Dark Star (18 page)

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
After we lost that cottage, we had a second house on Madrone Avenue. Hunter lived with us and that was where
American Beauty
came together. John Dawson lived right across the street. Our house was 271 Madrone and we lived there for almost two years. It was during that time that Annabelle was born. It was also the period of time during which Altamont took place. The band had just done Woodstock so they were still high on that Woodstock vibe. The Woodstock thing had been so incredible. It really set the stage for Altamont because it raised everybody's expectations about how everybody would come together and how this thing would be so great. In other words, the audience would lend their participatory energy to making this a wonderful event. That didn't happen.

Nicki Scully:
I went by myself to Woodstock and discovered co-incidentally that I was on the same plane with the band so I sat with Jerry and he took me under his wing. I ran with Jerry for a day or two until I found Rock. It was a fun trip. Everyone was up for it. I remember we wound up at some motel. The first time we went into the site, I went with Jerry and it was pretty easy to get in. We checked things out. And then when I tried to get back in with Rock at four in the morning, it took hours and hours.

Owsley Stanley:
Woodstock was a disaster because the wrong sort of people tried to control it instead of just flowing with it. The helicopters and all those guys with their weird announcements about things that could have easily been avoided.

Nicki Scully:
I had been carrying around this bag with brown acid. I hadn't been giving it out because I'd already been told it was bad. I had it and nobody was going to get any more. Then I looked and there was a hole in the bottom. I had been trickling brown acid wherever I walked.

Owsley Stanley:
On stage, they had four of these large plywood cookies with two-by-four structure and casters underneath. They would set up two bands back-to-back on the cookies, roll them into place, and that was their way of getting rid of the time lag between sets. Ramrod and I looked at this and we said, “This is not going to work. Our equipment is too heavy. We're gonna have to set up on stage.” They told us, “Absolutely not. You have to do it this way.” The time came for our set. The guys hooked up the ropes. The plywood moved approximately one foot and all the casters broke.
Wham
. Down the thing came on the floor. We had to take everything down and set it up again. Everyone was bitching and saying it was our fault. We hooked it all up again on the stage. Phil turned on his bass amp. Out came the helicopter. We were getting the helicopter radio on Phil Lesh's bass. It was not a great show.

Nicki Scully:
I was standing on stage as they played. It was night. The wind was blowing, nearly tipping over the stage. It was an ominous moment. I was so high that I knew it was my fault. I knew if I weren't there, everything would have improved instantly. Looking out over that sea of people in every direction, there was obviously no place to go. No way out. I tried to dance. I couldn't dance. I really struggled to help them by trying to get myself out of the funk I was in. It was like a bad acid trip. It was a bad acid trip.

Jon Mcintire:
I was their manager at Woodstock. They got off stage and they'd sucked the hairy root. They were just horrible. I'd never heard them play so badly. I was feeling it personally and I was crestfallen. I was so embarrassed. But I would never have talked to Jerry about it. Later on, when I felt more at ease talking with each of them about musical things, I would have said, “God, that was awful!” But at that point, I didn't feel it was my place to make any musical comments. I just happened to be standing there when Garcia was walking off stage. He walked up and looked at me and said, “Well, it's nice to know you can blow the most important gig in your career and it doesn't really matter.” There it was. The epitome of cool.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
Jerry and MG and Sunshine lived in Larkspur. I was still recuperating from Woodstock and I was living in Mountain Girl's bus. At nine o'clock in the morning every day, Jerry and I would watch
Sesame Street
, essentially with Sunshine. But if Sunshine wasn't there, we watched it anyway. We liked the psychedelic images of the show.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I didn't go to Woodstock. I was pregnant with Annabelle and decided not to make the trek. I regretted not being there. I watched it on TV and I heard all the stories. But it set the stage for Altamont, which was a series of errors. It has been exhaustively autopsied but each of us had a different path through that thing and it was all scary.

Owsley Stanley:
Altamont was an example of greed, the inability and unwillingness of the Rolling Stones to take care of one of their problems, which was with the company that owned the Sears Point Raceway, and the energy of the event. It was December 6, the day before Pearl Harbor Day, which is a very low energy moment in the yearly cycle anyway.

Jerry Garcia (1988):
Originally, the Rolling Stones were just going to come out and play in Golden Gate Park. They made the stupid mistake of announcing that they were going to play. That was it. That was the end of it right there. They should have just called it off from then on. But the Stones were traveling in a bubble. They couldn't be contacted. You couldn't explain. Somebody, I think it was Emmet Grogan, wrote on the bulletin board up at Alembic Sound up by Hamilton Field where we were rehearsing and a lot of planning was going on—“First Annual Charlie Manson Death Festival.” Before it happened. It was in the air that it was not a good time to do something. There were too many divisive elements. It was too weird
.

Owsley Stanley:
We were driving to Altamont in a sports car that I had. All of a sudden, we looked up and there was this rocket blowing up in the sky. I said, “That's got to be some kind of strange sign.” We couldn't figure out where to get off the freeway. Most people drove along until they saw the site and then drove right onto the grounds. We took a turnoff somewhere and the road kept getting weirder and weirder and the trees kept getting closer and closer and eventually we were going through a tunnel. We came out of this tunnel into this moonscape of crushed auto bodies. Crushed and crunched. As we drove along, we looked over to the left and we saw this place that looked like a skull. It was the actual arena in which they had these demolition derbies. And I thought, “Oh, my God. This place smells of death. And of the energy of people who come here to watch other people crashing these cars and hoping they die.” I thought, “This is the
worst
possible place to hold something like this.” I realized that if you took acid at this show, you were going to have a trip you didn't really want to do.

Jon Mcintire:
Lenny Hart, Mickey's father, was the co-manager with me during Altamont. Before we went there, we were on the helicopter pad with the Rolling Stones. Lenny ran over to Mick Jagger and said, “
Mick! Mick!
You remember Jerry?” and he dragged him over. They'd never met. Of course, they put the Rolling Stones on the helicopter first. They were more famous.

Jerry Garcia (1988):
And that place. God. It was like hell. It was like one of those things you could watch happening. You could see it coming and you couldn't do anything about it. Like watching trains. I ended up acting like a security person. Trying to keep people off the stage and off stuff. I never was threatened. But it was horrible. We went there expecting to play but we didn't play. It was so horrible for one thing. For another thing, Pigpen got lost in the traffic flying in and out and he didn't show up. We had another gig that night but we blew it out. We said, “Fuck it.” We were too depressed
.

Laird Grant:
Straight people used to say to Jerry, “Oh God, man. The Hell's Angels, you ought to take their jackets away from them.” But he would say, “No, man. It's a good thing they have the jackets on. At least you know where they are and who they are. All those straight people wearing the same colored suit walking down the street are the sons of bitches you got to look out for because they're all wolves in sheep's clothing. At least here you can see the wolves. You can know who they are when they growl at you.” That was the basic thing of the Dead. We got out there and growled. Sometimes we bit. Sometimes we got bit back.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Altamont was a terrible blow. It was organized originally in my living room and it seemed like such a good idea at the time. And to have it turn into such a nightmare was frightening for us. We were still pretty addicted to the peace and love generation. To have it turn into such a nightmare was a serious wake-up call. After it all went down, we all felt guilty and really concerned about the people who had gone out there and gotten hurt. Every single one of us saw different terrible things that happened there. I think it made the band aware of the danger of calling attention to yourself and calling for mass attendance at these kind of events.

 

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
The Dead had just gotten back from a road trip and they were at their place in Hamilton Field. They had a big barnlike building with an office that they used as a studio and a rehearsal hall. I was hanging out up there and Garcia said, “I got this brand-new pedal steel guitar.” I said, “Can I come over and hear it?” And he said, “Sure.” So I brought my guitar and a few of my songs and he just jumped right into it. Like not even sticking his toe in the water to see what the water temperature was. He just jumped in and started playing pedal steel.

I played him some of my songs and he said, “Oh yeah, this is cool. That's nice. I like that. When are we going to do this again?” And I said, “I've got this gig down in Menlo Park.” On Wednesday evenings, I was the entertainment in a Hofbrau House not far down the street from Guitars Unlimited. I'd play for a couple hours for the people eating their roast beef sandwiches. Garcia invited himself along. He had this little foreshortened school bus, just as big around as a regular school bus but squashed, only four rows of seats in it. They had converted that to a hippie van slightly bigger than a Volkswagen. He put his pedal steel together and he would drive all the way from Larkspur down to Menlo Park every Wednesday and unload the stuff and set it up.

I'd sit there and do my songs and he'd accompany me on the steel. There wasn't any money involved and there was no importance to the thing. But it got to be pretty good. On Wednesday evenings at about seven o'clock, you could see all the kids emptying out of the Round Table Pizza Parlor which was their normal hangout up the street. They'd come marching down the street and pay their fifty cents or a dollar at the door of the Underground, which was the name of this Hofbrau House.

David Nelson:
I was staying at Jerry's house. Hunter came downstairs one day and said, “I've got a name for you. The Riders of the Purple Sage.” We'd called ourselves the Murdering Punks and we'd also had some other names. I said, “There already
is
a Riders of the Purple Sage. Foy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage. How about New Riders of the Purple Sage?” And he said, “You just like names with new in 'em.” Because I had just been in the New Delhi River Band. And we'd all always liked the New Lost City Ramblers.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
After the Underground, we said, “Let's make a little bar band out of this.” Like the country and western guys who played in bars and had a good time. So we got Nelson and we rehearsed a bunch of stuff.

David Nelson:
When we were starting the New Riders, I was staying at Jerry's house in Larkspur. That was where I first heard all the Grateful Dead's new songs because the band would come in and do vocal rehearsals in Jerry's house. I got to hear “Attics of My Life” and “Candyman” and “Cumberland Blues.” God, it was great. On
Workingman's Dead
, I play acoustic guitar on “Cumberland Blues.” It's pretty apparent that song is about Cumberland, the mines, and the southern Appalachians. After the big chorus and singing, it comes back into a rest on G and gets more country. Jerry was going to play banjo there and I was going to play guitar. Just like we did in the Wildwood Boys. But the banjo playing didn't mesh with the drums. It had never been done and it was too much trouble so Jerry stuck with the little banjo-y sound on the electric guitar and he had me play the acoustic part. I know he did do a banjo track on that. Maybe they just mixed it down. But it was him and me playing some bluegrass on there.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
This was when Hunter came up with the idea for “Friend of the Devil.” Hunter was living in Garcia's house. He came over to my house and said, “I've got this brand new song.” He had the melody. “Okay,” I said. “So you can do that twice. Then you gotta go somewhere else.” I came up with the other place to go to. “A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.” I came up with the chorus. The hook part. Together, we evolved that song.

David Nelson:
I ran the tape recorder and strummed along while they worked out this tune, “Friend of the Devil.” Actually, Hunter had it pretty much worked out. It was just me and John playing along as far as I was concerned but Hunter swears that John really helped write it. I have the piece of paper that Hunter wrote the lyrics on and it has lyrics on it that aren't in there. Before Hunter thought of, “Set out runnin' but I take my time,” it was “Looks like water, tastes like wine. Run like the demon from the thousand swine.” That was crossed out. Then in place of it is “Set out runnin' but I take my time, a friend of the Devil is a friend of mine.” They changed “Got a girl in Boston, babe and one in O-hi-o” to “Got a wife in Chino, babe, and one in Cherokee. First one says she's got my child but it don't look like me.” It's in his handwriting and the chords are A minor, E minor, F, E minor. F, C, F, C.