It was Stewart Brand, not Ken Kesey, who was the driving force behind a three-day multimedia extravaganza known as the Trips Festival at Longshoremen’s Hall on January 21, 22 and 23, 1966. Brand’s concept, or at least what he told the local media, was an event that would be like an acid trip, but without the acid (wink wink). What an extravaganza: Friday was to feature Brand’s multimedia America Needs Indians Sensorium and something called the Open Theater, which consisted of everything from the Congress of Wonders comedy troupe to a recitation of an Aimee Semple McPherson sermon, to a group called the Jazz Mice. Saturday evening was turned over to Kesey and the Pranksters, with music by the Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Sunday’s lineup brought together elements of Friday’s and Saturday’s events, along with such new stimuli as Henry Jacobs’s Air Dome Projections and the Stroboscopic Trampoline. A flier for the Trips Festival offered this explanation to the curious: “the general tone of things has moved from the self-concious happening to a more JUBILANT occasion where the audience PARTICIPATES because it’s more fun to do so than not. maybe this is the ROCK REVOLUTION. audience dancing is an assumed part of all the shows, & the audience is invited to wear ECSTATIC DRESS & bring their own GADGETS (a.c. outlets will be provided).”
Basically the festival was designed to be a three-day freak convention, a big party to usher in the dawn of the acid age. The gullible press completely bought into Brand’s rap and gave the event lots of free publicity.
Meanwhile, Ken Kesey had a problem. Way back in April 1965 the police had raided his house in La Honda and busted him for possession of pot. He was released on bail, and it wasn’t until just four days before the Trips Festival that the case finally worked its way through the crowded court docket. Kesey found himself on the receiving end of a stern lecture from San Mateo County court judge Louis Demateis. The judge said that the crime Kesey had committed could have landed him in the state prison, but since he was a first-time offender, Demateis instead sentenced Kesey to six months in the county jail, three years probation and a $1,500 fine. As part of the probation, the judge also ordered Kesey to sever all ties with the Merry Pranksters and the Acid Test. Kesey paid a $5,500 bond and announced his plan to appeal the sentence.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Kesey’s situation was complicated further when the night after the sentencing he and Mountain Girl were busted on the roof of Stewart Brand’s Telegraph Hill apartment. The pair had been lying around on the roof late at night, smoking pot, watching the stars above them, the lights of North Beach below them, and playfully tossing gravel from the rooftop. This was not a good idea: some of the gravel apparently hit the window of an apartment beneath them and a woman called the cops. Kesey and M.G. watched as police cars arrived in the street below them and officers entered the building they were on top of, but they failed to make the connection. The next thing they knew there were two cops on the roof with them. Kesey tried to throw away a baggie containing a small amount of pot, and the officers, with guns drawn, took the pair into custody. Mountain Girl bravely tried to take the rap, but nobody was buying her claim. No, Kesey had not only been busted a second time, but he was also caught consorting with a Prankster! This could land him in jail for an extended period—maybe even the three years the San Mateo judge had originally said was a probation period.
The Trips Festival was a huge success. Longshoremen’s Hall was jammed all three nights, with more than 10,000 people attending overall. The event grossed $12,500, which was good money for its day, a fact that was not lost on the man Stewart Brand had hired to help run the event—Bill Graham. Contrary to Brand’s pre-event assertions to the press, nearly everyone who attended the Trips Festival was high on something; acid was everywhere. It was, in fact, undoubtedly the largest concentration of psychedelicized people in one place that the world had ever seen. Kesey turned up Saturday night wearing a silver space suit and a bubble space helmet, and managed not to be too conspicuous, which gives an idea of how wild many people’s outfits were.
The handbill ads for the Saturday night event promised “ken kesey, members of the s.f. tape music center, big brother & the holding company rock ’n’ roll, the don buchla sound-light console, overhead projection . . . ‘the acid test,’ the merry pranksters and their psychedelic symphony, neal cassady vs. ann murphy vaudeville, the grateful dead rock ’n’ roll, allen ginsberg, roy’s audioptics, movies, ron boise & his electric thunder sculpture, the bus, hell’s angels, many noted outlaws, and the unexpectable.” In the middle of the hall the Pranksters constructed a giant tower—their command control center—which they filled from top to bottom with stacks and stacks of sound, lighting and movie equipment. What a pile of stuff: It was as if the little ol’ Acid Test of yore had been zapped by some ray and mutated, like the Amazing Colossal Man!
“The Trips Festival was a continuation of what was happening at other events, but in a much bigger dose,” says Steve Brown, who was managing a local band called the Friendly Stranger at the time. “Our thing was we did a liquid light show, strobe lights, a fog machine and projected cartoons. We had all that environmental thing going already. What this added to it was a more chaotic, unpredictable type of edge: tying everybody together with string, turning off the lights and throwing thousands of marshmallows down on everybody. Weird stuff that was sort of like performance art and got everyone participating. You’d be going along doing whatever you were doing and all of a sudden you’d find yourself in the middle of some other completely weird scene that somebody else was doing, so you did that until it ended or until something more interesting came along. And if a band happened to be playing and was good, that was an added bonus. The place was packed. There were people inside and outside, and people who didn’t know if they were inside or outside. There were all these people just kind of bumping around Fisherman’s Wharf scaring the tourists; it was great! What it really was, was a public drug event. Everyone was completely aghast that this many young people would want to do this. They couldn’t believe it!”
For Garcia the Trips Festival was “thousands of people, man, all helplessly stoned, all finding themselves in a roomful of other thousands of people, none of whom any of them were afraid of. It was magic, far-out beautiful magic.”
Facing a bail hearing on February 2, which would almost certainly result in his being jailed because of the rooftop bust, Kesey decided to go on the lam, but not before he hatched one more prank. He arranged to have an old panel truck driven up to the rainy northwestern corner of California, outside of Eureka, and parked on a cliff overlooking the ocean. On the front seat he left a “suicide” note that concluded: “I Ken Kesey being of (ahem) sound mind and body do hereby leave the whole scene to Faye, corporation, cash, the works. And Babbs to run it. (And it occurs to me that nobody is going to buy this prank and now it occurs to me that I like that even better.)”
Of course the police didn’t buy it; not for a second. But by leaving the truck so far north, Kesey led people to believe that he’d returned to his native Northwest, whereas in fact he’d hopped into a rented red Mustang convertible with Hassler, driven down to Los Angeles, then hooked up with Ron Boise and headed across the Mexican border in a truck. As the anointed successor, Babbs tried to keep the momentum of the Acid Tests going, and in fact there was more craziness to come in the weeks after Kesey’s departure, but most agreed that the Acid Tests were never quite the same. This brings to mind Prankster axiom number two: “Nothing lasts.”
All during this period, the band was still living in and around Palo Alto. Jerry, Sara and Heather had moved from the cottage on Bryant Court into a huge Victorian house a block or so from the Gilman Street pad, on the corner of Forest and Waverly Streets, along with Dave Parker, Robert Hunter, Rick Shubb and David Nelson. There were palm and avocado trees in the large yard, and most of the rooms were big and sunny. Inside, there was sometimes a palpable tension between Jerry and Sara, who were still drifting apart despite their shared love of tripping and of Heather. Jerry
had been unfaithful to Sara on numerous occasions with a few different women, but what finally broke up the marriage was Sara’s falling in love with Roy Seburn, one of the Pranksters:
“He and I started hanging out and then he came and stayed at our place on Waverly Street. The Acid Tests were going and I was just miserable with Jerry, absolutely miserable. One evening Roy was camping on the couch in the living room and I went down to be with him. And Jerry came down and found us hanging out together—we hadn’t done anything together yet—but I had strong feelings about Roy and I hadn’t had any strong feelings about Jerry, except disappointment, for quite some time. And Jerry basically said, ‘I can’t tolerate you being with somebody else,’ so I said, ‘Okay, that’s it. We’re done.’ I threw away my wedding ring and burned the letters he’d written me and gave a lot of my stuff to Cassady’s girlfriend and took off with Roy.”
Garcia noted that one of the effects of his experimentation with psychedelics during this period was that “It freed me, because I suddenly realized that my little attempt at having a straight life and doing that was really a fiction and just wasn’t going to work out. Luckily I wasn’t far enough into it for it to be shattering or anything. It was like a realization that just made me feel immensely relieved. I just felt good and it was the same with my wife; at that point it sort of freed us to be able to go ahead and live our lives rather than having to live out an unfortunate social circumstance.” Of course his “attempt at a having a straight life” was never very earnest, and it’s doubtful that Sara, who continued to care for Heather, enjoyed the same relief that the now unburdened Garcia did.
In early February the Dead and the Pranksters headed down to Los Angeles. For the Pranksters this was a chance to bring the Acid Test to new crowds on their way down to Mexico to reconnect with Kesey. In the Dead’s case, going to L.A. offered an opportunity to spend some solid time working on new material to expand a repertoire that new manager Rock Scully said was getting stale.
Owsley had also reconnected with the Dead in the weeks since his rough time at the Muir Beach Acid Test. While still somewhat distrustful of the whole Prankster ethos—“I thought they were probably messing with something that was probably very dangerous. It was not so good,” he said—seeing the Dead again at the Fillmore Acid Test confirmed his earlier notion that they were onto something special. “I met Phil,” he said. “I walked over to him and said, ‘I’d like to work for you guys.’ Because I had decided this was the most amazing thing I’d ever run into. And he says, ‘We don’t have a manager . . .’ I said, ‘I don’t think I want to be the manager.’ He said, ‘Well, we don’t have a sound man,’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about that, either, but I guess I could learn. Sounds like more fun.’ That’s how that happened.”
Owsley knew Los Angeles well from his years in the air force, the electronics industry and radio/TV, and he’d actually made LSD there as recently as the spring of 1965. He had roots and connections there, and a little bit of money from his drug operation to help support the band, yet he says he was opposed to the Dead’s moving there in that late winter of 1966: “The Acid Test went to L.A. and the Grateful Dead felt obligated. I argued long and strongly that it wasn’t really a very good idea to do it because I didn’t see any point in it. It was going to be expensive, none of us had a place down there to stay and there were no assurances there was any income; I had limited amounts of money. When I first met those guys they couldn’t make enough to live on. If they went out and worked a show, there were five of them and they were lucky to get $125 a night. So there was no money in it; it was more like a hobby.
“But, like I said, they felt like they had to do it, that they were part of the Acid Tests, so they went ahead and did it. I missed the first one because I couldn’t disconnect whatever I was doing [in Northern California], but I showed up the next week. We went down there and then somebody who was connected with the Pranksters had met some person who was in real estate and they located this house in Watts. I thought, ‘Who the fuck wants to go there?’ It turned out it was right next door to a whorehouse, and the whorehouse patrons would throw pot seeds out the window, so there were little pot plants growing all around—that’s all we needed, since we were bringing the cops there almost every day because of the noise.”
The big pink stucco house on the edge of Watts had no furniture in it at all, and, according to Rosie McGee (née Florence Nathan), who was Phil’s girlfriend, “That whole scene down there was totally controlled by Owsley. He rented the place, paid for everything. They had very little income during that period. They’d do a few gigs here and there for a couple of hundred bucks, and there was a house full of people to feed. But because Owsley was in charge of it and paying for it and was the massive control freak that he was, he controlled every single thing, down to what we ate. I’ll never forget that when you’d open the refrigerator there were big slabs of beef in there. The shelves weren’t even in there—just these big hunks of meat. So of course behind his back people were sneaking candy bars in. There were no greens or anything—he called it ‘rabbit food.’
“It was kind of an odd period because the band wasn’t working very much,” she continues. “They were home a lot and practicing in the house.” And how did they sound? “They were very rough but they were working hard at it; at the same time they were all having a lot of fun. I’m not sure they really had a direction at that point, except to stretch—musically, with drugs or whatever. It all went off in so many directions at once. They weren’t very focused. But that’s to be expected, because they were pretty loaded much of the time.”
For the record, Owsley acknowledges that he kept the band on the all-meat diet (which he preferred because he believed that humans are essentially carnivorous and that vegetables poisoned the body) and he admits, “I tend to be a control freak. I’ve had that epithet thrown at me a bunch. I like to see things done right.” Still, he was no Svengali telling the Dead what to do or what to play. Phil Lesh once noted, “He was our patron, in the ultimate sense of the word. . . . He never once thought about the money. We were able to be the Grateful Dead, and if they hired us, great. But we could at least eat.”
While the Dead contingent was staying in Watts, the Pranksters were spread out in several different locations around L.A., setting up Acid Tests at various odd places, including a Unitarian church in Northridge, Cathay Sound Studios, and the most notorious Test of them all, the Watts Acid Test, held in an old warehouse on Lincoln’s Birthday in 1966.
“We got a couple of 30-gallon garbage pails and mixed Kool-Aid,” Lee Quarnstrom said in On the Bus. “Owsley had a couple of glass ampules with pure LSD in them and he poured it into the Kool-Aid. We did some quick mathematics and figured that one Dixie Cup of Kool-Aid equalled 50 micrograms of acid. The standard dose, if you wanted to get high, was 300 mics. So we told everyone that six cups would equal a standard trip. After a couple of cups, when I was as high as I’d ever been, somebody recomputed and realized each cup held 300 micrograms. I remember hearing that and realizing I had just gulped down 2,000 micrograms. The rest of the evening was as weird as you might expect.”
The other L.A. Acid Tests were considerably more benign, and there’s no question that the Pranksters made quite an impression on the Angelenos who turned out. “It was a very different scene than San Francisco,” says Rosie McGee. “The San Francisco scene and the Pranksters and all of that was always a really funky, real, hairy kind of thing. It was the true edge and it was gritty. We brought that down to L.A. and there was this overlay of the glitzy people trying to be hip coming to this event and not knowing what to make of it. There were always people at the L.A. Acid Tests who were not on acid and who were very Hollywood, so they were standing around like poseurs, looking at all this stuff while we were down on the ground, holding on for dear life, and getting down to it. Then, those of them who did get high . . . well, glitz and acid don’t mix too well, so when these people started shedding their skin, s
o to speak, a lot of them got pretty freaked out. It was definitely a collision of cultures there.”
Jerry and Sara were tripping at the same events, but were psychically far apart for most the L.A. Acid Tests. While Jerry and the band were shattering the peace of their Watts neighborhood (Rosie McGee says the band’s response to noise complaints was “to open the window and put the speakers going toward the neighbors”), Sara and Heather were across town with Roy and the other Pranksters. “I loved being part of that scene,” she says. “There was a can-do attitude about the Pranksters that was just thrilling in those days. There was great idealism. We were going to take the Acid Test across the country and save the country by opening people’s minds.”
Sara even took baby Heather to the Acid Tests with her: “I would always find a place for a little nest that would be safe and quiet for Heather, like the projection room in a theater or someplace like that, and set her up with her toys and crayons and snacks and a snug little bed.” One time at an Acid Test in L.A., “Jerry wanted to see Heather,” Sara says, “and I remember taking him up to this place where I had nested her, and him just kind of adoring her while she was asleep. He asked me to come back to him, and I said no.”
After about six weeks in L.A. the Dead and the Pranksters finally parted ways, with the bus heading south to Mexico and the Dead returning to Northern California. “The Acid Test had sort of run its course and it was time to do something else and take it apart,” Babbs says. “For one thing, we had a huge crew that was traveling with us, and we didn’t have any money. The choice was either to take it on the road and head east and try to keep limping along, or to stop it. But it wasn’t like people were after us to do it in their town or anything. Not that many people knew about it, really.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 17