At the beginning of September the Dead, with Hunter in tow, drove north to the quaint Russian River community of Rio Nido to spend time at a friend’s ranch honing some of the group’s original songs in preparation for recording sessions in Los Angeles for their second album, set for mid-September. The newly written “Alligator” was developed further, and Phil Lesh and his poet friend Bobby Petersen had written a piece, sung by Weir, with the unlikely title “New Potato Caboose.”
It was in Rio Nido, too, that the Dead’s most famous improvisational vehicle, “Dark Star,” was born. “I was in my cabin,” Hunter recalled. “They were rehearsing in the hall [about 100 feet away] and you could hear from there. I heard the music and just started writing ‘Dark Star’ lying on my bed. I wrote the first half of it and I went in and I think I handed what I’d written to Jerry. He said, ‘Oh, this will fit just fine,’ and he started singing it. That’s true collaboration. I mean, I actually heard the Grateful Dead playing and those are the words it seemed to be saying. I’m going to take a big stretch here and say the music seemed to be saying that and I transcribed it.”
Dark star crashes
Pouring its light into ashes
Reason tatters
The forces tear loose from the axis
Searchlight casting
For faults in the clouds of delusion
Shall we go, you and I while we can?
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds
“That did it for the time being,” Hunter continued. “Then, a couple of days or weeks later—days, weeks, what were those in those days?—Jerry said he’d like as much material again. So I went out and sat in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. I was sitting there writing some more lyrics and a hippie came up and offered me a joint. I took a hit on that and he said, ‘What are you writing?’ I said, ‘This is a song called “Dark Star.” Remember that, it’s gonna be important.’ He said, ‘Far out.’ Off he went and I finished writing it. I suppose it is important within the context of the Grateful Dead, and the most we can ask for is importance within a context.”
Though the song had begun from a groove Hunter had heard the band playing, Garcia noted that “the reason the music is the way it is, is because those lyrics did suggest that to me. That’s what happened. They are saying, ‘This universe is truly far out.’ That’s about it. You could take whatever you will from that suggestion. For me, that suggestion always means, ‘Great, let’s look around. Let’s see how weird it really gets.’” From the outset, “Dark Star” was designed to be a tune with a constantly shifting interior between the two verses, though in its nascent stages it didn’t have nearly the complexity it did a year later.
The Dead went down to Los Angeles in the second week of September to begin work on the group’s sophomore album for Warner Bros., with Dave Hassinger once again producing. Though much has been made through the years about the Dead’s apparent dislike of Hassinger, that was not based on their experience making the first record. In fact, part of the band’s dissatisfaction with that album was that Hassinger didn’t have more engineering input on the record, since that’s what he was best known for. However, working at RCA Studios, Hassinger was forced to use RCA engineers, rather than relying on his own engineering chops. “That’s a lot of what the band wanted from me,” Hassinger recalled. “I was new to production, and the Grateful Dead really didn’t need a producer to tell them what to play or how to play it. They needed someone to help them get the record to sound the way they wanted it to sound, and that’s what I would have liked to have done.”
This time around, the Dead were determined not to be rushed through the recording process as they had been on the first album. This was an era when albums rarely took more than a week or two to record and mix, though by the summer of 1967 there were starting to be records that took longer and showed more obvious studio craftsmanship—the Beatles’ Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds being the great shining examples that so many musicians, producers and engineers have cited through the years as having inspired them. Those albums had an incalculable impact on the recording industry because they showed that there could be more to making a record than simply documenting a performance; an album could be art, and, used creatively, the recording studio itself could be a tool to create that art. That meant thinking in new ways about how to work in the studio and make the most of the technology that was available. And if the Beatles could make such powerful, sophisticated and sonically detailed records using four-track recorders, imagine what the Dead could do with an eight-track, which became the de facto standard in top studios around the time the Dead started work on their second album. The Dead may not have aspired to make an album like Sgt. Pepper’s, but from the outset they decided that rather than just playing live in the studio, they would layer the record, first putting down basic tracks—drums, bass, guitars, keyboards—then adding other parts to it to make the album more texturally interesting and involving.
During the two weeks or so the Dead were down at RCA Studios, they worked a little on the basic tracks for a number of different songs, but “we accomplished absolutely nothing,” Garcia said. But they did play their biggest Southern California concert to date at the Hollywood Bowl (“Bill Graham Presents the San Francisco Scene in L.A.”), taking the middle slot on a bill that had the Jefferson Airplane headlining and Big Brother and the Holding Company opening. Then, after a pair of shows at the Family Dog’s Denver ballroom and a free concert in downtown Denver, the band headed back to San Francisco for two nights at the Straight Theater, which, after having been denied a dance permit because of city and neighborhood opposition, managed to operate as the Straight Theater School of Dance. There was, in fact, a bit of dance instruction at the Straight: Peter Weiss, a onetime dancer with Anna Halprin’s troupe, said to the crowd, all of whom had to fill out dance class registration cards to attend, “What I would like everyone to do is close your eyes and relax and note how you breathe and how your heart is pumping. . . .” This rigorous instruction out of the way, the Dead broke into their raucous version of Martha and the Vandellas’ Motown hit “Dancing in the Streets.”
At the first of those two Straight shows the Dead took on a sixth member, a drummer named Mickey Hart. His addition to the lineup would have a profound effect on the direction the band’s music was to take.
* * *
Brooklyn-born Michael Hart was the son of two drummers. His father, Lenny, was a national and world champion rudimental drummer, and Mickey’s mother, Leah, took up drumming to get close to Lenny; together they won a mixed doubles drumming competition at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Shortly after Mickey was born in 1941 his parents split up and he and his mother moved in with her parents; Mickey didn’t really meet his father again until he was about twenty. Though not a musician himself, Mickey’s grandfather, Sam Tessel, was a huge fan of military drum-and-bugle corps, which were highly popular during World War II and in the years right after.
Growing up, young Mickey loved going to drum corps competitions, and though the absent Lenny Hart was scarcely mentioned in the Tessel household, Mickey “was acutely aware that I was the son of a great drummer,” he wrote in his autobiography Drumming at the Edge of Magic. “That was my father’s legacy to me; that and his drum pad and a pair of beautiful snakewood sticks he’d won in a competition.” Mickey got his first drum when he was ten or eleven, but it wasn’t until the Tessels had moved to Lawrence, Long Island, and Mickey was a freshman in high school, that he started to play seriously. Over the course of his four years in high school, he worked his way up from pulling (rather than playing) a giant bass drum on wheels in the high school marching band to first chair percussionist in the all-state band. Mickey practiced incessantly, on drumming fundamentals as well as just bashing along to records featuring big band jazz drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, or to Elvis Presley and other rock ’n’ rollers. But sometime during his senior year, Mickey ab
ruptly quit school and joined the air force, “burning to test myself in the world of grown-up drummers. I wanted to become an adult as fast as possible, and the quickest way to accomplish that when I was young was the military.”
Mickey got to play plenty of music in the air force. Stationed in Spain, he traveled the country playing military music by day and big band jazz at night. By 1965 he’d left the air force and returned to Long Island, hoping to make it as a drummer in New York. He got fired from the first and only drumming job he landed through the New York musicians’ union—filling in for a drummer in a staid fox-trot band. Then, without warning, Mickey received a letter from his father asking if he wanted to work with his old man in a music store he was opening in San Carlos, California. Without hesitation, Mickey moved west and convinced his father that the guitar store the senior Hart had envisioned should—of course!—be a drum store. For the next two years Mickey spent his time working in the store and practicing his rudimental drumming.
Then, one night in late August 1967, Mickey went to see Count Basie’s band at the Fillmore Auditorium. Mickey was friends with Basie’s drummer, Sonny Payne; they hung out together whenever the Basie band was on the West Coast. At the Fillmore, a friend of Mickey’s introduced him to Bill Kreutzmann, who was in the audience that night, and the two hit it off immediately. After the show, Hart and Kreutzmann hung around outside the Fillmore, talking and drumming on parked cars for a while. Then Billy suggested they go to the Matrix club to hear some friends of his, Big Brother and the Holding Company. Even though Mickey had been in the Bay Area since the early days of the San Francisco rock ’n’ roll scene, he’d never heard any of the bands before, and that night at the Matrix the combination of James Gurley’s deafening, feedback-laden guitar solos and Janis Joplin’s raw, primal singing “cracked open my comfortable little notions about music,” Mickey wrote. “In my excited and defenseless state I let myself be ravaged. . . . I felt like I’d fallen through a time warp into another universe. I was grinning so hard my jaws were starting to ache.
“Kreutzmann and I became drum brothers after that first night at the Matrix. We started hanging out, drumming together, cruising around Haight-Ashbury in Billy’s Mustang.” A couple of times Billy invited Mickey to Grateful Dead practices, “but I could never find the right warehouse where they were rehearsing,” Hart wrote. And so, as fate would have it, the first time Mickey ever saw the Grateful Dead play was also the first night he played with them—September 29, 1967, at the Straight Theater. Mickey watched the first set and was blown away by the band’s energy and power. Then, between sets, Kreutzmann suggested they round up another drum set so Mickey could sit in with the band during the second set. They drove to a friend’s house, grabbed a kit, zipped back to the Straight, set up the drums as fast they could and “launched right into the first song of the next set, a tune they’d been fooling around with called ‘Alligator/Caution.’ Everything had been so frantic that it was only then, as the song gathered speed, that I was able to focus on the fact that I didn’t have a clue as to what I was supposed to play. . . . One of the things Billy had stressed about his band was that the unexpected was welcome, indeed was actively sought—so I threw away my caution and dove in.”
Hart’s baptismo del fuego had been a triumph: “Suddenly, with two drums pounding away in the back,” he wrote, “they had glimpsed the possibility of a groove so monstrous it would eat the audience. There seemed no question that it was an adventure we would all explore together.” And from that night, Mickey Hart was in the band.
* * *
The intense civic resistance to the Straight Theater that fall was emblematic of the city’s changing attitude toward its hippie enclave in Haight-Ashbury. All summer, as the crowds in the Haight got bigger, so did the police presence in the neighborhood. From the freaks’ perspective, there seemed to be more police harassment. Drug busts became more common and in some cases more violent.
But the drugs in the area were changing, too. Amphetamines had been a problem in the Haight for a while, but in the summer of 1967 the problem escalated, as more and more dealers moved into the area and found easy prey among the thousands of out-of-towners looking for kicks. Heroin, too, made new inroads in the Haight, and with increased heroin use came more petty crime, as desperate young addicts turned to robbery to scrape up enough money for their next fix. Psychedelics had been the inspirational soma in the early days of the counterculture, but now a dark side began to manifest itself in the Haight, as poorly manufactured drugs were taken by kids who had no prior experience with psychedelics, no guidance from caring friends, no clue about what constituted a safe dose and no idea how to deal with the intense changes the drugs put them through. And it wasn’t just bad acid that was going around. There were all sorts of odd substances being concocted in makeshift labs in the area, a veritable alphabet of bizarre and often dangerous synthetics—STP, MMDA, PCP—that would flood the streets for a few days or even weeks at a time, leaving dozens of people in hospital emergency rooms or, if they were lucky, in the capable and caring hands of workers from the increasingly important Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.
Not surprisingly, from the earliest days until Garcia’s death in 1995, the Grateful Dead scene was a magnet for people on the dark periphery of the psychedelic drug world—lowlife dealers, kids who were barely functioning drug burnouts and out-and-out wackos attracted to the lunatic fringe of the hippie world. Anyone was welcome, it seemed, and few judgments were made. What this meant for the band, however, was that a certain amount of vigilance was required to keep the crazies away from the inner circle, and to recognize which folks trying to glom onto their scene were nice people with good ideas, and which ones were scam artists looking for money or power or both.
“Back in the Haight,” Garcia said in 1981, “there were some Charlie Manson characters running around, really weird people who believed they were Christ risen or whatever, and who meant in the worst possible way to take the power. Some of them saw that the Grateful Dead raised energy and they wanted to control it. But we knew the only kind of energy management that counted was the liberating kind—the kind that frees people, not constrains them. So we were always determined to avoid those fascistic crowd-control implications in rock. It’s always been a matter of personal honor not to manipulate the crowd.”
“It got so we could recognize those kind of people in a heartbeat,” Mountain Girl says. “The minute you looked at somebody you could tell by their vibe, by what was coming out of the tops of their heads kind of, whether they were going to be really dangerous to you or really dangerous to themselves or completely off the wall so you didn’t know what they might do. I hardly ever felt personally threatened. The negative energy pretty much stayed away from me. But it would attach to Weir, and Jerry attracted it, too. If anybody tried to chase down Kesey at the Acid Test, it was usually because they were an English major who had freaked out and been in the nuthouse and then read Cuckoo’s Nest. But for Jerry it was other types of nuts. He seemed to attract compulsive people; strange people that either wanted to be part of his life or part of the Grateful Dead—they would write themselves into the drama and it would just become this maddening compulsion for them and they’d follow us around. That stuff was going on pretty early, actually. Then there were these other types who would have some doom-filled message that they had to communicate to us. Or it would be something inter-hippie: ‘So-and-so is an evil person,’ and you had to be warned about stuff. Or there were a lot of warnings about incipient busts. There were a lot of false alarms.”
There was also the real thing. At 3:30 in the afternoon on October 2, 1967, eight narcotics agents from the San Francisco police, accompanied by reporters and television crews they’d tipped off, pulled up to 710 Ashbury, knocked on the door and demanded to be let in, even though they didn’t have a search warrant. When their entry was denied, police kicked in the door and searched the house from top to bottom, eventually finding about a pound of pot and ha
shish. They confiscated the files, money and address books of both the Dead and the Haight-Ashbury Legal Organization, which had an office in 710, and proceeded to arrest everyone in the house on marijuana possession charges, including Bob Weir and Pigpen, Bob Matthews, Pig’s girlfriend Veronica, Sue Swanson, Rosalyn Stevenson, Christine Bennett and Antoinette Kaufman. Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully arrived once police were already in the house and were promptly busted, too, as was another late arrival, Rosie McGee.
After six hours in jail the suspects were released on bail. The next morning, the San Francisco Chronicle’s front page carried the news under a banner headline: ROCK BAND BUSTED. Below a very sinister-looking photo of Pigpen—ironically, the one person arrested who was not a dope smoker—was a subhead that read COPS RAID PAD OF GRATEFUL DEAD, and a long story detailing the arrests in “the Dead’s way-out 13-room pad.” That morning, too, the eleven bustees were arraigned in court, and then the entire Grateful Dead and their managers held a press conference in the living room of 710 to decry the bust, draconian drug laws and the police crackdown in the Haight.
In the end, the bust was more an annoying distraction than a serious threat to the band’s future. No one believed for a minute that anyone would serve time, and no one did. In May 1968 the eleven defendants were fined $100 to $200 each. But the bust did have a somewhat sobering effect on the Dead, or at the very least taught them that they were being watched by disapproving forces from the straight world.
“The bust was kind of like the last straw for us,” Mountain Girl says. “We were feeling too exposed. And Haight Street just wasn’t any fun anymore. There were tour buses driving in front of our house, cops all over the streets. The Chinese grocery closed up so we were going to have to drive to shop. Everything started changing and becoming very trendy, so we started looking for a new place to go, but it was hard to find a place because the city had such a low vacancy rate in those days.” Eventually Garcia and Mountain Girl found an apartment in the outer Sunset district—near the ocean but often fogbound—and lived there for five months or so. “It wasn’t too great,” M.G. says, “but at that point we were tired of sharing a house, so it was kind of nice to be off by ourselves.” Jerry and M.G. didn’t need a car to get around when they lived in the Haight, but once they moved to the western edge of the city they bought a used Plymouth station wagon with a rear window that didn’t roll up, and they continued to bop down to 710, which remained the Dead’s headquarters for a few more months after the bust.
Garcia: An American Life Page 23
