There was another incident involving guns and Bobby at Olompali. Pigpen and I got our hands on a .22 and we were hungry for dinner, so we decided to shoot a deer that we saw in the driveway. I took the shot and thought I missed. The deer ran off. It turns out, the bullet went right through the deer’s head and landed about three feet from Weir, who was sitting up on a hill on the other side. Later on, when he told us how close he was to the bullet, he said, “Also, there’s a dead deer up there somewhere with a hole in its head.” By the time we found this out, a few days had gone by and it was too late to eat the meat. We messed up everything with that one.
Neal Cassady came to those parties at Olompali and stayed overnight sometimes. He was in the bedroom that was over the garage. The band was in the main house. I walked in on him fucking this chick, a Prankster I think, named Anne Murphy. Cassady was famous for his ability to hold seven conversations at once while doing a dozen other things and, like a master juggler, never drop a ball. He also was known for fucking a lot of women. But when I walked in on him and Anne, he said, “Bill, you’ve got to get out of here. Now is not the time.” Just like that. Ended the conversation. He didn’t get mad that I interrupted him and his girl and he didn’t miss a beat fucking her, either. It was simply, like, “Hi, Bill. Not now. Get out of here.”
That Cassady story reminds me of a contrasting one involving Bear, which I’m going to tell you now, even though it took place some time later.
We were playing with the Allman Brothers and the Hampton Grease Band (led by my friend Col. Bruce Hampton) in Atlanta on May 10, 1970. In those days, and probably still in many cities across America, the local populaces were just straight as hell. If you weren’t married, you couldn’t be with a girl in your room. All these fucking rules. And the authorities always knew what hotel the bands were staying in. Especially back then. So Phil and I were hanging out with Bear and his girlfriend in their room. Phil and I were smoking a joint while sitting on one of the beds, while Bear was over there fucking his girlfriend on the other one, making all these weird sounds. When he fucked, he always made these really weird, strange sounds. Phil and I were yukking it up, “Oh, Bear, ha ha!” And the poor chick, you can imagine, “Oh God, what did I get myself into? What’s this guy doing?” Bear wasn’t a really big, muscle-bound guy, but he was completely addicted to sex. He wasn’t afraid to admit it, either. He was balling the hell out of his lady, and there was a knock at the door—bam, bam, bam. It was the cops. The local cops. They were going to come in, one way or the other, so Bear got up like a flash of fucking lightning, opened the window, and tossed his pot stash, so he wouldn’t get busted. We tossed our joint, too, and tried to air out the room. To buy us time, I told the cops, “You’re going to get in over my dead body,” or something. They proceeded to knock the door in. This was at a hotel, so maybe they had a key. I was still sitting with Phil on the one bed, and Bear was still fucking the chick in the other. He didn’t stop. He didn’t miss a beat. He got right back on her after he threw the weed out the window. He was fucking her like crazy and the cops came with their guns drawn right at our heads, right at me and Phil. But they slowly lowered them as they became aware of what was going on in the other bed.
Bear and this chick were into this weird thing, and pretty soon the guns were held at rest, pointing at the ground, and the cops asked us, “Hey, can you guys get them to stop?” It was too uncomfortable for them.
I said, “I can’t do that! He’s our soundman. If I get him to stop, we’ll have terrible sound tomorrow night.” Finally, Bear succumbed to the cops and stopped doing it, and the cops just made us go to our own rooms. They were weirded out. We were just glad to be out of there. And that was Owsley “Bear” Stanley for you.
Well, anyway, moving on: We had to move out of Olompali after just six weeks. Not by choice. But we lucked out and relocated to a space not too far away that was equally unique—an abandoned Girl Scout camp in Lagunitas, a small town on the west side of the county. As you approached the town, you’d take a right at a road just before the main intersection, where the bar is, and it was right up there. Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother also lived in West Marin, and we’d all hang out.
Our encampment in Lagunitas was like this: There was a garage out in the front and little cabins scattered throughout the property. A creek bed ran off to the left, throughout, and it was nestled under redwoods. There was a cafeteria with a commercial kitchen, like a mess hall, and we set up all our gear in the front of that room. That became our practice space. We also had all of our communal dinners there. We were all living together then.
Camp Lagunitas was really cool; we loved living there. We could rehearse as much as we wanted and we never got hassled by the police. At first. Eventually there were noise complaints or something, but it was a great run. We took acid there as regularly as we could. And we played in the river a lot. It was a cold river, so we only really got in during the afternoons.
This was also neat, and something I always remember: We didn’t drink at Camp Lagunitas. Pigpen was the only one that drank. Nobody else drank at all. Nothing. No beer—nothing. We just smoked pot and ate acid.
I think Pigpen got dosed once or twice—either against his will or accidentally—although I don’t remember the details. He was probably unhappy about it. I felt lonesome for him, because the band had found something that had become nearly as important to us as music. It changed us as people and as musicians and as a band—and Pigpen, by his own choice, was left out of all of that. I never judged him for it, and Pig never judged us in return. But it did make me sad that it was like that.
Pigpen was a very soulful guy. He loved to romance chicks and he loved to drink Southern Comfort. He and Janis were great friends, then lovers, and they’d sit up late at night, playing guitar, wooing each other. He was just a real salt-of-the-earth guy. He dressed sort of like a biker, but he wasn’t one. He liked bikes, but he didn’t really have a Harley or anything like that. Pigpen was pseudo-tough. He dressed tough and he acted tough—but on the inside, he was the sweetest guy anybody had ever met. We used to laugh about it, because people thought he was kind of this badass, but he wasn’t. He was like a puppy, with an outer shell of motorcycle insignia, which didn’t really say anything on it.
We met a guy named Gene Estribou, who had a studio on Buena Vista West in San Francisco, just a couple blocks up from the famous intersection of Haight and Ashbury. Phil once lived right around there, too. For a while, we’d drive down to the city from Lagunitas every day to record at Gene’s studio. We recorded songs that a lot of people have probably never even heard of. A Pigpen tune called “Tastebud” and a Lesh number, “Cardboard Cowboy.” I don’t even remember how they go. We also recorded “Don’t Ease Me In” and “Stealin’” at those sessions and ended up releasing those two tracks as a forty-five single that summer. We only pressed maybe 100 copies, give or take, and sold them exclusively at shops on Haight Street. Talk about a rare artifact; one of those would be quite a find.
I would drive the band down to Estribou’s every day in my station wagon. With the roads in West Marin—and city traffic—it took us nearly an hour, each way. Man, we put a lot of miles on that thing and it showed. There was a leak in the radiator and we didn’t have the money to fix it. Every morning, I fed the baby oatmeal, and then I’d go and pour raw oatmeal directly in the radiator and added water. When oatmeal heats up, it expands and that fixed the leak. It worked. It got us to where we needed to go—and back. Just in time for another oatmeal fix. That station wagon ended up dying in Haight-Ashbury a few months later, when we all moved into the city. It got up to where Phil and I lived, on Belvedere Street, and that was it. Rust in peace. To this day, I can see it sitting there, just watching it rust away. The city finally came and towed it.
We started getting regular gigs, mostly in San Francisco on the weekends, thanks in large part to our new management team of Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully. Rifkin lived with us at Camp Lagunitas, in
the unenclosed arts and crafts space, but the Grateful Dead now had an official management office at a boarding house, a couple blocks up from Haight Street, on Ashbury. The band managers also managed the boarding house. The house would become famous. So would the band.
That summer, 1966, we were able to get our own practice space—away from where we lived—for the first time. It was at a heliport just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, in Sausalito. There was an open space that wasn’t being used, an open room, and we just took it and used it. It had a bathroom and that’s all we needed. So it became our practice hall. Being in Sausalito, it overlooked San Francisco and, of course, the bay between. Otis Redding wrote “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” on a houseboat just a couple of miles from there, during the same period. Otis once hit on Phil’s girl, Florence—outright at a gig—but she said she just couldn’t do it. Funny enough, she did it with me, and I didn’t even hit on her.
Florence was a real free spirit and a photographer. As we’ll get to in just a few more pages, Phil, Florence, and I all lived in a house in San Francisco’s Diamond Heights district for a while. It was a split-level house on the hillside and I lived on the bottom. One afternoon or something, Florence came downstairs and asked if we could fuck. “It’s okay,” she said. She fucked my eyes out and Phil wasn’t mad or anything. It was all okay. In fact, we all hung out afterward. That sort of thing didn’t happen as much as you might think, really, but that one happened and it was kind of surprising. It’s not the standards by which most of us live these days, and I think it had more to do with stuff between them—that they were going through—than anything to actually do with me. But I worked my way through it.
Anyway, our stay at Lagunitas felt like a summer camp, especially since that’s what the property was literally built for. And, of course, it was summertime. We each had our own spaces. I was in a cabin with Brenda and Stacy. Other people lived in other cabins, or in the main house, or in the bunkhouse, or in other buildings originally built for a kid’s camp. When we moved from Lagunitas, we left Marin County and went to San Francisco. I think one reason for that was that we couldn’t find a house big enough to fit everybody, with me having a wife and daughter and all that. But that was about to end real soon.
One of the most difficult acid trips I ever had was at Lagunitas. It was nighttime and Brenda was having the hardest time. “This isn’t working. I’m not happy.” All that kind of crap. And here I was, high on acid, having the best time, playing music with the band in the cafeteria. I knew then that Brenda was right. It wasn’t working. It had been a long time since she had been happy and, besides, living with the Grateful Dead was no way to raise a baby. Especially during that period. Our days together were coming to an end.
In late September 1966, when the band moved down to San Francisco, I made it official. Around the time that I broke up with Brenda, the band broke up with Bear. It was a mutual split. We were tired of his power plays and long delays, and he was tired of being broke, since he gave up making acid to work for the Dead. So he went back to just making acid. That worked for us. And it wouldn’t be the last we saw of our brother.
Like the Pink House and Olompali, Lagunitas was really far-out. But in 1995, Jerry died at a facility that’s a stone’s throw from our old camp, and when I think of Lagunitas, I can’t help but think of that.
4
Much has been made about the Grateful Dead house at 710 Ashbury Street in San Francisco but we’re not really going to make much of it here. For one thing, I only really lived there for but a moment. A couple of weeks, at most. We can talk about it, but it didn’t have the same magnitude, in my mind, as Olompali or Lagunitas or even the Pink House.
Our place on Ashbury Street was the same boarding house where Scully and Rifkin first set up the band’s office, while managing both the band and the house. It was no coincidence that when we needed to leave Camp Lagunitas for the real world, rooms there mysteriously began to open up until we took over the entire building. “We knew the management.” And that’s how 710 Ashbury became the Grateful Dead house.
There was another Victorian across the street, at 715 Ashbury that, while not nearly as famous, is still a part of the story. Sue Swanson and Ron Rakow, both eventual Grateful Dead employees, lived there. So did Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, the famous psychedelic poster artists who did several of our album covers and whose art remains a big part of our identity today—most notably the “Skull and Roses” image. Also of note: 715 became somewhat of a nest for Hells Angels. So you had the Grateful Dead on the one side of that street, and the Hells Angels on the other. Kinda a nice juxtaposition—and the names play off each other, too.
Like many San Franciscan streets, Ashbury is on a hill. I heard that Ken Kesey was driving down it one day and his brakes gave out and he had to make a quick decision: he could crash into the Grateful Dead house, or he could crash into the Hells Angels house. He chose the Hells Angels. Wise choice from our perspective but perhaps questionable from any other.
The Grateful Dead posed for band pictures on the front stoop of the 710 house and one of those images is now rather iconic. A thin, beardless Jerry is grinning from the doorway, Pigpen’s holding a rifle with a real outlaw aura to him, Bobby—by contrast—is playing the innocent; Scully and Rifkin are on the stoop, smiling; Phil is looking at me; and I’ve got my arm raised, finger pointed upward, as if in some kind of peaceful warrior battle cry. Photographed by Baron Wolman for Rolling Stone, over the decades it has become one of the band’s most enduring images. Maybe that’s why so many people, both Deadheads and otherwise, get their picture taken in front of that front gate whenever they visit San Francisco.
It helps that the house was just a few short blocks up from the intersection of Haight-Ashbury. When we weren’t hanging out at the house, we’d walk down Ashbury, hang a left on Haight, and hang right there with the throngs of like-minded people gathered outside, on the street. That stretch became hippie central, a phenomenon, a time and place that has since made it into the history books. We really became entrenched in that scene, if not synonymous with it. Wandering around Haight, you’d end up bumping into everyone you wanted to find and—as the song goes—strangers would stop strangers, just to shake their hand. It was also a brisk walk to Golden Gate Park and its eastward extension, the Panhandle. Both of these public spaces would be “instrumental,” so to speak, during our time there.
For the most part, during the band’s tenure at 710 Ashbury, it wasn’t where I spent the night, but it is where I spent most of my time. There’s that story of Weir getting in trouble with the police for throwing water balloons off of the roof—that’s been written about in every book (including this one, now). Stuff like that is probably the real reason that house became so famous. As at all of our group residences, outrageous shit happened at least once every time the hour hand circled back around. Sometimes, the minute hand, too. To this day, tourist buses still go down Ashbury Street to view the famous “Grateful Dead house”—minus the water balloons—and it’s a permanent part of San Francisco’s “map of the stars.” It’s become that kind of thing.
But living there wasn’t exactly glamorous. There were too many people for too small a space, no privacy, and the whole building just became this electric zoo with an open-door policy for just about anyone. Phil and Florence wanted out of there. I wanted the same thing. And, back then, I also just wanted to follow Phil, as a person, in the same way that I wanted to follow Jerry, as a musician. Phil was like an older brother to me in those days. That’s an important point to remember.
The two of us relocated to a house in a neighborhood called Diamond Heights, about two miles uphill from Haight-Ashbury. Phil brought Florence with him, and I still had Brenda and our daughter with me, at that time. So Diamond Heights had something of a family vibe going for it. When we wanted to run away and join the circus, which was on a daily basis, we’d head on down to 710 and take it from there.
I wasn’t at Diamond Heights
but for a minute before I broke up with Brenda and had our unlawful marriage lawfully annulled. I basically just woke up one day and told her that she got her wish. It was over. Time for her to leave.
The earth was spinning on its axis at a dizzying pace, and it’s not that the world revolved around me, it’s just that I was in orbit too, moving from place to place, keeping up with changes within me, changes within my country … and changes with my love life. It seemed like no time really passed between saying good-bye to Brenda and saying hello to a girl named Susila Ziegler.
I met Susila at 710 Ashbury although she lived at her parents’ house in Mill Valley, which is an affluent town directly across the Golden Gate Bridge, just minutes north of the city. We started hanging out, then we started going out, then we became a couple.
Susila was a very beautiful young woman, an artist, and in fact, she designed one of the first Grateful Dead T-shirts and began selling them at shows. That might not seem like a big deal now, but Susila was actually one of the first people to ever do this for any rock band. Remember: the concert business was just starting back then, just figuring itself out, and San Francisco led the way. Silk-screened T-shirts were fairly new, in and of themselves. Susila made and sold Grateful Dead shirts and then she made shirts for the Allman Brothers and suddenly T-shirt sales—and, later, other merchandise items—at live concerts became a key component of every band’s income. Eventually, the Grateful Dead’s merchandise arm would grow into a business unto itself, with everything from pint glasses to dog collars sporting the band’s name, logo, or artwork. Anyway, Susila did well with that and sometimes I would even carry boxes of her T-shirts to the shows to make sure they got there. We were partners; we had a good time together.
I remember my first date with Susila. We drove from San Francisco up to Healdsburg, a charming little wine town in Sonoma, one county north of Marin. Northern California. She had a friend who had a farm up there. We got into a one-man sleeping bag and made love that first night and I knew that we were probably going to see each other a lot after that. It was freezing, so we had to stay really close to stay warm, and that was kind of romantic. Very romantic, in fact. Driving up to Northern California seemed like a big deal to me at the time. It was a great adventure and the start of a great romance and I ended up marrying Susila and having my son, Justin, with her. Justin was born on June 10, 1969, just in time to attend Woodstock. But we’re still in 1966, having high times on Haight Street.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 7
