Dark Star (13 page)

After the weekend was over, I told Danny and Rock, “As nice as you guys are, as honorable as you are, you'll never never be able to pay any of this money back. It just won't happen. But what I can do is give you the twelve thousand dollars. I'll become a patron and be entitled to respect.” So that was what I did. I gave them the twelve grand.

Laird Grant:
I was hustling their equipment in my minivan. A Metromite walk-in van. It had a little teeny four-cylinder Austin engine and it was just like an eight-by-eight. A little bit bigger than a postal truck. We'd stack our PA and everything else into it and a lot of the time the band went along. Usually, Pigpen rode with me anyway. I set their stuff up on some of those Acid Tests and then they went off to L.A. and did the Watts Acid Test.

 

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
Kesey and Carolyn had gotten busted. We went to a meeting in Bernal Heights where Kesey asked the Ouija board what he should do and the Ouija board told him to go to Mexico. At that point, Jerry was messing around with somebody else. I was picking up the vibes from that one and I was really pissed. I didn't like that at all. Except when I was on acid, I was miserable. I wanted something different in the relationship and he was really not available to me. After having been in that primary maternal preoccupation with the baby, I was starting to feel my oats. So I fell in love with a Prankster and left Jerry.

Rock Scully:
We decided to get out of town because we didn't really have enough material. We'd waste ourselves playing around San Francisco with the same songs because they really only had one set together. They could do blues forever but already Garcia was the driving force to get new material together. It was his idea and Owsley's, out of considerations about his nefarious businesses, that we bail out of town. Jerry was the one who'd clued me to it. I was supposed to get them to a place where they could get more songs together rather than work them to death in pizza pubs. That was when we went to L.A. We got a house big enough for all of us that we could rehearse in off Western Avenue in the middle class section of Watts. Not a stick of furniture in there.

Owsley Stanley:
I'll tell you what living with them was like. If people were on one floor and you were on another and they decided to go somewhere, the next thing you knew the house was empty. There was very little concern for others' possible interests. We were just sort of all there. It had something to do with the Kesey bunch. There didn't seem to be much of a family thing in the Kesey scene. It was everybody for themselves. The camaraderie there was kind of gritty. Almost like the Hell's Angels who'd punch each other out and that made them the best of friends. I never understood that.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Owsley had rented this huge house that had no furniture. So everybody had like little mats on the floor that they slept on. And he had them on a diet of milk and acid and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which was the grossest. There was also a lot of DMT around.

Owsley Stanley:
It might have been Chicken Delight. Chicken Delight and steak. But it was never my idea to go to L.A. I was against it. The Dead were following the Acid Tests and it seemed to me not such a good idea to do that and it was inconvenient for me but they decided they had to go there. They decided the Acid Test was more important than anything else they were doing. Now, when they worked a regular show in the Bay Area, they only got a hundred and twenty-five dollars. That was twenty-five dollars for each musician. They got paid nothing to do an Acid Test. They had no roadie, they had no manager, they had no sound man, they had nobody because they could barely make enough to cover their expenses. Most of them had day jobs. So then I started thinking, “Maybe this
is
a good idea.”

Rock Scully:
The idea was that I would put together gigs down there for the new material. Jerry had this thing about playing new material in front of live audiences. Which would change how the song developed. This was the only band I know of that has ever done that. The Jefferson Airplane certainly never went out there with anything that they didn't have down cold. The Dead would play stuff that they didn't even remember having written that day. They'd go out there and try to remember it. All of them staring at each other bad, saying, “No, wait a minute. We did
this
.” They would rehearse all week long and I was booking these weekend gigs at Trooper's Hall on Fairfax. We'd go to Cantor's Deli every night we could get out of Owsley's sight because all he wanted us to eat was meat and milk and eggs.

Owsley Stanley:
I tried to get people to eat meat because it was cheaper. That was not a good idea. It was okay for me but not for others. Those guys taught me as much as I taught them about getting along with others. I didn't want to smoke pot. But they kept saying they couldn't get along with me unless I did.

Rock Scully:
We'd rehearse all day long and into the night and there was this black card parlor, not a crooked game but an underground game, next door. So they made noise all night, which was perfect. There were always cars pulling up and people fighting and arguing about hands that they had been dealt. I think this had something to do with how a lot of our songs ended up as gambling songs.

Owsley Stanley:
It was a whorehouse. And the whores would complain that our music would drive their johns off. They used to throw pot seeds out the window and we found pot plants growing between the two houses and they weren't ours. We thought the whorehouse was going to get us busted but we brought the cops on ourselves. Because of the loud music we were playing, they would call them.

Jerry Garcia (1988):
We'd met Owsley at the Acid Test and he got fixated on us. “With this rock band, I can rule the world!” So we ended up living with Owsley while he was tabbing up the acid in the place we lived. We had enough acid to blow the world apart. And we were just musicians in this house and we were guinea pigging more or less continuously. Tripping frequently if not constantly. That got good and weird
.

Owsley Stanley:
It doesn't take a lot of acid to keep a lot of people high for a long time. One gram is three or four thousand doses. In modern terms, it's ten thousand doses. Which is a lifetime supply for a band fifty times the size of the Dead. Saying we had a lot doesn't mean much.

Rock Scully:
We were even selling the stuff. It was illegal but we were selling it over at the deli at night. That was where everybody went. Zappa was there and Captain Beefheart and Jim Morrison. We were turning on all these L.A. people in the parking lot.

Owsley Stanley:
Number one, Cantor's Deli doesn't have a parking lot. There was no parking lot at Cantor's, there is no parking lot, there never will be. We never met any other musicians when we were down there. This is absolutely false. Just total bullshit. Number two, we never sold acid to anybody anywhere in Los Angeles. Ever. As far as I was concerned, it was a religious thing for me. I never cared about the money. I wasn't doing it for the money. Money was an embarrassment.

Rock Scully:
At that point, Garcia's thing was actually very down-to-earth. “Let's get some songs together. Let's work. Let's work.” He was very curious as to what I was doing. Did I get the hall? Are the people there? How are we going to get people in the hall? He cared about there being an audience. He didn't want to play to an empty house and rightfully so.

Owsley Stanley:
In L.A., I saw sound coming out of the speakers. One dose of acid, some DMT, and something else, and I thought, “This is important. I've got to remember what this is about.” I studied it very intently, which was difficult to do when you were that high. I thought, “This is not what I expected sound to look like.” I never assumed it was some hallucination caused by the drug. The circuits were open full-on. It was real.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
Owsley was trying to manage them, making them live on nothing but acid and steak. I was in L.A. too but with the Pranksters. Kesey had already gone on the lam so Babbs was in charge and none of the wives and kids were along. I was the only mother there with a child. I'd bring Heather along to the Acid Tests and make her a little nest someplace off quiet and safe and read her her books and put her to sleep in her little sleeping bag so I could go off and dance in the light show. Poor kid.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Jerry adored Sara. And Heather was such a precious child. They had bought her a bag of junk jewelry at a thrift store or something, a great big box of wonderful rhinestones and pearls and all sorts of cool junk jewelry, and she would just laden herself with it. She would cover herself with this stuff and then walk around and give pieces to people and she gave me this really beautiful rhinestone cross that I used to wear on my Acid Test outfit. I wore it up on my forehead a lot on my swami hat. I had a big froufrou hat that I wore on my head and that was right in the middle of it. I remember being very stoned over at their house and spending quite a bit of time with Heather going through the jewelry piece by piece, commenting on all of them. Sara was there but I was not paying too much attention to Sara because she was in a state of real frustration over Jerry being unable to quit doing what was he was doing. At this point, he and I weren't talking on any kind of intimate level. He was one of the boys and I loved to go hang out with the boys. Mostly we just bullshitted each other and giggled and talked. It wasn't personal.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
At one of the Acid Tests in L.A., Jerry and I sort of reconciled a little bit. But it had been clear that our paths were separating and we were going in different directions. When he started the band, he didn't want me coming to where he was playing. Because then he'd have to worry about me. I would get out there and dance and he wanted me to stay home. He probably didn't want me knowing what was going on. It probably felt terribly constraining having the old lady there. And I wanted a life of my own. I'd always said I played second fiddle to a banjo. I said that jokingly but there was a lot of pain in it. By the time we started doing the Acid Tests in L.A., I had left him. I gave away all of our stuff. It was a real separation. I even threw away his letters.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
It wasn't until after the Watts Acid Test that Jerry and I first made contact. The Watts Acid Test was just a hell of a scene. Two separate parties dosed the punch independently so it was stronger than it should have been. There were many overdoses. After it was over, we were in the process of cleaning up the building. We were sweeping the floor. I'd gone back in the janitor closet and found these great big wide brooms and I was wearing my pink-and-yellow-striped tent dress that I'd made for myself during my pregnancy. It was very gaudy and hilarious and I had some funny hat on my head and I was sweeping away.

We were talking and loading stuff on the bus and wrapping up the wires and the sunlight was coming in and Jerry came over and grabbed a broom and helped me sweep. Together, we swept the place out and talked while we were sweeping. We were mostly just bullshitting each other and goofing off and saying funny stuff and commenting on what had been going on. I was eight months pregnant and I didn't feel really attractive. I felt like one of the guys. I was just there working. So we spent about an hour and a half sweeping together and made friends. And then they drove off in their big car. They had a big car and we had a bus and I didn't see those guys again for six months. That was April. We came back to see them at San Francisco State in October.

Owsley Stanley:
We were having a good time. We'd go to the beach and run around and do our own shows and we did several Acid Tests there. Every so often, we'd get a phone call with a job offer. First, it was the hundred and twenty-five dollars. Then it was one fifty. Then it was one seventy-five. Then it was two hundred. Just at the time when we had absolutely totally run out of money and there was nothing left, Rock went up to San Francisco and hammered out a deal for three hundred and fifty dollars for a show in April '66 with the Loading Zone at the Longshoreman's Hall. By being out of town, we got to rehearse and know each other better but we also created a mystique where fans of the band were agitating and calling up the promoters and club owners and saying, “Where the hell is the Grateful Dead?” So they thought, “Maybe they have a better audience than we thought.” That was the start. It was a way of proving that the band could be in control.

Rock Scully:
The L.A. thing lasted about six or eight weeks. Then we came back up to San Francisco. Because now we had a couple of sets.

Sue Swanson:
I met Bob Dylan at the airport late one night and told him about the Grateful Dead. They were living down in L.A. in that big house. I was with Danny Rifkin. Three o'clock in the morning, we were both coming through the airport and there was Bob Dylan standing there with that manager of his who looked like Ben Franklin. I shouldn't have done it. You know how friendly he is. He's
so
friendly, right? But I walked over to him, waited until he finally looked at me, and said, “Look. I gotta tell you about this incredible band called the Grateful Dead.” He looked at me and said, “Oh, aren't they the ones that play with the one-handed drummer in the front of the picture of the Taj Mahal?”

Jerry Garcia (1988):
We met Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully, who became our early managers. They said, “We have these people in San Francisco who are dying to hear you guys.” So we decided to move back up. Having been out of town, we'd created a little legend for ourselves. When we got back into town, there was already a crowd waiting to see us. After that, we played really regularly in the Bay Area
.