We had matching band costumes—we wore red sport coats and black pants and black ties. It was all corny, straight stuff. Nobody had taken psychedelics or smoked pot yet. The Legends were still a straight band. We were just copying other songs; we didn’t have any original material. It was just a platform to learn and play music, while having fun.
We had a sax player and we played whatever was popular then. We’d do “What’d I Say,” which I already said I loved and knew how to play. And we did stuff like Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” We also did some Ventures’ songs—“Walk Don’t Run” was one of them.
Our first gigs were at the YMCA. They were always big events for us. I wasn’t sixteen yet. My dad would drive us all over there. We would load everything into his Ford station wagon and then he’d help me set up. It was always a horrible scene: the Mexicans would beat up the white guys. I was glad to be on a drum set, playing, so I didn’t get in a fight. It was terrible. They were such fighters, but we were just white, middle-class kids. For a while I grew up frightened of Mexicans.
My parents got divorced when I was in eighth or ninth grade. My mom couldn’t handle me at home. I was too wild or something. At least, in her eyes. So she sent me away to a prep school that was run by a headmaster who was once on a football team that my grandfather coached.
My grandfather, Clark Shaughnessy, coached the Stanford University football team that won the 1941 Rose Bowl. He modified the T Formation and tweaked it until it was wild enough to win championships. It was innovative and crazy at the same time. It made him famous. He eventually accepted the position of head coach in the NFL with the Los Angeles Rams and then, later, coached the Chicago Bears. He was a really good man. I loved him. Still do.
Until Stanford won that championship, though—at the end of his first year as head coach—they were really uneasy with his nontraditional approach. They were worried about his twenty-fifth-century way of thinking. They had never seen plays like his before, and that concerned them. When someone comes along and changes the way something is done, if it doesn’t work, they call it foolish. But when it works, they call it revolutionary.
Whether you loved the Grateful Dead or felt differently, there’s no disputing that we changed the way things were done. Even when we tackled traditional songs, we always approached everything with an eye toward innovation. Some of it worked and some of it didn’t, but we put more money on risky chances than on sure bets, every time. People told us we were crazy, pretty much every day of our career. Yet, we ended up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. My grandfather ended up in the College Football Hall of Fame (and accumulated other, similar accolades as well). So, as the drummer, you can see where I got it from.
After playing for my grandfather, Charlie Orme became headmaster of the prep school that his father founded in Prescott, Arizona: the Orme School. My mom sent me there. I ended up only going for a year—ninth grade—but it was an interesting year. Not my favorite.
I didn’t get in there on my grades or accolades; I got in because my granddad was a well-known football coach. They made me repeat the ninth grade, but it was either that or military school. That was the ultimatum my mother gave me. I really had no choice at all. It was either horses or guns. But with horses came the promise to play football. Guns we’ll get to later.
I had been playing music for a few years at that point and really getting into it. Being sent to prep school meant that I had to be away from my drums, but not my drum sticks—I brought those sticks that Lee Anderson bought me. In bed at night, after lights-out, I would count the days until I could be reunited with my drum set. It was like suffering a punishment for a crime I didn’t commit.
For sport, at this prep school, I played six-man football. We had a really good team. We won every game. But I couldn’t keep a grade point, so they kicked me off. It’s embarrassing telling you all this now, actually. But I was big for my age, so I was a redshirted freshman. I was on the varsity and played with all the seniors and did really well—just because I was big, not because I was any good at football. When they booted me from the team, they said, “Now you have to ride horses.”
That didn’t sit very well with me. The other people that rode horses were mostly girls, and they weren’t exactly pretty, so it was kind of like, “Ehh.” And I wasn’t able to play any music. Whenever I could, I would practice by hitting my drumsticks against my pillow. Every night, I’d listen to Ray Charles and the cool stuff from when he was in his R&B period, when he first started playing, and I’d fall asleep happy.
Every day, I begged my mother to take me out of prep school. I wrote her letters from study hall, insisting she let me withdraw. But she didn’t. Then my dad did the coolest thing. He crated up my drums and shipped them off to Arizona. I didn’t know they were coming. When they arrived, I pried open the crates, not knowing what to expect. At the very first glimpse, the very first second I saw that my drums were in there, love and meaning and passion all came flooding back into my life. I had my drums back.
The school allowed me to play those drums after class instead of riding horses, which was really cool of them. They let me set up my drums in the multipurpose room, which actually was a reconditioned barn, with a stage.
I could go in there and practice every day after school, just about whenever I wanted, unless they were holding meetings. One day, I was playing away and in walked the headmaster with this guy that had these really thick coke-bottle eyeglasses, and the headmaster signaled me to be quiet. You know, “Come on, shut up, enough already.” But his guest didn’t mind. He prodded the headmaster in the side with his elbow. “No, tell him to keep playing. I’ve never heard anything like that.” I liked that guy. It turns out, that guy was Aldous Huxley, the author.
I had no idea who Aldous Huxley was at that time. He was there to give a lecture later in that very same room to the student body. We heard the lecture that night. I remember being there really well, I just couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about. I recognized that his words had a really good energy to them, but I didn’t understand what they meant. Years later, it began to make sense.
Huxley’s most famous book, Brave New World, was about his fear of a government that could manufacture people, creating a nation of exact duplicates. The cloning of the masses. Huxley’s trip was that we’re approaching a point where we’ll have the technology to do that. Give a government enough power and control, and they could start mass-producing obedient citizens. And it would be a total nightmare. A living hell.
Huxley was English, and he experienced the horror of Germany during its darkest period. Hitler wanted a world of clones. Huxley did not. He had a fear of a country—not just Germany but maybe even America—trying to artificially make their own flawed idea of the perfect race of people. That was the theme of his lecture.
I have that same fear and it’s even more relevant today. In more ways than most of us care to admit, America isn’t that far away from doing something like that right now. It’s just more insidious than in Brave New World.
But the coolest thing about my serendipitous encounter with Huxley is that Huxley was also an acid head. A few years later, so was I. In fact, in different ways, we’re both now famous for our love of acid. And because of it.
Anyway, that’s one of my clearest memories of being a kid. My other memories include my parents doing some pretty wild stuff. My dad taught me rocketry class. It should’ve been called missile class. This was earlier; I think I was around eleven or twelve at the time. He said, “We’re going to learn to make rockets, Billy,” and I said, “Okay, let’s do that.” We packed black powder into copper tubes, put firecracker fuses on them, and fired those fuckers off. I got the hang of it pretty fast. We’d shoot them out across the road, carelessly. Luckily, we didn’t hit anything. At least, nothing that mattered or complained.
Then one day, my dad said, “Okay, I’m going to teach you about thrust.” We had a wood swing in the backyard, hung by metal chains. He too
k clamps and bolted an eight-inch metal pipe to the swing, packing it with black powder. Passersby would have not-so-causally thought, “Hey, why is there a pipe bomb stuck to this kid’s swing?”
I had a sneaking suspicion that this might not be set up correctly, so I went over and got a piece of plywood and hid behind it. I’d seen what the smaller copper tubes could do and this one looked like it could’ve belonged to NASA. As soon as he lit the thing, it made a loud whooshing sound and the whole area instantly filled up with smoke. It was a complete white-out. I couldn’t see a thing but the swing hadn’t moved—not an inch. The rocket itself was gone. My dad told me to go inside. “If anybody asks,” he said, “tell them the car backfired.” When I felt it was safe to come out, I found my dad looking through our orange tree at a brand-new six-inch hole in the back of the house. At least we knew where the rocket had gone. That was my dad, for you. He was pretty carefree like that. We did lots of wild stuff together. But that was the end of rocket class.
After that, my dad said, “That’s enough, no more black powder.” But he’d leave to go to work and I knew where he kept the black powder, so I went in and continued the experiments. There was this really wealthy kid down at the end of the block, Jeffrey Smedburg, and we wanted to prank him. We had a Prince Albert can—way before we used them for marijuana—and we took it and I filled it about half full of this black powder. I said to him, “When you light it, whatever you do, don’t look in it. Hold a match out in front of you; don’t let go,” and I heard this big whoosh and saw a giant cloud of white smoke. When the smoke cleared, the hair on Jeffrey’s face was completely burnt off. We were just kids, so there was no mustache or facial hair, but his eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, his hair was burnt way back, and his face was black. I took him inside and scrubbed him up. I washed him off as hard as I could, hoping to make him look good so his parents would believe the story I was going to make up for him. It finally came to me: “Tell them you’ve been to a séance.” I didn’t even know what a fucking séance was. “Tell them you’ve been to a séance.” And that was the last that Jeffrey Smedburg was ever allowed to play with me. With other kids, we just did stuff. We grew up. We did whatever kids do.
I started smoking pot when I was sixteen and I loved it. The first time I got high was right next to my junior high school, at some guy’s house in downtown Palo Alto. He had a matchbox full of marijuana—it looked like oregano to me, but when we smoked it, all of a sudden we got this funny buzz and went outside and said, “Oh, this is fucking great!” and we walked all around Palo Alto, stoned. It felt like I was walking on mashed potatoes. Everything was gravy. The next time we bought weed from him, he sold us actual oregano. Bait and switch. So I learned right away what the difference was. You learn about these things as you go; it’s a wonderful part of growing up. You learn, you grow. I’m growing now.
Both of my parents went to Stanford and they had a great library. There was never anything good on television, even back then, so whenever I got bored, I would go through my parents’ books. When they weren’t home, I’d investigate and start reading whatever interested me. I read a bunch of Faulkner and it was kind of intriguing—he wrote in such a weird way. I loved Steinbeck, too, of course.
I don’t think I got Jack Kerouac’s On the Road from my parents’ library, but it came to me somehow. I read it before I really knew the other guys in the Grateful Dead—I know that—but it was an important book to all of us. It became influential to me in the same way that certain music was influential. It was jazz, on the page.
I never met Jack Kerouac but I eventually became friends with Neal Cassady, the real-life hero of On the Road. His character, Dean Moriarty, was larger than life. Even in real life. He was Kerouac’s inspiration behind that novel, but he also was an inspiration to anybody who ever crossed paths with him. Myself included. And Ken Kesey. And his Merry Pranksters. And Jerry Garcia. And the Grateful Dead. That was all to come; sooner than you might think.
But when I first picked up On the Road, it was my boarding pass out of Palo Alto and into destinations unknown—my life’s great adventure. It seemed to say that there was something greater out there, and even if it didn’t appear within my reach, I could grab ahold of it anyway, just by believing that it was possible. That’s really important. Because after that, I started reaching for it. And sure enough, I was able to grab ahold.
This was right at the age when everyone started getting their driver’s licenses and we got to experience some of the freedom that Kerouac talked about in On the Road, but for real. This was the teenage version because we still went home at night. The first car I had was a ’58 Dodge station wagon, not unlike my dad’s. We wore grooves in the asphalt on Highway 101 going up to San Francisco. Sometimes we’d hit Skyline and take the back roads up. That’s how I learned that the best stuff is often found on the alternate routes.
In San Francisco, there was a club called the Jazz Workshop and they used to have an eighteen-and-over section. You could sit behind a screen of chicken wire and watch artists like Cal Tjader play. They had to keep us separated from the bar because we weren’t old enough to drink, but I’d go there because I could hear live music—live, far-out music—and that was always my calling. I’d find myself in Santa Cruz … I remember Big Mama Thornton singing at a club across the street from the boardwalk. Since I wasn’t twenty-one yet, I had to look through a hole in the wall, but I could hear the music. I’d always do that kind of thing—anything to get within earshot.
When my parents finally got divorced, it had a much bigger effect on me than I first admitted. It hurt because you can’t really side with one or the other. You love them both. You don’t want to see them fighting. I came home from prep school after only one year. At first, I stayed at my mother’s house. Then my dad helped me get my own apartment. I left home, basically, at sixteen. Still in high school.
In order to pay for my first apartment, I worked any kind of job I could get. I gave drum lessons, just trying to get by any way I could. I worked at the weirdest job ever—I sold human hair wigs. “That wig is so you; you look ten years younger!” That was when I was a junior in high school.
I wanted to be in a band again, so I tried to get my gig back with the Legends. I lucked out when they didn’t let me rejoin. They said, “Oh, you left.” “Well … okay.” “You were sent away to school.…” “Yeah, I know.” Thank God they didn’t take me back, because soon after that, I went and saw Jerry Garcia play at the Tangent and that led to being in a band with him and that led to everything that followed. The rest of my life.
I played a gig with Jerry before that, but with him on bass. He didn’t even sing. He did it just to do it. That group was called the Zodiacs. A guy named Ron McKernan played harmonica. You know who that is? That’s Pigpen. He didn’t have that nickname quite yet. The guitarist’s name was Troy Weidenheimer; he was a hotshot player from Palo Alto and it was his band. Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn’t matter. I just went for it.
The night that I saw Garcia at the Tangent, he played banjo with a jug band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. I had forgotten that he bought my dad’s banjo. He might’ve even been playing it that night.
It was an amazing night. He had the whole place totally under his spell. I sat right in front of him, spellbound. Right then, I became the first Deadhead because I said, “I’m going to follow this guy forever.” I really did say that to myself, and I’d never said that about anything or anybody before. About two weeks later, he called me and said, “Hey, you want to play in a band?” “Yeah, sure.” Suddenly I had a band again. We called ourselves the Warlocks, then we changed our name to the Grateful Dead.
2
Everything was about to happen. I was about to start eating a lot of acid. So were my bandmates. We were about to transform from a g
arage band—or, technically, a music store blues band—to the sound-track band of the psychedelic revolution. The long strange trip was about to kick in.
The summer before my senior year in high school, I started dating a girl named Brenda and we had the kind of romance that really blossoms in the schoolyard; we loved making out at the train station and fogging the windows up in the car. The very first time we made love, I got her pregnant. I remember it. It was in a blue-light cheap motel. I even remember the street it was on: El Camino Real. We’d been wanting to do it for days and days. You know how teenagers are always swinging for the big home run. When you’re seventeen or eighteen, you’re at the top of your game. You can’t be held back. And contraceptives were about as foreign to us as social security, so that was that.
Brenda had red hair and freckles. She was cool, she was beautiful, and she was my first real girlfriend. I tested the waters with various girls before Brenda, but even at that age, I was a relationship guy. I liked to stick to one at a time. And it worked. For a while, anyway.
When I got Brenda pregnant, there was never any talk of an abortion. That wasn’t really common back then, so it never even crossed my mind. And, besides, she was going to have the baby anyway. So she gave birth to Stacy, my daughter. Our daughter. Stacy was born on July 3, 1964. I wanted to be an upstanding guy because my dad raised me that way. So, even at that young age, I thought I should get married and have the kid and have a job and have an apartment and play drums in a band, and still go to high school. Forget it. It doesn’t work. Something had to give. And it wasn’t going to be my band.
I was too young to have a daughter, I was still just a son myself. But once the baby arrived, I had to be a man. Or at least try. It wasn’t a shotgun wedding, but I didn’t exactly propose to Brenda. I simply took her to Reno and married her there. I was eighteen, but you had to be twenty-one to get married, so I faked that I was of age. That’s also how I got out of the marriage. A few years later, I had it annulled. My dad was an attorney by then and said, “You weren’t twenty-one.” It was never a divorce because it was never a real marriage.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 3
