As soon as we got out there, a big squall came in and started dumping rain on us. Suddenly, we had a bite. We hooked up what we guessed was a marlin, because it just started running line like crazy. Joe and another guy on the boat with us start yelling at me, in Hawaiian. “Hana pa’a! Hana pa’a!” I was new to fishing, new to the island, new to Hawaiian culture; I didn’t have any clue what they were saying. Why would I? They were trying to tell me that we were hooked up to a fish. They thought I understood that it was my cue to gun the boat for a few seconds, push her forward, because it would sink the hook in the mouth and get us one step closer to bringing in the fish. So what did I do? I backed off the gas, instead.
“Okay,” I thought, “Let’s stop and reel it in!” The fish instantly spit the hook and got away. I got yelled at a few times during all of this. That’s how I learned what “hana pa’a” means and also what to do when I heard it. I wouldn’t make that same mistake again. But I still had to prove myself to Big Joe and his friends. And I had to prove myself to the island. I had to prove that I was worthy.
The next time out, it was just me and Big Joe. We managed to catch two really large ahi tunas. They might’ve been 100-pounders. It was serious. I didn’t fuck up this time. I started driving the boat home while Big Joe got to work cleaning the fish. He gutted them efficiently, then threw them on ice in the fish boxes. When he was done, he sat down next to me—it was a good day at sea. We were happy fishermen. But something caught my eye: in the back corner of the boat, there was this triangular fleshy thing, with a white valve on it. “What the fuck is this?” I picked it up with my hand and, lo and behold, it was beating. It was one of the fish’s hearts and it was still beating! I was totally shocked. I grabbed Joe’s arm and shook his hand with it. He tried to play cool but his eyes betrayed him. I caught him off guard.
I knew what I had to do. I took the heart back in my hand, looked Big Joe in the eye … and then ripped into it with my teeth, taking a bite out of it. It was easily the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. Fucking horrendous. Worse than anything on the menu at Applebees. I could feel the heart beating between my teeth. I spat it out, guzzled a Budweiser and fought to get my composure back. Then I looked at Big Joe. I stretched out my hand and offered him the rest of the heart. Here was this 300-pound Hawaiian whose acceptance and respect I had been trying to earn. But suddenly, there I was, daring him—challenging him—to take a bite out of a beating, disembodied fish heart. He looked back at me with big, alarmed eyes; he knew damn well that it was a test. The tide had turned. He took a little bite, spat it out, chased it with beer, and then said, “Holy shit! That was disgusting!” We laughed about it, all the while knowing that we had just cemented our friendship. I passed his test; he passed mine.
Big Joe’s face softened up and he, very gently, said, “Don’t tell any of my brothers about this. I don’t want them to know.” He made me promise I wouldn’t tell, and I promised, and for years I kept that promise. The only reason I can tell you now is because, eventually, he took to bragging about the whole thing.
Later on, when we became regular fishing buddies, Big Joe would shout orders at me, like, “Hold that pole like a man, Bill!” He didn’t give a shit that I was in the Grateful Dead. We caught fish together and that was all that mattered.
Palo Alto, California
People have always called the Grateful Dead a San Francisco band, but the truth is that we were a San Rafael band that started out as a Palo Alto band.
I was born in Palo Alto, a small town about thirty-three miles south of San Francisco. It’s less than an hour’s drive to the city—usually—but it can feel like continents apart, and not just because of all the standstill traffic. It’s a whole different culture.
I spent most of my time in Palo Alto just trying to figure a way out. I needed something bigger, something more. I wanted to break out.
My parents met at Stanford University. My dad was from San Francisco and my mom was from New Orleans. The hospital where I was born, Stanford Hospital, is now a rehab center. Kind of apropos, huh? That was May 7, 1946.
I have one sister, Marcia L. Kreutzmann, thirteen years younger than me. I was an only child for thirteen years. Our house was at 1512 Byron in Palo Alto. It’s still there.
The first music concert that I went to was in Palo Alto. It must have been some time in the summer and it was on the back of a flatbed truck. I think it was a country-and-western/rock band, and I watched the drummer play and it looked really cool to be able to play music and still get physical with stuff. It was the music and movement, working together to create rhythm that I really liked. I wanted to play piano and I wanted to play trumpet, but I never picked up either one. My parents didn’t have a piano so that wasn’t going to happen, and drums just became the thing.
And yet, I hated the snare drum, growing up. Our house was in earshot of a military academy; every afternoon, we’d be forced to hear marching band practice. I was always aware of the time, because they would start at 2:30 and for the next hour, the marching band would be louder than my thoughts. And my thoughts were, “I hate those drums.” There was no escape. You could hear it all throughout the neighborhood. I was sick of stupid march music. I wanted nothing to do with it and never wanted to hear another snare drum in my life. But then I saw my first live band and the drummer had a full kit and it was a whole different ball game. He used all four limbs and the snare was just one thing in his arsenal of sound. Also, I think this might explain why I had an aversion to Mickey Hart’s marches, decades later. But we’ll get to that.
By the time I was in sixth grade, my last year at Middlefield Elementary School, all I wanted to do was to play music. I was so determined, that I joined the school’s god-awful band class, even though it didn’t sound like music to me. Whenever I walked by that classroom, all I heard was noise. And the poor teacher taught all the different instruments, including the drums. Every instrument. A lot of the kids from wealthier families had their own equipment, but since I didn’t, I was assigned one of the school’s drums. I was handed a big old marching bass drum, covered with dust as if nobody had ever played it. And then the teacher handed me sheet music and I was supposed to read it and play along on the drum. I had been told that much, but I hadn’t been told how to do it. I could tell during that very first class that this wasn’t going to work. About a minute into the second class, the teacher came over and kicked me out. She said, “You can’t keep a beat.”
My response was, “Okay, good.” The music sucked. I didn’t really care. I just hit the bass drum any time I felt like it—kind of like I do today. There was nothing for me to keep a beat to; the notes on the page looked like someone spilled an ashtray across the sheets after a full night of partying. The splotches of ink made no sense to me. And I didn’t hear anything that I wanted to play along with, anyway. It wasn’t music to my ears. I’d been listening to Ray Charles and Fats Domino and all this wonderful stuff as a kid. My musical tastes were already hip. Remember, my mom was from New Orleans. So whatever the teacher was trying to get these kids to play, it was like, “What the fuck?”
Lucky for me, both of my parents loved black music, and they would listen to the black radio station, KDIA in the East Bay. “Lucky 13.” It’s still there today, I believe. For many years it was the heartbeat of soul music in the Bay Area. Our whole family tuned in to it. We wouldn’t be caught dead listening to KDIA now, though, because it devolved into a Christian rock station.
My dad worked up at the Emporium—one of the first real department stores—and I’d go to work with him some days, just to hang out or go to a movie, and he would always have the dial tuned to KDIA. I don’t remember all the music—a lot of it embarrassed me, because it was so frank compared to the white stuff—but my parents loved it. It was cool.
After I got kicked out of band class, I got on my bike and rode up to old town Palo Alto to a music store, and there was a sign in the front window that said, “Drum lessons, three dollars per h
alf hour. Call Lee Andersen at this number.” I called him and that very Saturday he met me at the music store. That’s when I bought my very first pair of drumsticks. At $1.95, they were too expensive for me, but Lee loaned me the money, and I remember those sticks to this day. They were the most precious thing I’d ever owned. It was like, “Ah, this is me! I’m holding me for once.” I finally had something that really meant “Bill.” Something that I could identify with.
Lee Andersen became my drum teacher. Immediately after my first lesson, I went home and took out all my mother’s pots and pans, and started playing on the kitchen floor. I didn’t have a drum set yet, but my parents weren’t home. So I did that for hours.
Lee lived up behind Stanford University on a street called Perry Lane, which is where Ken Kesey was writing his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They were almost next-door neighbors. Kesey was working on his book at the same time that I was taking drum lessons, just a few houses over.
Walking inside Lee’s house was like taking a trip to the Hawaiian Islands—it was decorated top to bottom in Hawaiian style, with fake palm trees and hula skirts lining the bar. It was my first trip to Hawaii. Little did I know I’d end up living on Kauai.
Lee had a silver Slingerland drum set sprawled out like furniture across the living room, with a bass drum that doubled as a floor tom if needed. During my lessons, he also taught me some more advanced stuff, such as the finer points of making multicolored mixed drinks. You have to layer them so the colors don’t run together. That was very important. So was drinking them. At the beginning of the lesson, he’d tell me about the woman he had been with the night before, what she looked like naked, and all these other things. It was all part of the drum lesson. It was learning the rhythms of life.
After one of the lessons, Lee started high jumping with some friends of his, over a high bar that they had set up outside. Kesey was there, too, and came crashing over the bar. At age thirteen, it was too high for me, so I went back inside the house and banged on Lee’s kit until dark. He never stopped me or told me to quit.
Lee got a physics degree at Stanford, then regretted it. When you’re a physicist, who wants to hire you the most? The government. And what do they want you to do? Make nuclear weapons. Lee said fuck that. He wanted to invent. He had the idea that he was going to invent a machine that detected gold.
My whole focus was on getting to that drum lesson every Saturday afternoon. I had to ride my bike up the hill behind Stanford University and I can still remember the smell of the eucalyptus trees along the way. It was the beginning of fall and the trees still held the smell of summer. The scent of the trees, with the feeling of the drum sticks in my pocket, gave me the motivation to ride uphill, as fast as I could go. I never missed a lesson.
I barely noticed any of the other houses around Lee’s, but Phil Lesh told me a funny little story once about one of them. At some point, Phil actually snuck into Kesey’s house and read part of the manuscript Kesey had been working on, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, before it was published. He came back and said, “Kesey’s a really good writer.” Everybody knew he was writing a book, so the buzz was already out among a certain crowd. But Phil had the courage, the audacity, to go in and read his stuff. “Yeah, he’s a good writer.” I didn’t know Phil yet, but that would change.
Not far from Perry Lane was a boarding house nicknamed the Chateau, where Phil, Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter—who became the Grateful Dead’s lyricist—and many other creative types lived at various points. Some of them would in some way intersect with my life in the years that followed, some were just transients. Jerry and Robert actually lived in their cars, out back, at first, before they could afford rent. I didn’t know anything about Jerry, or the others, when I visited there, though. I was the high school kid; they were the beatniks.
I knew some of the other musicians staying at the Chateau but I only remember Danny Barnett, a good jazz drummer who’s no longer with us, darn it. Somebody must’ve invited me to go over there once and I stumbled into a really hip scene. Almost too hip for me, at the time. I don’t remember smoking dope or anything, I just remember being there. There was a great jam session in the living room and that’s what I was really after. I sat in on the last song of the night, where I got to show off my newest trick: a shuffle. I was nervous. I was also elated.
I always gravitated to places where I could hear music that was far-out. In downtown Palo Alto there was a coffeehouse called St. Michael’s Alley, next to the movie theater on University Avenue, where I would go to check out live music. Jazz. And there was another place I used to frequent called the Tangent, which was where Garcia played banjo with Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
The first time I played music in front of people wasn’t at a gig. It was just playing around, in front of friends, for fun. My dad drove me there. I was probably thirteen or fourteen years old. I didn’t have much of a drum kit, though. My dad rented me a snare drum and a hi-hat, and that was it. The bassist’s dad rented him a bass and a bass amp, and he knew about as much on bass as I did on the drums. The guitarist was this hot local player who knew some rock ’n’ roll songs, and we sat there and played for a while. The last song we did at the end of the session was “Johnny B. Goode.” The guitar player really got it right and, to my surprise, my friends on the couch all got up and started dancing, and I said, “Yeah!”
That moment was the catalyst for everything. It was the first truly joyful moment of my life. I was given the gift of finding something that was so clearly my passion, it was undeniable. That was my direction from then on.
Afterward, my dad came to pick me up and on the way down the front stairs, he saw something sparkling in my eye, lighting up my entire face like a kid at his first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, watching his favorite cartoon character waltz across the sky. I was lit from doing something that I really loved. And from out of nowhere he said, “You know, Billy, you won’t earn any money playing music.” I said, “Dad, I didn’t even think of that.” My head was still somewhere else, still high from the experience of playing music and the unexpected joy it brought me when I saw those kids dancing to my beat. It was my own little acid trip, years before I first tried acid. I learned a lot about my dad in that moment and I knew that he had seen something new in me that wasn’t there before. I now had desire in my life. Passion.
My dad was so concerned with money and that was very strange to me. The war had ended something like twelve or maybe fifteen years earlier, but it had taken him out of Stanford, where he was studying to become a lawyer. He had to become a soldier instead.
My dad wanted me to go to college and become a businessman and make a respectable income. Musicians were still second-class citizens—the “help,” back then. My dad loved me and he supported me, but he never thought I’d have much of a career being a drummer. I think he wanted his own second chance, through me, and didn’t think that it would happen if I ran off chasing fantasies with a rock ’n’ roll band.
Legends in our minds—my first band, the Legends, and that’s my first drum set. This must’ve been taken in Palo Alto High School, sometime in the early 1960s. (Photo credit unknown; image courtesy of the Kreutzmann family archives)
Years later, he returned to Stanford, but this time to watch the Grateful Dead play a sold-out concert at the Frost Amphitheater. He wore a shirt that said, “Grateful Dad.”
I got a paper route so that I could buy my first drum set. I’d throw my papers the same way that most paperboys do. You know how kids ride without holding onto the handlebars? That’s what I did. It was a flat and easy paper route, so I’d just practice playing drums on the handlebars as I rode along. It was fun to do that; I didn’t think anything of it.
Around this time, I got totally hooked on rock ’n’ roll. I couldn’t have been more into it. There was so much to learn but I was an eager student. I started playing Ray Charles songs, like “What’d I Say.” I found out that a lot of the stuff that I liked
in my playing came from Fats Domino—more of a 12/8, more of a shuffle feeling, a New Orleans feeling. That’s really my style more than straight sixteenth notes. It bounces a little bit and it feels good. Anyway, that came from listening to that earlier music—Fats Domino and the music from New Orleans. I don’t remember many of the other artists by name. My mom had lots of albums by black groups that were really good. She had an album by a band called the Olympics that had one or two really great songs. And she had Duke Ellington.
The first time I listened to James Brown was when I was a senior in high school. I had my own apartment where I could play drums and nobody would complain, so I would put on albums and try to play along and learn the parts. But when I tried to do that with James Brown, I went, “What the fuck is that guy doing, and how the fuck is he doing it?” Of course, years later, I learned that he had two drummers on those albums. That’s interesting to think about now. Two drummers, eh?
I liked jazz a lot, too, but my heavy jazz stuff didn’t really start until I was nineteen and living with Phil Lesh. So that came later. Mostly, I listened to early Ray Charles, just to get off on the way the drummer played so musically. I was fascinated by the different rhythms he used throughout the album and the way the different parts and instruments all fit together. I loved that music. I loved hearing Ray Charles’s Live at Newport—that was a really big one for me, because it had “The Night Time is the Right Time” on there, with a killer intro sax solo. I used to listen to that all the time. I also listened to some funk.
I joined my first band before that—the Legends. They were all guys from Palo Alto. One of the members played football on the high school team—I was still in junior high. The others were all perfectly fine muggles. I haven’t kept in touch with them but one of the guys got into politics and became some kind of town representative in Palo Alto.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 2