Bear

by Robert Greenfield

  “I got into trouble because I had organized Phil’s gear so completely that my stuff was always up in about ten minutes and then back down again and in the box in ten minutes. So I was out there trying to help the other guys, and that was a no-no. That was something I shouldn’t have been doing. That was no good because they couldn’t work with me.

  “The Dead came to me just before they went to Egypt and said, ‘We don’t think we want you to work with us there, but we want you to go.’ And I said, ‘Fuck you. You want me in Egypt but you don’t want me working? Get lost.’ I said, ‘You’re going to the high temple of alchemy and the band is going to sit in the studio until a week before the first show to try to make a record? You’re crazy. You should be rehearsing. You should be out on the road doing warm-up gigs. What the hell’s wrong with you?’ But they didn’t want to hear that shit from me.”

  No longer able to exert control over the band in any way, Bear received a phone call the night before one of the Grateful Dead’s charter flights was scheduled to depart for Cairo. Taking advantage of an offer of three free tickets, Bear flew to Egypt with two friends and spent a week exploring the pyramids before the band arrived two days before the first show. The Dead then amused themselves by smoking hashish, climbing the Great Pyramid of Giza, and riding camels in the desert.

  Although Bear had already figured out how to wire the Great Pyramid to attain the best possible sound, no one wanted to listen to him. “They were trying to make the King’s Chamber into an echo chamber, and I said, ‘Number one, that’s the wrong use for it, and number two, the chamber is the wrong dimension and sonically bad.’ I wanted to use the descending passage from the Queen’s Chamber as a big organ and drive it resonantly and use it as a delay system. That would have been fantastic, but they wouldn’t do it. Instead, they said, ‘We don’t want you. Get lost.’ I said, ‘Okay, fine,’ and I went off and did my own thing, and they kept trying to wire up the King’s Chamber the wrong way.”

  On Saturday, September 16, 1978, the Grateful Dead performed before one of their smallest audiences since the Acid Tests. Six hundred and ninety people had paid to be there, while thousands of Bedouin on camels watched and listened for free out in the surrounding desert. The total lunar eclipse that took place during the show only added to what was already a thoroughly surreal event.

  In Bear’s words, “Sure enough, the big night of the last show came with a full moon, and I was onstage and the guy who was doing the sound came over to me and said they were having a lot of trouble, and I said, ‘Hey, I just dropped two hundred mikes, man, and I’m not going anywhere,’ and that was it.”

  Bear’s long-running term of service with the Grateful Dead had in fact finally ended and he would never again work for the band. Finding employment with the Jefferson Starship as their onstage monitor mixer, Bear began looking for an improved monitor cabinet and went to visit John Meyer, “who was in Berkeley trying to sell a theater-system concept to Francis Coppola for Apocalypse Now. I was blown away by the sound of a speaker that John had built in Switzerland. It was the first speaker I had ever heard that sounded totally ‘coherent,’ and it was somewhat like comparing a laser to a lightbulb.

  “I surprised him with my description of what it was doing, which he only knew about from his instruments but I could hear perfectly clearly. Once he realized I knew what I was going on about, I was able to coax him into abandoning his theatrical-speaker concept to concentrate on designing super-quality speakers for live music, starting with the monitors I needed for the Starship. The meeting resulted in the development of the world’s finest sound-reinforcing equipment and the founding of a very successful business. As I intended, the Dead were also a beneficiary of John Meyer’s excellent products.”

  Although Bear soon learned that this was no way to make a living, he had by then begun growing high-quality marijuana along with two partners in Fairfax just up the hill from Bolinas Road in Marin County. “I did that for about seven years from 1974 to 1981. We would get about fifteen pounds of weed from the garden. An ounce was two hundred and fifty dollars, and a pound went for somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars if it was really good. The whole crop was about thirty thousand dollars, and I was making about ten or twelve grand a year and paying eight hundred dollars a month in rent and so always wound up in the hole.

  “Basically, we worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, because somebody always had to be there for four or five months. So we were working for about a dollar twenty-five an hour. It was the most dangerous, underpaid job I ever had in my life, but I did it because I loved it and I was into the breeding. I never smoked pot heavily, but I had some strains that were absolutely unbelievable. I wasn’t really a grower. I was a dilettante, playing with breeding plants and growing enough of them so I could support my hobby for a few years while I was doing it because it was all so fascinating to me.”

  Bear might have gone right on pursuing his newfound avocation as the Luther Burbank of weed if he had not been attacked one night by some local junkies who had come to steal his crop just before it was ready to be harvested. “One of the junkies was a Vietnam vet with a stocking over his face who knew how to use a weapon, and at one point he was aiming a rifle at my chest while this black guy held a pistol up under my chin. I realized I could be dead in a second, and they said, ‘Well, any unfinished business?’ And I said, ‘No. I’ve done everything I need to do. There isn’t really that much I care about.’

  “And then in one absolutely uninterrupted motion, I grabbed both guns and moved them away from my body in a single continuous sweep. The twenty-two fired twice just as it cleared my clothing, and then the Vietnam vet brought the butt of his rifle around and smacked me on the side of my head so hard that I went to the ground, and then he stomped me on the back of my knees in such a way that I couldn’t stand up for about a day.”

  A friend who had come to visit that night drove up to the house just as Bear was being attacked. Dropping to the ground, the friend rolled beneath a bush and hid. Knowing someone was out there, the junkies decided not to begin ripping off the crop. Making his way to a phone, Bear called his coworkers and they phoned another friend, who promptly jumped into his car and drove up the hill.

  “So here was this guy coming up the driveway as one of the junkies was trying to get away by climbing over the fence, which he didn’t know was electrified. He found out about that pretty fast as he was being knocked to the ground by nine-thousand-volt pulses. Just as the other junkie was tying me up with my own garden hose, this guy came up the driveway, so off they went.”

  Bear then called a friend who lived farther up the hill and he arrived with a MAC-10 nine-millimeter pistol that could fire more than twelve hundred rounds a minute. “When you fired it, it just made a pop. Like a lightbulb breaking. We knew the junkies were still around because we could hear them talking. This son of a bitch was firing a twenty-two at us, and you’d think a Vietnam vet would have realized that he was outgunned when that nine millimeter went crashing through the bush. But, no, these guys were so determined to steal our pot that they went off a little ways, and one of my partners snuck up on them and heard them planning to come back, not the next night, but the night after that with a crew.”

  After fortifying the property, Bear hired some people to help him protect his crop. “We armed ourselves to the teeth, and sure enough they came. And sure enough, there was a running gun battle. There were all kinds of bullets lodged in the walls of the house, and one of the invaders got a bullet through his biceps and we drove them off. I don’t know why, but nobody called the cops. But we had to rip out all our pot and lost thousands of dollars.”

  Since the dope-growing community in Marin County was then still fairly small, it only took Bear a few weeks to find out who the attackers were. “But there wasn’t anything I could do about it and they never came back.” As fantastic as this tale seems even now, the moral of the story for Bear was “I have a rule. No matte
r what happens, don’t panic. The more that the stress increases, the more cool and calculating I become. Like when I pulled those guns off my body. There I was, facing these guys who were obviously belligerent, armed, dangerous, and a lot bigger than me, and yet I calmly grabbed those guns and pulled them off my body. Why? Because I am not afraid of anything.”

  Throughout the rest of Bear’s life, this was a trait that would prove to be both a blessing and a curse.

  17

  Bear’s Dream

  The first time that Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally ever met Bear was at a Rhythm Devils concert featuring Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Airto Moreira, Flora Purim, and Mike Hinton at the Marin Civic Center on the weekend of February 13–14, 1981. Then thirty-one years old, McNally had already written Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. Jerry Garcia had liked the book so much that he suggested McNally begin working on an authorized history of the Grateful Dead.

  In McNally’s words, “I was just the brand-new biographer, starting to break in and take my hazing, and that was the first time I had ever gone into a show through the backstage door. I came in early for the sound check, and Bear was mixing and everything was already late. Whether that was Bear’s fault or not, I don’t know, but the show itself was patently late.

  “Phil Lesh was part of this, and he was not a master of patience and he was growling and fuming and glaring at Bear, who was standing at the sound board with a tablecloth that he was putting down before putting the actual board on the table. It was cloth. It was not technical. It was not the equipment. But it had to be arranged perfectly. Because this was Bear after all.

  “And there was Phil Lesh trying to generate pressure, and of course Bear was impervious to all that stuff. He simply went deaf when he chose to do so, and I was thinking, ‘Nothing has changed in twenty years. Nothing has changed. This is the way it has always been.’ That was my first insight into Bear. He was in his own world.”

  On April 25, 1981, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and John Kahn performed a forty-minute acoustic set at the Berkeley Community Theatre as part of a benefit concert for the Seva Foundation, a charity dedicated to treating blindness all over the world founded by Wavy Gravy and Ram Dass that had initially been funded by Steve Jobs. The show also featured Country Joe McDonald, Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, and Odetta.

  Although Bear had not done live sound since his time with the Jefferson Starship two years earlier, he volunteered to do the mix for the concert. Still, he was constitutionally unable to accept that this task could ever be properly done in any way but his own, and those who had accepted his offer to do the job got far more than they had bargained for that night.

  “By this time, I knew you had to do all the sound through a single system, and I wanted everything set up stage right, but they said no. I said, ‘What do you mean no? I’m the sound mixer.’ This guy said, ‘Well, it’s our PA system and we won’t do it. The band won’t let us.’ I said, ‘The band has nothing to say about it.’ When I had first started working with the Grateful Dead, I didn’t know any better so I would stupidly delay the PA, but now I knew that it just didn’t work.

  “So the guy set the system up the way he wanted it that night, and when nobody was around after the sound check, I went up to the mixing table and disconnected the hot wire to stage right. The show started and I turned on the system, and I had everything coming through the speakers that were stage left. I only had half the cluster, but that was all I really needed.

  “The guy came up to me and said, ‘Stage right is not working. We have to do something about it.’ I said, ‘Don’t you dare touch anything. The show is on right now. I’ll deal with it. You touch anything and I’ll knock your block off,’ and the whole night went beautifully. I had the best sound I’d ever gotten in Berkeley Community Theatre, which is a rotten hall to begin with where the sound was always lousy.

  “At the end of the night while everyone was relaxing, I opened up this little connector and soldered the wires back on and put it all back together. This same guy came back up to me and said he had to find out what had been wrong with the system. I turned it on for him and it worked perfectly. He said, ‘What’s going on here?’ And I said, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. These sort of things happen all the time.’ The guy kept apologizing for what he thought was a screwup, but it was just what I wanted.

  “In every way, what happened that night was just so typical of what still goes on in the sound business today. It’s full of egos and people who only know that you have to hang line arrays. I know more about line arrays than anybody, including John Meyer, and I know you cannot use a line array by itself. Two strings of speakers, one hanging down on each side of the stage, sound like dog shit. No matter how hard you try, you simply cannot ever make them sound right.”

  Eleven months later, on March 20, 1982, Bear took some acid with friends on the day of the vernal equinox. After going to bed that night, Bear had a dream in which he saw the planet “as if I was out on a satellite and the whole northern half of the earth was all wrapped up in this swirling cloud, and I realized I was watching something like the Deluge in the Bible.”

  When Bear awoke the next morning, he told his housemate Bob Thomas about this “weird dream I’d had. I said I had never seen anything like it before, and we both marveled at it, and then I stopped thinking about it and went on with my day. My opinion had always been that dreams are things you entertain yourself with at night, but when I woke up the next morning, I realized I’d had the exact same dream again, and I couldn’t ever remember having had the same dream twice.”

  When Bear returned home later that day, Bob Thomas told him that he had heard about someone on the radio who had just given a lecture about carbon dioxide and the ice age cycle. “I said, ‘Oh, well. That’s very interesting. I wonder who that is.’ And then I went to bed that night, and the next morning just before I woke up, I had this same dream again. Third time in a row, and by then, boy, I was freaked.”

  Bear then began looking for any kind of clues he could find that might help explain the mystery of his recurring dream. After calling around, Bear found a professor at Berkeley who told him that if he really wanted to learn about this subject, he should contact George Kukla.

  Born in Czechoslovakia, Kukla had gone to Columbia University on an exchange program in 1971 and then become a senior research scientist at the university’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. In 1972, Kukla and geologist Robert Matthews of Brown University had convened a historic conference on glacial cooling and what they feared was the advent of another ice age. After their findings had been published in Science magazine, the Nixon administration established a panel to investigate the matter.

  Over the phone, Kukla told Bear that he would soon be attending a meeting in La Jolla and urged Bear to call him again there. “Then I went to sleep and I had that same dream again for the fourth time. So I called him down in La Jolla, and I was telling him about the dream, and all of a sudden the line went dead. And I went, ‘Oh, fuck. This is so weird. I better go down and see him.’ So I jumped on a plane and went down there and met him and talked to him about the ice age cycle.”

  Slipping into the back row at the meeting, Bear began listening to a lecture about the blocking effects of high-pressure ridges only to realize that he was attending a meeting of meteorologists sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, also known as NOAA. In Bear’s somewhat fevered state of mind, the synchronicity was so overwhelming that even the acronym seemed to be part of the grand design. “Noaa is a word that doesn’t exist in either ancient Egyptian or Hebrew. So I began thinking that Noah really does exist but that it referred to this atmospheric association.”

  As the lecturer explained that the computer model used to predict weather was no longer working because a high-pressure ridge had appeared in a place where it was not normally found and the low-pressure area was being amplified because of it,
Bear began thinking about an article he had read in Scientific American about a vortex tube that could separate hot and cold and seemed to him like a practical demonstration of Maxwell’s demon.

  After returning home from the conference, Bear went right on having the same dream night after night. Although he was clearly being sent a message, he could not understand what it meant. “I got to the point where I couldn’t even drink a glass of wine with meals. I mean, talk about my drug tolerance being zero. I thought I was losing my nut. After about three weeks, the dream finally stopped when I figured out that the event I was dreaming about was thermodynamic in nature and located in the shadow of winter in Baffin Bay, which is a polynya, or a permanently unfrozen area of water, near Greenland in the arctic circle.”

  Plunging into research on the subject much as he had done while teaching himself how to make LSD in the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, Bear discovered that atmospheric energy in that region began rising dramatically every year around the middle of December and then fell off again in February when the sun began to shine on Baffin Bay. Consisting of roughly forty days and nights, Bear reckoned this was the period during which the Great Deluge described in the Bible had taken place.

  Using Egyptian chronology, Bear then learned that the seventeenth day of their second month was celebrated as the festival of the goddess Hathor, the bringer of the yearly flood of the Nile that enabled the Egyptians to grow their crops. “When you compute the seventeenth day of the second month, putting the flood of Noah on the festival day of Hathor is very interesting because that is about the sixteenth to the twentieth of December. Which is why the Christians put the birth of Christ at the time of this festival. Why do people celebrate the winter solstice? Because if they made it through to the solstice and there had been no storm, they knew it wasn’t going to happen until the following year.”