The Dead played at the Dance of Death Ball at California Hall on Halloween, as originally planned. And the Acid Test Graduation took place in a dark, funky warehouse on Sixth Street, near downtown San Francisco, where some of the Pranksters had been staying since their return. In the end it was mainly friends and fellow travelers, not the hoped-for multitude they would’ve turned on with at Winterland. Not thousands but dozens of the right people, their people—“The Few and the Faithful” as Wolfe called them—pouring into the place, which the Pranksters had magically transformed with paint and props and a giant orange parachute billowing from the ceiling.
People tripped and danced and screamed and carried on as if it might be the last time this group would get the chance to be this high, this uninhibited, this free together. There were heavy moments, weird moments, scary moments, deep, dark, soul-searching moments, too. And sadness. And more dancing. And introspection. And eventually, inexorably, the dawn. With morning, too, a sense of finality. This was the last Acid Test. The Pranksters dispersed shortly after. Kesey took Furthur back home to Oregon, a few of the inner circle following close behind. Others scattered to points east and south, and a handful, including Mountain Girl, melted into the San Francisco scene.
CHAPTER 7
Come Join the Party Every Day
y the fall of 1966, various L.A. and New York record business types had been sniffing around the Haight for a while, hoping to cash in on the rapidly developing scene, which some truly believed might be the American answer to the British Invasion. The Jefferson Airplane’s first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, hadn’t quite lived up to RCA Records’ commercial expectations, but in between that record and the sessions for their second album, which took place in Los Angeles in November 1966, the Airplane had brought in Great Society lead singer Grace Slick to replace the departing Signe Anderson, and the chemistry between Slick and singers-writers Marty Balin and Paul Kantner instantly took the group to a new level, both live and in the studio. It’s a sign of how much respect the Airplane had for Garcia that they asked him to join them down in L.A. when the group was cutting tracks for their second album, Surrealistic Pillow, with producer Rick Jarrard and engineer David Hassinger. Garcia played acoustic guitar on four tracks—“My Best Friend,” “Today,” “Plastic Fantastic Lover” and “Coming Back to Me”—and served as an intermediary of sorts between the group, Hassinger and Jarrard. In addition, Garcia had a strong hand in rewriting the arrangement for “Somebody to Love” (written by Darby Slick for the Great Society), which became the Airplane’s first hit single.
“The Airplane thought it would be helpful to have somebody there who could communicate to their producer who they could communicate to,” Garcia said. “And since they all knew me and I understood their music and understood what they were doing pretty much at the time, it would be far-out. I went down there and hung out and was a sort of go-between.”
Though he’s not credited specifically for his contributions, which included the album’s title, Garcia is listed on the record—as “Musical and Spiritual Adviser.” Of course it was meant mainly tongue-in-cheek, but that credit was the first exposure most people outside of California had to the name “Jerry Garcia.” Surrealistic Pillow, released in February 1967, was an immensely popular album, particularly in counterculture circles (it was the obvious product of heads), so Garcia’s association with it boosted the mystique that was already starting to surround him.
Not surprisingly, as one of the top bands in the Haight, the Grateful Dead attracted considerable interest from record companies. Joe Smith, who was then an A&R man for Burbank-based Warner Bros. Records, came up to San Francisco and, at the urging of Tom Donahue, went to see the band at the Avalon Ballroom. Smith was already becoming known for his good musical intuition, but he’d never encountered anything quite like the Grateful Dead—Warners was a straight, mainstream label with a roster boasting names like Dean Martin, Petula Clark and Frank Sinatra. Smith showed up at the Avalon wearing a suit, and, as he said in Gene Sculatti and Davin Seay’s San Francisco Nights, “There we were, walking up the steps of this startling place and there were these kids lying around painting each other’s bodies and all of these lights and smells everywhere. Somebody wanted to dance with my wife. I told her, ‘Don’t come with me to meet the band. You must understand.’ The Grateful Dead. Even the name was intimidating. What did it mean? No one knew.”
The band had reservations about signing a deal with an L.A. record label—“They lived in terror of being ripped off,” Smith said—but a few weeks after their first encounter, the Dead decided to accept the Warner Bros. offer of $3,500 (to be matched with a bonus if the record sold more than 15,000 copies, which it did, easily). Smith flew to San Francisco and met Scully and Rifkin at Tom Donahue’s Telegraph Hill apartment to get the contract signed. Donahue remembered, “Joe walks out on the porch and Rock and Danny say to me, ‘Listen, man, we gotta take acid with this cat. Then he’ll really understand what it is we’re doing.’”
“They told me I couldn’t really understand their music until I dropped some acid,” Smith said. “I informed them that under no circumstances would I do that.” He didn’t. And the band signed on the dotted line anyway.
There’s no question that Scully and Rifkin were a new breed of manager; after all, they had virtually no experience, and they were completely distrustful of the straight show-business world. Actually, being a “manager” for the Grateful Dead was almost a contradiction in terms. But every band had to find that person or combination of people who had a “business head,” and in the beginning it was that unlikely pair.
“The managers don’t do things the old cigar-chewing-manager way,” Garcia noted in early 1967. “When our managers go someplace, they go just the way they are around the house. They have long hair, wear outlandish clothes and beads, and they talk like people on Haight Street do, because that’s the way they are. That’s the way we all are, and we’re not sacrificing any of ourselves to do business. When we go into the business part of things—when we talk to lawyers, the vice presidents of Warner Bros.—we talk to them the way we talk to our friends. We’re being out front. We’re trying to change the whole atmosphere of music, the business part as well as just the way it is, just by dealing with it on a more humanistic level, because it’s a valuable commodity—it’s an art.”
Between October 1 and December 31, 1966, the Dead played the Fillmore Auditorium sixteen times, the Avalon five times, the Matrix four times, and they landed a few other gigs at odd places like the North Face Ski Shop in Berkeley, Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek and the Old Cheese Factory in San Francisco. They became headliners that fall, second only to the Airplane as a popular draw (though the Dead begged Bill Graham to let the group open for the great R&B singer Otis Redding at the Fillmore in mid-December). Additionally, the band played occasionally for free in the Panhandle: in those days it was easy to load their equipment into Laird Grant’s truck, drive a couple of blocks and play for a while using a generator for power. Between money the band earned through gigs and cash that passed through 710 from low-level pot and LSD sales, the Dead were able to live comfortably, though not lavishly, and support a few of their friends in the process. In that way, the Dead scene was a microcosm of the larger Haight economy, which was driven mainly by rock ’n’ roll and dope dealing, but also supported craftspeople and hippie business entrepreneurs as the area thrived.
Asked in the spring of 1967 what would happen if the Dead somehow became successful (how unlikely that seemed then), twenty-four-year-old Jerry replied, “Then we’ll see if there’s a better way to become successful and wealthy! A way that’s more rewarding to us. A way to spend our money so that it brings about more enjoyment for more people. More food certainly. A lot of what we make now is just money to live on for us and our friends and anybody else who doesn’t have anything. I don’t need anything. I don’t really want anything. I’ve got instruments, I know I can eat, so there’s nothi
ng to worry about.”
That fall of 1966 Garcia and Mountain Girl began spending more time together, at 710 and out in the world, and at some point what had long been just a close friendship developed into mutual affection. “Actually, I thought Jerry was really special from when I first met him [in 1964] because he played the banjo so well and I loved the banjo,” she says. “I was knocked out by him. I was a little disappointed by Mother McCree’s because Jerry wasn’t really the leader; everybody took a turn. Then, in the Warlocks, it seemed like Weir and especially Pigpen were more out front and Jerry was in the background; he didn’t push his way out there. But I wasn’t that interested in amplified music at that time. I liked folk music and classical music and I loved the banjo, too. By the time we’d gone through the Acid Tests, though, I loved the Grateful Dead, and as time went on, Jerry got better and better and the same kind of special thing that I saw in his banjo playing was obvious in his [electric] guitar playing and he just had a really nice stage personality; really ‘up’ and smiling a lot. Always very positive.”
Still, Jerry nearly got back together with Sara that December. As she recalls, “When Heather turned three [on December 8, 1966] I invited Jerry to my parents’ home for a celebratory dinner. It felt good having our little family together, and we talked about giving it a try again. He invited me to come visit him at [710] Ashbury and see if it would work for Heather and me to move in there with him. I did go, but I didn’t feel comfortable there, and I couldn’t imagine a place for Heather and me in that life. There was a lot going on, no privacy, too chaotic for me. It didn’t exactly feel ‘family-friendly’ to me.”
Nineteen sixty-six ended gloriously with Bill Graham’s first New Year’s Eve concert at the Fillmore, an acid-soaked revel that found the Airplane, the Dead and Quicksilver trading sets until dawn. There was incredible optimism in the Haight as 1966 turned to 1967: the bands were getting better and more popular; the steady influx of freaks from other parts of the country brought new energy into the scene but still seemed manageable; and increasingly the neighborhood felt like an oasis far away from straight society—a vision of what many felt was a better world in every aspect.
“The utopian sentiments of these hippies was not to be put down lightly,” Warren Hinckle wrote in perhaps the finest contemporary article about the rise of Haight-Ashbury, in Ramparts magazine in mid-1967. “Hippies have a clear vision of the ideal community—a psychedelic community, to be sure—where everyone is turned on and beautiful and loving and happy and floating free. But it is a vision that, despite the Alice in Wonderland phraseology usually breathlessly employed to describe it, necessarily embodies a radical political philosophy: communal life, drastic restriction of private property, rejection of violence, creativity before consumption, freedom before authority, de-emphasis of government and traditional forms of leadership.”
From the outset, the Dead refused to get involved with overtly political activities, though not surprisingly they were often asked to appear at various marches and rallies. There’s no question that as individuals, Garcia and the other members vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and supported the goals of the civil rights movement, to mention two of the hot-button issues of the day, but many freaks believed that protesting and trying to reform what they viewed as a corrupt, morally bankrupt political system was, in effect, buying into that system. Basically, the apolitical freaks in Haight-Ashbury wanted to create a world where people could get high (or not; most weren’t doctrinaire about it), live and work together, support each other and police themselves, without conforming to what they viewed as tired and judgmental societal “norms.”
“The politics of hip was that we were setting up a new world, as it were, that was going to run parallel to the old world but have as little to do with it as possible,” said Country Joe and the Fish guitarist Barry Melton (who’s now a lawyer) in the film Berkeley in the Sixties. “We just weren’t going to deal with straight people. And to us, the politicos—a lot of the leaders of the antiwar movement—were straight people, because they were still concerned with government. They were going to go march on Washington. We didn’t even want to know that Washington was there! We thought that eventually the whole world was just going to stop this nonsense and start loving each other as soon as they all got turned on. It’s amazing that these movements [that] coexisted at the same time were in stark contrast in certain respects, but as the 1960s progressed, drew closer together and began taking on aspects of the other.”
“What we’re thinking about is a peaceful planet,” Garcia told a reporter in an infamous 1967 CBS documentary called The Hippie Temptation. “We’re not thinking about anything else. We’re not thinking about any kind of power; we’re not thinking about any of those kind of struggles. We’re not thinking about revolution or war or any of that. That’s not what we want. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to hurt anybody. We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life; a simple life, a good life. And think about moving the whole human race ahead a step, or a few steps.”
And in another 1967 interview, Garcia said, “We’re trying to make music in such a way that it doesn’t have a message for anybody. We don’t have anything to tell anybody. We don’t want to change anybody. We want people to have the chance to feel a little better. That’s the absolute most we want to do with our music. The music that we make is an act of love, an act of joy. We really like it a lot. If it says something, it says it on its own terms at the moment we’re playing it, and it doesn’t have anything to do with— We’re not telling people to go get stoned, or drop out. We’re just playing and they can take that any way they want.”
On the cool but sunny Saturday afternoon of January 14, 1967, the freaks of Haight-Ashbury and North Beach and Berkeley and Marin and everywhere got together on a gorgeous patch of green in the heart of Golden Gate Park known as the Polo Fields. This was the Human Be-In, “A Gathering of the Tribes,” and it drew more than 20,000 people in an unprecedented show of numbers by the emerging counterculture. The Be-In was really an extension of the energy that had gone into the Love Pageant Rally back in October, with Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen again leading the way. This time around though, there was an effort to broaden the scope of the event and to include Beat poets and writers, more bands, and even some of Berkeley’s radical left firebrands. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lenore Kandel, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure read poetry and led chants and prayers. Millbrook vet Richard Alpert and activist Jerry Rubin spoke. Timothy Leary, a yellow flower tucked behind each ear, urged the assembled to “Turn on, tune in, drop out. . . . Turn on to the scene; tune in to what’s happening; and drop out—of high school, college, grad school, junior executive, senior executive—and follow me, the hard way.” (Rock Scully joked years later that the Grateful Dead’s ethos in that era was “Plug in, freak out, fall apart.”)
But “The few speakers were hardly intelligible over the microphone, the gathering being more interested in the great light show of nature and themselves,” wrote the Chronicle’s Ralph Gleason in a poignant and amazingly sympathetic article in Monday’s paper. “The rock bands—the Quicksilver, the Grateful Dead, the Airplane—came over well and the Dead’s set was remarkably exciting, causing people to rise up wherever they were and begin dancing. Dizzy Gillespie, playing while a young girl danced over on one side, asked who the Dead were and commented on how they were swinging.”
The Hell’s Angels cared for lost children (!) and helped provide security. People threw Frisbees, watched their dogs run free, danced, sang, tripped in the surrounding pine and eucalyptus groves, pounded on drums, played flutes, strummed guitars, clinked cymbals and clonked cowbells. Incense and pot smoke rose into air already colored by balloons, kites, flags and streamers. Acid was everywhere, but there were no bad trips. “As the sun set, and the bands played and the people glowed,” Gleason wrote, “Buddha’s voice [actually, it was Ginsberg] came over the sound system, asking everyone to stand up and turn towards t
he sun and watch the sunset. Later, he asked everyone to help clean up the debris and they did.
“And so it ended; the first of the great gatherings. No fights. No drunks. No troubles. Two policemen on horseback and 20,000 people. The perfect sunshine, the beautiful birds in the air, a parachutist descending as the Grateful Dead ended a song. . . .
“Saturday’s gathering was an affirmation, not a protest. A statement of life, not death, and a promise of good, not evil. . . . This is truly something new and not the least of it is that it is an asking for a new dimension to peace, not just an end to shooting, for the reality of love and a great Nest for all humans.”
All in all it was probably the Haight scene’s finest hour.
“I’d never seen so many people in my life,” Garcia said a few weeks after the event. “It was really fantastic. I almost didn’t believe it. It was a totally underground movement. It was all the people into dope of any sort, and like 20,000 people came out in the park and everyone had a good time. There was no violence. No hassling.”
However, many years later Garcia recalled one aspect of the Be-In that was not sunshine and roses for him: “There was a whole contingent of people from over in Berkeley, guys like Jerry Rubin. . . . And I remember standing out in the crowd and I heard people like Allen Ginsberg got up—he ‘ommed’ and played little finger cymbals and that felt very good out in the crowd. I had taken some LSD; I was feeling really good. A lot of people were there and were real happy. Then all of a sudden this voice came over the loudspeaker—it turned out to be Jerry Rubin—and he was exhorting the crowd. And all of a sudden the kind of images that went into my mind were Hitler, you know, every angry voice I’d ever heard popped into my head. So I felt, well, of all the things I would like to avoid people having to feel, that’s one of the things I’d like to avoid. I’d like to avoid transmitting that message to people—that angry voice.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 20