So Many Roads (20 page)

Lesh, Kreutzmann, and their new roommate, a drummer named Mickey Hart, were preparing an early dinner at 17 Belvedere Street when the phone rang. On the line was Mountain Girl, telling Hart a bust was going down at 710 and that none of them should drop by. “She said, ‘Don't come over,'” Hart recalls. “‘
Don't come over
?' She said it real quick.” Lesh would remember picking up the phone, hearing the news, and immediately redialing the house number to confirm what was happening; when a “very serious, unknown, masculine voice” answered, Lesh received his answer and hung up. The news was out, and Hart found himself in yet another alien situation with a band he'd only just joined.

Hart's initiation into the fold had been typically loose and laissez-faire. On a night in late September 1967 he'd wandered into the Straight Theater, where it was immediately clear the name was something of a joke (as was the billing on the marquee, which called the event a dance class). Decades earlier the Straight had been the Haight Theater, a movie house on the corner of Haight and Cole streets, but only the shell of the old structure remained. The first two dozen rows of seats on the main floor had been ripped out, a wooden dance floor was installed in their place, and all around Hart were bodies—some dancing, others intermingled. The overwhelming aroma of freshly lit joints wafted over it all. (The show had been billed as a “school of dance” event to avoid having to land a permit for a concert.) Hart made his way to the stage, where his new friend Kreutzmann was playing with his band, the Grateful Dead.

The two drummers had met shortly before, introduced to each other at a Count Basie show—possibly at the Fillmore in August 1967—by someone neither of them knew. (Decades later they would still puzzle at that mysterious stranger who altered both of their lives before disappearing into the night.) Hart and Kreutzmann had different personalities. Hart was brash, wiry, and proactive, with a goatee that gave him the look of a freshly arrived Eastern European immigrant. Kreutzmann was taller, laconic, and laid back, with a page-boy haircut and a grin that always seemed as if he were pulling a practical joke. Yet they shared a love of banging on things, and that first night they ran together around the streets of the Haight, making a percussion racket on anything in sight. “We took two pairs of drumsticks and played the whole city—cars, bumpers, street signs, trash cans,” Hart says. “We were yakking and laughing.” Afterward Kreutzmann invited Hart to jam with his band at a garage rehearsal space, but he never gave Hart the exact address, leaving Hart to wander the neighborhood in vain before heading back to home and work.

Work was Hart Music, an instrument store in a San Francisco suburb run by his father, Lenny. The Harts originally hailed from Brooklyn, and Mickey would long remember his grandmother's minuscule backyard, what he called “sacred space—because there wasn't that much space in Brooklyn.” Lenny, who'd won a drum championship at the 1939 New York's World Fair, had left his wife and their son—born Michael Steven Hartman on September 11, 1943—during his son's formative years, after which Mickey became obsessed with drumming himself. After high school and during a stint in the Air Force, he learned his father was in California and tracked Lenny down after his Air Force days were over; by then Lenny was running the instrument store, and Mickey went to work for him. (Coincidentally, Hart had met Connie Bonner about two years before, when she and some friends stopped by his place, but the Dead were still in their gestation years.)

In the relatively tight San Francisco music scene of the time Hart had heard about the Dead but hadn't heard them, and he wasn't sure what to make of them at first at the Straight Theater. As he watched from close to the stage, the music was overpoweringly loud and deafening—“cacophonous,” he would later call it, “this amazing wall of sound swirling around.” The rumble of Lesh's bass and a bit of Garcia's guitar rose up through the murk, but little else did; he couldn't hear the other guitarist at all, never mind the guy behind the organ. It didn't sound like anything typically rock 'n' roll except in its volume, which seemed to overtake the entire theater.

Between sets Hart reacquainted himself with Kreutzmann, who immediately asked his fellow drummer to sit in. Jumping into Kreutzmann's Mustang, they found a kit and made it back to the Straight in time for the second set. They all launched into “Alligator,” a loose, newly written boogie that featured Pigpen's voice and allowed for endless improvisation. No matter what Hart was playing, it all seemed like one very long song, tribal and amorphous, firm but nebulous. “It started up,” Hart recalls, “and I was holding on for dear life.” The people splayed about the Straight didn't seem to notice there was another musician onstage, and they didn't seem to care whether he knew the song or not; they were too busy screwing, dancing, or both. Dust drifted down from the ceiling, intermingling with the strobe lights and casting surreal shadows across the whole scene. The whole scenario struck Hart as a throwback to Dionysian times.

Finally, after what seemed like a few lifetimes, the music wrapped itself up. No one applauded, and Hart wasn't sure whether the audience was preparing to boo or throw things at them. Instead, what he heard was the sound of people breathlessly exclaiming, “Aaah!” (Even their reactions to the music weren't conventional.) Garcia turned to everyone and said, with a smile, “We could take this around the world, man.”

They didn't immediately know it, but they had just found the final element to their sound and identity. Lesh wasn't interested in playing
conventional bass lines, so the music lacked a bottom end that kept it tethered to the ground. But two drummers would finally help anchor their arrangements. The drums made the songs feel more expansive, grander, and more rubbery—in a strange way, more limber with two percussionists potentially colliding. “Right away, it became obvious that two drummers would really help matters,” Scully recalls. Kreutzmann seemed interested in adding another drummer, but, like Scully, he had financial concerns: How were they going to be able to afford it? Despite his encouraging remark to Hart onstage at the Straight, Garcia was initially reluctant to hire Hart, telling Mountain Girl that Hart's kit would take up too much space on stage and leave Garcia less room to move around. “But you can't hear what it's like in the hall,” she told him.

Hart quit his job at Hart Music, without even telling is father at first, and moved into 17 Belvedere Street, where for a while he slept underneath a set of stairs. Almost immediately rumors began drifting back to 710 that the new member was hypnotizing Kreutzmann. They were partly right: in order to help the two men play in sync, a doctor friend had suggested a mild form of hypnosis. “Bill and I were using it in our practicing in order to get coordination and be able to practice for long periods of time,” Hart says. “At that point only James Brown had two drummers. Owsley said, ‘Why don't you do that to play like one?' It was like training: we're going to play for five hours, but it will seem like twenty-four, and we're not going to get tired. You play with your right hand and I'll play with the left hand. We split the body up like that. It was one of the things that really created a bond with me and Bill.” Word filtered back to 710 that they'd also tried to hypnotize Pigpen, who ended up walking through a door instead. “Mickey had a bumpy entry into our world,” says Mountain Girl. “There was quite a lot of discussion about whether he had hypnotized Bill into letting him join the band—that maybe it was a trick. Mickey said nothing like that ever happened, but I don't think any of us really believed it.”

In the end the music—and the fire blazing within them to improve and expand on it—won out, and Hart became a member of the Dead. In time his hustling quality and energy appealed to Garcia, who was equally driven but more passive about success. “They wanted to be a big-time rock band, and they had serious competition from bands like Cream,” says Mountain Girl. “And they felt they needed a bigger sound to get bigger.” To the thrill of some and the uncertainty of others, the Dead were now six.

At the police station the arrested suspects arrived, took seats on benches, and waited for their paperwork to be processed and for their legal team to arrive. Her hash high having kicked in, McGee had to be propped up between Swanson and Grant. “I was melting onto the floor, and they were holding me up,” McGee says. “It was probably a near-lethal dose of hash. To this day I don't eat vanilla ice cream.” O'Connor and the other lawmen presented their case—boasting to the press that they'd confiscated “over a pound of marijuana and hash”—and that they were “processing some marijuana in the kitchen.” (In that regard he was right.) Not all of them knew who they'd arrested: “Hey, have you guys heard of a group called the Grateful Dead?” asked one of the sergeants when he returned home that night to his family.

In a sense their time at Olompali had been a pyrrhic victory; it made them seem as if they could live in whatever way they wanted. “We were living in a bubble,” admits Swanson. “We were all into flaunting the life we'd grown up in. We felt untouchable in a way.” But the word was out on them even outside the city. The previous summer Weir's Menlo School for Boys classmate Michael Wanger heard that a nearby band called the Warlocks had changed their name to the Grateful Dead, but he didn't know Weir and Garcia were members until someone filled him in. Although he'd lost touch with Weir, Wanger still went to see
the Dead, largely because of a warning he'd heard from a friend: “If you want to see them, better see 'em fast because they're way involved in the drug scene and they're going to be arrested soon.”

At the police station Pigpen was particularly rattled. “What are they gonna do—are we gonna have to go to jail?” he lamented to Scully, who told him to cool it and said they'd be out on bail soon enough. Ironically, it would be Pigpen's face that would be plastered on the front page of the next day's
San Francisco Chronicle
. Pigpen was still more of a drinker than a doper. He seemed to spend much of his time in his room, playing blues records and harmonica, only drinking late at night, out of sight of the others in the house. On the road he and Grant would usually be paired off as roommates because, Grant says, “we both stank of alcohol.” Together they'd drink a quart of 100-proof Southern Comfort every day, but Pigpen generally steered away from pot. (Grant would also watch as one lovely or another would brush out Pigpen's long hair with his whale-bone brush.) But as the jail incident revealed, Pigpen was also easily spooked. During the Dead's earlier trip to New York all the traffic rattled him, especially when he found himself in a truck speeding up to Central Park, and bees rattled him too. During their time in Los Angeles he and Swanson shared a room, platonically, and Pigpen lulled her to sleep in her own bed by reciting recordings of Lord Buckley, the quasi-beat, boho-spewing comedian and monologist.

Back on Ashbury Street, the press and media now dispersed and onto their next assignments, Garcia and Mountain Girl made the decision to venture across to their home. To make sure all was clear, they called first; when no one answered they crossed the street and made their way into 710. The place was eerily quiet, and Mountain Girl rushed into the kitchen to see if the colander with pot was gone. Not surprisingly, it was, but to their shock, the brick of wrapped pot in the cabinet was untouched. All seemed intact, but not enough to make them want to
stay much longer; after forty-five minutes Garcia and Mountain Girl left their home, unsure of its—and their—future.

By the time everyone was booked—for either drug possession or a charge related to it—six hours had passed and night had fallen. By chance Rohan and a fellow lawyer, Michael Stepanian, had a makeshift office at 710 for HALO (Haight Ashbury Legal Organization), which came to the aid of runaways, drug bustees, and other in-need local clients. Their secretary, Antoinette “Toni” Kaufman, was also arrested in the bust. Police found pot in the couch in their office but only dusted their file cabinets. At the police station Stepanian was impressed with the proactive attitude of those who'd just been arrested: they announced they'd stand together and not blame anyone else for what had happened. “They said, ‘We're going to get through this case, we're going to have some fun, but we're not going to act like jerks,'” Stepanian recalls. “And I said, ‘Fine, that's a great attitude.' There was no panic.”