All that changed in September when the Warlocks started playing regularly at the In Room, a lounge in a Belmont hotel that was trying to attract a younger crowd. Five nights a week, five sets a night for six weeks, the Warlocks held court at the In Room, getting weirder and louder, but also better, with each passing week. The crowds varied from night to night; not surprisingly the band drew best on weekends. Working in the same environment night after night gave them a chance to hone their chops and get to know each other’s idiosyncrasies as players and performers. In essence, they learned to play their instruments together (though obviously the learning curve was higher for some than others), and that is one reason why the Warlocks, and later the Grateful Dead, played so well together. “When we first started working,” Garcia said, “we were really working hard. I never saw anybody. When we were working the bars, I lost contact with almost all my friends ’cause the Warlocks were playing every night, and on Sundays, afternoons and nights. We were booked solid.”
In another interview Garcia said, “The only scene then was the Hollywood hype scene, booking agents in flashy suits, gigs in booze clubs, six nights a week, five sets a night, doing all the R&B-rock standards. We did it all. Then we got a job at a Belmont club and developed a whole malicious thing, playing songs louder and weirder. . . . For those days it was loud, and for a bar it was ridiculous. People had to scream at each other to talk, and pretty soon we had driven out all the regular clientele. They’d run out clutching their ears. We isolated them, put them through a real number, yeah.”
With the exception of Pigpen, who eschewed drugs in favor of his beloved screw-top wines, the Warlocks smoked pot whenever it was around—and by 1965 it was rolling up the coast in increasing quantities as more and more people discovered it. And they took LSD, which was still legal (though underground), with increasing regularity. At this point there was no regular, reliable source for the drug, but it was popping up simultaneously in San Francisco, Berkeley, the Peninsula and the South Bay, so obtaining it wasn’t that difficult. At the In Room, “we’d be sneaking out in the cars, smoking joints between each set and so forth,” Garcia recalled. “One of those days we took [acid]. We got high and goofed around in the mountains and ran around and did all kinds of stuff, and I remembered we had to work that night. We went to the gig and we were a little high, and it was all a little strange. It was so weird playing in a bar being high on acid. It was just too weird; it definitely wasn’t appropriate.”
Heads, in the drug sense of the word, were few and far between on the Peninsula in 1965—there weren’t many beyond the Warlocks’ scene and the crowd that had hung out around the Offstage club in San Jose. But not too far away, just up over Cahill Ridge, across Skyline Drive, down twisty Highway 84, and deep in a magical redwood-forested community midway between Palo Alto and the Pacific known as La Honda, something big was cookin’. The word came down through the jungle telegraph that there were strange doings at Kesey’s place.
Ken Kesey was already a semilegendary figure by the time the Warlocks cruised over to La Honda for the first time in the fall of 1965. An Oregon native who had attended the University of Oregon in Eugene and distinguished himself as a wrestler and drama student in the mid- and late ’50s, Kesey and his wife, Faye, moved to Palo Alto in 1958 after the aspiring novelist won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and was admitted to the Stanford Writing Program, which was founded and spearheaded by novelist Wallace Stegner. Ken and Faye moved into a little cottage on Perry Lane, a bohemian enclave in Menlo Park since the ’20s, and fell in with a hard-partying intellectual crowd that included Ed McClanahan, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, Chloe Scott and Kesey’s future Merry Pranksters partner Ken Babbs. Though a country boy at heart, Kesey became intoxicated by the Beat scene in San Francisco (and its ripples on the Peninsula)—so much so that he abandoned a novel he was writing about football and began a book called Zoo, which chronicled the adventures of a rodeo rider’s son who moves to North Beach and becomes part of the Beat scene.
There were other intoxicants, too: Kesey was introduced to pot on Perry Lane, and like Robert Hunter a couple of years after him, he made the life-changing decision to volunteer for the government’s tests of psychotomimetic drugs at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park. It’s only in the past fifteen years that the truth about these experiments has been revealed—how the CIA wanted to study the effects of psychedelics on people, with a notion that perhaps drugs could be used against our enemies in some way: disorienting them, scaring them, perhaps making them tell us truths and secrets that conventional interrogation could not elicit. Kesey’s and Hunter’s descriptions of their test environments are fairly similar—the bright white rooms and dispassionate scientists who clearly had no handle on what was really going on inside their test subjects; whose periodic checks of Kesey’s blood didn’t tell them anything real; who never got an inkling of the completely indescribable profundity of the experiences they were routinely dispensing in pill and capsule form; who never once suspected that a guy like Kesey would be so moved by what he felt that he would take it upon himself to secrete away his own stash of these substances.
Peyote also made it to Perry Lane, direct from a place in Texas called Smith’s Cactus Ranch. It was legal, too—it probably never occurred to government types that anyone other than Native Americans would have any use for the stuff. Kesey said that the first part of the book he was writing at night while he worked in the psychiatric ward at the Veterans Hospital, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, had emerged and crystallized while he was high on peyote. So it’s not too surprising that the pivotal character in the book is an Indian, Chief Broom.
“It was a real tribal scene at Perry Lane,” said novelist Robert Stone in Ken Babbs and Paul Perry’s superb oral history of Kesey’s world in the early and mid-’60s, On the Bus. “It was tribal in part because we were amusing ourselves with these experimental drugs. . . . We were young and thought we were just incredibly sophisticated and bohemian to be doing all this far-out stuff.”
During the year that Alan Trist was in Palo Alto, “My parents had a Spanish house right there behind Perry Lane; in fact, the backyard of my house looked over into the backyard of Kesey’s house, when he had his little cabin there. And Jerry often stayed over [with me]. We didn’t know Kesey, but we were aware of him, because he already had a reputation as a writer and he had a little scene around him. So we were curious about that, and I remember being in my backyard and peering over the fence with Jerry and hearing a party going on there, so we went around—I can’t remember if it was that night or another night—and we tried to gate-crash the party. So we did and we were unceremoniously thrown out. The person who connected our scene—what would be the Grateful Dead scene later on—to Kesey, was Page Browning, who was part of the Chateau scene.”
Kesey finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the spring of 1961, and that summer he and Faye and their two kids moved back up to Oregon so Ken could do research for his next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, a sprawling saga about a logging family. That autumn they returned to Perry Lane, and for the next year-plus Kesey worked diligently on his opus, while still finding lots of time for extracurricular partying, psychedelic and otherwise. The cottage on Perry Lane was razed by developers in June 1963 and was eventually replaced by more upscale housing. By the time the bulldozers arrived, though, Kesey had already found a cabin deep in the La Honda redwoods that was perfect for his needs. It offered the isolation he needed to complete his book, and it was a great party pad, if a bit off the beaten track from Menlo Park. Kesey hoped that the spirit of the old Perry Lane scene would somehow follow him over the mountain down to this magical, sylvan hideaway that looked like something out of Tolkien. But the vibe around Kesey was beginning to change—he had started to attract more friends who shared his interest in chemical exploration, and a sizable contingent of the Perry Lane crowd chose not to make the drive over the hill to La Honda once things started to get more psychedelic than literary.
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Kesey was changing, too. By the time he completed Sometimes a Great Notion he had become somewhat disenchanted with the novel as an art form and was looking for new, less static media in which to express himself. Like everyone else in the hip culture of 1964, he was turned on by the Beatles and Dylan and innumerable filmmakers, artists, dancers and writers who seemed to be in the vanguard of some bold but undefinable new movement outside mainstream culture that was picking up steam with each passing month. Kesey talked about what he called the Neon Renaissance: “It’s a need to find a new way to look at the world, an attempt to locate a better reality, now that the old reality is riddled with radioactive poison. I think a lot of people are working in a lot of different ways to locate this reality: Ornette Coleman in jazz, Ann Halprin in dance, the New Wave movies, Lenny Bruce in comedy, Wally Hedrick in art, Heller, Burroughs, Rechy, Günter Grass in writing and those thousands of others whose names would be meaningless, either because they haven’t made it yet, or aren’t working in a medium that has an it to make. But all these people are trying to find out what is happening, why and what can be done with it.”
In the spring of 1964 Kesey decided to drive from California to New York with a few buddies to check out the New York World’s Fair and attend a publication party for Sometimes a Great Notion. Originally, Kesey, his friend George Walker and a couple of others talked about throwing a mattress in the back of a panel truck and cruising across the heartland that way, but then the idea seemed to take on its own incredible momentum, and the result was the fabled psychedelic bus trip of song, story and a never-completed cinema weirdité film. Convinced that film was the new way he and his friends could make art that was more immediate, pliable, real and relevant, Kesey had invested a good chunk of his royalties from Cuckoo’s Nest into buying film and audio recording equipment.
Ken Babbs, who had been part of the Stanford Writing Program, returned from a tour of duty as a chopper pilot in the quickly escalating Vietnam War and signed on with Kesey to go east for the great adventure. Babbs also helped find the mode of transport for the trip, a 1939 International Harvester school bus that Kesey bought for $1,500 and which he and his friends transformed into the perfect tourmobile for the dawn of the psychedelic age—complete with bunk beds, a kitchen, a cut-out rooftop perch, plenty of room for all the wires, speakers and odd equipment that were needed to make the movie, and a paint job (by everyone!) that mixed a million eye-popping colors, swirling patterns, mandalas, op-art geometrics and symbols of unknown origin and meaning, all slopped and glopped on with brushes, walked on with paint-covered feet, poured on in great rainbow streams and sometimes even meticulously labored over in the fashion of Michelangelo high on his scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel. And who was to say that pulsating green curlicue leaping from a field of crimson and midnight blue on the right front fender wasn’t Adam’s finger touching the hand of God? The destination sign on the front read FURTHUR, and on the back WEIRD LOAD.
By the time the bus pulled out of La Honda in mid-June for points south and east, the crew, dubbed the Merry Band of Pranksters (or Merry Pranksters for short), numbered fourteen and included a strange assortment of old and new friends, neighbors, relatives (Kesey’s brother Chuck and Babbs’s brother John) and, to share the driving duties with George Walker, none other than Neal Cassady, the fast-talking, larger-than-life hipster hero of Kerouac books—he was Dean Moriarty in On the Road, Cody Pomeray in The Dharma Bums and Visions of Cody—and Beat-era associate of Ginsberg and Burroughs. Everyone got a new name—Sir Speed Limit (Cassady), the Intrepid Traveler (Ken Babbs), Zonker (Steve Lambrecht), Gretchen Fetchin’ (Paula Sundstun), etc. Almost nothing was planned: “In the bus trip we were working at being spontaneous,” Ron Bevirt (aka Hassler) said in On the Bus. “And we were working at having fun. We were really having fun! And we were Pranksters.” Added Ken Babbs: “We were astronauts of Inner Space, which is as big as outer space. As above, so below. We popped acid, flopped on the floor, hooked up tape recorders and rapped out whole novels. We got up on our feet and played musical instruments, acting out parts we made up on the spot. This wasn’t a summer lark, but a legitimate literary endeavor of artistic merit, holding the promise of commercial success.”
Mainly it was an acid-drenched coast-to-coast goofin’ and freakin’—sort of a traveling dada circus; a rolling conceptual art piece that we now know was actually the signal flare for the great psychedelic bombardment of America that was to follow shortly in Furthur’s Day-Glo wake. You have to give the Pranksters credit for chutzpah: their route to the World’s Fair took them through the heart of the South at a time when racial tensions were at their absolute highest—civil rights workers were being murdered, their bodies dumped by the roadside, that horrible summer. It was mile after mile of cultural weirdness and potentially bad vibes, yet here was the bizarre-looking contraption just swarming with laughing, barely coherent young men and women, spilling out of the magic bus with cameras and musical instruments and God knows what else. They were greeted mainly by delighted, if puzzled, faces—“Gee, never had one of those come through here before”—and curious police patrol cars making damn sure the thing kept movin’ right on through town.
Not surprisingly, the bus caused quite a sensation when it finally arrived in Manhattan. Even though New York is a city that takes weirdness in stride, no one had ever seen anything quite like this blur of bright colors clattering noisily through the midtown streets like some hyperkinetic vehicle from a ’30s cartoon. The World’s Fair, out in the Flushing Meadows section of Queens, was already good and strange, so the Pranksters weren’t quite as conspicuous in that setting. Hell, they could have put the bus in there next to GM’s Futurama or Buckminster Fuller’s mammoth geodesic-domed U.S. Pavilion—which had spaceships outside and Warhol paintings inside—and attracted a line of sight-seers in no time.
The bus arrived back in La Honda near the end of August 1964 after a relatively quick and calm (by Pranksters standards) journey across the northern Midwest, the Canadian Rockies and down the Northwest coast. Cassady and Hassler had returned to California separately in advance of the bus, so the Pranksters’ exploits were already infamous on the Peninsula by the time the bus rumbled, sputtered and gasped its way onto Kesey’s property.
* * *
Before we get back to Garcia’s story, we need to meet one more significant new character—Carolyn Adams, Jerry’s future girlfriend and wife, who became an integral part of the Pranksters’ scene almost immediately after the bus trip. “It was shortly after that that I ran into Neal Cassady and Bradley Hodgman at St. Michael’s,” she says. “They had just come back from the Prankster bus trip. They came up to my table and said, ‘Do you want to go for a ride and smoke a joint?’ and I said, ‘Yeah!’ I guess I was sort of the ‘babe.’
“I knew who Neal was, of course. Plus he had all his clippings in his wallet! I was an attractive eighteen-year-old and he was a celebrity and I thought he was a weird old guy. Bradley had a Beatle haircut and had been a tennis star at Stanford who also liked speed, and I guess he ran into Neal on the speed circuit. I thought Bradley was really quite cute. Anyway, I decided these guys looked interesting and I went for a ride with them and the ride ended up at Kesey’s and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, look at these people!’ The bus was there in the trees. It was incredible. This beautiful place and the bus was just shimmering in the gloom. And here were all these weird people. I felt instantly at home with them. They’d just gotten back from New York and they were still very high on it, partly with exhaustion I think.”
Carolyn had only been in Palo Alto about a year when Cassady swept her into the Pranksters’ orbit. She had grown up in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the Hudson River valley, the daughter of an entymologist/botanist and a grade school teacher. She had two brothers, five and seven years older, who went to Swarthmore and Haverford out of high school. “They were golden, they could do no wrong; on the crew team, great grades,” she says. “I came along and I did really
well for a while, and then when I was about twelve or thirteen it all fell apart for me and I got into the heavy rebelling. I got suspended, which was rough for my parents because my mom was on the school board. I couldn’t stand all that stiffness and regulation. There was just too much of it. I became a sort of class clown, as well, and pulled lots of stunts and was thrown out of high school a few weeks short of graduation.”
She managed to collect her diploma by mail, and in the summer of 1963 Carolyn and the younger of her brothers drove to Palo Alto. “He was in the psychology program [at Stanford] with rooms full of monkeys; I thought it was the nastiest possible scene,” she says. “So I got a job at Stanford. I immediately got hired by the organic chemistry department, making over $400 a month, which was really good back then. But all these organic chemistry guys were leching on me when I was on the graveyard shift, so it wasn’t as cool as it sounds.”
Unbeknownst to Carolyn when she took the chem job at Stanford, some of the scientists she worked with were involved in complex drug research: “They were working on psychedelic drugs and they never told me. What I did know is that when they would send this stuff down for analysis they would look at me really funny and tell me to be really, really careful with the samples. There was a lot of unpsoken stuff going on that I had no clue about. I had no idea about consciousness-expanding drugs.
Garcia: An American Life Page 14