A Long Strange Trip (25 page)

Late in the year the Dead entered the world of national publicity. In November the respected music monthly
Crawdaddy!
reported in “San Francisco Bay Rock” that the Dead were “rapidly gaining prominence and ascending from their underground status to a position close to the Airplane.” Garcia’s leads were “exciting, sustained genius.” It also commended Bill “Sommers,” which had been the name on Kreutzmann’s phony draft card. Of the mainstream national press,
Newsweek
covered San Francisco best. Rick Hertzberg, a relatively young reporter in the local bureau, was attuned to what was happening in the Haight, and his enthusiasm yielded a December 19 article called “The Nitty Gritty Sound.” Music in San Francisco was “the newest adventure in rock ’n’ roll. It’s a raw, unpolished, freewheeling, vital and compelling sound. And it’s loud.” Although sprinkled with clichés regarding the light shows and dress—“bead necklaces, the high sign of LSD initiation”—the article was not only positive but less silly than most. The Dead, “second in popularity [to the Airplane] are blues oriented, and so far unrecorded. Their hard, hoarse, screeching sound is pure San Francisco . . . Mostly untrained, the top groups boast skilled and intuitive musicians in whom a depth of genuine feeling and expressive originality is unmistakable.”

The Dead family had much to give thanks for, and they celebrated Thanksgiving Day 1966 from the heart. They borrowed chairs and tables, opened the room dividers, and ran a table from the front door back to Pigpen’s room, seating forty to fifty people, including the Airplane, Quicksilver, the
Oracle
people, the Thelins, and many others. Kreutzmann’s friend John Warnecke brought two kilos of pot, and there was pot tea, pot cookies, and pot stuffing. Jack Casady, a highly dexterous roller, left a souvenir joint at each place setting. Lesh rose and toasted the moment: “These are the good old days.” It was a sign of the impending times, however, that one friend inappropriately brought along to the family gathering a photographer from
Paris-Match;
the stranger was politely asked to leave. The next night they enjoyed a second celebration at the Fillmore, where Bill Graham threw a bash for musicians, friends, and regulars. Appropriating a green onion as a sword, Pig fenced with a friend, and Jerry declared, “This is the bossest.” Afterward, the Dead played a set that Ralph Gleason lauded. They had achieved a particular kind of status within their world. They’d been a band for less than two years, yet there was an apartment at the corner of Stanyan and Alma in the Haight whose tenants sold buttons that read “Good Ol’ Grateful Dead.”

The musical year crested later in December, with one of the most incredible runs the Fillmore would ever see. Bill Graham didn’t listen to the radio, but he always listened to the musicians, and they were unanimous in telling him that he needed to book Otis Redding. For three nights, Otis and an eighteen-piece band held court, with the Dead opening one show. Each day, Janis Joplin would come in the afternoon to secure a central position in front of the stage. The Dead were there each night, rapt. Once Danny took some of Otis’s backup singers for a walk, and shocked them when he announced he was going to smoke a joint. In 1966 it was a long way, culturally, from Macon to San Francisco.

The year ended with what would become a tradition, a Bill Graham Presents New Year’s Eve concert, with the Airplane, Quicksilver, and the Dead. The new year’s baby, diaper and all, was Jim Haynie, Graham’s stage manager. Tripping happily, Haynie lay on a litter and pitched flowers to the audience as security guards hauled him up to the stage, where he danced long enough to lose the diaper. Haynie would keep the role for years, even after he left Graham’s employ. Country Joe and the Fish were at the Avalon that night, and when they were finished, they went over to the Fillmore to join in a memorable jam that included Garcia, Lesh, John Cipollina, and Barry Melton, the “Dead Silverfish.” At some point, Melton looked around at the light show screen, and sure enough, there was an image of a cartoon bug, its legs in the air.

The year 1967 was ushered in by
Time
with an article that chose people under twenty-five years of age as “Man of the Year.” Lieutenant Norbert “the Nark” Currie of the San Francisco narcotics squad noted that there had been 163 drug arrests in the Haight in 1966, double the previous year. On January 3 the
Chronicle
began a major series with a banner front-page headline, “Life with the Hippies.” The accompanying photo was captioned, “One stop on [a young hippie named] Diana’s route—dirt, crowded bedrooms, and more risks than you’d imagine.”
Life
reported on Francis Cardinal Spellman’s twenty-first annual Christmas visit to the troops, this time in Vietnam, where more than 200,000 were stationed; “Less than victory is unthinkable,” he intoned. On the tenth, Chester Anderson, a friend of the Diggers then working at
Ramparts
magazine, secured financing from some dope dealers and acquired a Gestetner 366 stencil machine to establish the Communications Company, or com/co. It would become a Haight Street–specific medium of information.

The Dead began the year by playing in the Panhandle with Big Brother for a New Year’s Day party that the Hell’s Angels were throwing for the Diggers. Two weeks before, the Diggers had sponsored a “Death of Money” event in which member Phyllis Wilner rode down Haight Street on the back of a motorcycle carrying a banner that read “Free.” The day ended with the arrest of Chocolate George, a Hell’s Angel, who was thereupon bailed out through the efforts of the Diggers. Now the Angels were saying thank you. Garcia would identify it as the day that the Angels adopted him and the Dead. Though the Angels certainly shared with the hippies a sense of alienation from the norm, their predisposition toward violence, their general suspicion of all non-Angels, and their political conservatism had always made for uneasy relationships with the hip community. During the fall 1965 Vietnam Day marches from Berkeley to the Oakland Naval Base, Angels had sided with police and beaten demonstrators. Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey had negotiated with them, and in the end the Angels had announced that they would not soil their hands with these un-American peaceniks. But the Dead’s personal gesture of playing for their party seemed to matter.

The park and Panhandle gatherings grew. Starting with the first October rally, various members of the community led by Allen Cohen and Michael Bowen had begun meeting at the
Oracle
office to plan an event that would assemble all of the various elements of the larger “freak” community of Northern California and beyond. The first stumbling point was politics. As Rock Scully put it, the suit-and-tie Berkeley politicos wanted a political platform and “kept busting into our meetings.” They wanted to rouse the rabble—“Rabble-rousing is their very raison d’être,” said Rock, while his and the Dead’s view was “Let’s make it fun, not misery. We’ve won already, we don’t have to confront them [the government and other prowar forces]. Why go on their trip? Why battle? Dissolve. Disappear. Let them be the ones looking for a fight.” Conversely, the politicals distrusted drugs and rock and roll as hedonistic and antirevolutionary, and truly despised the hippies’ lack of overt political sensibility. Perhaps they also resented the way that the hippies had stolen their thunder with the media. The meetings did not resolve any differences, except to allow Vietnam Day Committee activist Jerry Rubin three minutes on the stage at the big event. A second sticking point was the Diggers, who had become suspicious of almost everything. The greatly esteemed poet Gary Snyder interceded and convinced Peter Berg that a group celebration was called for. The organizers took the event’s name from Richard Alpert, who had chortled, on first observing a Panhandle rock show, “It’s a human be-in.”

Early in January the
Oracle
published a Stanley Mouse poster for “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In” featuring Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Michael McClure, Jerry Ruben [sic], Gary Snyder, and “All S.F. Rock Groups,” to take place Saturday afternoon, January 14, at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park. The central image was a picture of an (Asian) Indian holy man with a third eye. It would be “a union of love and activism previously separated by categorical dogma and label mongering . . . the joyful, face to face beginning of the new epoch.” Another poster, by Rick Griffin, depicted a Native American with a guitar. Otherwise, there was little publicity, except for a piece in the
Chronicle
and a few mentions on the radio.

The Be-In weekend was good and crazy for the Dead. They were booked for those three nights at the Fillmore with Chicago blues star Junior Wells and a new, as-yet-unknown band from Los Angeles, the Doors. On Friday afternoon the Dead got a call from Bill Graham, who also had the Mamas and the Papas playing at the Berkeley Community Theater, with Jose Feliciano booked to open. But Jose couldn’t make it, and Bill asked the Dead to rush over to Berkeley to fill in, which they did. Then to the Fillmore, where they listened to the Doors. Garcia was ordinarily a generous man and would almost never bad-mouth any musician who honestly tried, but Jim Morrison struck him as the embodiment of Los Angeles, which meant the triumph of style without substance. The Doors had no bassist and consequently sounded thin to him, and Morrison’s imitation of Mick Jagger did not impress him. Androgyny, Garcia thought, had been fulfilled by James Dean. Morrison would have considerably greater success with other audiences. The son of a U.S. Navy admiral, he was a raving antiauthoritarian who had been set on his path by Kerouac’s
On the Road,
Nietzsche, and Rimbaud, and formed the band after meeting keyboardist Ray Manzarek at the UCLA film school. Their name was taken from William Blake, by way of Aldous Huxley. Much of the Doors’ thinking was parallel to the Dead’s, but stylistically and emotionally they were oceans apart.

Saturday, January 14, had been identified as propitious by astrologer and eminent Haight citizen Ambrose Hollingsworth, and he was right. Early in the day, Danny Rifkin and Jay Thelin went to scout out the site at the Polo Field, and found the road to the berm, an earth wall that surrounded the field, chained shut. A little surgery with a bolt cutter, and the road was clear. As the Dead family walked from 710 to the park, it slowly dawned on them that more and more people were joining them, and everyone had a secret, stoned smile. As Charles Perry put it later, it was the “unique Be-In smile, at once conspiratorial, caressing, astonished, and beaming with stoned-out optimism . . . a giddy high. Except the puzzling thought: what were we doing here? Was this a political demonstration? A religious gathering? A party? . . . such a big unspoken secret we shared.” “My God,” thought Florence. “There’s so many of us.” The tribes had indeed gathered, and at least twenty thousand people were there. Garcia was blown away. “I’d never seen so many people in my life. It was really fantastic. I just didn’t believe it almost. It was a totally underground movement. It was all the people who were into dope of any sort.”

People settled down on the grass, gathering in little affinity groups, the Dead family here, a Big Sur tribe there. Bear ran around passing out tabs from his latest batch, which he had named “White Lightning” after the bolts on Rick Griffin’s Be-In poster, and the afternoon assumed a certain glow. At length, Gary Snyder picked up a conch shell and blew a long blast and the ceremony began, with bands and poets alternating.

Fairly early in the day, as Quicksilver played, the stage power was interrupted, the reasons unclear. The Angels took responsibility for guarding the lines, which kept them pleasantly occupied, and there was a half-hour pause. Later, Ron Polte decided that it was this half hour that really made the day, because the audience became the show, sharing fruit and smiles, bonding. It was “early Christianity without the lions,” thought Julius Karpen, and everyone caught the mood. When Julius had arrived at the Polo Field, he saw a lady approach one of the two mounted policemen on duty and say, “I’ve lost somebody, please help me go down in that crowd.” The cop replied, “I can’t go down in that crowd, lady. All those people are smoking grass.”

The crowd was not interested in gurus or politicians, and neither Leary nor Rubin got much attention. As he went on to speak, Rubin told Rifkin, “Now, pay attention. What I’m going to say is very important.” Garcia found his message at best laughable and at worst fascistic. “Like, all that campus confusion seemed laughable too. Why enter this closed society and make an effort to liberalize it when that’s never been its function? Why not just leave it and go somewhere else?” When Rubin began a standard antiwar harangue, “The words didn’t matter. It was that angry tone. It scared me, it made me sick to my stomach.” Timothy Leary’s rap was equally off-putting. Weir listened closely, “trying to get with it,” but he failed. Leary’s hierarchical and ritualistic inclinations were utterly in-congruent with the Dead’s democratic approach. Even Leary’s fans at the
Oracle
conceded that his talk that day simply didn’t fly. A week later the Dead would go down to Santa Barbara and open for a Leary lecture, and it would be a different matter. He brought with him Ralph Metzner’s elaborate slide show, which Rifkin would find “quite gorgeous.”

The Dead’s set at the Be-In got people up and dancing, so of course the band felt great. They played a folk tune they’d electrified called “Morning Dew,” “Viola Lee Blues,” and, with saxophonist Charles Lloyd sitting in on flute, “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl.” As they played, a parachutist drifted down and landed in the crowd. A toothless speed freak with a harmonica leaped onstage and sat in until Laird got there, but it was a very brief distraction. For the band, the best thing was that Dizzy Gillespie, there with Ralph Gleason, thought they were “swinging.”

“No fights. No drunks. No troubles. Two policemen on horseback and 20,000 people,” wrote Gleason. “The greatest non-specific mass meeting in years, perhaps ever.”

Allen Ginsberg chanted a mantra at sunset, and the crowd left the field spotless.

“My day was full,” said Rifkin on his way home.