Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

by Bill Kreutzmann

  When our helicopter landed, the drummer for Santana, Michael Shrieve, came up to us—I think he and some of his bandmates were trying to hop on the next copter out of Dodge. He looked a bit roughed up. “What’s happening? You okay?” “No, man, things aren’t right. The bikers are knocking people out.” So, right then, we were like what the fuck did we just fly into? It felt like we landed in the middle of some kind of turf war. And, in a way, we did.

  Shrieve told us that when the Jefferson Airplane took the stage, their frontman, Marty Balin, jumped into the audience to stop some of the bikers from beating a fan with pool cues. In return, Marty got punched out. They punched him out a second time, after he came to, for good measure.

  Even backstage, the bikers had free rein to bully at will. There was nothing stopping them. No police. No security. The bikers were the security but, of course, they weren’t on the payroll and they answered to nobody. It showed us all that even freedom had an ugly side. It’s true that some of the Hells Angels were our friends and they remained our allies back there. But others, whom we had never seen before, were roughing people up just because they could. One of these unruly newcomers even threatened Phil at one point, seemingly for no real reason. The threat was serious. Phil was forced to retreat to the back of the pickup truck where we were all waiting for our turn to play. We felt like captives. And definitely not safe. When Crosby, Stills & Nash had the stage, we watched as Stephen Stills finished his set while bleeding, because he had been attacked.

  The day’s lineup was supposed to be: Santana, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Grateful Dead, and the Rolling Stones. But we scratched ourselves off that list. I don’t remember any real discussion about it. There was no way we were playing. No way we were going out there on that stage. Not a chance in hell we were playing under these hostile conditions. It was a simple survival instinct.

  The Rolling Stones should’ve gone on at that point, but they waited several more hours until it got dark. Their true motivations came to light: they were filming the concert to use as the climax of their tour documentary. So it wasn’t free after all—they planned to profit from it. Maybe that had something to do with the dark shadow over the event: In our own experience, free concerts only worked when they had no other agenda. We could play or not play at will—there was nothing at stake either way.

  We watched the Rolling Stones perform that night and, to their credit, they gave it their all. I couldn’t give it my full attention because I was also watching out for my hide and trying to monitor the chaos. Right in front of the stage, during “Under My Thumb,” another scuffle broke out. This one ended in murder. Someone in the audience, Meredith Hunter, pulled out a gun and he was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel. The courts later ruled that the biker was acting in self-defense. Meanwhile, the Stones kept playing, later claiming that they weren’t fully aware of what just happened. But they did play as if their own lives depended on it. Jagger always held himself as the devil and the band’s newest album was entitled Let It Bleed—all of that stuff kind of factored into the vibe, I’m afraid. It got ugly.

  We took a helicopter back to San Francisco, where we were scheduled to play at the Fillmore West for the third consecutive night. I called it off. After seeing all that shit, after a guy got murdered during a concert we were connected with, after all the day’s horror, I didn’t feel like going out and playing music. It just didn’t seem right to me. At dinner, I said, “I’m not doing the gig.” The band backed me up on it. Bill Graham was furious about that, but that’s just how he was. I think everybody understood.

  We may not have been a political band but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t have certain principles that we held sacred. We backed out of Altamont mostly out of concern for our own safety, sure. But the decision was also a statement about our views on violence—and our reaction to it. The era of peace and love had come to a close. And our refusal to play even later that night, miles away from the speedway, was our moment of silence.

  8

  In the wake of Altamont, something else happened to the band that perpetuated this sudden darkness. Eventually the storm would pass, of course, but not before we got soaked. In short, we got ripped off by one of our managers. But that manager happened to be the father of a band member.

  Sometime in 1969, when we realized the colossal debt we got ourselves into with the decidedly indulgent making of Aoxomoxoa, we realized that we needed to get a handle on our finances. We were a group of altruistic troubadours, a traveling psychedelic circus. We had gotten used to living hand to mouth and, now that we had reached a certain level, we were able to cover our costs of living. Great. We didn’t need anything else. But that kind of thinking had led us into a massive debt with our record label and no real money in our individual bank accounts. We were at a point where we at least wanted to be able to afford houses. Cars. The occasional vacation. The stuff people with real jobs all get to enjoy. Our affairs were a picture of chaos, and we needed someone who could help us do a little spring cleaning. Someone who could lock down the front office while we played ball out back, so to speak.

  Mickey suggested that we hire his father, Lenny Hart, to help us get on track. Jerry and I were skeptical from the start and I don’t think I was ever fully convinced that it was a good idea. I kept my hands in my pockets and shuffled my feet as Mickey tried to sell us on it. Mickey’s pitch was that Lenny was a businessman and now he was also an evangelist—a self-ordained fundamentalist minister. He was a man of God … at least, in theory. Plus, he was connected to us by blood. Meaning, if nothing else, we could trust him. It’s amazing some of the lessons you learn in life.

  Lenny had this whole Southern Gospel rap that he’d throw on us. He didn’t try to convert us, but he did try to convince us that he was doing the Lord’s work by managing us and that he brought a sort of divine providence to our organization. Consequently, none of us—particularly Jerry or me—liked the guy very much. We couldn’t confide in him. He wasn’t one of us. I think his intention all along was to rip us off, and that’s exactly what he ended up doing.

  There had been a number of signs that we ignored because we were naïve and because we weren’t paying close enough attention and because we didn’t believe that one of our fathers would have the heart to steal from us. There was this one show that we played in San Jose that was kind of reminiscent of the show in Paris, years later, where I fired Jon McIntire because the promoter told him we didn’t turn a profit. This time, it was our manager with that sad refrain. The venue was completely packed and, afterward, Lenny told us that we didn’t make any money. That was hot air. We made money. He just kept it, that’s all.

  At one point, Pigpen had an organ repossessed—they came and took it right from the stage—because the payment wasn’t made on it. There were other omens like that, as well. Too many of them. And Ram Rod knew—he was the whistle-blower. When we couldn’t ignore our suspicions anymore, we decided to simply let Lenny go. But first we asked to see the books. And that was the end of Lenny Hart. He fled to Mexico. And our money went with him.

  Naturally, the band discussed what we should do about that, but there wasn’t a whole lot that we could do. After Altamont, we weren’t exactly going to hire bikers to go take justice in their own hands or anything. The idea was brought up, but we would never actually follow through with that. That just wasn’t our style. The other option meant having to go to the authorities and get the police involved and that wasn’t our style, either.

  We were a band of hippies, so we decided on taking the hippie high road to justice: let karma get him. And it worked. Eventually, Lenny Hart got caught by a detective—somewhere in San Diego, I think—and he ended up doing some time behind bars. Also, we recovered a fraction of the money he stole from us. But this was all still a few years down the line.

  In the meantime, Mickey took all of this the hardest. We were careful not to put any of the blame on him and we made it clear that he
was still our brother—but this was his father that we’re talking about. The rest of us had just been ripped off by our manager, but Mickey had just been ripped off by his own dad. How do you think that made him feel?

  By 1970, we were a successful band—we could headline theaters, ballrooms, and college gymnasiums all across the country. We were on a major label and had just played Woodstock. And yet, Lenny left us hobbled. Broke. Funny things happen from hard situations: you learn to survive. I had a family to feed at home and I wasn’t about to go back to selling wigs or giving drum lessons … so I started poaching deer for the dinner table.

  When the band wasn’t touring or rehearsing or recording, I would sometimes go out and do a little bit of pickup work for a cowboy named Tony Veranda who had a private cattle ranch out in Point Reyes—still in Marin County, but on the Pacific Coast. His 1,000-acre slice was called Hand Mountain and there were a ton of deer on the property. Tony was a true cowboy from Arizona and knew that I was hard up at the moment, so he said, “If you want, I’ll show you how to hunt deer.” He taught me how to shoot them and how to clean them, which can be pretty tricky—you have to be careful not to cut the scent glands and all this stuff. It was poaching but it was on my friend’s land so I didn’t get in trouble for it. The only reason I did it was because I was flat broke. I wasn’t hunting for sport. I was poaching for food.

  There was this one time when I shot a deer and the bullet went right through her neck and killed the baby deer that must’ve been standing right next to her, on the other side. They both dropped. Yes, that’s sad, but that also meant the Kreutzmanns wouldn’t need to worry about food for a while—I suddenly had a good stash of meat. I did all the nitty-gritty stuff that you have to do when you’re doing it yourself: I cut off the head, skinned the deer, wrapped it in sheets so flies couldn’t get in there and lay eggs, then hung it to dry for three or four days. When it was time, I took it all down and cut it up, but I’m not much of a butcher. I cut it up in approximate steaks, with a big accent on “approximate.” I took the back strap, which is one of the best parts of deer meat, and cut it into really long strips that could be rolled into a roast. Bear would’ve been proud.

  Susila put garlic inside the layers of the roast and tied it all up with string and we started cooking when Lesh drove up to the house unannounced. “Hey Phil, want to join us for dinner?” “Yeah, sure.” So we sat down with full plates of vegetables, potatoes and—for the entrée—the venison roast. As we’re eating, Phil goes, “This is the best beef I’ve ever eaten.” When we told him it was venison, he just about choked. He wasn’t down with that, even though he loved the way it tasted. If we hadn’t just been ripped off by our manager, then maybe we would’ve served filets mignons. We were making do.

  We lived the cowboy lifestyle out at Mickey’s ranch as well. Not by tending cattle or doing any sort of wrangling, per se—but we did ride horses. I think Mickey and I were probably more into horseback riding than the other guys, but the whole band learned to ride. We got into a situation where we had to. The previous year, somebody, Lenny, probably—thought it’d be a good idea for us to be a part of this western movie they were making down in Hollywood called Zacharia.

  I owned my own horses and riding them was a big part of my downtime during that whole period. But, in preparation for this movie, everyone in the band sharpened their horseback riding skills at Mickey’s. Including Jerry, who we’ll just say wasn’t a natural. He didn’t want anything to do with it, but we got him up there and riding. It was a fun group activity, even though the movie didn’t work for us. We backed out of it. In the end, they got John Coltrane’s drummer, Elvin Jones, instead. Joe Walsh appeared with his band James Gang; I think Country Joe & the Fish were also in it; and the actor Don Johnson had a starring role. I watched it once, years ago. So it goes.

  Anyway, since Mickey’s ranch was remote enough, we’d have shoot-outs there all the time. Not against each other. We’d bring all of our guns to this creek bed that ran through the ranch and we’d set up old television sets and stuff to shoot at. I remember we had a poster of a certain actor named Ronald Reagan, who at that point was our governor in California, and we’d unload all of our guns just shooting at it. It was a picture of him dressed up in his cowboy costume and we shot the shit out of it. There were at least 200 holes in it. I remember we all got paranoid about it afterward and were like, “We’ve got to get rid of that. If anybody else sees it, they’ll think we’re terrorists.” This was way before terrorism was really much of a threat, as such. This was also more than a decade before Reagan became president and launched the “War on Drugs.”

  We used to blow the shit out of everything down there and just go completely crazy, without anyone around to tell us otherwise. It’s really amazing that nobody got shot or hurt and that there were no accidents or anything. We dodged the bullet on that one. Literally.

  Two things happened, during one particular afternoon, that still stand out. First, I walked out there after target practice and there was brass all over the ground. Empty shells. I looked at where we had been shooting and this tree, probably less than a foot in diameter, suddenly fell to the ground. It had been hit with so many bullets that the wind was able to finish it off. It toppled over. My friend and GD crew member, Sonny Heard, came along and, when I told him what just happened, he said, “That’s nothing. Check this out.”

  He’d gotten his hands on something called a four-sticker, an explosive package that construction workers use. It’s the equivalent of four sticks of dynamite and he assembled the detonator cap and wrapped it up with a three-minute fuse and then stuck it in a hole that he dug near the creek bed. He buried it with rocks, thereby essentially making the world’s biggest grenade. He lit the fucker and walked away with his back to it. I suddenly remembered some of those gunpowder lessons in my backyard with my dad and so I had a bad feeling about this. I found a big fat oak tree and hid behind it and it turned out to be a good thing, too, because sure enough, the rocks flew as far as 200 yards, with some of them landing on the metal roof of Mickey’s main house where our friend and den mother, Eileen Law, was cooking all of us dinner. She came out screaming, “What the fuck have you guys done?” The rocks completely pounded the whole area. They came thundering down on the roofs in a way that made hailstorms seem like whispers by comparison. Sonny just stood there with his back to the explosion. He assessed the damage and said, “Okay. Cool.” He was a lucky son of a gun that time, although he’s no longer with us, darn it. Anyway, that was a great ranch and we had a lot of adventures there.

  The greatest adventure of all started at that ranch and it took me east to Nevada and it transformed me from a cowboy into an Indian. At least, in spirit. It was under the charge of an actual Native American—a great one, at that—named Rolling Thunder.

  Mickey’s thirty-two-acre ranch continued the communal vibe that we had at most of the Grateful Dead houses over the years—it was a safe-house for transients, with an open-door policy, where friends could come and go. Various Hells Angels lived at Mickey’s ranch at various points, as did Rock Scully, members of the so-called “Pleasure Crew,” (friends of ours who had all-access, but not officially employed—at least, not by us), and, for a little while one summer, me and Susila. (Justin was at his grandparents.)

  We moved into an old hay barn on the property and, even though it was summertime, summer nights in Northern California can still get quite cold. The barn was made out of redwood and the walls had more holes in them than your average conspiracy theory. This was all in a tree-lined area where there were scrub oak trees, and we went out and got wood and anything else that we could to patch it up and make it more habitable. It had a dirt floor and we literally put blankets right up against the walls for insulation and we were just happy as hell. We were out there in this country setting and it was quite beautiful. There were no creature comforts whatsoever. I don’t think we had a bathroom. We had to go into the main house for that, or to shower. We didn’t s
tay there for very long.

  But I remember that while we were there, Phil would come over with an incredibly powerful rifle that he would test-fire. It was so damn loud, he had to put on ear protectors. He started calling it the Ray Gun because we could shoot it over the road, 500, 600 yards, and as soon as you pulled the trigger, you’d see the dust blow where the bullet hit. It was that fast. Phil would sometimes put up targets not far from our little barn, and that scared the hell out of us so we’d flee to the other side of the property. Survival instincts kicked in.

  But it was on this ranch, Mickey’s, where I met Rolling Thunder. He was a Shoshone Indian medicine man who lived in Carlin, Nevada. For a reference point, Elko is the bigger city, just past it—we’re talking about four hours east of Reno, on Highway 80. Rolling Thunder was the real deal. He was an authentic medicine man; very spiritual and very rooted in his people’s traditions and rituals. If you were going to have a cigarette, you had to offer him one first. He didn’t drink—he hated alcohol. He didn’t smoke marijuana. He thought we were a little too loose with the LSD and that we should be a little more reverent with it. Of course, we didn’t listen to that talk too much, except to nod our heads, respectfully. But when he needed a ride from Mickey’s ranch back to his home in Carlin, Susila, and I thought, “Shit! Let’s go live with a Native American for a while and see what that’s about.”