Dark Star (17 page)

—
Robert Hunter, “New Speedway Boogie”

It wasn't surprising to get busted. It was surprising if you
didn't
get busted.

—
Jerry Garcia, interview with author, 1988

 

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
We bought a little TV and settled into some sort of domestic life. We had a big Plymouth station wagon with a back window that didn't roll up, and that was what we got around in. Right about this time, we took our one and only camping trip. Jerry and I went camping in the Sierras. They'd played a show at a bowling alley in Lake Tahoe. We just hated the motel. Jerry said, “Let's camp out.” I said, “Camp out?” I loved camping but I had never tried anything like this with him. I figured, “I'll have to do it all.” So I made my checklist and got some food and made sure we had sleeping bags and something to sleep on. He drove up to some little logging trail and on out into the woods. Bumpety bumpety bumpety down into this really beautiful spot that was there off the road. He slammed the station wagon down there and I was going, “Oh, hell. We're going to be stuck here forever.” The sun immediately set and the mosquitoes came out. Jerry really surprised me. He bustled all around and built a little fire and he cooked some steak and potatoes in tin foil and we made ourselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sat out there. We spent the night looking at the stars and it was as sweet as it could possibly be. That is one of my most treasured memories because it was the only time we ever did anything like that and it was completely on his whim. In the morning, he threw everything back in the car and packed us all in there. I was so sure we'd never get that car out of there because it was so damp and we were way down in. He just hauled ass. Spinning mud all over, just
booow-wow
, he came up out of the woods and heaved this station wagon back up on to the logging road and we were out of there. It was really a lot of fun. When we got back, everybody said, “Where were you guys? You missed a great party.”

There was a very very strong cohesive addiction that we all had to each other and to getting high together. It was hard to break off from the group and get high separately. It felt lonely. When you were used to that connection being made for you all the time, you were being reflected back in a circular group. You were aware that it was limiting on a certain level. But you're also aware of the nurturing, and the comfort level was much higher. I'm talking about taking psychedelics. I don't think any of us were ready for the spiritual development that it would have required for us to go off and get high by ourselves and sit in a dark room and trip our brains out. That wasn't what we were doing at all. We were forming a social nucleus. It was very nuclear and it was very centered on the band members. Phil was a very strong-minded member. Phil never seemed to lose his consciousness of the situation or of the players or of the humor that was inherent in any of the silly stuff we did. I remember Phil as being one of the funniest people I'd ever heard in my whole life. Just a needle wit and he could keep you giggling when you really didn't want to laugh anymore because your face hurt.

Bill Thompson:
The Grateful Dead and the Airplane started the Carousel Ballroom. This was in '68. The Airplane and the Grateful Dead got together and we were both going to be given ten percent of this club. We played there for free and we had lots of jamming shows. In return for that, we got ten percent. Ten percent of nothing. A guy named Ron Rakow ran the Carousel. Later, he would start Round Records for the Grateful Dead. He was our first mistake. He had cut a very bad deal. A hundred and some thousand dollars a year for rent. At that time, it was a lot of money.

Ron Rakow:
I didn't want to do the Carousel. I made a deal for the ballroom which later was written up as the worst lease in show business. The deal I made was seven thousand dollars a month against fifteen percent of the gross. The deal my lawyer, who was incompetent, wrote up was seven thousand dollars a month
plus
fifteen percent of the gross. I had to sign it. By the time the papers were drawn up, we already had guys in the building with sledgehammers, chopping the building up.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
There were two major critical errors made. The first one was that the previous owner of the Carousel had convinced Ron Rakow that the capacity of the place was greater than it was. In most places like that, the fire capacity is generally no more than two thirds of the actual amount of people it can hold. It turned out that the previous owner had bribed the fire department and the fire capacity of the place was the physical capacity of the place. Ron always believed the true capacity was another fifteen hundred higher than that. That was one thing, and the other one was that he based his projection on carrying that place on the shows of the Grateful Dead, who could not play every night.

Ron Rakow:
The fire capacity was not accurate. We knew we could get more people in there. But it was not a democracy. I ran that place. It was my mistake and I paid for it. It wasn't a communal thing.

Owsley Stanley:
Rakow was charging too little and he was paying too much and he wasn't paying attention to what was going on. The band had nothing to do with it. They just contributed a certain amount of money to it in the beginning. Bill Graham offered people more money and told them that if they ever played for the Carousel Ballroom, they would never play for him. He wanted the hall for himself. It was a better location than the Fillmore.

Ron Rakow:
The night Bill Graham and I were sitting in Zim's making the deal for him to take over the Carousel, Bobby Kennedy got assassinated. Prior to that, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed. For eleven weeks in a row, no dance halls made money. It was a bad business time. Also, I overpaid for every act because I had this bear barring people from playing for me. That was Bill.

Bill Thompson:
It lasted less than a year. Then it became the Fillmore West.

Jerry Garcia (1988):
We thought we'd give it a try. It was terrible! But we did have some crazy times. We had a lot of fun. It was one of those things that we just couldn't make work. We weren't ruthless enough
.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
In that group situation, we all had a tendency to generalize and not be specifically one-on-one with people and just let the energy move around the room. It was not soul searching. It was soul involvement. It was admitting that you were part of this group and that you were involved with this group energy. And it wasn't necessarily good for you as an individual during your individual growth. Jerry floated in it like nectar. He loved it because it allowed him lots of freedom. In it, he was pretty golden. He definitely had the gift of charming people and it almost seemed like the bigger the job, the harder he worked at it. Everyone sort of waited for his say-so. I know that Rock and Danny Rifkin wanted to run things a little bit more their way but Phil and Bill Kreutzmann both had strong leadership impulses. Jerry was really good at undermining them by changing the plans at the last minute.

Owsley Stanley:
I got busted in December 1967 and while I was locked up, it changed. It became partitioned. The guys on stage had little black curtains between their little cubbies. It all got divided up. It became, “This is my territory and this is your territory and this is my job and that is your job.” People started going off into their own dressing rooms and their own little cubicles on stage. To me, that was absolutely alien. It was more of a star trip. Somebody told me, “Things aren't the way they were in the old days. We're much more professional now.” Weren't we always professional? We were writing the book on rock 'n' roll.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Through the years, I mistrusted women less than I mistrusted a lot of men that came through our scene. I felt there were men who came through that were far more dangerous than any of the women. I felt equal to the men in the group. But I also felt the possessiveness of the situation. That in a certain way, I belonged to the group. I also felt it from Jerry. He was definitely a possessive person when it came to me. As far as I was concerned, it was a monogamous relationship. The playing around that went on, I tolerated it. The part I didn't like was women coming through the scene who were too messed up to look after themselves. I really frowned on that. They were never the ones who were after Jerry. His were more clever than that. They didn't come and stand in front of me. They knew better. But the ones who were interested in Bobby or Laird or Pigpen, they'd trail through the house. Basically, they were just looking for a place to lie down. I could feel that they were searching for something they could get their hooks into and that always really upset me.

 

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
We moved out of the Haight into that little apartment. After that, the rush was on to Marin. Jerry and I found a little cottage which is gone now over in Larkspur. It was rented to us through Gino Cippolina, who was John's father and a sweet old man. Jerry and baby Sunshine and I moved over there and it was pretty bare bones. It was a really funky old place and we had to do a lot of cleanup. We lived there for about six months. While we were gone one time, we actually had everything stolen out of that house. We had no furniture left. Nothing but the bed. They left the mattress on the bed and I think one chair but everything else had been moved out. They even stole Jerry's banjo.

Jerry had gone to rehearsal and I was sitting on the porch just feeling really sad and this guy walked up and he was this really weird-looking guy. He had another guy with him that was skulking around and looking around the corners really weird. He said, “If Jerry wants his banjo back, it's going to cost you about a hundred dollars.” And I went, “Hah, okay. Got the message. Check back with us tomorrow. Same time, same station.” When Jerry got home, I told him the story and he was like, “Oh, wow.”

So we got together ninety bucks for this guy and bought Jerry's banjo back. But we didn't get anything else back. The baby bed and the baby clothes were gone. They even took my diapers. These guys were a bunch of junkies and it turned out they were guys that Jerry knew a little bit. We were really lucky that he did because I don't think we'd ever have gotten any of those things back. For a lot of this time, I knew nothing about nothing. I didn't understand that there were junkies out there that would steal stuff from you. They'd steal stuff from their mother.

We were really broke during those days. We had no extra anything. It was hard to stay honest when you were that broke all the time. I was not above boosting a pint of strawberries from the grocery store. Luxuries were out of reach. But life was a lot less expensive in those days. I think we paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month for that cottage.

Bob Weir:
Needless to say, for the first many years of our existence, we didn't run a very tight ship businesswise. God knows how much money got away from us. More often than not, we'd be going through pretty lean times. After a fair bit of that, we started to try to streamline things so that our managers wouldn't take our money and run. So we would be able to function fairly comfortably without having to be constantly scrounging. Bill Graham came and made a presentation to us. Basically, he was too organized for us. We weren't ready for even that much structure. We were a complete democracy. The band and the crew and the family would all come to our meetings. With Bill, there would be shouting. In rapid order, we sort of drifted apart.

Jon Mcintire:
We were at Mickey Hart's barn in Novato and Mickey said something like, “Okay, so we've got a problem here. We've got a crisis. We don't have anybody managing us. We have a problem with keeping track of stuff. We're hippies and we need something more, and enter Lenny Hart, my father....” On cue, Lenny entered from behind this door. There was this concrete runway through the middle of the room and Lenny started rapping like a charismatic minister and he was a self-appointed Pentecostal minister. “Okay. We're talking about the spirit. We're talking about the spirit of God. We're talking about the spirit of the devil. We're talking about the same thing. It's the spirit. We want to bring out the spirit. We're the spirit of music, we're the spirit of …” He was going on and on and on and walking the whole time, throwing out this charismatic rap and they hired him. The same way I became their manager was the way Lenny became their manager. He was there. At that moment.

At the really big junctures, Garcia called the shots. He was always the goose that laid the golden egg. But Garcia didn't believe in being very consciously selective about these kind of things. Especially the stuff that he didn't take very seriously. Such as management. In terms of Lenny Hart, he wanted to believe. Absolutely. Anybody that Garcia chose, he was going to give full belief to. You had to fuck up bad before he would cut you loose. You had to be a jerk. You could make any number of mistakes and Garcia would say, “Of course, mistakes are made. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It just didn't work out.” That was the way they did it on stage with music. They would go down different musical lines and try it and then say, “Well, that one didn't work out.”

Bob Weir:
Then Mickey's father came in and that was a fiasco. Mickey's father didn't argue with us. He didn't have the time. He was too busy pocketing money.

Owsley Stanley:
They wanted to play the bigger shows and they had to keep renting sound systems that didn't coordinate very well with the gear that was there. They turned to me and said, “Do something.”