by David Browne
Given how relatively small and insular the Palo Alto community was, it wasn’t surprising that by 1964 Kreutzmann had met or played with some of the future Warlocks. He’d not only seen Mother McCree’s at the Tangent but had been part of the Zodiacs with Pigpen and Garcia. (The guitarist who organized the band, Troy Weidenheimer, was partly responsible for the birth of the Dead in the way he brought those three young musicians together.) Most importantly, though, Kreutzmann could swing; having been exposed to jazz drummers, he was already remarkably accomplished for someone who was only eighteen when the new rock ’n’ roll band began congregating at the music store. In fact, his playing, influenced by drumming heroes like jazzman Elvin Jones and big-band walloper Buddy Rich, was so advanced that he was already teaching drums there, another bit of common ground with Garcia.
The nascent rock ’n’ roll band had equipment and a lineup of two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboard; Pigpen, who could play first-rate blues piano and gave an occasional lesson to local kids, switched to the more garage band–fashionable organ. Now they also had a space to boot: the front of the Dana Morgan Music Shop. The room was cluttered as it was; anyone walking into the store had to duck under a hanging cymbal or two and navigate around a few amplifiers. With the band set up, the room felt even smaller, and on the second day of rehearsal the musicians also had to make room for Bonner and Swanson, who immediately became the group’s first cheerleaders—bringing along donuts or playing records for the band to learn and copy. They tried some of Pigpen’s favorite blues songs or Rolling Stones or Everly Brothers covers—almost everything except the Beatles. (“They were untouchable,” said Weir.) The music was so loud that the instruments dangling on the walls swayed and made their own clamor.
If the nascent band had a front man, it was Pigpen; his voice was the most distinctive and guttural, and he commanded the material in ways the others couldn’t yet. Without meaning to, he had antistar charisma. But Garcia remained the most assertive and was clearly in charge of the proceedings. “There’s a difference between being the star of the band and being the leader,” Swanson recalls. Before long they had a name, the Warlocks, probably an homage to fantasy books in vogue at the time. Soon after came their first booking, at a pizza parlor in Menlo Park. As Weir said, “And bang, we’re on.”
Garcia wasn’t alone in taking note of the gangly blond guy with the Beatle haircut who sauntered into Magoo’s, buzzing off some acid he’d taken beforehand. Anyone who’d met Phil Lesh knew he was tall, but they also noticed he’d let his freak flag fly high since his days kicking around Palo Alto and the Chateau two or three years before. “That blond page-boy look was his signature—it definitely stood out,” recalls Jim Cushing, a friend of Bonner’s who attended two of the Magoo’s shows. “If there was a crowd of people, you’d spot Phil in a heartbeat.”
By his own admission, Lesh’s life over the previous two and a half years had been aimless and frustrating. By the spring of 1963 he’d fled Las Vegas and his post office job. (He’d also left Constanten’s family’s house and was crashing with a nearby friend.) Hopping aboard a Greyhound bus, Lesh returned to Palo Alto and was able to score a room at the Chateau. Once more he was immersed in the outlier scene he’d come to love, which included attending Garcia and Sara Ruppenthal’s wedding—where Lesh would see Garcia’s “scuzzy beatnik friends,” as he put it, wolfing down as much of the free food as possible.
But the good times, which included Lesh’s stab at writing an ambitious orchestral work, ended when the owner of the Chateau announced he was selling the house. After bouncing around a few places, Lesh rented an apartment in San Francisco with Constanten, who had himself returned to the area. Lesh resumed work on his classical piece, but the fall of 1963 and most of 1964 became a lost, open-ended period for him. To support themselves, both he and Constanten took jobs with the post office, Lesh driving a delivery truck. “Those jobs weren’t that hard to get,” Constanten says. “We worked 6 to 10 p.m., four hours. And it paid quite well.”
Another rising composer, Steve Reich, whom he’d met at Mills College, introduced Lesh to the world of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a three-year-old hotbed of political theater and activism. Again, Lesh’s world seemed to be on the verge of blossoming: he wrote a piece to be performed at a Troupe-led concert and met his soon-to-be-girlfriend, Pakhala. He’d also obtained his first-ever cube of LSD and, taking it alone in his apartment, saw “a kaleidoscope of emotional peaks,” as he would later write. But again Lesh’s life stalled. He realized the piece he’d written wasn’t working and soon fell in with a crowd who loved to shoot speed, which Lesh himself dabbled in. “I was content to live in the moment, I guess,” he says. “I didn’t see any future in composing. You had to be either part of the academic scene or I didn’t know what. I wasn’t going to back to school; I was completely done with that.”
During a break in the Warlocks’ set Garcia sat Lesh down in one of Magoo’s booths. Without any preamble he said, “Listen, man, I want you to play bass in this band. We have to tell this guy every note to play. I know you can do it. I know you’re a musician.” Lesh was stunned. The idea seemed ludicrous: Lesh didn’t know how to play that instrument, had never even held one in his hands before, and hadn’t played rock ’n’ roll yet. But Garcia was insistent. Watching nearby, Swanson recalls “the feeling of trying to get Phil to become part of the band.”
Both Swanson and Denise Kaufman—another band friend who’d graduated from an all-girls private school in Palo Alto and had seen various Warlocks play in different configurations—recall Garcia venturing to Lesh’s apartment in San Francisco to make a final push for Lesh to sign up with the band. (Swanson believes she drove Garcia and then waited outside Lesh’s apartment during the talk.) Lesh himself has no recall of such a meeting: “I don’t remember him having to convince me to join the band,” he says. But Garcia’s determination to make Lesh a new Warlock was undeniable. “I remember Jerry telling me about it,” says Kaufman. “It was a big deal. Jerry was a very discriminating guy, but he was excited by the level of Phil’s musicianship.” Lesh’s lack of bar-band experience, Kaufman thinks, wouldn’t have been a deterrent to Garcia. “Jerry was an out-of-the-box creative person, so what would be a left-field choice for someone else wouldn’t be for him,” she says. “He thought Phil would make the music more interesting. Phil had already put years into his musical development, and that was fascinating to Jerry.”
Ultimately Lesh didn’t need that much convincing to join the Warlocks. “That’s when I realized this is what I’d been waiting for,” he says. “This is why I hadn’t done anything else in music. There it was—the reason I didn’t go back to classical. This was my chance to play with Jerry. And it was a chance to redefine part of that music, shape it in my own image, if you will. I could bring my training and compositional sense to that level while still collaborating.” Grant says he felt Lesh’s joining a band gave him “a physical manifestation of what he could do musically instead of just on paper.” Lesh was now a Warlock.
The timing was right. Lesh was no longer a rock hater: he’d seen the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (after which he’d adopted his Fab haircut), caught a Rolling Stones show in the area, and was mesmerized after hearing Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on the radio. As with the guys playing at Magoo’s, Lesh now realized rock ’n’ roll had endless possibilities, and the idea of joining the array of misfits was supremely appealing as well. “To find a place where everybody seemed to be on the same wavelength—about music and about substances, if you will—it was just a revelation,” he later told Hajdu. In a 1990 interview Lesh, who’d been fired from the post office in San Francisco thanks to his grown-out hair, admitted that taking up the bass was “a way to earn a living” as well.
Back at Garcia’s house after the Magoo’s show Lesh said, “Let’s have my first lesson.” After all, Garcia was a well-regarded and hip teacher, and Lesh was curious to see his technique. Once Garcia had put one-yea
r-old Heather to bed, he grabbed a guitar and said, “Now, the bottom four strings on this guitar are tuned exactly in the same way as the bass.” Lesh replied that he knew that already, so Garcia said, “This is your lesson. Borrow someone’s guitar and start practicing those bottom four strings. That’s all you have to do. Get it under your fingers before you come down.” (“Phil plunked away on it, and there it was,” remembers Grant of that night.) Lesh did indeed borrow a guitar from a friend, and within two weeks he and Pakhala had moved from San Francisco to Palo Alto, with Grant’s help, to start what looked to be a new life. “It was seamless,” Bonner Mosley says of Lesh becoming part of the Warlocks and their sensibility. “He was a friend, and everyone knew him.”
The Warlocks would never again play Magoo’s. By Menlo Park standards, the scene growing around them at the restaurant was becoming too boisterous. The night he finally saw the band’s complete set, Lesh himself was told by the owner not to dance, and the threat of another visit by the fire marshal hung in the air.
May 26 would also be the Warlocks’ final public performance with Dana Morgan Jr. Although it would remain unclear who did the actual firing (Lesh says he never met or spoke with him), the younger Morgan was soon out of the band—the first sign that Garcia, for all his casual airs, knew where he wanted his music to go and how to make hard choices. Because neither Dana Morgan Jr. nor his store-owning father was happy with the decision, the Warlocks were soon stripped of a rehearsal space and instruments. But thanks to family loans and neighboring music stores, the gear would soon be replaced. It had been a night of dreams, new connections, and pasta, in that order. Now they simply had to find someplace that would foster and tolerate them as they transformed into whatever came next.
Rock Scully, Garcia, and Tom Wolfe in Haight Ashbury during the Acid Test era.
© TED STRESHINSKY/CORBIS
CHAPTER 3
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, DECEMBER 18, 1965
Connie Bonner saw the look on Phil Lesh’s face when she told him. He didn’t seem to either believe or grasp it, and why should he? Here they were, a week before Christmas, gathered with friends, strangers, and random street people inside a large, darkened building in an industrial wasteland off Highway 101 in Palo Alto. Disembodied speaking voices were echoing around the room. A strobe light was making anyone dancing look as if they were in stop motion. People were growing spacier by the minute, especially once they began dipping their paper cups into the plastic bins filled with liquid. And now here was Bonner, along with her friend and fellow Warlocks devotee Sue Swanson, telling Lesh that George Harrison had walked through the front door.
Peering out through his waterfall of blond hair, Lesh paused for a moment to digest the news. To learn about an Acid Test was one thing; to know where it was and how to get there was another. The following week the building would officially open as the Big Beat—“the Peninsula’s Most Popular Go-Go Spot,” as a local newspaper ad announced. But right now it was just an empty hall that had been rented for the night by the Merry Pranksters, the festive, nonconformist freaks and creative types who’d been gathering around Ken Kesey. The fanciful Acid Test fliers, crammed with wildly varying typefaces and illustrations, listed neither date nor address, simply an exhortation to come “this Saturday night.” And even if a Beatle happened to know about all this, how would he know who the Warlocks were? They’d just made their first recordings the month before, but none had been released nor might they ever be. They’d changed their name to something far more macabre than the Warlocks, but the new name turned off so many of their friends that it could have easily kept George Harrison away too.
As dubious as Bonner’s sighting was, something about it was strangely plausible. As the Kesey crowd knew, almost anything could happen at an Acid Test. You never knew who’d you see there, what wired-on-something idea they’d have for the night, or what condition they’d be in by the time the sun rose in the morning. And as the Warlocks, now the Grateful Dead, were about to learn on this late December night, you never knew which future comrades, lovers, and inspired crazies would show up and ingratiate themselves into your world.
Try as they might, the Warlocks couldn’t quite pull off the role of eager-to-please rock ’n’ roll band. They were either too loud, too unattractive, or too raucous for someone or another’s tastes. Herb Greene, a local photographer who would soon become one of the foremost chroniclers of the emerging Bay Area music world, was among the first to recognize the Warlocks’ innate wooliness. About a month before the December Acid Test in Palo Alto they had convened for an auspicious event, their first photo shoot. Greene, who’d worked as a stage manager for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, had met Lesh through that group and would be the man behind the camera.
Cavorting and indulging in funny, Beatle-inspired faces and poses under the Golden Gate Bridge, the Warlocks tried to make like a friendly, accessible band for local teenagers. But collectively they weren’t the most handsome or restrained guys on the planet. A short time later they were invited over to Greene’s home to inspect the photos, and Greene would never forget the clamor as they barged in and ran up the stairs. “It was a thundering herd,” he says. “They were the rudest, loudest people. Pigpen was the first one up the stairs, galloping, and he’s terrifying looking.” When he saw Greene, Pigpen said, “You got any juice?” Greene told him he had apple juice in his refrigerator, but Pigpen meant Thunderbird, the cheap white wine known as one of the best ways to get a quick buzz.
With Lesh now installed as their bass player and Garcia teaching guitar at another store now that the Dana Morgan Music Shop was no longer an option, the Warlocks had begun poking their way around the world of show business. Rock ’n’ roll wasn’t quite respectable—many still considered it a fad—but so many kids were forming bands and trying to write their own material that the dream of making it didn’t seem that absurd, even for a months-old combo like the Warlocks. Garcia was relentless in pushing them to rehearse, including at least once in the backyard of the Swanson family house. Garcia brought his young daughter, Heather, and Kreutzmann his daughter, Stacy, and the kids cavorted in the pool. But the sound of the band practicing was so obtrusive that the neighbor next door complained that his own child couldn’t take a nap. (Swanson never told her father about the Warlocks’ takeover of their yard and pool cabana, which was probably for the best.) Meanwhile one friend or another, from Bob Matthews to a pal of Lesh’s named Hank Harrison, took a stab at managing them and booking them into whatever venues would have them.
During the summer and into the fall of 1965 those venues mostly amounted to bars, dives, and a strip club or two, but somehow that suited the Warlocks. They weren’t polished, musically or physically, and some of them still didn’t know that many chords. A few weeks after Lesh had joined up with them the band was booked into Frenchy’s, a teen hangout in nearby Haywood. During his school years Lesh had played trumpet and violin onstage; now he was faced with the idea of mastering a new instrument, electric bass, and shaking loose any of the classical-music formality he’d accumulated. “The only thing I can remember is how stiff I felt,” he recalls of that show. “I didn’t feel I had the groove. And I didn’t know what the other guys were going to be doing.” When the Warlocks returned for a second night they were told they’d been replaced by an accordion, bass, and clarinet trio, the polar opposite of what the Warlocks were trying to accomplish. “That was such a moment,” he says. “I can’t even remember what we did the first night that would have thrown up the red flag.”
Whether they wanted to or not, the Warlocks threw up plenty of such flags. From Quicksilver Messenger Service to the Beau Brummels (who managed to land in the Top Twenty early in 1965 with “Laugh Laugh”), one-time folkies were plugging in around the Bay Area; another new band, Jefferson Airplane, featured Jorma Kaukonen, who’d shared the stage at the Tangent with Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Next to them, the Warlocks were motlier and, with the exception of Weir, prematurely hardened
. Onstage they wore mismatched striped shirts and vests; combined with Lesh’s, Garcia’s, and Pigpen’s mushrooms of hair, they sometimes resembled better-dressed versions of cavemen.
In September the Warlocks were awarded a genuine prize for any upcoming band: a week of gigs at the In Room, a bar in Belmont, that wound up stretching to over a month. Starting with its awkward name, the In Room was such a wrong-side-of-the-tracks place that it was actually located near railroad tracks. Six nights a week, with Sundays off, the Warlocks played to a small and often indifferent crowd of boozers, men and women on the prowl, and what Weir would call “wooly freaks.” Attendance was low, especially at the start: Tom Constanten, Lesh’s music-college and Las Vegas friend, took a weekend leave from the Air Force, where he was now serving, and realized he was one of the only people there. But the gigs amounted to extended paid wood-shedding: playing covers of songs both rock (“Gloria”) and R&B (“In the Midnight Hour”), they learned how to lock in together, even how to hold their electric guitars and bass the right ways onstage. “With the Warlocks, we were just trying to work up a lot of tunes—the more tunes the better—and become a proficient rock ’n’ roll band, so we could get work,” Weir recalled to Hajdu. “When we got a steady gig at the In Room, practice makes perfect, I gotta tell you.”
