A Long Strange Trip (28 page)

The band members responded, as usual, by playing. The free Panhandle shows were their last-ditch gift to their community. Bert Kanegson was a War Resisters League activist who’d been putting on benefits for the WRL at the Anchor Steam Brewery, which was owned by a WRL member. He occupied what he thought of as the gentle end of the Diggers, as the more famous and angry Diggers began to spend more time doing heroin than on the street. That spring he helped get permits for the free shows, working from an office at 715 Ashbury. The building had been owned by Don McCoy, a wealthy young hippie, and then by his ex-wife, Paula, who became involved with the Diggers. Kelley and Mouse, Ron Rakow, Sue Swanson, and other friends lived there as well.

Now that they had an album, the Dead began to make plans to go to New York in June. Meantime, they played locally and in Los Angeles. Even with an album, they were still sufficiently small-time that many of their shows remained something of an adventure. In May they began a brief series of Monday nights at the Rendezvous Inn, a gay bar on Geary Street where Weir insisted that Sue and Connie accompany him at all times. Laird, Pigpen, and Phil’s pal Bobby Petersen suddenly betrayed an inclination to pat him on the ass, and the nickname “Candy” was bruited about, but as Lesh put it, “I thought it was going to be freaky, but it wasn’t.” They journeyed down to Fresno one day, played a fairgrounds another, and then worked a high school assembly in Mountain View, a gig set up by Garcia’s banjo student Randy Groenke. Under the pretext of a dentist’s appointment, Kesey and Neal Cassady snatched up Neal’s son John from school and took him to the show. When they arrived, the band was hanging out in the teachers’ lounge. “Jerry’s got his Les Paul out, and he’s talking philosophy with the principal,” wrote John. “Bob Weir and Phil Lesh were babbling to the teachers.”

Back home, the band heeded Brian Rohan and played another benefit for their community. On the night of the Be-In, police had arrested more than a hundred people on charges of failure to disperse as the crowd flowed through the Haight on its way home. Rohan and his partner, Michael Stepanian, had gone to the D.A. and proposed a bargain. Promising to tie up the courts for years if necessary, they suggested taking a small group and trying them. “If they’re guilty, we’ll plead the others,” said Rohan. “If not, you’ll drop.” “We picked fourteen of the smartest, most polite, best-looking, most articulate defendants you have ever seen in a courtroom.” At four counts per defendant, they got acquittals on fifty-five of fifty-six charges (one man admitted taking a minor into a bar). “From then on,” Rohan said, “judges had to recognize hippies as human. Bail bondsmen, too.”

Soon after, the two attorneys founded the Haight Ashbury Legal Organization, HALO, which was run from the downstairs room at 710. On May 30 all the major San Francisco bands played at Winterland and raised $12,000, which would finance the HALO office for the summer. After a day at the Hallinan office, Rohan and Stepanian would pull up at 710, double-park, go in, and take every case, no matter what the crime. In Rohan’s memory, HALO had 265 clients that summer, and only one—a kid who flipped off the judge and had many, many traffic tickets—went to jail.

The HALO concert would be the only time that the Airplane, the Dead, Quicksilver, Big Brother, and the Charlatans all played on the same bill, and in some ways, it was the Haight’s last gasp. Summer made it clear that the scene simply couldn’t endure on such a scale. The Haight had developed because a group of young adults, not children, had found themselves in a quiet spot, flying under the cultural radar while they worked out some ideas about freedom during a time of such prosperity that it was possible to live easily on the fringe of the mainstream culture. But the war in Vietnam was about to end that prosperity, and the social divisions over the war would produce a mood completely opposite to what the Haight had stood for. “I never was that optimistic,” Garcia said later. “I never thought that things were going to get magically better. I thought that we were experiencing a lucky vacation from the rest of consensual reality to try stuff out. We were privileged in a sense . . . Our world certainly changed. Our part of it did what it was supposed to do, and it’s continuing to do it, continuing to evolve. It’s a process.”

The Haight had broadcast a message of a revolution of consciousness such that, as one historian wrote, “personal liberation had become a mass movement rather than the privilege of small cadres of bohemians.” The Haight was indeed a brief vacation, a fragment of time when there seemed to be grounds for faith—faith in freedom, in the ultimate benevolence of humans, in the chance that racism might be replaced with mutual respect. It was part of a long parade of dreamers that heard a different song, from Thoreau and Whitman to Rexroth and Kerouac. Much of what would be perceived, for better or worse, as “New Age” began or was influenced there. Yoga, meditation, biofeedback, astrology, the occult, all of these alternative spiritual approaches were simply LSD without the acid. Hippie antiviolence sentiments challenged sexual roles and contributed mightily to feminism and gay liberation. Perhaps more important than social developments was the evolution of the environmental movement in this country. If humans manage to avoid destroying the earth, it will be hippies and their heirs who will be significantly responsible.

Late in May, the band fled the city to John Warnecke’s family ranch on the Russian River north of San Francisco near Healdsburg. Too many fans and too much negativity on Haight Street had left them somewhat burned-out—710, for Chrissake, was now a stop on a Gray Lines bus tour. They had a platform over the riverbank where they set up their instruments, a campfire, and a mix of tents and cabins. It was a reflective and spiritual moment. An avant-garde filmmaker, Robert Nelson, had expressed interest in working with them, and during their time on the river he made a ten-minute film, most memorably as they fooled around in a canoe.

They’d been working on a new blues tune for Pigpen for some time, but they got some extra help during their stay on the river. Robert Hunter had spent the previous couple of years ingesting methedrine and mostly writing experimental Joycean poetry, but he’d come up with one thing that wasn’t too complex. “Sleepy alligator in the noonday sun / Sleepin’ by the river just like he usually done / Call for his whiskey / He can call for his tea / Call all he wants but he can’t call me.” Hanging out on the platform by the river, they’d watch people slide by, and then, said Kreutzmann, “we’d get freaky, get high, and make weird sounds. Frogs, invading Martians, whatever, the P.A. turned up all the way . . . We could almost turn over canoes.” Back on the city streets, some dreams were dying, but out in the country, new ones were just taking shape.

16

The Prodigals (6/1/67–9/15/67)

A few minutes into the Dead’s first set on the East Coast, at a free concert in Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in an area that had recently come to be known as the East Village, someone threw a framed portrait of Jesus onto the stage. It landed on the drums, scattering fragments of glass, and native New Yorker Danny Rifkin was bemused. “We didn’t know whether we were pelted or blessed.” Weir thought of it as a challenge: “One of those New Yorkers tossed it up there and said, ‘Waddya think about
that
?’ ” New York was not only the Western world’s media headquarters, it was a place where every citizen was a critic by right. The essence of being a New Yorker required a pride in coping with the sheer difficulty of life in the city. To New Yorkers, life in San Francisco was simply too easy to be meaningful. In Rock Scully’s view, the press never covered the Dead as a band but as a social phenomenon, “some artifact from the decadence of the West Coast.” As the
Village Voice
’s Richard Goldstein wrote of their visit, they “functioned not only as missionaries of the San Francisco sound but as emissaries from the Haight.”

Goldstein was the first full-time rock critic at a major American publication. A longhaired Columbia journalism school graduate, he’d gone to work for the
Voice
the previous year, and was fascinated with San Francisco and London, the era’s twin psychedelic capitals. He’d written a book about drugs while in journalism school, thought the acid scene was “important and world-changing,” and saw San Francisco as “the center of whatever new culture was going to emerge.” He’d taken it seriously enough to visit the city early in 1967, where he went by the Digger house and stayed for several days, sleeping on the floor and watching the Diggers distribute food. When he returned to New York, he wrote a story, “In Search of George Metesky,” that in March brought the first published news of the Diggers to Manhattan. He’d also visited 710 and was fascinated with its openness, people wandering in and out at all times, so unlike New York with its paranoia and Fox police locks. He felt welcome in the Dead’s home, yet felt “shy about being around such incredible people,” and they reacted by being “solicitous.” Weir’s heterosexual androgyny was also new to him. “San Francisco has the vanguard because it works hard to keep it.”

But Goldstein was a New Yorker, and couldn’t really trust what he saw. He quoted Wier (as he spelled it) that “if the industry is gonna want us, they’re gonna take us the way we are,” and speculated, “It will be interesting to visit the Bay Area when the breadmen have gutted every artery.” “I always had very mixed feelings,” Goldstein mused later. “And the Dead apotheosized this for me because on the one hand I felt that scene was extremely naive and apolitical and completely without substance and tradition . . . and very middle-class. And I wasn’t middle-class, because I’d grown up in housing projects and had a kind of working-class upbringing. So I held some contempt for it on those grounds. On the other hand, it worked. It was a really functioning community. All the hierarchies of status that applied in New York weren’t there, and the way the Dead lived was sort of the essence of this notion, and that’s what I regarded as so heroic and romantic.”

The Dead arrived in New York on May 31. They were met at the airport by their initial hosts, the Group Image, a band and a surrounding arts collective led by an old friend of Rifkin’s named Artie Schlachman. The Dead settled in at the dumpy Van Rensselaer Hotel, where Weir almost came to tears over the traces of broken dreams that he could imagine “humming and buzzing in the elevator cage.” Meanwhile, Rock hurried off to consult with East Village district captain Joseph Fink, the man Mayor John Lindsay called “my favorite hippie,” about their free show at Tompkins Square Park the next day. Friction between Puerto Ricans and the hippies in the East Village was Fink’s immediate problem, and the Dead’s show would perhaps help alleviate it. It was preceded by a hippie parade down St. Marks Place to the park, where Pigpen graciously accepted a white carnation key to the East Village. Richie Havens opened for them, and the band got its feet wet on a new coast. Goldstein stood there thinking that it seemed as though they’d been “parachuted in, that there was a kind of gap between them and the audience.” He wondered if the difference was drugs, because while everyone in the park was probably on something, the New Yorkers were more likely to be doing speed than LSD. There was a “lack of edge and definition in New York terms in their music,” which might be interpreted as a lack of hostility and aggression. Eventually, Goldstein noted, they would create their own “innocent, as compared to New York,” milieu.

Lacking an agent, Rock and Danny had booked this tour on their own, and the linchpin was a week at the Cafe au Go Go, where the owner, Howard Solomon, was attuned to the West Coast music scene and would bring a number of the bands to New York. As a way of laying off his risk, Solomon had joined forces with Howie Klein, chairman of the Student Activities Board at Stony Brook, a State University of New York campus some fifty miles east on Long Island. Consequently, the Dead’s first paying East Coast gig was at Stony Brook, widely considered to be the stonedest campus in the East. They earned $750. Klein was also a D.J. at the campus radio station, and his close friend was Sandy Pearlman, the student body president and an editor of
Crawdaddy!,
the seminal rock magazine. Pearlman was plugged into a growing network of insiders that yielded him prerelease tapes of music, and he shared them with Klein and another Stony Brook student and
Crawdaddy!
editor, Richard Meltzer. Klein loved the Dead’s first album and worked hard promoting the group at every college on Long Island; the region would be Dead territory for many years to come.

At the time, the Cafe au Go Go was
the
important club for rock in New York, the music otherwise being largely confined to the Scene, the Electric Circus, the efforts of the Group Image at the Cheetah and other places, and the Dom, home of Andy Warhol’s “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” events with Nico and the Velvet Underground (formerly the Warlocks). The Velvet’s first album, the “Banana album” (so called because of Andy Warhol’s pop art cover), had been released in March, and it defined New York’s rock attitude, which was, of course, the polar opposite of the Dead’s. Its most memorable song was called “Heroin,” written under the influence of William Burroughs and Hubert Selby’s
Last Exit to
Brooklyn,
and the music was all hard edges, with a dark, nihilistic attitude that hated not only something as soft as hippies but its own audience as well. It was then and forever a complete success with the generally New York–based critics. Howard Solomon’s taste was somewhat more varied, but the Cafe au Go Go was certainly dark enough to feel like New York to the Dead. It was a dingy little cave with horrible acoustics that did not allow dancing and charged a pricey three-dollar cover plus a one-drink minimum. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention played upstairs, and the band’s roadie Laird was known to join Zappa’s audience in pelting the Mothers with fruits and vegetables.

On opening night, after a big announcement from the house manager, the lights came up on the Dead, and there stood Garcia, tuning. He looked up, nodded, murmured “That’s right,” and resumed his task.
Time
sent a stringer to the show, and his notes, never used for an article, were revealing. His very thoughts were clichés: the band was “a shaggy lot who would prefer making music to most anything. Except, perhaps, making ‘luv’ and strewing flowers.” Yet the Dead got to him, and he concluded that the music was “sensory, piercing right to the blood, and you become one with the music.”

Pleased with their Tompkins Square gig, Captain Fink passed the Dead on to City Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving, and they received permission to play at the Central Park Bandshell one afternoon. One member of the audience was Charles Mingus, who sat watching them while sipping from a thermos of martinis. Lesh was delighted to meet the great man, who charmed him with the observation that “the way to make a woman love you is to fuck her for an hour and not come.” Along with the Group Image, the Dead played free for a few hundred people, and the
New York Times
duly reported that “hippies armed with electric guitars occupied the bandshell” as dancers bounced around “like rag dolls being jerked by wires.” That same afternoon, a few hundred yards across Central Park on a lawn in back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lower East Side political activist Abbie Hoffman was married in a wedding so perfectly media-designed that a picture of it was part of the July 7
Time
cover story on hippies. Hoffman had correctly intuited something very powerful. A Brandeis graduate and civil rights activist, he was then running Liberty House, a store that sold Poor People’s Corporation handcrafts in New York. But the gritty day-to-day of hard street politics didn’t really suit him. His real gift lay in the imaginative manipulation of the media via the “put-on.” It occurred to him that it would be more fun to use those gifts to organize the hippies, using the Lower East Side as a base and the Digger message as the vehicle.

After Richard Goldstein’s initial
Voice
article, Digger philosophy had come to New York in a series of reprints of the com/co papers by a man named Linn (later Freeman) House, who published a psychedelic review called
Inner Space
from the Group Image loft. In April, Peter Berg and Emmett Grogan had visited New York. Peter appeared on the
Alan Burke
Show
and did a masterful job of taking over the program. He refused to answer Burke’s questions, changed the subject to his own concerns, and concluded by walking off the stage and up the aisle. Beckoning to the camera to follow him, he told the home audience, “I am leaving this black box of a studio; you can leave the black box of the TV by turning it off.” Impressed, House became the first New York Digger, making his 23rd Street loft available to the Diggers to begin a New York Free Store. Emmett still preached Digger anonymity, or freedom from media identity, but that was something Abbie would never grasp. Although he promised House, who would perform the wedding ceremony, that he would keep it private, Abbie turned it into a photographers’ field day.

An old pal of Weir’s popped up at one of the Cafe au Go Go shows and made an interesting connection for the Dead. Weir and John Perry Barlow hadn’t really stayed in touch since leaving prep school, but the instant they saw each other, they were close again. With Weir’s current flame, Mireille, they wandered around the city, managing to attract the attention of some suburban thugs, who rudely introduced Weir to New York with a hippie-bashing. The thugs poured out of a car, and foggy as he was, Weir chirped, “I sense violence, and when I feel violence in myself, there’s something I sing that calms me.” He set into “Hare Krishna,” and for a fragile moment it worked. Then the leader grunted, “What the fuck?” and led his friends in punching out Weir and Barlow.

Barlow was then attending Wesleyan University, and he’d connected with LSD in a manner very different from the cheerful chaos of the Dead-Prankster world. He’d gotten to know Timothy Leary, who was headquartered in a mansion north of New York City called Millbrook, and in the middle of the run at the Cafe au Go Go, Barlow took Lesh, Garcia, and Weir to visit.

Millbrook was owned by the Hitchcock family, including Billy, a budding stockbroker, and his sister Peggy, a “colorful patroness of the livelier arts,” wrote Leary, “and confidante of jazz musicians, race car drivers, writers, movie stars. Stylish, with a wry sense of humor, Peggy was considered the most innovative and artistic of the Andrew Mellon family.” Millbrook was extravagantly enormous. It was fully a mile from the gatehouse, complete with sallyport and portcullis, to the main house, which had four stories, sixty-four rooms, and two towers. A mile across the fields lay “the bungalow,” a more modern mansion. Leary’s underlying authoritarianism, born of an Irish Catholic and military background, was immediately observable to the band members, and they were not impressed. What they would remember of their visit to Millbrook was psychedelic, but had nothing to do with Leary. It was the first place they heard the new Beatles album,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

For any number of reasons,
Sgt. Pepper
was an extremely important piece of music. It distinguished the album—versus the single—as the defining mode in rock. It was assumed to be psychedelic because of tunes like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” although it lacked the improvisational guitar previously thought to represent psychedelia.
Sgt. Pepper
was psychedelic in its costumes and spectacle and words, what one critic would call “vaudeville for the mind,” but the music was still English music-hall mixed with rock. In any case, it was a wonderful album, something to unify all rock fans in pleasure. It became ubiquitous, and that fall it was not possible to pass through a college dormitory, day or night, and not hear it being played.

The Dead’s stay at the Cafe au Go Go passed pleasantly. They played a final show with the Group Image at the Cheetah and headed home. It had been a good run, a successful introduction to the big time that is New York, although the critical take on them would be a frequent handicap in the coming years.
Crawdaddy!
had served as the field of germination for what would be many critical points of view in the next few years. Begun early in 1966 by a Swarthmore freshman named Paul Williams, it was the first rock magazine, and it brought together many bright minds. In the magazine’s pages, as critic Sandy Pearlman would put it later, criticism ranged from his own “technogothic” vision to Richard Meltzer’s “philosophochaotic” version to Jon Landau’s “scholastically rigorous style of exegesis” to Paul Williams’s “morally engaged ethos.” The dominant view came to be that of Landau and
Esquire
’s Robert Christgau, and it focused on two things: technical excellence and the primacy of the African American roots of the music. As Christgau wrote, “the problem is that when poetry, musical complexity, and psychedelic basso-profundity come into the music, its original values—simplicity, directness, charm—are often obscured.” This became code for limiting rock to three-minute songs with clever hooks, and the Dead clearly failed that test. That spring, Christgau wrote, “Most hippie rock and roll musicians exhibit the same in-group pretentiousness that characterized the folk and jazz purists who were their predecessors.” Though Christgau himself would be more flexible in the future, Landau would not. In his defining critical manifesto, “Rock and Art,” Landau declaimed, “Rock was not intended to be reflective or profound.” Where this left Bob Dylan went unsaid, but this essentially reactionary attitude became the prevailing orthodoxy in rock’s critical establishment.