Dark Star (11 page)

Dexter Johnson:
Bill Kreutzmann was a drummer in a group called the Legends at Palo Alto High School and they were the best band at the school. I was Social Commissioner at Palo Alto High and I hired them for the opening dance. They were great. All my friends were like, “All, right, man!” Then when I came to school on Monday, there was a note for me to go to the office and I was screwed. Kreutzmann's band had made the kids dance like they weren't supposed to. There were no fights or anything but it was some moral issue because they were doing the “Swim.” They were pumping and doing bumps and grinds. It was a white upper middle class thing. We were right next to Stanford University.

Justin Kreutzmann:
My dad met Jerry in '63 before the band started because Jerry answered an ad in the paper put there by my grandfather, Big Bill. He was selling a banjo that we had and my dad answered the door and there was this guy named Jerry Garcia asking to buy this banjo and he bought the banjo and then they both ended up working in Dana Morgan's music store.

Sue Swanson:
Then they started the rock band and they didn't want to let me watch them. Bobby wouldn't let me come to the first rehearsal. No one could go. But then he let me go to the second rehearsal and I was the first person that ever got to go to their rehearsal besides them and I never went away. That was it. I've always been there. That was why Jerry called me his first fan. This was 1965. I was a junior in high school.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
I remember spending some time up at John Dawson's parents' house in the hills when they were just getting the band together, playing “Gloria” and some Rolling Stones' songs. It took some persuasion but Phil was definitely the bass player by then. They also practiced at Sue Swanson's parents' place. By now, we had moved to that big old house on Waverly with Hunter and Nelson and Rick Shubb and some other folks. Things were changing.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
Pigpen really did have the beatnik edge. Pigpen was the real beatnik. Everybody else was imitation beatniks. Pigpen got brought up on R and B. That was why he was able to play harmonica like a black guy. He'd go hang out in East Palo Alto with black hookers. One time Garcia said, “If you're going to hang out with Pigpen, you're taking your life in your hands.” He was hanging some with Pigpen just to see but he was not going to go on Pigpen's trip because that was a little bit too weird. Pigpen was drinking Ripple. Pigpen was able to buy when he was sixteen because he looked that old. That was what ruined his liver by the time he was twenty-five.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
I was surprised when Jerry first told me he was playing with this electric band. It was like he had really gotten down on the ladder after he got married. They had a baby and he was saying, “I have to make gigs. So this is what I have to do.” And I thought, “Jeez, this banjo player all of a sudden is lowering himself to play in a rock 'n' roll band?” I was thinking, “Jerry, what's happened to you?” And he said, “I gotta make a buck. You know?” I could understand it. They were hurting. You do what you have to do to survive.

David Nelson:
That place on Gilman Street only lasted about six months and then we had to move out. Rick Shubb scored another house that was just amazing. Right around the corner, there was this place called Waverly on Forest and Waverly. None of us checked it out because we thought, “Oh, we'd never get a place like that. That'd be just too good.” It was this old big Victorian that had round turrets on the corners and this porch with actual pillars and lots and lots of rooms. Jerry and Sara were living there. Me, Hunter, Dave Parker, an occasional ne'er-do-well in the other room or somebody in the attic. But that was the main hard core. I really loved that place. It had a big garden area in back with a huge avocado tree and it had an elevator but the elevator wasn't working. The place was that big. That was where Jerry was living and where the band was centered.

Peter Albin:
I knew that they had gotten together a rock band in the ensuing months and were playing some pizza parlor down at Menlo Park but I never saw them at that point. I saw them at Pierre's on Broadway in San Francisco. They played behind a stripteaser. It was the funniest fucking show I ever saw. Here were my old friends playing rock 'n' roll music and “In The Midnight Hour.” Pigpen was playing behind this girl with these tassels. This was an old-fashioned type of stripteaser. It was before totally nude dancing. I was sitting behind three sailors and they were going, “Hey, take it off!” This girl was down to these little things and there were these air holes in the floor. That was real entertaining. The tassels would go up whenever someone pressed a button. Air would shoot up, the tassels would flap, and you'd see the boobies. Can you imagine the Grateful Dead playing behind a stripteaser? But after a while, the sailors' eyes turned away from the girl and began watching Garcia and the band. The girl was boring. She was just dancing. Her tits were flopping. So what? The band was playing some interesting music. This guy with the one finger missing was doing some incredible shit. Even the sailors appreciated it. Of course, the people I was with, my brother and his friends, they thought it was fantastic.

Justin Kreutzmann:
In the '65 to '66 period, they just basically wanted to be the Rolling Stones. That was what my dad said. They just wanted to make blues records like the Rolling Stones. He said they used to back up strippers and there was one bar where they had this little drainage ditch in front of the bar. A little dip right there. If the set was really good, the bartender would pour alcohol into it and he'd light it on fire. This whole ring of fire would burn down the bar. What if you were reaching for your glass and you didn't notice that?
Aaahh!

David Nelson:
I went up to their Tuesday night audition at the Fillmore. The other bands that were auditioning that same night were the Great Society and the Loading Zone. I remember I took acid that night, too. I walked in real early and nobody was even there. Bill Graham used to put a barrel of apples out. I saw the apples. I thought, “Hmm! Probably for somebody private or something.” I said, “I'm hungry. I'll steal one anyway.” So I took an apple and I was just biting into it when Bill Graham walked in. I didn't know who he was. I thought, “I hope he's a janitor.” I just started cooling it and then he walked by and I looked at him and nodded. He looked and nodded and then he did one of those Bill things. He stopped, did a slow double take, and went, “Uh, who are you? Who are you with?” I said, “Warlocks.” I knew this would make him know I really was with them. Because this was the first night they were auditioning as the Grateful Dead.

 

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
So the acid and the Beatles and Dylan all together and then the Acid Test. The idea of the Acid Test started to really capture our imagination in a big way. There were those Acid Tests in the Palo Alto area. After I plugged into that, I really loved it.

Ken Kesey:
When we started doing the Acid Tests out in La Honda, the thing that made them exciting was the fact that they were entertaining but it wasn't a closed circle. We hadn't planned our entertainment to the point that everybody knew for sure how it was going to end up. The most bizarre one was when we invited Kenneth Anger and the San Francisco diabolists out for Mother's Day. We had all taken a lot of acid and were wearing long robes and playing dolorous music up to the trees and we walked them all up to this little amphitheater we'd made in the redwoods where the thunder machine was. We banged and clanged on the thunder machine with the sound system set up so we were getting a nice echo with about three hundred yards between the echo. In the middle was a little spotlight hung about a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet up in a redwood tree so you had no sense of there being any light. It just looked like a glowing stump. The stump was painted gold and sitting on the stump was a golden ax. After banging and clanging, we lowered a bird cage from the redwoods. In the bird cage was a big hen. We got everybody out and spun this little pointer on what was called the “toke board.” We spun it around and whoever it pointed at, it was obvious they were going to take that hen out and chop its head off. The thing pointed at Page Browning. Page went in there and picked the chicken out and the chicken had laid an egg. On the tape we've got, you can hear that Herman's Hermits song, “Stomp That Egg.”
“Stomp that egg!”
So he got the hen out of there and put its head on the stump and chopped the head off. Page threw the chicken still alive and flopping right into the audience. Feathers and blood and squawking and people jumping and screaming and all these diabolists and Kenneth Anger got up and left. They didn't think it was funny at all. We thought we were paying them the sort of honor they would expect. We out-eviled them. It all had that acid edge to it of, “This is something that might count.” We might conjure up some eighty-foot demon that roared around. As Stewart Brand said, “There was always a whiff of danger to it.” Those Saturday nights got bigger and bigger till finally La Honda couldn't hold them and we started branching out with the Dead who had just become the Dead. They'd been the Warlocks till then.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
Actually, Jerry didn't love that scene up there at Kesey's right away. It took him a while to fit into it. He was always telling me, “These people are up in the woods getting ripped and doing this....” Like it was beneath him to do that. I said, “Jerry, people do that all over. What's the big deal? If you want to play with these guys, that's what you have to do.” I'd lay that kind of trip on him whenever I talked to him about it. I said, “Don't feel bad about doing that shit.” He didn't think they were too stable a group and he knew they were party animals. He wasn't into it. It was a wild scene.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Page Browning was the liaison guy. He said, “I can get you this band. I can get you this band.” We didn't know who it was. We'd never heard of the Warlocks. It sort of happened while we were concentrating on our weirdness up in the woods. And when we did meet up with the Warlocks, then I realized who it was and I recognized them from the Tangent. By then, they had started to change their haircuts. They were starting to get into these really lame bad haircuts. Bad moustaches and bad haircuts. But they were pretty cute.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
They did that first Acid Test at Kesey's house probably before it was even named the Acid Test. I didn't understand what it was about and I was threatened by it. Jerry tried to describe this event to me. It meant a lot to him and it was hard for him to figure out. He was amazed by it. As it turned out, the Hell's Angels came to that party and I was really glad I hadn't gone because I was afraid of those guys. The idea of dealing with motorcycle gang members while stoned on acid was not my idea of fun. The new thing was, “Can you pass the Acid Test?” Do you have the resources to open up your nervous system to anything? I wasn't sure I could. The idea of somebody directing or evaluating people's trips was pretty scary. Then came the Palo Alto Acid Test and I got to be part of it and see Cassady do his hammer routine which was so amazing that I began to get a sense of this new possibility. Once I started to catch on, I was divided between being the mom and the student and tending the home fires and going off to participate in something extraordinary that had never happened before. There really was a sense of history to it all that was quite exhilarating. I couldn't stay at home while this was going on.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Ken's parties were getting bigger and harder to handle and we got busted and the Hell's Angels were coming and it was just unwieldy and it was getting unruly. But Ken's dedication to making a place where people could get together to get high was unshakable and I fell right into that and became part and parcel of it and spent all my time splicing film, repairing microphones, plugging stuff in, packing and unpacking, and making little films.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
And there was Carolyn. I was so impressed with her. Patching together the electrical systems. An Amazon. I didn't know if she liked me but I really admired her. She was gutsy. She said what was on her mind. Like a big kid, a big beautiful girl who had somehow escaped being squelched as a teenager.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I was pretty young and I hadn't been to college. Ken was a generation older than me. Was there a big initial flash between Jerry and Ken? At that point, I think there was more of a professional rivalry. Jerry was always interested in what Ken was doing but at that time, I think, they all felt kind of over-powered by the Prankster scene. Because it was so well developed and so loony and unpredictable. The Warlocks sort of treated us as the loonies in the band. They thought they could drive through our scene. They were almost voyeuristic. They would come through, perform, and take off again. They didn't really want us to stick to them. The straight guy was Kreutzmann. He was the guy that organized the gigs and he was kind of the manager. The guy that would get all upset if there wasn't any money. Still, there was room there to form some friendships. But it was so wacky. Plus, we were going to court all the time.

Jerry Garcia (1988):
We were younger than the Pranksters. We were wilder. We weren't serious college people. We were on the street. It was kind of a more intellectual bent than street kids in the present-day sense. It was street kids in Palo Alto. More Bohemian than anything else. We were definitely Dionysian as opposed to Apollonian. It was like we were celebrating life. And so for us, psychedelics was what we'd always been looking for. Drugs were part of that continuous search for that explosion. The realization of something. When the Pranksters took acid, they fucked with each other really. In a big way. We just got high and went crazy. It was unstructured. But they liked us. Because we were so out there. Our music scared them. It scared them at first but then as soon as they realized it was not going to hurt them, they liked it. Like a scary roller coaster
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