A Long Strange Trip (22 page)

One further effort to translate the progressive mood of the summer in San Francisco came from the Mime Troupe’s Ronnie Davis, who established the Artist’s Liberation Front, a loose collective of artists in all sorts of media whose goal would be a free outdoor trips festival. Naturally, the ALF turned to the musicians for a benefit, and on July 17 the Dead, the Airplane, and Sopwith Camel played the Fillmore, capping the evening with a “Midnight Hour” that included Marty Balin, Pigpen, Joan Baez, and Mimi Fariña trading vocals. The ALF would not accomplish much, but it planted a seed in various minds. “Free” was a very powerful idea.

Back home at Olompali, the Dead’s lease on paradise came to an end. Brenda Kreutzmann would recall that people in Novato were “having a fit” at the idea of hippies occupying a historic landmark. Then and after, there were two Marin Counties. Eastern Marin was known as a cluster of generally wealthy suburbs near San Francisco such as Sausalito, Tiburon, Belvedere, Mill Valley, and Ross, along with the more middle-class towns of San Rafael and Novato somewhat to the north. But to the west, past the bohemian town of Fairfax and over White’s Hill, along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, it was rather too far for the average commuter to settle. Western Marin was mostly dairy country, and through Woodacre, Forest Knolls, and Lagunitas to the coast and north to Olema, Point Reyes, and Marshall, it became the promised land for hippies. That summer of 1966, bands led the way. Late in June the Dead left Olompali and resettled at a former Girl Scout camp on Arroyo Road, in the town of Lagunitas.

Farther up the highway, Quicksilver Messenger Service—sometimes called, said Girl Freiberg, the “good-looking Grateful Dead”—had acquired a ranch in Olema. Big Brother and the Holding Company lived five minutes away from the Dead in Lagunitas, and they became particularly friendly. Not only did Big Brother’s bassist, Peter Albin, go back to the Boar’s Head days in Garcia and Pig’s circle of friendship, but they’d added a new lead singer, Jorma’s buddy Janis Joplin. She’d performed her first show with Big Brother on June 24 and had settled in with the band. That summer she also had a hot romance going with Pigpen. He introduced her to Southern Comfort, a whiskey-based cordial, and they’d sit and play guitars and the piano in the camp dining hall, where the Dead’s equipment was set up. At some point they’d be loaded enough to retire to bed and noisily consort with each other, in between restorative breaks in the swimming pool.

The atmosphere at the Lagunitas camp reminded many of Middle Earth, the world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s hobbits. A creek ran through the property, which was carpeted with redwood trees; it was lovely. Phil and Florence drew the basement room at the main house, Rock and Tangerine had part of the bunkhouse, and Rifkin lived in the former arts and crafts shack, which had only three walls and was open to the air. The one complication to life on Arroyo Road was their next-door neighbor, the county sheriff, so the main house rule, said Lesh, involved never hollering “ ‘dope,’ ‘fuck,’ or the names of young girls.”

Business, in the form of Local 6, American Federation of Musicians, intruded on their life that summer. The local was hassling Bill Graham about his hiring policies, requiring him to retain a quantity of Local 6 members to balance the out-of-town, frequently English, bands that headlined. The local also insisted that Graham pay the acts through the union on the previous Wednesday. It would then subtract fees and pay the designated leaders of the band by check the following Wednesday. Since hardly anyone had a bank account, this presented problems. Quicksilver’s John Cipollina and Garcia joined a group of bandleaders in a visit to the Local 6 offices one day, and their protest developed an amusing quality. There was a glassed-in meeting room in the center of the office, and when the board looked up and saw Cipollina, Garcia, and company filling up the main room, it seemed as though the barbarians had breached the outer defenses. There were more than a dozen young longhairs, and they were, as Cipollina put it, “cocky.” The members of the board sat tight in their glass cocoon, with no intention of ending their meeting. At length, John and Jerry began an “Oh yeah?” mock argument, partly to amuse themselves and the other guys, partly to send shivers up the spines of the union bureaucrats hiding so nakedly behind glass. The mock argument escalated.

“My band says your band eats shit,” said Cipollina.

“Oh yeah?” And then Garcia had a sweet inspiration. The Dead lived in a camp in the woods with an archery range, arts and crafts room, and so forth, and Danny Rifkin was not alone among them in his interest in Native American crafts. By contrast, the members of Quicksilver lived on a horse ranch and had taken to wearing cowboy hats. So Garcia segued into a whole new riff. “Indians are better than cowboys.” After a suitable period, the bandleaders left for the day.

Eventually, Local 6 was approached by Ron Polte, Quicksilver’s manager and a former union guy from Chicago, and Julius Karpen, ex-Prankster, manager of Big Brother, and a former union business agent, who convinced them to loosen up. But on the day of the barbarian invasion, the leaders left with the cowboy-Indian riff as the highlight, at least to John and Jerry. At home, they told their bandmates the story, and each resolved to “get” the other band. Quicksilver had been nicknamed the Quicksilver Consumer Service for their massive ingestion of pot, and after supper, they were vulnerable. Members of the Dead dressed up in feathers and variations on war paint—Garcia painted “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” across his face—picked up bows and arrows, and snuck up on the Quicksilver ranch house. Accompanied by popping firecrackers, they burst in and found the cowboys with their metaphorical pants down. Quicksilver offered a swift and honorable surrender, and everyone sat down to smoke the peace pipe.

Of course, Quicksilver couldn’t take this lying down, and they plotted revenge. The Dead were playing that week at the Fillmore with Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver conspired with Graham to prank the Indians. While the Dead played, Quicksilver would go onstage dressed as cowboys, their faces covered with bandanas, stick up the Dead, tie them to their amps, play Hank Williams’s “Kaw-Liga Was a Wooden Indian,” and leave. They began rehearsing “Kaw-Liga’’ with special enthusiasm. On the appointed evening, Quicksilver gathered outside the Fillmore. They went to the door, but Graham hissed at them that it was too early, and to wait, so they returned to their van to get stoned. Unbeknownst to them, what was commonly called the “long hot summer” of racial unrest of 1966 had reached San Francisco, and a fairly small but nonetheless real race-based riot had begun in the Fillmore neighborhood in response to the police shooting of a young black man. People living near the Fillmore Auditorium observed white men with rifles getting out of a car, and called police. The members of Quicksilver were enjoying themselves when a gun poked into the front door of the van. Freiberg said, “Aaah, come on, you guys,” then looked again and realized that it was a very real .357 Magnum. “And all we had was cap pistols.” Poor Quicksilver. Arrested for the pot, they went off to jail and never got their revenge.

After their thin economic pickings in L.A., the Dead enjoyed a busy and relatively prosperous time that summer. There were gigs on most weekends, at either the Fillmore or the Avalon, or somewhere within reasonable commute. Unable to rehearse in Lagunitas for noise reasons, they found space first at the Straight Theater in San Francisco. When that fell apart, Jerry’s old friend Laird Grant, now their roadie, found them a spot at the Heliport, a warehouse area in the houseboat district of Sausalito. That summer they also had their first recording experience, with a man named Gene Estribou, who had built a studio in his home at 737 Buena Vista West, a few blocks from the Dead’s office at 710 Ashbury. Estribou’s building was spectacular. It had been built in 1897, and in the course of its history, Ambrose Bierce had lived there and Jack London had written
White Fang
on the premises. Unfortunately, the studio was on the fifth floor, and most of Weir’s memories of the session centered on hauling the lead sled up four flights of stairs. To Lesh, Estribou seemed to be a wealthy “dilettante” who wanted to break into the business, but the session was at least an opportunity to get something on tape. They recorded the old jug songs “Don’t Ease Me In” and “Stealin’,” and other songs, including a Pigpen number called “Tastebud,” and one by Lesh called “Cardboard Cowboy.” The first two were duly released as a 45 rpm single on Scorpio Records that August. Garcia later guessed that not more than 150 copies were pressed, and since they were sold only on Haight Street, primarily at the Psychedelic Shop, the record made little impression.

That summer they left the Bay Area for their first out-of-town shows, and their trip swiftly went sour. They began in late July with three shows at the British Columbia Festival, at the rather large Pacific National Exhibition Garden Auditorium, in Vancouver. On their way up they lost their crew member Laird, who was turned away at the border because he had an arrest record. Then the Dead made the fundamental mistake of forgetting that they had a show to do. That afternoon they’d all gone to the coast to take LSD, and at some time late in the day they all came to the adrenaline-surging realization that showtime was only an hour away. They stuffed themselves into the one car available, but the overloaded vehicle blew its clutch and it took a lot of angst to find cabs and get to work. When they got to the gig, Garcia recalled, they were told they could play only one set a night and “got screwed around one way or another.” He found the stage to be so inordinately high that he insisted their equipment be moved back so they could avoid the edge. Members of the audience were trying to climb up the front of the stage, and in sufficient numbers to shake it. Nothing sounded right that night, and their patience with Owsley dwindled. After the festival dates, they spent several days in a motel with no money, playing Monopoly and bemoaning their lack of marijuana, and on the next weekend played a couple of nights at a small club called the Afterthought, which, while fun, did not make up for the generally miserable week.

They straggled back to Lagunitas and convened a meeting. Bear had not been quite so potent a figure in their lives since they’d gotten to Olompali, where he’d had a room but still lived in Berkeley. Their tolerance for the delays endemic to his sound experiments had run out. Bear himself was tired of being broke and wanted to return to his other art. Besides, since he’d joined the Dead, the whole Bay Area scene was experiencing a drought in the psychedelic realm, so it was time for him to go back to work. Tim Scully later attributed the change in the band’s relationship with himself and Bear to the impending criminalization of LSD, set to take place in October, but neither Bear nor anyone else remembered it that way. Bear told the band, “Fine. Tell you what. Go to Leo’s [music store], pick out whatever you want, and send me the bill.” He took back his system and sold it to Bill Graham for the Fillmore, where as a permanent installation it worked much better. Bear went off to his laboratory, but left behind a legacy, one of alchemical “purification” in whatever one might do, “a really solid consciousness,” Garcia said, “of what quality was.”

Shortly after Bear’s departure, the band played at the Fillmore, and Phil Lesh’s amp went on the fritz. In one of the lovely moments of serendipity that always carried the Dead, they looked up from the amp and found in the audience one Dan Healy, a friend of John Cipollina’s who worked at a radio station and was able to solve the problem. Later that night he remarked that he’d not been able to hear the vocals, and was instantly invited to do better. Blessed with a consummate pragmatic troubleshooter’s gift, Healy could, in fact, do better. A self-described “Gyro Gearloose kid,” he was an ugly duckling growing up in the town of Weott, on the Eel River in Northern California. His father was a jukebox, vending machine, and slot machine operator, so Dan had plenty of access to records. His mother had been a big-band stride pianist, and he inherited a subtle ear from her. After a flood during his childhood, he found a Web-cor tape recorder and radio parts in the debris, and created his own low-power radio station. Graduating from high school in 1963, he got a job at Commercial Recorders, a jingle/advertising business studio in San Francisco. As he got to know the Dead, he would sneak them into the studio for late-night off-the-books recording sessions. Challenged by the band to improve their live sound, he went to McCune Audio, the primary local source of equipment, rented a bunch of stuff, blew it up, and rented some more. Eventually, he forced McCune to go to the manufacturers for better equipment. On an ascending scale of sophistication, he would do this off and on for the next three decades. He would be essential to the Dead for a very long time.

With their more conventional and functional new equipment and a new soundman in Healy, the Dead went to work, taking any gig, as a young band must. But often their jobs seemed to be more fun than the average young band’s. Late in August they played two nights at the Grange Hall in the coastal village of Pescadero, thirty miles south of San Francisco, as part of the Tour del Mar three-day bicycle race. The pre-race/concert hype was also fun, since it involved the band and some
Playboy
bunnies riding around the San Francisco Civic Center in convertibles. The female members of the Dead’s scene, like Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner, were excluded by the band, which was not popular. At the end of the car ride, the band and bunnies were delivered to City Hall, where they were to meet the mayor. He sent an assistant, who came out to encounter Phil Lesh. In his best Prussian manner, Lesh clicked his Beatle boot heels, offered his hand, and said, “People are starving.” What the Dead would remember of the shows themselves was that Pescadero was simply carpeted in strawflowers, and it was vividly beautiful. One of the people they met at the show was Gary Fisher, who would later invent the mountain bike.

Their next gig, on September 2, was a debutante party at La Dolphine, in the exceedingly wealthy neighborhood of Hillsborough. Garcia would recall being treated as though he was “unclean.” Lesh said it was “boring . . . we weren’t allowed to fraternize with the natives.” Naturally, Weir’s sister, Wendy, who’d arranged the booking, managed to catch Phil smoking a joint in the backyard. A much better gig was one of the endless benefits they played that year, this time for the Both/And jazz club, which Ralph Gleason called “the most successful show since Bill Graham has been operating.” Unannounced and on borrowed equipment, they joined a lineup that featured Jon Hendricks, Elvin Jones, Joe Henderson, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Great Society among others. As Darby Slick remembered it, the Society delivered a truly great performance that night, but afterward his brother Jerry told him that Grace had been invited to join the Airplane, and Jerry had advised her to do so. Darby would feel betrayed for many years.