So Many Roads (3 page)

Sam Cutler, who popped into the Pacific High sessions now and then, should have been accustomed to rock 'n' roll madness. He himself was a road-dog buccaneer; with his thin face and mustache, he looked like Captain Hook after a visit to a leather-jacket emporium. Cutler had worked for the Rolling Stones the year before, helping shepherd them around America on the band's first tour of the States in four years. Starting in January 1970, he'd begun a new job, tour manager for the Dead, a task that also involved plenty of opportunity to hang with what he first thought were a group of loosey-goosey West Coast hippies.

About two years earlier most of the Dead had fled the Haight (or “Hashbury,” as the
New York Times Magazine
had dubbed their former neighborhood) for Marin County, just north of San Francisco. They relished the sprawling area's meandering, tree-shrouded streets, which
looked like paths running through Muir Woods, and one by one they settled into various ramshackle houses, ranches, and quasi-communes in towns like Novato and Larkspur. In the privacy of the Marin woods they could do whatever they wanted, or at least close enough to it. Cutler witnessed that for himself during one of his early visits to Hart's Novato ranch. A television had been dragged out of the house and, with long extension cords, had been set up in a dry creek, and one hundred rounds had been loaded into various guns. With the TV on, there suddenly was Ronald Reagan, the actor turned politician who was now the governor of their state, the man who embodied everything the Dead despised about the straight world. Normally they'd shoot up concrete blocks or records, but now they took aim at Reagan's image on the small screen and let loose. Cutler estimates they fired off “about three hundred times,” obliterating the set once and for all. Other times the victims were sales plaques their label, Warner Brothers, had presented to the band.

For a time Weir was living in what he would later call a “self-imposed dustbowl of a ranch” in Nicasio in western Marin County. Named Rukka Rukka, it was home as well to Weir's girlfriend, Frankie (soon to take his last name even though they weren't married), and various members of the Dead's crew, along with random wandering chickens and horses. Tales of the origins of the ranch's name were appropriately bawdy: according to one account, someone they'd known at another hangout would chase after women, squeeze their breasts, and say, “Rukka, rukka!” The Dead thought the story was hilarious, and the name stuck.

Even more than their music, Hart's ranch became a symbol of the way the Dead could build their own remote community outside the normal confines of society. Whoever had found it first—either manager Rock Scully or road manager Jonathan Riester—Hart was now the overseer of the rambling thirty-two-acre property tucked away
beyond a wooden entry gate nearly hidden by trees. Dubbed Hart's Delight by some, it became the go-to place for the band, friends, roadies, and their increasingly expanding family unit to congregate, get high, and record music. With its large barn (soon filled with recording gear), horses, working water pump, and occasional displays of excitable-boy gunfire, the ranch felt like something straight out of the previous century—though with a few contemporary twists. Mike (nicknamed Josh) Belardo, an afternoon-drive DJ for KMPX in San Francisco, ventured onto the ranch one day to interview the band and had his mind blown even without hallucinogens. “Everybody's walking around stoned, and the chicks are naked,” he recalls. “Topless women. Horses. It was unbelievable.” Hart had a beloved Arabian white horse named Snorter, a name that took on additional meaning when Snorter would be dosed now and then—“Oh, there were many times with something or another,” Hart admits. The horse didn't seem all that affected while under the influence, even dodging a herd of trampling cows once during a ride.

Unlawful activity wasn't always tolerated at Hart's Delight. They'd already been burned by the law at least once, not to mention driven out of the Haight by a tidal wave of tourism, drugs, and increasing police scrutiny. When Hart learned that certain people living on the ranch were expert pickpockets, he scolded them. “They would come home with things, wallets and stuff,” he recalls, “and I'd say, ‘First, if you're gonna live here, that's not the right thing to do, and second, it will bring the heat on the Dead.'” After all their busts, “under the radar” was the operative phrase.

Among those living at the ranch were Rhonda, Sherry, and Vicki Jensen, three sisters who moved onto the ranch after their previous home had burned down. The sisters cleaned, swept floors, prepared breakfast for anyone who crashed there, and fed horses: “It made the music work,” says Vicki, “and that was the inspiration to do it.” The
only irksome part of the job involved the women the road crew would bring to the ranch. The Jensen girls had to pick out which horses the girls would ride—and, just as important, find ways to keep the women busy once the roadies left for somewhere or someone else. “They'd just sit there and think that looking pretty was enough,” Vicki says with a laugh. “I used to tell them, ‘You need to join in and help out here!'”

At Hart's ranch the Dead and their extended family were able to live out their fantasies as cowboys and outliers who played by their own rules without worrying about societal norms. Even the local police were skittish about stopping by. The fantasy did have its learning curve, like the day Garcia went riding on a horse whose cinch hadn't been tightened. As his girlfriend, Carolyn Adams, otherwise known as Mountain Girl, watched, Garcia fell off and broke a few ribs. “First and last time he was on a horse,” she recalls. “He didn't like horses after that.” Sometimes even the fantasies had limits.

“Dire Wolf,” the song they were scheduled to start recording that February night at Pacific High, was symbolic in and of itself. If Hart's ranch was the Dead's almost-anything-goes headquarters, the Garcia and Mountain Girl house on Madrone Avenue in Larkspur was its creative hub. Set on a flat acre with sizable redwood trees and a creek out back, the house was far from ostentatious. Garcia had moved in first with Mountain Girl, who was now, in the parlance of the times, Garcia's “old lady.” MG, as everyone called her, already had a child with writer Ken Kesey and in 1969 had given birth to Garcia's daughter, Annabelle. The two weren't technically wed, as both had been married before and hadn't yet obtained divorces, but no one seemed to mind.

One day Garcia brought up the idea of a new roommate: “I want my friend Bob Hunter to move in,” he told Mountain Girl, who hadn't even met Hunter yet but knew his history with Garcia: the two men,
who both could flash wide, welcoming grins, had met in the early days of the Palo Alto folk and literary scene nearly a decade before, living in adjacent cars when they were homeless, and had put their friendship through its share of inspired highs and head-butting lows. With his bookish glasses and brain-of-a-poet intensity, Hunter could be as bristly and intense as Garcia could seem affable and casual. After going their separate ways in the middle of the sixties they'd reconvened when Garcia asked Hunter to sign up as the Dead's resident lyricist.

Along with their respective girlfriends, Hunter and Garcia were now roommates in Larkspur, and one night they and Mountain Girl were watching one of the original black-and-white Sherlock Holmes movies,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. As Hunter would later recall, they all pondered what a “ghostly hound” would look like, and the phrase “dire wolf” emerged. Just the thought of a big wolf called Dire was enough to inspire Hunter, who began writing lyrics, and in no time they had a song.

Financially, life at the house on Madrone could be a daily survival challenge. Although the Dead were technically rock stars, they didn't have the cash flow that went with that job. Their rent was an affordable several hundred dollars a month, but Garcia and Mountain Girl relied on welfare and food handouts courtesy of the WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program and often settled for meals of peanut butter, honey, and sacks of rice. Other relationships in the generally fraught Dead world were on fairly steady ground. With his second wife, Susila, Kreutzmann had just welcomed a baby boy, William Justin, who came to be known simply as Justin. (Kreutzmann already had a daughter, Stacy, from his first marriage.) Weir had settled into a relationship with Frankie, a sparkplug who'd been a dancer for the TV shows
Hullabaloo
and
Shindig!
and briefly an employee of the Beatles' Apple Records. Pigpen was into the third year of his relationship with Veronica “Vee” Barnard.

As soon as Hunter moved in during the first months of 1969 Mountain Girl saw how intense he could be: she would sometimes look outside and see Hunter using an axe handle to thwack away at a car tire dangling from an apple tree. “Bob had a pretty high need to release his physical energy,” she says. “He had a lot of juice.” Yet the two men complemented each other creatively and temperamentally. Garcia never relished the idea of spending hours working on lyrics; Hunter loved nothing better, even if it meant staying up all night. Mountain Girl recalls “a lot of wine and playing guitars until two in the morning.” Many days, she says, Hunter would bound into the kitchen during breakfast, carrying a stack of papers: “I've got a bunch of new ones for ya!” Garcia might flash a vaguely irritated look, as if irked by his meal being interrupted, but would then start sifting through the poems: “Like this one. Like that one,” he'd say. In five minutes Garcia would select up to a dozen lyrics, and soon he'd have the melodies to match.

In June 1970, a few months after the “Dire Wolf” session, Hunter beheld a particularly arresting example of the way he and Garcia collaborated. The Dead, along with Delaney and Bonnie, the Band, Janis Joplin, Ian and Sylvia, and others, embarked on a wild tour of Canada by private train. Everyone was partying and playing music even when they weren't on stage, so much so that the train had to periodically stop so more liquor could be bought. During one stop Garcia sat on the tracks, grabbed Hunter's latest lyrics—for “Ripple”—and worked out a melody. For decades to come this would remain one of Hunter's most cherished memories of a time when their creativity seemed as unstoppable as a locomotive.

The Dead's world could be a constant lurch between light and dark, and nothing captured the latter mood better than another song that took shape during the same sessions as “Dire Wolf.” If “Dire Wolf”
was a merry, if dark-humored, stroll, “New Speedway Boogie” snarled; Garcia's guitar poked at the melody, and his voice was a little frazzled around the edges at times. The song was testy and aptly so: it documented a moment when the darkness threatened to overshadow them.

The speedway in question was Altamont, where the Dead had been scheduled to play in December 1969 as part of a mammoth free concert with a formidable lineup: the Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The Dead and Stones' camps had been in discussion about doing some sort of free show, somewhere, and the end result, after two venue cancellations, was at Altamont. (As Scully would later write, “We actually talk[ed] the Stones into doing a free concert in Golden Gate Park,” the original site until the city of San Francisco nixed the idea and the speedway became the organizers' last resort.) The day-long show was ostensibly a way to celebrate the end of the Stones' American tour, give them a filmed finale for their in-progress concert movie,
Gimme Shelter
—and help them ward off accusations of high ticket prices by presenting one concert for free. The Dead weren't just scheduled to perform the show but also supplied their PA system and crew, who helped set up the recording gear and speakers. One of Hart's ranch mates was in a truck backstage rolling hundreds of joints for Keith Richards and anyone else who wanted one.