A Long Strange Trip (35 page)

Having demonstrated his skill at creating something out of nothing, Rakow proceeded to establish their new home at the Carousel. At one of their earliest shows there, they invited the owner, Bill Fuller, and a local real estate attorney, Rubin Glickman, to come and see. Glickman would recall Janis Joplin cheerleading the evening, “waving her arms and yelling.” Glickman thought that they wanted to buy the Carousel, and being in the real estate syndication business, he suggested that the bands syndicate themselves and hire an outside businessperson to run the ballroom. He did not recall drawing up a lease, nor did Rohan, who was not a real estate lawyer. It would appear that Rakow did so on his own, although he later blamed the lease on “my lawyer.” Rakow certainly signed it, and that was a mistake, as he also later conceded. It was an untenable lease, based on a flat rate
plus
a percentage of capacity. Familiar with Rakow’s business style, Bert Kanegson, who would later become one of the house managers, later theorized that Rakow planned to make money by exceeding the legal capacity set by the fire marshals. This would normally be a reasonable plan, since the limit was usually conservative and permitted tolerable overselling. Unfortunately, the capacity turned out to be solidly realistic, which led Bert to further theorize that Fuller might already have had a conversation with the marshals. “I think Rakow did it all,” Bert said. “He kept it all pretty much in his pocket.” Once they got into the building, Rakow ensured they could stay for a while by immediately beginning construction to move the stage and make various other changes.

The lease guaranteed that the Carousel could not succeed for long as a business. Given the Dead’s utter lack of financial resources, perhaps a bad lease was the only way to bring off the adventure at all. Certainly the wobbly business structure meant nothing to the band, which didn’t know or care. But as a sanctuary and an experiment in community, the Carousel was a roaring success, Olompali in the city, a clubhouse for the city’s freak community. As Jorma recalled, “I could get in free all the time, and something was always happening there.” The Dead were tired of Bill Graham’s manner, and working with Chet Helms meant listening to lots of “I have to feed my family, I don’t have any money” stories. The Family Dog had made a terrible mistake in opening a branch in Denver. A local cop decided to run them out of business, and effectively did so, bleeding them with legal costs until they closed.

With himself as the booker and chief manager and with his lover, Lydia d’Fonsecca, as chief bookkeeper and secretary, Rakow went about creating a team to run the Carousel. The previous year he had met a man named Jonathan Riester, who was then building a laboratory for some chemists near Cloverdale, north of San Francisco. Born in Indiana, a horseman and handy guy, Riester was a member of the Psychedelic Rangers of Big Sur, one link in the LSD distribution network. Rock and Rakow went down to Big Sur, found Riester, and drafted him to help with the renovation and running of the Carousel. Annie Corson, who had been cooking at 710, was naturally tapped to run the Carousel’s food service, which in itself would make it one of the better restaurants in the city. The Carousel had an impressive professional kitchen, with giant stoves and refrigerators, but it was abysmally filthy, and Annie was just beginning to clean it when her friend and regular assistant at 710, Jon McIntire, walked in with news. He had been due to return to St. Louis to deal with a civil trial that had arisen from a car accident, but that morning he’d received a telegram setting him free. Enlivened, he took the bus to the Carousel to help her clean, and in so doing considerably changed his life.

McIntire was an actor and student from an upper-middle-class family in Belleville, Illinois, a few miles across the river from St. Louis. A charter member of the Early Music Society of St. Louis, he had graduated from Washington University and wound up at S.F. State, where he made a specialty of the history of ideas, especially the work of the heavier Germans, like Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities,
Hermann Broch’s
The
Death of Virgil,
Heidegger, and Hegel, as well as the Comte de Lautreamont’s
Les Chants de Maldoror.
But he took what he thought of as a Taoist view of his life, going where the wind blew him, and that day it took him to the kitchen. He had just filled up a sink with hot water and was unscrewing a fry grill when Riester, whom he’d met at 710 and instantly liked, came in.

“McIntire! What are you doing?”

“Well, Jonathan, I’m going to take this fry grill and I’m going to put it in that water, and I’m going to scrub the fuck out of it.”

“No no no no no no, you can’t do that. That’s not a job for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to manage this ballroom with me.”

“Jonathan, I’m an actor. What do I know about managing a ballroom?”

“McIntire, I’m a cowboy. What do you think I know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Besides, what do you have to do for the rest of your life?”

“Well, as of a few hours ago, nothing,” Jon admitted.

“My point exactly.”

By now, Annie was staring at both men with daggers in her eyes, certain that she was about to be stuck with a lot of grease. But McIntire made Riester promise that she would get helpers, and Jonathan kept his word. Before long, McIntire ran the ballroom’s concessions along with other duties.

After being fired from the Dead’s equipment crew in December, Bob Matthews had flown home to San Francisco, where his flight was met by Betty Cantor, a lissome young woman who’d been working at the Family Dog. As the Carousel evolved, she began by selling hot dogs for McIntire, then apprenticed herself to Matthews, who was working on the sound system with Bear. Matthews had ulterior motives, but their subsequent romance did not obscure the fact that she turned into a good engineer as well as an ace hot-dog salesperson. Bear had been busted in December and had decided to retire from the chemistry business, so he returned to the world of sound, hot-rodding amps and designing the sound system.

At one of the earliest shows, Bert Kanegson came to Rock and asked if the Diggers could be admitted free. Rock was happy to say yes, but replied that it was up to Bert to identify them. Before long, that qualified Bert as a house manager, dealing with security and a variety of other issues. Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner sold tickets at the box office. Laird Grant returned from wherever he’d been to be stage manager. Lydia’s brother Johnny, a superb carpenter, took care of the rebuilding of the stage. In the crowd of Alameda kids that tagged after Johnny and Lydia was a boy named Bill Candelario, who hung around doing odd jobs and gradually came to be a fixture. What really happened at the Carousel was a latter-day revival of the early Haight, in which people who cared about each other and loved what they were doing came together. The staff practically lived in the place, hanging out night and day. Generally speaking, such pay as there was came to living expenses, which meant rent money on good days, Annie’s cooking, and all the dope you could smoke. Their labors paid off, and they created a warm and comfortable environment. Bert was especially proud of the dance floor, which he kept in a state of high gloss with powdered dance wax.

Once the remodeling was completed, the Carousel had its official opening on March 15, with the Dead and the Airplane sharing the weekend. Kelley’s poster of a bandaged thumb was entirely apt. Though tickets went on sale at the last possible second, they did extremely well. Unfortunately, the venue was dark the second weekend and lost momentum. For their next shows, they went to the Haight and gave away tickets and then gave away ice cream at the shows. As Rakow put it, “If we’re going to lose money, let’s make sure that everybody in the place is going to have such a gas that they’re going to tell everybody else about it.” On other nights, admission took the form of even more provocative social theater. One night the door charge came as a choice: burn a dollar bill or pay five dollars. Ken Goldfinger, a well-known acid dealer, refused to burn money. He could certainly afford the five dollars, but others who couldn’t still found themselves unable to torch a bill. Another time, Garcia recalled, someone paid with a piece of butchered sheep, the bloody stump sticking out of the cash register, covered by a bunch of dollar bills gummed together with lamb’s blood.

Life at the Carousel was an ongoing example of social deconstruction, and lots of people found it scary—and they didn’t even know about the occasional rooftop orgies. The musicians loved it. It was a hangout, always good for a jam, and they were treated as family. One East Coast band manager, Ted Gehrke, recalled coming out to San Francisco about this time on a scouting mission and visiting with Rakow to see about possible gigs. After all his experience with New York diamondringbastard agents, Ted watched awestruck as Rakow fired up a joint and handed it to him. Fifteen minutes later he was on the phone to his band proclaiming the glories of San Francisco and the Carousel.

At 3 A.M. on the Monday after the Carousel opened, the staff of KMPX went out on strike, walking out of the warehouse at Green and Battery Streets that housed the station to gather around a flatbed truck parked in the street. There, members of the Dead, whose gig had ended only a couple of hours before, Stevie Winwood, and others began to play. The strike became a party. In May the strikers would march to 211 Sutter Street and begin a new station, KSAN, which would, with WNEW in New York, define “free-form radio.” Influenced by Donahue, a man named Ray Riepen began a similar station in Boston in March, called WBCN, and the trend was on.

With their new home opened, the Dead went off on a logistically ridiculous and not entirely atypical road trip, flying all the way to Detroit for two shows with Eric Burdon and the Animals at the State Fair Coliseum. Their schedule then called for them to play a benefit in Grand Rapids, where the organizer was Rock’s brother Dicken’s girlfriend’s mother, and then go home. In Detroit it snowed fourteen inches, and the benefit was canceled. The lovely poster, which was a drawing of Pigpen with angel’s wings, was the only evidence of the dream.

On their return, they went back to the Carousel for a weekend with Chuck Berry, and something quite unusual happened. The Dead’s music was new, and utterly challenging. They had broken into an entirely new plane, and it was sometimes incredibly difficult to get any perspective on it from the inside. In the middle of a particularly brutal show, Lesh simply took his hands off his bass, defeated. It was “the first time I discovered that there were realms of music that we could play into that I couldn’t even imagine what was going on . . . it got more and more incomprehensible to me as the night wore on.” It was the first time he had ever wanted to leave a gig because he felt so bad about his playing. “So I’m walking around the sunken area and I’m just at the door when Jerry comes up the stairs, and I try to just go past him because I know if I said anything it would be the wrong thing. He was so pissed, he just grabbed me and said, ‘You play, motherfucker,’ and sort of threw me down the stairs. [Others recalled it was a weak punch that was effectively a shove.] I didn’t fall down, I just stumbled.” Shocked, Lesh reacted first with the usual manly posturing— “You ever touch me again, man”—and then with shame that the two partners could possibly come to such a pass. What really put the cherry on the sundae for both men was realizing, sometime later, that their performance that night had been so good they would include it in their new album. Of course, the album’s working title hinted at their musico-emotional difficulties—“No Left Turn Unstoned,” a sign Paul Foster had put at Kesey’s driveway at La Honda, which did require a left turn.

Two major currents flowed through their musical lives that spring. One was their integration of live and studio music on the album, which went on apace from December, when Hassinger departed, to the weekend of March 29 at the Carousel. The other was something that Mickey Hart had brought in. Shortly after Mickey joined, Lesh had given him an album called
Drums of North and South India,
featuring Ravi Shankar’s tabla partner, Ustad Allarakha. In December, after the band’s very cold night at the Village Theater, Mickey had gone out to Mineola, Long Island, and met the Indian master drummer, taking with him sticks, a pad, and a trinome, a metronome that could count three rhythms. After gently informing Mickey that the trinome was not entirely accurate, Allarakha taught Mickey a counting game in which one hand counted tens, and over that he would call out numbers that had to be fitted into the tens. It was a game Mickey Hart was born for, and he went bananas. Later, Allarakha would say of him, “What a strange boy. He liked the difficult things.”

There was something richly appropriate about the Dead learning about time from Indian music. As the philosopher Art Kleps once wrote, Indian music “in no way encourages you to notice the passage of time—or better, to notice that time has stopped passing and instead is sort of loitering around shooting the shit with space.” By then, the band was rehearsing at the Potrero Theater, an abandoned movie theater on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. It was a rat-infested dump and the neighbors complained about the sound volume, but it was a hothouse for creative work, and one of their exercises became playing in time signatures that no one in rock and roll had ever imagined actually using. Two bars of seven, three bars of seven, four of eleven, and so on. They had patience, desire, and nothing in their way. Day after day they ate rogue time signatures until they were as familiar as their teeth to their tongues, and the result was the song “The Eleven,” which they debuted in January, a blues shortened by a beat with lyrics from the poetry stash Hunter had sent them with “Alligator.” “St. Stephen” was another piece that they put together from Hunter’s work but without his direct participation. The song was elaborate, complex, and difficult, but with the amount of labor they put in at the Potrero, it was frequently stupendous.

Now they settled down to making the album. Warner Bros. was alternately aghast and apoplectic. It had been more than a year since the band had recorded its first album, and six months since they’d begun recording this one. They had a tall pile of recording tape in varying formats made at differing speeds on different machines, different versions of the same songs played at basically the same tempo and in more or less the same tuning, but each flawed by the vagaries of live performance, so that one would be interrupted by the power going off, or another by a broken string, or perhaps by a cable that had chosen a moment of ecstasy in which to disconnect. Fortunately, the Dead also had Healy. Garcia and Lesh had a fair idea of what they wanted to hear, but barely any knowledge of recording techniques. Healy not only knew the studio, he had a special gift that made everything possible: he was fearless, completely ready to think of ways to do things that simply were not done. Some of their tape, for instance, came from an old Viking deck that someone (Healy thought it was Bear, who denied it) had made by putting together two quarter-inch stereo tape machines to create a four-track machine. It was idiosyncratic. “You had to set it down,” said Healy, “and have a talk with it, warm it up, and if you got it just in the right mood, then it would record for you and cease to stop and warble.”