“Everybody there was entertaining. Everything there was entertaining; every event that happened. And you didn’t need expertise. The musician’s chauvinism—‘I can do something you can’t do’—all that stuff went up in smoke, which I think was very good for everybody; everybody learned a lot from that process. I think everybody who ever went to an Acid Test came out a different person and loved it.”
Everyone who attended paid a buck to get in—musicians and Pranksters included—and there were no rules; whatever happened is what happened.
The night after the Dead’s Fillmore debut, the third Acid Test was held at a club in Palo Alto called the Big Beat. This was the first Acid Test where the Dead got to play on a real stage, but as usual they were just part of a larger, more amorphous event. The Pranksters always commanded as much attention as the Dead at these affairs, with their piles of sound equipment, Roy Seburn’s light show and the unholy triumvirate of Kesey, Babbs and Cassady always moving in three equally weird but compelling directions at once, doing strange things with microphones—laying down a rap or playing ghastly tuneless harmonica or chanting nonsense or narrating the insane scene in the room, sometimes even while the Dead were playing. There were times when the Dead were too high to play; other times they’d hit monstrous fat grooves that had everyone in the place dancing deliriously. “Our trip with the Acid Test was to be able to play long and loud . . . as long and as loud as we wanted and nobody would stop us,” Garcia said.
The following week the Acid Test moved out of the South Bay/Peninsula area for the first time. Originally it was scheduled for a public lodge at Stinson Beach, on the coast twenty-five perilous but scenic miles north of San Francisco on Highway 1, but that fell through at the last minute and instead it took place in the log lodge at Muir Beach, a few miles closer to San Francisco. Perhaps because it was nearer to the city and the San Francisco freaks had already gotten a glimpse of the Dead at the Mime Troupe benefit, the Muir Beach Acid Test drew a lot of new faces. (It probably would have attracted even more if untold numbers hadn’t shown up at Stinson Beach instead; which brings to mind the most famous Prankster axiom: “Never trust a Prankster.”)
Owsley Stanley, who was already legendary in underground circles for making high-quality LSD, was at Muir Beach that night seeing the Grateful Dead for the first time. He had met Kesey about a month earlier in La Honda, after friends had tipped him off about the acid parties in the redwoods, and before too long he became a primary supplier to that scene, though he continued to live in Berkeley.
Owsley, known to most then and now as “Bear,” was an interesting fellow. He was a few years older than the guys in the band—he and Kesey were the same age—and like Kesey, he had grown up in a very straight world. He was the grandson and namesake of a U.S. senator from Kentucky (Augustus Owsley Stanley) and the son of a Washington, D.C., lawyer (A. O. S. Jr.). His misfit tendencies showed up fairly early—in junior high he was expelled from Charlotte Hall, a military prep school in southern Maryland, “for smuggling a lot of booze into the school and getting the whole campus intoxicated,” he says. Later he went to public high school in Arlington, Virginia, “where I ate at the same table in the school cafeteria where Shirley MacLaine held court; she was a year ahead of me.”
Although he ultimately dropped out of high school after the eleventh grade, he managed to get into the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering, where he studied for just a year before quitting. In 1956 Owsley joined the air force and, on the basis of experience he’d gained working as a rocket test mechanic for Rocketdyne, was assigned to the Rocket Engine Test Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, east of Los Angeles. There, “I wound up teaching myself electronics, which I knew nothing about. I was reassigned to the salvage yard, and took apart every piece of gear that came in—and there was some pretty high-tech stuff at Edwards.” He also took and passed the tests for the ham radio and First-Class Radiotelephone Operator’s licenses.
When he landed a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Owsley was released from his military obligations. Later, he worked at various Southern California radio and TV stations, including a stint as chief engineer at an AM station in San Diego. Eventually, though, he went back to college, this time to UC Berkeley. He lasted only two semesters there, but he liked the city of Berkeley, which was filled with people who were, like him, intellectually voracious, stimulating to be around and definitely weirder than your average citizen. Then, as now, he was given to expounding at length, lucidly and enthusiastically, on a startlingly broad assortment of pet theories, which he held with absolute conviction, no matter how far away from the mainstream thinking on a given subject they were. In early 1964, Owsley “got turned on to the Beatles’ first album and LSD in the same week,” he recalls. “It was amazing. It all seemed to fit together. We had Meet the Beatles within a few days of it coming out. One of my friends who was a folkie brought it in and said, ‘Man, you gotta listen to this!’ And I was off and running on it. I loved it.”
But not quite as much as he loved LSD. Acid had a deep and profound effect on Owsley—so much so that with the help of his girlfriend, Melissa Cargill, a Berkeley chemistry grad student, he set up his own lab in the bathroom of his house to make the stuff, and in short order became renowned for the superior quality of his potion. Which is what led him to Kesey in the fall of 1965 and brought him that night to the lodge at Muir Beach.
There was a lot of weird energy in the air that night at Muir Beach. Owsley, for one, was overwhelmed by the totality of the experience—by what he saw as an almost maniacal edge to the Pranksters’ mind-warping assault, and by the sheer power of the Grateful Dead: “I’d never heard anything like it,” he says. “It was a little bit scary. Garcia was sort of frightening with that cosmic electric intensity he had back then. I remember at some point that night thinking, ‘This band is going to be bigger than the Beatles.’ That was my thought as I listened to this incredible cosmic shit they were playing. Of course I was out of my gourd that night. . . . But that was my thought, and I think on some level they proved me correct.”
Mountain Girl, who was a few months pregnant with Kesey’s child, remembers, “That was a strange night. The poor band couldn’t get anything going. I know Pigpen got dosed and he was very unhappy about it. The lighting was bad in there and the band would go up and play for about five minutes and then they’d sit down; that was all they could do. ‘C’mon guys! Why aren’t you playing?’ ‘I dunno. Why do we have to play?’ It was pretty funny. So then the Pranksters would play and that was perfectly dreadful. It sounded like a bad version of Sun Ra—screechy, but still kind of fun and upbeat; dissonant, goof-off kind of music. There were lots of silly costumes and colored smoke and bubbles and whatever I could come up with. I did a lot of light show stuff—I ran various slide projectors and film loops, mainly Prankster footage—the bus going down the road, and so on.”
In Tom Wolfe’s account of the evening, the night ended with Owsley screaming denunciations at Kesey for the dark power he had seen unleashed on the world during his peculiar night at Muir Beach. Owsley jumped into his car and started to roar off into the night, but crashed into a tree almost immediately and tumbled out of the car still raving and railing at Kesey and the Pranksters. As Garcia said later, “[Owsley’s] mind was completely shot—he thought they’d come and taken it from him. . . . He didn’t get along too well with our wilder version [than the Berkeley psychedelic scene Owsley was from] because the big, straight psychedelic scene always called our scene too high-energy—‘You can freak out in there, you know.’ That was what they always used to say.”
Garcia explained the allure of the Acid Tests from his perspective in a 1969 Rolling Stone story on the band:
“What the Kesey thing was depended on who you were when you were there. It was open, a tapestry, a mandala—it was whatever you made it. Okay, so you take LSD, and suddenly you’re aware of another plane, or several other planes. And the quest is to extend that l
imit, to go as far as you can go. In the Acid Tests, that meant to do away with old forms, with old ideas, try something new. Nobody was doing something, y’know. It was everybody doing bits and pieces of something, the result of which was something else.
“When it was moving right, you could dig that there was something that it was getting toward, something like ordered chaos. The Test would start off and then there would be chaos. Everybody would be high and flashing and going through insane changes during which everything would be demolished, man, and spilled and broken and affected, and after that another thing would happen, maybe soothing out the chaos, then another; it’d go all night ’til morning. . . .
“When we were playing, we were playing. When we weren’t, we’d be doing other stuff. There were no sets; sometimes we’d get up and play for two hours, three hours. Sometimes we’d play for ten minutes and then freak out and split. We’d just do it however it would happen. It wasn’t a gig—it was the Acid Test, where anything was okay.”
Commented Bob Weir: “When we played the Acid Tests, we set up before the whole thing began—wisely so. Then we’d take acid and wait until we could kind of deal with the physical. Back then, God knows who decided what the doses were gonna be, so there were times when it was a couple of hours before we’d make a stab at trying to play. And oftentimes we’d pluck around a little and then abandon ship pretty quick. It was hard to relate when we were heavily into hallucination.
“We began turning up loud pretty quickly. From the start, it was faster, looser, louder and hairier. We were going for a ride. We were gonna see what this baby’ll do. It helped that we were playing in an uncritical situation. What didn’t help was that the fact that we were completely disoriented, so we had to fend for ourselves and improvise. When we would come around in a song to what should be a familiar chorus, it seemed completely unfamiliar. The jams made us rely on each other a lot. ‘How are you doin’, man?’ ‘I don’t know! How are you doin’?’ ‘Well, I got this,’ and you’d play a little line. ‘Okay, I think I can relate to that.’ So we had to hang together. We got better and better at it as time went on, so we could take a pretty massive dose and hang in there for a while.”
Garcia often said that one of the biggest turn-ons of the Acid Tests for him was getting to know an ever-growing assortment of odd, interesting people who shared his own insatiable taste for adventure, the unexpected and the truly weird. It was under the aegis of the Acid Tests that Garcia encountered Kesey, Babbs, Bill Graham, Owsley, Wavy Gravy, Stewart Brand and many of the people who would become the movers and shakers of the blossoming San Francisco music scene. But the figure who impressed Garcia the most during this period was Neal Cassady, the fastestmanalive!, legendary for his verbal and physical dexterity and his death-defying feats of reckless driving. His exploits were dutifully chronicled by writers from Kerouac to Wolfe, and seemingly everyone who encountered him was affected by him.
“It’s hard to even know what to say about Cassady,” Garcia said in 1994. “He had an incredible mind. You might not see him for months and he would pick up exactly where he left off the last time he saw you; like in the middle of a sentence! You’d go, ‘What? What the . . .’ and then you’d realize, ‘Oh yeah, this is that story he was telling me last time.’ It was so mind-boggling you couldn’t believe that he was doing it.
“If you’d go for a drive with him it was like the ultimate fear experience,” Garcia continued. “You knew you were going to die; there was no question about it. He loved big Detroit irons—big cars. Driving in San Francisco he would go down those hills like at fifty or sixty miles an hour and do blind corners, disregarding anything—stop signs, signals, all the time talking to you and maybe fumbling around with a little teeny roach, trying to put it in a matchbook, and also tuning the radio maybe, and also talking to whoever else was in the car. And seeming to never put his eyes on the road. You’d be just dying. It would effectively take you past that cold fear of death thing. It was so incredible. . . .
“He was the first person I met who he himself was the art. He was an artist and he was the art also. He was doing it consciously, as well. He worked with the world. . . . He was that guy in the real world. He scared a lot of people. A lot of people thought he was crazy. A lot of people were afraid of him. Most people I know didn’t understand him at all. But he was like a musician in a way. He liked musicians; he always liked to hang out with musicians. That’s why he sort of picked up on us.”
“The only thing I can really say is everybody who ever knew Cassady was tremendously influenced and affected by him,” Kesey said. “People from all sorts of stations in life, from Stewart Brand to Garcia to Kerouac to Ginsberg to Burroughs to strange little teenage girls who had never read a book—were all very affected by him, and that in itself should say to people, ‘Pay attention to this guy. There’s more going on than you get in the first glimpse.’ It takes a bit of study.”
“One of the essential points of the Acid Tests is that you were safe in your idiosyncrasies and safe to be who you really were,” M.G. says. “That idea is at the heart of Ken’s nature, and it’s also the heart of Jerry’s nature. Jerry adored idiosyncrasies, and Ken as well. They would genuinely be charmed by weird people. Jerry would take people in who he thought had some special charm or something fascinating about them. It was an openness to weirdness.
“We also had this commitment to a group decision-making process and that worked fine as long as Ken or Jerry—in either one of the groups—hadn’t already made a decision about things, in which case we were going to do what they wanted to do. That’s the hilarious thing about it. We had this system which was truly democratic a lot of the time, but occasionally veered into being a dictatorship. I think Bill Graham shared that same oddness, of letting people do what they want to do and run stuff until suddenly it contradicted what he wanted.”
The Grateful Dead’s first performance of 1966 was an Acid Test at Beaver Hall in Portland—Kesey country—and then a few days later the Acid Test finally hit San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. Hundreds of heads turned out and had their minds blown by what they experienced. The Dead played an incredible set that night and the place was jumpin’ in a way it never had before. “All I know,” comedian–social satirist Paul Krassner said into a microphone at the Fillmore that night, “is that if I were a cop and I came in here, I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
Indeed. The “authorities” were not happy about these public carnivals of what was, by mainstream societal standards, deviant behavior on a mass scale taking place under their noses. Since LSD was still legal, they couldn’t just shut the Acid Test down, but there’s no doubt that they were taking notice of what was going on at these events. As early as the Big Beat Acid Test, newspapers began running stories about “drug orgies,” and police and government officials started talking about making the drug illegal and cracking down on the anarchic scene.
“The Acid Test started expanding at an incredible rate,” Garcia said. “It started from about enough people to fill a room this size, to enough to fill the Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco. And it had virtually no advertising or anything. You sort of had to be a detective to even find out where they were gonna be. But even so they got to be immensely popular. More and more people came to them, more and more people got high. After about three or four months, it seemed like the Acid Tests were going to take over the world in about a year.”
One person whose life was changed by seeing the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore Acid Test was Rock Scully, who as part of the Family Dog organization was actually putting on a competing dance concert featuring the Charlatans and the Jefferson Airplane at California Hall half a mile away the same night. In an early example of freak solidarity, Scully and the Pranksters worked out an arrangement where tickets were good for both events, and even set up a shuttle bus between the two venues. At one point Scully left his own show to check out what was happening at the Fillmore, and he was so mesmerized by what he saw and h
eard that he never returned to California Hall. Shortly afterward he became the Grateful Dead’s first manager.
Just as UC Berkeley was the center of cultural upheaval in the East Bay in the mid-’60s, and Stanford the bohemian nexus on the Peninsula, San Francisco State, located on an often foggy stretch of land at the southwest end of the city, produced many of the “pioneers” of Haight-Ashbury, Rock Scully among them. Rock hailed from Carmel, an idyllic coastal village 125 miles south of San Francisco, but much of his youth had been spent in European boarding schools. After attending college in Switzerland he went to S.F. State for graduate school and fell in with a crowd of students that included members of the Charlatans, Rodney and Peter Albin, and a New York kid named Danny Rifkin, all of whom, like Scully, lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, near the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park. Rifkin was living in and managing a stately old Victorian at 710 Ashbury when the two became friends, and after a while Scully moved into the building. Through Luria Castell, a former 710 resident who’d moved into the Dog House, Scully became involved with the Family Dog, and he in turn persuaded Danny Rifkin to help put on the dance concert with the Charlatans that December night at California Hall. Scully first heard the Dead at the Big Beat Acid Test, where he claims he and Pigpen were the only people in the room not on acid, but it wasn’t until he blasted into the Fillmore Acid Test, high as a kite, that he understood why so many people were latching onto this band.
That January the Dead also began playing regular gigs at the Matrix club in San Francisco, giving those who found the whole Acid Test scene a bit too strange, frantic and unpredictable (as well as those who simply dug the band and wanted to see more) a chance to groove on the Dead’s music without the confusing distractions that pretty much defined the Acid Tests. The Jefferson Airplane had been the first group to play the club when it opened in August 1965, and by year’s end they were signed to RCA Records. Though in early 1966 no one was beating down the door trying to get the Grateful Dead into a recording studio, the Matrix gigs certainly elevated their status around town and helped establish them as a “San Francisco” band, whereas before they had been considered a Peninsula group.
Garcia: An American Life Page 16