So Many Roads (17 page)

Weir (alongside Rosie McGee, with Toni Kaufman and Danny Rifkin behind them) during the bust at 710.

PHOTO: BARNEY PETERSON/
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
/POLARIS

CHAPTER 4

SAN FRANCISCO, OCTOBER 2, 1967

Mountain Girl didn't give it a second or even third thought when the visitor—let's call him Snitch—unexpectedly appeared at the front door of 710 Ashbury. Plenty of people, friends and otherwise, had scaled the dozen steps that led to the front door of the Victorian rowhouse in Haight Ashbury. Two years before, college students who'd rented rooms there were trudging up and down with their backpacks. Ever since the Dead had settled into the building in what amounted to a less-than-hostile takeover, Mountain Girl, her long hair now in a short, boyish bob, was more likely to greet local musicians, various Pranksters, and the band's assorted girlfriends, childhood pals, and business associates. Some might stay a few hours, some a few days; most would make their way there by hitting the intersection of Haight and Ashbury before striding up the sloping Ashbury Street and arriving at the house with the bay window.

Today's visitor, Snitch, small and curly haired, was an acquaintance of the band's from the area. In what was another commonplace request at 710, Snitch asked Mountain Girl whether she had any weed, and
she didn't vacillate. “There's some funky pot in the colander in the kitchen,” she told him. As she would later recall, “I would do that for practically anybody I knew.” She didn't know Snitch that well, but she accepted him along with others who straggled into what had become the Dead's combination home, clubhouse, and business office.

The house at 710 wasn't their first attempt at group living. Less than two months after the last attendees had drifted off into the daylight hours after the Acid Test at the Big Beat nightclub, the Dead and their extended posse had decamped to Los Angeles. Rock Scully was now their comanager along with Scully's friend and neighbor Danny Rifkin, and both felt the Dead needed time to work on original material, and Los Angeles in early 1966—home to the Byrds, the Turtles, Sonny and Cher, and many others—was a throbbing heart of the music business. “We needed more songs and needed to get tight,” says Scully. “We wanted to go back to San Francisco with more songs.”

With the help of the Pranksters, already ensconced in the area, the Dead and their growing family found a home on the outskirts of Watts. (According to Babbs, the Dead and the Pranksters first shared a house in LA, but it was so packed with people that the Dead got their own place.) Tim Scully, who came along with them, remembers the pink-painted house as once home to a bishop or priest, down to its confessional booth in the living room. Next door was a brothel, and many would later recall the sight of pot growing outside between the whorehouse and the Dead's house, thanks to customers who tossed seeds out the window of the brothel. Mountain Girl also feels another reason the Dead headed south was to deal with their growing following, even at this early stage. “They were already beginning to attract serious fans, both good and bad, but they hadn't thought about how they were going to handle people paying attention to them offstage,” she says. “I got the sense they were trying to protect their privacy down there.”

Over the course of roughly two months and several Acid Tests in the LA area, the Dead practiced in their temporary living room. (Not
surprisingly, neighbors would sometimes call the cops to complain about the noise.) They learned they could live together in the same house, even if it meant adhering to the all-meat diet that the proudly eccentric Owsley imposed on everyone else. Anyone peering into the refrigerator would be greeted with the sight of slabs of raw beef. Some were disgusted; others didn't seem to mind. “It got a little old after a while,” says Lesh, “but I had gone through a period where I hadn't had a lot of meat to eat, so I was happy to have it.” The women in the house didn't seem as enamored of Owsley as some of the Dead were, but no one had a choice when it came to coping with Owsley's eccentricities: he actively supported and financed the band, “buying and renting equipment as needed and paying for groceries,” says Tim Scully. Scully also lived in the house, along with various Dead girlfriends and a friend from the Dead's Palo Alto early days, Don Douglas.

At first Owsley refrained from manufacturing acid in the house, although there was still plenty around; about once a week, according to Douglas, everyone took Owsley's product en masse. Weir had been irked one night when Owsley exclaimed, “Well, we're surely doing the devil's work here!” Weir had to admit that between the chemicals and the loose social arrangements, one had to have a fairly liberal brain to accept it all, but he didn't fully agree with the devil remark, and he rarely ventured upstairs to Owsley's lair on the third floor. “Every now and then I'd go up and talk to him about this or that,” he told
Rolling Stone
in 2011, “but we spent most of the time on the bottom floor rehearsing or hanging. I know he was making stuff and cranking it out, but I don't know where the apparatus was.”

Their journey to Los Angeles puttered out for several reasons, one of them financial. Owsley soon ran out of money, and according to Tim Scully, Owsley and his cohorts took some of the leftover crystal LSD from a previous lab and sold it. (Lesh would often imagine the dust from Owsley's hand-pressed Blue Cheer acid drifting down through the ceiling and infusing the music they were making in the
living room.) Although the Dead managed to play a few shows in town, locals didn't know what to make of them, as Bonner learned when she pitched in posting fliers for the LA Acid Tests. As she recalls, “People would say, ‘What is that—Grateful Dead? That's disturbing!'”

By April, they'd flown back to the Bay Area and, with the help of McGee, relocated en masse to a rented house called Rancho Olompali in Marin County. For six weeks they lived the alternative lifestyle—ingesting acid, taking advantage of the swimming pool, and throwing communal parties. One day their folk-scene friend Jorma Kaukonen, now with Jefferson Airplane, was sitting around with Garcia and another pal, Janis Joplin. “We're gonna be archetypes,” Garcia told Kaukonen, who found it startling that someone would say that so early in his career; the Dead hadn't even made a record yet.

For Douglas one memory from the Los Angeles trip would always linger. One night a bunch of them gathered around a Ouija board, and one of the directives spelled out the message that they'd be leaving the stage on July 9. “Everybody seemed to think it meant July 9, 1966,” says Douglas, “and by ‘leaves the stage,' we thought the group-high thing, like lifting off the stage.” No one thought much of it, especially because they were heading back home to see what the Bay Area now had to offer them.

The sights and sounds of Pigpen alone were enough to help them secure what would become their grandest experiment in all-for-one living. It began with Danny Rifkin, a transplanted New Yorker working as a building super at 710 Ashbury after a brief student career at Berkeley. For him 710 was a college rooming house, but one of his renters was Rock Scully. Because people in town associated the Haight with the crumbling Fillmore district nearby, the area, home to artists and African Americans, was, Scully says, “the best deal in town.” After
he'd moved into the building, Scully hit upon the idea of having his new clients, the Dead, relocate to 710 as well. Though he was far from a nondabbler, Rifkin wasn't overjoyed at the thought of scruffy, revenue-challenged, LSD-imbibing musicians moving into a house for which he was responsible. Eventually he agreed only if Scully became the superintendent and had his name replace Rifkin's on the lease. Given the relative freedom they'd had at Olompali, few thought anything could go wrong, and Scully's name was now attached to the paperwork for running the building.

One by one during the fall of 1966 the Dead made their way into 710, and the tenants already there began packing up and leaving. Rattled by the sight of the stout, seemingly gruff Pigpen and the sound of his blues records and guitar playing in the back room, they individually decided it was time to leave. (“Unbeknownst to him, Pig was a big help,” chuckles Scully.) Wherever anyone could find space, they took it. Garcia, Lesh, and McGee, now Lesh's girlfriend, settled in upstairs, with Scully in a room next to theirs. Rifkin installed himself in the garage apartment, complete with antique lighting from the days when that part of the 1890s house was a horse stable. Weir settled into the living room, which doubled as an office. Sue Swanson, Weir's friend from high school, crashed sometimes as well. “As people would move out of the rooms, some of us would move in,” Lesh recalled. “We just weaseled our way in and eventually took over.”

Given that the front door was never locked, plenty of other friends made their way into 710 too. (“We'd argue about how many friends could spend the night,” Mountain Girl recalls. “There was no place to sleep.”) One day it was Betty Cantor, a teenager with long, sandy-colored hair who hailed from Martinez, northeast of Berkeley. In love with the new rock 'n' roll and the culture rising up around it, Cantor had put up posters and worked the concession stand at the Avalon and already had a fine-tuned set of ears for music and sound reproduction.
(Later she worked at the Family Dog in Denver after meeting promoter Chet Helms at the Avalon.) In a nearby park, she found herself at 710; one of her friends knew Rock Scully's brother. As she walked up the front steps, out came Weir, who held the door open while holding a guitar, extending his arm and exclaiming, “Come on in!” It was an especially vivid memory; Weir had, she recalls, “hair down to here and big doe eyes.”

During his own initial visit to 710, about a year after the Dead had moved in, John Perry Barlow wandered upstairs and found Weir lying on a couch. Although Weir's eyes were open, he seemed to be asleep, Barlow recalls. Next to Weir, shirtless and high on speed, was none other than Neal Cassady, listening to jazz with headphones and scat-singing along with the music as he danced around the couch. (To Barlow it almost seemed as if Weir was conjuring Cassady up from his imagination.) For Weir at least, the disorder of 710 was initially constructive. “It reinforced how to operate in a profound state of flux and chaos,” he told writer David Hajdu. “Haight-Ashbury offered that in copious servings. When we put our instruments down, we still lived in chaos. Our entire lives were about sorting our way through chaos and making little pockets of, I won't call it order, but little pockets where we could function, and that's what we ended up doing in our sets too. You know, life imitates art, art imitates life. There was no separation between living and playing for us.”

A more frequent guest at 710 was Laird Grant, Garcia's carousing buddy. By 1967 Grant had logged time as the band's first roadie, driving them to bar gigs and helping them set up their sometimes screeching sound systems and instruments. With his scraggly beard and rugged looks, Grant looked the part of a hardened laborer for the Dead, and he had a new nickname to match: to help deflect the wind when he rode his motorcycle, he'd taken to wearing a hat made out of the bottom of a leather purse and folded up Robin Hood–style. “You look like a
Barney!” Pigpen chortled when saw Laird wearing it, and Grant was Barney forever after.

Grant's brief stint with the band ended at the Monterey Pop Festival, a multi-act gathering in June 1967 that found the Dead on a bill that included Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who, the Mamas and the Papas, and Otis Redding. Along with other San Francisco bands, the Dead had to be talked into appearing at the festival, especially because it was run by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and their label head, Lou Adler, both LA pop kingpins who represented everything San Francisco rockers were against. (Scott McKenzie's comely if hokey summertime hit, “San Francisco [Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair],” was written by his friend Phillips.) At a meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco Phillips and Adler tried to make their case to the local musicians, and for a while relations almost went south. “It was that kind of volatile situation,” admits Adler. But thanks to the intervention of Ralph J. Gleason, the well-regarded
San Francisco Chronicle
music columnist who wrote favorably about the new Bay Area rock in spite of his inclination toward jazz, the Dead agreed and wound up playing a respectable but far from show-stopping set between career-defining performances by the Who and Jimi Hendrix. Averse to playing too many industry games, they refused to allow their footage to be used in the eventual documentary about the festival. Adler says the Dead did leave with a prize, though: they wound up carting some of the festival's amps back to their home base. “When I asked for the amps,” Adler says, “Rock Scully said, ‘Why don't you come up here and get 'em? And be sure to wear flowers in your hair.'”