Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

by Bill Kreutzmann

  It was hard on Brenda and Stacy, but what can I tell you? I didn’t make the best decisions when I was eighteen, as far as those kinds of things went. There was so much going on in my life. Haight-Ashbury had just come alive. I was plugged into that whole scene. I was making electrifying, new music with the band that was soon to become the Grateful Dead. That was a big transition time. It was the Summer of ’65. It was hard to be a husband and a father. In the end, I wasn’t able to do it.

  Our apartment wasn’t free, neither was starting a family, so I would give drum lessons at students’ homes while Brenda and Stacy would wait in the station wagon. And I also taught drums at a music store in Palo Alto called Dana Morgan’s, named after the owner. The same place where Jerry Garcia was teaching guitar. At night, after the store closed, Garcia and some of the other employees would take the instruments off the wall and play music right in the shop. This may have been Pigpen’s doing. He swept floors or something there, and he really wanted to form an electric blues band. That’s what he listened to. That’s what he loved. His dad was a DJ at a local radio station and had a tremendous record collection. It was all blues music. So that’s where Pigpen was coming from and where he wanted to go. He was able to get Jerry and a young kid about my age named Bob Weir on board for this thing. They were all in Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions together, covering jug band material and playing out. Back at the shop, they started playing rock music on electric instruments.

  That’s when Jerry called, asking me to join this new group. He was now on electric guitar. Weir too. Pigpen on harp. They recruited Dana Morgan’s son, Dana Jr., to play bass, mostly because his dad owned the music store, which meant his dad owned the instruments, which meant the band had instruments.

  Dana Jr. gave me a sparkling gold drum set, a Ludwig, and he also supplied Jerry with some of his guitars and amps and stuff. The flip side of that deal was that Dana just bought himself a position in the band, on bass. But he wasn’t much of a bass player. It wasn’t going to work. No offense, Dana.

  We tried to do some gigs and they were as disastrous as open mic night at the School for the Tone Deaf. The guy just couldn’t play the bass. I don’t know what to tell you. Technically, we played our first show at Menlo College in Menlo Park, one town over from Palo Alto. That was on April Fool’s Day, ’65. No joke. The same date listed as my birthday on my fake driver’s license. Also no joke.

  Our first public show was about a month later, on May 5, at a pizza joint in Menlo Park called Magoo’s Pizza Parlor. That’s when we started calling ourselves the Warlocks. We played a couple more shows there. At one of them, Phil Lesh was in the audience and even though I still hadn’t met him, I remember watching him that night because he was trying to dance, and you weren’t allowed to dance there. The pizza parlor didn’t have a dance permit which, in those days, believe it or not, you needed. Otherwise you’d get in trouble.

  You know, I don’t really remember ever formally meeting Pigpen or Bobby. I just remember that we all met at Dana Morgan’s and that our first practices were at that shop. After closing time, we’d practice while our friends Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner just kind of hung out. They encouraged us. They were our first fan club. They later worked for the Grateful Dead—for years and years. Those two gals really liked us, and I think one of their parents was wealthy, so we went to their house in Atherton and would practice there sometimes. Atherton is a rich community in the Bay Area. Weir was also from Atherton and we practiced at his house once too. His mom took Jerry and Phil aside and made them promise that, if she let Bobby stay in the band, they’d make sure he finished high school. They broke their promise.

  I don’t remember much about about those first band practices. They were with Dana Morgan Jr. on bass, and there wasn’t much that was memorable there. Then one day Jerry came to me and said, “Billy, we have to get a new bass player.” No shit. I agreed and he said, “I have this friend who could do it. He’s up in Berkeley, but he’d move down here if we let him in the band.”

  So I asked, “Is he a bass player?” “No.” “That’s interesting.” But, sure enough, his friend—Phil Lesh—came down to Palo Alto and got a house near University Avenue and it became the spot where a lot of future shenanigans went down. It was on High Street. Aptly named. We’ll get to all that. But first, one cool thing I have to say about Dana—he never asked for the gear back.

  When Phil first joined, he got himself a little red Gibson four-string bass and he learned how to play that thing in about an hour, I think. He knew music, so he just had to apply it to that instrument. To this day, Phil has a very unique style of playing bass. The Grateful Dead had a very unique way of playing rock ’n’ roll. You have to remember that it wasn’t that we were trying to be different—that, too—but we had no blueprint. The Rolling Stones had only been around for three years. The Who had just formed. Pink Floyd were just forming. Led Zeppelin didn’t exist yet. We were making it up as we went along. All of us.

  So Phil joined the band and the first time I took acid was at his house on High Street. Robert Hunter was my partner for that trip, and I’ve loved him dearly ever since. I was eighteen and it was the earth-shattering, life-changing experience that I had hoped it would be, but that I never fully expected. I ate the acid and those however many micrograms of LSD-25 hit me like a teardrop falling into a huge body of still water—one minuscule drop was all it took to send ripples out in every direction, progressing into waves by the time they came crashing down on the shores of consciousness. First the drug itself was that drop, then I became that drop, splashing into the same vast ocean whose shores I had been standing on for eighteen years, always scanning the horizon, always looking out beyond the reflection of the lighthouse, always balancing on the edge of some bluff, catching the spindrift, wondering what would happen if I dove on in.

  Taking the LSD was me diving on in. And, just as I had suspected, there was a never-ending parade of incredible things—sea creatures of the wildest imagination, ranging from fish that can camouflage themselves as your best friend from high school to mermaids who will love you then leave you to drown just to get back at their landlocked underlings—all brimming and buzzing underneath the unfathomable deep blue. And all it took was a tiny drop to penetrate the surface, to break on through. And even in the dark, down deep, there was little fear but no shortage of curiosity. “What’s this?” “What’s over here?” I had goggles on that gave me perfect vision. Not only could I see all these strange and fabulous creatures around me, but I could also see their intention. I could see more than just their shells.

  Ever since I picked up On the Road, I knew that there was more out there, that there was something more than just life in the suburbs where people worked all day and then sat around watching television after dinner until they were ready for bed. I always believed that the America that Kerouac wrote about so convincingly was not just a place to visit in books, but a place to visit in the flesh. It was where I wanted to be, and I always knew I would arrive there, just by knowing that I would. If On the Road was my boarding pass, then acid was my vehicle of choice. Before the drug even fully came on that night, I could feel that it would forever change my life. I was right.

  Hunter and I watched the garbagemen picking up trash in the morning, while still tripping, going, “Far out!” And it really was far-out, too. They were as strange as any other psychedelic crustacean. They would stop in front of all the houses, one at a time, and do a little preprogrammed, emotionless dance that involved dumping strangers’ trash cans into the back of their truck, tossing the cans like yesterday’s news, and then moving on without ever looking back. No mercy. The truck was the biggest trash compactor I had ever seen—and it was on wheels! It made an incredible noise every time it started up and it would screech a few feet later at the next stop. Just really crazy jazz. Horns and a snare. The garbage men, meanwhile, were like automatons with hair and grease and dirt. I could see their auras. They were neither happy nor unhappy.
Just containers of electricity, plugged into the current.

  I looked at Robert Hunter like I had just seen a brave new world, and repeated myself—“Far out.” Then I jumped into Sue Swanson’s car and drove for hours, driving all around Portola Valley. We stopped by some redwoods and I ran up to the biggest one I saw, with a trunk as wide as the number one wide receiver in earth’s biggest football league—a game of giants—but its countenance was still and solemn, revealing a lifetime of staunch service to the forest. It had a consciousness. I could see it sure as I could see the auras of the garbagemen earlier.

  Redwoods are hard on tree huggers because you can’t even begin to wrap your arms around them. Much less your mind. “You’re alive!” I shouted, with my neck craned, looking up at its 250-foot declaration of a life well lived. “You’re alive!” And it was, too. And so was I. And all of that was far-out. And then it occurred to me that the tree was maybe even more alive than most of the people we drove past that morning, on their way to work. That’s one of those perceptions that you have on acid, but is it also not true?

  Almost everybody in the band took acid that day. One of Phil’s friends, Hank Harrison, insisted on it. Hank wanted to manage us, so we gave him a shot and that lasted all but a few days. He was a terrible manager. Granted, I’ll probably say that about all of our managers; I have issues with management. Hank didn’t work out for us, but he did go on to father a famous singer—Courtney Love.

  Under Hank’s temporary stewardship, he suggested to us—very strongly—that we all take LSD together and play music. What a great idea. And everybody but Pigpen, to the man, went “Yeah!” So we took acid and jammed. This led into the Acid Tests and a whole series of gigs with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, once a week, for a while.

  But we had a string of strange gigs before then, straight gigs that didn’t really work for us. Our first gig with Phil was June 18, 1965, at a place called Frenchy’s Bikini-A-Go-Go in Hayward, which is a city in the East Bay, about twenty miles from Palo Alto. Our first road gig. Phil’s first show. I don’t think we played that well. It was awkward. We weren’t the right band for the place. We weren’t a Top 40 band. When we went back the second night, we found out they hired another band instead. Someone told me they were a clarinet, accordion, and upright bass combo, which is pretty strange. Guess that’s where the money was.

  The clubs around there in those days often had topless dancers. That November, we played a topless club up in San Francisco—Pierre’s in North Beach—and while we were playing, one of the dancers had sweat pouring off her boobs like crazy. She turned around and asked us, “Hey, can’t you play any shorter songs?” We were having a great time playing and looking at her boobs, so we didn’t care. I think Bobby took her home that night. At least he wanted to.

  In the fall, before that gig, we landed a residency at this club called the In Room, which was located in Belmont, directly between Palo Alto and San Francisco. Six weeks straight, five shows a week, five sets a night, forty-five-minute sets, fifty-minute sets, something like that, stop, start, all that. They wanted us to play loud and stop between songs so people would order more drinks. The In Room was hardcore. There was no shortage of meth, alcohol, or loose women. That was the vibe. Real angular. Cigarette smoke filled the air.

  From the very beginning, we would cover Rolling Stones songs. We’d play stuff like “Get Off of My Cloud” and “Satisfaction.” They were just fun, easy tunes to do in the nightclubs we were playing back then and that’s what the people in those places wanted to hear. Toward the end of our career, we would cover “The Last Time” a lot. People thought we were trying to convey a secret message because the chorus goes, “This may be the last time,” and there were all those rumors about Garcia’s health and the health of the band—Deadheads would read stuff into it. But that wasn’t the case at all; we just liked playing it. In fact, Phil has said it was one of the songs that first got him into rock ’n’ roll.

  At the beginning of the In Room residency, we backed up Cornell Gunther and the Coasters. The Coasters were already a popular band with hit songs like “Little Egypt,” “Love Potion No. 9,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Poison Ivy.” Gunther brought a musical director with him who doubled as a rhythm guitarist. He tried to teach us the songs in mid-performance—even though we already knew them. He insisted on playing in the band and it was just miserable. We didn’t respond well to somebody sitting there telling us how to do it. The next night, we said, “Don’t bring him,” and we played the songs perfectly because they were so easy. Gunther loved it. He was just gay as could be; a wonderful cat. We hung out afterward and it was cool.

  The In Room was really where we got our first chops as a band, in front of an audience. It’s also where we really first started improvising. We didn’t learn how to get that far-out with our music until the Acid Tests a few months later, but we started jamming—improvising in the jazz sense—at the In Room. When you have to play all night, every night, and you don’t have a lot of material, you almost have no choice. We learned that we could make one song last an entire set. And nobody really noticed. That was nice.

  When we would stretch out and go long, when we got really loud and into it, the dancers would look at us uncomfortably and start glancing at the bartenders for help. But rather than putting an end to it, this one particular bartender, who had a glass eye, would add to the freakiness. He would pour lighter fluid all along the drainage ditch of the bar, pop his glass eye out of its socket, spin it on the bar top, and then set the whole damn thing on fire. From my perch on the drum riser, it looked like a curtain of flame with a madman’s eye spinning right through it. Everyone was like, “What the fuck is going on here?” We seem be a magnet for that kind of thing; maybe there’s some kind of chemistry that attracts that kind of weirdness. But the In Room nurtured us as a live act and allowed us to discover who we really were as a band.

  It seems like so many bands that have really made an impact with their own unique sound all have one thing in common—they all did some kind of residency during their infancy. A place to learn and grow, to play and play and then play some more, to let loose and then get tight, to see what works and, also, what’s what. That was the In Room, for us. Although the manager did once tell us that we were never going to make it. I’m not so sure that he was right about that. (I think most successful bands have a story like that in common, too).

  We get credited for starting the jam band scene and maybe that is true, but jazz musicians jammed way before rock musicians. John Coltrane jammed way before the Grateful Dead. Some of us loved jazz and loved John Coltrane but, oddly enough, Garcia wasn’t so into it at first. He once told me that he didn’t get Coltrane. That blew my mind, but who knows? He sometimes made comments like that to me about other music and I would discover later that he only meant it in the momentary space of a particular mood.

  Years—decades—later, there were moments on stage where occasionally it would just be Jerry and me playing for a few minutes. An unintentional duet. I don’t remember what shows they happened at, and we didn’t get to do them nearly as often as we should’ve, but Lesh came up to me once, after one of those shows, and said, “Man, you guys sounded like John Coltrane and Elvin Jones up there.” I knew better—we hardly sounded like that. But what he meant was that we were able to be completely open and free, without being restricted, without having to play in fours or in twos or any disco crap. We played so loose, it was like water going over a waterfall. The water flows over different rocks and splashes off here and there at unpredictable moments where it’s just pure nature and beauty and art and it can’t be practiced and it can’t be planned, it just is. It was a blending of a certain amount of strangeness with something that was still understandable. It was really satisfying to play that way, too. Nothing about it was obvious and none of it was literal. That’s the music that I like the most. Jerry and I used to really get off on those duets.

  Phil was the one who first turned me on to Joh
n Coltrane—and to Elvin Jones, his drummer—a year or so after the In Room, when we were living together on Belvedere Street in San Francisco. I was high on some kind of relaxant; there was something going around for a while that they were lacing weed with—way before rat or any of those horrible things. I think it was the same as smoking heroin. Whatever it was, Phil rolled it in this joint and I loved it. Then he played me Coltrane and I got drenched by the sound. I let it wash all over me: “Yes!” I wasn’t listening for structure and I wasn’t looking for theory. I didn’t try to understand that music from any academic standpoint. That would’ve been totally misguided and would’ve missed the point, anyway. When you listen to music that moves you, you don’t sit and count the beats. That music is about being free. And being in the moment.

  That’s exactly what we were trying to create ourselves, beginning at the In Room. Once we started playing high on acid at the Acid Tests, it all went into high gear. Meanwhile, during this initial phase, we played in all these rough nightclubs. It was the fall of 1965, so none of us except for Jerry and Phil were even twenty-one. Unless, of course, you looked at our fake IDs.

  Phil’s girlfriend somehow got her hands on a stash of blank draft cards around the same time that I took a day job at the Behavioral Research Center at Stanford. I was essentially a gopher for all the professors.

  With fancy typewriters at my disposal and everybody minding their own business, I did what any acid-eating, pot-smoking hippie would do: I took the blank draft cards and filled in all the numbers, using the exact same dot matrixes that are on the official cards. I made sure they were a perfect match. We may have been technically underage at the time, but we had documentation that “proved” otherwise.