So Many Roads Read online

  During one of the night’s breaks Garcia went outside with Kaufman for a time out from the craziness inside. Soon after, the police arrived. Because Kesey had been busted for pot at La Honda the previous April, no one wanted to attract any unwarranted attention. According to Mountain Girl, the Kool-Aid being dispensed was intentionally low dose. “We weren’t trying to create too big of a stir,” she says. “You had to drink five or six cups to really launch.”

  Garcia and Kaufman watched as the squad car pulled into the Big Beat parking lot and a policeman stepped out and headed their way. “You could tell he was walking over with an attitude,” Kaufman says. “He had a serious law-enforcement vibe.”

  Anyone else might have acted uptight or defensive, but Garcia radiated the opposite attitude; the people-handling skills he’d learned—perhaps from watching his mother working at her bar—rose to the fore. As Kaufman watched, Garcia charmed the cop in only a few sentences, and the officer, suddenly less agro than he’d first been, simply said, “Uh, okay,” returned to his car and drove away. Reflecting back on Garcia’s modus operandi, Kaufman says, “It was like watching someone do this beautiful martial-arts move where someone comes in with an energy and you dance with it and turn it around and off it goes.” When the cop drove off, all Kaufman could say to Garcia was, “How did you do that?”

  Garcia had one last, enduring gesture. As the cop was leaving, Garcia took off the hat he was wearing and genially said, “Trips, captain,” which Kaufman interpreted as shorthand for “Have a good trip.” (According to Kaufman, the often-reported legend in which Garcia said “Tips, captain”—meaning a tip of the hat—is incorrect.) Back inside the Big Beat, Kaufman relayed the story to Kesey, who so loved Garcia’s comment that he flipped the words around and came up with Garcia’s new nom de Prankster, Captain Trips. (Everyone had a nickname: Babbs, for instance, was “Intrepid Traveler.”) In the course of two breaks the Dead had a potential manager and a nickname for one of their front men.

  As dawn approached, the Acid Test at the Big Beat began gravitating back down to earth. The Warlocks and the Pranksters started packing their instruments, movie projectors, strobe lighting, and whatever else they’d each dragged along. Everyone, even those still flying on the unorthodox Kool-Aid, straggled into the chilly night to make their way back home.

  The Acid Tests had few rules, but one of them decreed that everyone had to stay put until the Test ended in the early morning hours. Prolonging the communal group vibe was one reason—it was comforting to find so many similarly minded oddballs in the Palo Alto area—but personal safety was equally tantamount. “It was not good to be high and out wandering by yourself,” says Babbs. “You wanted to stay in the scene where it was safe, with the people who were with you.” In her car, McGee, along with Lesh, both still tripping, turned on the heater and watched the ice crystals on the windshield melt—which, in their state, seemed like the most mesmerizing thing they’d ever seen.

  The Acid Test at the Big Beat would be neither the last nor largest of those gatherings. In the months ahead others would be held in San Francisco, Portland, and down in Los Angeles. The setups would be similar. Once sound systems, projectors, microphones, and whatever else were installed, everyone was told to leave the building, re-enter, and pay the admission. Each Acid Test would add its own lore and yarns to the legend: dazed Testers wandering out into the streets of LA, huge garbage cans filled with dosed Kool-Aid, Lesh and Owsley conspiring about sound systems, Garcia and Mountain Girl sweeping up, Pigpen uncharacteristically asking Swanson to dance. Delays would be added to the tape recorders to make people’s recorded voices reverberate more around the rooms. In late January 1966 about ten thousand people would gravitate to the Trips Festival, a three-day-long, acid-driven freak-out at San Francisco’s Longshoremen’s Hall that presented some of the Big Beat contingent—the Pranksters, the Dead—along with poets, dancers, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, pre-Janis Joplin. No one, least of all anyone in the mainstream media, had witnessed anything like it. Far more than any of the earlier Acid Tests, the Trips Festival confirmed the existence of a growing movement. “In the Peninsula the people interested in something like that would be a few dozen or people who knew each other,” says Brand, who co-organized the Trips Festival. “But no one knew there were thousands of hippies.”

  Compared to that gathering, the Big Beat Acid Test felt more like a test run than a major happening. “It was lighthearted fun that night,” Mountain Girl recalls. “Nothing too heavy happened.” She was right—no arrests, no overdoses, no violence, no calamities—but something did take place that night, a coming-together of disparate people, media, and chemicals that signaled a series of new beginnings for the Dead. By the time many of the band members drove off in Kreutzmann’s station wagon, other aspects of their world had begun taking shape. They’d met not only their future manager but in the house were two women who’d play leading roles in their lives, McGee and Mountain Girl. (When McGee arrived at Lesh’s home she discovered he had a girlfriend—who didn’t seem to remotely mind when McGee and Lesh kept walking into their own private back room.) Other attendees included Hugh Romney, the activist, satirist, and counterculture clown known as Wavy Gravy, and Annette Flowers, who would later work for the Dead’s publishing company.

  The Acid Tests were also where the Dead began finding their collective musical voice. They’d already begun reaching for the outer limits at bars like the In Room, but those gigs were straight-laced compared to the ones at the Acid Tests, where a song could last five minutes or fifty. Neither traditional rock ’n’ roll nor copy-cat blues or R&B, the sound was morphing into a mélange of it all, heavily dosed with free-form improvising. “We played with a certain kind of freedom you rarely get as a musician,” Garcia later told TV interviewer Tom Snyder about the Acid Test experiences. If Owsley was indeed at the Big Beat, as Scully recalls, they also spent additional quality time with the mad genius who would make a body-slam impact on their sound, finances, and sensibility. “He kept talking to me about how the better sound was low impedance,” Lesh says of conversations the two had at one Acid Test. “While we were waiting to start playing, it was all very loose. We were all peaking and ready to play. Bear and Tim Scully [Owsley’s electronics-whiz friend] are down there on their hands and knees soldering a box to make it work with the system. It was like a bunch of guys watching someone work on a car.” When the system finally was up and blasting, Lesh was impressed with the bass, but the Dead only played for a few minutes and then, according to Lesh, Garcia “decided he wanted to go do something” and they stopped. But within a few months they would be playing through Owsley’s sound system.

  “Can YOU Pass the Acid Test?” read the fliers passed around by the Pranksters. Whether the locale was Muir Beach, Palo Alto, or southern California, the Acid Tests were endurance tests of sorts: if you were strong, wily, and open-minded enough, you could make it to dawn. (“It was pretty scary if you weren’t expecting any of that stuff,” says Tim Scully, unrelated to Rock, who helped Owsley by building a mixing board, finding speakers, and ensuring the Dead’s instruments didn’t emit odious hums and noises.) The same mentality would now extend to the Dead. Theirs was an increasingly demanding world, one that would take stamina, thick skin, and the proper constitution to survive. “The Acid Test was the prototype for our whole basic trip,” Garcia later told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner. He was right, and in more ways than he probably foresaw.

  Weir (alongside Rosie McGee, with Toni Kaufman and Danny Rifkin behind them) during the bust at 710.

  PHOTO: BARNEY PETERSON/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/POLARIS

  CHAPTER 4

  SAN FRANCISCO, OCTOBER 2, 1967

  Mountain Girl didn’t give it a second or even third thought when the visitor—let’s call him Snitch—unexpectedly appeared at the front door of 710 Ashbury. Plenty of people, friends and otherwise, had scaled the dozen steps that led to the front door of the Victorian rowhouse in Haight Ashbury. T
wo years before, college students who’d rented rooms there were trudging up and down with their backpacks. Ever since the Dead had settled into the building in what amounted to a less-than-hostile takeover, Mountain Girl, her long hair now in a short, boyish bob, was more likely to greet local musicians, various Pranksters, and the band’s assorted girlfriends, childhood pals, and business associates. Some might stay a few hours, some a few days; most would make their way there by hitting the intersection of Haight and Ashbury before striding up the sloping Ashbury Street and arriving at the house with the bay window.

  Today’s visitor, Snitch, small and curly haired, was an acquaintance of the band’s from the area. In what was another commonplace request at 710, Snitch asked Mountain Girl whether she had any weed, and she didn’t vacillate. “There’s some funky pot in the colander in the kitchen,” she told him. As she would later recall, “I would do that for practically anybody I knew.” She didn’t know Snitch that well, but she accepted him along with others who straggled into what had become the Dead’s combination home, clubhouse, and business office.

  The house at 710 wasn’t their first attempt at group living. Less than two months after the last attendees had drifted off into the daylight hours after the Acid Test at the Big Beat nightclub, the Dead and their extended posse had decamped to Los Angeles. Rock Scully was now their comanager along with Scully’s friend and neighbor Danny Rifkin, and both felt the Dead needed time to work on original material, and Los Angeles in early 1966—home to the Byrds, the Turtles, Sonny and Cher, and many others—was a throbbing heart of the music business. “We needed more songs and needed to get tight,” says Scully. “We wanted to go back to San Francisco with more songs.”

  With the help of the Pranksters, already ensconced in the area, the Dead and their growing family found a home on the outskirts of Watts. (According to Babbs, the Dead and the Pranksters first shared a house in LA, but it was so packed with people that the Dead got their own place.) Tim Scully, who came along with them, remembers the pink-painted house as once home to a bishop or priest, down to its confessional booth in the living room. Next door was a brothel, and many would later recall the sight of pot growing outside between the whorehouse and the Dead’s house, thanks to customers who tossed seeds out the window of the brothel. Mountain Girl also feels another reason the Dead headed south was to deal with their growing following, even at this early stage. “They were already beginning to attract serious fans, both good and bad, but they hadn’t thought about how they were going to handle people paying attention to them offstage,” she says. “I got the sense they were trying to protect their privacy down there.”

  Over the course of roughly two months and several Acid Tests in the LA area, the Dead practiced in their temporary living room. (Not surprisingly, neighbors would sometimes call the cops to complain about the noise.) They learned they could live together in the same house, even if it meant adhering to the all-meat diet that the proudly eccentric Owsley imposed on everyone else. Anyone peering into the refrigerator would be greeted with the sight of slabs of raw beef. Some were disgusted; others didn’t seem to mind. “It got a little old after a while,” says Lesh, “but I had gone through a period where I hadn’t had a lot of meat to eat, so I was happy to have it.” The women in the house didn’t seem as enamored of Owsley as some of the Dead were, but no one had a choice when it came to coping with Owsley’s eccentricities: he actively supported and financed the band, “buying and renting equipment as needed and paying for groceries,” says Tim Scully. Scully also lived in the house, along with various Dead girlfriends and a friend from the Dead’s Palo Alto early days, Don Douglas.

  At first Owsley refrained from manufacturing acid in the house, although there was still plenty around; about once a week, according to Douglas, everyone took Owsley’s product en masse. Weir had been irked one night when Owsley exclaimed, “Well, we’re surely doing the devil’s work here!” Weir had to admit that between the chemicals and the loose social arrangements, one had to have a fairly liberal brain to accept it all, but he didn’t fully agree with the devil remark, and he rarely ventured upstairs to Owsley’s lair on the third floor. “Every now and then I’d go up and talk to him about this or that,” he told Rolling Stone in 2011, “but we spent most of the time on the bottom floor rehearsing or hanging. I know he was making stuff and cranking it out, but I don’t know where the apparatus was.”

  Their journey to Los Angeles puttered out for several reasons, one of them financial. Owsley soon ran out of money, and according to Tim Scully, Owsley and his cohorts took some of the leftover crystal LSD from a previous lab and sold it. (Lesh would often imagine the dust from Owsley’s hand-pressed Blue Cheer acid drifting down through the ceiling and infusing the music they were making in the living room.) Although the Dead managed to play a few shows in town, locals didn’t know what to make of them, as Bonner learned when she pitched in posting fliers for the LA Acid Tests. As she recalls, “People would say, ‘What is that—Grateful Dead? That’s disturbing!’”

  By April, they’d flown back to the Bay Area and, with the help of McGee, relocated en masse to a rented house called Rancho Olompali in Marin County. For six weeks they lived the alternative lifestyle—ingesting acid, taking advantage of the swimming pool, and throwing communal parties. One day their folk-scene friend Jorma Kaukonen, now with Jefferson Airplane, was sitting around with Garcia and another pal, Janis Joplin. “We’re gonna be archetypes,” Garcia told Kaukonen, who found it startling that someone would say that so early in his career; the Dead hadn’t even made a record yet.

  For Douglas one memory from the Los Angeles trip would always linger. One night a bunch of them gathered around a Ouija board, and one of the directives spelled out the message that they’d be leaving the stage on July 9. “Everybody seemed to think it meant July 9, 1966,” says Douglas, “and by ‘leaves the stage,’ we thought the group-high thing, like lifting off the stage.” No one thought much of it, especially because they were heading back home to see what the Bay Area now had to offer them.

  The sights and sounds of Pigpen alone were enough to help them secure what would become their grandest experiment in all-for-one living. It began with Danny Rifkin, a transplanted New Yorker working as a building super at 710 Ashbury after a brief student career at Berkeley. For him 710 was a college rooming house, but one of his renters was Rock Scully. Because people in town associated the Haight with the crumbling Fillmore district nearby, the area, home to artists and African Americans, was, Scully says, “the best deal in town.” After he’d moved into the building, Scully hit upon the idea of having his new clients, the Dead, relocate to 710 as well. Though he was far from a nondabbler, Rifkin wasn’t overjoyed at the thought of scruffy, revenue-challenged, LSD-imbibing musicians moving into a house for which he was responsible. Eventually he agreed only if Scully became the superintendent and had his name replace Rifkin’s on the lease. Given the relative freedom they’d had at Olompali, few thought anything could go wrong, and Scully’s name was now attached to the paperwork for running the building.

  One by one during the fall of 1966 the Dead made their way into 710, and the tenants already there began packing up and leaving. Rattled by the sight of the stout, seemingly gruff Pigpen and the sound of his blues records and guitar playing in the back room, they individually decided it was time to leave. (“Unbeknownst to him, Pig was a big help,” chuckles Scully.) Wherever anyone could find space, they took it. Garcia, Lesh, and McGee, now Lesh’s girlfriend, settled in upstairs, with Scully in a room next to theirs. Rifkin installed himself in the garage apartment, complete with antique lighting from the days when that part of the 1890s house was a horse stable. Weir settled into the living room, which doubled as an office. Sue Swanson, Weir’s friend from high school, crashed sometimes as well. “As people would move out of the rooms, some of us would move in,” Lesh recalled. “We just weaseled our way in and eventually took over.”

  Given that the front door was ne
ver locked, plenty of other friends made their way into 710 too. (“We’d argue about how many friends could spend the night,” Mountain Girl recalls. “There was no place to sleep.”) One day it was Betty Cantor, a teenager with long, sandy-colored hair who hailed from Martinez, northeast of Berkeley. In love with the new rock ’n’ roll and the culture rising up around it, Cantor had put up posters and worked the concession stand at the Avalon and already had a fine-tuned set of ears for music and sound reproduction. (Later she worked at the Family Dog in Denver after meeting promoter Chet Helms at the Avalon.) In a nearby park, she found herself at 710; one of her friends knew Rock Scully’s brother. As she walked up the front steps, out came Weir, who held the door open while holding a guitar, extending his arm and exclaiming, “Come on in!” It was an especially vivid memory; Weir had, she recalls, “hair down to here and big doe eyes.”

  During his own initial visit to 710, about a year after the Dead had moved in, John Perry Barlow wandered upstairs and found Weir lying on a couch. Although Weir’s eyes were open, he seemed to be asleep, Barlow recalls. Next to Weir, shirtless and high on speed, was none other than Neal Cassady, listening to jazz with headphones and scat-singing along with the music as he danced around the couch. (To Barlow it almost seemed as if Weir was conjuring Cassady up from his imagination.) For Weir at least, the disorder of 710 was initially constructive. “It reinforced how to operate in a profound state of flux and chaos,” he told writer David Hajdu. “Haight-Ashbury offered that in copious servings. When we put our instruments down, we still lived in chaos. Our entire lives were about sorting our way through chaos and making little pockets of, I won’t call it order, but little pockets where we could function, and that’s what we ended up doing in our sets too. You know, life imitates art, art imitates life. There was no separation between living and playing for us.”