

  Like so many other aspects of the rock life the Dead were tweaking and broadening—and would continue to do so for years to come—the idea of a band member who only wrote lyrics was radical. Comanager Scully immediately had concerns: How would this upset the nitroglycerin balance in the rest of the band? How would they set up a publishing arrangement that included all of them as composers? And given that they weren’t really making any money, how were they going to feed this new guy who was only supposed to write words for their songs? As things stood, they barely had enough income to fill their own stomachs. (At the very least, Scully didn’t have to worry about putting Hunter up; there was no room at 710, so he was forced to crash elsewhere.) “Usually the arranger is the band, and that’s what I suggested,” says Scully. “Except we found that Jerry and Hunter got so prolific off the bat we had to make a separate arrangement. It wasn’t fair to include four other guys in there as arrangers when Jerry came up with the tune and Hunter came up with the lyrics. That’s when it got very complicated. I was working at the time with a number of tricky relationships.”