A Long Strange Trip (27 page)

His refusal to be a leader in any verbal way was already established and clear. “We are trying to make music in such a way that it doesn’t have a message for anybody. We don’t have anything to tell anybody. We don’t want to change anybody. We just want to give people a chance to feel a little better . . . The music that we make together is something that’s an act of love and an act of joy, and we like it . . . If it says something, it says it in its own terms at the moment we’re playing it . . . we’re not telling people to get stoned, or to do something different, or to drop out . . . We started all of this [Haight-Ashbury scene] from nothing, just people moving in, and decided, ‘Let’s get a little bit friendly, and let’s get a little bit closer together, and let’s just see what we’re trying to do.’ And what we’re trying to do is live a good life and have things happen in a good way and not put anybody uptight.”

The interview came to a happy close. Jason McGee, the 710 adoptee, came in and demanded a dime, and Garcia dismissed him. Then from the front room came the sound of Rifkin on the phone, shouting, “Incredible! Too much!” Bear and Laird had cruised around the alleys near their rehearsal hall and found some street kids who’d led them to the truck. Their equipment was safe.

His conversation with Gleason stayed on music. Garcia remarked that they’d only been playing electric instruments for the two years the band had been together, so they were all novices. He thought of himself as a “student guitarist.” “I’d say that we’d stolen freely from everywhere! Remorselessly . . . and we have no bones about mixing our idioms . . . so you might hear some very straight traditional counterpoint, classical-style counterpoint popping up in the middle of some rowdy thing.” One of their newest compositions, “New Potato Caboose,” was especially interesting because it lacked the normal verse/chorus form. Such new approaches were in their immediate future.

The media interest and their new album led to three rich visual images. In connection with a
Look
article, the Dead were part of a gathering on the Panhandle that included the Airplane, Quicksilver, the Charlatans, and Big Brother, where Jim Marshall snapped a picture of all the bands together, the 1967 Haight-Ashbury music team. On a more amusing note, he also got Bill Graham and all the managers to line up, each with a hand in the next man’s pocket. Later in the year, Marshall took some formally posed pictures of the band, Lesh shoeless, Weir in white Kabuki makeup, for
Teen Set.
For his pains, the band dosed him with LSD, which only annoyed him until he was finished with the shoot. The Dead were also the subject of a more elaborate and abstract portrait. Bob Seidemann was a New York photographer who’d come to San Francisco and been brought over to 710 by his friend Mouse. A picture Seidemann had taken of Pigpen became a popular poster at Louis Rapaport’s Berkeley Bonaparte poster shop, so he came back with a second idea. They tried to shoot it, but it required standing in the street, and the police ran them off. Finally, Seidemann cajoled them all back to the location, a suburban Daly City block that perfectly represented Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes”—“and they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.” The sun was behind them, and a red filter darkened the sky. Each musician was therefore in black, except for a light on each face reflected by a mirror held by Seidemann’s helpers. They looked, thought Seidemann, like “mutant transplants from Jupiter, fresh out of their flying saucer.” It was the first metaphorical photograph of the band, and the poster sold like crazy.

On March 20 Warner Bros. threw an album release party at Fugazi Hall, a small club in North Beach. Hippies and businessmen met in a stereotypical clash of cultures; Joe Smith and his “chief speller,” Director of Creative Services Stan Cornyn, came wearing their natty blazers, “WR” (Warner Reprise) on the breast pocket, custom-made by Carroll & Company, Beverly Hills. The first thing Stan saw was a woman sitting on the floor swaying to music, her head wreathed in dry-ice vapors. The straights sat on one side drinking, the hippies on the other side smoking. The hippies would pass joints to Joe and Stan, who would politely return them unsmoked. A former disc jockey, Joe Smith would become a legendary speaker, but that night he fell into cliché. “I want to say what an honor it is for Warner Bros. Records to be able to introduce the Grateful Dead and its music to the world.” Blah blah blah blah. Garcia rose. “I want to say what an honor it is for the Grateful Dead to introduce Warner Bros. Records to the world.” It was the last time Stan would remember wearing the blazers.

From the time of the Be-In, it was obvious that the Haight-Ashbury was about to be inundated by pilgrims, certainly by summer and perhaps sooner. In January the Thelins, Tsvi Strauch, and some of the other Haight Street business owners had formed HIP (Haight Independent Proprietors), and in a conventional liberal way, were trying to pressure the police to be more friendly. They met with Chief of Police Tom Cahill, who observed, “You’re sort of the Love Generation, aren’t you?” The term stuck, but the police continued to grow ever more irritated with the problems of overpopulation. The city installed ugly yellow crime lights and made Haight Street one-way, and the police pursued a regular policy of rousting the young. On March 24 Mayor John F. Shelley asked the Board of Supervisors for an official declaration that the hippie migration was “unwelcome.” The board ignored him. On the twenty-fifth, City Health Director Ellis D. Sox (a name too good not to be true) announced a review of the Haight-Ashbury that claimed his forces had in one day visited 691 buildings and issued sixty-five notices, of which he said sixteen recipients might be presumed to be hippies. Since he had eight teams, this suggested that they were able to visit ninety buildings per day per team, or more than eleven buildings per hour. The hippies ignored him.

On March 24, an anonymous rock band played from a corner apartment at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury. A crowd gathered and the police moved in. Two hundred hippies, the
Chronicle
reported, then surrounded a paddy wagon, cutting the valve stems on the tires. Sixteen people were arrested, and by the end of the scuffle, there were fifty police, five paddy wagons, and two thousand people on the scene. March 26 was Easter Sunday, and the street was set for an encore. As people began to gather, Allen Cohen of the
Oracle
went to the supervising captain and said, “You don’t want to hurt anybody, man, it’s Easter Sunday. Let the people have the street.” “It’s an illegal rally, and we have to get them off the street.” Yet the captain was not itching for trouble. Cohen sent a messenger up to 710 and then got a bullhorn from the police. Mounting a police car, he announced to the growing crowd that the Dead were going to play in the Panhandle, and to go there, because after all, “It’s ridiculous to have more crucifixions on Easter Sunday.” Sure enough, the Dead came down Masonic Avenue waving, went down to the Panhandle, plugged in, and played. A week later they were not available, and 150 riot police arrested thirty-two hippies when they shut down the street simply by walking around.

Two moments involving the media enlivened the month of April. Early in the month, Jerry and Phil went off to promote the new album on radio station KMPX, but this was not the average radio station visit. In the middle 1960s the urban AM airwaves had begun to fill up, and the FCC decreed that FM stations generate original programming instead of repeating, or simulcasting, material from AM stations. Until then, FM had been virtually ignored, since few people owned FM receivers and the rare FM stations tended to be foreign-language or generally obscure. Tom Donahue fixed that. Early in 1967 he called every FM station in San Francisco until he found KMPX, which was so broke that its phone was disconnected. Donahue took over the evening slot, and subsequently the whole station. He gathered up friends, including a few languishing in jail, pooled their record collections, and basically started “underground FM” radio, one of the first creative adaptations of mass media in America. Just as the Haight was beginning to sink beneath a flood of overpopulation, some of its best aspects were magically available on the radio.

Garcia and Lesh visited Donahue only days after he’d taken over his air shift, and brought with them a selection of material that was singularly eclectic and indubitably hip: the Swan Silvertones, Charles Mingus’s “Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting,” Blind Willie Johnson, Ray Charles, James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and “Ain’t That a Groove,” Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic’s “The Moon Shines,” Charles Lloyd Quartet’s “Dream Weaver,” the second movement of Charles Ives’s Symphony no. 4 conducted by Leopold Stokowski, Ian and Sylvia, Skip James, Aretha Franklin, the Righteous Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, Lou Rawls, the Rolling Stones, and Otis Redding. Oh, and two cuts from their own new album. Albums were expensive, but if you had a radio, good, varied music was now free. KMPX became a part of people’s lives and an integral part of the community.

The whole band shared the next adventure, which was their first appearance in a movie. Petulia starred George C. Scott and Julie Christie in a romance set in San Francisco, but the real attraction, especially for cinephile Garcia, was director Richard Lester, of
A Hard Day’s Night
and
Help!
fame. It was a tremendous learning experience. Although it was a big-budget Hollywood film,
Petulia
was shot by Lester, a cameraman, a script girl, and a recordist. All sound was “wild,” or live, rather than re-recorded afterward. Their friends at the satirical troupe the Committee, who were also in the movie, had recommended them, and the shoot was a fine opportunity for good talk, even if the interminable delays of movie-making were a bore. Lester was funny and accessible, jamming with them on organ during one break.

What happened after the filming was quite extraordinary. In order to be in the movie, they had to join the Screen Actors Guild, and in order to join SAG, they were required to sign a loyalty oath. Danny Rifkin had prepared a rousing speech for why they shouldn’t sign, but he’d barely begun when the band unanimously agreed. Film fame was not worth hypocrisy. They’d already rejected the opportunity to work in the James Coburn film
The President’s Analyst
because ABC-Paramount would not give them creative control over their part. Just a month or two before, Otto Preminger had visited 710, ostensibly to discuss a film, only to be greeted by M.G., Sue, Connie, and Weir, armed with water balloons and firecrackers. Shouting what M.G. recalled as “vile epithets” on the subjects of mogulism and Hollywood, they sent the famous director scurrying back to his limousine. Weir wasn’t even sure who Preminger was, but he welcomed any opportunity to exercise his superior throwing arm. Having rejected the SAG loyalty oath, they assumed they’d land facedown on the cutting room floor. Remarkably, this did not happen. SAG’s board of trustees met, and sanity prevailed. Perhaps they feared a right-to-work lawsuit, little knowing that the Dead had neither the money nor the inclination for such a thing. Seemingly, they realized that the oath, instituted in 1953, was irrelevant. Perhaps a few members even understood the essentially un-American nature of a loyalty oath. For whatever reason, the board voted to make the oath optional, and seven years later it was deleted. The apolitical Grateful Dead had struck a blow for freedom.

Still resolutely apolitical, they played a benefit on April 9 at Longshoremen’s Hall for the Spring Mobilization to End the War. The evening was supposed to be a big homecoming for the headlining band, Sopwith Camel, which had gone to New York and recorded the song “Hello, Hello,” currently a radio hit. This did not particularly impress the Dead, who were moved by the spirit that night, playing quite late. The Camel got through half of one song and were shut down by union stagehands. This was not the only time a band grew upset with the Dead. Late that month they played a show in Santa Barbara with the Doors. When Ray Manzarek noticed that he and Pigpen had the same Vox organ, he suggested to Pigpen that they save the roadies work and use the same instrument. “No way, man,” grunted Pig. “Nobody plays my organ.” “What difference does it make?” “It makes a big difference.”

The San Francisco music business was beginning to show the effects of success. All feathers and beads, Janis Joplin was zipping around town in a Sunbeam convertible. Moby Grape, with whom the Dead would play yet another Mime Troupe benefit on April 12, was just about to release its first album. In an act of inspired hubris, they and their record company announced that there would be five singles from the album and a $100,000 promotional budget. Just as it came out, various band members were arrested with pot and underage women, and their future dimmed.

The Grape’s approach contrasted vividly with the Dead’s, whose promotional vehicle was a mimeographed newsletter,
The Olompali Sunday
Times,
put out to about 150 people by Sue Swanson, Connie Bonner, and Bob Matthews. The first issue, in March, gushed. Lesh: “reads extremely fast . . . energetic!” Kreutzmann: “has a shiny new Mustang . . . used to sell wigs.” Garcia: “talented, talented . . . has a lot to say . . . digs girls, girls . . . loves orange juice . . . hates dishonesty (they all do) . . . owns a pedal steel guitar . . . Leo.” Pigpen: “rides a BSA . . . walks around the house in strange outfits . . . washes his hair a lot . . . afraid of bees.” Weir: “on Zen macrobiotic diet . . . super nice guy . . . nickname Mr. Bob Weir Trouble.” Their second issue grew more wry, as the band took to contributing tall tales: Garcia was Captain Trips because he had once piloted boats on the Sacramento River, while Phil Lesh was known to kids as “the lovable Miss Frances of ‘Ding Dong School.’ ” “We inherited the evil and wars, but chose to ignore them to death rather than to try and kill off everyone who does not see Utopia as we do. The movement of Joy is spreading, and we are glad to be a part of it.”

On the afternoon of April 16 Garcia wandered down to Haight Street and came across the latest missive from com/co: “Pretty little 16 yr old middle-class chick comes to the Haight . . . gets picked up by a . . . street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed . . . feeds her 3000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body . . . Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street.” Garcia was sickened, not only by the rape but by the focus. The positive avenue that had been the Haight and its ways was not naive or innocent, he thought, but honest. And now “this guy took it upon himself to print up bad news and put it up. We had no bias for positive or negative, only some real reasonable stuff about freedom, and fun was the filter. We had to have laughs.” Laughs were getting harder to find on Haight Street in April. By now, Weir noted, the atmosphere on the street was the product of police and very young kids, often strung out on speed.