A Long Strange Trip (13 page)

By the second gig, on May 12, the joint was packed, and the response was fabulous. Hunter, for one, thought the show was “wonderful.” They were a basic cover band, playing Chuck Berry, “Stealin’,” Dylan’s “Baby Blue,” “King Bee,” “Walkin’ the Dog,” “Wooly Bully,” and other hits. Afterward there was the usual party, and Jerry and Phil Lesh, who’d arrived late and missed the gig, went out to Weir’s friend’s car to get stoned. It was a slightly nervous situation, since Weir was not only underage but incapable of dissimulation. But pot was pot, and this baggie came from a special source, a friend of Weir’s having purchased it from the legendary Neal Cassady, “Dean Moriarity” of Kerouac’s
On the Road.
This was an exceptional pedigree, and they all appreciated it.

Lesh remarked casually that he might take up bass, but it was only an idle remark. He’d pretty well left the music world as a participant by now, but
A Hard Day’s Night
had made him a rock music fan, and he took a transistor radio along with him in his post office truck. When he heard Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on the Top 40 station KFRC, he was so startled that he pulled over and forgot about his route for a while. He’d grown his hair out, and someone complained in a letter to his boss that he looked like an “unkempt monkey,” a compliment he of course thoroughly cherished. Although he cut his hair once, it was still too long, and he was ordered to do so again. Enough—he began collecting unemployment. On May 14 he joined some of the hipper people in San Francisco, including many of the Beat poets and the people who would create at least three significant new bands in the next few months, at the Rolling Stones’ concert at the Civic Auditorium. It was a seminal event, thought poet David Meltzer: “We are witness to the emergence of a song-culture.” The show was in a fifties-style format, with many bands, including the Byrds, doing three or four songs each. Despite the trite structure, when it was over, many of those hip young people left the show by snake-dancing down the aisle.

On May 27 Phil and his friends Hank Harrison and Bobby and Jane Petersen took some acid and went down to Menlo Park to see what Jerry’s band could do. Hunter was also there, as were Bonnie and David Parker. His imagination seized by Pigpen’s harmonica on “Little Red Rooster,” Lesh began to dance, and was told by the pizza parlor management to stop. Kreutzmann would recall his long blond hair shaking away, and the ensuing argument. Weir knew that Garcia had plans for his old friend. The bass player, Dana Morgan, wasn’t really a musician, and he couldn’t make weekend gigs because of a National Guard obligation. Moreover, his wife didn’t particularly care for the other Warlocks. Consequently, after the first set Garcia pulled Lesh into a booth, put a beer in his hand, and told him, “Listen, man, you’re gonna play bass in my band.” It was a statement, not a question or invitation. “I was so excited,” Lesh said, “that I didn’t have to think about it . . . but I knew something great was happening, something bigger than everybody, bigger than me for sure.” Afterward they went over to Garcia’s home, where Bobby Petersen told Garcia that they’d all taken LSD. “Gee,” Jerry replied, “if I’d known you were doing acid, I’d have taken you on a better trip . . . I could never play doing acid.” It would be a while before he’d be confident enough to get high and play, and the first time was accidental.

Lesh went back to San Francisco, where his girlfriend, Ruth Pahkala, bought him his first bass, an inexpensive Gibson, with a “neck like a telephone pole,” he thought. “Kinda like a flashlight.” He demanded a lesson from Garcia, who said, “See those bottom four strings on my guitar? They’re tuned just like the bass, only an octave higher.”

“Yeah, I know that already, Jerry.”

“Well, didn’t you used to play the violin?”

“Sure.”

“Here you go, man.”

Later, Lesh would say that his first practice session lasted seven hours, and he could not sleep that night. He’d listened to and loved the great jazz bass players like Scott La Faro and Charlie Haden, but this instrument involved electricity, and that created something altogether special. His style was unique, because he had almost no electric role models and essentially made it up from scratch. On June 7 Laird Grant helped Phil move down to Palo Alto. As a way of acknowledging the significance of the moment, he injected the psychedelic drug DMT and found out, as he put it later, whom the joke was on. “Oh my God, here comes the invisible mind circus” was the day’s slogan, and he laughed all the way to Palo Alto. “It was perfect, too perfect,” Lesh thought some twenty years later. “There’s that core of perfection that runs through the whole thing, that thread, we’re still sliding along it.”

With Dana out of the band, Mr. Morgan Sr. “decided I just hated the noise they were making . . . I put them out in the carport, but they kept sneaking back in. Finally I got so tired of them I sold the instruments.” Jerry had to ask his mother for money to buy a guitar and amp, and they borrowed instruments from Swain’s and Guitars Unlimited. They rehearsed anywhere they could find, from Sue Swanson’s house to Lesh’s to wherever. But this was the kind of practice that was fun. Phil became the guy who would crawl through the window to wake up Pigpen, never a reliable soul that way, and they were off.

On June 18 they played their first show with Lesh, at a teen rock club in Hayward across San Francisco Bay called Frenchy’s. It was a fairly wobbly night. Their sound was “wooden,” thought Phil, “real stiff.” “Our most endearing quality was how rough and raunchy we were . . . noisy,” said Garcia.

It must have been rough. When they returned for the second night of their engagement, they found out they’d been replaced by an accordion and clarinet duo. They never did get paid for that first night.

8

A Very Loud Bar Band

(6/10/65–11/12/65)

The summer of 1965 was probably the best in history for listening to Top 40 rock. Two days before Lesh had seen them in San Francisco in May, the Rolling Stones had gone to a studio in Los Angeles to lay down what was Keith Richard’s first classic chromed buzz-saw chord progression, a perfect, murderous ode to adolescent frustration called “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” By late June and for the rest of the summer it was no. 1. It had displaced “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Dylan tune covered by the Byrds, the first of the American folk rock responses to the British Invasion. Smart enough to get ex-Beatles press agent Derek Taylor as a cohort, the Byrds were miles ahead of the Warlocks in ambition and sophistication, but they were also all former folkies turned on to rock by the Beatles, and Byrd David Crosby was part of the same Bay Area folk scene as Garcia.

The
live rock and roll moment of the summer took place in July, on a stage at Newport, Rhode Island. Bob Dylan’s
Bringing It All Back Home
had been a complex album with electric instruments, but this was something else. After his normal solo acoustic set, Dylan took to the stage of the Newport Folk Festival in late July with Mike Bloomfield on guitar, Harvey Brooks on bass, Al Kooper on organ, and Sam Lay on drums, all of them recruited and rehearsed that very afternoon. He plugged in his own electric guitar and proceeded to lay waste to the temple of folk with amplified versions of “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” The saintly Pete Seeger called for an ax, threatening to cut the power cables. Once the audience recovered from its shock, it booed. Dylan returned solo to sing what would, in time, become obvious: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” “Like a Rolling Stone” had been released as a single in June, had entered the charts the day before Newport, and would replace “Satisfaction” at no. 1 in September. The album
Highway 61 Revisited
would be released in early August. The future of rock had arrived.

Like most new bands just getting a start, the Warlocks were scuffling through a series of bar gigs. There was the Fireside Club in San Mateo, and Big Al’s Gas House and the Cinnamon A-Go-Go in Redwood City. The band celebrated Garcia’s twenty-third birthday on August 1 with a group LSD trip. Acid wasn’t Pigpen’s thing, and he declined. Kreutzmann was not yet ready. But Jerry, Phil, Bobby for the first time, and various others dropped, and then everyone went off to run around the hills, leaving Weir with his cheerleader girlfriend, who hadn’t taken any but wanted to watch. It was a telling moment for his future when the car zoomed back and his friends tossed him in the car, smiled at the cheerleader, shrugged apologetically, and took off. He ended the day with his buddies Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner in the hills above Palo Alto, gazing down at the twinkling lights as he intoned, “If I’ve had any major realizations, it’s that I want to be a musician.” Just as LSD separated Weir from his girlfriend, it brought Garcia to a new reality. “The whole world just went kablooey . . . my little attempt at having a straight life,” he told an interviewer, “was really a fiction.”

That August, the Garcia family moved into a communal house on Waverly Street in Palo Alto with David Nelson, Robert Hunter, Rick Shubb, and David and Bonnie Parker. Heather and Piro, the son of Hunter’s friend Chris, shared a room, and it all seemed to work well.

The same week, on August 4, the gang went up to San Francisco to see another band of folk veterans, the Lovin’ Spoonful, at Mother’s, advertised as the “world’s first psychedelic nightclub.” Painted by the Psychedelic Rangers of Big Sur in layers of plastic and fluorescent paint, the colors crawled across the walls, and “the bathrooms alone,” recalled the manager, “were just a trip, you know.” The Spoonful included John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky, New York folk veterans who tickled Sara by acknowledging Garcia as a respected musician. Their hit song “Do You Believe in Magic” was one of Lesh’s favorites, and became part of the Warlocks’ repertoire.

Culturally speaking, it was a busy and prophetic summer. On August 7, members of the Mime Troupe were arrested in San Francisco’s Lafayette Park for performing
Il Candelaio,
a bawdy commedia dell’arte piece, without a permit. On the same day, a considerable portion of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club met Ken Kesey and his friends, who’d come to be known as the Merry Pranksters, at Kesey’s house in La Honda. August 13 saw the debut of the
Berkeley Barb,
the first of the alternative “underground” weeklies, which covered political rallies, the Sexual Freedom League, the Hell’s Angels, and anything else weird enough to interest its publisher, Max Scherr. On August 11, the first major urban American riot in many years ripped through South-Central Los Angeles. Before it was over, the Watts riot would kill 33, injure 812, and cause 3,000 arrests and $175 million in damage. Robert Hunter was among the National Guardsmen called out to “keep order.” None of these events were isolated; all of them would have many consequences.

August 13 also witnessed the debut of yet another band, this time at a new club called the Matrix, on Fillmore Street in San Francisco’s Marina neighborhood. Marty Balin had been a printer, dancer, and artist, and a member of the Town Criers, a slick professional folk act. Then he saw the Beatles and began to assemble a rock band, often choosing members for inscrutable reasons. He encountered Paul Kantner at a folk club called the Drinking Gourd, and, based on Paul’s long hair and old cap, invited him to join. Somewhat later he saw a guitarist named Skip Spence auditioning for yet another group and divined that Spence would make a good drummer. Kantner called his old San Jose buddy Jerry, now Jorma, Kaukonen, but Jorma was still an acoustic blues purist, and declined. But hanging out with Kesey one day demonstrated to him that electricity could produce fascinating sounds, and he changed his mind. Later still, when they decided to replace the original bassist, he would put in a call to his old friend Jack Casady, a veteran of Washington, D.C., rhythm and blues bands, who happened not to have played bass in six months. “You better be able to play,” Jorma told him, “or I’m gonna kill you.” Jack lived. With vocalist Signe Toly Anderson, they were a band. Their search for a name would be involved. Utterly taken by Robert Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land,
Kantner wanted to call the band the Nest, but was overruled. Their friend Steve Talbott spoofed the entire name game and offered “Blind Lemon Thomas Jefferson Airplane.” Another friend cut it down, and the Jefferson Airplane took flight.

They had an invaluable ally. Bill Thompson was a copyboy at the
San
Francisco Chronicle
as well as a poet and a painter who’d gotten to know Balin, and had eventually come to share a house with him. Tipped by Thompson, Ralph Gleason, the
Chronicle
’s legendary jazz critic, presented himself at the Matrix on opening night. Gleason had always had an affection for rock, and his approval and support were gold. His piece “Jefferson Airplane—Sound and Style” appeared on August 15 and was the first public announcement of what would become the San Francisco music scene. As Gleason added a couple of days later, it was “entirely possible that this will be the new direction of contemporary American pop music.” He was right. And more than just music was emerging. On September 5, the
San Francisco Examiner
ran a piece called “A New Paradise for Beatniks,” about the Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood named after a street intersection, where writers, painters, musicians, civil rights workers, crusaders, homosexuals, and marijuana users had gathered. But these weren’t exactly beatniks. The paper called them “Hippies,” the first time the word, a derivation of “hipsters,” was applied to the San Francisco scene.

At the same time, six thousand miles east, another cultural pot was on a rolling boil. More stylistic and fashion-oriented than philosophical, Swinging London, as the media dubbed it, seemed to be the emergence of a hip, happening new generation of Londoners finally outgrowing the pinched legacy of World War II. It created a new aristocracy—of rock stars like the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who, fashion models like Jean Shrimpton, photographer David Bailey, designer Mary Quant, and actresses Julie Christie and Diana Rigg. Carnaby Street was style central, and the television show
The Avengers,
and especially the films
Blowup
and
Help!,
documented the mood. For the first time, youth-oriented styles began to have widespread artistic and commercial influence.

The Warlocks had found a home at a club halfway between Palo Alto and San Francisco in the town of Belmont. The In Room was a heavy-hitting divorcée’s pickup joint, the sort of swinging bar where real-estate salesmen chased stewardesses and single women got plenty of free drinks. Dark, with red and black as the color scheme, it was the kind of place that sold almost nothing but hard liquor. The Warlocks’ agent at this time, Al King, booked the headliners, like the Coasters, Jackie De Shannon, and Marvin Gaye. Managed by Donald Johnson, also known as Whitey North, and Dale O’Keefe, it was a hot room, with bouncers escorting the waitresses through the crowd. At first the Warlocks seemed a mistake, playing too loud and too strangely. As O’Keefe saw it, the band would be okay for the first two of their five fifty-minute sets, but by the third they’d be high, and by the fifth they’d be “barbaric.” But in some sort of mysterious transference, they began to develop their own audience, and held their own, avoiding the management of the bar, except for Larry, their favorite bartender. Each night they’d show up with their equipment stuffed into Kreutzmann’s Pontiac station wagon, set up, and get to work. One of the complications to their lives was that Kreutzmann and Weir were not only considerably but obviously underage. Bobby Petersen stole some draft cards that somehow passed muster, and the cops would look at the ID, chuckle, and warn them not to drink. O’Keefe swore that he did not pay off the cops, so such tolerance could only be ascribed to providence.

For six weeks the Warlocks worked six nights a week, five fiftyminute sets a night, earning $800 weekly at most, and began to learn how to be a band. They surely didn’t look like anyone’s idea of the sort of group that would keep the booze flowing and the action hot. The lead guitarist was bespectacled, round-faced, acne-scarred, and lank-haired. Though longhaired, the bass player looked as though he should have a slide rule in a holster, a plastic pocket protector, and twelve pens. The rhythm guitarist looked like a longhaired fourteen-year-old angelic choirboy. This left the drummer and the keyboard player. Ed McClanahan, one of Kesey’s Stanford friends, saw them around this time and thought that Kreutzmann “looked so young and innocent and fresh-faced that one’s first impulse was to wonder how he got his momma to let him stay out so late.” And then there was Pigpen, “the most marvelously ill-favored figure to grace a public platform since King Kong came down with stage fright . . . bearded and burly and barrel-chested, jowly and scowly and growly . . . long, Medusalike hair so greasy it might have been groomed with Valvoline . . . motorcyclist’s cap, iron-black boots . . . the gap between the top of his oily Levi’s and the bottom of his tattletale-gray T-shirt exposed a half-moon of distended beer belly as pale and befurred as a wedge of moldy jack cheese . . . But the ugly mother sure could
play
! . . . Verily, he was wondrous gross, was this Pigpen, yet such was the subtle alchemy of his art that the more he profaned love and beauty, the more his grossness rendered him beautiful.”

They began their run backing up Cornell Gunther and the Coasters, and for the first set their rhythm guitarist was a guy named Terry, who taught them the songs. It was not really necessary for Garcia, who loved the Coasters and knew the material. Weir took the slight in seeming good humor, watching Terry so closely that he not only learned the chords but absorbed unconsciously how to cue a band with the neck of his guitar as a baton. From then on, when he sang a song, he became the bandleader, a democratic development not common to most bands. “We knew Weir could cut it then,” said Lesh. “And after that it went much better, of course.”

As the weeks went on, things began to get . . . stranger. The word “weird” derives from
wyrd,
“controlled by fate,” and it was the Warlocks’ fate to incline in the direction of strangeness. They would spend the day romping about the Peninsula high on LSD, come down, and go to the In Room to smoke pot and play. The songs began to get “longer and weirder and louder,” Garcia said, and the early audience would run outside “clutching their ears.” The bartenders loved it and wanted it louder. Larry was a striking man, six foot four, with a glass eye he’d take out on the odd interesting occasion. As the sets mounted and it grew late, he would fill the drain on the inside of the bar with lighter fluid, touching it off at a good crescendo. “So then he was our man,” said Kreutzmann. One night there actually was a grease fire in the kitchen, and after everyone evacuated the bar, Kreutzmann ran back in to rescue his kit, they put out the conflagration, and the band returned for the last set.

A few years later, Phil Lesh would read a book by the distinguished science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon,
More Than Human,
that would portray for him exactly what happened at the In Room: the development of a gestalt, a rapport, a group mind. It was not a consequence of LSD. Whatever acid did for them later, their bond was first musical. Weir recalled playing on acid once at the In Room, but was quite sure he was alone that night. Lesh never did, and the one time that Garcia came in a little too high, he concluded that LSD and a bar atmosphere simply didn’t jibe.
More Than Human
describes a small group of people in a postapocalyptic setting, each member deeply flawed or damaged in some fashion. Baby is a mongoloid; two little black girls, Bonnie and Beanie, are tongue-tied; Lone is mentally damaged; Alicia is the emotionally distraught daughter of a sadist. As the novel progresses, they come together, blend and mesh. And in “bleshing,” as Sturgeon put it, they have “a part that fetches, a part that figures, a part that finds out, and a part that talks.” Weir learned the word “gestalt” that fall, and came to realize that the five of them were one hand with fifty fingers. One day during this time, he looked down at his hand during an acid trip and saw the claw of a dragon, in itself a symbol of a collective. It would be a year before he concluded that this was indeed a symbol of the same unity Lesh would later identify as bleshing. As for Garcia, being in the Warlocks was about commitment and liberation. “Surrendering your own little trip . . . [being] willing to stop caring about what you’ve already got . . . We just thought . . . why not?” At another time, he remarked, “Bluegrass music was formal . . . [this] music was not formal, not traditional, and when it got to that place and did that thing, it was something incredible. It took off.”