Dark Star (16 page)

Jorma Kaukonen:
It is Jerry. Absolutely. You bet. It's Jerry and Marty. I think he might have played rhythm guitar on another track. He's definitely in the mix and an important part of the band on those tracks. When I got into the Airplane, I didn't have a clue about what an electric guitar was except that you plugged it in and it was louder. Jerry was way ahead of all of us in that. Jerry was his own electric guitar player from the jump. He was never played like B. B. King, or Freddy King or Chuck Berry. Jerry always had his own thing on the electric guitar.

Sue Swanson:
It was never easy. Every day you'd wake up and there was always some kind of psychodrama going on at some level or other. One person was disagreeing with another or they were going to fire Weir. Pig was not playing right or somebody was being a motherfucker or Billy was pulling some maneuver with the money. It was always something. For many years, I lived and breathed by what was happening with them. Those kind of habits die hard.

Jon Mcintire:
Neal Cassady was around a lot. Really a lot. He would kind of live up in the attic. There wasn't really a floor in the attic. There were just boards that were laid down. I remember at one point, Cassady's foot came through the ceiling. He slipped and his foot came down into Pigpen's room. I think Neal Cassady just went where the juice was and this was where he felt it. This was the moment of the shift from the beatniks to the hippie movement. The baton was passed on by Neal Cassady directly to the Grateful Dead. You can draw that literal connection because of Neal Cassady.

Jorma Kaukonen:
They had a house and they all lived in it. The Airplane lived together later in our career but never in the embryonic state where you were working together, living together, dealing with each other's day-to-day shit. We did not do that in the beginning. But they did and I think that formed a really important bond in their emerging character. Strictly looking at it as an outsider, their band family almost superseded their personal lives. To really live in a real honest-to-God, no bullshit commune? That's hard.

Ron Rakow:
We were poor for a lot of that time. It wasn't poor. Poor is when your spirit is beaten down. We were broke. But we were having a great time. One time Garcia said, “I found my guitar. It's at Dana Morgan's Music. I can't buy it, though. I need nine hundred bucks.” I said, “Oh, I got nine hundred bucks. Let's go get it.” We jumped in my Cadillac and we drove down there with Mountain Girl who was wearing these white Keds tied with thick round wool instead of shoelaces. One was red and one was green. She pushed down the armrest between the seats and put her feet up on it. We got him a black Les Paul Gibson with flat frets. The guitar that's in the Irving Penn photograph.

Jon Mcintire:
The reason they lived in 710 was because it made economic sense to do so. There wasn't any money. And so yes, there was a commitment to community, to family, to the living situation as a commune, but it wasn't some sort of political ideal that was being lived out and realized as in, “Ah, yes, we will become a commune.” It was economic necessity and the fact was they were all buddies. Music was always the driving force. As soon as there was the financial wherewithal, their living situation changed.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
The bust really put an end to 710. The bust and that we were busted by a Prankster. We had just gotten some weed and this guy came to the front door and asked me for a joint. He was somebody I was on the bus with. Now this guy was not your up-and-coming Jaycee or anything like that. He was quite a gnarly, weird little guy who'd been in and out of Napa State Hospital, the mental institution. He came in and asked me for a joint. I rolled a joint right out of the strainer on the kitchen sink there and he said, “Oh, wow, thanks a lot. See, I have to leave right now but are you going to be home later on?” I said, “Jerry and I are going over to Sausalito.” We had a car and we were going over to Sausalito to buy stuff at the ribbon store because I was making Jerry a ribbon shirt. So he said, “I guess I won't see you later then,” and he went outside. He waited for us to leave and then he handed the joint to the narcotics officers who were with him. I think he busted eight houses that day. He had been busted. They had him and they turned him. Because they were going to send him back to Napa if he didn't do it.

We came back from having our nice day in Sausalito but we didn't get busted. Because Marilyn, who was Brian Rohan's girlfriend, lived right across the street from us. She saw us pull up in the car, raced downstairs, and said, “Oh,
hi
! Come up to my apartment. Come
on
!” Suddenly, she was so friendly. We said, “Oh, okay.” She got us up to her house and she said, “Look out the window,” and I was going, “Uh-oh.” There were these strange guys coming out of the house carrying stuff. We hung out in her living room watching all this in relative safety as they were taking Pigpen and Weir away in handcuffs. Poor Pigpen, who didn't smoke weed, got arrested repeatedly for other people's sins.

After they cleared out of the house, we slipped back over there after dark and looked around. Everybody was gone. That damn kilo of weed was still sitting in the kitchen. They had not found it. It was in the pantry. It was sitting there in its cellophane wrapper dribbling weed on the floor and they had not found it. How this is possible, I don't know. But they got that colander full of seeds and stems that I had rolled a joint for that guy out of.

Jerry and I were pretty cheerful about not being swept up and it didn't really turn into anything anyway. But it made us not want to go back to the house. It made it very edgy over there. There was another trip to Los Angeles right after the bust. While we were down in L.A., I was saying things like, “I don't ever want to move back into that house. I feel really uneasy and unsafe there.” So while we were gone, Rock moved all of our stuff out of our room and moved himself into our room. At that point, we had the big room. When we came back from L.A., we weren't living there anymore. All our stuff was over in the little room.

Jon Mcintire:
The first time I met Mountain Girl was when she and Jerry had moved out of 710 and gone somewhere else but not for very long. Wherever they went didn't work out. So they were coming to move back into their room. Of course someone else was already in the room and they were kind of storming around, especially MG was kind of storming around, trying to figure out what the fuck to do here. Rock was following after her. Poor guy, he didn't know they were coming back and so he was saying, “MG, please. Please don't be mad at me.” And she turned around and said, “No. It's okay, Rock. I just forgot how quickly things change around here.” Because there was a lot of that in-and-out and back-and-forth with things happening very quickly. But also there was a definite family feeling.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Jerry and I moved into an old motel somewhere down by the beach along the Great Highway. We stayed there for a couple of weeks. I was madly searching for an apartment and I finally found one out in the Richmond District out by the Palace of the Legion of Honor on Thirty-third and Geary. We moved in there with baby Sunshine, who by now could run.

Rock Scully:
Jerry didn't even get busted. He stayed across the street. Marilyn was at 715 and warned him off. He was over there with Richard Brautigan, who wrote that wonderful poem, “The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead.” They were determined to clean up the street but they were dirty about it. They took our money. We had a cashbox, which was what we would use to send Tangerine or Mountain Girl or Bobby Weir or whoever was available to go down to the market to get food. It was like our food drawer and in there was the lease on the place out at Novato and my name was on that lease so they assumed that I was leasing 710 Ashbury as well. After we got through the bust and Owsley got us all bailed out, we went for our arraignment and all the TV crews were down there and they busted me a second time for “running a place where marijuana is smoked.” Like it was some sort of a bordello for marijuana smokers. Like an opium den or something.

Jon Mcintire:
They weren't famous and they didn't have a lot of money but they were certainly famous in San Francisco. There were giant headlines in the
San Francisco Chronicle:
GRATEFUL DEAD BUSTED
. It was as though the Grateful Dead somehow personified what was going on in San Francisco and that they were San Francisco, and here was this other thing that was also San Francisco personified by the police. A lot of people back then were getting busted. But this was the Grateful Dead and they had that name. That name that, for whatever reason, was absolutely brilliantly chosen.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
Every time someone mentioned the name to me, they told me a different thing. At 710, I clearly remember Jerry telling me that the name, the Grateful Dead, came from the
Egyptian Book of the Dead
. There was a line in the book, which he had with him at the time and that he showed me, which said, “Osiris, we the grateful dead salute you.” That was definitely what Jerry told me and that was probably in '67.

Jon Mcintire:
They were originally called the Warlocks. It was a goofy sixties kind of name but then another group named the Warlocks came out with an album. The band was at Phil's house and Garcia was sitting at a table. On the table was the
Oxford Companion to Classical Music
. Garcia told me he opened up the book at random and there, looking to him like it was written in red, was the term “grateful dead” and it went on to define it as kind of an English folk song about people who were grateful to be released into death. Among the Grateful Dead, no one ever ever talked about the name coming from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Jerry Garcia (1988):
Our background was the sort of deeply cynical beatnik space. Which evolved into something nicer with the advent of psychedelics and the good-time mentality of the Haight-Ashbury. There really was a good year in there. Maybe a little more than that. And it was special and exceptional and magical. The fun part was before acid was actually made illegal. Because then you could go out there fearlessly and you weren't breaking any laws. It was just crazy as hell. And what were they going to do? That was fun. That was like pure fun
.

Ron Rakow:
When we played at the O'Keefe Center in Toronto in the summer of 1967, the review in the big-time Toronto newspaper was “The Grateful Dead—hirsute simian horrors.” We read the review out loud in a room with everyone there and people started saying, “What does that mean?” Jerry said, “It means we have a lot of hair and we walk on our hind legs.” When I was interviewed in
Billboard
magazine, I was quoted using the word “exacerbated.” When the Grateful Dead read that article, everybody said, “What the fuck is he talking about?” Garcia just said, “Makes worse.” He had a fabulous vocabulary. He also trained his cat to eat cantaloupe and I have a photograph to prove it. He was a tripster.

Suzy Wood:
It wasn't odd that Jerry was part of it. It was odd that the whole thing was going on. That there was this Haight-Ashbury, hippie, summer of love, flower children huge phenomenon boiling out of Vietnam protests and freedom riders and this whole boiling seething thing was going on all over. That was what was odd to me. Because that was not what had been happening in Palo Alto. But it got huge. The dope-smoking, Diggers, communal living, Avalon Ballroom, acid rock blah blah blah taking LSD. The whole thing was just so enormous and frightening to me. Which was my own personal trip. I was terrified of psychedelics. I thought I would go crazy if I took them. I thought I would never come back.

Eileen Law:
In '67, the Haight started changing. I started seeing bars being put up on windows. Then they advertised it as the place to go and all those songs came out. “If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair,” and all. When the tour buses started coming around, I believe the people came out of 710 and put mirrors up so that the people on the buses could see themselves.

Sue Swanson:
The next thing we knew, there were tour buses coming down Haight Street. Then we were out of there.

(left to right):
Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Jerry Garcia

 

Please don't dominate the rap, Jack If you got nothing new to say If you please, don't back up the track This train got to run today....
One way or another
One way or another
One way or another
This darkness has got to give.