Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  “Then this Life magazine article came out and it had Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert talking about seeing God, and I thought, ‘Wow! I want to see God, too,’ and I vowed that if any psychedelics came my way I’d try it.”

  So she did. “I tried one of the drugs, which turned out to be this leafy African drug called ibogaine. It changes your head and initiates you into the channel of the ancestors. I ended up passing out at my workstation, and when my boss came in at seven-thirty the next day, there I was.”

  A few weeks later Carolyn was fired, and shortly after that Cassady showed up. Her boyfriend in Palo Alto had already turned her on to pot, “but I took acid for the first time twenty-four hours after meeting the Pranksters. They were having their debriefing—they’d gotten back from New York and everyone had gone back to their houses to see how everything was, do the laundry and all that. It was a couple of weeks after the bus trip. And of course the debriefing was an excuse for a party, and I got high with them. I thought it was the greatest stuff in the world. My first dose was a really light dose—just enough to see the redwood needles start rearranging themselves in all sorts of intricate Celtic patterns.”

  Cassady gave Carolyn her Prankster name, Mountain Girl (to this day, most of her friends call her “M.G.”), but it was with Kesey that she bonded immediately. “We had an instant rapport because I had read Sartre and Albee; I was a reader,” she says. “In my family we read Shakespeare to each other; we had a literary tradition.” Their relationship became physical soon after they met. “I was an interloper to Faye,” Carolyn says. “It was very difficult for her and I was pretty unsympathetic, as young people will be. But I just adored her kids and I thought she had a marvelous family.”

  Over the next several months the scene at La Honda continued to grow “and more and more people started glomming onto it and showing up,” Carolyn says. “Ken developed the idea of having these Saturday night parties, and that’s what eventually led to the Acid Tests. It became just a huge social scene.” The Pranksters had set up loudspeakers and colored spotlights in some of the trees on Kesey’s property, and the house itself became a chaotic multimedia center, with music usually blasting at all hours, and M.G. and others working in fits and starts trying to edit the bus footage and audiotapes into a manageable feature film. There were forty-five hours of film to wade through, much of it poorly shot and as incoherent as one might imagine a film of people on LSD and/or amphetamines shot by cameramen high on those same substances would be.

  It was only a matter of time before the Warlocks hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters. In the fall of 1965 the Warlocks were experiencing a bit of an identity crisis. Not that they weren’t getting along and playing music that everyone agreed was evolving to be more interesting, more far-out, every day. It’s just that Phil, or someone, thought they saw a 45 in a record store one day by another group called the Warlocks—beaten to the punch!—though to this day no one has ever confirmed that the record or the other band even existed. Maybe it was a sign; at the very least it was an auspicious opportunity to come up with a moniker that had more weight, in the cosmic sense. “The Warlocks” was a little too Roger Corman B-movie—it was easy to imagine it as the title of a bad mid-’60s gore film. But it wasn’t easy coming up with a new name. The group bandied about a thousand possible names—serious, funny, surrealistic tags that didn’t quite resonate for one reason or another. When they drove up to San Francisco on November 3 to record their first demo tape at Golden State Studios, they went under an interim name, the Emergency Crew; not bad, but not really them either.

  That tape, often bootlegged through the years, is the only surviving musical artifact of the band’s pre–Grateful Dead period, and it barely hints at the group’s power as a live act (a problem that would dog the Dead for the rest of their album-making days). In 1964 and ’65, Golden State Studios was the place where up-and-coming bands recorded demos and albums for Autumn Records, the label owned by Tom Donahue and Bobby Mitchell. The studio was geared to cranking out tapes quickly and cheaply, and Sylvester Stewart, later famous as Sly Stone, was a house producer, known then for being somewhat autocratic and more than a little crazed. John Haeny generally engineered the sessions.

  The Emergency Crew cut six songs that afternoon, four originals and two cover tunes. Garcia sang lead on only one song, “Can’t Come Down,” a Dylan-inspired number (shades of “It’s Alright Ma”) in which Jerry sings/raps verses such as the following: “They say I’ve begun to lose my grip / My hold on reality is startin’ to slip / They tell me to get off this trip / They say that it’s like a sinking ship / Life’s sweet wine’s too warm to sip / And if I drink I’ll surely flip / So I just say as I take a dip: I can’t come down / It’s plain to see / I can’t come down / I’ve been set free / Who you are and what you do don’t make no difference to me.” It ain’t Dylan, or Robert Hunter for that matter, but at least it’s an attempt to put into words some of the feelings and attitudes of the early psychedelic age. And the music isn’t bad, either: Pigpen blows harp with zest and power all through the tune, Billy drives the track with his sure, steady beat and Garcia gets in a nice speedy guitar run as the song fades at the three-minute mark.

  “Mindbender” (also known as “Confusion’s Prince”) is dominated by a guitar riff that sounds as if it were lifted off Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man,” and the group’s vocal weaknesses are clearly brought to the fore—Phil and Bob’s tandem lead vocal is anemic and slightly off-pitch, and the harmonies are ragged, to put it charitably. Instrumentally, Pigpen’s piercing Vox Continental organ predominates, though Garcia also gets in a fine solo. The next track, “The Only Time Is Now,” with Phil’s vocal again highest in the mix, has an unmistakable Byrds quality to it, complete with heavy vibrato on Garcia’s guitar and stacked harmonies that the Emergency Crew couldn’t pull off if their lives depended on it.

  The remaining three songs each showed a different side of the group (which, of course, is usually the point of a demo tape). “I Know You Rider” was from the folk and blues world; it was an electrified holdover from the days of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. “Early Morning Rain,” written by Gordon Lightfoot, was arranged by the group as a mild slice of folk-rock, which was all the rage then. But the song where the band really cut loose was “Caution,” a locomotive blues jam that Bob Weir said had been inspired by Them’s “Mystic Eyes.” The interweaving of Phil’s relentless, propulsive bass line, Weir’s slashing rhythm guitar attack and Garcia’s wiry lead offers a glimpse of what was ahead; alas, it fades abruptly at just over three minutes. Live, it was one of the songs that the band stretched out on a bit.

  It was sometime in November 1965, while the band and a few friends were sitting around Phil’s apartment on High Street in Palo Alto, smoking DMT and thumbing through a gargantuan Funk and Wagnalls dictionary, that the group’s name was revealed (cue biblical trumpets!). As Jerry said in his oft-quoted 1969 description of the episode, “There was ‘grateful dead,’ those words juxtaposed. It was one of those moments, y’know, like everything else on the page went blank, diffuse, just sort of oozed away, and there was grateful dead. Big black letters edged all around in gold, man, blasting out at me, such a stunning combination. So I said, ‘How about Grateful Dead?’ and that was it.” Later, he noted, “Nobody in the band liked it. I didn’t like it, either, but it got around that that was one of the candidates for our new name and everyone else said, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ It turned out to be tremendously lucky. It’s just repellent enough to filter curious onlookers and just quirky enough that parents don’t like it,” he added with a laugh.

  Perhaps the most common misconception about the name is that it derives from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. In fact it comes from a folktale that is found in many cultures dating back hundreds of years. As that Funk and Wagnalls dictionary defined the term, it is “a motif of a cycle of folk tales which begin with the hero’s coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bur
y the corpse of a man who died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him a decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune, saves his life, etc. The story ends with the companion disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had befriended.”

  Garcia stumbled upon the name during a period when the band wasn’t playing many gigs, but they still rehearsed regularly to keep their chops up and try to develop new material. Garcia admitted that the grind of playing five sets a night, six days a week eventually became stultifying: “We just did it and did it and did it. And we got good doing it. It was a great way to get good. And we were young enough to love it. And we made enough so we could quit our day jobs. That happened immediately; that was the first thing that happened with us. But we were already burning out on the professional level that was available to us about the time the Acid Test came to our attention.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Can YOU Pass the Acid Test?

  o one seems to know exactly when Garcia and the others first connected with Kesey and the Pranksters. Garcia and a couple of other members of the group were definitely at the party that is usually considered the first Acid Test, held in late November at Babbs’s spread near Santa Cruz. Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg were there, as were all the Pranksters who were around, and even a few curious thrill-seekers who responded to a little sign Hassler had put up in the Santa Cruz bookstore he ran: CAN YOU PASS THE ACID TEST? The evening was fun and profound enough that by the end of the night, as Prankster Lee Quarnstrom put it, “It was like a Mickey Rooney movie where we suddenly said, ‘Hey, I know—we can put on a show!’”

  “Before there were Acid Tests,” Garcia said, “there were parties, and we got invited to one of these parties and we went down and plugged all our stuff in and played for about a minute. Then we all freaked out. But we made a good impression on everybody in that minute, so we were invited to the next one. So we just started playing at these things and they were great fun. . . . We were ready for something completely free-form. It kind of went along with where we were going, which is we were experimenting with psychedelics, as much as we were playing music.”

  The next Acid Test took place in the wee hours of December 4, 1965, after the Rolling Stones had played a show at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, with the Dead and Kesey’s gang in attendance. The Pranksters had unsuccessfully tried to rent a hall in San Jose for a party, so in the end Kesey called a bohemian acquaintance in that city known as Big Nig and talked him into hosting the postshow gala. As the Stones concert ended, the Pranksters swung into action, handing out “Can YOU Pass the Acid Test?” handbills to the masses filing out of the auditorium, then hopping onto the bus and hustling down to San Jose. Tom Wolfe’s description of the evening in his funny, hip and hallucinatory 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test gives some of the wild flavor of these early acid parties:

  “They come piling into Big Nig’s, and suddenly acid and the worldcraze were everywhere, the electric organ vibrating through every belly in the place, kids dancing not rock dances, not the frug and the—what?—swim, mother, but dancing ecstasy, leaping, dervishing, throwing their hands over their heads like Daddy Grace’s own stroked-out inner courtiers—yes!—Roy Seburn’s lights washing past every head, Cassady rapping, Paul Foster handing people weird little things out of his Eccentric Bag, old whistles, tin crickets, burnt keys, spectral plastic handles. Everybody’s eyes turn on like lightbulbs, fuses blow, blackness—wowwww!—the things that shake and vibrate and funnel freak out in this blackness—and then somebody slaps new fuses in and the old hulk of a house shutters back, the wiring writhing and fragmenting like molting snakes, the organs vibro-massage the belly again, fuses blow, minds scream, heads explode, neighbors call the cops, 200, 300, 400 people from out there drawn into The Movie, into the edge of the pudding at least, a mass closer and higher than any mass in history, it seems most surely . . .”

  On December 10 the Grateful Dead played its first show under the new name in San Francisco at the Fillmore Auditorium, a black-run nightspot that had hosted countless great R&B shows through the years. The occasion was a benefit for the radical performance group the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who had been seriously harassed by San Francisco police for performing their politically charged musical plays without the requisite permits from the disapproving city government. The Mime Troupe’s business manager was Bill Graham, a brash New Yorker who once had acting aspirations of his own but who now brought the full force of his excitable personality to keeping the Mime Troupe solvent, defending them against the hostile powers that be and getting them lots of publicity however he could. Though not particularly a rock ’n’ roll fan (he preferred Latin music and jazz), Graham was savvy enough to see the potential for making money to defray the Mime Troupe’s mounting legal costs by putting on benefit concerts for the group using local bands as his drawing card. The first Mime Troupe benefit, on November 6, featured the Jefferson Airplane (who sometimes rehearsed in the Mime Troupe’s loft), eclectic guitar virtuoso Sandy Bull and New York gutter-rockers the Fugs. At the December 10 Mime Troupe benefit, the Dead (whom Graham billed as “The Grateful Dead [Formerly The Warlocks]” because he was so uncomfortable with the name) shared the bill with some of the best young rock bands in the city, including the Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society and the Mystery Trend, as well as local jazz saxophonist John Handy.

  While the Warlocks had been playing bars and getting deeper into acid on the Peninsula, an even bigger psychedelic scene was developing in San Francisco. A group called the Charlatans, conceived and led by an artistic San Francisco State student named George Hunter, spent much of the summer of 1965 in the arid hills of Virginia City, Nevada, near Reno, taking acid, strutting around town with their friends in Victorian finery they’d picked up in San Francisco thrift stores, taking target practice in the surrounding hills and playing their rough-hewn rock ’n’ roll music in a Western bar called the Red Dog Saloon, which was built in a gambling hall that dated back to the 1860s. Word quickly got around San Francisco that there were high times to be had at the Red Dog, and for a while there was a small but steady stream of visitors from the city making the pilgrimage to Virginia City. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters even stopped by the Red Dog near summer’s end, but their timing was off: one of the Charlatans had been busted back in the Bay Area, the police had traced his connection to what was going on in Virginia City and the scene was forced to disperse.

  That fall, some of the folks who’d been part of the Red Dog summer and who were living together in a commune called the Dog House (in honor of various mutts who’d lived there) on Pine Street in San Francisco decided to seize upon the energy of the Virginia City romp and put on a dance with the Charlatans at Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco, a big, funky space near Fisherman’s Wharf that was often used for more conventional teen and young-adult dances. The first “Family Dog” dance concert, October 16, 1965, was billed as “A Tribute to Dr. Strange,” after the Marvel Comics hero. Also playing that night were the Jefferson Airplane, who had begun to create a stir through their appearances at a San Francisco club called the Matrix, and the Great Society, with Grace and Darby Slick. The Warlocks had a connection to the Airplane before they ever shared a bill with them: guitarists Jorma Kaukonen and Paul Kantner had both been folkies in the South Bay during Garcia’s bluegrass days.

  The Family Dog’s second dance, “A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty,” was held the following weekend, with an even bigger turnout, mostly because word of mouth on the first event had been so positive. This time the headliner was the Lovin’ Spoonful, the popular New York folk-rock group then riding high with their smash hit “Do You Believe in Magic,” fresh from a sold-out week at the San Francisco music and comedy club the hungry i.

  “The first time that music and LSD interacted in a way that really came to life for us as a band,” Garcia said, “was one d
ay when we got extremely high on some of that early dynamite LSD and we went that night to the Lovin’ Spoonful. . . . That day, the Grateful Dead guys—our scene—went out, took acid and came up to Marin County and hung out somewhere around Fairfax or Lagunitas or one of those places up in the woods, and just went crazy. We ended up going into that rock ’n’ roll dance and it was just really fine to see that whole scene—where there was nobody there but heads and this strange rock ’n’ roll music playing in this weird building. It was just what we wanted to see. . . . We began to see that vision of a truly fantastic thing. It became clear to us that working in bars was not going to be right for us to be able to expand into this new idea.” It was that evening, too, that Phil Lesh uttered his famous remark to Ellen Harmon of the Family Dog: “Lady, what this little seance needs is us.”

  The Family Dog dances were mainly that: dances, though they also featured primitive light shows—strobe lights were the perfect accompaniment for LSD because, like that drug, they seemed to fracture both light and time. And people increasingly used the dances as an excuse to dress up in odd thrift-store clothes—capes and long coats and feathered boas and strange hats direct from grandma and grandpa’s musty attic trunk. The Acid Test, on the other hand, made no pretense of being a concert of any kind. Yes, the Grateful Dead was part of the package, but as Garcia put it, “We had no significance. We weren’t famous. Nobody came to the Acid Test to see us, particularly. We got to play or not play, depending on how we felt. We could play anything we could think of, which meant we didn’t have any constraints on our performance. We didn’t have to be good, or recognizable even. We had an opportunity to visit highly experimental places under the influence of highly experimental chemicals before a highly experimental audience. It was ideal. And that was something we got to do long enough to get used to it.