Bear

by Robert Greenfield

  “It was like a moonscape of crushed auto bodies, and as we drove along, we looked over to the left and saw this place that looked like a skull. It was the actual arena where they held these demolition derbies, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this place smells like death. This is where people come to watch drivers crash their cars into one another while hoping one of them might die.’ And I realized that if you took acid at this show, you were going to have a trip you didn’t really want.”

  Bear then “took just the tiniest amount, and because of that, I was able to understand what was happening without being controlled by it. I watched a Hells Angel punch out Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane onstage, but I knew we couldn’t control any of it.” Because there was only enough scaffolding to build a stage three feet high, and all those at the front of the crowd of three hundred thousand people kept pushing forward, the Hells Angels who had been hired to provide security began using sawed-off pool cues to beat them back.

  Having wisely decided not to perform at Altamont that day, the Grateful Dead had already left the site by the time the Rolling Stones finally took the stage. As the Stones began to play “Under My Thumb,” a seventeen-year-old black man named Meredith Hunter began waving a pistol in the air. In full view of the film crew shooting the documentary that would be entitled Gimme Shelter, Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel, who was later acquitted of the crime.

  To the straight media, the free concert at Altamont was the death knell for a counterculture that had only been born just four short months earlier at Woodstock. The Rolling Stones, who were then considered the bad boys of rock, were widely reviled for having ever believed the Hells Angels could police anyone, much less themselves. Bill Graham would later call the event “the Pearl Harbor of rock.”

  Yet another casualty of that day whose passing went pretty much unnoticed was Terry the Tramp. By then, he had attained such legendary status that when Cream had come to play the Fillmore for the first time in 1966, Terry the Tramp was one of the people whom lead guitarist Eric Clapton was most impressed to meet. Described by Mountain Girl as “the most fop of all the Angels,” Terry the Tramp, in Kesey’s words, “wore more stuff and had more stuff hanging off him and he could just shake it all around.”

  After he had seen a show by the Doors that left him less than impressed, Kesey walked out into the lobby of the Fillmore Auditorium one night and found Terry the Tramp standing there “loaded to the gills” on acid. When Kesey asked him what he thought of the Doors, Terry the Tramp replied, “Gettin’ smaller all the time. Gettin’ smaller all the time.” And so they were, but in ways that no one back then could even begin to understand.

  Blamed by many of his fellow Hells Angels for having involved them in the media disaster that Altamont became, Terry the Tramp killed himself in Bear’s house in the Oakland Hills by taking an overdose of Seconal on February 13, 1970. He was thirty years old.

  14

  Set Up Like a Bowling Pin

  After the Grateful Dead had performed two shows in the Honolulu Civic Auditorium on January 23 and 24, 1970, Bear spent a few days in Maui before flying back to San Francisco and then on to New Orleans, where the band was scheduled to open a brand-new venue known as the Warehouse along with the Flock and Fleetwood Mac on January 30.

  In May 1969, bass player Jack Casady of the Jefferson Airplane had been busted for possession of marijuana in New Orleans, and so the Dead had already been warned to be careful while they were there. After being provided with the name of a local attorney when they landed at the airport, the band checked into the same hotel at 300 Bourbon Street where Casady had been arrested.

  A house detective at the hotel stopped Pigpen and asked him if he was with the Flock. When Pigpen told him that he played with the Dead, the house detective said, “Look, you better be clean because you’re going to get busted.” Although Pigpen then relayed this warning to Jon McIntire, the road manager dismissed it as just part of the vocalist’s ongoing paranoia about both cops and drugs.

  Less than two weeks after having been busted in New Orleans, Bear stands behind the amps at Fillmore East on February 11, 1970. (©Amalie R. Rothschild)

  After a less-than-stellar show at the Warehouse, the Dead returned to their hotel sometime after 3:00 a.m. and gathered in the room shared by Bob Weir and McIntire. Someone had already shown up with what Dennis McNally later described as “a pound of pot and a goodly quantity of hashish.” McIntire was busily cleaning the marijuana when the New Orleans Police Department narcotics squad came through the door.

  Having obtained a search warrant at 1:50 a.m. on the basis that “opium derivatives, amphetamines, barbiturates, marijuana, synthetic drugs, and narcotics paraphernalia” were present in Room 2134 of the hotel, the cops promptly arrested Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Jon McIntire, two Dead roadies, an assortment of partygoers, and, most grievously for all concerned, Bear as well. The subhead on the front-page story that appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune the next day read, “Rock Musicians, ‘King of Acid,’ Arrested.”

  Despite all available evidence to the contrary, Bear would insist to the end of his days that the bust had come about because of a vendetta that was being waged against him by the promoter of the New Orleans Pop Festival in Baton Rouge, with whom Bear had gotten into a knock-down, drag-out argument six months earlier. “The promoter set us up to get busted. The cops came in and they not only found stuff, but they also brought stuff and planted it too. That was what ended my touring with the Dead. Bad, bad time for me.”

  Bailed out eight hours after they had been arrested, the Dead returned to the Warehouse and played what everyone agreed was a far superior show than their set the night before. The bust was eventually laid to rest when Joe Smith, the Yale-educated A&R manager who had signed the band to Warner Bros. Records, called Jim Garrison, the noted John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist who was then the district attorney of New Orleans. In return for Smith’s generous offer to contribute $50,000 to Garrison’s campaign fund as well as his heartfelt promise that the Grateful Dead would not return to New Orleans anytime soon, all the charges were dropped.

  Although the band had been set up like a bowling pin in New Orleans, the Dead went right on working. Because Bear had been arrested two weeks after the period of time during which he was permitted to be outside the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco, his bail was revoked on February 27, 1970, and he was sent to jail.

  After somehow getting himself back out once more, Bear was then busted yet again with Bob and Betty Matthews on July 15, 1970, at the house in the Oakland Hills where they were then all living. The warrant for the arrest had been issued at the request of Bear’s landlord, who went to the police after it became evident to him that Bear was not about to vacate the premises on the day that he had been told to do so. The ensuing police search turned up marijuana, hashish, and “a tiny bit of opium.”

  On July 21, 1970, Bear’s bail on the Orinda bust was revoked once more on the grounds that he was “a threat to the community and a flight risk.” Despite being urged by Rhoney Gissen to flee to Canada to avoid going to jail, Bear “accepted that it was his duty as an American citizen to do time” and “refused to run away.”

  Not long after he had been returned to jail in Oakland, Bear told Gissen over the phone that he had been assaulted by a fellow inmate, who had broken Bear’s nose with a punch. Although Bear had insisted that he needed plastic surgery, the staff doctor handed him a Band-Aid instead.

  Then already nearly four months pregnant with Bear’s child, Rhoney Gissen could not visit Bear in jail because of her involvement in the bust in Orinda. In order to do so, she then managed to circumvent this restriction by obtaining a borrowed ID. To her, he looked thin and depressed. While she was helping Melissa Cargill move all of Bear’s stuff out of the house in Oakland Hills, Gissen learned that Cargill was also pregnant. Taking turns using the borrowed ID, both women then regularly
went to see Bear in jail.

  On October 4, 1970, Janis Joplin, then twenty-seven years old, died of a heroin overdose in the Landmark Motor Hotel in Hollywood. After learning in jail of Joplin’s death, Bear wrote an incredibly touching eulogy for her by hand on a page of lined notebook paper. Entitled “Notes on a Lady,” the eulogy began by stating that not only were he and Joplin both Capricorns, but they also shared the same birthday. As Edgar Allan Poe, Robert E. Lee, Cézanne, and Richard Lester, the director of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, had also been born on January 19, Bear reckoned that this had to be a weird day to be born.

  Admitting that he and Joplin had most certainly had their differences, Bear wrote that he loved her. Although he had tried to share his LSD with her, she had always preferred a slug of whiskey straight from a bottle of Southern Comfort to ease her pain. Concluding his eulogy, Bear wrote that he knew she was scared and trying to hide while fighting some kind of phantom that would disappear in the light but that she herself had never done so.

  Two and a half months later, on December 21, 1970, Rhoney Gissen gave birth to a son. A few days later, she took the baby with her to visit Bear in jail, where he named the baby Starfinder. About three weeks later, Melissa Cargill gave birth to a girl, whom Bear named Iridesca, but who came to be called Redbird.

  After having languished for months in a county jail that in many ways was a far more difficult place to do time than a federal prison, Bear was transferred to the Terminal Island penitentiary in San Pedro, California, to begin serving his three-year sentence for manufacturing LSD. A low-security federal correctional institute on a man-made island in the San Pedro harbor, the prison had formerly housed Al Capone, famed LA racketeer Mickey Cohen, and Charles Manson, who had been incarcerated there in the sixties for stealing cars and trying to cash a forged check. In 1974, both Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy, the convicted Watergate conspirator who had busted Leary in Millbrook, would also find themselves there.

  “At Terminal Island,” Bear would later say, “they tried to put me into the metal shop, where you had to work your ass off. I’d had some injuries to my fingers as a kid, and so I used my acting training and freaked out and said I was terrified of sharp metal things because the ends of my fingers had been cut off.

  “So then they said, ‘We’ve got either the grounds, where you can be a gardener, or food service.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I like working outside.’ And they said, ‘You’re in food service.’ Which was exactly where I had wanted to go. I was still eating only meat, and so in food service I could completely control my diet.

  “I worked my way up to the top job, which was as a linebacker for the steam tables, and I traded my two cartons of cigarettes a week for a steak a day from the butcher, and I got all the meat and eggs I needed and cooked my own food and had a great time.”

  As Timothy Leary would also do when describing his experiences in prison, Bear always portrayed his time behind bars as a series of personal triumphs in which he got the best of not only his jailers but also all those with whom he was now confined. However, as Bear would later tell David Gans, “I had a hard time at the beginning because I kept telling them that I didn’t do it for the money. I was just doing it because of service to the community.

  “As long as I maintained that, my time was hard. I got shit from everybody. As soon as I stopped saying that, they assumed I did it for the money and I acquiesced, no problem then. That was the only reason you were allowed to be in prison, because you did it for the money. If you did it for any other reason, you were lying.”

  Having only ever lived communally with the Grateful Dead, Bear now found himself surrounded by about a thousand other inmates. Remarkably, the Dead came to visit him at Terminal Island on August 4, 1971, so they could perform in the prison library. Bear helped the band’s roadies, all of whom were high on acid, set up gear that the authorities had not even bothered to search as it had come through the gates. He then introduced them to some of his fellow prisoners. Bear also told one of the Dead’s roadies that he had to get back out on the road with the band again.

  As perhaps some form of acknowledgment as to why Bear was now in the audience rather than onstage with them, the Dead began their twenty-song set with “Truckin’.” In the Rolling Stone interview that Jann Wenner and Charles Reich conducted with Jerry Garcia that fall, which was then published in book form, the Dead’s lead guitarist went on at length about Owsley in a way he would never have done if the man he was talking about had been there. Knowing Garcia, he might well have done this specifically to boost the spirits of someone who he knew would be reading his words behind bars.

  Garcia said that getting to visit Bear at Terminal Island had been “just great. Owsley is a hero. I didn’t get a chance to get into a really in-depth thing with him, which I was sorry about, but his head’s together, he really feels good. And he’s doing what he feels he has to do, I suppose. And I’m looking forward to having him out again. He’s a tremendous asset when he’s working.

  “… I think that there’s an important lesson involved which took us a long time to snap to, which is this: Owsley is the guy who brought a really solid consciousness of what quality was to our whole scene. And that’s been the basis of our operations since then: being able to have our equipment in really good shape, our PA really good, stuff like that.

  “We try to display as much quality as possible in the hopes of being able to refine what we do. And that’s the thing Owsley does like no other human being that I know can do or devote his attention to, and that is that thing of purification. It’s a real thing with him. He’s really, really good at it. Owsley’s a fine guy. He’s got just an amazing mind.

  “He’s got enough of every kind of experience, man! There’s almost nothing the guy hasn’t done. You know he’s a licensed blacksmith? Not only that, but he’s got a first-class broadcaster’s license, too. He worked for years in TV. He’s also an excellent auto mechanic; he’s obviously a chemist. There’s almost nothing he doesn’t do, or at least have a good grasp of. He understands just about every level of organization. He’s just incredible, he’s got some incredible capacity for retaining information.”

  Sometime after the Dead had performed at Terminal Island, Bear was transferred to the low-security federal correctional institute in Lompoc, California, not far from Vandenberg Air Force Base. “When I went to Lompoc, I stayed in food service, but they cooked it all up inside the big prison so I wound up taking care of the dining room, and I figured out a way of keeping the floor absolutely shiny by only having to clean it once a week.

  “Then they put this black guy in there who insisted on doing it his way, and he fucked it up. I had a private talk with the guy and I realized, ‘I’ve gotta get out of here. This guy is going to kill me.’ It was also too much work, so I transferred into the maintenance shop, and that was when I got into art. I had access to the tools and I began carving pieces of wood and stone. There was a lot of great serpentine lying around in Santa Barbara County, and then I got into using welding torches so I learned how to do all kinds of stuff.”

  When Charles Perry went to visit Bear at Lompoc, the prison reminded him “of my high-school campus except you couldn’t go home after sixth period.” Although Perry’s name had been announced at the beginning of the hour set aside for visitors, Bear did not appear until the assigned period of time was nearly over. Arriving out of breath, Bear handed Perry a belt buckle he had made for him, “a lion’s head boldly composed of a few drops of molten brass.”

  By then, Bear had already smuggled in tapestries for his cell as well as “all sorts of hi-fi and electronic equipment.” The smaller objects had been handed to him out on the visitors’ lawn, while the bigger items such as tape decks had been hidden beneath a pew in the prison chapel. As Perry would later write, “The joke around Lompoc was that when Owsley was released, he’d have to leave in a Bekins van.”

  The next time Perry went to visit him at Lompoc, he conveyed the news that Rolling
Stone magazine wanted to publish an interview with Bear. By then, Columbia Records had issued an album of Janis Joplin performing live in concert that included three tracks that Bear had recorded at the Carousel Ballroom. Although Bear had been paid for the work, the label had remixed what he had done. In exchange for doing the interview, Bear demanded that the magazine print an item stating that “word was out on the street” that there was “something funny” about the mix.

  Although Perry persuaded a San Francisco disc jockey to say this on the air and the item then ran in the magazine, Bear changed his mind about doing the interview because Rolling Stone was only interested, in Perry’s words, “in his drug career and the interview would caricature him as a mere chemist and a has-been.” Instead, Bear offered to write an essay on Marshall McLuhan’s theories, which he wanted to sign Publius. Not surprisingly, the magazine declined his offer.

  While doing the rest of his time with Bob Thomas, Will Spires, and Robert Massey, all of whom had been convicted with him in the Orinda bust, Bear also worked in the prison laundry and was then put in charge of the gym, where he began regularly lifting weights.

  After completing two years of his three-year sentence, Bear was released from prison on July 15, 1972. Since it was her weekend to visit him, Rhoney Gissen came with their eighteen-month-old son, Starfinder, to pick Bear up in his royal-blue Mercedes 190. He then began driving north on Highway 1. They stopped to have lunch on the patio at Nepenthe in Big Sur, but when someone there recognized him, Bear decided to leave without eating. After arriving in the apartment that Gissen had rented in Berkeley for the week, she went out with their young son to shop for food. When Gissen and Starfinder returned, Bear was gone.