Dark Star (14 page)

 

Rock Scully:
By the time we came back, Chet Helms was taking over the Family Dog. Bill Graham had formalized his Fillmore deal. With the advent of the Fillmore and the Avalon, things started changing in terms of the size of our audience. The scene had fired up just the way we thought it would. Because we had bigger places to play, we had to be more professional. Since Bill Graham and Chet Helms were charging money and people were paying to come and see us, Garcia's full thrust on this thing was, “This isn't an Acid Test anymore, boys and girls. They're paying money to come and see us. We have to put on a show.” He was very professional about it. He was really diligent and he got Phil on the case. Phil was such a perfectionist. But Jerry was the guy who instructed the band that we were now getting into show business and the people were paying money to come and see us so we had to be good. We had to do our best and we had to be on time. He was very specific about that. “Scully. Just get us there on time.” Personally, I was late a lot. As far as the band went, I got them there on time every time. Because of Jerry.

Suzy Wood:
In the summer of '66, we went to Avalon Ballroom to see the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. It was an awful experience. It was a huge crowd. There were too many people and light shows and people smoking joints in the middle of a public place, which was just horrid and weird. San Francisco had become something real
real
different. We were wending our way through this crowd and we heard this voice say, “Want coffee?” We turned and there was Jerry. His hair was in braids and I was so relieved to see the person we had come to see. He took us to the backstage area. Ron McKernan was back there and I was so glad to see them both in this little back room where we could sit around and talk and joke, and Jerry was just like he always was. When I left, Jerry was leaning against a post.

Laird Grant:
When they came back to the Bay Area, they got this place up in Novato, Rancho Olompali. That was when I split from my wife and said, “I've got other things to do, dear. I'm joining the band.” I went back as the van master.

Rock Scully:
It was the height of our folly. This was a time when girls were taking off their clothes. It was wonderful. It was idyllic and a very happy time.

Eileen Law:
Olompali was just a wonderful place to go to hang out. The parties were outrageous. There was this big all-night party when the Hell's Angels raffled off a motorcycle with Chocolate George. The Angels and their ladies ended up running the place. I grabbed all the kids and put them in a room and we just hung out in there. Danny Rifkin and different people stayed up all night and made sure the house stayed okay.

Jorma Kaukonen:
It was a really fun place. To get out of town, go up there, and take a guitar, hang out for a day, two days, whatever. Play, socialize. It didn't get much better than that. I really didn't know much about Marin County then because it was like another world, and this was an era when we all had cars that couldn't be relied upon to go very far. Our world was really proscribed in a lot of ways but they moved out there and they had an
empire
. When I was living in an apartment in the Western Addition on Divisadero Street, they had a fucking empire and to go visit them was great. I didn't have to hear the rats in the kitchen. Before we knew what rock star heaven was, they were defining rock star heaven.

Eileen Law:
I remember being at an Olompali party when a musician in another band went a little nuts and he had a gun. I guess he thought Garcia was coming on to his girlfriend or something. I'd had an accident a few weeks before where I'd burned my legs so I had to stay in one position out there on the lawn. Garcia was near me and here was this guy with the gun. I kept saying, “Will you please move? Will you
move
!” Under my breath, I kept going, “Garcia, just move, please. Get out of the way.” I was right in back of him and I couldn't move because of my legs. Everybody was so high, I don't think anyone realized how serious the guy was.

Rock Scully:
Jerry freaked out there on an overdose of LSD. He blamed it on ghosts of the Tamal Indians. That was the site of the Bear Flag Republic War, which lasted about twelve hours. An uprising that was put down immediately by the cavalry. It was a very quick war. But that land was sacred to the Tamal Indians. One day, I caught Jerry in the old adobe that the house was built around. There was a little trapdoor with a window in it where you could see the original adobe and he was in there feeling around. Feeling the adobe. His hands were all down inside the hole.

He was high and then the next time I saw him, he was out by this giant oak tree that had partially died and it was ancient. The Indians had baked bread in it. They had put clay on the inside of this dead tree. You know how dead trees sort of get hollowed out? They'd used it like a chimney and it was their baking oven. Jerry was out there communicating with that tree. I was looking for him all over the place because I thought something was a little bizarre about his behavior and the next time I saw him, he was under the dining room table all huddled up and shivering. It had been a tough day. Some kid had almost drowned in the pool and things had gone a little haywire. There were about two hundred people there and they had played and David Freiberg had played.

LSD can be a razor-edged kind of deal sometimes. It's a very chemical psychedelic. It really is. You feel it in your back and your jaws. When you do mescaline or peyote or mushrooms, it's like you're sore from smiling. Everything's got rounded edges. You look at an old Buick and it's got a friendly face on it instead of being cold steel and iron. But LSD is sort of two-faced. It takes away your defenses and then leaves you vulnerable. At the same time when you start coming off it, everything looks pretty sharp. For instance, if somebody's lying to you, it's apparent. Then the world starts looking harsh and cold. The color goes out of it and everything becomes black-and-white. It's not all that friendly anymore.

I couldn't get Jerry out from under the table. So I just tried to keep people out of the room to give him space. After everybody left and it had gotten dark, I made a fire in the fireplace. It got to be more organic and the vibes went down. Once the fire got going and most of the people had left and it was back more to a familial thing, he came out. He'd just hidden there. It wasn't like he was invisible or anything. You could see him. But he felt with this low roof over his head, which was the tabletop, he was okay down there. That was where he'd gone to gain his solace. He came out and sat by the fire. He didn't say anything for maybe an hour or two. I played some Otis Redding. Music always helped. Then he started to talk about it. I said, “You know, Jerry, I saw you in the wall there and out by the tree.” He said, “I started having feelings about the Spanish coming to California and what happened to the natives that were here and I just felt their ghosts. I felt a ghost and it scared me.”

I got him to talk about it and he started talking about how the Spanish had come into California and kicked the Native Americans' butts and then how gold had brought in all these other people and he was Spanish so he felt this sort of
mea culpa
. He felt some guilt and dealt with it and came out of it. Then the color came back into his face. He'd been really pale. Ghostly pale. Scary. That day, this kid had nearly died in the swimming pool and there had been some shockers but it was shocking for me to find Jerry in this state because I'd always leaned on his good vibes which were always there. I could always rely on him to find the positive track. Always.

Without a doubt, he'd always go for the most positive thing. When we'd be walking down these hallways in our minds with all sorts of dark decisions everywhere, I'd run into Garcia and he'd say, “Hey, try this door. Check it out.” I was sure that was why Kesey loved him so much. Jerry never had a bad thought in his head about anybody. I never heard him ever say he hated anyone. He'd get pissed off at people. He was pissed off at Albert Grossman for the way he treated Big Brother. But never hate. Never disgust or hate. He always looked for the positive. That was his major forte, I thought.

That was the only time I ever saw him like that. There was one other time in L.A. when we all dosed and went up around the observatory. Way up on the top of Griffith Park. It was kind of desertlike. Especially in the summertime. It got kind of otherworldly and Jerry felt that an alien ship had landed. Several of us felt an electrical presence. Being that close to some of the power lines across the hills might have had something to do with it but we all got spooked out. That wasn't real scary because we all shared that. This was something that he went through by himself.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Sunshine was born in Mexico. She was an absolutely precious little blond child. We drove from Texas back to California because someone had put together a scene at San Francisco State. In our absence, San Francisco had changed. We came back and somehow San Francisco felt a little stale. When the band came off stage there, they said, “Oh, we're so glad to see you guys!” Big hugs all around and it was just a really important moment of contact for Jerry and I. We actually walked off and spent some time together that day. Actually, quite a bit of time. To the point where I left Sunshine on the bus and they had to come looking for me because she was crying and hungry. I just walked off with Jerry and we talked for a long time. I didn't pursue it at all at that point because we had a lot more stuff ahead of us as the whole Prankster scene began to come apart.

Then I was invited to a party in Lagunitas out in Marin at the boys' camp. I remember going out there looking for the band but just missing them. I missed them like at four or five different scenes. I never did quite find them. During all that looking for them, I began to realize that it didn't really have that much to do with the band. I was really looking for Jerry. So then I was having this moment of truth over that. I was thinking, “Oh, man, do I really want to be involved in another group living scene?” And the answer was “Yes. Yes, I do.” It was ever so much more fun than struggling along alone. Soon as I could, I contacted him at 710 Ashbury. I went over there and we got together. It was a wonderful relationship from the very beginning.

Rock Scully:
I'd convinced Danny Rifkin to try to remove the lodgers from 710 Ashbury so we'd have a place to move back to from L.A. I'd lived there before with Danny and Danny was the actual official landlord. It was a boarding house. Jerry was a bachelor for the first part of our 710 stay but somewhere along the way, Mountain Girl started coming around to our gigs and just fell for Garcia. She came to 710 and at about that time, my girlfriend Tangerine did this deal on me. “It's me or them, Rock. I can't handle this.” She was the only girl in the house and we wouldn't do the dishes so she had to clean up after us and there were beer cans and dirty towels.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Tangerine was there for a while but she quickly split because she was tired of cooking and cleaning for those guys. But she had whipped them into shape. When I stepped in, they were already pretty domesticated. The house was full of wild crazy people living in chairs and basements and closets. The plaster was falling from the roof and the door was never locked and it was just a wonderful scene. None of them cooked or cleaned. They didn't know where the grocery store was. I had already lived through the Pranksters and I loved these guys. They were so sweet. You have no idea. Danny Rifkin, Laird Grant, the sweetest people on earth. And they weren't nearly as cranky as those old Pranksters. They were darling. I came in right when Phil and Billy had both moved out. They had gotten their own place up on Diamond Heights with their girlfriends and they actually had dinner on the table and clean laundry and all that stuff. They had a really solid living scene. Which meant that the scene down at Ashbury Street needed some tending and there was room for me there. It was a great big house and I felt that I was needed. I felt that I was called to do this. I also felt they would let me get away with shit there. In there, I knew I could rule.

Sue Swanson:
It was a gathering of a tribe. Palo Alto was a faction. There were people in Berkeley. There were people in L.A. And then slowly but surely, everybody ended up together in the city and it became something else.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Quickly, I got busy and made Jerry a whole bunch of little bit wilder clothes than he'd been wearing. I felt my role there was to keep it together and that felt good to me because I had to keep it together for Sunshine as well as for myself. I did a lot of laundry and I did an awful lot of cooking. There was a stove in that kitchen that if you took your eye off it for ten minutes, something bad would happen. I remember one time I was turning on the gas oven and it burned off all my eyebrows and eyelashes and ruined dinner completely. We spent a lot of time sitting on the steps out in front looking up at the old nunnery up the street. Over on Haight Street, there was a drugstore and a Chinese grocery store where we shopped and the little St. Vincent de Paul store where I bought all my stuff. We had such a beautiful spot to watch the fog come in.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
Jerry and I got together another time around Heather's birthday. She was a little more than two when we split up. He came to her third birthday party at my parents' house, and we talked then about getting back together. By that time, he was living on Ashbury Street with the band, and he said, “Come back.”