Before ever meeting the Grateful Dead, Owsley had already purchased and installed a sound system in his thirty-five-by-fifty-five-foot living room in Berkeley that far surpassed what even the most fanatical hi-fi enthusiast at the time might have dreamed of owning. Looking like “something that someone had rescued from behind the screen at the local movie theater,” his Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre system consisted of two large wooden cabinets, each of which was “about the size of a small fridge.” Equipped with a fifteen-inch speaker, a driver that was “about four inches in diameter,” and “a little horn mounted on top,” each cabinet weighed a hundred pounds. Owsley then ran the sound through a McIntosh amplifier with “two channels, forty watts per channel.”
In Rock Scully’s words, “Owsley brought us together in a whole other way because he had a cottage in Berkeley where there were no neighbors who could complain about the noise and the place was packed full of gear. He had tape decks and really good microphones and great speakers. It was the ideal haven that was just as high-tech in fidelity terms as you could get back then. He also had these tape loops, and so for Phil and Jerry and all of us, it was just a playground where we could get something going on a tape, start a loop, and then improvise on top of that.”
When the Grateful Dead decided to follow the Pranksters to Los Angeles in February 1966 to play a series of Acid Tests down there, Owsley provided the money that enabled them all to make the trip. The band departed so abruptly from San Francisco that Jerry Garcia left his yellow, four-door Corvair parked in a gas station in Palo Alto. All of Bob Weir’s clothes were in the trunk, but neither he nor Garcia ever saw the car again.
After getting on a jet plane for the first time in his life, Phil Lesh flew to Los Angeles alongside Owsley. “It was a red-eye flight,” Lesh would later write, “and we were the only two people in the back of a 707.” Because Owsley was footing the bill, Melissa Cargill, Tim Scully, and Rock Scully (who were not related to each other), Danny Rifkin, and a friend of theirs named Ron Rakow also accompanied the band to LA.
Due in no small part to the high-quality LSD that Owsley was handing out at no cost to his new circle of musician friends, as well as his continuing willingness to bankroll the band with money he had made from the sale of his product on the streets throughout the Bay Area, the scene around the Grateful Dead had now started to expand at what would soon become an exponential rate.
8
LA Fadeaway
Thanks to the Pranksters, Owsley and the Grateful Dead came to ground in Los Angeles in a three-story pink stucco house on a street near West Adams Boulevard, not far from the Santa Monica Freeway in the Watts section of the city. As everyone soon discovered, their next-door neighbors did not take kindly to their arrival.
“We were living next to a black whorehouse,” Owsley would later say. “The whores hated our loud music and would complain that it was driving off their johns. They used to throw pot seeds out of the window, and we found little pot plants growing between the two houses that weren’t ours because we were careful about that. We thought the whorehouse was going to get us busted, but we brought the cops down on ourselves a few times because of the volume of the music that the Dead were playing.”
Although Owsley quickly installed himself on the top floor and paid the rent while also providing food for all those in the house, he was not initially pleased by the move. “It wasn’t my idea to go to LA. I was against it because I didn’t see any point in it. The Dead were following the Acid Tests, and that turned out not to be a great idea, but it was more important to them than anything else. At regular shows in the Bay Area, they had been getting paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars, but they got nothing for playing an Acid Test. After I thought about it for a while, I realized we could do some shows ourselves down there and the band could practice a lot.”
Along with Tim Scully, Owsley began modifying the sound of the band’s guitars by installing a transformer that was connected to low-impedance cables to clean up the signal. Owsley and Tim Scully then built a stereo mixing panel and acquired an oscilloscope so they could check on the amplifiers during a show. After providing the Dead with expensive Sennheiser microphones, Owsley began obsessively recording all their performances so the band could hear how they had sounded onstage.
While all these innovations were significant advances in what was then still the primitive state of rock ’n’ roll sound, the system Owsley had brought with him from his cottage in Berkeley soon proved to be less than ideally suited for use on the road. In Rock Scully’s words, “The Voice of the Theatre speaker boxes were huge. Four of them would just about take up an office, but they were also alarmingly delicate and would constantly blow fuses and burn out so we had to haul spares along with them. We couldn’t trust any promoter to provide us with enough electricity or clean electricity, so we also had these huge, incredibly heavy transformers that were just monsters and needed sledding.”
What came to be known as “the lead sled” also took an incredibly long time for Owsley and Tim Scully to set up onstage. The problem was compounded by Owsley’s refusal to ever rush when he was doing this. That everyone was also usually high on acid while the work was going on only made it all seem to take just that much longer.
As Owsley and Scully were crouched over together onstage one night soldering a transformer box onto Phil Lesh’s amplifier, the bass player began fantasizing about giving them both a swift kick in the ass. Instead, all Lesh could do was just stand there and wait for them to finish because he knew “this is the way it’s going to be.”
What regularly occurred onstage before the Grateful Dead performed in Los Angeles was nothing compared to what passed for their daily life together. The communal-living scene inside the pink stucco house in Watts was so utterly chaotic that horror stories about it would be told over and over in the years to come. By far the most colorful description appears in Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Rock Scully’s memoir of his time as the manager of the band.
According to Scully, there was not a single stick of furniture in the entire house. There were no lamps, and the only illumination came from bare bulbs in the ceiling. There were no couches or beds, so people slept on foam mattresses covered with Army blankets or Indian fabrics. Because Owsley was doing all the shopping, the refrigerator was filled with slabs of meat so huge that he had to remove one of the wire shelves in order to hang them in there. Using a sharp knife, Owsley would cut off slices of beef and fry them up in a pan for every meal. Along with eggs and milk, this was the only diet that Owsley allowed everyone who lived there to eat.
His rules about what could be consumed inside the house were so strict that drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s wife, Brenda, had to fight with Owsley just to get oatmeal for their young daughter. Brenda Kreutzmann soon began derisively referring to Owsley as “a hippie Sonny Bono.” Sara Ruppenthal, who was then married to Jerry Garcia, felt the band was being held captive and that Owsley was “obviously a wizard, obviously a madman.”
Bob Weir’s opinion of Owsley during this period was that he “was both strange and difficult and the soul of kindness. He insisted that we follow his diet regimen, which was basically one hundred percent protein. Meat and milk were all that we were allowed. I was pathologically antiauthoritarian and reacted to that fairly swiftly by becoming a strict vegetarian.”
During an era when they were no apparent limits as to how high people could get, the level of drug use within the house was off the charts. In Jerry Garcia’s words, “We’d met Owsley at the Acid Test and he got fixated on us. ‘With this rock band, I can rule the world!’ So we ended up living with Owsley while he was tabbing up acid in the place we lived. We had enough acid to blow the world apart. And we were just musicians in this house and we were guinea pigging more or less constantly. Tripping frequently, if not constantly. That got good and weird.”
When Phil Lesh politely declined Owsley’s offer to take acid with him o
ne night, Owsley told him, “The band is my body. You are my left leg. My left leg is asleep. You must get high.” Knowing it was useless to argue about it, Lesh complied with Owsley’s demand. Accurately, drummer Bill Kreutzmann would later write that Owsley “was as stubborn as red wine on a white carpet.” After having ingested a synthetic hallucinogen known as STP that Owsley had given him, Kreutzmann stayed awake for seventy-two hours laughing hysterically at all the giant bubbles he saw wherever he looked.
In Bob Weir’s opinion, Owsley “had Phil’s mind so much that Jerry wasn’t going to fight about it. And if Jerry wasn’t going to fight about it, then I wasn’t going to fight it. Billy couldn’t give a shit. Billy saw, ‘Here’s this guy with some bucks and he’s going to bankroll us.’ … As far as I was concerned, Owsley was the devil. I’d just as soon have him living on the top floor than not know where he was.”
Weir also told Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally that the name Bear came from the horrifying noises Owsley would make while he was having sex on the third floor. Whenever Weir would go up there to tell Owsley that he had a phone call, Weir would hear what sounded to him like “a combination of a flying-saucer invasion and some sort of demonic hoedown.”
Completely unsuited in every way imaginable to communal living, most especially with a group of outsized individuals such as the Grateful Dead, Owsley was not oblivious to how others in the house felt about him. “I’ll tell you what living with them was like. If people were on one floor and you were on another and they decided to go somewhere, the next thing you knew the house was empty. There was very little concern for others’ possible interests.… It was pretty much everybody for themselves. The camaraderie was kind of gritty. Almost like the Hells Angels, who’d punch each other out and that made them the best of friends. I never quite understood that.”
For someone who needed to control every aspect of what all those around him were doing, Owsley himself also somehow managed to lose it fairly regularly while the Dead were doing shows in Los Angeles. After having ingested LSD, DMT, and “something else” one night before a show, he “saw sound coming out of the speakers. I thought, ‘This is important. I’ve got to remember what this is about.’ So I studied it very intently, which is difficult to do when you are that high. I thought, ‘This is not what I expected it to look like.’”
At one Acid Test, Owsley was so stoned that he became convinced that one of the Pranksters had found his way into the wiring and was now somehow messing around with the sound. “He came to me completely freaked-out before we started the show,” Rock Scully recalled, “and we had to kind of talk him down. Jerry knew what was going on and just sort of looked after his own amp, as did Weir. They just followed the cords and plugged in. But that kind of thing was to be expected at an Acid Test.
“Owsley did have a couple of real weaknesses. At these events, he would get pretty high on his own medicine and become totally preoccupied with something that no one else really cared about. His other great weakness was that he was a fearless and undaunted womanizer who simply would not take no for an answer. He would lay it on thick with women he wanted, and they were either ready for him or scared of him and would run away. But even if they wanted to run away, he would really try to keep them there. If he couldn’t, he couldn’t. But then he would immediately be on to the next one.”
All told, the Grateful Dead’s sojourn in Los Angeles lasted for about six weeks. The band performed at Acid Tests held in a Unitarian Church in Northridge, at the Youth Opportunities Center in Watts, at the Sunset Acid Test at Empire Studios, and at the Pico Acid Test at the Cathay Theater, none of which were particularly successful. The band also played two regular shows, one at the Danish Center and another at Trouper’s Hall.
With Ken Kesey having decamped to Mexico after faking suicide to avoid going to jail on his latest marijuana bust, the bloom was now most definitely off the rose in the Pranksters’ relationship with the Grateful Dead. Because Kesey was no longer around to run the show, the Acid Tests that were held in LA were little more than a pale shadow of those that had come before. Far more significantly, the Pranksters’ role as the leaders of the psychedelic revolution had now also pretty much ended.
Putting his own positive spin on the Dead’s time of exile in a city where they most definitely did not belong, Owsley claimed, “We all had a good time in LA. We’d go to the beach and do things together. We did our own shows and Acid Tests down there, and every so often we’d get a phone call from San Francisco with a job offer. First, it was a hundred and twenty-five dollars, then one fifty, then one seventy-five, and then two hundred. We had just run out of money, so Rock Scully went to San Francisco and hammered out a deal for three hundred and seventy-five dollars for the Dead to do a show at Longshoremen’s Hall.
“In LA, we got constant rehearsal time and we also got to know each other better by living cheek to jowl. But we also created a mystique. Fans of the band were calling promoters and club owners, and they realized the band had a bigger audience than they had thought. So that was the start.”
Owsley would never acknowledge the real reason that he and the Grateful Dead decided to leave Los Angeles. Having promised the band that he would not make any LSD while he was working for them, Owsley kept his word until he ran out of money. Converting his remaining stash into pills that he dyed purple to foil the chemical test kits used by police that also turned purple if LSD was present, Owsley made up three thousand doses of acid that came to be known on the street as Blue Cheer.
The well-known journalist Lawrence Schiller was in Los Angeles researching an extensive article about LSD that appeared in Life magazine. Schiller was hanging out with four LSD middlemen in their apartment when a girl appeared clutching a peanut-butter jar filled with purple pills. Gleefully she announced, “Look what I got from Owsley.” Slipping away, one of the middlemen promptly phoned Owsley at the pink house in Watts to inform him that his cover had just been blown.
As luck would have it, Owsley, Melissa Cargill, and Tim Scully had themselves each just dropped one of those purple tabs only to be told that someone from Life magazine now knew all about it. Expecting to hear the sound of approaching police sirens at any moment, the three of them manically scoured the house for LSD and pot. Totally stoned and completely paranoid, they threw everything they found into the trunk of a car and drove to a friend’s house on the beach in Venice.
After acting so weirdly that they were asked to leave, they returned to the house only to find the four middlemen waiting for them. Having never before heard of LSD in tablet form, they accused Owsley of having ripped them off. Still high as a kite himself, Owsley told them all to go home and try the stuff. If it was no good, they could come back to work out a deal. Because what they had bought was in fact pure Owsley acid, the middlemen were never seen again.
Although Owsley would later insist “the bit about our leaving Los Angeles because of acid is rubbish—it was only about the band, and nothing else,” Bob Weir’s version of the story was far closer to what actually happened. “I remember that when we were living in Los Angeles with Owsley and it was time to move, it was very suddenly time to move. He got word that some informant had spilled some sort of beans on him. And so we packed up into a couple of cars and headed north.”
After they had returned to San Francisco, someone asked Phil Lesh why they had come back. His succinct reply was, “We were tired of living with Superman.”
Jerry Garcia at Olompali with Melissa Cargill in hat and sunglasses as Owsley stands in the background. (Photo © Rosie McGee)
9
Olompali
Five weeks after the Grateful Dead had performed at Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco on April 22 and 23, 1966, the band began living together in a sprawling white mansion that Melissa Cargill and Phil Lesh’s girlfriend, Florence Nathan, now known as Rose McGee, had somehow managed to rent for six weeks at the unbelievable bargain-basement price of $1,100.
Located three and a half m
iles north of Novato in Marin County’s Olompali State Historic Park, the idyllic site also featured a swimming pool. With rock luminaries such as Janis Joplin and Grace Slick in attendance along with various members of the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, the house and surrounding grounds soon became a party scene of major proportions where naked teenage girls stoned on Owsley acid frolicked in the sunshine as the Dead played.
Although Owsley had a room of his own at Olompali, he continued to live in Berkeley and so was “only out there episodically, and that was where I separated from them.” The split was more than a matter of mere geography. After what they had all been through together in Los Angeles, both Owsley and the Grateful Dead knew they could never again inhabit the same living space. In Berkeley, Owsley was at the center of his own scene and so could do whatever he liked without having to seek the band’s approval. Yet another factor in the split was the Dead’s unwillingness to bow to what they considered to be Owsley’s increasingly impractical demands.
Although he was now no longer a part of the Dead’s daily scene, Owsley did continue to work as their soundman as the band capitalized on their newfound popularity by performing regularly for Bill Graham at the Fillmore Auditorium and for Chet Helms at the Avalon Ballroom as well as at a host of other venues where they had never before appeared.
After he had set up his equipment, Owsley could often be seen onstage doing what the Dead called “The Bear Dance” as the band performed. “Owsley liked being part of the band,” Rock Scully would later say. “He liked that a lot. And if he wasn’t mixing, he was dancing. He liked to dance up on the stage and always reminded us that he was a trained dancer. He also always had his Nagra tape recorder with him, and there was never any problem with that.”
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