Somebody to Love? (10 page)

Paul Kantner, me, Jerry Garcia, and Bill Graham organizing the flying objects. (John Olson,
Life
magazine © Time Inc.)

The Dead ranch had a big swimming pool, and on this particular day, Jerry Garcia was unintentionally holding court near the trunk of one of the old trees down by the diving board. Wherever he was, a small group of people would gather to talk about anything and everything. Even in his twenties, he projected the wise old rascal image of an Eastern guru. As we moved closer, a sixteen-year-old girl ran by, laughing and waving hello.

No clothes, no makeup, no problem.

That was Girl, so nicknamed by her family because she was the only girl in a family of eight kids. Children and adults leaped in and out of the pool while watermelon, chips, and dips were spread out on the long worn-out picnic tables and thin streams of smoke rose up from the barbecue pits. Dogs, horses, guitar music, wheat-gold hills, and blue sky—the Novato farmland. It looked like the northern branch of the Hotel California, the mythical subject of the not-yet-written hit song by the Eagles.

I was curious about a cluster of people over by the barn. They were standing in a loose circle watching some guy bend and turn, snarl and laugh, his whole body in constant motion. As I got closer, I could hear what he was saying—but could I understand it? Phil Lesh, the bass player for The Dead, was standing in the circle with his arms crossed and a grin on his face, just watching this ball of energy go through his routine. I looked at Phil and there must have been a question mark stamped on my forehead, because he leaned over and said, “That's Neal Cassady, and if you stand here long enough, you'll catch up with all seven of the conversations he's having with himself.”

Neal, the lead character in poet Jack Kerouac's
On the Road,
was one of the Merry Pranksters, a group of people based in Santa Cruz who'd traveled the country in search of everything in a graffiti-covered bus called Furthur. He and Ken Kesey (author of
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest,
inspired by his twenty-dollar-a-day job as LSD guinea pig for the CIA), Jerry Garcia and his wife, Mountain Girl, and several other happy, eccentric freaks put on some of the best musical gatherings.

Everyone comes, anything goes, and the music drives the action.

When the bus, Furthur, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, a bystander was reported to have said, “Larry, Kesey and Garcia aren't heroes, they're criminals. And that's not a bus, it's a hearse!” Echoing what is probably “popular” opinion, there'll always be people who are afraid of living and afraid of dying. And there are always more of them than there are risk-takers, the people who bring innovation into every area, with or without drugs. Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist, once said, “Living in San Francisco in the sixties was like being in Paris in the twenties.” Kesey added, “The sixties aren't over until the fat lady gets high.”

The musical events inspired by the Pranksters were called Trips Festivals, and they couldn't be managed by “regular” promoters; they were too purposefully fragmented and spontaneously erratic to fall into a classic “party” or “concert” category. We knew when and where they were going to happen, but after that, it was shifting chaos and Wavy Gravy party games. Wavy Gravy, aka the clown saint, who was also one of the Merry Pranksters, literally dressed in a clown outfit, complete with the big red nose, the wig, the painted lips, and the huge ears. Wavy was integral to all our concerts and events, the only clown I ever saw who was conscious, at each moment, of everything that was going on. He had a unique ability to show people the humor in all things and, most of all, in themselves. A gentle, funny, and helpful man, he was always around in a tent or a trailer, providing people with a place to come and relieve themselves of their seriousness. Wavy Gravy reminded you that you didn't have to be an adult; five minutes with Wavy and he could loosen up the strings and have you laughing at life in the most beautiful and disarming way.

Most of the early gatherings (often called happenings) were spontaneous and chaotic. There was an anything-goes kind of atmosphere—that is, until various business-oriented types saw there was money to be made by opening more halls and exposing the paying public to more controlled versions of the first rock parties. That was when the Avalon, the Carousel Ballroom, and even some of the “straight” concert halls started bringing in four- or five-group lineups featuring the Bay Area's young electric bands. As a member of The Great Society and later Jefferson Airplane I played them all, but Society, Airplane, and others like The Dead were still just local bands until the record companies read about “the new Flower Power explosion” in San Francisco. Free publicity, although somewhat too cutesy, was popping up in the national magazines like
Time
and
Life
. We'd dose the young reporters with acid until they thought a whole new world was emerging on the West Coast.

Maybe it was.

17

Initiation Rites

N
ot long after we'd formed The Great Society, we were approached by a couple of L.A. business/music men scouting for hippie talent. Jack Nitzsche, a Dutch Boy Paints look-alike, mumbled several things we didn't quite understand, but Howard Wolfe said, “Fifty-thousand-dollar contract with Columbia.” We all understood that, signed an exclusive deal with him, and the result was that Howard got fifty percent of publishing for “White Rabbit,” which he later sold to Irving Music. I still don't know exactly how it all worked, but one day, after The Great Society broke up, Howard Wolfe also “sold”
me
to Bill Graham for $750. Bill was now my new manager for a sum that was not bad for
him,
considering that Airplane's album
Surrealistic Pillow
cost eight thousand dollars to make and pulled in eight million in sales.

Concerning the split-up of Great Society, as far as I can remember, it happened after we'd played together for about a year. Darby Slick and Peter van Gelder had become so enthralled with the sounds of tablas and sitars, they were considering going to India so they could be near the source and study with the masters. At the same time, Jefferson Airplane singer Signe Anderson decided to move to Oregon to raise her child—away from the craziness of the rock community.

It was sometime in 1966, and I was up in the balcony at the Avalon Ballroom watching the crowd down below as they were slowly moving out after an Airplane concert, when Jack Casady, their bass player, came up to talk for a while. The rock and roll community was small, we all knew each other, we all went to clubs together, and we all watched each other play. So I was accustomed to hanging out and chatting with the guys from Airplane. But that night, seemingly out of nowhere, Jack said, “What do you think about singing with Airplane?”

My reaction to Jack was a calm (trying to be cool), “Yeah, that might work.”

What was I really thinking?
ARE YOU KIDDING? FINALLY, I'M GOING TO BE ON THE FUCKING VARSITY SQUAD!

I didn't say that out loud, but for me, this was an initiation, an invitation to hold what I'd always thought was a lofty position reserved only for supermodels, movie stars, and great physical beauties ad nauseam. It felt like the flat-chested, kinky-brown-haired sarcastic bitch was breaking down another barrier in Barbie Land.

Grace, take a bow.

My mother was the first in a succession of blondes who solidified my early belief that blondes were always the first choice and everybody else, except Elizabeth Taylor (who
was
a blonde for her part in the first movie of Taylor's I saw,
Little Women
), had to stand in line for the scraps. Since I was blonde as a child, I'd figured things would be just fine when I was an adult, and until I was thirteen, my confidence in the successful transition was unquestioned. After all, I'd been born with the preferable hair color. If the prevailing color for female icons had been red, I would have been bedeviled by the likes of Botticelli's Venus on a half shell.

But that unlucky number, thirteen, was the year puberty kicked in, and instead of getting pimples, my father's genes came roaring into place. The fat, short, round-faced blonde that I was shot up from five feet, two inches to five feet, seven inches, my weight plunged downward, and my hair changed from a soft, textured curly blonde to fourteen inches of dark brown S.O.S. pad, all uncontrollable fuzz. All in the space of about two years.

Getting the weight off wasn't bad, but the rest of the genetic makeover had me inwardly screaming.

By the way, I've tested out my people-prefer-blondes theory. In the late seventies, I went to a bar in Mill Valley, California, once, with my own brown hair, my own unpainted face, regular clothes, and flat heels. I sat down for a half hour, and the only man in the room who spoke to me was the bartender. I went back home, put on a long black dress, makeup, high heels, and a long blonde wig. And then back to the same bar.

Instant popularity.

Come to think of it, maybe I was predestined to sport the darker look. During an acid trip, as odd as it was, I realized I had an almost eerie affinity for anything Spanish. In fact, I discovered that I could jam in the Eastern flamenco tradition easier than I could sing in the Western twelve-tone scale. I don't know where it came from, but the music, dance, architecture, and culture of Renaissance Spain is still burned into my psyche as if I had actually lived there. With no Spanish blood that I know of, and no Spanish influence (with the possible exceptions of California city and street names), I still gravitate to all aspects of that country as if it were my own.

Out of this same influence came the song “White Rabbit.” The music is a
bolero
(Spanish) rip-off, while the lyrics were inspired by Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland
. In part the lyrics allude to the hypocrisy of the older generation swilling one of the hardest drugs (alcohol) known to man, but telling us not to use psychedelics.

Well, how about
their
medicine chests?

Patriarch has to get it all done
now
? Take some speed.

Is Mom nervous about the kids? The PTA? The burnt dinner? Take some phenobarbital.

Need some sleep? Take some barbiturates.

The athletes want to jump higher? Take steroids.

How about the addict who wants to forget his painful day-to-day existence? Take heroin.

Take booze to get into the party mood. Take Valium for the nerves; Tagamet for the ulcers.

Contrary to popular belief, the “adults” were the original experimenters with the ups, downs, and sideways manufactured by the “legal” drug dealers—Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Rorer, Eli Lilly, Yuban, Smirnoff, American Tobacco Company, and the list goes on. Fun with alcohol and cigarettes. Fun
and
deadly. Just like the rest of life.

Let's face it, we all want it—the smoke, the fat, the sugar, the booze,
and
the magic-bullet drugs to fix us up when all of the above have taken their toll.
Prevention
means you have to be responsible for your own health.

Fuck it, we want a Big Mac.

But—

One pill makes you larger

And one pill makes you small,

And the ones that Mother gives you

Don't do anything at all.

These were cautious mixed messages that seemed to be the way our parents dealt with the world. After listening to Miles Davis's and Gil Evans's
Sketches of Spain
about fifty times without stopping—a manic marathon of obsessive behavior—I went to my old red upright piano (with about ten keys missing), and crammed
Alice in Wonderland
–inspired lyrics into a
bolero
-style march that I called “White Rabbit.” Being totally honest with myself, I think I missed the mark with the lyrics, because what I'd intended was to remind our parents (who were sipping on highballs while they badgered us about the new drugs) that
they
were the ones who read all these “fun with chemical” children's books to us when we were small.

And if you go chasing rabbits

And you know you're going to fall,

Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar

Has given you the call.

Peter Pan sprinkles white dust on everybody and suddenly they can fly—cocaine.

Dorothy and her band of sweet misfits (a rock-and-roll band?) are off to see the wizard and they get off on poppies—opium.

Suddenly they encounter the fantastic Emerald City—a psychedelic wonderland.

Which brings us, last but not least, to the biggest druggie of them all, Alice, who uses chemicals that literally get her high, tall, and short—
drink me, eat me
. She takes a bite out of the Caterpillar's “magic” mushroom (psilocybin) and pulls a toke from his hookah (hashish). The girl is thoroughly ripped all the way through the book. And our parents wondered why we were “curiouser and curiouser” about drugs.

When logic and proportion

Have fallen sloppy dead