Loading summary
Transcript182 lines
- [00:00]
A
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly.
- [00:30]
B
Foreign.
- [00:35]
A
The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official Podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Greetings friends. Welcome back to the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. We've got a special bonus episode for you today and it's the second in our ongoing Bear Drop series centered around the mythical Owsley Stanley. We are in the middle of season four and you can get new episodes of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast right here every other week. Visit us at our website dead.netdeadcast and check out the extra materials we have for you to explore for this episode. And also@dead.net deadcast are all of our past episodes including the complete seasons 1, 2 and 3 and you can link from there to any and all of the podcasting platforms available so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help us by subscribing, hitting that like button and leaving a review. Thank you very much. Listen to the River St. Louis 717273 is the new Grateful Dead Live archival release and it's out and available now. This set includes seven previously unreleased concerts from St. Louis recorded on December 9th and 10th 71 at the Fox Theater, October 17th, 18th and 19th, 1972 at the Fox Theater and October 29th and 30th, 1973 at the Keel Auditorium. Production of the 20 CD set is limited to 13,000 individually numbered copies and is also available in its entirety as a digital Download exclusively@dead.net in Apple, Lossless and FLAC 19224 dead.net has also released Light Into Ashes Fox Theater, St. Louis 101872 as a double LP on 180 gram custom vinyl. It's limited to 7200 copies and the set focuses on an exceptional hour plus jam plucked from the Grateful Dead's October 18, 1972 show at the Fox. The breakout show from this set is Fox Theater, St. Louis, MO 121071 and is available as a 3 CD set and a limited edition 5LP set on 180 gram vinyl. All of these configurations of Listen to the River St. Louis 717273 are available now. Get more infoedead.net well, today's episode is the second of our Bear Drops bonus episodes, and today's installment focuses on Owsley's time with the Dead in early 1966 down in Los Angeles. And thanks to the kind help of our friend David Ganz, we have a bunch of great archival Owsley interview audio to help tell the story. Besides David and Bear, our other esteemed guests include Tim Scully, Don Douglas, Rosie McGee, Denise Kaufman, Ken Babs, Starfinder, Stanley and Hawk. Time to be heading into Los Angeles with our own tour guide, Jesse Jarno.
- [04:13]
C
On December 10, 1965, the band formerly known as the Warlocks played for the first time as the Grateful Dead at the San Jose Acid Test. A month later, on January 8th, the Merry Pranksters and the Dead took San Francisco at the Fillmore Acid Test. It was glorious.
- [04:30]
D
Glittering, glowing, ever flowing neon. All the money that we're owing to.
- [04:37]
C
The electrical company until the cops showed up and then somehow it was still glorious.
- [04:42]
B
Everybody out. The dance is over At a clatter Hill. This is incredible. A chief security agent has suddenly taken over and informed everybody else to dance his own way at a clatter house.
- [04:56]
C
It was also the first live recording of the Grateful De. We went through it in detail in our episode earlier this year called Hug the Heat or the Story of the First Dead Tape. That night at the Fillmore Auditorium, somewhere in the swirl, the Grateful Dead met one of their newest fans. He'd seen them for the first time the month before at the Muir Beach Acid Test and had reacted strongly. His name was Owsley Stanley and he'd made nearly all of the LSD available in the underground, and by all accounts, the best.
- [05:25]
D
I thought, these guys are fantastic.
- [05:28]
C
David Ganz continues to be the absolute undisputed Dead cast savior. In 1991, he interviewed Owsley Stanley Bear, an incredibly riveting discussion featured in David's book Conversations with the Dead, a cornerstone of any Grateful Dead library. Signed copies of the revised edition are available through David's web store@perfectible.net. we've posted a link at dead.net deadcast it's one of the only extended interviews with Owsley, and we couldn't be more thankful to David for sharing the original audio.
- [05:59]
D
But it was scary. The music was scary, pushed me to the edge, and I thought the sound of Garcia's guitar was like the claws of a tiger. They were like, it was, like, dangerously scary. Very, very to the point they can't talk about this stuff. I thought to myself, one of these days, these guys are going to be greater than the Beatles someday. I just. And it was as though. It wasn't as though. I just thought that. It was almost like a revelation, like, looking into the future, I just instinctively knew that there was something like that. Yeah, there was. Like, not even that I actually thought about it in those terms, but I did think, these guys are going to be greater than the Beatles. Yeah, it made it that. That was this. That was the way the thought. That was the way I recognized the thought I was having about it. I mean, that was the terms in which I sub vocalized that to myself. The next time I saw him was at Thermore Acid Test. And I met Phil, and I walked over to him and I said, I'd like to work for you guys. Because I decided that they. That this was the most amazing thing I'd ever run into. He says, oh. He says, we don't have a. We don't have a manager. I said, I want to be a manager. So we don't have a sound man. I said, well, I don't know anything about that either, but I guess I could probably learn. Sounds like more fun. And that's how that happened.
- [07:48]
C
What happened next is the subject of this bear drop. A few weeks later, Owsley and the Dead move to Los Angeles.
- [07:59]
B
My home in Norfolk, Virginia, California on my mind Saddle a greyhound Golden Adirondack bypass route Till we never wasn't at late 90 miles out of Atlanta by so now Rolling out of your.
- [08:23]
C
That was the Grateful Dead doing Chuck Berry's the Promised Land with, as you may have noticed, Jerry Garcia singing lead vocals instead of Bob Weir, who sang it with the Dead for many years. It was still a pretty new song, too, barely a year old, when Owsley Stanley recorded that version, sometime In February or March 1966, the Grateful Dead were an extremely new band. They'd gone electric and played their first gigs as the Warlock seven months earlier. Six months earlier, Phil Lesh had joined as bassist, and they'd gigged in bars up and down the San Francisco peninsula. In the late fall of 1965, they connected with the Merry Pranksters and changed their name to the Grateful Dead. The acid tests were a slingshot for the Dead, and the first stop was la. Why la? Well, why not? The short answer won't sound real, but here goes. Ken Kesey faked his death and fled to Mexico, and the Pranksters decided to find some fresh surroundings. Another extremely important person had come into the Dead family at the Fillmore Acid Test, Florence Nathan. And a few years later she changed her name to Rosie McGee. She was Phil Lesh's new partner and would work in tons of jobs for the Dead over the years, from translator to photographer, from secretary to Ty Dyer. We talked to Rosie about her mini roles on our side B episode during our Skull and Roses season. She's got a great book called Dancing with the dead available from rosiemcgee.com and is working on a massive new photo anthology Kickstarting now at bit ly RosiesKickstarterPreview. We've posted links@Dead.net Deadcast Please welcome back to the Deadcast Rosie McGee.
- [10:00]
E
When they were talking about going to LA, it was essentially to follow the Pranksters because they had been doing the acid tests up in the Bay Area where the Dead were the house band. The Prankster said, hey, let's go to LA and do some, do some down there. And that was a perfect entry point for Owsley to say, hey, you want to go? I will bankroll you. I mean, otherwise they might never have gone to la. I don't know. He just said, I, you know, I'll take care of it. He rented the house and he paid for everything and controlled everything.
- [10:42]
C
There were surely many compelling reasons to go to LA in the Bay Area. They were still having trouble finding an audience.
- [10:52]
B
One more thing I want to tell you right now. I'm gonna wait until the stars come out. Shut us off again well, that's what happens.
- [11:04]
D
The story of our lives.
- [11:05]
B
You play somewhere and somebody turns you off.
- [11:08]
C
Shut us off again While the notion of the Merry Pranksters making it in showbiz was a little ridiculous, la in early 1966 was actually a pretty smart place for both a psychedelic multimedia troupe and a rock band. Ahead the week they went down the probably the last days of January or first few days of February 1966, the rascals were at the Whiskey a Go Go on the fabulous Sunset Strip. At the Trip, Wilson Pickett was heading out and Sam the Sham and the Farrows were coming in. But the other act on the bill, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, were being held. Over three fifths of the group, including lead guitarist Mike Bloomfield, had just backed Bob Dylan for much of Highway 61 revisited in the summer of 1965, and they'd put out their influential self titled debut later in the year, including Screamin and Just for a little bit more Context, the same week. The Dead Landed in LA At Western Recorders in Hollywood, Brian Wilson was working on the rich instrumental tracks for his new opus in progress, Pet Sounds, which would be recorded and completed in almost exactly the same two month window in which the Dead were in town. When the Dead Landed, Brian and the Wrecking Crew had just gotten to work on Caroline Noe. 2 bars intro, take 10, 2, 1, 3. What followed over the next two months would be a foundational adventure for the ungrateful Dead. An origin story if you want to look at it that way. Before we get back to Owsley and the Dead, we're going to pause for a moment and appreciate David Ganz's incredible interview recording, which is as Owsley as they come. Here's David Ganz of the Grateful Dead Hour and Tales from the Golden I.
- [13:27]
F
Honestly don't remember exactly how I persuaded Bear to sit for an interview with me. We'd gotten to know each other over the years. I had met him up at Phil's house a few times. I was there one time in the early 80s when Bear came up with his climate maps and everything and made this big long presentation to me and Phil and a few other people about how there was going to be this thermal catastrophe over the Northern hemisphere and the only habitable place on earth in the future was going to be in Australia where he happened to have some property. Anyway, Bear was around and I was around and we hung out together at various times and I somehow persuaded him to do an interview. I think it might have been that when I was offered the opportunity to do the book Conversations with the Dead, I made an extra push to get something cool that nobody else had ever had. And that was an interview with Bear. So Bear came to my loft studio in Oakland one evening in January of 1991 with his wife Sheila in hand, and he insisted on setting up a boundary layer microphone, AKA pressure zone microphone, and recording the interview that way. And that involved taking a condenser microphone and pointing the business end of it at a piece of glass. And the idea was that the audio that was happening in the room would be sent into the microphone by being reflected off the piece of glass or something. I'm not entirely sure I understand the principle of the PZM's, but Behr insisted that we do a PZM and I insisted that we do a conventional microphone to make sure that I got the interview. So we recorded both on a stereo DAT and we wound up with his PZM and my conventional recording and both are perfectly audible sound just fine. After the Interview. It was probably three or four in the morning, I think, and Bear and Sheila and I went off to Dave's Coffee Shop up on Broadway in Oakland, California. And I got to watch Bear trying to order a piece of our barely cooked meat and then watch him complain when it showed up with vegetables on the plate. But that's another story.
- [15:39]
C
Bear's extreme interest in the Grateful Dead was complemented by his extreme interest in high fidelity audio. In early 1966, both took over his life.
- [15:48]
D
Six months or no, just a few months. I don't remember how many months before I met the Grateful Dead. I bought a hi fi and I went around and tried to figure out what was the best hi fi and I had a pretty good sized place. You were living in Berkeley? Yeah, had a pretty good sized place. It must have been 55 foot long room, about maybe 35ft wide, this big single room. And I wound up going around and listening to a lot of stuff. And I decided to buy a Voice of the Theater system, which is about the ugliest hi Fi system you could possibly conceive of. It had a cabinet in the bottom with a. It was a front loading horn. It wasn't a back loading horn, it wasn't folded or anything. It had a 15 inch speaker in it and it was in a large box about the size of a small fridge and had a little horn mounted up on top. And it was a 800 series horn and the driver was maybe 4 inches diameter. It was relatively small. One horn on each speaker, one a bottom and a horn on each side. It looked like something that someone had rescued from behind the screen at the local small movie theater or something. It was basically that. But Altec was selling it and hyping it and it had a nice tight. Rather to me sounded tight. Of course later I learned it wasn't. We learned things to make it tighter. But compared to the average run of the mill spot speaker sounded okay. And it would get loud. I wanted something that would get loud. As it turned out, it wouldn't get loud enough.
- [17:36]
C
The Dead's PA would get louder and bigger, but it had to start somewhere. Very quickly, Bear began making recordings to help improve his work. He called them his sonic journals. We did a dive into Bear's life on our Bear Drop last year. If you want to go deeper into his story over the next decade and a half, Bear his sonic journals would accumulate into a breathtakingly diverse archive. In the past few years, the Owsley Stanley foundation has been excavating and releasing some of these Tapes. In just the past 12 months, they've put out music by Johnny Cash, Ali Akbar Khan, and Commander Cody in his Lost Planet Airmen. I can't wait for whatever's next. Joining us today is Hawk of the Owsley Stanley foundation, who's been cataloging Bear's 1966 tapes.
- [18:20]
E
Our archive starts at 66, early 66. You know, I think one of the interesting things about what we do have from that time period are these questions of provenance. And what are we actually listening to here? How reliable are the markings on the box and what's inside? Is it accurate? Is it correct? Does it match up with what's in the Tapir's compendium or archive.org or dead base? And oftentimes we find discrepancies. Like I said, we're doing a final sweep of the 66 boxes just to make sure that we got everything. But we initially targeted 66 because we figured that the oldest tapes would be most in jeopardy. And they were. They were actually pretty, pretty good. The tape. Tape quality was really good in 66 and they were well preserved.
- [19:08]
D
But I'm not an engineer, I never was. So I thought, we gotta do something about this. And so I started looking around for someone who could help and ran into this kid Tim Scully. And he seemed to know about electronics. I thought, hey, I need somebody. You want to do it? He said, okay.
- [19:28]
C
Tim Scully took LSD for the first time in the spring of 1965, and his life was changed. But unlike anybody else by the end of the year, Tim Scully succeeded in finding the person who'd made it and asked Owsley Stanley to be his mentor. We are so honored to welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast Tim Scully.
- [19:46]
B
There was more than one other underground chemist, although most of them weren't producing very pure lsd. Baers was known by his given name, Owsley. Owsley Acid was known as being the purest and strongest that was available. At the time, I was living in Berkeley. I bought my own house. By then I was had been making a good living doing electronics design work. Good enough that I'd taken a leave of absence from the university for a little while to finish a big contract. My real motivation was to treat this as an extended job interview for working with Bear in a lab. But I needed to do the electronics work.
- [20:23]
D
He was a bright kid, real bright. He knew enough about electronics, how to wire two or three parts together. All I knew basically was what I had learned to be an electronic technician in my Air Force period. I was a ham Radio operator. And I knew something about the theory operation of radios, and I'd worked as a broadcast technician, but I wasn't a design engineer.
- [20:48]
B
Well, Bear knew that I was interested in becoming his apprentice. And I don't remember exactly how he put it, but it was pretty clear that he wasn't going to take somebody that he didn't know well into his confidence to that level, and that we'd have to get to know each other well. And that trip to LA was ideal for that purpose because we took acid together at least once a week and spent most of the rest of the time hanging out together.
- [21:17]
C
Over the past year, Tim and his friends had experimented with LSD in quite a different way than the Merry Pranksters.
- [21:23]
B
I was more into taking acid either in the park or at home in front of a fireplace with one or two friends in a quiet, contemplative environment. But Bear had asked both Don and me to go to the Trips festival, and we took acid for that. And that was certainly as wild as any acid test. And Kesey was there with the Pranksters. He had his spacesuit, if I remember correctly. I had sort of a foretaste of what was going on.
- [21:54]
C
One of Tim's closest and oldest friends, and now a psychedelic pal, was and is Don Douglas. Don actually went way back in the Bay Area folk scene and already knew Jerry Garcia in Pigpen. The first time he'd gotten stoned, it was at the hands of Paul Kantner, and he stumbled wondrously into a backroom jam session at a coffee house that included Jerry Garcia. How's that for Craig?
- [22:16]
G
I got involved with acid and my college career came to an end, and Tim invited me to come and live in his house. So I did. And so we lived in Berkeley there. We went to one acid test in the Bay Area and then we went to la.
- [22:28]
B
I loaded up all my electronics gear, my tools, my test equipment, and drove down to la.
- [22:35]
G
The band flew down.
- [22:37]
C
They were met at the airport by the artist Gene Millay, who'd recently made a film called the Psychedelic Experience. Narrated by Timothy Leary, the Psychedelic Experience.
- [22:47]
D
Is a voyage inside a trip into.
- [22:53]
B
The countless galaxies of your own nervous system. She also had produced a film called the Psychedelic Experience, a film that she made on Super 8. She managed to recruit Ravi Shankar to do the soundtrack. She got some really great people to help her with this little film that.
- [23:10]
C
She made over the course of two months in aligning themselves, first with the Merry Pranksters and then with Owsley, the Dead transformed from a Palo Alto bar band into the soundtrack for the emerging counterculture. In the next few weeks, the band would meet several other collaborators that helped shape their next three decades.
- [23:26]
G
Barrett wanted them to house them at their place in Venice, but she didn't have room, so someone else I don't know took them. I remember staying in a motel briefly.
- [23:38]
C
Arriving in LA that week was another band friend, Denise Kaufman, AKA Mary Microgram of the Merry Pranksters and soon to be the co founder of the great band Ace of Cups. Denise narrated the Fillmore acid test for us in our Hug the Heat episode. Because Denise had the most 60s 60s ever. Her trip to LA began in Big Sur at the Esalen Institute, arguably the North American capital for heady conversation about expanded consciousness. Since 1962.
- [24:05]
H
I had gone to Esalen Institute with my mom to do a marathon therapy weekend. I was just curious about Esalen. I was curious about how do we access expanded consciousness without taking anything. And Esalen was exploring that. I met this guy there who was a psychology professor at UC la and I ended up, because I knew I wanted to get to la, so I ended up going back with him to LA and ended up being in a psychology experiment, ucla, to see if people who had taken LSD were more psychic than other people. It was a really interesting. That was a whole nother thing that I ended up which was really interesting and kind of far out. But anyway I was. So I was staying at his house in Westwood while we did this program, this experiment or this, that he was doing. But I just, I. He was sort of getting into some. He was like painting this big coffin in his living room and it was just kind of a little like okay, I'm done. And I, you know, I didn't have a car or anything and I didn't know LA really. And I, but somehow I was able to reach Pigpen. I'm like, okay, I'm here and it's a little strange and you know, and Pigpen's like, I'm coming to get you. And so he did, he came out and picked me up and got to go join, join up with the Pranksters and you know, that was the time of the Watts acid test held on.
- [25:35]
C
February 12, 1966 at the Youth Opportunity center in Watts. The Watts acid test was a blowout. A night when the punch was accidentally double dosed or more. And many took way too much. At the door was Hugh Romney, the stand up philosopher who transmogrified a few years later into Wavy Gravy. He'd been throwing acid test like theatrical events in LA minus the acid, with his roommate Del Close, who became a pioneer of long form improvised comedy. And his house had been a landing point for the Pranksters when they arrived in town. I'm not sure of the original interviewer here, but thank you for eliciting this answer.
- [26:10]
D
We had these two enormous ash cans, brand new, filled with Kool Aid. And hey, the Kool Aid on the right is the electric Kool Aid. The Kool Aid on the left is for the children once more. Elay and I went over it like five times. But people would come off the dance floor after dancing for an hour or two to the Grateful Dead. And they were just looking for something wet.
- [26:40]
B
When I went to la, what I was expecting was we were going to set up for the Watts acid test at the Youth Opportunity Center.
- [26:47]
D
Wet could be a couple hundred mics of swallow and people started to melt down.
- [26:54]
B
So we met there and, you know, I was soldering cables and hooking up equipment. We didn't get the whole system put together for that acid test. But we did have an Ampex tape recorder, a reel to reel tape recorder, and the pa. There was a super bass speaker that Bear had come across which is, you know, very low frequency. And with a separate big Macintosh amplifier for it. We hooked that up to Phil's bass and you could feel his bass in the sidewalk, you know, on the other side of the block. So it coupled really well to the ground. So we didn't have the whole sound system together. But part of it, and that's mostly what I was doing is, you know, focusing on the sound system. During the was acid test, I went.
- [27:43]
G
With Paul Foster out to a little store. I forget what we were going to buy. Bought something. And the proprietress of this store, like kind of pretended not to notice that half of his face was painted silver and the other half painted gold. And he had, you know, like. I mean, we were very weird.
- [28:04]
H
What I remember most was the Watts acid test. I don't think any big event had.
- [28:09]
E
Happened in Watts since the big.
- [28:11]
H
The civil unrest there, as far as I was told.
- [28:15]
E
And so.
- [28:16]
H
And we had this warehouse, you know, it was really. It was this grungy warehouse. And outside was like the Watts riot squad in like helmets and batons. And they didn't come in. And I can imagine how that place was going.
- [28:38]
D
And this, this young woman started freaking out, screaming, who cares?
- [28:44]
H
And that was the woman who was. Who cares? You know, she. This woman was just screaming or, you know, moaning, you know, who cares?
- [28:55]
D
And I found her in A little side room surrounded by like 15 people. A coup buffalo, which I recognized.
- [29:03]
H
And she's going, okay, you know, Wavy put the mic in front of her. And that just echoed through the room. And it was all of us, like to. Our molecules were like, who cares?
- [29:13]
E
Who cares?
- [29:15]
H
It was just deep.
- [29:17]
D
And we joined hands and turned into jewels and light. And she turned into jewels and light. And that's when I passed the acid test, which you get to the very bottom of the human soul. Where the nit is slamming into the grit and you're sinking. But you reach to help somebody who is sinking worse than you are. That's when everybody gets high. And you don't even need LSD to do that.
- [29:43]
C
It was an intense night for a lot of people. Dennis McNally breaks it down pretty well in his biography A Long Strange Trip. And of course it's recounted down to the molecule in the book that it gave name to. Tom Wolfe's the Electric Kool Aid Acid test, published in 1968.
- [29:58]
H
That acid test, when we were winding down, I mean, it was like the police were outside and they wanted to get somebody or something, but they didn't come in.
- [30:09]
B
The Watts acid test was attended by a large number of different kinds of police. At the time. We joked that there were 14 or 15 different kinds of cops there. Most of them in plain clothes, but even some uniformed ones trying to figure out what to arrest someone for.
- [30:31]
H
And at the end when we were, you know, it was sort of like a tail. I always envisioned it felt like the tail of a. Some creature that had a long tail. Because we were kind of winding everything into the bus and taking the last of us and the last of everything we were carrying out. And Paul Foster, he was like the end of the tail. And you know, he was wearing this like thing that was part white and part black. And he would have this whole joker opposite smelling energy.
- [31:04]
B
And I think they finally arrested Paul Foster because he had his body painted very lavishly and was acting strangely enough that I think they. They arrested him for being drunk and disorderly. And he wasn't either. But you know, they. I think they had to keep up their franchise somehow.
- [31:24]
H
And it was like when we were kind of pulling everything in. It's like a tape measure that you pull in at the very end. They just grabbed him. So they took him away and that was. And get. You know, I think Babs. I'm not sure who was. Who eventually got him released.
- [31:38]
C
Paul Foster, arrested in silver and gold face painting, became the inspiration for the infamous debut Episode of the rebooted Dragnet 1967 television series with the title character Blue Boy painted in similar makeup.
- [31:51]
B
Standstill. Reality, man, Reality. I could see the center of the earth. Purple flame down there. The pilot light all the way down. Purple flame down there. The pilot light.
- [32:04]
C
Pilot light of all these clean Joe creation and reality. Reality. What's your name, son? You can see my name if you look hard enough.
- [32:12]
B
Come on now.
- [32:13]
C
What's your name?
- [32:13]
B
Don't you know my name?
- [32:15]
C
My name's Blue Boy.
- [32:17]
B
What do you think, Joe?
- [32:18]
D
Cartwheels?
- [32:19]
B
Sugar cubes? I'll make you a book.
- [32:20]
C
He's been dropping that acid we've been hearing about.
- [32:22]
H
The rest of us got in the bus and we went to the Watts Towers, which was, you know, the Simon Rodea beautiful towers. And on the way there, I was still. I don't know, my LSD was still very much coming on or was really strong at that point. But Neil. Neil was like. Kept looking at me going, oh, my God. He, like. And he was seeing ectoplasm come out of my mouth. I didn't see that. But he was totally seeing this kind of spirit energy.
- [32:58]
C
Jerry Garcia talked about this moment with Dennis McNally in a 1973 interview included in Dennis book. Jerry on Jerry. This is from the audiobook available from Hachette. Amir Barlev made beautiful use of this quote in his incredible documentary Long Strange Trip, which we'll point back to here.
- [33:15]
D
As well at the end of this particular essay. We went and looked at the Watts Towers.
- [33:19]
B
The Watts Towers are interesting because this.
- [33:21]
D
Guy, Simon Rodea, one guy, he went.
- [33:23]
B
And picked up little pieces of flossam and jetsam and junk and glued them and cemented them and stuck them together.
- [33:29]
D
And when he died, the county of.
- [33:31]
B
Los Angeles couldn't pull the towers down. So they made him a park.
- [33:35]
H
Watts Towers. We were climbing around the towers. And that was beautiful, you know, just to see the creation that this one man did. You know, I was back there not so long ago, and it's just. It seemed bigger the first time I went the later two times, you know, but just that he did it himself. And, you know, just art. It was a very prankster appreciation expression. You know, it's like, perfect for us to see.
- [34:07]
B
He couldn't pull them down, you know, they were. They wanted to destroy him. So I said, well, if you work really hard as an artist, you might be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone. But, hey, what the. You know, I thought I. What I want to do is I want it here, I want it now, in this lifetime. I want it, what I enjoy, to last as long as I do and not last any longer, you know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art.
- [34:31]
C
Sorry, Jer. It's definitely not a nuisance. At least somewhere around then, the band found their own digs in La. 2511 Third Ave. According to one receipt that survived, it was a big pink house. About a year before the band formerly known as the Hawks moved into their own big pink house outside of Woodstock.
- [34:49]
G
We were living in a house in LA which people will call the Watts house, but it wasn't in Watts. It was 13 miles from Watts in South Central LA, in the area called West Adams. The house was a still. Is there a Craftsman style house with a big porch. And you go in the front door and there is the living room. And it had previously belonged to a priest of some sort. And there was a little room off the side of the living room with a confessional in it. And that was Garcia's bedroom. Then you walk through a little hallway and there was a large old fashioned kitchen and room for a large table. So we would eat in the kitchen. And then upstairs there was I don't know how many bedrooms, the smallest of which was a room that was in the corner directly above Garcia's bedroom. And that small room was where a big bowl of marijuana was. And the rule was you smoked there, you left your roaches there. You don't have marijuana strewn around the house. And then on the floor above that was where Bear and Melissa lived and where Bear's electronics work was. And there was like a cottage out in the back. I think Pigpen at first had one of the bedrooms on the floor, the second floor, or British would call the first floor that all the bedrooms were. And then I think he later moved out to that cottage in the back.
- [36:23]
B
I'm a pretty introverted kind of a guy. I've come to a conclusion since then that I'm on the Asperger spectrum, although I didn't recognize that terminology at the time. I was completely out of my depth being in the large crowds and noisy surroundings. And it was an interesting experience, like being thrown into the deep end of the pool.
- [36:45]
D
I knew we had to do something because the technology was so primitive. It seemed like it was holding the music back that we could go to another level if we had better instruments. Half the time they'd crackle and pop and hum and there'd be distortion out of the speakers. It wouldn't be controllable. And the guys would make a sound not what they wanted. So we went wholly the other way.
- [37:07]
B
The idea was Bear and I had agreed that we were going to try to rework the Dead's sound system into something much higher fidelity. Do direct electrical recording and clean up the quality of the sound. Use better amplifiers and speakers and so on. And we'd already started gathering equipment before we left for la. He contributed most of his hi Fi system, which was pretty snazzy. He had Macintosh amplifiers and Voice of the Theater speakers. And he already had a couple of good microphones.
- [37:43]
D
Yeah, I knew nothing when I started. I just said, hey, sure, I'll be the sound man and we can use my hi Fi. But I did notice one thing straight away, and that was that the instruments that they were using looked like somebody built them in their garage. When you opened them up, they looked like they had parts that looked like they came out of a 1932 radio. And in fact, it was about right. It was right. It was. I think it was less Paul who took apart a radio and put the parts in his guitar. Basically, the guitars in 1966 were identical. They still had magnet with a coil of wire around it, six screws in the top of the magnet. Sometimes not even the screws, but often the screws. They had a wax capacitor and a cheap potentiometer. That was it.
- [38:42]
G
My involvement with them was to be helping him and Tim making this sound system. But part of why I wasn't there for so long was the fact that there really wasn't. I mean, there's these two nerds talking nerd to each other.
- [39:01]
B
And I.
- [39:02]
G
You know, and I wasn't able to contribute to that. But thanks to Corky Ryan, I could drive a truck full of equipment across LA in the middle of the night. Stoned on acid. I was fine with that. So that. That was my role.
- [39:14]
C
Before they connected with Bear, Tim and Don briefly ran their own business recording radio commercials called the Hung Up Advertising Company. Its acronym was a stone Wink. At the House UN American Activities Committee.
- [39:26]
G
We started recording musicians. Particularly a duo called Corky and Buck. And Corky, unfortunately, is no longer with us, but Buck is still Buck England. And he performs blues on a big Hammond organ in Seattle, where he grew up. It was actually Corky that I got the idea that I could drive while very stoned on lsd. Because he would say, just melt and pour, melt and pour. How could I do anything wrong? It's all flowing, but it's okay. I mean, the trees and the phone poles dance, but they don't try to cross the street. Just go ahead and. I got used to driving on acid, which is the main role that I had. The brief period of time that I live with the Grateful Dead.
- [40:13]
B
Seems to me as they were practicing every day. I think that's why they grew rapidly as a group, is because they spent a lot of time in the woodshed.
- [40:22]
G
Every day the band played, you know, it's like, were they practicing or jamming or. They'd be working out a new tune. But Bill's drums were set up in the living room, and then the others would just open up their cases and play.
- [40:56]
B
I think the band always listened back to what we recorded. They wanted to improve their playing and they wanted to understand how they sounded and they wanted to understand what they'd done right and wrong. They were definitely in a process of rapid growth and learning during that period when we were in la. And so they took every opportunity to learn from what was going on. Stealing, stealing Hurting mama don't you tell on me I'm stealing back to my same old.
- [41:55]
C
That's Steelin from Rare Cuts and Oddities, very likely recorded in the Pink House by Owsley Stanley with his own distinct stereo mix from the Owsley Stanley Foundation. We are also pleased to have with us today Owsley's son, Starfinder.
- [42:09]
I
A lot of the early tapes he borrowed from a technique that I think came originally from the Beatles, where he was putting some of the inputs into one track and then other inputs into the other track. So even though he would set up all of his mics as stereo pairs, so every source had a stereo pair of mics, he wouldn't split the right channel to one track and the left channel to the left track and create two tracks of right and left from all the summed sources. He would put a subset of sources, both mics, both stereo mics into one track and then a subset of sources into the other track.
- [42:47]
C
As Bear described it in the liner notes to Rare Cut, I used a stereo reel to reel recorder with a mono PA signal in the left channel, principally vocals and drums, and a few instruments with the instruments that were not in the paper, that is most of them in the right. You can hear this pretty clearly on this early original song, you See a Broken Heart, written by Pigpet.
- [43:22]
B
You see a broken heart.
- [43:28]
C
Asley was learning a lot about audio.
- [43:30]
D
As he went one of the acid tests. I. I don't know which one it was it might have been Watts. Actually. It was a very strange experience. Where all of a sudden I was looking at sound coming out of the speakers. This happened on several occasions. Also happened in the house that we were staying in in Watts. Where I actually saw sound coming out of the. The speakers. I just wanted to have that happen. What's that called? Synesthesia? Yeah, synesthesia. Synesthesia. I've always read about that. I always wanted to hear coming. I've never seen anyone else who's actually had that experience. But I actually had that experience. It was funny because I'm looking at this sound, you know, I'm really out there. And all kinds of other things are going on. And I was thinking, you know, that doesn't look the way I thought sound. And then I thought. But you see, it was very funny because the lady that I was with in those days was quite correct. Her name was Melissa. This is long before I met the dead. But whenever we get high and things just start getting really weird. She would insist on dealing with them as though they were real. Not a hallucination, not something that the drug was doing. But this is reality. And forced me to deal with it. So I never got into that space that a lot of people get into. Where they say, oh, it's the drug that's doing this. This is a hallucination. This is a non real effect which is being produced by a chemical which is in my brain. I had to deal with it as though this was the absolute concrete, everyday reality. Now deal with it. And that was interesting because that's different. It's different that way. See, you do a whole different. You have a whole different set, right? It's like the difference between sitting in a. Driving a car in a video game or getting in a car, right? And she wouldn't let me drive the video game car. She made me deal with it. Deal with it on the street now. And so when I got to this point in the acid test, when I saw sound coming out of the speakers. I was totally programmed to accept whatever I saw as being real. More real, perhaps, in my everyday life. Which I had come to believe was restricted consciousness. Where I actually saw less or felt less and perceived less.
- [46:00]
I
In later analysis of his experience, he said he figures that the auditory input that was coming in through his ears got misrouted. And was being interpreted by the visual cortex in his brain. He was taking the sound, the data, in through his ears. But a different part of his brain was processing it. And so as a result, he saw it wasn't sound. But he could see it wasn't color. He could see the sound coming out of the speakers and moving around the room and bouncing off the walls and reverberating. And he said it was astounding. And it wasn't at all what he expected sound should look like. You know, it's what it was. One of those experiences where he recognized in the moment, this is extremely important. And he was out of his gourd on acid. And, you know, there are those revelations that come in the. In the throes of an acid trip, not all of which stick around the next day.
- [46:57]
C
In some ways, Bayer's synesthetic experience was his equivalent to getting bitten by a radioactive spider and constitutes the origin story for the set of sonic principles that would eventually grow into the wall of sound, as well as the sound company Alembic.
- [47:10]
I
It really informed how he set up his sound systems. And I think that was part of where that obsession with the point source systems came from, because he recognized that the way that sound moves through air and then bounces off walls and reverberates, there's a cohesion when it's coming from one place where that sound wave is coming out and moving the air. I mean, it was like being in a giant tub of Jello and seeing all the jello moving around. Having multiple iterations of the same sound coming from different places and moving around and creating all these interference waves was discordant and muddying. And he recognized that to get clear sound, you needed to have that synchronization of waves and the. And to have that coordinated movement of sound through the air. It's just having that visual image, and I wish I could experience it myself, but I can kind of visualize from what he was saying.
- [48:10]
C
And A few weeks into the dad's LA sojourn, enter Rosie McGee from the north.
- [48:15]
E
On February 25, 1966, is when I drove my VW Bug down to LA, quit my job, got rid of my stuff, packed my bags, and drove down to join Phil and start living with him. The interesting thing to me is that of the four years that Phil and I lived together, we only lived alone the last year and a half. The rest of the time, we lived with the band. The band all lived together for a couple of years, and I think it has a lot to do with how they became a cohesive group as people and as musicians. They had to learn to live together, and then they could just fall out of bed and go play anytime they wanted to. And it wasn't for a long time. It Wasn't you had to go. Okay, we got to go to the rehearsal hall. Okay, everybody get in the cars. And it was a very organic thing. We were all together in one big heap and music. Making music and rehearsing and writing stuff.
- [49:27]
C
The band had started to write their own material when they were still the Warlocks. One that was written in LA or just before was Cream Puff War, which would survive to the band's debut album.
- [49:38]
B
No, no she can't take a mile I know it does Another trick she ever seen I can't believe that she wants you to die after all it's more than enough to pay for your.
- [50:00]
C
Life But a lot of the material they came up with in that period disappeared into the deep memory hole, often sounding nothing like any other iterations of the Grateful Dead. That's a mystery song from 1966, presumably titled Wandering man, sung by Phil Lesh, with backing vocals by Jerry Garcia and very faintly, Bob. Weird. It's not in the Owsley Stanley foundation archive, so it might not be from the spring of 1966, but the extreme stereo separation does sound like something made on one of Bayer's decks. And the point is the. That the Grateful Dead were experimenting constantly and weren't yet sure who they were.
- [51:13]
G
Some people have described the early Dead as Pigpen and his backup band. And I probably. How I saw them. I mean, this is not to take anything away from the. The brilliance of Jared Garcia and the others, but that's kind of how it came across in the beginning. This was a blues band led by Ron McKernan. And besides being a total sweetheart under that crusty exterior, I mean, for a white guy, damn, he was good. You know.
- [51:50]
B
I went out to see a gentle woman one day I want to find out I want to find out baby what's wrong with me?
- [52:03]
I
They were pretty much Pig's band, right? And, you know, they were a much more bluesy, bar bandy sort of musical experience. And that. That was. That was what captured Bear's attention when he first ran into him was, you know, that. That sound. And he was really tight with Pigpen. They were definitely brothers. You know, it's. Which is funny on some ways because, you know, Pig favored alcohol as. As his drug, and Bear hated alcohol. And Bear loved acid, and Pig was not at all into acid, but they loved each other. The music from that era has resonance for me in part because that's the Grateful Dead that captured Bear's attention.
- [52:43]
B
She said, she said, Bear, why you need it why you need. It's just a Little bit of mojo, a little bit of mojo hair. That's all I need. That's all I need.
- [53:13]
G
I was over 21 and he was under 21. I was just over 21, he was under 21. Tim had a 1959 Hillman convertible. So we'd go out and I'd buy a bottle of Red Mountain, I mean a gallon of jug of Red Mountain wine in the passenger seat. Pigpen would have this between his legs to steady it and I would drive. We'd go carousing around la. I do not and cannot sing, but drunk I could sing with him, right? So we'd like to be wailing away and having a good old time. And then we would go to places like for instance, there was a place, I think the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. It would had a section for people who are 18 to 21. They wouldn't serve alcohol, but of course we were fine by that point. And we would sit there and like we heard the Temptations. And Pigpen said to me, if you ever want to see what's happening next, look at the Black Axe. He also. We went to see a friend of his who played in a 1950s style dance band with two tone jackets and the whole thing. And he said, you will find that fans tend to like one kind of music or another, but musicians like all kinds of music as a rule. And he was just fine listening to this 1950s dance band. So yeah, we would do that and we would come back pretty late. At one point we were all up together and everybody but Pigpen was stone on ass and Owsley and Melissa had a. Their bedroom was on the top floor of this house where the electronics equipment was also. And we would also sometimes gather there because it was pretty big. They were saying something about guys doing out who knows what. And I made some joke about we were looking for an all night harmonica store. They ended up using that name, I guess for one of their.
- [55:11]
C
And Owsley had a special diet. Red meat, all red meat and nothing but red meat. Maybe some milk. We talked more about his proto Paleo eating habits on our first bear drop.
- [55:23]
B
From last year when I first signed up. But I. I decided that I would submit to whatever I needed to, to be his apprentice. So I actually tried his diet for a few months. But he believed that carbohydrates were bad for humans and that we were. We evolved to eat a meat diet primarily to the extent that he was paying for the groceries, which he mostly was while we were in la because the band was pretty Broke. They weren't well known at the time. He wanted more flank steak to be served than anything else. When I got sent grocery shopping, I got the money from Bear. I got his marching orders, and then I got requests from the band members. And the band members mostly wanted things like Coca Cola and cigarettes. And Bear wanted me to get a lot of flank steak. And some of the band members, old ladies, wanted me to get some healthier things like some milk and some juices and some fruit and vegetables. You know, I gave priority to what Bear wanted, and then the band members and then the other stuff was my first experience of living with a communal refrigerator. So I. I rapidly learned that I. There wasn't much point to buying groceries for myself because they'd disappear if I put them in the refrigerator.
- [56:43]
E
Tim was very quiet, Obviously smart enough to keep company with Bear because Bear would not suffer fools or tolerate people that weren't at least a third as smart as he was. He was definitely a helper to Bear.
- [57:05]
C
You can see Tim Scully at work in Rosie's photos of the band's show at troopers hall on March 25, 1966. Tim set up at the rear of the stage, visible between Pigpen and Garcia.
- [57:15]
E
He was very methodical and very calm, and he was a good counterpoint to Owsley, who has this. Well, intense energy is not enough to describe being in the presence of Bear. Back then. I'm thinking about Bear. Yeah. My description of Bear is that the word intractable comes to mind and somewhat humorless, in my opinion. And he was every interaction that you would have with Bear. He would dominate. He dominated every interaction with just about everybody, unless he had a reason to pull back. But it was all, you know, he always seemed to have an agenda. Like he was paying attention to it, to how he was presenting himself, of course. Very smart, innovative ideas, and, you know, after a while, I gained a lot of respect for what he thought up. But he had no people skills as far as I was concerned. I had a hard time with him all along. He liked to poke me, literally and figuratively like to poke me. Once I became aware that that was his M.O. i would refuse to take the bait.
- [58:54]
C
Though the Dead didn't exactly break into the LA rock scene, they were hardly antisocial, as Don Douglas remembers.
- [59:00]
G
The Jefferson Airplane had a house across town, and the groups didn't jam together, but Kalkonen would come over and he and Garcia would jam acoustically, just the two of them. And I wish or hope that someone had recorded that, because this was some really Good stuff. Just them, like fooling around on their guitars, you know. And then I remember. I can't say why this was so funny to me, but a thing came up for them to play with the Paul Butterfield Band in a bar. Garcia said, we're going to play with Paul Butterfield on Friday night. Calvinist said, I don't understand. He said, we're going to play with Paul Butterfield on Friday night. I don't understand. We're going to play with Paul Butterfield on Friday. Oh, I'm beginning to understand. I can't say why I think this was so funny, but I just like, didn't stop laughing for about 10 minutes. Like just repeated enough.
- [60:02]
C
That's a gig unnoted elsewhere. The Dead and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at a Bar in LA in 1966. Officially, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band were ensconced at the Whiskey a Go Go throughout the first part of February. But several LA rock scholars note that other bands didn't simply waltz onto a gig at the Whiskey, but that Whiskey bands might take gigs elsewhere. I pressed Don for some more details by email and he wrote back in terms of memories as visual clips. I do have a recollection of Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop on stage with our guys. End quote. Take that as you will. One person who definitely ended up at band practice one day was Barry Maguire. You know, Eve of Destruction? Barry Maguire.
- [60:52]
B
You don't believe we're on the Eve of Destruction?
- [61:06]
E
I went to one of his shows at one of the clubs in North beach in 1965. We hit it off and we hung out for a little while. And then he moved to LA at some. Or maybe he was already living in la. So when I got down to la, I looked him up and we had stayed in touch. He was living at the Castle, so he invited me to come over. And that was just a fabulous. What a building, what a house, you know, it was as only you can find in Hollywood. It had. This was like a stage set more than architecture. The owners of the castle was Tom and Lisa Law, who later became better known through the Woodstock, you know, being part of the Hog Farm. And they were the owners of it and that's how I met them. And it was this beautiful house that was reminiscent of kind of the Arabian Nights kind of stage set or something. That's how I remember it. Lots of tile work and exotic, you know, wood cutouts and different things. And beautiful view was up on a hill with views and gardens. They had a bunch of different rooms that they rented out to different people for short or long periods of time. One of them was Bob Dylan.
- [62:42]
C
In fact, Dylan and the Dead were in LA at the same time too, with Dylan finishing up the last Blonde on Blonde session in Nashville on March 10, playing a few more shows, and then taking up residence at the Castle until leaving in early April for his first Electric World tour. The late Hetty McGee, no relation to Rosie, was also friends with Tom and Lisa Law and with her partner and child, also briefly crashed at the Pink House during this period, stirring up trouble from Bear when she brought fruit and vegetables home after a grocery run with Tim Scully. She would go on to play the Tampora Drone on the Dead's Dark Star single. The next year, Hetty would go on to marry original Velvet underground drummer Angus Maclise. In 2008, she published detailed memoirs in blog form. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast she wrote of visiting Tom and Lisa at the Castle, who told her to come alone. She got a ride over from Owsley, who came inside anyway and pushed his way to where Mr. Dillon was standing by the Art Nouveau window, strode up to him, extended his hand. Owsley, he proclaimed. Zimmerman. Came the reply, followed by will someone get this bum outta here? Oh shit. Hetty blamed again, but how hilarious. Two monomaniacs face to face I have.
- [64:05]
E
A very vague memory of being in the same room with Bob Dylan and some of the members of the Dead. It was a short episode and what I remember, the overwhelming feeling I remember is discomfort. They were maybe it was bare, I don't know somehow. Maybe it was like in a dressing room or even in our living room or in at the Castle or something. Somehow we were all together for a brief time and nobody knew what to say to Dylan. They were uncomfortable in his presence. That's a very vague memory, but I think it did happen.
- [64:49]
C
But the center of the Dead's life in LA remained the acid tests for a long time.
- [64:54]
D
It was like no matter whatever else we were doing, we had to be the acid test every week. That was it as part of it is totally committed part of it. No matter what other shows we did or anything else, Saturday night we were there. Other than that, I don't know how many of those I would have gone to. I didn't actually think of myself as a prankster per se. I found it all kind of scary and I found it all every time was it provided days and days and days of sorting it out, putting it together, trying to get it together. It was sort of like a crash course and how to become a jet pilot when you had never seen a jet before. And the way they did it was they dropped you in there, took you.
- [65:35]
C
Up and said, control of yours. Whoa.
- [65:42]
D
Barrel rolls. Immelmans, you know, tail spin right into the ground sometimes times. And. But psychically you recover from all those, I guess, if you're tough. And I guess most of us were occasionally, some people weren't. It's unfortunate, but because of the way in which it was undertaken in those days, and the fact that we used to take huge amounts of acid, we used to take 250, 300 mics or more. Keezy preferred 400 or more. And Albert Hoffman told me that was a substantial overdose. I said, yes. In retrospect, we realized it was.
- [66:21]
A
What do you consider an optimum dose?
- [66:22]
D
Oh, I don't know. People nowadays seem to take around 100 or 150.
- [66:29]
C
The Merry Pranksters were doing their best working in LA. Please welcome back to the Dead cast, Merry Prankster Ken Babs.
- [66:36]
J
We were set up to do the an acid test on UCLA campus. And so this is going to be really a big deal. And with the Hog Farm and Tiny Tim and the Dead and us. And so at noon we did a preview show in the student union. They had a stage in there and we all were there. And there was a grand piano on stage. The Grateful Dead came out. I introduced them as the Band and they opened up the lid of the grand piano and Bob Weir got in there and began plucking the strings. And Bill the drum was playing. Drummer was playing on it with his sticks and Phil was banging on the sides and Jerry was playing, banging around on the keys and everything. And then they left. Then Neil Cassidy came on and did a impromptu rap for about five or 10 minutes and he left. And then Tiny Tim came on and did his whole singing, you know, Tripping through the Tulip and all that high voice. What do you play? The ukulele, I guess. And, and, and when we told them all that, you know, we'll be at this place tonight, come and see the whole show. You know, it starts in so and so goes till dawn. And then we, we got up and went to leave and we were going out and this guy comes up to me, he says, hey, Ken, he says, your boss wants to talk to you. I said, well, what about? He says, I don't know. And so he takes me up to this office and there's these two stern looking dudes in there with suits on and everything.
- [68:17]
C
You can imagine where it goes from here. No more acid tests at ucla.
- [68:21]
D
They had to be at the party. They were the essential part of the party in their minds. That was an essential thing that had to be done every Saturday night. Which I found not to my liking at first. Because, well, it was a little too weird, a little too heavy. And it was hard to control. And it looked like too much exposure and made too much heat. I don't know all those things. I was not a real loud thing at that point. And I didn't want to be a loud thing or attract a lot of attention for any reason. And here was this scene that was so loud that if you put it on the moon, it would attract attention, right? So I was thinking that maybe. And here was this band of incredible musicians. Making this magic music. Which I thought was more important to do that than to do this other crazy thing. So you were sort of an impetus toward professionalism at that point. I've always been that.
- [69:18]
C
The Dead played a few non acid test gigs in la. Don Douglas got involved in the organization.
- [69:24]
G
I was out doing promotion and tacking up posters. Because they didn't want to have gigs in nightclubs like that. They had one with Paul Butterfield, but mostly they didn't want to do that. So we would rent a hall and go out and tack up posters. And I was enthusiastic about that.
- [69:42]
C
One show they booked was at the Troopers Hall. Which they billed as the All Night Harmonica Store. Throwing back to Don Douglas joke Baron. Melissa drew a poster in the ads. Their initials are in the bottom corner.
- [69:53]
D
When we went and worked at, say, the Troopers hall. Or at the Longshoremen's hall. Or at whatever show we were doing a show, we were being paid. It was different. And even in the beginning there was a great reluctance to get weird at regular shows. There was no reluctance to get weird at the Acid Test. Because they said if they can't play, it doesn't matter. If they don't play well, it doesn't matter because nobody's paying to see them. It's not a matter of. Of having an audience that you're performing for. It's just a big party.
- [70:21]
C
But acid was about more than the partying.
- [70:24]
G
Not every day, but quite often, maybe three times a week. We'd end up taking acid just for the hell of it. We were acid heads, so that's what we did. Yeah, and you know, of course, smoking pot daily.
- [70:36]
C
One book high on the collective reading list was Theodore Sturgeon's science fiction novel More Than Human.
- [70:41]
B
In More Than Human There was a group of people with psychic abilities that slowly coalesced, who as individuals were not very functional in the everyday world. But as a group they became more and more functional as missing members of the group fitted into their positions in a gestalt consciousness that they formed. And there were times when we all took acid together when we had experiences of forming a gestalt consciousness. So that resonated strongly with us. A fair number of the pranksters had read that science fiction story and sort of thought of the acid tests as being a way of looking for missing members of the gestalt by getting high with as many strangers as they could. I read the Lord of the Rings while we were in la, the Hobbit, and I think the Lord of the Rings. And that idea of a quest to try to overcome the evil forces was one that at the time resonated. I like to think that what we were trying to do with spreading LSD around was raising people's consciousness in an effort to try to save the world. At the time, we could see ourselves that. Looking at it with hindsight from years later and from how. What I know about the history of underground LSD manufacturing and how many people got corrupted by the money that was involved, I think there are other lessons that we could have taken from that, you know, that maybe the. Maybe making LSD was like carrying the ring. And the ring was pretty dangerous to carry because it could easily corrupt you and take you. Take over and flip you to the bad side instead of being on the good side. But at the time, that wasn't a thought that was in my mind.
- [72:38]
C
Tim quickly passed the Owsley test.
- [72:40]
B
He rapidly got to know me better and came to trust me more. So it didn't take very long. I think it was less than a month maybe before he trusted me enough to let me help them tablet some acid.
- [72:53]
C
This was the reason Bayer got the. The whole top floor to himself. The activity that Tim is now going to describe was not illegal in that time and place, but it would be soon. Tim's gonna get technical now too, but also very historical.
- [73:07]
B
His lab had shut down quite a few months before. At the point when we were making the tablets. I didn't know how much acid he had at the time. But later we had a long email conversation about it because I'd written it story about it and he made a lot of corrections and he said that at that point he was down to having only one or two grams of acid left. Ampoules with crystalline grams of acid and what we tableted in the attic that night was may have been the last gram of crystalline acid that he had available. That would have made 3,600 tablets. That's how many he got to a gram. He brought just a little bit, bit of equipment for doing that. I mean, they were tablet triturates, the kind of tablets that a pharmacist would have made in the old days if they were hand making tablets. A sheet of Bakelite with holes in it and another sheet of Bakelite with pegs matching those holes. And you take the sheet of Bakelite with the holes and put it on a clean flat surface like a mirror. We went through a whole process to dilute the acid. Of course, lsd, when it's pure, one dose is, you know, about the size of a grain of salt or smaller. You know, it's very small. So to accurately disperse the dose, he dissolved it in alcohol and first dispersed it on a quantity of tribasic calcium phosphate equal to about 10% of the tablet weight, mixed that up and then dried it and ground it in a ball mill. He had a little machine with a small electric motor and some rubber rollers that would, if you took a bottle or a jar and set it on those rollers, turn on the motor, the jar would rotate and he put some stainless steel balls inside the bottle with the powder and then used the balls to and the ball mill to run it for a number of hours to thoroughly mix up and turn into powder, everything. And then he added the lactose for the bulk of the tablet weight, mixed that up with the ball mill for quite a few hours. So we ended up having a bunch of powder that was evenly dispersed LSD in the right amount so that when he made a slightly moist pace out of it and smeared it into that Bakelite board with the holes, each hole would be filled with the proper amount to produce one dose accurately. Because he'd done this as a dry run with powder that didn't have LSD that he could then weigh out and measure exactly what each tablet to be weighed. So he knew how to do the calculations to correctly dilute everything. So his tablets were very accurately dosed.
- [75:59]
E
There was always an awareness that the people upstairs were going to come down at any minute and they were going to be high, they were going to be high. That ended up taking us in some different directions. You know, maybe we would be downstairs just hanging around, maybe smoking at the time. I don't think we smoked a bunch of weed. I think we smoked hash mostly. It was a lot Easier to get and handle, you know, we were just kind of getting by and hanging out, like I said, hanging out on the porch and everything, and where the guys would be rehearsing in the living room and just jamming. And then Vera and Melissa would come downstairs and it would turn into something else.
- [76:49]
B
We always got high for the shows in la. I don't remember anyone. We didn't take acid, but we also got high sometimes in between. The night that stands out is the night after we finished making the blue tablets in the attic, and we all took some. And that wasn't for a show. That was to celebrate making the tablets and try them out. Bear put most of it into a peanut butter jar and sold it to a local LA dealer named Margie. And. And inconveniently, she took that jar and immediately boped down to, I think it was a restaurant where a Life magazine crew was doing interviews and taking pictures for an article they were doing on lsd. Lawrence Schiller and his crew were there. And so she popped in and held up this jar and said, look what I just bought from Owsley. And a friend of mine was there. Bob Hamilton was there at the time, and he went out and got on the phone to us and said, you know, Margie just came in and announced to a crowd that Owsley had just sold her this big jar of LSD tablets. So instant paranoia. We thought that, you know, the cops might come swooping down on that pink house that we were renting and try to arrest all of us. So we tried to clean up the house and pack everything up and be absent for a day or two. Jean Millay and Marge King were sisters, and they both had worked as school teachers. They were both divorced, they each had kids, and they had gotten together to share a house in Venice. So they were living in Venice at the time when the band came to la. And Jean was primarily an artist and had been an art teacher, while Marge was a scientist and had been a science and chemistry teacher. And she also worked at times at Aerojet General as a technical librarian. So they were fairly different personalities, but they were an interesting team and their household was quite wonderful. There was a screening that took place at the AIAA hall on March 3 of her film, which was followed by the band playing. And she also gave a talk, you know, sales pitch for the Timothy Leary Defense Fund. She met the band members and invited us all to come to their house at some point soon. And it was only a few weeks after that that we made the tablets in the attic. Packed everything up in the trunk of one of the cars and decided we had to be out of the house for a while in case the police came. So we went to Jean and Marge's. We thought that would be a fine time to take up their invitation. We were all totally ripped on acid. We brought a kilo of Acapulco gold. Showed up at their house kind of late in the evening and blew their cover. They were trying to be seen as schoolteachers in the neighborhood. But, you know, there were all these outrageous long haired freaks. They were living in a house that was right on the beach in Venice. Yeah, that was quite a memorable experience.
- [79:56]
C
A lot of pretty unbelievable things happened to the grateful dead in LA in 1966. So here's one more. This one involves a Ouija board. I'm unclear about the specifics of the query, but the answer was appropriately spooky.
- [80:09]
G
There was this event with the Ouija board. Garcia, I'm sure of everybody else kind of crowded around. I'd love to compare notes sometime with someone who remembers better. I was just one of the people in the group standing around looking at it, doing this Ouija board. And the one thing that I remembered about that was that they were going to leave the stage on July 9. The kind of mentality that we were back then. I thought they were going to like everybody lift off the stage and some kind of like astral projection, kind of a hippie version of the Rhapsody or. I mean, anyway, I found it interesting that later on in the mid-90s, in fact, their last concert was July 9th.
- [81:10]
B
There was a story that Don might have told you about a Ouija board. And the idea that we'd be leaving the stage on July 9, I think it was. We thought that maybe we'd be traveling international to, you know, with the band to play elsewhere, but. Or possibly leaving the planet or possibly, who knows.
- [81:30]
C
And in fact, the Grateful Dead's last show would be July 9, 1995. Heaviness. The time flow always bent weirdly around the Dead.
- [81:39]
G
There were several reasons that I left. One of them was that I just really didn't see myself contributing enough to merit a seat at the table when the band wasn't making any money.
- [81:49]
C
Don had been helping the band with promotion.
- [81:52]
G
Rock Scully joined, and for a little while, Rock Scully and I did that together. But in fact, Rock wanted his friend Danny Rifkin to join. And so I was sort of in the way when it came to that. They worked well together. And Rock and I had only just met. And so that didn't happen. I mean, it happened for a little while, but then it stopped.
- [82:17]
C
When the UCLA acid test was canceled, a reporter from the LA Free Press visited the Pink House, the first real interview with the Grateful Dead. We've posted a link in scan@dead.net Deadcast Rock Scully would be infamous for press briefings that were somehow both enthusiastic and sincere, but not always entirely fact abiding. In this article, Rock plays a tape for the reporter, hyping it as the band's new single coming out on Monday. I know you ride her backed with Otis on a shakedown cruise. You probably know the A side.
- [83:08]
B
I know you are miss me when I go.
- [83:15]
C
That was from the Autumn Records session as the Emergency crew, recorded in November 1965, released on birth of the Dead. Weirdly, neither of these songs appear on Owsley's studio tapes from la, perhaps lending credence to the idea that there might have at least been, in theory, a debut lost Grateful dead single from 1966. The B side, Otis on a Shakedown Cruise would get renamed much later, perhaps accidentally, and become known by its chorus, you don't have to ask. That was from July 29, 1966 in Vancouver, released as the bonus disc on the 50th anniversary edition of the Dead's debut album. They'd started playing it just before going to la and it's a fascinating glimpse at the early dad's musical ambitions. While they were jamming a little bit in this period that wasn't their focus just yet. Another song they wrote around this time, Cardboard Cowboy was known in the band as the Monster because it was so complicated to play. You don't have to ask might sound like an innocent garage rock song, but try to cover it. That first verse we heard had lead vocals by Bob Weir with answer vocals by Garcia in Lesh. The second verse has lead vocals by Garcia and Lesh with answers by Weird. There's a key change midway through the guitar solo and then there's this section and yet a different vocal arrangement for the final verse. People call this the Grateful Dead's garage rock period, but their ambitions were higher. You know, duh. But heard one way, this might perhaps be called Garage Prague. Heard another way. It's actually somewhat close in concept to what Brian Wilson was doing across town, trying to write richer, more musically informed pop songs. By the time the Dead left la, Brian was deep into the sessions for Good Vibrations, his multi part pop epic with worked out vocal arrangements and abrupt section changes. No guitar solo though. By the time Good Vibrations was Released in December. Otis on a shakedown cruise, was long gone from the Dead set lists. It certainly wasn't easy to play, maybe more clever than musical. Try it with your band. That version from July 1966 is the last known time they performed it. But for a minute they were thinking about putting it on a single. Like the Dead in la. It was a fleeting thought. By the time the UCLA acid test was canceled in late March, the heat was rising.
- [86:46]
J
Larry Schiller, he was not as well known as he became. But he got the job of doing a cover for Life magazine. And a story inside on LSD and doing the shooting for it. So he set up a phony acid test in the studio. And got everybody to come there and perform for him. And so everybody's in there and the strobe light's going, and the music's going. Can music's going. But he's there saying, all right, now, you people there, no start dancing.
- [87:16]
B
Just stand there and talk.
- [87:17]
J
Start dancing.
- [87:18]
E
The photographer for Life magazine came to do a photo session at one of the acid tests before it started. So there was an arrangement made that we would dance under a strobe light. And also pose, however, for this photo shoot. And so there was these big portrait lights. I mean, a whole photo shoot setup. The photos are. They're really kind of funny because you can see there's Jerry and Bobby and a couple of the Pranksters. All dressed out in their wild, crazy costumes. And were posed. Like some kind of statues were posed in these photos. You have to look them up. They're really funny. So there's a girl in a green dress in that photo, and that's me.
- [88:09]
J
As it got close to midnight, I went and tapped all the Pranksters on the shoulder. And I said, let's go out in the bus parked outside. I said, so what do you say? Let's go down to Mexico. Y' all said, yeah, let's go to Mexico. So we. George started the bus up and we headed out and met Keyzi down there in Mexico. And we went on down south to this little town called Manzanillo and stayed down there for six months. One of the best wood shedding that anybody's ever done in their lives.
- [88:42]
C
The Merry Pranksters reconvene with Ken Kesey south of the border. The acid tests were over.
- [88:47]
E
As we were going through the time in la, we did a number of consecutive acid tests. February, March, and maybe into April or something. But then at one point, then they did go to Mexico, and there was no more acid tests. And There we were in la, you know, with no gigs, no money. What do we do now? And that's when we did the one gig at the Troopers Hall. Rock and Danny put that together and that's just a one off, you know, it's just kind of a fun memory. We did everything ourselves. It was kind of like, you know, those old movies with the kids going, hey, let's put on a show, you know. And so we, Owsley drew up a poster that we put on all the telephone poles. We rented this Troopers hall, which was a small performance space in a home for retired actors. We all got high and had a good time. There were a hundred people, but the Pranksters were long gone. It wasn't a NASA test and it was kind of our last hurrah in la. Meanwhile, back in the Bay Area, the ballrooms were in full flower and everybody was having a good old time. And there was gigs galore, you know, we just said we got to get out of la. And so Melissa and I were sent north with a big wad of cash to find a rental where we could all live and re enter the Bay Area scene. That's when I found Olampoli and he ended up going there for six weeks and came back to the Bay Area.
- [90:38]
C
For Tim Scully, it had all been an eye opening experience.
- [90:42]
B
I really came to like the guys in the band a lot and I lived with them for several months and that was, you know, that was a great experience, very broadening.
- [90:51]
D
It finally got to a point where it was just not working. And everybody sat down and they said, hey, it's not working. And I said, fine, I agree with you, I don't think it's working. And they said, well, we want to do something different. I said, fine, go to the music store and pick out what you want.
- [91:10]
B
So this is where you began being there.
- [91:12]
D
And he says, and then what? I says, well, I'll buy all the stuff you have now for the amount of money it takes to buy all the stuff you need, right? So I'll make a trade. So they went and got all the stuff that they wanted and I took all the stuff. And so then I went and sold it all off. And I sold some to the straight theater, some to Bill Graham, some to this and some to that. So all got sold. All I gotta get rid of. Some of it I gave away. A lot of it I gave away.
- [91:32]
C
And so went Owsley's original stereo. Its last hurrah were the two performances in Vancouver in late July. The last of Behr's first year of sonic journaling, he'd get back to it. He and Tim had to go make some more LSD first. The Vancouver tapes are where you don't have to ask came from. And it's where our last song today comes from too. Incredible. Thanks to Tim, Don, Rosie, Denise and Babs and our buddy David Gans, we'll let Tim Scully introduce this final bit.
- [92:00]
B
My favorite song that the band played from that time was Jerry doing Baby Blue.
- [92:36]
A
How about that Ouija board story? And I love how much of a family the Grateful Dead were from the very start. Hearing Rosie talk about the band as a we when she told the story about finding Olampoli highlights the unique community they created that continues to welcome like minded heads to this day. Be kind. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next episode. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast Martin, Mark Pincus and Doron Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.