So Many Roads (14 page)

Lesh had invited his striking new female acquaintance, Florence Nathan (later rechristened Rosie McGee), who agreed to meet him there. Driving to the address on the far side of town, McGee arrived at a wide, squat A-frame building that, she recalls, looked like “one of those strip clubs in the nasty part of town.” The building was so ordinary it was hard to tell what might be happening inside. “It could have been anything,” she says, “and anything could be going on in there.” She parked and ventured inside.

Before the paying customers began arriving at the Big Beat, the Acid Test needed to be set up, and Mountain Girl was happy to volunteer. Having flown back to the East Coast to visit her parents for Thanksgiving, she'd missed the previous Acid Test. But now she was back in the
Peninsula and ready to serve in Kesey's army. The place would be filled with tape recorders, movie projectors, and other electronics gear, and Mountain Girl, who was learning how to edit and archive film, signed up for the task. Given all the equipment she'd have to oversee, she only took one sip of the acid-dosed Kool-Aid that would be distributed for the night. There was work to do, and she needed to be as straight and proactive as possible.

Born Carolyn Adams in May 1946 and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, Mountain Girl was made to be a Prankster. Weeks before her high school graduation she'd been kicked out of school for venturing into the boys' locker room to sneak a peek at the mysterious new Nautilus machine installed there. “I had never seen anything like it,” she says. “I had no idea what it was. It looked like an alien machine from outer space.” She popped into the locker area for less than a minute, but a janitor saw her and reported her, and she was out. (“They had been waiting for something,” she says, given her past indiscretions at school.) Her older brother, a graduate student at Stanford, invited her to fly out and live with him, and Adams arrived in Palo Alto in the summer of 1963. By September, at age seventeen, she'd found a job at Stanford's organic chemistry lab and begun killing time at the local coffeehouses and clubs like St. Michael's Alley and the Tangent—the same places as Garcia and his gang, although their paths had yet to cross.

At St. Michael's Alley Adams met Cassady; the Furthur bus had just arrived back in town, and Cassady was in search of Benzedrine. “You want to go for a ride?” he asked her, and Adams, no longer working at the lab and dealing with what she calls “some personal struggles” that included breaking up with her boyfriend, went along, saying, “What the hell.” With his brain-on-overdrive charm, Cassady was hard to turn down. At dawn the two wound up at Kesey's place, the iconic Furthur bus parked in the driveway and Kesey hard at work on its wiring. Adams was immediately smitten with the bus. Having been a monitor
in grade school, she was familiar with school transportation, and this overhauled vehicle, outfitted with bunks by the previous owner, was “the most fascinating object I'd ever seen,” she says. She spent several hours examining it and all its finger-painted characters and symbols.

Tall, strapping, outgoing, and headstrong—or, in the words of Tom Wolfe in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
, “big . . . and loud and sloppy”—Adams had a warm, earthy aura and easily ingratiated herself into the Merry Pranksters' world. Soon she was helping catalog the seemingly endless amount of film shot on the Furthur bus trip. (She was less than taken with Big Nig's nickname at the second Acid Test: “I could never say that name. The guy might have called himself that, but Kesey had a conservative streak.”) She lived here and there—in a tent in the area, on the boat of another Prankster, Mike Hagen, even briefly squatting in a house in La Honda. When Cassady found out her name was Carolyn, also his wife's name, he stopped hitting on Adams, but she wouldn't be Carolyn for long. One day she visited Hagen in the ramshackle home he called the Screw Shack. Asking her where she lived, she pointed up to the mountain, where she was crashing in a cabin. “Oh, so you're
Mountain Girl
,” he said. Adams wasn't thrilled with the name—“oh, great,” she thought to herself—but it stuck, and from then on she would be Mountain Girl, or MG to her friends.

Showing their movie was one of the Pranksters' goals for the Acid Tests, but they also wanted to transform the parties into a type of living, breathing, heaving performance art. At the Big Beat they'd be placing microphones on the floor and encouraging everyone to walk up to them and scream or talk into the mics. The recordings would then be broadcast during the evening, and part of Mountain Girl's job that night would be to continually circle around the room, setting up the projectors, tape decks, and microphones, using masking tape and glue to repair them if they broke down. In what Mountain Girl called “a gift from the gods,” her brother hauled in a strobe light on loan from
Stanford. Acid Test cards—which asked those who entered to write down their address, eye and hair color, and weight—were also printed up and handed out.

Last but extremely far from least were the small buckets the size of household waste-paper baskets, each containing Kool-Aid dosed with LSD. Kesey would long brag about all the acid he purloined from the VA hospital during his stint there; he said he snatched it right out of a desk. But Babbs would also say the acid at the Tests didn't come from the Pranksters. According to others, it arrived by way of people with connections at Stanford who'd obtained some of Dr. Hofmann's stash. Mountain Girl also heard some of it came to the school by way of the CIA: word had it that the government had shipped the drug to hookers in San Francisco for testing and, in some way, for spying on businessmen who were availing themselves of the prostitutes.

When Mountain Girl first saw Garcia hanging around Kesey's place in La Honda, she immediately recognized him from around town. She'd seen him at the Tangent; hearing someone play banjo as she bicycled past, she parked her bike, went upstairs to the second-floor performance space, and came across a hairy guy diligently working on what sounded like a complicated banjo tune. He was clearly diligent, playing the melody over and over, but he was also imposing in the same way others felt about him—he was, she recalls, “scowling horribly.” A few weeks later she returned to the Tangent—or possibly stopped into another area spot—to catch a set by Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. And there he was again, this time part of that ragtag jug-band ensemble, all of them playing, singing, and joking onstage. She found the group highly entertaining—it took her back to her own folk-singing days during high school on the other side the country—but didn't introduce herself to him or anyone else in the band.

To Mountain Girl the Warlocks always seemed game when it came to adventures with Kesey. They'd arrive in time to help everyone set
up the Acid Tests, bringing along their own, better gear, as the Pranksters' speakers and equipment weren't up to snuff for a rock 'n' roll band. Along with everyone else on the scene, she'd also heard that the Warlocks were now going by a very different name, thanks in part to their first shot at the record business.

For a few hours on November 3, about a month before the Big Beat Acid Test, the Warlocks had auditioned for Autumn Records, the company co-run by rotund and influential San Francisco DJ Tom Donahue. At Golden State Recorders in San Francisco they put their music on tape for perhaps the first time. The tape revealed how much the Warlocks were still in the midst of figuring out who they were and how they should sound. On two songs—a cover of Gordon Lightfoot's “Early Morning Rain,” with a lead vocal by Lesh, and a group-written ballad, “The Only Time Is Now”—they made like a proficient folk-rock band, even down to the use of a de rigueur tambourine. On “Mindbender” and “Can't Come Down” they showed how much they could be a conventional organ-driven garage rock band. Their sense of dynamics was already evident in the way they stripped down and then built up their rhythms toward the end of “Early Morning Rain.” “We knew instinctively that with all this stuff converging it would take some time to sort it out,” Weir told Hajdu, “but once we started getting stuff sorted out, it would be meaningful—meaningful to us and we hoped meaningful to others.” But on those and other songs, like the traditional “I Know You Rider,” the guitars were timid and the harmonies underdeveloped; Garcia's attempt at a solo in “Mindbender” was halting. As Paul Curcio of the Mojo Men, who was at the session, recalls, “They came in and scared the hell out of everyone. No one had ever seen a band that grungy.”

They didn't get a record deal—the label wound up passing—but one career-altering change did emerge from it all. Flipping through vinyl at a record store in town, Lesh had come across a 45-rpm single
credited to the Warlocks, so a new name was needed, fast. At Autumn, they dubbed themselves the Emergency Crew. Even they must have sensed what a terrible band name
that
was, as a little over a week later the band, along with friends Swanson, Bonner, Matthews, and Grant, congregated at Lesh's apartment to finalize a new one. After Garcia (and maybe others) had smoked DMT, a hallucinogenic far stronger than LSD, Lesh began flipping through his copy of
Bartlett's Quotations
for inspiration. A slew of silly names were tossed out, none deemed acceptable. Finally, according to Matthews, Garcia said, “We aren't able to find a name, so maybe a name will find us.” With that he flipped open a copy of a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary on a book stand, ran his finger down the page, stopped and read it. And there it was, “The Grateful Dead,” a folk tale about a heroic figure who encounters people “refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts.” After giving “his last penny” to them so that the corpse can be properly disposed of, the hero leaves and later meets a fellow traveler who comes to his aid—and who winds up being the ghost or reanimated body the hero had saved.

The story was appropriately creepy, as much in the tradition of Rod Serling's
The Twilight Zone
as one of the death-haunted Child folk ballads of the 1800s that Garcia loved so much. But for a band that would never be terribly genteel with each other, the name was fitting, and to Garcia, everything else on the page disappeared in favor of what he called “a stunning combination of words.” From the tone in Garcia's voice, Lesh sensed his friend loved the name and bounced up and down in agreement. “I was so excited,” he says. “It had so much resonance.” Reactions from everyone else in the room were varied: “We all looked at each other and said, ‘How morbid,'” recalls Matthews. Weir and Pigpen were particularly unimpressed, but according to Lesh, their opinions took a backseat to his and Garcia's. “We just went ahead and said, ‘Sorry, guys, but this is it,'” Lesh says. “At least
I
did. I went ahead
like it was an accomplished fact, and I just kept calling us the Grateful Dead. It just became our name.”

When Mountain Girl heard about the change she too was taken aback. “I said, ‘The Grateful
Dead
—what kind of a name is
that
?'” she recalls. “I thought, ‘That's not very attractive!' But ‘The Warlocks' wasn't very attractive either.” As the Warlocks began arriving at the Big Beat she saw that the name wasn't the only alteration. She'd seen them at the party at Big Nig's house, but tonight she was able to better focus on them and notice how different they both sounded and looked compared to the Mother McCree's era. She took note of the new drummer and the new bass player, how impossibly young Weir looked, how long Pigpen's hair was, and how wild Garcia's was. (Garcia would later recall they wore loud-colored shirts and pants.) It was, she says, “a complete transformation.” And she had to admit that, in their way, they were pretty cute.

The feeling was apparently mutual on Garcia's part. One day at Kesey's La Honda home Garcia was hanging with Denise Kaufman, now one of the female Pranksters, nicknamed Mary Microgram. Although Garcia was married, Kaufman couldn't help but notice how Mountain Girl grabbed his attention when she walked by. “I'd give up music to be with Mountain Girl,” Garcia said. As Kaufman says, “On a deep psychic level I could see him totally connecting.”