With the Pranksters suddenly out of their lives and the Acid Tests over (at least for the time being), it was time for the Grateful Dead to become more self-reliant and carry its own version of the Acid Test spirit into the clubs and ballrooms of San Francisco. It wasn’t, Garcia noted, quite the same:
“In order to keep on playing, we had to go with whatever form was there. Because for one thing, the form that we liked [the Acid Test] always scared everybody. It scared the people that owned the building that we’d rent, so they’d never rent twice to us. It scared the people who came, a lot of times. It scared the cops. It scared everybody. Because it represented total and utter anarchy. Indoor anarchy. That’s something people haven’t learned to get off with. But our experience with those things is that’s where you get the highest. . . .
“The Acid Test was the prototype for our whole basic trip. But nothing has ever come up to the level of the way the Acid Test was. It’s just never been equalled, really, or the basic hit of it never developed out.”
But what it evolved into over the next three decades was no less remarkable.
CHAPTER 6
In the Book of Love’s Own Dream
he Grateful Dead stayed in Los Angeles for only about six weeks, but things were moving so fast in San Francisco in the winter of 1966 that the dynamics of the city’s music world had changed fairly dramatically by the time the band returned to the Bay Area. While the Dead and the Pranksters were scuffling around L.A. digging up odd places to play, the scene in San Francisco was simultaneously solidifying and opening up in exciting new directions, as both Bill Graham and the loose-knit group known as the Family Dog began putting on dance concerts more frequently, showcasing both the city’s own up-and-coming bands and out-of-town groups.
Because of what they became and their longevity, the Dead’s role in the early days of the San Francisco rock ’n’ roll renaissance has probably been somewhat overemphasized through the years. While the Acid Tests were unquestionably influential, the Haight-Ashbury scene might still have flowered as it did if Kesey had never left La Honda and the Warlocks had broken up after their third gig at Magoo’s. The fact is, hundreds of sources of intense energy, bold musical statements, creative thinking and wild flights of imagination were germinating in the city. Drugs were certainly a major catalyst, but they proliferated independent of the Dead/Pranksters. And the dozens of bands that sprang up in the garages, basements and living rooms of drafty old Haight-Ashbury Victorians and nondescript apartments and row houses around town drew their inspiration, as the Dead did, from all over—the Beatles, the Byrds, Dylan, the Stones, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Chicago blues cats, the Yardbirds, Ravi Shankar, Nashville country pickers, Miles and Coltrane, Mongo Santamaria and a thousand other musicians, famous and obscure, whom the city’s young players listened to on records and the radio and in clubs of every variety.
And of course there was a lot more to the scene than just the music, though the bands and dances became the primary galvanizing force. Over a period of just a few months, the Haight became the center of a loose movement of adventurous and eclectic visual artists—poster designers, light show makers, painters, filmmakers and lithographers, some of whom became nearly as celebrated as the musicians. All of the artists shared a playful spirit of adventure and a willingness (or compulsion) to experiment. They drew from art nouveau, Hindu and Buddhist art, contemporary op and pop painters, Native American crafts, nineteenth-century woodcuts—everything was fair game, and each of the artists developed a distinctive style, much as each of the bands on the scene developed a unique musical signature.
Not surprisingly, the name “Grateful Dead” lent itself to interesting iconic possibilities, “because we had such an evocative name,” Garcia said in 1987. “You can throw anything at it. ‘Grateful Dead’ is so huge and wide open that anything works. That’s one of the reasons the artists loved it. . . . Because the artists came to the shows, they’d get all excited and come over and say, ‘Look, here’s the latest Grateful Dead poster. What do you think?’ They liked to blow our minds, too. It got to be feedback on so many different levels with everyone trying to blow each other’s minds. And it works! When everyone’s putting all their energy into it full-time, pretty soon everyone’s mind is blown.”
With Danny Rifkin joining Rock Scully in actively working with the Dead—though there was little money in it at this point—there was talk about the Dead moving into 710 Ashbury, the rooming house that Danny managed and where Rock had a room, and various members crashed there for a week or so after they arrived back in town following the L.A. sojourn. But instead of immediately plunging into the world of the Haight, the Dead decided to take a scenic detour and headed into the country, where Rosie McGee and Owsley’s girlfriend, Melissa Cargill, succeeded in renting a giant house for the group in the wilds of Novato, in northern Marin County, on a plot of land known as Rancho Olompali.
“It was a kind of Spanish-style, pseudo-adobe structure with at least two stories, and a whole bunch of rooms,” Rosie McGee says of the house, which had been used as a home for retarded children before the Dead took it over. “The grounds were famous—there was the pool and several buildings; a building off in the back that some people stayed in.”
“The Dead used to have some pretty good parties out in their place in the country, in Olompali,” said Charlatans founder George Hunter. “Two or three hundred people would come, and of course, most of them probably took LSD. This was around the time that a lot of new ground was being broken, socially, and it seemed like a third to a half of the people at these parties would be naked, hanging around the pool. It was a great place. It was a sort of ranch estate that had a nice big house that looked kind of like Tara in Gone With the Wind. . . . In between the house and the pool the Dead would set up their equipment and play from time to time. Usually there’d be members of other bands there, too, like the Airplane and Quicksilver, and there’d be little jams with people who wanted to play. I remember the Dead would be playing and Neal Cassady would be doing this strange little dance—it was almost like break dancing; very fluid. . . . Those parties—I’m not sure how many of them there were—were always on a nice afternoon. Everybody would play all day in the sunshine—just doing everything—and then when the sun would start to go down and it got cold, people would pack it in. By the time it was dark most people were gone, but there were always enough people who were either around to begin with or who wanted to stay, that the party would continue inside. In fact, with the number of people hanging out there all the time, it was pretty much a party all the time anyway. I don’t know if it was twenty-four hours a day, but every time I was there it was going.”
“Novato was completely comfortable, wide open, high as you wanted to get, run around naked if you wanted to, fall in the pool, completely open scenes,” Garcia said in 1971. “Everything was just super-groovy. It was a model of how things could really be good. . . . It was good times—unself-conscious and totally free.”
If this all sounds like some sort of freak utopia, that’s probably not too far off the mark. The spring and summer of 1966 were in some ways the apex of the whole San Francisco scene—the true “Summer of Love” a year before the media latched on to that tag; a time when the Bay Area’s freak community was joyously coalescing, discovering its breadth and diversity, and people were turning each other on in a thousand different ways: with music, art, books, dope, endless conversations. . . .
Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before LSD was made illegal—in California, legislators had already been whipped into an anti-drug frenzy by a rising tide of hysterical press associated with the Acid Tests—so in a sense this period was the last window of opportunity for people to trip without the paranoia associated with the knowledge that possessing acid could lead to jail time. And for the Dead, trying to eke out a living on the still growing local band circuit, and playing an increasing number of conventional dance concerts—as opposed to Acid Tests—meant that they
could no longer get as high as they wanted and then either play or not play. People started coming to dance to the Dead because they were the Dead, and as Owsley puts it, “In the early days, we were almost always well lubricated [for shows]; till after the Acid Test period, when they started getting working gigs. Then there was a greater reluctance to get too screwed up because there was a certain level of professionalism that was required.”
But out in the bucolic wilds of Olompali it was another matter altogether. Garcia and the others gobbled acid regularly in that beautiful, unpressured setting, psychically far removed from the sensory whirlwind that the Pranksters had created at the Acid Tests, and physically from the bustling, citified swirl of the Haight-Ashbury. Garcia said that some of his most profound LSD trips occurred during this magical period, which, though far from the end of his psychedelic days (he tripped occasionally for the rest of his life), marked the end of his serious exploratory phase.
“Psychedelics were probably the single most significant experience in my life,” Garcia said. “Otherwise I think I would be going along believing that this visible reality is all that there is. Psychedelics didn’t give me any answers. What I have is a lot of questions. One thing I’m certain of—the mind is an incredible thing and there are levels of organizations of consciousness that are way beyond what people are fooling with in day-to-day reality.”
And how did psychedelics affect his music?
“I can’t answer that. There was a me before psychedelics, and a me after psychedelics; that’s the best I can say. I can’t say that it affected the music specifically; it affected the whole me. The problem of playing music is essentially of muscular development and that is something you have to put in the hours to achieve no matter what. There isn’t something that strikes you and suddenly you can play music.
“I think that psychedelics was part of music for me insofar as I was a person who was looking for something and psychedelics and music are both part of what I was looking for. They fit together, although one didn’t cause the other.”
Although mid-1966 probably represents the apex of the Dead’s experimentation with psychedelics, the music the group played during this period wasn’t nearly as twisted, weird and obviously chemically inspired as what they would unleash a year later, when, though their own psychedelic intake was down, they’d been playing together longer and the cumulative effect of their psychedelic consumption had become manifest in their original music. In 1966 the Dead were still essentially a cover band, and in terms of their song choices, what they played wasn’t tremendously different from what was being churned out by other bands around town, except that the Dead always retained some of the jug band’s feel and repertoire. (In fact, the band’s first single release, in June 1966—a pressing of just 150 copies on a local independent label, Scorpio Records—featured electrified versions of two songs they’d played with the jug band: “Don’t Ease Me In” and “Stealin’.”) Everybody, it seemed, was playing blues-based rock ’n’ roll of one kind or another. Some bands took their blues approach from British bands like the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals and Them; others looked directly at the Chicago blues artists the Brits had copied, such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells and others.
Garcia noted, “As a band, the Grateful Dead has never thought of itself as being a psychedelic band. We’ve always thought of ourselves as a rock ’n’ roll band. What we were playing back then [the mid-’60s] was basically a harder, rhythm and blues–oriented rock ’n’ roll; especially Pigpen’s stuff. We were going for a sort of Chess Records school of R&B—Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. Those are the records we stole a lot of our tunes from. We didn’t have that Midwestern authority—we weren’t like the Butterfield band, but we were a funky blues band.”
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band played fairly often in San Francisco in 1966 and 1967, and their influence on many of the Haight-Ashbury groups was considerable—it’s fair to say that they set a standard for musicianship that other bands aspired to (and few could match). This Chicago group was the real deal: Butterfield blew harp as well as James Cotton, the rhythm section of bassist Jerome Arnold, drummer Sam Lay and pianist Mark Naftalin was as good as any in Chicago, and the group boasted two excellent guitarists: Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, who’d come up playing in Chicago’s highly competitive blues circuit, where imitating Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and Hubert Sumlin wasn’t enough: “It had to be the real thing; it had to be right,” Bloomfield said.
John Kahn, who played with Garcia beginning in 1970 and also played extensively with Bloomfield, said, “Jerry told me that when he was first playing in San Francisco, Bloomfield was the one guitarist who really impressed him, because of the way he could endlessly come up with different ways of playing around a melody. I think Jerry would say he was influenced by Bloomfield a little, though Jerry had stronger country influences that shaped his tone. But they both had their own special kind of tone and they both played American roots music and were completely influenced by all different strains of American music.” In a 1968 interview, Bloomfield said of Garcia’s playing, “He sounds amazingly like he’s trying to sound like me, but I don’t think he is. I think he came that way himself.”
In terms of their approach to playing, the Dead were as influenced by jazz musicians as they were by the classic electric blues bands. Phil Lesh had a lot to do with educating the other bandmembers, including Garcia, about jazz, though the Chateau had been a jazz hotbed, so Garcia had already heard plenty of jazz independent of Phil. Danya Veltfort remembers Garcia sitting around Phoebe Graubard’s apartment in the summer of 1961 listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and Coltrane’s Soul Trane over and over, though he was playing old-timey guitar at the time. Garcia also attended the Monterey Jazz Festival that autumn and saw Coltrane there. Miles and Coltrane were still the dominant figures in jazz five years later, and both were still evolving in fascinating directions when the Warlocks were starting off. By the early ’60s, too, Ornette Coleman was making noise—literally and figuratively—in Los Angeles, pushing the limits of what was considered jazz with his daringly dissonant free improvisations that shocked and outraged the jazz establishment.
“We felt at that time, when we were listening to Coltrane, that we were hardly fit to grovel at his feet,” Bob Weir said. “But still, we were trying to get there; our aims were pretty much the same.”
One would be hard pressed to point to elements in the Dead’s music in mid- to late 1966 that specifically echoed Miles or Coltrane or Ornette, but the group was definitely inspired by the questing spirit of their jazz contemporaries: the great jazz groups’ willingness to abandon form and structure in search of wondrous new avenues of self-expression; the fluid and intricate dynamics of their highly intuitive ensemble playing; and their refusal to make commercial compromises with their work. The musical influences were more readily apparent in 1968 and 1969 and later, as the Dead became more proficient and took their jams farther “out,” in the jazz sense.
Garcia noted, “I’ve been influenced a lot by Coltrane, but I never copped his licks or sat down, listened to records and tried to play his stuff. I’ve been impressed with that thing of flow, and of making statements that to my ears sound like paragraphs—he’ll play along stylistically with a certain kind of tone, in a certain kind of syntax, for X amount of time. Then he’ll, like, change the subject, then play along with this other personality coming out, which really impresses me. It’s like other personalities stepping out, or else his personality is changing, or his attitude’s changing. But it changes in a holistic way, where the tone of his axe and everything changes.
“Perceptually, an idea that’s been very important to me in playing has been the whole ‘odyssey’ idea—journeys, voyages and adventures along the way.”
In the early and mid-’60s Coltrane was a master of the introspective musical odyssey, a shamanic conjurer whose playing breathed fire one moment, floated in the ether the next, but always seemed
to bubble up from some deep spiritual wellsping. During the Beat era, jazz was considered a transportational medium: it opened up your head and took you places. And from the beginning, that’s also what the Dead’s music was designed to do. The band’s early music might not have had the compositional depth or improvisational sophistication of Miles’s or Coltrane’s groups (to say the least), but the conversational relationship between the instruments in the Dead—the way they engaged each other and seemed to always be simultaneously providing both melody and rhythm without explicitly defining either—clearly owed much to the jazz world.
“We’re trying to think away from the standard routine of these members comp, this member leads,” Garcia explained to Ralph Gleason in 1967. “We’re trying to think of ensemble stuff. Not like Dixieland ensemble stuff; something else which we don’t yet know anything about. The way Bill [Kreutzmann] plays is he plays a little with everybody. So if I’m playing a line, he knows enough about my playing and thinking that he can usually anticipate the way I’ll think a line. And he’s a great rhythmic reinforcement for any line that I can play, no matter how it relates to the rest of the time going on. He also plays beautifully with Phil, the bass player. . . . And Phil’s way of approaching the bass is utterly different than any other bass players, ’cause he doesn’t listen to any bass players. He listens to his mind!
“The problems we’re having with all this [are] because all of us still think so musically straight, really, that it’s difficult to get used to not hearing the heavy two and four [beat]. It’s difficult to think rhythmically without having it there all the time, but we’re starting to develop that sense better.
Garcia: An American Life Page 18