“Weir had a whole cabinet in the kitchen for his weird macrobiotic things that he was eating,” M.G. remembers. “I’d run into the macrobiotic thing before and I just sneered at him; I thought it was absurd. You get skinny and pale on this diet; it has zero nutritional content. He was not an untroubled person. He definitely brought emotional baggage with him from school experiences, his whole scene with his parents, and the feeling that he wasn’t as big a dude as the rest of the guys: they pushed him around quite a bit. But he always took it with pretty good grace. He was always extremely gracious.
“Phil was hilariously funny in those days. With a little bit of LSD and a long night, Phil could keep you laughing until the point where you thought your face was going to fall off. He had a terrible, wicked, needly sense of humor. He was lots and lots of fun, and though he didn’t live at 710 when I was there, he and Rosie were around most of the time it seemed.
“Jerry was sort of the indestructible, fast-moving guy. He talked a blue streak—talk, talk, talk, talk—always spinning ideas and concepts, philosophies and possibilities. If he had a genius, it was for recognizing possibilities, and he had this limitless enthusiasm. He’d get all enthusiastic about ephemeral stuff and get everyone all charged up in an instant. And he was a great supporter of people’s ideas. There was a lot of sitting around bullshitting, shooting the breeze, getting enthusiastic about things and then dropping them just as fast—sending out so-and-so to research something; discussions about buying a boat and taking the show onto the waters; or buying a bus of our own and doing something with that. There were a million ideas about what we were going to do and it was really exciting to be around that, but what actually transpired was they rehearsed a lot and they played a lot and they stayed home a lot—the touring thing didn’t really come on until later. The band’s work ethic at that time was really strong. They rehearsed all the time and that’s how they got so good.”
On the last day of May the band flew to New York for its first shows away from the West Coast, with Warner Bros. footing the bill for the trip. The Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish had already played New York by this point, so the ground had been broken, so to speak. Amazingly, though, none of the Dead had been to New York before this trip; Garcia’s bluegrass quest had taken him only as far east as Pennsylvania. As Laird Grant, who helped haul and set up the Dead’s equipment, noted, “For California boys like us it was strange to be in New York. It looked like all the old gangster movies I’d ever seen. The place looked just as grimy as it did on black-and-white TV.” Of course the Dead weren’t lodging on Park Avenue, either. Rather, they stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, the notorious bastion of junkies, poets, artists, musicians and bohemian drifters of every stripe. “It was very strange, charmingly seedy,” Mountain Girl remembers. “I’d never slept overnight in a big city. I couldn’t believe it. Here we were, these acid-soaked, highly sensitive woodsbunnies from California, and I could hear every toilet flush and every siren passing.”
Appropriately enough, on the Dead’s first full day in New York the group played a free concert in Tompkins Square Park, in the East Village, immediately endearing themselves to the area’s sizable freak population. All through the second half of 1966 and the first half of ’67 there had been caravans of people traveling back and forth between New York and San Francisco, so actually there was already a contingent of folks in New York who’d seen the Dead in San Francisco and knew what the Haight scene was all about by the time the Dead arrived in the East. Mostly, though, Tompkins Square Park was filled with people who either didn’t know the Dead at all or had perhaps heard something about them through the underground grapevine. And then there were the simply curious: “During the concert I was looking off to the side, and, sitting down under a tree drinking pink lemonade, with his Cadillac nearby, and his white chauffeur and his white butler, was Charles Mingus,” Laird Grant says. “Phil went over and talked to him after the show. It was cool.”
Though there were no bands in New York that were truly comparable to the Dead, Rosie McGee says, “Everything we were doing in San Francisco, they’d been doing in New York for a while longer. It was very different, of course, but they’d been having events in people’s lofts and dances and really weird happenings, and the music scene had gone on through the folk years into rock ’n’ roll like it did in California. But it was much more entrenched and serious and gritty in its own way. We were the Wild West people to them. If you compared us to the L.A. crowd, we were the gritty ones. But then we moved into New York and we were kind of the lightweights, or that’s how it felt to me, anyway. We were treated that way, I thought. But maybe not so much musician to musician.”
During their brief New York stay the Dead played a few nights on the cramped stage of the Cafe Au Go-Go, downstairs from where Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention were playing at the same time; at the trendy, chrome-walled Cheetah Club; in the gym at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Long Island); and at another free concert, this one in Central Park. And though all the gigs went well, there was nothing about the two-week jaunt that indicated what a phenomenon the Dead would become in New York in the years to come.
“We were very insular on the road,” Mountain Girl says. “We were considered very exotic almost everywhere we went. I would wear wild shit on the street. In New York, my diaper bag was made out of American flag bunting and I had some guy who attacked me and tried to rip it off my arm. I had it chock-full of baby diapers and baby bottles and here’s this guy screaming some gibberish about desecrating the flag. ‘You people should all be put in jail!’ ‘Really, for what, asshole?’ That’s the way it was on the street—we experienced a lot of naked hatred just for being different. I loved being different. For me it was the final expression of things I’d been feeling since high school—all that repression and pressure to conform.”
Things were much more comfortable for the Dead at home, though the scene they returned to in the middle of June 1967 was starting to get a bit weird. The Summer of Love was in full swing, thousands of young people from all over the world were descending on the Haight each week and the hippie utopia was clearly beginning to fray around the edges.
CHAPTER 8
Poised for Flight, Wings Spread Bright
ver since January’s Human Be-In, which was the first Haight-Ashbury event to get extensive national media coverage, teenagers and young adults had been arriving in San Francisco in increasing numbers. They took buses from Des Moines and planes from Boston. They hitchhiked west with just a few clothes tossed into a backpack, or stuffed all their worldly possessions into old cars and Volkswagen microbuses. Some came from comfortable suburbs with a wad of cash supplied by Mom and Dad (who had no idea why it was so important, all of a sudden, to go to San Francisco). Others came from poor rural areas with just a few hard-earned dollars and wide-eyed expectations for the hippie promised land. Runaway rebels, dropouts and misfits were joined on the interstates and on buses by curious college students eager to check out the commotion in California. There was even a fluffy but infectious bit of folk-rock all over the radio that May and June that added to the buzz: “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” written by the leader of L.A.’s Mamas and the Papas, John Phillips, and sung by another Angeleno, Scott McKenzie, promised “summertime will be a love-in there.”
Time and Newsweek, Look and Life and all the major television networks covered the rise of the San Francisco counterculture with varying degrees of befuddlement. This was, after all, something genuinely new in this country, a cultural and generational rebellion of unparalleled scope and seriousness. Though it was easy for mainstream Americans to chuckle at the colorful external trappings of the revolution—the long hair, wild clothes and jargon-filled lexicon, not to mention that noise these kids call music—the majority of Americans truly believed that what they saw happening in the Haight, and maybe on a much smaller scale in their own cities and towns, was truly a threat to the traditional American Way of
Life.
And it was. Hippies rejected many of the assumptions that are the foundation of Western materialistic society. They believed that working hard in an unfulfilling job to acquire enough money to live in a culture that values conformity over creativity and individuality was not a well-spent life. They believed that the competitive capitalist paradigm was outmoded and noxious, destined to be replaced by cooperative community. Further, they believed that the widespread expansion of consciousness through drugs or other means—meditation, yoga, music, art of any kind—was the only way the Earth was going to survive what appeared to be a certain apocalypse, caused either by war or by the destruction of the planet’s natural resources. There had never been such a public flaunting of out-and-out lawlessness and morally seditious behavior in this country before. And that scared the hell out of people.
“When the big media flash came out,” Garcia said, “when Time magazine guys came out and interviewed everybody and took photographs and made it news, the feedback from that killed the whole scene. It was ridiculous. We could no longer support the tiny trickle that was really supporting everybody. The whole theory of hip economics is essentially that you have a small amount of money and move it around very fast and it would work out. But when you have thousands and thousands of people, it’s just too unwieldy. And all the attempts at free food and all that—certain people had to work too hard to justify it.
“At the early stages we were operating purely without anybody looking on, without anybody looking through the big window. We were going along really well. And then the crowds came in. All the people who were looking for something. . . . [There were] too many people to take care of and not enough people willing to do something. There were a lot of people looking for the free ride. That’s the death of any scene, when you have more drag energy than you have forward-going energy.”
On the surface at least, the Haight-Ashbury scene must have seemed extremely appealing to independent-minded kids. Free music in the park! Cheap rent in communes or no rent at all in crash pads! Free food for those in need! Dope for the taking! A community run by freaks for freaks! According to Garcia, the Haight was originally made up of “all those kids that read Kerouac in high school—the ones who were a little weird. Then it became a magnet for every kid who was dissatisfied: a kind of central dream, or someplace to run to. It was a place for seekers, and San Francisco always had that tradition.” And because rents were so cheap—an old house with a dozen rooms that could accommodate twenty or thirty people living in close quarters might cost only three or four hundred dollars a month—and there was a well-established cooperative economy, where barter was nearly as common as cash on the street, a subsistence hippie lifestyle was fairly easy to maintain. At least for a while.
Even with the Haight’s population explosion beginning to strain the resources of the neighborhood (not to mention the patience of the area’s sizable non-freak contingent of mainly working-class folks), the feeling on the street was still overwhelmingly positive as the summer solstice approached. Just a few blocks from 710 Ashbury, the Straight Theater was getting ready to open its doors. The long-abandoned theater, built in 1910, had been acquired by a group of local hippies in April 1966 with an eye toward making it a neighborhood rock ’n’ roll hall and an arts center offering a broad array of cultural programs for adults and children. But it took more than a year and about $100,000 to completely renovate the decaying structure and fight through mountains of bureaucratic hassles and red tape, and some neighborhood merchants were still waging a bitter war against the theater when the Grateful Dead played at the “christening” party on June 15, 1967. The Dead also played the official opening of the Straight near the end of July, a gig notable for the appearance of Neal Cassady rapping onstage into a microphone as Pigpen and the Dead charged through a version of “Turn On Your Love Light,” the Bobby “Blue” Bland rave-up that was a brand-new addition to their repertoire.
But the biggest event in the counterculture that June wasn’t the Straight Theater christening or the giant solstice celebration at the Polo Fields a week later. In fact it wasn’t even in San Francisco. Two and a half hours down the coast from Haight-Ashbury, the Monterey International Pop Festival drew thousands of people to the Monterey County Fairgrounds for three days and nights of music featuring some of the most popular rock ’n’ roll bands from England and America, as well as various lighter pop groups and singers, and from India the great sitar master Ravi Shankar.
Though the event was organized by L.A. record business types, including promoter Lou Adler and “Papa” John Phillips, because the event was taking place in what was, figuratively at least, San Francisco’s backyard, every effort was made to include the top Bay Area bands in the festival lineup. At first most of the local groups were wary of getting involved—it had the look of some slick L.A. scheme to cash in on the growing reputation of the San Francisco underground. Who knows—maybe the release of Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco” had even been designed to grease the wheels for the festival. In the end, though, entreaties by everyone from Paul Simon to Beatles associate Derek Taylor, and the obvious strength of the bands who had signed on for the festival, finally persuaded the Dead and some other San Francisco groups to participate. However, even after agreeing to play, the Dead remained suspicious of the motives of the organizers, did everything they could to stay away from Adler and Phillips, and flatly refused to sign a waiver, presented to them right before they went onstage, that would have allowed their performance to be filmed for a movie being shot by the noted documentarian D. A. Pennebaker.
Despite the troubles between the Dead camp and the festival organizers, the band was given a prestigious Sunday slot for their set at Monterey. Unfortunately, the way things worked out, that slot was between two of the most powerful and electrifying acts of the entire three days: the Who and Jimi Hendrix. Much to the consternation of Dead roadie Laird Grant, the Who left the stage in a shambles after ritually destroying much of their equipment during their grand finale, “My Generation.” And Hendrix’s performance was so eagerly anticipated by the throng that much of the crowd seemed distracted and uninvolved during the Dead’s brief time onstage.
Nevertheless, the festival was hardly a washout for the Dead and their retinue. After all, the music was spectacular. The lineup included the sensational soul singer Otis Redding, the Byrds, African trumpeter Hugh Masakela, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Simon and Garfunkel, Canned Heat and the Blues Project. The event turned into another gathering of the tribes, as freaks from up and down the West Coast and points east descended on Monterey to dig the music and each other. Owsley acid was everywhere, and the vibes were good all three days and nights. The Dead managed to organize a free campground on the football field of nearby Monterey Peninsula College, and even set up a stage there, powered by generators, where various musicians who were playing at the festival—Eric Burdon, Jimi Hendrix, lots of San Francisco band people—came and jammed late at night after the fairgrounds were closed. (Contrary to the impression given in Rock Scully’s Living with the Dead, Garcia and Hendrix never played together there, or anywhere else for that matter.)
“Monterey was an incredible event,” says Dick Latvala. “How could it not be? Jimi Hendrix was coming! We’d all heard about how great the Who were live. And of course Otis Redding already had a big following in San Francisco. Everybody looked completely stoned on acid. People were so high it was common to think that the Beatles were going to come out of the sky in flames! To have so many amazing personal experiences in the context of all these other people having amazing group experiences, gave everyone a huge sense of respect for each other. When you were there, it felt like everyone was in sync, and that was amazing.”
About three weeks after Monterey Robert Hunter arrived in San Francisco, fresh from two and a half months of adventures in New Mexico and Colorado. His Scientology experiences behind him, Hunter had drifted in and out of the Dead’s orbit during the latter part of 1966 and the f
irst part of 1967, but he’d gotten heavily involved in what he called the “caustic” Bay Area methedrine scene, even contracting a case of hepatitis B. So he went to Santa Fe at the end of April 1967, in part to get away from that world. He spent his time in the Southwest doing psychedelically inspired pencil drawings—“but they were not the sort of things that rich Texans were going to buy,” he said—and working on song lyrics, a relatively new pursuit for him.
“I first started waking up to the possibilities of rock lyrics being serious with Blonde on Blonde [Dylan’s ambitious 1966 double album],” Hunter said. “It opened up everything; it said it was okay to be as serious as you wanted in rock. I had been writing unpublishable poetry. Joyce was my primary influence; it was really heavy Joycean stuff. I guess it made Joyce look more conservative, though—he didn’t have acid.”
Hunter mailed some of his lyrics to Garcia in San Francisco, and within a few weeks, unbeknownst to Hunter, Pigpen and Phil had worked out the music for one called “Alligator,” with Pigpen even adding a verse or two of his own. As set lists from 1967 are rare, it’s impossible to determine exactly when the song was first performed onstage. In the book Deadbase, which is regarded as the more-or-less official source of information about what the Dead performed when, the first listing for “Alligator” is the Dead’s opening night at New York’s Cafe Au Go-Go in early June 1967, but chances are it was introduced sometime the previous month. Two other songs from the first batch of lyrics Hunter mailed from New Mexico, “China Cat Sunflower” and “Saint Stephen,” were set to music later. In early June Garcia wrote a letter to Hunter—“incredible to think that Jerry would sit down and write a letter,” he said—telling him that the band had set the lyrics for “Alligator” to music and urging Hunter to come back to San Francisco to work more with the group.
Garcia: An American Life Page 22