In fact, the cards were so good, that the authorities couldn’t bust us. A couple ABC guys strolled into a bar where we were playing once, and when we handed them our forgeries, they tried not to laugh: “Unbelievable! These check out. Somehow.”
The gig where that happened was actually at a place called the Fireside, right before the In Room residency—August 1965. The Fireside was the same kind of gig as the In Room except we didn’t last there but maybe a week. And it was, again, one of these raunchy bar scenes—they wanted rock bands in there. We got away with the underage thing, but then we were asked to leave anyway. So that gig didn’t work out.
Here’s another thing I got away with that same year, talking of draft cards: I’m pretty sure it’s safe for me to talk about this now. From the moment the Warlocks started, the band was my life. That’s what I was doing. I wasn’t going to let the war in Vietnam interrupt band practice. Some of my friends were getting drafted—one of them shot himself in the foot with a 30/30 to get out of it. When I got my notice, my dad said, “You’ve got to go report. They’ll come after you and put you in jail if you don’t report.” That got through to me. So I went down to my draft board in San Jose, and I looked at the address of the induction center where I was supposed to go, and when I got there, all I found was a burnt-out shell. There was nothing else there. Somebody must have torched the building. Some of the Jesuits were allegedly burning down induction centers, and I’m not sure if they burned mine down, but I’m positive that it was gone. There was no more “Bill Kreutzmann” in the system. That was the age of two-inch computer tape—not like today’s digital age where information is more permanent and stored in the cloud. My file was gone. It was remarkable. Whoever is responsible for that, here’s to you.
When I got there and realized that the whole damn building was gone, I said, “Fuck that. I’m out of here!” A thousand other guys lucked out too, I bet.
So I didn’t go to war and instead I got to stay in the Warlocks, even though that was a horrible name for a band. I’m glad we decided to look for a new one. We had to. The Warlocks name was already taken. At least, that’s what someone in our group told us. Now, maybe they made that up, just because in later years nobody was really able to track that other band down. Either way, a name change was for the best. There were a lot of fortuitous things that happened to us. This was one of them.
I remember we were at Phil’s house one day trying to come up with a new name. Garcia sat on the couch with a giant dictionary and he came across the words, “Grateful Dead.” The words jumped off the page. We were all there, the whole band together, all clustered around the couch. When the phrase “Grateful Dead” came up, everybody went, “What?” We’d just been smoking DMT and those words stuck out. They were so incongruous. “How could you be grateful and dead? How could you possibly be both of those things?”
And then we learned the beautiful story behind those two words. There are a few different variations of the “grateful dead” folk tale throughout history, and from different parts of the world, but the essential motif, or common thread, behind them is that there is a traveler who comes across a burial scene. The villagers refused to bury some body because they hadn’t paid off their debt. In a tremendous act of good will, the traveler pays the debt for them and continues on their way. Then along comes this spirit, this ghost, and says, “I’m the grateful dead and I’d like to reward you for your good deed.”
A whole bunch of ballads are written about that. I thought that was a beautiful story, although I wasn’t convinced that it would make a good band name. At first, I voted against it, but then I finally consented. “Fine. We’ll be the Grateful Dead.” I’m glad I lost that argument.
Another one of those fortuitous things that happened was that we were all invited up to one of Ken Kesey’s wild parties at La Honda. By this point, Kesey had published his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, and a bunch of his freaky friends started calling themselves the Merry Pranksters. In 1964 they went all the way to New York and back on a school bus that Kesey bought with some of his book money. They painted the bus in Day-Glo colors and called it Furthur. There was a lot of LSD involved.
Most of the Pranksters had nicknames, like Mal Function, dis-MOUNT, Gretchen Fetchin and, of course, Wavy Gravy. Jerry Garcia’s future wife, Carolyn, was nicknamed Mountain Girl. The Grateful Dead didn’t actually go on that cross-country Furthur tour. We weren’t Pranksters—we were the Grateful Dead. But some of us got Prankster names, anyway. We were initiated into Pranksterdom. Garcia got Captain Trips. I got Bill the Drummer.
With his success, Kesey was able to move out of Perry Lane to a bigger property in La Honda, about forty minutes west of Palo Alto. La Honda was up in the redwood forest in the coastal mountain range of California. It’s a gorgeous country place, real quiet. It’s foggy in the summertime, like most coastal areas in California. La Honda was more like a psychedelic ranch, a commune for the Pranksters and their friends, than a writer’s retreat, which is what Kesey may have originally wanted it for. That didn’t happen. Oh well.
When we made it over there for that party, we didn’t even bring our instruments. We were just up there, hanging out and partying. That’s where I first met some of the Hells Angels. I know they can smell fear so I just put on my game face and wished for the best. But that’s also the night that I first met Neal Cassady. He was always really wired, juggling conversations, sledgehammers, girls, and drugs—all at once, although nobody could keep count. He was jazz personified. All horns and a snare. He hit me up for dexamyl and shook me down for speed. By this point though I think he was getting more into acid. We all were.
The first Acid Test was more like a pop quiz than a test. We all aced it. It wasn’t a gig. We just went to get weird, and that’s exactly what we did. It was a house party at Ken Babbs’—one of the Pranksters—place in Santa Cruz.
We played our first show as the Grateful Dead about a week later—December 4, 1965—at what was really the first public Acid Test. How’s that for a perfect pairing? Two one-of-a-kind firsts. Or was it two of a kind? It was held in San Jose at the house of a friend of Kesey’s that he nicknamed Big Nig. That was Kesey’s way of poking fun at racism, since Big Nig was a big black man. The Rolling Stones were playing a concert down the street from his house and some effort was made to get Mick Jagger or Keith Richards to the party. But, inside the Acid Test, something more important happened. We had already played all those shows as the Warlocks, but this was the start of something new, something different. It was bigger than itself for the first time.
The Rolling Stones never showed up, but Jann Wenner was there, in the audience. Two years later, he founded Rolling Stone Magazine—with a feature on the Grateful Dead in the very first issue.
The Acid Tests were the physical manifestation of what goes on in your mind during an acid trip. Things don’t always make sense. Some sounds are noises, some noises are music, music is being played, but not everything being played is music. Some things you hear over the loudspeaker are snippets from a conversation you had earlier on in the night with a friend of yours. Did you really say that aloud? You must’ve because now it was being looped over the PA system, along with weird announcements and proclamations. And you can’t trust anything you see because you’re seeing things that just can’t be. Or can they? It was a psychedelic circus and everyone was the sideshow and everyone was the main event, but was there even any main event at all? Nobody could say for sure.
After Big Nig’s Acid Test in San Jose, we started playing Acid Tests about once a week. Some are more memorable than others and, then too, some are more famous than others. But they were all historic. The Muir Beach Acid Test, on December 11, 1965, was held in a lodge about 100 yards from the ocean, and it’s where a guy named Owsley Stanley first came into the Grateful Dead story. I don’t actually remember meeting him that night, so he doesn’t come into my own story quite yet. At least, not for another paragraph. But at the Muir Beach Acid Test
, I do remember the Pranksters showing movies of their bus adventures, projected onto a screen. As the acid was coming on strong, Babbs would ask over the sound system, “Are you watching the movie? Are you in the movie? Now, are you in the movie, watching the movie?” Overlaid, it was like the mirrors in barbershops that ricochet to infinity. You’re watching the movie and, pretty soon, you are the movie.
The same could be said for Owsley—first he was watching the movie, then he was in the movie. There is an account of him at the Muir Woods Acid Test pushing around a heavy, metal chair that made a horrible scraping noise on the floor, then getting so wrecked he wrecked his car going home that night. Yep, sounds like him.
Pretty soon, I learned that he made the stuff that made the Kool Aid so electric. At first we were eating acid by taking capsules that came straight from Sandoz Laboratory in Switzerland. Official stuff. Sandoz didn’t actually cap those things; the Pranksters did. But Sandoz manufactured the stuff inside. You’d hold it up and look in the light and see this little teeny speck of dust. You were almost sure there was nothing there, but it sure got you high.
When that supply disappeared, we started taking Owsley’s. He very quickly came onto the scene with a reputation as the guy who made the best acid. And it was true—he did. He’d get really, really high when he concocted it. If you don’t get high while you’re making it, you’re not making it right. He told me that.
Owsley had a lot of beliefs that were questionable, but in his mind, they were unquestionable truths. When we first went to his place in Berkeley—a couple blocks down from Telegraph Avenue—he told us he could talk to electronics, mentally talk to them, like people talk to plants. He talked to electronics and chemical compounds. And for all I could ever tell, they actually listened. Sometimes they just listened slowly, that’s all. And they didn’t always talk back.
Owsley studied chemistry at Berkeley. I’d go to his place with Brenda and the band on the weekends and take acid and mess around. Sometimes we’d paint the floor Day-Glo colors and stuff. We didn’t play music there, because of his neighbors, but he showed us all his tricks—his electronic wizardry and stuff. So, immediately we got enthused about getting involved with him somehow and bringing him into the Grateful Dead fold. He became our first soundman but, more than that, he also started financing the band, once his acid sales took off. Once he earned the nickname: “Alice D. Millionaire.” Get it?
While studying chemistry at Berkeley, Owsley met Melissa, one of the great loves of his life. Great lady. She was a chemistry student and she and Owsley took classes together. He didn’t give a shit about most of it, because he already knew what he wanted. He just needed a lab. So he went in there and at first he made speed, and then he made acid. Nobody knew what he was doing, of course. But he did.
Meanwhile, Ken Kesey got turned on to acid by volunteering for CIA-financed psychedelic experiments at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Palo Alto. He volunteered to be one of the guinea pigs, and after so many trips, the doctor asked, “How are you feeling, Ken?” He replied, “I don’t feel anything this time, Doc,” as he watched the doctor’s face turn into something from a science-fiction film yet to be made. “Nothin’.” He went outside, high as a motherfucker, and said, “This is so much better.” That was the last time he ever took acid at the hospital.
So, the Acid Tests started out fueled by Sandoz product and then Owsley’s acid came in and took over. Owsley had a way of doing that with everything. He even took over the band for a while. He was our medicine man, our soundman, and our patron saint … but at a cost.
The first time I remember meeting Owsley was at an Acid Test at Longshoreman’s Hall, which is this weird, far-out building down in San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf neighborhood. Down by the docks of the city. This wasn’t just an Acid Test though—this was a weekend-long psychedelic convention billed as the Trips Festival. A newly formed Big Brother and the Holding Company also performed at this one. Before we played, we went across the street to a friend’s apartment—I don’t remember who—and they had white caps that they said had acid in them. It didn’t look like anything from Sandoz. They said, “No, this is new Owsley. This is what you want.” The whole band, except Pigpen, dropped a white capsule of acid that night and got really high and had a great Acid Test.
That’s the same night that Kesey came up to us and said, “You guys are going to be more famous than you realize, not just here in San Francisco.” He saw that there was something going on here, even if Mr. Jones didn’t know what it was, just yet. Kesey was wearing a spacesuit with a mirrored helmet. It was a disguise because he was running from the law. Back on his property in La Honda, he had been set up and busted with less than an ounce of weed. It was supposed to be some kind of slap on the wrist, so that they could make an example out of him, but Kesey called bullshit and went on the run. At the Trips Festival, there were a lot of people in costumes, so he wasn’t the only person incognito. Still, it was pretty outrageous. He was a fake spaceman but a real American hero.
Another Acid Test story, this one from Portland: Neal Cassady drove most of the gang up to Oregon in a rented U-Haul, in treacherous road conditions, after Furthur had broken down en route. Cowboy Neal was at the wheel but Sue Swanson and I had decided to fly up to Portland from San Francisco instead. We took acid before the flight and got really high while we were in the air. We were supposed to be picked up by somebody who we didn’t know and we sat in the Portland airport, PDX, for what seemed like hours, so high on acid that we couldn’t recognize faces or see straight or do anything useful. The person who was supposed to come get us was there the whole time. Finally he came up to us and asked, “Are you Bill and Sue?” He’d been waiting for us since we landed. We were just so completely high. The next night was the Acid Test.
The thing about acid is that it’s tricky to take two nights in a row. You have to double up on the dosage the second night if you want to get to the same level. And even then, you don’t always get there. That’s one of the many interesting things about that drug; there are a lot of interesting things about it. Anyway, I more than doubled up. I wanted to make sure we had a really great Acid Test. We played in a small, open-seated theater. It was more of an “Acid Test Show” than a fully realized Acid Test. Needless to say, we passed it. With flying colors.
3
“Music from the Pink House”
Throughout the thirty-year history of our band, people have always accused the Grateful Dead of trying to sabotage our own career. It seemed to outsiders, many times, like we just didn’t care about success. At least, not in the big Hollywood-superstar kind of way. But in February of ’66, we moved to Los Angeles because we wanted to make the big time and we thought that meant we had to be in L.A. for some reason. We learned a lot of lessons about all of that, but those three months also gave us an entire lifetime’s worth of adventure. Or, at least, a chapter’s worth.
I always found it funny that The Band had an album called Music from the Big Pink, named after a house they all shared in the mid-Hudson region of New York. Around the same time The Band lived at Big Pink, the Grateful Dead also lived in a big pink house, but in L.A. (The Band recorded some of the Pink Album in L.A., making a further connection.) We could’ve made a record called Music from the Pink House. Instead we just made memories.
Our version of the Big Pink was in the Watts district of Los Angeles, a black neighborhood that made headlines the previous summer when the Watts Riots broke out. Ignited by racial injustice on behalf of—who else—the local police, the weeklong riots killed a few dozen people, injured around 1,000, and resulted in more than 3,000 arrests. Later I would learn that Robert Hunter was one of the National Guardsmen who was called up for duty, to report to the scene. I wonder how effective he was in maintaining order.
All sense of order was lost, anyway, once we moved into the hood. But in a totally different sense. The Pranksters accompanied us on our journey south, with the ultimate goal of reuniting w
ith Kesey, who was at-large in Mexico. A fugitive. But before meeting up with him, the Pranksters took advantage of our southern migration by throwing a few Acid Tests in and around Los Angeles. In my mind, those Tests really exposed all the elements of why L.A. just wasn’t going to work for us.
The Doors were a good example of the Southern California scene. They wore that outfit well, what with the leather pants and the affected swagger and all. But the Grateful Dead were ambassadors from the north. We realized this soon enough. Learning what we weren’t helped us define what we were.
In the meantime, the most outrageous things happened at the Pink House. Owsley lived with us, which meant we took a lot of acid. We’d dose once a week, on Wednesdays. Always on Wednesdays. I don’t know why we chose that day in particular, and sometimes we’d do it more often—but getting high on acid every Wednesday was part of the ritual of the house.
That was one of the things I really liked about being in that Pink House, and about being in the Grateful Dead, period, during the early years: everybody had a sense of adventure. We were never satisfied with everyday occurrences. It took something weird to grab our attention, to deserve our attention—and once it got our attention, that was it. Then suddenly we could frame it in the living comic book that was our lives at the time, and put a punch line on it.
Watching stuff on TV just didn’t cut it. That was somebody else’s storyline. We were too busy living in ours. Playing music did the trick and we did that all the time. It was our number one occupation. But we needed extracurricular activities too, in order to feed the beast of inspiration. Whatever we did, part of the unspoken criteria was that it had to be far-out. It had to be an adventure. A good catalyst for that, a good motion-maker for this attitude of creativity, was to take LSD.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 5