So Many Roads (22 page)

Stretching out at one of many Family Dog shows.

© ROBERT ALTMAN/RETNA LTD.

CHAPTER 5

SAN FRANCISCO, NOVEMBER 2, 1969

They'd been playing the song nearly two years, and tonight it started the same as it always had. Lesh played four notes on his bass, and gentle maracas and a caressing organ began poking around him. No matter if you were in the band or in the audience, it was anyone's guess where it would go from there. Garcia's instantly recognizable pierce-the-clouds guitar began slithering its way through the swamp, playing off the introductory motif and looking for a way in. It's as if the players had each joined a conversation at a party but hadn't yet decided what to say.

The delicate musical dance, which at times sounded as if the musicians were tuning up, continued for several minutes. Then, three and a half minutes in, the organ, played by the newest addition to the now seven-man Dead, took the reins and played the melody, but not for long. Garcia jacked up his lead line, Lesh joined in with his familiar rumble, and the two instruments began circling each other like two puppies at a dog run. Finding his footing, Garcia unleashed a barrage of stinging-bee notes that all but asserted his dominance. Five minutes
in, when most rock 'n' roll bands would have finished whatever they were playing, the Dead were just warming up.

The setting for this performance was surreal but fitting. Only a few years before, the hulking building on the Great Highway, the road that ran along the western side of San Francisco, had been home to the world's largest slot-car raceway. Miniature-car freaks gathered to watch their toy autos careen along an electrical track that stretched out 220 feet. For Garcia the mere sight of Playland at the Beach, where he'd once romped as a teenager, must have brought back memories of another, different lifetime.

The model car freaks were now gone, and a different type of freak had taken their place. In 1968 promoter Chet Helms, who'd been booking some of the Dead's shows, reopened the space as a concert hall called the Family Dog on the Great Highway. He proudly called it a “musical environment sensorium,” but the spirit of the previous business lived on. During its slot-car days, everyone knew where the track began and ended, but given its twists, turns, and bends, you couldn't predict what happened in between: go too fast, and your car would jump the track and wipe out. The song the Dead were now playing, three songs into the set, had its own share of lurches and potential derailments: no one ever knew how long it would last and where it would go before it ended.

“Dark Star” also embodied the mixture of creative struggles and triumphs they'd endured since the bust at 710 Ashbury. The previous two years had been unpredictable, often discombobulating—a seemingly nonstop series of growing pains. Starting with their look, so much had changed. Their previous image—be it black Beatle-style boots or page-boy haircuts with headbands—were gone, replaced by slightly shorter, scruffier almost-shags. Garcia had grown a beard that
lent him the look of a kind-eyed mountain man; whether he liked it or not, it also made him the band's physical focal point. With their denim, ponchos, and cowboy hats, the Dead now looked more like a gang of bemused hippie ranchers than a blue-collar garage band. The days of communal living in the Haight were also long gone. They'd staggered their way through two more studio albums—and, along the way, clashed with their record company and producer, almost imploded as a band, and added a new member meant to compensate for what some saw as the musical shortcomings of another. They'd put themselves and everyone around them through a trial by fire that threatened to scorch everyone in its path, and yet the Dead seemingly wouldn't have it any other way.

“Dark Star” became a turning point for the Dead on several levels. Evolving right before the bust at 710 Ashbury, it marked Robert Hunter's return to Garcia's life and the world of the Dead. Tried though he had, the hypersensitive Hunter wasn't destined to be a member of the Dead (or, for that matter, any band). His earlier attempts to join Garcia's bluegrass or jug combos hadn't worked out. When he'd heard the Warlocks had changed their name to the Grateful Dead, he was somewhat appalled, thinking it was a bad name. Embarking on his own idiosyncratic journey, he'd spent time in Los Angeles, an outgrowth of his fascination with a relatively new movement called Scientology that appealed to his spiritual quest. Back in San Francisco Hunter's wanderings had also led to speed and meth—a journey so dark he had to remove himself from the scene and relocate to New Mexico. All along Hunter was writing, and one day at 710 Ashbury Garcia received a batch of lyrics in the mail, a collaborative method Hunter would adhere to for decades to come. Never one to have the patience to write his own lyrics, Garcia loved Hunter's words so much that he asked his friend whether he'd consider returning to San Francisco to become the Dead's in-house lyricist.

Like so many other aspects of the rock life the Dead were tweaking and broadening—and would continue to do so for years to come—the idea of a band member who only wrote lyrics was radical. Comanager Scully immediately had concerns: How would this upset the nitroglycerin balance in the rest of the band? How would they set up a publishing arrangement that included all of them as composers? And given that they weren't really making any money, how were they going to
feed
this new guy who was only supposed to write words for their songs? As things stood, they barely had enough income to fill their own stomachs. (At the very least, Scully didn't have to worry about putting Hunter up; there was no room at 710, so he was forced to crash elsewhere.) “Usually the arranger is the band, and that's what I suggested,” says Scully. “Except we found that Jerry and Hunter got so prolific off the bat we had to make a separate arrangement. It wasn't fair to include four other guys in there as arrangers when Jerry came up with the tune and Hunter came up with the lyrics. That's when it got very complicated. I was working at the time with a number of tricky relationships.”

Yet the advantages of having Hunter at their disposal became immediately clear. After hitchhiking his way back to San Francisco, with a lengthy stop along the way in Colorado, Hunter—in one of the Dead's most enduring and mythical stories—found himself listening to the Dead practice for a show at a dance hall in the small nearby town of Rio Nido and scribbled down a verse inspired by T.S. Eliot. Later, sitting on a bench in the Panhandle section of San Francisco, he continued working on the lyric, which proved a game-changer for him and the band. “I remember Hunter bringing it to us at 710 and me going, ‘Whoa, where's
this
gonna go?'” says Scully of watching Hunter and Garcia piece it together. “I'm looking over their shoulder and going, ‘Oh my God—what kind of freak stuff is
this?
'” The song had verses and a chorus, but the similarity to conventional rock 'n' roll ended there. Like the melody that was developing around it, it was spacey
and spacious, meandering and lovely, so open-ended it could go anywhere—much like the elliptical lyrics themselves. Called “Dark Star,” the song was recorded in a studio and released as a single in 1968, but the record, barely three minutes long, was like a charcoal sketch of a painting that wasn't yet finished.

“Dark Star” was one of a handful of songs Garcia and Hunter began writing during this period. Having entertained visions of becoming a novelist, Hunter now realized he'd found both a direction for his life and an outlet for his lofty literary goals. “You'd see Hunter standing over in the corner,” Hart recalls. “He had this little dance he'd do. He had one foot off the ground, and he'd be writing in his notebooks. He was communing with the music. And all of a sudden we had
songs
.” About a week after the Family Dog on the Great Highway gig they would release a two-record set of live performances,
Live/Dead
, that would include two of those collaborations—“Dark Star” and “St. Stephen”—in drawn-out, largely improvised renditions that made the studio takes seem precise and already outdated. “We'd leave the songs behind and go into a different place,” says Hart of this period. “Sometimes we might come back to that place and sometimes we might not. We rarely talked about it. It just happened.”

It was happening again tonight. Seven minutes into “Dark Star,” they still seemed to be working their way toward
something
, Garcia's dots-and-dashes notes as much Morse code as rock 'n' roll. Finally, around nine and a half minutes in, Garcia began to sing. His voice pushed into an upper register, as if he were trying to match the sweetened tone of his guitar. They'd reached one mountain; now it was time to scale a few more.

In the months after the bust at 710 Ashbury, fleeing the Haight became as pressing as earning a living. “Behind all the publicity and all that
shit, the tourists started coming and the out-of-town kids and all that kind of stuff,” Garcia bemoaned to
Rolling Stone
writer Michael Lydon a short time later. “And pretty soon there was a big traffic problem on the street. And all of a sudden it was a political trip. And who needs it?” He added that most of his friends were heading out of town anyway, and, in a comment that would presage the band's future, he said their community “is larger than Haight Ashbury.”

All signs pointed to the six hundred square miles on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge known as Marin County. History itself was a lure: named after a chief of the Licatiut Native American tribe who'd long ago vanquished the Spanish, the area had defiance in its blood. One of the earliest histories of Marin, written in 1880, described it as “one interminable mass of hills of varying altitude,” culminating in the three-thousand-foot-high glory of Mount Tamalpais. The area implied space, privacy, somewhat warmer weather, and distance from San Francisco cops, all of which appealed to the Dead and their community at that moment. “Some friends came in one day, and they were always in shorts and T-shirts, and we were always in sweaters,” says Bill “Kidd” Candelario, who'd become part of the Dead's crew the year before. “We were like, ‘Where you guys from?' and they said, ‘We're from Marin.' The next week we drove up, and after that we were always there.”

Garcia and Mountain Girl were among the first to kiss the Haight good-bye, landing an apartment in another part of town before heading north. Eventually almost everyone else rented houses or semi-abandoned ranches in the Marin area: Lesh and his girlfriend, Rosie McGee, in what Lesh calls a “little shack” in Fairfax, and Kreutzmann and his girlfriend, Susila, in Novato. Weir, Hart, Hart's girlfriend (but not wife) Frankie, and 710 regular Sue Swanson initially shared a house in Novato, but by early 1969 Hart had settled into his own Novato ranch, the one sometimes called Hart's Delight, and Garcia and Mountain Girl had taken root in their home in Larkspur. Only Pigpen stayed
behind in San Francisco, almost as if he were subconsciously hoping the scene—and the music the band was playing—would remain the way it was, untouched by the Dead's growing improvisational fervor and the psychedelics Pigpen himself disdained. Eventually he too gave in to the Marin scene, finding a place in Novato to live with his girlfriend, Veronica. Even then his life didn't get any easier: in 1968 Veronica (also known as Vee) had a stroke. Desperate to find someone who would help, Pigpen called around looking for Scully, and Sue Swanson wound up taking the call. “Please, pray for Veronica,” he told Swanson, and the worry in his voice and his use of “pray”—“not a word we used much,” she recalls—was downright terrifying. It was one of the few moments anyone recalled when he seemed so vulnerable.

Frankie Hart, a petite but feisty new addition to the Dead family, was the type of free but strong-willed spirit now regularly winding up in their community. Born Judy Louise Doop, she told Dead biographer Dennis McNally that she'd been adopted not once but three times, and strangely enough, the last family to do so had been named Hart. Growing up in San Luis Obispo, she'd won a dance contest in high school and eventually made her way to New York, go-go dancing (with clothes, she proudly pointed out later) at clubs like the Peppermint Lounge; she also began dating a member of the Rascals, New York's preeminent white R&B band. Small and lithe, with a slender dancer's body, Frankie first saw the Dead play at the Electric Circus in New York. Although she hadn't been initially impressed with their music, she was captivated by Hart. The attraction being mutual, he invited her to their next show, in Virginia (“drop out or drop in,” he told her), and she followed them back to San Francisco. She'd already been married—to a singer and pianist named Charlie Azzara—but after their divorce she'd gone back to calling herself “Frankie Hart” when she applied for a cabaret license to be a dancer. Admittedly impulsive, she left Hart for a period, moved to Oregon, and landed a job in the Beatles' Apple headquarters in London
by way of their California-based publicist, Derek Taylor. There she took George Harrison's phone messages and heard plenty of gossip about the increasing friction between the Beatles.