Night Beat

by Mikal Gilmore

  During this same period, the Beat scene was in full swing in the Bay Area, and it held great sway at the North Beach arts school where Garcia took some courses, and at the city’s coffeehouses, where he heard poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth read their venturesome works. “I was a high-school kid and a wanna-be beatnik!” he said in 1993. “Rock & roll at that time was not respectable. I mean, beatniks didn’t like rock & roll. . . . Rock & roll wasn’t cool, but I loved rock & roll. I used to have these fantasies about ’I want rock & roll to be like respectable music.’ I wanted it to be like art. . . . I used to try to think of ways to make that work. I wanted to do something that fit in with the art institute, that kind of self-conscious art—’art’ as opposed to ’popular culture.’ Back then, they didn’t even talk about popular culture—I mean, rock & roll was so not legit, you know? It was completely out of the picture. I don’t know what they thought it was, like white-trash music or kids’ music.”

  By the early 1960s, Garcia was living in Palo Alto, hanging out and playing in the folk music clubs around Stanford University. He was also working part time at Dana Morgan’s Music Store, where he met several of the musicians that would eventually dominate the San Francisco music scene. In 1963, Garcia formed a jug band, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Its line-up included a young folk guitarist named Bob Weir and a blues aficionado, Ron McKernan, known to his friends as “Pigpen” for his often unkempt appearance. The group played a mix of blues, country, and folk, and Pigpen became the front man, singing Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins tunes.

  Then, in February 1964, the Beatles made their historic appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” and virtually overnight youth culture was imbued with a new spirit and sense of identity. Garcia understood the group’s promise after seeing their first film, A Hard Day’s Night! For the first time since Elvis Presley—and the first time for an audience that had largely rejected contemporary rock & roll as seeming too trivial and inconsequential—pop music could be seen to hold bold, significant, and thoroughly exhilarating possibilities that even the ultra-serious, socially aware folk scene could not offer. This became even more apparent a year later, when Bob Dylan—who had been the folk scene’s reigning hero—played an assailing set of his defiant new electric music at the Newport Folk Festival. As a result, the folky purism of Mother McCree’s all-acoustic format began to seem rather limited and uninteresting to Garcia and many of the other band members, and before long, the ensemble was transformed into an electric unit, the Warlocks. A couple of the jug band members dropped out, and two new musicians joined: Bill Kreutzmann, who worked at Dana Morgan’s Music Store, on drums, and on bass, a classically trained musician named Phil Lesh, who, like Garcia, had been radicalized by the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. “We had big ideas,” Garcia told Rolling Stone in 1993. “I mean, as far as we were concerned, we were going to be the next Beatles or something—we were on a trip, definitely. We had enough of that kind of crazy faith in ourselves. . . . The first time we played in public, we had a huge crowd of people from the local high school, and they went fuckin’ nuts! The next time we played, it was packed to the rafters. It was a pizza place. We said, ’Hey, can we play in here on Wednesday night? We won’t bother anybody. Just let us set up in the corner.’ It was pandemonium, immediately.”

  It was around this time that Garcia and some of the group’s other members also began an experimentation with drugs that would forever transform the nature of the band’s story. Certainly, this wasn’t the first time drugs had been used in music for artistic inspiration, or had found their way into an American cultural movement. Many jazz and blues artists (not to mention several country-western players) had been using marijuana and various narcotics to intensify their music-making for several decades, and in the ’50s the Beats had extolled marijuana as an assertion of their nonconformism. But the drugs that began cropping up in the youth and music scenes in the mid-1960s were of a much different, more exotic, sort. Veterans Hospital near Stanford University had been the site of government-sanctioned experiments with LSD—a drug that induced hallucinations in those who ingested it, and that, for many, also inspired something remarkably close to the patterns of religious experience. Among those who had taken the drug at Veterans Hospital were Robert Hunter, a folk singer and poet who would later become Garcia’s songwriting partner, and Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey had been working on an idea about group LSD experiments, and had started a makeshift gang of artists and rogues, called the Merry Pranksters, dedicated to this adventure. Kesey’s crew included a large number of intellectual dropouts like himself and eccentric rebels like Neal Cassady (the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road) and Carolyn Adams (later known as Mountain Girl, who eventually married Garcia and had two children with him).

  The Pranksters had been holding parties at a house in the nearby town of La Honda, to see what would happen when people took LSD in a situation where there were no regulations or predetermined situations. At Kesey’s invitation, the Grateful Dead—as the Warlocks were now called—became the house band for these collective drug experiments, known as the Acid Tests. The Dead would play for hours as the Pranksters filmed the goings-on—everything from freak-outs to religious revelations to group sex. The Acid Tests were meant to be acts of cultural, spiritual, and psychic revolt, and their importance to the development of the Grateful Dead cannot be overestimated. The Dead’s music, Garcia later said, “had a real sense of proportion to the event”—which is to say that sometimes the group’s playing would seem to overshadow the event, and at other times, it would function as commentary or backdrop to the action of the event itself. Either way, the band did not see itself as the star of the party; if there were stars, they were formed from the union of the music and musicians with the audience and the spirit and shape of what was happening, from moment to moment—which meant that there was a blur between the performers, the event, and the audience.

  Consequently, the Acid Tests became the model for what would shortly become known as the “Grateful Dead trip.” In the years that followed, the Dead would never really forsake the philosophy of the Acid Tests. Right until the end, the band would encourage its audience to be involved with both the music and the sense of kinship that came from and fueled the music. Plus, more than any other band of the era, the Grateful Dead succeeded in making music that seemed to emanate from the hallucinogenic experience—music like 1969’s Aoxomoxoa, which managed to prove both chilling and heartening in the same moments. In the process, the Dead made music that epitomized psychedelia at its brainiest and brawniest, and also helped make possible the sort of fusion of jazz structure and blues sensibility that would later help shape bands like the Allman Brothers.

  “I wouldn’t want to say this music was written on acid,” says Robert Hunter, who penned some of the album’s lyrics. “Over the years, I’ve denied it had any influence that way. But as I get older, I begin to understand that we were reporting on what we saw and experienced—like the layers below layers which became real to me. I would say that Aoxomoxoa was a report on what it’s like to be up—or down—there in those layers. I guess it is, I’ll be honest about it. Looking back and judging, those were pretty weird times. We were very, very far out.”

  BY 1966, THE SPIRIT of the Acid Tests was spilling over into the streets and clubs of San Francisco—and well beyond. A new community of largely young people, many sharing similar ideals about drugs, music, politics, and sex, had taken root in the city’s Haight-Ashbury district, a run-down but picturesque section of the city adjacent to Golden Gate Park, where Garcia and the Grateful Dead now shared a house. In addition, a thriving club and dance-hall scene—dominated by Chet Helms’ Avalon Ballroom and Bill Graham’s Fillmore—had sprung up around the city, drawing the notice of the media, police, and various political forces. In part, all the public scrutiny and judgment would eventually make life in the Haight
difficult and risky. But there was also a certain boon that came from all the new publicity: The music and ethos of the San Francisco scene had begun to draw the interest of East Coast and British musicians and were starting to affect the thinking of artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan—the same artists who, only a year or two before, had exerted such a major influence on groups like the Grateful Dead. For that matter, San Francisco bands were having an impact on not just pop and fashion styles, but also on social mores and even the political dialogue of the times. Several other bands, of course, participated in the creation of this scene, and some, including Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, would make music as inventive and memorable as the Dead’s. In addition, nobody should underrate concert promoter Bill Graham’s importance to the adventure; he was an often acerbic character, but he would emerge as an invaluable and scrupulous caretaker of the community that he served.

  Still, it was the Grateful Dead that became known as the “people’s band”—the band that cared about the following that it played to, and that often staged benefits or free shows for the common good. And long after the Haight’s moment had passed, it would be the Grateful Dead—and the Dead alone among the original San Francisco bands—who would still exemplify the ideals of camaraderie and compassion that most other ’60s-bred groups long relinquished, and that many subsequent rock artists repudiated in favor of more corrosive ideals.

  The San Francisco scene was remarkable while it lasted, but it couldn’t endure forever. Because of its reputation as a youth haven, the Haight was soon overrun with runaways, and the sort of health and shelter problems that a community of mainly white middle-class expatriates had never had to face before. In addition, the widespread use of LSD was turning out to be a little less ideal than some folks had imagined: There were nights when so many young people seemed to be on bad trips, the emergency rooms of local hospitals could not accommodate them all. By the middle of 1967, a season still referred to as the Summer of Love, the Haight had started to turn ugly. There were bad drugs on the streets, there were rapes and murders, and there was a surfeit of starry-eyed newcomers who had arrived in the neighborhood without any means of support, and were expecting the scene to feed and nurture them. Garcia and the Dead had seen the trouble coming and tried to prompt the city to prepare for it. “You could feed large numbers of people,” Garcia later said, “but only so large. You could feed one thousand but not twenty thousand. We were unable to convince the San Francisco officials of what was going to happen. We said there would be more people in the city than the city could hold.” Not long after, the Dead left the Haight for individual residences in Marin County, north of San Francisco.

  By 1970, the idealism surrounding the Bay Area music scene—and much of the counterculture—had largely evaporated. The drug scene had turned creepy and risky; much of the peace movement had given way to violent rhetoric; and the quixotic dream of a Woodstock generation, bound together by the virtues of love and music, had been irreparably damaged, first by the Manson Family murders, in the summer of 1969, and then, a few months later, by a tragic and brutal event at the Altamont Speedway, just outside San Francisco. The occasion was a free concert featuring the Rolling Stones. Following either the example or the suggestion of the Grateful Dead (there is still disagreement on this), the Stones hired the Hell’s Angels as a security force. It proved to be a day of horrific violence. The Angels battered numerous people, usually for little reason, and in the evening, as the Stones performed, the bikers stabbed a young black man to death in front of the stage. “It was completely unexpected,” Garcia later said. “And that was the hard part—the hard lesson there—that you can have good people and good energy and work on a project and really want it to happen right and still have it all weird. It’s the thing of knowing less than you should have. Youthful folly.”

  The record the band followed with, Workingman’s Dead, was the Dead’s response to that period. The record was a statement about the changing and badly frayed sense of community in both America and its counterculture, and as such, it was a work by, and about, a group of men being tested and pressured—at a time when they could have easily pulled apart from all the madness and stress and disappointment. The music reflected that struggle—particularly in songs like “Uncle John’s Band”—a parable about America that was also the band’s confession of how it nearly fell apart—and “New Speedway Boogie,” about Altamont. “One way or another, this darkness has got to give,” Garcia sang in the latter song, in a voice full of fear, fragility, and hard-earned courage. Workingman’s Dead—and the record that followed it, American Beauty—made plain how the Grateful Dead found the heart and courage and talent to stick together, and to make something new and meaningful from their association. “Making the record became like going to a job,” Garcia said. “It was something we had to do, and it was also something we did to keep our minds off some of these problems, even if the music is about those problems.”

  As a result, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty were records that explored the idea of how one could forge meaningful values in disillusioning times. Says Robert Hunter: “When the Jefferson Airplane came up with that idea, ’Up against the wall,’ I was up against them. It may have been true, but look at the results: blood in the streets. It seems the Airplane was feeling the power of their ability to send the troops into the field, and I wanted to stand back from the grenades and knives and blood in the street. Stand way back. There’s a better way. There has to be education, and the education has to come from the poets and musicians, because it has to touch the heart rather than the intellect, it has to get in there deeply. That was a decision. That was a conscious decision.”

  Sometimes, adds Hunter, it was difficult to hold on to that conviction. “When American Beauty came out,” he says, “there was a photograph due to go on the back which showed the band with pistols. They were getting into guns at the time, going over to Mickey’s ranch, target shooting. It wasn’t anything revolutionary; they were just enjoying shooting pistols. For example, we got a gold record and went and shot it up.

  “I saw that photo and that was one of the few times that I ever really asserted myself with the band and said, ’No—no picture of a band with guns on the back cover.’ These were incendiary and revolutionary times, and I did not want this band to be making that statement. I wanted us to counter the rising violence of that time. I knew that we had a tool to do it, and we just didn’t dare go the other way. Us and the Airplane: We could have been the final match that lit the fuse, and we went real consciously the other way.”

  In addition, with their countryish lilt and bluesy impulses, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty were attempts to return to the musical sources that had fueled the band’s passions in the first place. “Workingman’s Dead was our first true studio album,” Garcia told me in 1987, “insofar as we went in there to say, ’These are the limitations of the studio for us as performers; let’s play inside those limitations.’ That is, we decided to play more or less straight-ahead songs and not get hung up with effects and weirdness. For me, the models were music that I’d liked before that was basically simply constructed but terribly effective—like the old Buck Owens records from Bakersfield. Those records were basic rock & roll: nice, raw, simple, straight-ahead music, with good vocals and substantial instrumentation, but nothing flashy. Workingman’s Dead was our attempt to say, ’We can play this kind of music—we can play music that’s heartland music. It’s something we do as well as we do anything.’ ”

  In a conversation I had with Robert Hunter in 1989, he revealed something else that he thought had affected Garcia’s singing in that period, and made it so affecting. “It wasn’t only because of the gathering awareness of what we were doing,” he said, “but Jerry’s mother had died in an automobile accident while we were recording American Beauty, and there’s a lot of heartbreak on that record, especially on ’Brokedown Palace,’ w
hich is, I think, his release at that time. The pathos in Jerry’s voice on those songs, I think, has a lot to do with that experience. When the pathos is there, I’ve always thought Jerry is the best. The man can get inside some of those lines and turn them inside out, and he makes those songs entirely his. There is no emotion more appealing than the bittersweet when it’s truly, truly spoken.”

  WITH Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, the Grateful Dead hit a creative peak and turned an important corner. For one thing, the two records sold better than anything the group had issued before, and as a result, the band was able to begin working its way free of many of the crushing debts it had accrued. More important, the Dead now had a body of fine new songs to perform onstage for its rapidly expanding audience. With the next album, a double live set, Grateful Dead (originally entitled Skullfuck, until Warner Bros., balked), the band issued an invitation to its fans: “Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.” It was the sort of standard fan club pitch that countless pop acts had indulged in before, but what it set in motion for the Dead would prove unprecedented: the biggest sustained fan reaction in pop music history. (According to The New Yorker, there were 110,000 Deadheads on the band’s mailing list in 1995.) Clearly, the group had a devoted and far-flung following that, more than anything else, simply wanted to see the Grateful Dead live. One of the aphorisms of the time was: “There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead show,” and though that adage sometimes backfired in unintended ways—such as those occasions when the band turned in a protracted, meandering, and largely out-of-tune performance—often as not, the claim was justified. On those nights when the group was on, propelled by the double drumming of Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, and the dizzying melodic communion of Garcia and Weir’s guitar’s and Lesh’s bass, the Grateful Dead’s verve and imagination proved matchless.