What started off as just another afternoon at the Chateau d’Herouville transformed into our first French Acid Test. Magne invited the village people, while we set up near the swimming pool. We watched with wide eyes while we played, as colors and shapes melted into the countryside. That’s another “You had to be there” moment that you can now watch on YouTube. It may have been the best festival cancellation ever, and it was a lot more satisfying than being on a lineup with Black Sabbath. (Pink Floyd, Elton John, and Fleetwood Mac also recorded albums there after our unplanned visit.)
* * *
And then there was “Europe ’72.” A tour that saw us play twenty-two shows during a fifty-some-day journey. A tour in which we brought along all of our significant others, our entire crew and their significant others, and even some extraneous hanger-on types from our “Pleasure Crew.” The Grateful Dead paid for room and board for everyone. Everyone. It was high time in springtime, full of wild exploits in strange lands. The band played great and it was nothing but kicks from the very beginning to the very end. One big holiday.
We went to a number of different countries on that trip, including little-known Luxembourg. We paid return visits to England and France, but also hit Denmark, the Netherlands, and what was then known as West Germany for the first time. West Germany, in particular, became a problem for me. When it came to German policy, and the genocide that led to World War II, I didn’t like my German heritage very much. But most of the really exciting, notorious events of this tour happened in that country, and maybe that’s because we didn’t know what to do with the energy that we felt there, so we let it out in all these weird ways.
The tour kicked off in London, with a couple nights in Wembley. Not at the famous stadium—at the Empire Pool. But the pool was right next to the stadium and it wasn’t actually a pool. At least, not since the 1948 Summer Olympics. After those games, it was converted into a small arena. But even a “small arena,” for us, in 1972, during just our second visit to England, was a big deal. History and venue buffs take note: The building is now known as Wembley Arena. We played to about 8,000 people, each night.
We had two tour buses and we quickly formed psuedo-alliances based on which bus we were on. You were either one of the Bozos or one of the Bolos. I was on the bus where most of the seats faced backward. That meant I was a Bozo. Most of the band were Bozos. Just a bunch of clowns, really. Our crew clowned around too, but most of them were Bolos. Who knows what their deal was? Or I should say, who knows what their deal really was? Never ask a Bozo about a Bolo. General rule of thumb.
The entire tour became a continual running joke as we would try to put each other down for either being a Bozo or a Bolo and, like everything, we took it as far as we could. At one of the gigs, we went onstage wearing wigs and clown masks, perhaps to publicly declare ourselves a band of (mostly) Bozos. Or to spread the Bozo message to the world. It was outreach. It was also all just one big gag. For our own amusement, really.
Part of the whole Zen head trip was that it mattered tremendously which bus you were on but it also didn’t matter one bit because both buses were both things at all times. You were either on one or you were on the other. The Bozo bus and the Bolo bus had one thing in common—European bus drivers with really hard edges to them. They could cut right through traffic as if they were on mopeds, and they were skillfully gnarly on the road, zipping us from country to country. They made for great tour guides, too—they knew all the places to make piss calls and whatever else we needed to stop for. We knew nothing about Europe before this trip and I’m not sure that we really learned much of anything at all during it, either. We were too firmly entrenched in our own Bozo and Bolo culture to take in much of the culture surrounding us.
Most of the crew guys had switchblades that they picked up somewhere early on during the tour. That was a huge deal to us because switchblades were legal in these countries and you could buy them in most of the tourist shops. Want to witness a crew of tough guys transform into adolescent boys in an instant? Give them switchblades. It’s that easy. They were happy as kids on Christmas morning. But we took it to the next level, of course: As we rode along on the Bozo bus, they took to snorting cocaine off of these razor-sharp switchblades, while the bus careened around hairpin turns at breakneck speed. I’m amazed that nobody accidentally pierced their nose during those proceedings.
I was so into the music on that journey—and making sure that I could be in the moment within that music—that something came over me. I declared something that I can guarantee nobody expected to ever hear from me on that trip: “I don’t want any cocaine this tour.” And so I didn’t do any cocaine during that entire tour. If you listen to the drums from any of those shows, you’ll hear that I was rock steady, so I think that was a solid decision on my part. Because regardless of what that drug makes you think while you’re on it, the truth is, cocaine is just not a good drug to play music on. It doesn’t serve the music. It may be good for other things and I’ve had my fun with it. But musically, it usually hurts more than it helps.
I made that decision early on during Europe ’72, so to kind of balance it out, or as some kind of trade-off, I drank as much beer as I could. My partner-in-crime in that department was Sonny Heard—the loudest, most boisterous equipment guy in our midst. I’ve already told you a little about Heard, but he was really just a big redneck from Pendleton, Oregon. We would get piss drunk just about every night, after the show, and that was fun. Acid made the rounds, too, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
* * *
A lot of fun things happened on those buses. And off them. The crew wasn’t getting laid, but they all wanted to, of course. One of our roadies, Steve Parish, somehow knew the owner of a whorehouse at one of our stops in Germany, so off we went on an expedition. It was me, Parish, Heard, Ram Rod, and a friend of ours named Slade—a prominent force on the Pleasure Crew. I was the only band member on board; the crew sometimes had wilder adventures than the band and I didn’t want to miss out. I wasn’t disappointed.
We checked into our rooms at the whorehouse, but the chicks wanted us to wear rubbers, just to get head. We didn’t like that. We all went, “What the fuck?” We were from California; we didn’t wear rubbers. Especially not for blow jobs. That was crazy talk. Kids, take note that this was way before HIV or AIDS became a concern; sure, there were other STDs to be had, but it was a different time. Well, not in this whorehouse. Some of the other guys were experiencing other difficulties with their girls, like being misled into paying up-front for false promises. Even though we were in different rooms with different chicks, we almost all started yelling in unison. We could hear each other through the walls. We started yelling the proprietor’s name, Hans. Like, “We’re going to kill you, Hans, you motherfucker!”
We were wound-up rock ’n’ roll animals on the loose. We stormed out of the place and threatened to demolish the building as we left. We went into the bathrooms, turned over garbage cans, and lit the contents on fire. We punched holes in the walls. We yelled a lot of things. We were hauling ass down the stairs when Ram Rod saw this big fucking picture, a two-by-three-foot frame of this drop-dead gorgeous naked chick, and he instantly fell in love with her. So he grabbed the fucker off the wall and took it with us, right in the middle of our getaway attempt. He held it tight, under his arm, as we ran full speed down the street, doing our best not to cause any attention. We began to hear those European sirens going off. The proprietor called the authorities immediately, of course. Later we learned that he accused us of threatening the girls with our switchblades. That was rubbish, of course, but it would be their word against ours and we didn’t want to have it out like that.
As we were leaving, a group of Japanese business men, in suits, with cameras around their necks, were all on their way in. We shoved past them, knocking one or two to the floor, on our way out the door.
We hauled ass down the street and suddenly we saw a taxicab about a block away. The cabdriver saw us, jump
ed out of the car, opened his trunk just in time to take the picture from Ram Rod and slam it in there. “Get in the car right now!” he yelled. He was American. We lucked out. Our American cabdriver drove us away just as the cops came screaming by us with those blue lights on. We got away by a matter of moments. Naturally, Parish heard back from Hans later on that night. He wasn’t too happy. What really upset him, I think, was that the other johns freaked out after we flipped out. They dipped out in the middle of the chaos. The other thing was that as soon as the police showed up, they started arresting the Japanese business guys … for inciting a riot.
I was already in trouble with Susila, as far as mingling with other girls went, because of something that happened after the second night of the tour. At the Empire Pool. A woman named Christine Keeler was in the audience. I didn’t know it at the time, but later I learned that she was responsible for taking down England’s Conservative government back in 1963, because of a scandal known as the Profumo Affair. She had been fucking the British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo; she was also fucking both a Russian spy and some hotshot drug dealer during the same time period. It was that last one, the drug dealer, who fucked it up for Profumo, when he got busted for shooting a gun aimed at Keeler’s front door. I’m not sure what instigated that, but after that incident, Keeler’s personal life became public knowledge. Her affair with Profumo came to light. He was forced to resign.
When Keeler strolled backstage at our Empire Pool gig, nine years after the scandal, she was dressed in a short red dress that was tight as hell. Obviously looking for another scandal. It would’ve been impossible not to notice her. There was an instant attraction between us and even though Susila was there, I did something that was very rare for me—I got her phone number. I used it to call her and we made plans to meet up at her place, later that night. I left Sue back at the hotel and headed over. There were a couple cars parked outside; authority types, in suits, that looked like they were on some kind of a stakeout. “Get in here, quick,” she said. So I did.
I went over there with Kidd Candelario, an indispensable member of the crew and my wingman for the night. He hooked up with her hot friend and I went off with Christine. Well, I can tell you that I made a mistake. I was dismally disappointed. When she took off that hot red dress, she insisted on hiding under the sheets. I became suspicious. I was a hippie musician from San Francisco, used to natural women with soft, lovely breasts that they weren’t ashamed of. Christine had giant, fake boobs that were as hard as coconuts. They just weren’t very pleasant. Or sexy. I didn’t even get off that night. I couldn’t—her body looked a lot different adorned in that red dress. I should’ve left the rest to my imagination because my imagination, at least, had it right.
Meanwhile, Kidd got the better end of the deal with Christine’s friend, or assistant, or whoever that other girl was. It was a disaster for me, on all fronts: I got back to the hotel and, naturally, Susila was more than a little pissed off at me. And that was just the beginning of the tour.
Most of the other incidents didn’t involve girls, necessarily, but were still about boys behaving badly. The landscape in Bremen, Germany, looked like a scene from a postapocalyptic horror film. Under Nazi rule, Bremen was the site of a concentration camp. During World War II, both U.S. and British air forces bombed a number of targets there and British troops eventually captured the city. That happened more than a quarter century before we arrived, but the memory was still there—on both sides. As was the destruction; the aftermath of war.
We were there to play just a song or two for a television show called the Beat Club, but we decided to play a full set for the cameras, and we also decided to take acid for it. We took something else too; I don’t recall the specifics, all I know is that it got us unbelievably high. Our hotel that night was in an old classic building and I’m guessing that maybe they had to rebuild or repair some of it after the bombings. After the show, we were in one of those collective moods where we were all just fucking around, jacked with the same kind of energy we had the night of the McGovern hotel scandal.
For some reason, for me, that translated into punching a mirror in the elevator on the way to my room. Well, that wasn’t a very good thing to do. The mirror was an old antique. It survived the bombings … but not Bill Kreutzmann bombed on acid. The hotel was really pissed at us for that one. To get even with us, they managed to steal one of our acoustic guitars. It was some kind of trade for the broken mirror. They didn’t break it or anything—they just took it. This was before eBay, otherwise it may have shown up in some rich hobbyist’s garage studio.
At another point, back in my room, I was thinking about crawling through my window because it opened out onto a roof. I looked outside at just the right moment to catch sight of a telephone falling through the air and crashing right outside my window. That was our doing, as well. Our sound guy, Dan Healy, was a couple flights up and couldn’t get the hotel phone to work, so he ripped it out of the wall and threw it out his window. We never really did the cliché-rock-star thing of tossing TV sets out of windows; we mostly just stuck to tossing out bad ideas, drugs, and the occasional telephone instead. Oh, sure, we kicked a few hotel televisions around in our day, but I don’t think any of them learned how to fly. For one thing, a telephone is much lighter and easier to chuck than a TV set. So is ice cream, as we were about to find out.
When we were in Paris, a French revolutionary type harassed us because he wanted free tickets. He must’ve heard accounts of Woodstock or Festival Express and surmised that demanding free tickets was a very hip, very revolutionary, very rebellious thing to do. And attainable too. Except, not for him. He was on the sidewalk in front of our hotel, and instead of granting him his wish, someone in our crew dumped ice cream out of their hotel window, right onto the kid. It ruined his day … and his fancy jacket.
The next morning, however, when we left for our gig in Lille—about 140 miles up the road—we discovered, through empirical evidence, that the little fucker had filled the gas tank of our equipment truck with something that was … not fuel. We looked into every available solution but, all told, we weren’t able to get our gear up to Lille on time, so we weren’t able to play the gig. I stayed back at the hotel with Jerry, Pigpen, Keith, and Donna. Meanwhile, Phil and Bobby were our ambassadors. Florence, Phil’s girl, was fluid in French and went with them as our translator. They headed over to the venue to inform the promoter and break it to the crowd (with the sworn promise that we’d be back and make it up to them).
If only it were that simple. The crowd didn’t like that announcement one bit and they turned on Bobby, Phil, and Florence, who retreated backstage and then were forced to make a dramatic escape through the window of the second-story dressing room, climbing down a drainage pipe and jumping onto an escape vehicle in the nick of time. Meanwhile, I’m sure I was relaxed and enjoying the casual downtime back at the hotel.
We did make up that Lille date and it turned out to be a free show, so that little rebel fuck-face got his wish after all. Although I doubt he got a chance to enjoy it. Like most of our free shows, it was all done in stealth mode. Nobody knew about it until it was already happening. This was before social media, so … it was “catch us if you can.” It was a cold and overcast day and the stage wasn’t sheltered. There was a little bit of rain but it was certainly psychedelic.
That make-up gig in Lille is something I call an “endurance gig” because, fun as it was, I had something else on my mind the entire time. As a hobby, Phil and I had been casually getting into car races. Since we were already in France, we decided to spend some free time catching the big Formula One race in Monaco—the famed Monaco Grand Prix.
Our friend Sam Cutler, who, if you remember, we snatched from the Rolling Stones after Altamont, was our tour manager for Europe ’72. Cutler had a rental car, which Phil and I commandeered as soon as we finished the afternoon show at Lille. Phil, Florence, Susila, and I all jumped in the car. My seat came with a steering wh
eel. So I drove like hell through Paris, at breakneck speeds, so that we could make our flight. It was getting down to the wire but we were zigging and zagging our way to the airport, and we weren’t talking much, because we were all really high on acid. So we communicated without having to say a lot out loud. Phil was a backseat navigator; a human GPS. He’d just say, “Next street, left” and BAM—we’d careen off to the left. “Next street, right.” He’d give me just enough lead time to figure it out. But I also had to beat all the Parisian drivers, who are famous for keeping tourists locked in an eternal roundabout around the Arc de Triomphe. There was none of that for us. We beat every car around every turn with needlepoint precision, a testament to time spent with Neal Cassady, perhaps, and also a testament to LSD superpowers. We didn’t jump out of university buildings thinking we could fly. But we did get to Orly Airport just in time to hop on a plane that could. We didn’t have time to return the car to the rental agency or any of that tedious crap, so we left it right there in the parking lot. I called that audible as we pulled into a space. “Okay, everybody, we have to make one little error—we have to abandon the car here and get the fuck out of Dodge,” I said. “Maybe we’ll own a Ford Cortina after this.”
For some reason, though, I reached under the driver’s seat and, holy shit—I found a package under there. And, holy shit—it had a big bag of cocaine and another big bag of hash in it. This was during a more innocent time of air travel where going through security wasn’t quite as intimidating as it is these days, but still—I didn’t plan on getting busted for drug smuggling, especially when they weren’t even my drugs. But if we left them in the car, we would’ve almost certainly gotten busted that way. Someone would’ve found it. So I thought, “Well, fuck. We have to take this with us. And it’s not even mine, damn it.” Also, I wasn’t too happy about the idea that I had just sped recklessly through all of Paris—on acid—with a large stash of illegal drugs beneath my seat. That could’ve been serious.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 19