Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  The Dead’s first set opened innocently enough, with a typically serpentine version of “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” But that would be just about the last glimpse of terra firma until the final “Midnight Hour” at the end of the evening, about three hours later. Everything in between was unrecorded material that showed the Dead at their spacey best. During the first set the band introduced the vast listening audience to a formidable sequence of three new songs written with Robert Hunter.

  Just a few months after its unveiling in the fall of 1967, “Dark Star” was already beginning to stretch in all sorts of interesting directions, slowing down and elongating a little more with each playing.

  Garcia had plucked the whimsical “China Cat Sunflower” from the first batch of lyrics Hunter had sent from New Mexico, and devised a bouncy, bopping musical setting loaded with clever contrapuntal melodic lines and neatly interlocking rhythms that were every bit as playful as the words, which owed a debt to Dame Edith Sitwell, Lewis Carroll and psychedelics:

  Look for a while at the China Cat Sunflower

  Proud-walking jingle in the midnight sun

  Copper-dome bodhi drip a silver kimono

  Like a crazy-quilt star gown

  Through a dream night wind

  Musically, the song was a new form for the Dead, a harbinger of other interesting rhythmic numbers Garcia would create over the next five years. Each player laid down a different but complementary rhythm with his part, and then Garcia’s light, skipping vocal pulled the pieces together into a “song.” “China Cat” was an instant success with the Dead’s fans, and it was the only late-’60s Garcia song that he performed for the rest of his career.

  The third new song that night was “The Eleven,” a furious, constantly mutating jam in 11/4 time (hence the title) that had been conceived by Phil and the drummers during marathon rehearsals at the Potrero Theater before the Northwest tour. Like “China Cat,” it was quite obscure lyrically (in fact, a section of the words was originally a verse that followed the three stanzas that became “China Cat”), but it was always less a song than a long monstrous groove that gave the musicians on opportunity to see how much music they could pack into a fast eleven-beat pattern—spraying bursts of notes, chords and beats in long and short phrases that somehow, incredibly, always ended up meeting at the one-beat of each measure as the song rolled through space like some planet threatening to spin out of its orbit.

  “[Playing in unusual time signatures] really started when Mickey met [the Indian tabla master] Alla Rakha [in the fall of 1967],” Garcia noted. “What Indian music seems to have—the combination of tremendous freedom and tremendous discipline—really impressed Mickey, so he started right away studying with Alla Rakha. That influence got the rest of us starting to fool with ideas that were certain lengths.”

  At the Valentine’s Day show, the jam after “The Eleven” eventually calmed down enough to segue into “Turn On Your Love Light,” which became Pigpen’s signature tune in the late ’60s. The Dead never really got the credit they deserved for being innovative rhythm and blues players—on songs like “Love Light,” “Dancing in the Streets” and, later, “Hard to Handle,” the band was capable of jamming long and hard on different riffs and progressions that sounded like psychedelicized mutations of ideas swiped from James Brown’s Fabulous Flames or Archie Bell and the Drells or any of the other funky kings of the day. Sometimes they would hit on one fat soul groove after another, with Pigpen endlessly improvising above the band, masterfully playing with words and phrases, bringing the energy in the room up and down at his whim. And other times Pig would do his thing but the band would be on a completely different plane for much of the song, still out in space from the previous song, and perhaps unwilling to come back down to earth. But no matter which direction the “Love Light” jam took, eventually the song reached a climax that had Pigpen and Weir screaming call-and-response like preachers in a Baptist tent service, as the band played the song’s finger-snappin’-catchy six-note riff louder and more intensely with each pass. “Love Light” never failed to get a crowd up on its feet and dancing, and Pigpen was never above cajoling the few people who weren’t grooving with him to get loose and get down. “He always had more nerve than I could believe,” Garcia once said with an admiring chuckle. “He’d get the audience on his side and he’d pick somebody out—like a heckler—and get on them. He’d crack us up, too. Sometimes he’d just kill me!”

  The band dedicated their second set at the Carousel that Valentine’s Day to the memory of Neal Cassady, whose body had finally given out while he was walking along the railroad tracks near the small Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende on the evening of February 2. A seriously psychedelic version of “That’s It for the Other One” included a new verse by Weir that referred to “Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never-ever land,” a fitting tribute their fallen comrade/hero. The rest of the set was composed of the other tunes that would make up Anthem of the Sun, played in order and played extremely well; in fact, parts of this show actually made it onto the album. It was the Dead at a magical peak, fully in command every step of the way, equally comfortable ripping through a fluttering Spanish-sounding jam or letting all their musical structures crumble and dissolve into dissonant sheets of white noise, feedback and, ultimately, silence, which is how they ended the set. On tapes of the show, there’s barely audible clapping from about ten people in the crowd, but you sense that it’s because the rest of the audience was probably too incapacitated by what they’d been through to know whether it was the end of the set, or the end of the world for that matter.

  “It was right around that time that the Dead’s music started to take on this huge, monstrous dimension and the unique qualities that really separated them from all the other bands,” observes Dick Latvala. “Within a year we got ‘Dark Star,’ ‘That’s It for the Other One,’ ‘Alligator,’ ‘Caution,’ ‘Love Light,’ ‘China Cat.’ They were steppin’ out! Back in ’66 it was mostly Pigpen singing, and that was great for what it was, and they had three songs they’d really jam on—‘Viola Lee Blues,’ ‘Dancin’ in the Streets’ and ‘Midnight Hour’—and that’s the stuff you’d wait for. But when these other songs started coming in, that’s when the big change occurred. Mickey came into the band at the beginning of that wave.

  “It was like the music itself was escalating. Everything became a vehicle to go ‘out’ with, and the jamming was so focused but still totally on the edge of being out of control, I remember thinking, ‘This music is way, way unusual.’ Somewhere near the end of ’67, the music started getting too far out for me to even dance; I had to just sit down and be as still as I could so it could come through me. I remember being scared sometimes. I mean, there were times when Phil was making the bass notes so big that I thought I was going to explode, and maybe I should leave. But then I’d think, ‘Well, if I’m going to explode, let’s do it here!’ It was dense shit. Even today, you can’t listen to that stuff all day—it’s too much.”

  “People weren’t afraid to let go and get really high at Dead shows because it felt like a ‘safe’ place to [trip],” Mountain Girl says. “You knew that you’d probably be taken some pretty interesting places during a show, but that you’d always come out on the other end in one piece. Experience, expectation and fine-tuning—the Dead were really good at being there for that. The music evolved to enhance that and people got into it. The music would not have developed the way it did if it wasn’t for people’s willingness to go on a big trip with it, and the band’s willingness to help them along. That was pretty deliberate, and it made for a wonderful, musical, intuitive kind of mix. They definitely created the set and the setting, and then they played to that, both with the music and the lyric content, and the lights and the noise and the glorious and horrible sounds; all that stuff.”

  Though nobly intentioned, the Carousel Ballroom experiment was probably doomed from the start. “We were terrible business people!” said Jon McIntire, a f
riend of the Dead’s who helped manage the Carousel. “We made mistakes from the outset. We opened up with the Dead and [Country Joe]. The place was crammed to the gills. The next weekend we didn’t have anyone—the place went dark—and then we opened up the following weekend. Well, if you’re trying to establish a place as a draw, that’s death. But we simply didn’t know that.

  “To me, what the Carousel was about was freedom, true freedom,” McIntire continued. “‘You can do anything here and it’s okay, as long as you don’t hurt anyone.’ That’s the kind of anarchy that shows that people at their basis are good; they don’t need constraints to make them good. So that’s what we were experimenting with there. I think that’s what all of us in the Haight were experimenting with. The Carousel was the epitome of anarchy at its finest. A lot of people found it scary, but I think a lot of people in San Francisco found it to be exactly what was going on, and very important to them, and exciting, warm and wonderful.”

  Unfortunately, “warm and wonderful” doesn’t necessarily pay the bills, and when the Dead and the Airplane were on the road (separately) that spring—the Dead played various clubs, ballrooms and armories in cities such as Miami, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis (where the Dead opened for Iron Butterfly) and Los Angeles—the Carousel crew was forced to compete with Bill Graham and Chet Helms to book headlining acts. Graham, in particular, proved to be a formidable foe who was not above demanding that groups of national stature who played for him in San Francisco play only for him or he wouldn’t book them into his new venue on New York’s Lower East Side, the old Village Theater, which Graham renamed the Fillmore East. Graham was also looking for a new, larger dancehall for his shows in San Francisco in the wake of riots in the Fillmore neighborhood that spring after the assassination of Martin Luther King. So when it became clear that the Carousel was failing financially, Graham hopped on a plane and flew to Dublin to meet with the ballroom’s owner, Bill Fuller, and he persuaded Fuller to let him take over the struggling operation. By mid-July Graham had opened his new San Francisco flagship, at first called Fillmore-Carousel, then the Fillmore West. During the time they’d controlled the Carousel, the Dead didn’t play for Graham in San Francisco, but they did play at the Fillmore East, and after Graham took over the Carousel the group swallowed its pride and gigged there often. It was a great room, and by the end of 1968 the Dead were filling it easily, so it made good business sense to play there.

  By mid-’68 most of the bandmembers had moved out of Haight-Ashbury and relocated in different parts of Marin County. In early March the Dead had bid a fond farewell to the old neighborhood with an impromptu free concert in front of the Straight Theater, drawing thousands of people into Haight Street for what turned out to be their final appearance in the neighborhood. Panhandle shows were part of the distant past by this time, the Straight was struggling, and by the summer of 1968 the vibe in the neighborhood had deteriorated so much that it had become a dangerous and forbidding place for many people—particularly those who had been around the Haight two years earlier.

  “After a while, the police and the city just got sick of what was happening in Haight-Ashbury, and they cracked down,” says Steve Brown. “They were edgy because the black community was rioting and there was a lot of right-wing reaction to the anti-war, liberal, hippie, drug-taking, commie, pinko element. These guys wanted to smack a few heads. They were not interested in keeping cool. They wanted to scare them and drive them out. And by the late ’60s, especially with the change of the drug scene in the Haight-Ashbury, it was hard to blame them, because it had gotten pretty ugly there. In ’67 the police sort of turned the other cheek and let the hippies and the flower children do their thing. There was enough media support that they would have looked like real ogres to have gone hot and heavy on the kids. But by ’68 they’d had enough of it. ‘Let’s run ’em out!’”

  The Dead had seen the storm clouds gathering ominously over the Haight for so long that by the time they left they had already moved past any feelings of disillusionment. As Rosie McGee put it, “They were never really a part of the flower power thing, so it wasn’t too crushing for them when the Haight turned the way it did. We knew it couldn’t last forever.”

  It was really like a moment,” Garcia said in 1994. “There was a breath there for a moment that was like an open door—‘Oo-oo, look!’—and then BAM! It slammed shut again immediately. . . . There was a moment there where there was a very clear, wonderful vision, but you see, it had to do with everyone acting in good faith. It had to do with everybody behaving right. There was a lot to it. It wasn’t a simple thing.

  “So the thing of this door opening—it was one of those things that we were all inducing it as well as perceiving it. I think probably everybody saw what they wanted to see or what they needed to see. They’d all been brought there somehow for that moment. And you can’t even say what it was or when it was or what it boiled down to or anything like that. But for me it’s been enough energy to keep me going this long and I don’t see any end, at least for me, in terms of my work. . . . It doesn’t matter to me whether it has any historical value or whether it’s measurable in some objective way. I don’t care. For me, the subjective reality is what counts—what I experienced, what happened to me. I know a lot of people who shared something like it, their own version of it, and who are still moving with that energy; that energy is propelling us. That energy has also gained enough momentum over the years [that] it’s partly responsible for all the things that have happened historically since then, in some way. It’s part of it. It’s part of the gain in consciousness that the last half of this century has represented. And that includes all the technology that goes with it—the braincraft that subsequently sprang up. And it’s still rolling, it’s still happening.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Where Is the Child Who Played with the Sunshine?

  he band’s exodus to Marin County began in the spring of 1968, when Jerry and Mountain Girl moved into a little house behind the Silver Peso bar in downtown Larkspur. Shortly after that, Weir and Mickey found a place in Novato; Phil and Rosie settled in Fairfax; and Billy moved out to rural West Marin, off Lucas Valley Road. Pigpen stayed in San Francisco a while longer than the others, living with Veronica in a converted church that was owned by the Dead’s sometime lawyer Brian Rohan. Eventually they left, too, moving into Weir’s digs, while Mickey moved onto a ranch in a rustic, undeveloped part of Novato. Actually, the ranch had been under hippie control for some time already—it was being leased from the city by Rock Scully and Jonathan Reister, a fourth-generation Kentucky horseman who had been one of the managers of the Carousel Ballroom and a pioneer of the West Coast acid scene before that. Dubbed the “Pondareister” (or, after Mickey moved in, “Hart’s Delight”), the ranch became a bucolic hangout for the entire Dead scene, a place where people could ride horses and live out their fantasies of being pioneers of the new Wild West. Mickey eventually took over the lease for the ranch and built a recording studio—the first bandmember to do so—in the barn on the property.

  After several years of everyone living on top of each other in the Haight and doing everything together, the move to Marin must have felt like getting a friendly invitation to slow down a tad, take it a little easier.

  “It was never the same again after we left San Francisco,” Rosie says. “That was definitely a transition. Before that, we were all living together and being together and we did that for a couple of years. It changed after that. Then it became different nuclear units—couples and families were starting. Then the gigs became the focal point, or the rehearsal place. But that was okay. By then we all needed a little more space.”

  Anthem of the Sun came out in July 1968 and proved to be a challenging disc for Warner Bros. to market, even in an era when free-form FM radio stations were popping up all over the country. Nothing on the record was remotely “commercial” in the traditional sense—short and punchy—and since each side tracked continuously, it was difficult for
deejays to, say, drop the needle onto “New Potato Caboose” and play only that. Rather than touring to promote the record, the Dead stayed in California the entire summer and actually began working on their third album in early September. It was as if the process of making Anthem of the Sun had been the important thing for the Dead—learning how to make a record themselves—and the end result was secondary.

  By that summer, the songwriting partnership of Garcia and Hunter was picking up steam. Joining “China Cat” and “Dark Star” in their canon that June was a big, rubbery rock song called “Saint Stephen,” with music by Garcia and Lesh, tandem lead vocals by Garcia and Weir, and a catchy central riff that sounded almost like a spry Elizabethan dance played on rock instruments. Hunter said he wrote the lyrics over the course of a couple of inspired evenings with a light, lilting feel in mind, “and then [the band] put this up-against-the-wall-motherfucker arrangement on it. We came up with a hybrid that hit between the eyes!”

  Lyrically, the song is quite obtuse—we never really learn who Stephen is or why “wherever he goes the people all complain,” for instance. But in a way “Saint Stephen” is the prototypical Hunter composition, blending vivid psychedelic imagery (“Ladyfinger dipped in moonlight / Writing ‘What for?’ across the morning sky”) with a scattershot of lines and couplets that might have been drawn from the yellowing pages of some now forgotten culture’s Book of Wisdom, or its epic tales. In the jumbled swirl of images—“sunlight splatters dawn with answers”—and aphorisms—“Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills / One man gathers what another man spills”—there’s an oddly reassuring tone to the piece as a whole, as if the poet is reaching out to share something with us, and what that is will become clear . . . when it becomes clear, if you’ll pardon the Zen. Hunter made a point of never explaining what his lyrics “mean” or his intention with a given song, “because if it is that concrete, if I can really explain it, I might as well write books of philosophy,” he said. “The poet is touching and questioning; it’s open to interpretation.” And as with all poetry, the way Hunter’s lyrics resonate with someone depends on that person’s sensitivity, openness, the particulars of his or her own life and a thousand other undefinable factors that sometimes magically allow insight to bloom where before there was opacity or confusion.