So Many Roads Page 13

  The scenario was oddly retro—the bread winners and the stay-at-home moms and girlfriends—but no one seemed to object. “We just hung out together and cracked jokes and watched TV,” Lesh said to David Hajdu. “The women did the cooking and cleaning. All we had to do was get high and play music. It was like paradise.” Mountain Girl accepted her newfound role as, in her words, “a solid citizen” to keep the house running. “It was very traditional,” says Swanson. “We were right on the cusp of [women’s lib]. Me personally, I always thought, ‘Whatever I could do to help was good.’”

  Of the men Weir was the only one who didn’t need help with the meals. After giving up LSD the year before (he’d had his mind blown one too many times), he went macrobiotic. Regularly preparing brown paste out of rice, he cooked for what seemed like endless hours and then ate it very slowly, chewing each bite dozens of times. Fellow 710 residents would walk into the kitchen and find him cooking seaweed on the stove. For years afterward the other Dead members would kid Weir about that part of his life. But at least Weir worked hard on healthy habits at that point. Orange juice was a staple of the refrigerator at 710; with all the smoke in the house and trips to equally smoky clubs, everyone was getting sick faster than ever before.

  Having finished rolling his joints, Snitch paused. On the way out he turned and asked whether Mountain Girl and Garcia would be around later, and Mountain Girl mentioned they had planned a trip out of town, to Sausalito. Snitch asked when they were leaving, and she told him in a few hours, around 1 p.m. When she later thought back to his questions, she had to wonder why he asked for all those details. Maybe he was being thoughtful, or maybe he was simply afraid of her and Garcia. Given what was about to happen, she later wondered whether he was actually being considerate.

  Pigpen was in the john and Weir was upstairs practicing yoga when the pounding at the door began around 3 p.m. In the living room Bob Matthews, who’d become the band’s electronics expert (hence his nickname “Knobs”), had just cracked open a box of new speakers when he looked up and saw them: five agents from the California State Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, along with two city inspectors, barging into 710. “Well, what do we have here?” one of them said to Matthews, peering into his cardboard box. Rifkin was returning to the house from an errand when he saw a man in a suit who growled, “So, you’re Rifkin.”

  Leading the charge was Matthew O’Connor, head of the Northern Californian division of the state’s narcotics bureau, a fervent antipot crusader who two months before had told a group at the Hibernian Newman Club that pot was a “dangerous, unpredictable substance” and that he wanted possession to remain a felony, not a misdemeanor. Right behind him at 710 was Jerry (short for Gerrit) Van Raam, a seven-year veteran of the department who’d resigned as a cop after being charged with beating a boy outside a deli. (Van Raam claimed the kid was trying to steal change from him.) Two days after turning in his badge Van Raam was sworn in as a member of the narcotics bureau. On a mission to rid the Haight of illicit drugs, they first hit houses on Haight and Divisadero Streets, but according to O’Connor, 710 kept coming up as what he called “a supply source.”

  Sue Swanson was next. Earlier that day she’d been at 710 and had walked down to Haight Street—everyone pounded the pavement because no one at the building had a car—to buy a carton of ice cream. Walking up the stairs of 710 she noticed the door was uncharacteristically locked; on the other side stood an older man in a suit and tie, who opened the door and asked, “Do you live here?” Later Swanson realized she should have said no and walked back down the steps. Instead, in a moment of bravado, she snapped, “And who are you?” The man pulled her inside and escorted her into the kitchen, where she saw Rifkin, Weir, Pigpen, and Matthews, among others, all sitting silently. Around them everyone could hear men clomping up and down the stairs, pulling open file cabinet drawers, and talking.

  Next up the front steps was Scully, equally confounded by the sight of a locked front door. At first he thought it meant the band was doing an interview; such requests were coming in more frequently now that they had made an album. But when he saw the same suited officer, Scully realized something more ominous was taking place. When he told them his name, the police recognized it—it was on the lease—and gruffly informed him of the reason for their visit. “What—is someone smoking marijuana?” Scully replied faux innocently, but no one bought it, and he too was hauled into the kitchen.

  The cops thought they had them all until they saw McGee coming toward the entrance. Lesh and McGee had only briefly lived at 710 in the same room as Garcia and a girlfriend. The two couples (and Garcia’s waking-the-dead snoring) were separated only by a thin Chinese screen, which McGee says was “not acceptable.” Within a few weeks she, Lesh, and Kreutzmann had found a place together a few blocks away on Belvedere Street. “I just wanted a change of scene,” says Lesh. “It wasn’t like in ’66 when we were all living together. It just changed in some unidentifiable way that made me think, ‘This part of it is over.’ Everybody had girlfriends, and there were too many people in the house and not enough room for your own personal space.”

  Because her mail was still being sent to 710, McGee was stopping by the house that day to grab it. On her way up the front steps she saw Swanson, frantically waving to her to go back, but before McGee knew what was happening, she too was asked whether she lived there and then found herself in the kitchen.

  As police stood guard, everyone in the pantry was eerily quiet, either silently stewing or simply stunned. McGee was possibly the most anxious: leaning over to Swanson, she whispered that she had a ball of hash in her purse, tucked under her poncho. Swanson said nothing, and they continued listening to the police trample through the building, until Swanson finally said, “Let’s get some ice cream.” Because the cop in the room had his back to them, Swanson and McGee cracked open the freezer, pulled out the dessert, and quickly crumbled McGee’s hash into bowls with the ice cream. They were careful not to open the nearby pantry with the gnarly brick of pot. McGee decided to eat the evidence and dug into the ice cream, which tasted like it was sprinkled with grains of dirt.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours, it was time to head to police headquarters. In boy-girl pairs, the busted—Weir, Pigpen, Scully, Rifkin, McGee, Barnard, Matthews, Swanson, and Christine Bennett, girlfriend of the band’s new sound man, Dan Healy—were handcuffed and marched down the steps of 710 as photographers, alerted to the raid by police, snapped away. From Weir’s long, girlish mane to Rifkin’s mushroom head of hair to Pigpen’s untucked shirt and headband, they looked more like scraggly bohos than menaces to society, and Weir, cuffed to McGee, waved flamboyantly to the crowd. (“As they say, just spell the name right,” Weir has joked of the bust.) As Scully and Swanson made their way out, Swanson’s small hand kept sliding in and out of the cuffs, and Scully scolded her, “Just keep your hand in there! Don’t get me in trouble!” Before long they were all sitting crammed into a paddy wagon and were on their way to the police headquarters in the Market District. (For unexplained reasons, five other people in the house—a girl of thirteen and what were later described as “a young man and three other girls”—were set free; Bennett, who was underage, was sent to juvenile hall.)

  The shopping trip to Sausalito over, Garcia and Mountain Girl were walking up Ashbury when they heard Marilyn Harris, a neighbor living across the street, summoning them up to her apartment. From the vantage point of her window they watched as their friends were marched down the front steps of 710 and into the wagon. Having been busted before, Mountain Girl wasn’t overly rattled, but it was still disturbing to see their friends, especially dope-averse Pigpen, in the hands of the law. “Oh shit, oh shit,” was all she and Garcia could say to one another. They didn’t have to say much more.

  Lesh, Kreutzmann, and their new roommate, a drummer named Mickey Hart, were preparing an early dinner at 17 Belvedere Street when the phone rang. On the line was Mountain Girl, telling Hart a bust was going down at 71
0 and that none of them should drop by. “She said, ‘Don’t come over,’” Hart recalls. “‘Don’t come over?’ She said it real quick.” Lesh would remember picking up the phone, hearing the news, and immediately redialing the house number to confirm what was happening; when a “very serious, unknown, masculine voice” answered, Lesh received his answer and hung up. The news was out, and Hart found himself in yet another alien situation with a band he’d only just joined.

  Hart’s initiation into the fold had been typically loose and laissez-faire. On a night in late September 1967 he’d wandered into the Straight Theater, where it was immediately clear the name was something of a joke (as was the billing on the marquee, which called the event a dance class). Decades earlier the Straight had been the Haight Theater, a movie house on the corner of Haight and Cole streets, but only the shell of the old structure remained. The first two dozen rows of seats on the main floor had been ripped out, a wooden dance floor was installed in their place, and all around Hart were bodies—some dancing, others intermingled. The overwhelming aroma of freshly lit joints wafted over it all. (The show had been billed as a “school of dance” event to avoid having to land a permit for a concert.) Hart made his way to the stage, where his new friend Kreutzmann was playing with his band, the Grateful Dead.

  The two drummers had met shortly before, introduced to each other at a Count Basie show—possibly at the Fillmore in August 1967—by someone neither of them knew. (Decades later they would still puzzle at that mysterious stranger who altered both of their lives before disappearing into the night.) Hart and Kreutzmann had different personalities. Hart was brash, wiry, and proactive, with a goatee that gave him the look of a freshly arrived Eastern European immigrant. Kreutzmann was taller, laconic, and laid back, with a page-boy haircut and a grin that always seemed as if he were pulling a practical joke. Yet they shared a love of banging on things, and that first night they ran together around the streets of the Haight, making a percussion racket on anything in sight. “We took two pairs of drumsticks and played the whole city—cars, bumpers, street signs, trash cans,” Hart says. “We were yakking and laughing.” Afterward Kreutzmann invited Hart to jam with his band at a garage rehearsal space, but he never gave Hart the exact address, leaving Hart to wander the neighborhood in vain before heading back to home and work.

  Work was Hart Music, an instrument store in a San Francisco suburb run by his father, Lenny. The Harts originally hailed from Brooklyn, and Mickey would long remember his grandmother’s minuscule backyard, what he called “sacred space—because there wasn’t that much space in Brooklyn.” Lenny, who’d won a drum championship at the 1939 New York’s World Fair, had left his wife and their son—born Michael Steven Hartman on September 11, 1943—during his son’s formative years, after which Mickey became obsessed with drumming himself. After high school and during a stint in the Air Force, he learned his father was in California and tracked Lenny down after his Air Force days were over; by then Lenny was running the instrument store, and Mickey went to work for him. (Coincidentally, Hart had met Connie Bonner about two years before, when she and some friends stopped by his place, but the Dead were still in their gestation years.)

  In the relatively tight San Francisco music scene of the time Hart had heard about the Dead but hadn’t heard them, and he wasn’t sure what to make of them at first at the Straight Theater. As he watched from close to the stage, the music was overpoweringly loud and deafening—“cacophonous,” he would later call it, “this amazing wall of sound swirling around.” The rumble of Lesh’s bass and a bit of Garcia’s guitar rose up through the murk, but little else did; he couldn’t hear the other guitarist at all, never mind the guy behind the organ. It didn’t sound like anything typically rock ’n’ roll except in its volume, which seemed to overtake the entire theater.

  Between sets Hart reacquainted himself with Kreutzmann, who immediately asked his fellow drummer to sit in. Jumping into Kreutzmann’s Mustang, they found a kit and made it back to the Straight in time for the second set. They all launched into “Alligator,” a loose, newly written boogie that featured Pigpen’s voice and allowed for endless improvisation. No matter what Hart was playing, it all seemed like one very long song, tribal and amorphous, firm but nebulous. “It started up,” Hart recalls, “and I was holding on for dear life.” The people splayed about the Straight didn’t seem to notice there was another musician onstage, and they didn’t seem to care whether he knew the song or not; they were too busy screwing, dancing, or both. Dust drifted down from the ceiling, intermingling with the strobe lights and casting surreal shadows across the whole scene. The whole scenario struck Hart as a throwback to Dionysian times.

  Finally, after what seemed like a few lifetimes, the music wrapped itself up. No one applauded, and Hart wasn’t sure whether the audience was preparing to boo or throw things at them. Instead, what he heard was the sound of people breathlessly exclaiming, “Aaah!” (Even their reactions to the music weren’t conventional.) Garcia turned to everyone and said, with a smile, “We could take this around the world, man.”

  They didn’t immediately know it, but they had just found the final element to their sound and identity. Lesh wasn’t interested in playing conventional bass lines, so the music lacked a bottom end that kept it tethered to the ground. But two drummers would finally help anchor their arrangements. The drums made the songs feel more expansive, grander, and more rubbery—in a strange way, more limber with two percussionists potentially colliding. “Right away, it became obvious that two drummers would really help matters,” Scully recalls. Kreutzmann seemed interested in adding another drummer, but, like Scully, he had financial concerns: How were they going to be able to afford it? Despite his encouraging remark to Hart onstage at the Straight, Garcia was initially reluctant to hire Hart, telling Mountain Girl that Hart’s kit would take up too much space on stage and leave Garcia less room to move around. “But you can’t hear what it’s like in the hall,” she told him.

  Hart quit his job at Hart Music, without even telling is father at first, and moved into 17 Belvedere Street, where for a while he slept underneath a set of stairs. Almost immediately rumors began drifting back to 710 that the new member was hypnotizing Kreutzmann. They were partly right: in order to help the two men play in sync, a doctor friend had suggested a mild form of hypnosis. “Bill and I were using it in our practicing in order to get coordination and be able to practice for long periods of time,” Hart says. “At that point only James Brown had two drummers. Owsley said, ‘Why don’t you do that to play like one?’ It was like training: we’re going to play for five hours, but it will seem like twenty-four, and we’re not going to get tired. You play with your right hand and I’ll play with the left hand. We split the body up like that. It was one of the things that really created a bond with me and Bill.” Word filtered back to 710 that they’d also tried to hypnotize Pigpen, who ended up walking through a door instead. “Mickey had a bumpy entry into our world,” says Mountain Girl. “There was quite a lot of discussion about whether he had hypnotized Bill into letting him join the band—that maybe it was a trick. Mickey said nothing like that ever happened, but I don’t think any of us really believed it.”

  In the end the music—and the fire blazing within them to improve and expand on it—won out, and Hart became a member of the Dead. In time his hustling quality and energy appealed to Garcia, who was equally driven but more passive about success. “They wanted to be a big-time rock band, and they had serious competition from bands like Cream,” says Mountain Girl. “And they felt they needed a bigger sound to get bigger.” To the thrill of some and the uncertainty of others, the Dead were now six.

  At the police station the arrested suspects arrived, took seats on benches, and waited for their paperwork to be processed and for their legal team to arrive. Her hash high having kicked in, McGee had to be propped up between Swanson and Grant. “I was melting onto the floor, and they were holding me up,” McGee says. “It was probably a near
-lethal dose of hash. To this day I don’t eat vanilla ice cream.” O’Connor and the other lawmen presented their case—boasting to the press that they’d confiscated “over a pound of marijuana and hash”—and that they were “processing some marijuana in the kitchen.” (In that regard he was right.) Not all of them knew who they’d arrested: “Hey, have you guys heard of a group called the Grateful Dead?” asked one of the sergeants when he returned home that night to his family.

  In a sense their time at Olompali had been a pyrrhic victory; it made them seem as if they could live in whatever way they wanted. “We were living in a bubble,” admits Swanson. “We were all into flaunting the life we’d grown up in. We felt untouchable in a way.” But the word was out on them even outside the city. The previous summer Weir’s Menlo School for Boys classmate Michael Wanger heard that a nearby band called the Warlocks had changed their name to the Grateful Dead, but he didn’t know Weir and Garcia were members until someone filled him in. Although he’d lost touch with Weir, Wanger still went to see the Dead, largely because of a warning he’d heard from a friend: “If you want to see them, better see ’em fast because they’re way involved in the drug scene and they’re going to be arrested soon.”

  At the police station Pigpen was particularly rattled. “What are they gonna do—are we gonna have to go to jail?” he lamented to Scully, who told him to cool it and said they’d be out on bail soon enough. Ironically, it would be Pigpen’s face that would be plastered on the front page of the next day’s San Francisco Chronicle. Pigpen was still more of a drinker than a doper. He seemed to spend much of his time in his room, playing blues records and harmonica, only drinking late at night, out of sight of the others in the house. On the road he and Grant would usually be paired off as roommates because, Grant says, “we both stank of alcohol.” Together they’d drink a quart of 100-proof Southern Comfort every day, but Pigpen generally steered away from pot. (Grant would also watch as one lovely or another would brush out Pigpen’s long hair with his whale-bone brush.) But as the jail incident revealed, Pigpen was also easily spooked. During the Dead’s earlier trip to New York all the traffic rattled him, especially when he found himself in a truck speeding up to Central Park, and bees rattled him too. During their time in Los Angeles he and Swanson shared a room, platonically, and Pigpen lulled her to sleep in her own bed by reciting recordings of Lord Buckley, the quasi-beat, boho-spewing comedian and monologist.