So Many Roads (13 page)

Try as they might, the Warlocks couldn't quite pull off the role of eager-to-please rock 'n' roll band. They were either too loud, too unattractive, or too raucous for someone or another's tastes. Herb Greene, a local photographer who would soon become one of the foremost chroniclers of the emerging Bay Area music world, was among the first to recognize the Warlocks' innate wooliness. About a month before the December Acid Test in Palo Alto they had convened for an auspicious event, their first photo shoot. Greene, who'd worked as a stage manager for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, had met Lesh through that group and would be the man behind the camera.

Cavorting and indulging in funny, Beatle-inspired faces and poses under the Golden Gate Bridge, the Warlocks tried to make like a
friendly, accessible band for local teenagers. But collectively they weren't the most handsome or restrained guys on the planet. A short time later they were invited over to Greene's home to inspect the photos, and Greene would never forget the clamor as they barged in and ran up the stairs. “It was a thundering herd,” he says. “They were the rudest, loudest people. Pigpen was the first one up the stairs, galloping, and he's terrifying looking.” When he saw Greene, Pigpen said, “You got any
juice?”
Greene told him he had apple juice in his refrigerator, but Pigpen meant Thunderbird, the cheap white wine known as one of the best ways to get a quick buzz.

With Lesh now installed as their bass player and Garcia teaching guitar at another store now that the Dana Morgan Music Shop was no longer an option, the Warlocks had begun poking their way around the world of show business. Rock 'n' roll wasn't quite respectable—many still considered it a fad—but so many kids were forming bands and trying to write their own material that the dream of making it didn't seem that absurd, even for a months-old combo like the Warlocks. Garcia was relentless in pushing them to rehearse, including at least once in the backyard of the Swanson family house. Garcia brought his young daughter, Heather, and Kreutzmann his daughter, Stacy, and the kids cavorted in the pool. But the sound of the band practicing was so obtrusive that the neighbor next door complained that his own child couldn't take a nap. (Swanson never told her father about the Warlocks' takeover of their yard and pool cabana, which was probably for the best.) Meanwhile one friend or another, from Bob Matthews to a pal of Lesh's named Hank Harrison, took a stab at managing them and booking them into whatever venues would have them.

During the summer and into the fall of 1965 those venues mostly amounted to bars, dives, and a strip club or two, but somehow that suited the Warlocks. They weren't polished, musically or physically, and some of them still didn't know that many chords. A few weeks after Lesh had joined up with them the band was booked into Frenchy's, a
teen hangout in nearby Haywood. During his school years Lesh had played trumpet and violin onstage; now he was faced with the idea of mastering a new instrument, electric bass, and shaking loose any of the classical-music formality he'd accumulated. “The only thing I can remember is how stiff I felt,” he recalls of that show. “I didn't feel I had the groove. And I didn't know what the other guys were going to be doing.” When the Warlocks returned for a second night they were told they'd been replaced by an accordion, bass, and clarinet trio, the polar opposite of what the Warlocks were trying to accomplish. “That was such a moment,” he says. “I can't even remember what we did the first night that would have thrown up the red flag.”

Whether they wanted to or not, the Warlocks threw up plenty of such flags. From Quicksilver Messenger Service to the Beau Brummels (who managed to land in the Top Twenty early in 1965 with “Laugh Laugh”), one-time folkies were plugging in around the Bay Area; another new band, Jefferson Airplane, featured Jorma Kaukonen, who'd shared the stage at the Tangent with Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Next to them, the Warlocks were motlier and, with the exception of Weir, prematurely hardened. Onstage they wore mismatched striped shirts and vests; combined with Lesh's, Garcia's, and Pigpen's mushrooms of hair, they sometimes resembled better-dressed versions of cavemen.

In September the Warlocks were awarded a genuine prize for any upcoming band: a week of gigs at the In Room, a bar in Belmont, that wound up stretching to over a month. Starting with its awkward name, the In Room was such a wrong-side-of-the-tracks place that it was actually located
near
railroad tracks. Six nights a week, with Sundays off, the Warlocks played to a small and often indifferent crowd of boozers, men and women on the prowl, and what Weir would call “wooly freaks.” Attendance was low, especially at the start: Tom Constanten, Lesh's music-college and Las Vegas friend, took a weekend leave from
the Air Force, where he was now serving, and realized he was one of the only people there. But the gigs amounted to extended paid wood-shedding: playing covers of songs both rock (“Gloria”) and R&B (“In the Midnight Hour”), they learned how to lock in together, even how to hold their electric guitars and bass the right ways onstage. “With the Warlocks, we were just trying to work up a lot of tunes—the more tunes the better—and become a proficient rock 'n' roll band, so we could get work,” Weir recalled to Hajdu. “When we got a steady gig at the In Room, practice makes perfect, I gotta tell you.”

Still, the Warlocks couldn't simply grin, bob their heads, and play polite covers to whoever showed up at the In Room. Even when they launched into a rendition of a hit people would recognize, they'd forget the words or simply devise new ones on the spot: “Hey, you, get the fuck off my cow,” went one of their additions to the Rolling Stones' “Get Off My Cloud.” (“It was actually pretty funny,” says Greene, who checked out their set one night.) On their night off they'd take acid—or, at least, Garcia, Lesh, and Weir would, as Pigpen was averse to it and Kreutzmann was, for the time being, abstaining. By then some of the Warlocks had already tried the legal, odorless, and colorless hallucinogen discovered by Dr. Albert Hofmann in Switzerland about three decades before: Lesh during his pre-Warlocks days at his apartment in San Francisco, Garcia earlier in 1965 with a group that included his wife, Sara (both freaked out after they'd taken it). “LSD gave us an insight, because once you're in that state of profound disorientation, you play stuff out of muscle memory that you're used to playing,” Weir added. “We were taking acid every week for a couple of months, and I think we learned what we were going to learn with that method in that couple of months. We learned in that time an important lesson, to try to step back from what it is you're playing—not be there, to step back and let the song be itself.”

To Sam Salvo, a bartender at the In Room, it would have been best if the Warlocks had stepped as far back as possible. The band was, in
his words, “getting high smoking weed”—still a fairly foreign sight in public in the middle of the sixties—and when they were high they “talked of LSD,” he said. Weir would later claim he took more than enough acid—“I think I overdosed myself,” he has said—right before an In Room show. He was so discombobulated that the other Warlocks kept an eye on him all night to see whether he'd make it through; somehow he did.

With or without pharmaceuticals—and most of the time they didn't play high at the In Room—the Warlocks found their music slowly edging out into another, stranger zone. To Salvo the band sounded “loud and outrageous,” and he wasn't off beam. Because their repertoire was fairly limited at this time, stretching the songs out made it easier to fill up their sets, and one night they extended “In the Midnight Hour” to about forty-five minutes. The one song they wrote together during their stint at the In Room hinted at life after a cover band. A rumble-seat of a song, “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks),” inspired by a sign in the area, was loose and darker, driven by Pigpen's harmonica and Kreutzmann's astonishingly limber, jazz-rooted syncopation. Around this time they also began jamming on “Viola Lee Blues,” a bound-for-prison jug-band song from the twenties that the Dead played with sharp, cutting chords, more a strut than a plea bargain. For Lesh, the moment the band stretched it out at a rehearsal, playing what he calls “that crazy windup,” was a major musical breakthrough, hinting at what they could do.

In November they lost their gig at the In Room; the owners had had enough of them and their eccentric take on rock 'n' roll. (Garcia later told a friend that another turnoff was the arrival of an intimidating guy who told them they had to join “da union” if they wanted to keep their night job.) But beginning earlier that year they were far more welcome somewhere else in the area: Ken Kesey's house in La Honda. One or another of them had met the writer during the early Palo Alto days,
when Kesey, then a Stanford graduate student, lived in a cottage on Perry Lane in the town's undersized boho section. When Lesh would party next door to Kesey's, at the home of another Stanford graduate student and professor, Vic Lovell, Kesey would “come over from next door and throw us all out,” Lesh would later recall. The scene at the Chateau, where Garcia, Hunter, Lesh, and others had crashed on and off, wasn't particularly appealing to Kesey, a commanding figure whose stocky build reflected his days as a college wrestler and football player in Oregon. Since that time Kesey had become a celebrated literary hero due to the 1962 publication of his novel
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
; thanks to its success he'd earned enough to buy a home that looked like an oversized two-bedroom log cabin tucked into the redwoods near the Santa Cruz mountains.

Kesey's next novel,
Sometimes a Great Notion
, wasn't as much of a sensation as his first, but further adventures lay ahead: in 1964 he and the other members of his loose-knit, acid-enhanced gang, officially dubbed the Merry Band of Pranksters (shortened to Merry Pranksters), had driven a multicolored bus across the country, filming all the way. Their encounters with the straight world could be hilarious; once, when they pulled into a gas station, people ran out to check out the hand-painted International Harvester bus, dubbed “Furthur.” The Pranksters—who counted among them Ken Babbs, a gregarious, rubber-faced writer who'd met Kesey in 1958 and had just finished a tour of duty in Vietnam—would pretend to be fictional characters, complete with made-up dialogue. The footage had the makings of a unique full-length feature film. “No one had ever done anything like that before,” Babbs says, “a combination of documentary and made-up stuff. We were real serious about it.”

Anyone who wanted to see bits of the unfinished movie had to show up at one of the Saturday night parties Kesey began throwing at his house. LSD was always on the menu: Kesey had his first taste of it
when Stanford asked for paid volunteers to test hallucinogenics for the army, for $75 a session, at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. A group of Hells Angels pulled into a Kesey bash for the first time that August, and partygoers routinely began staying until 4 a.m.—not the best situation for Kesey's wife, Faye, and their young children nor for Kesey, who often had to clean up for days afterward. The Pranksters needed a bigger space, and what would be seen as the first attempt at an Acid Test took place in November at Babbs's home in Soquel. Garcia, Lesh, and Weir were there, as were Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, along with Neal Cassady, the fast-talking whirligig of a man who'd been the real-life inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
. With his waist-long hair, Orlovsky looked so foreign to them that Swanson, who also partook, asked him what happened if we went to a shoe store—meaning how would regular people deal with him. “He just looked at me like, ‘Who is this kid?'” she recalls. Lesh, tripping hard, bashed away on Kesey's guitar. (According to Dead historian Dennis McNally's
A Long Strange Trip
, Orlovsky, Ginsberg's lifelong lover, would forever be envious of Weir after Weir sat next to Ginsberg that night.)

When the Pranksters still couldn't find a hall to rent, a second, larger gathering was firmed up at the San Jose home of a local African American legend with the politically incorrect nickname Big Nig. There the Warlocks, some of whom had met with Kesey right after the party at Babbs's house and asked to play, set up in a large bay window; Babbs would always remember how heavy Pigpen's organ was and how difficult it was to haul it through the front door of the house. Tripping and listening to rock 'n' roll were two of the basic tenets of an Acid Test, but so was a type of underground marketing. When it came to the Pranksters' still-uncompleted road-trip movie, reality set in. “We thought, maybe it wasn't going to come out in theaters as a big two-hour movie,” Babbs says. Instead of attempting to sell it to a Hollywood
studio, maybe they could rent out spaces and show the footage in the middle of Acid Tests.

Parts of the movie were likely shown at the next Acid Test, on December 11 in a lodge at Muir Beach, a cove just south of Muir Woods. Then another Prankster cohort, Page Browning, heard about a nightclub in Palo Alto set to open just before Christmas that would be empty the night of Saturday, December 18. The owner, an area restaurateur named Yvonne Modica, was fifty-one years old but very young at heart, and she agreed to rent the space to Kesey and the Pranksters for a small fee. As with the cabin at Muir Beach, the Pranksters made sure to avoid telling Modica exactly what was planned—what happened at the Acid Tests would stay at the Acid Tests. But everyone knew intrinsically that the one local band bold enough to brave it all—and play music that would somehow fit in with the proceedings—was the Warlocks. Once more they crammed into Kreutzmann's station wagon, the band's transportation mode of necessity, and headed for a gig not too far from Magoo's.