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- [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. 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. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Well, we have a treat for you today in the form of this unique April Fool's Day bonus episode that features two esteemed guests, merry pranksters Ken Babs and Denise Kaufman. To say that Jesse and I enjoyed our conversations with Ken and Denise would be a frontrunner for understatement of the eon. Both of these luminous souls sparkle with excitement and enthusiasm when sharing their stories, and our conversations focused around one particularly important event in Grateful Dead history, the Fillmore Acid Test that took place on January 8, 1966. This event was recorded by the Kens, that's Babs and Key, respectively. And the tape captured the chaotic and colorful goings on, which includes the first recording of the Grateful Dead.
- [02:12]
B
Today, we're going to explore the very first live Grateful Dead tape in Circulation, recorded January 8, 1966 at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. And specifically, what happens during the last five or so minutes. It might be the first piece of great improvisation on a Dead tape, but even though almost every Dead member is involved, it's not exactly music. Let's start at the beginning. This is the first 23 seconds of live Dead appropriately. They're getting in tune.
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C
Everybody.
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B
It was the Fillmore Acid Test.
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C
Hello? Hello? Am I coming through? Oh, yes. There. I see a reading on the meter. Hello there. We've been waiting for you. It's me, friends, the old pointed head. I'm nestled somewhere deep inside the bowels of the Fillmore Auditorium, where I will be reporting the events of this auspicious.
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D
What's that?
- [03:22]
C
The toilet? No, no, no. Certainly not in here. No, I have no idea at all where it is.
- [03:29]
E
Let's see now, where was I?
- [03:32]
C
The Fillmore Auditorium, one of the Bay Area's brightest night spots, located here on the corner of Fillmore and Geary streets. Big Bay today. Bum, bum bum Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum I'm coming to you from communications. Located high on a balcony overlooking the main floor of the Fillmore Auditorium and able to participate in this historic endeavor thanks to a personal invitation extended to me by the Captain himself.
- [04:02]
B
That was Ken Babs of the Merry Pranksters. And this is Ken Babs of the Merry Pranksters.
- [04:07]
D
I was not only the tapir, but also up there in Comm Central, up in the balcony there at the Fillmore, taping and talking with Keezy and Cassidy while the band played on and events went on. Down on the floor, the acid test is everywhere.
- [04:23]
C
In this spaceship. Everywhere you are, you're all acid testing and acid tasting. Inside the confines of this interspatial dome, you will find the acid test taking.
- [04:33]
B
Place only a little bit more than a month earlier. The band on the floor had been known as the Warlocks. Then, in the late autumn of 1965, Jerry Garcia opened a dictionary and found the quintet a new name. Their first appearance as the Dead was also the first public acid test. December 4, 1965, in San Jose. Over the next few weekends, the acid test manifested in out of the way spots north and south of San Francisco. Possibly there was an out of town trip to and in Portland over the holidays. But memories are slippery and that may have been after the Fillmore. No matter how you look at it, though, the Fillmore Acid Test was the Pranksters and the Dead's first big party in the big city. Things are obviously already in full chaos as the band is getting ready to play.
- [05:17]
C
Just keep a playin', boys. You're coming through one of these. There ain't no power on the stage. Come on. Just keep no electricity on the stage. Fix it. This is the captain speaking. We have reached our first emergency and we haven't even got by the boundary. Why don't you rectify it pretty damn quick? Everybody put their worries and frets to mind to produce some electricity. Electricity for the space. It's about time to get it ready. Yes, we got our own electricity wires all around here, plugged into electricity all around here. Now just reach down, everybody. Hey, man, stop y' all babbling and fix these microphones. We need some power. Power, power, power. We need the power, the power. Anybody that can steady power, you got the power. Power. Come on now, get some power up here on the stage. Our best technicians are now on the problem. All right, turn up the microphone.
- [06:19]
D
And I'm saying, hang on there. Everybody's working here together to get the power going. Let's all together down on the floor and everybody starts screaming for power. And Pig Ben says, stop your babbling and give us some power. Somebody noticed that the electricity to the amplifiers was not plugged in. They plugged it in and boom. Suddenly everything came to life. And then the scene went on after that.
- [06:51]
B
Things weren't exactly under control. But the Dead did get to start their set, though they weren't playing on the stage.
- [06:57]
D
It must have been on the floor, because all the time they were playing, people were wandering in and amongst them. This was not a Bill Graham or anything like that. Bill Graham hadn't started doing stuff at the Fillmore yet. Our lawyer, Brian Rohan, had gone to the guy that ran the place and rented the hall for Saturday night.
- [07:18]
B
For over a decade, the Fillmore auditorium had been the musical center of San Francisco's Fillmore neighborhood. Sometimes called the Harlem of the West. Under owner Charles Sullivan, the ballroom became a center of black culture. With performances by James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, lectures by Malcolm X, and appearances by countless others, it became a west coast center for R and B, gospel, and the new music known as rock and roll. Bill Graham and the Mime Troupe had rented the venue from Charles Sullivan in December 1965. And later in 1966, Graham would start booking shows there on Sullivan's off nights, but not yet.
- [07:55]
D
And so the guy asked Brian, he says, well, what's the group? And he says, oh, it's this up and coming popular hot band in San Francisco now called the Grateful Dead.
- [08:05]
F
Oh.
- [08:05]
D
And he said, oh, okay. And so we all went in with all our gear and everything and did it all ourselves with, you know, nobody there, Just us and the people who came to the acid test. And the way they came was you just paid your dollar and got in the door. And we took their pict with a Polaroid camera and pasted it to a card, their acid test card. And with that card, when they came to another acid test, they'd pay a dollar and they'd get in the door. The only rule we had was everybody had to stay all night because we didn't want people wandering around the streets the next morning, loaded and loony out there, you know, and causing some kind of fuss. There were all these things that people were doing down on the floor. Like we had a big, huge speaker, big black speaker with a big black bell, and we hung upside down from the ceiling with a strobe light in there. So the sounds are all coming down through that speaker, and people would get in the. Under that and dance in the strobe lights. And then we had a dance group there that did dance Alpern, I think her name was Ann Alpern and her dance group. And they did dance scenes there all over the floor and all different people doing all their different crazy high things that they did when they were high there, you know, like breathing fire, of course, hula hooping and anything you could think of while the band was playing. And then up on the top, Keezy and I would be talking all the time and Cassidy would be talking all the time.
- [09:42]
B
Here's how Jerry Garcia remembered it in a 1975 KSAN interview with Ben Fongtoris.
- [09:47]
E
I remember one of the Fillmore, the old Fillmore was tremendously successful. There were like microphones distributed all over the place and all different people with mixers and tape recorders and all this stuff and speakers all over the place. And so somebody might say something down in the corner, it would go through a delay and you might hear it up in some other room. Completely unrelated, but there would be the credible timing thing that would be happening so that everything that happened would sort of fit right in perfectly, you know.
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B
It depended who grabbed the mics. Here's a fragment of Ken Kesey.
- [10:17]
E
Glittering, glowing, ever flowing neon.
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C
All the money that we're owing to the electrical company.
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B
But the microphones were legitimately open to everybody.
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D
All the people were on the microphones and just coming on all that one guy that came on and I said, what was his name? Lothar. This is Lothar. I am here bellowing this out. He became quite a famous character on that tape.
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C
You people out there, listen to me. This is Zofar speaking. This is a trap. A trap. You are all busted. Busted. You fools. You fools. You fool. And voice must be loudspeakers. The father sets out to investigate. Out of the days of yesteryear comes the daring in response. Big alright, shoot whatever moves. I mean move whatever shoots.
- [11:33]
B
Pay no attention. The pranksters had found some early portapac cameras paired with a small closed circuit television network. Pretty radically new technology for early 1966.
- [11:43]
D
You could see yourself, you saw it on TV sets. They had a TV set so people do little performances for the camera. And then people could watch them on TV or they could watch themselves on tv.
- [11:55]
E
Somebody would find a microphone on the floor and say, hey, is anybody there? And all of a sudden they'd hear their voice, huge coming from all over, you know, and they'd start raving, you know. Then it would go away, you know, and something else would come up. And all this, you Know, kind of continuous weirdness, you know, it's just so funny, you know.
- [12:13]
B
One of the Merry Pranksters who shows up a little bit later on the tape is Denise Kaufman, known in the Pranksters as Mary Microgram. She would become a co founder of the great band Ace of Cups, who got back together a few years ago and have a fantastic new album out called Sing youg Dream on High Moon Records. She'd been at all the public acid tests so far.
- [12:31]
F
The one in San Jose was pretty epic.
- [12:34]
B
What made it so epic, Denise?
- [12:36]
F
Well, the Grateful Dead, you know, there was this whole festival that was going on. The Rolling Stones were like playing nearby or supposed to be. And I mean, there was. It was. There was a lot of energy. The one at SoCal, you know, I think, was a precursor and it was sort of beginning. But San Jose was pretty. It's in this big old, like old Victorian ish house.
- [12:59]
B
It was their first performance with the name the Grateful Dead. The house has moved to a different part of town, but you can still find it in San Jose. And it's pretty funny to imagine the Dead crammed into the house's bay window. Denise made a pretty significant contribution to psychedelic lore a few weeks later at the Big Beat Acid Test.
- [13:17]
F
That was a club that was sort of between ownership or something like that. And so we were able to get this club in East Palo Alto. And there was a big, huge parking lot. And I don't remember a whole bunch of cars, but there were some cars. But the Dead had just played this really great set. And I remember Turn on your Love Light and Midnight Hour, Pig Pen rocking out. And then they went on a break. And Jerry and I walked out into the parking lot and there was nobody else around. And we were standing there. He had a hat on. And we were just talking and getting some fresh air. And this cop car drives up and it parks some distance away from us. And this cop gets out of the car and walks toward us. And, you know, it just occurred to me, like, oh, that just would not be good if he went in there, you know, with the vats of Kool Aid and whatever else was going on. You know, I was like, oh, right. And he walked up and he walked up with kind of a. Kind of. I would. An aggressive kind of walk, like, you know, walk. And as he got to us, Jerry did this thing that I could just. It was like an aikido move. It was like a ninja move. Like, he just didn't meet that energy and he just kind of. Like there was something that he did that was just so sweet and soft. And I couldn't tell you exactly the words that were said between the cop and Jerry, but it was sort of like something about Jerry just totally disarmed that energy. And the cop just kind of relaxed. And then he said, okay, well, have a good night. And he turned around to walk away. And it was like, you know, the difference of how he walked over to us and how he walked away was just like. Like that. And Jerry looked at him as he was walking away, and he took his cap and he went, trips, Captain. And I was like. And we walked inside and Keezy was right there. And I said to Kezi, I just saw Jerry do, like, magic. And so I described it to him. You know, it was just so. And so Tripp's captain turned into Captain Tripps.
- [15:26]
B
At the Fillmore acid test, Denise had something a little heavier to deal with than cops.
- [15:31]
F
So, you know, that night I had taken quite a bit of lsd, and my parents came to the Fillmore. They had come from some event. I was born and raised in San Francisco. My parents were kind of active in the community in different ways. So they had been at some black tie event, and my dad was in a black tie. I don't know if it was a tuxedo, but it was a, you know, black tie suit. And my mother was in an evening dress. And they kind of blended in, you know, like, with all the other, you know. But I remember they walked up to me and. And I was quite expanded. And I was like, I couldn't compute for a minute. I was just like, I couldn't compute who I was and who they were and where we were and everything. So that was like, oh, okay. That was kind of a memorable moment of that night for me, you know, because I'd been hanging out then with Casey since the previous. I mean, on the bus with the Prankster since the previous June. And they had never been to anything or seen, you know, kind of what we were up to. So I don't think that gave them a lot of comfort.
- [16:53]
B
When the Pranksters and the Dead emigrated briefly to LA a few weeks after this tape, Del Close would join the Brigade for a few acid tests later. Close would be known as the pioneer of long form improvised comedy, the same way the Dead would be known as the pioneers of long form improvised rock music. The acid tests were neither comedy nor music exactly, but somehow both. The last five minutes of the Fillmore acid test tape is one of the best distillations of the merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead collaborating at their peak. Emphasis on Peak. Around 2am, San Francisco's curfew for live music, things came to a halt. This is what happens, Larry, when you shut down an acid test.
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D
Finally, early in the morning, this guy that rented the hall we had rented the hall from appears on stage and he's saying, the dance is over. Everybody clear the hall. The dance is over.
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C
Everybody else, the dance is over.
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B
And here's Babs reacting in real time.
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C
He's made his extraordinary announcement and has pulled the block on the band, completely nullifying the engines.
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B
It's possible the man the Pranksters rented the venue from was Charles Sullivan himself. Though after a dozen years, the venue probably had a night manager to deal with the hippies who wanted to rent it.
- [18:12]
D
We had a microphone down in the crowd and Mountain Girl got on that and she was saying, I'm not leaving. She says, I'm not leaving this place. She says, nobody's going to kick me out of here. We're staying. And nobody was leaving. And finally our lawyer, Brian, who rented the place, comes on and he tries to talk everybody into it. Nobody had anything to do with Brian.
- [18:34]
B
Rohan would become one of the Dead's attorneys and negotiated their first contract with Warner Bros. As well as representing the band after their bust at 710 Ashbury street where, not coincidentally, Rohan worked pro bono as part of the Hate Ashbury Legal Organization. Very sadly, Brian Rohan passed away as we were putting this episode together, he appears here, and it's one of my favorite moments of the tape. He's very much keeping his shit together, maybe not even dosed. After Rohan finishes speaking, Bob Weir picks up on his last phrase while Ken Kesey appears in the mix and Weir riffs off of him, too. And one more thing.
- [19:08]
D
And that's when the cops showed up.
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B
You can hear the sirens appear during this sequence.
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C
Number two. We're planning on having other gigs in other cities, and if we have a hassle here, there's not going to be another hall that'll have us. So we'd appreciate. We'll just go a little bit more and then we'll turn on the lights and everybody use their head. Yeah, use your head. Everybody be calm now. Everybody keep very calm. There's nothing to worry about. Rumors of variety. Nothing to worry about. We're having a minute chaos.
- [19:43]
E
The cops came in and they looked around and here's this one of Ron Boyce's big Sculptor big thunder machines there, you know, people banging on it and pouring DayGlo paint over it. It's making this incredible din resonating and weird tastes and weird sounds going on. People running around, all this just totally banana shit going on. Here's these stray, good old Four Square San Francisco Irish cops, you know, a whole bunch of them, dozen or so of them, and they're in there. Who's in charge here? You know, it's like the limit of the absurd.
- [20:14]
B
In one account of this acid test, police officers begin walking through the room and unplugging the Prankster's electronics, Mountain Girl follows just behind and plugs everything back in. When the lights went off, everybody cheered. When the lights went back on, everybody also cheered.
- [20:29]
E
You know, who's in charge here, isn't it? There's cops standing there and standing in the middle of the floor, you know, with half a dozen freaks around him, raving at him.
- [20:38]
B
One of the things I love about this tape is that different voices come and go and there's some clear plot development happening both on and off mic after his narration at the beginning, Ken Babs voice disappears with the arrival of the police.
- [20:51]
E
Babs comes down and he looks like Babs at that time was. And Keezy and the Pranksters all had these kind of like superhero costumes that they wore. And they just looked incredible. Babs looked like, you know, Captain Marvel in the midst of these dumpy cops, you know, and he has this expansive style. Well, what is it, fellows? You know, what's going on, gentlemen? You know, can I be of some assistance? You know, and he's tall and commanding and all that. And he was an officer, and so he had all the shtick, you know, the officer's shtick. And he could always really come on to the cops. Just great.
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B
If you take into account the altitude and atmospheric conditions during the space time where this story occurred, what happened next is absolutely literal and accurate.
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D
And they came in and they were trying to hustle people out the door. I was sitting in the back there and the chair watching everything. And this one young officer comes up to me, says, you're going to have to get out of here. I says, no. I says, I can't. He says, why? I run this thing. I'm part of it. I said, I got to stay and clean up. He says, don't give me that. And he takes me by the coat and he pulls me. He's going to pull me out of there. I just bent down and slipped off and he pulled my jacket off and went tumbling back on the floor. And he got up and I said, okay. I says, let's go outside and we'll talk all this over. And we went outside and he calmed down and he wanted to know what the hell was going on in there. And I said, well, Ken Kesey and I do this show all over the place and we finally did it here at the Fillmore. I says, and we let it go till dawn and everybody leaves and all that. He says, where do you live anyway? And I says, santa Cruz. He's Santa Cruz. He says, what are you doing up here? I said, well, this is where we come and do this stuff. And he says, well, how often do you come here from Santa Cruz? I said, well, I don't know. I said, whenever I feel like it. He said, oh, okay. And he walked away and left us all alone.
- [22:45]
B
Meanwhile, back inside, Bob Weir is trying to get Jerry Garcia's attention to play one more song.
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C
Hey, Jer. On the road again. To keep the get the people on the road.
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B
But being an acid test, there are still plenty of open microphones. And this tape contains some unidentified flying trippers.
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C
All your families, families who don't want to stay here, please. Cops.
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E
Something happened and the cops were up in the balcony. They were going around in a little official knots, are inspecting, you know, and all of a sudden these freaks are there with this ladder and they're putting this ladder up to the balcony and climbing it and they're hollering how the heat?
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F
How's the heat?
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E
Amazing. These amazing crazy demonstrations.
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B
Maybe around the time the heat were getting hugged, Bob Weir got on a soapbox.
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C
You know, when you come to one of these things, you want to have a lot of clean fud. You know, good clean fudge and enjoy yourself and not hurt anybody, you know, and well, that's what people come here to do. Then they get kicked out, you know, really a pity. Try and shave is this. Is this thing still on? Arrest everybody, but don't hurt any of the equipment, you know, it's our livelihood.
- [24:15]
E
There was some cop on the stage. I remember an amazing scene with Weir and Phil. And Weir and Phil are both tremendous anti authoritarian guys. They hate any authority figures. And here's this cop, you know, like the lieutenant up there trying to make an announcement over the microphone, which is being. The dials are being run by some madman up in the valley somewhere. So the cop's voice is coming in and out and Kesey is raving some sort of semi patriotic slow hogans for the top of the cops rap about we have to clear the place out. And the thing would cut off right in the middle of his rap and feeling weird. They're arm in arm, you know, around each other singing something like the Star Spangled Banner real loud in the cops ear, you know, some big bear of a freak is banging his hand with a tambourine, you know, and the cops looking. I mean, it was just so funny. Really hilarious, you know, just amazing. Gun.
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B
Here you can hear Phil Lesh suggest to his bandmates that they sing the Star Spangled Banner.
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C
What a proudly we hail at the twilight clash beaming. Who's that?
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D
Right?
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C
And bright star. We're just signing off, you know, signing off with the Star Spangled Banger.
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B
You know, the Star Spangled Banger might be my new national anthem. And here we have the arrival of Jerry Garcia.
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C
We can stay here until hell freezes over, but we have to turn everything off. Okay, that's. Everybody go home, man. Everything is over. We don't have no choice. Oh, wait a minute. We don't want any trouble here. Okay? Now everybody out, man. It's been a nice party tonight. It's not spoiling now. That won't work. We have order tactics.
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D
Won't work around here.
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C
The never ending drama of young Robert Weir, local policeman. Everybody go home now, please. Chaos everywhere, chaos. Can you imagine? Total chaos. Rack and ruin. Best let them run it out. Let the energy just eventually wear out. Let them just stay here. Cops seem to be turning everything off and they have asked everybody to be turned off. That's impossible. You know as well as I do nobody's gonna be turned off. We're not machines after all. We're human beings. Can't turn us off. I know he can try to turn me off, but my switches have all.
- [27:10]
B
Been short circuited in terms of pranksters versus non pranksters. @ this point, the pranksters are pretty clearly in the lead and that lead is growing rapidly.
- [27:18]
C
Nobody can seem to find out how you're supposed to turn off this painting. Tastic. Fuck you.
- [27:36]
B
There are a few different versions of the tape floating around, unsurprisingly, with different fragments sometimes layered over others. The first voice on this segment is Mountain Girl. The harmonica player is Denise Kaufman.
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C
Find a harmonica, Denise. The crowd. Good night, ladies and gentlemen. We enjoyed having you here.
- [28:25]
F
I was on a mic with the harp and then I was also going back and forth making some sounds. You know, we all. I mean, we're a number of us run mics, right? So, you know, so those like that was all. And it was echoing around the room, right? With lots of reverb and speakers everywhere. Yeah, that harmonica playing was Definitely a space harmonica playing.
- [28:50]
B
At this point, I think there are two different pranksters who've picked up microphones and are retreating into the chaos.
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C
I don't know, we seem to be loose in the crowd here with a microphone and there just seems to be nobody doing anything that we're supposed to be doing. It just seems to be orderly chaos.
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B
And finally materializing out of the chaos, perfectly chill and all lit up at an untouched microphone. As Mary Microgram continues to wail. Here's Jerry Garcia to sum it all up.
- [29:26]
C
Even as it started, even with that same old dude, good old mindless chaos hassling Ever Hasling.
- [29:37]
B
And that's where most versions of the tape end, with one of the all time great psychedelic soliloquies. One of the other pieces of off mic action was the arrival of Brian Rohan to intercede with Ken Babs. Sometimes after his lone appearance on the recording. It's unclear exactly what happened and it doesn't really matter. But now back to the Mind Eye camera operated by Ken Babs.
- [29:57]
C
Is it my microphone still in operation? Yes, I believe it is. Just as we have feared, we are in a decaying orbit. But according to our latest report from the chief engineer we will achieve a soft safe landing so there's no cause for alarm. The legal pickle has given the chief security officer the necessary power to. To take command of the ship. And at any time he may completely shut down all electrical operation until then. The captain assures me that we'll keep all the lines open.
- [30:33]
D
So I went back in and we continued until dawn's early light. And when everybody left and we cleaned up and everything. But the beautiful thing about it was we had this tape, the Fillmore Auditorium acid test. And it. We have so many tapes, reel to reel, stereo great tapes. And they needed, they need work, you know, they needed to be edited. And I edited that Fillmore Auditorium tape down to what I considered to be a two sided record, you know, 20 minutes aside and got it all. You know, you had to cut the tape and splice it together and fill in other stuff and everything. And really, I think it's really one of the best tapes we've ever made. And then I designed an album cover and I first went to a printing shop and it was a head printing shop in San Francisco. It was doing Zap comics and that kind of stuff. And I thought they'd be the natural for it. And then they looked at it and then they looked at my liner notes and everything. They said, no, we can't do that. I said, why not? They said, this is too radical for us. This is. This is too far out. I said, what? I said, okay. And then I went to our lawyer, Brian, and told him what was going on. And he says, well, he said, I don't think this is going to happen as a record. I said, oh, damn. And so then other things happened. Kesey got busted for pot on a roof and had to go through the court thing. And that Acid Test tape just kind of slid into obscurity.
- [32:20]
B
There's a lot to unpack there. But if Ken's chronology matches with the one in our current time fork, and it might not, Underground comics were still two years away. But if he's remembering correctly, and this all went down in the week or two between the Fillmore Acid Test and when the Merry Prankster split town, the tape that has long circulated as the Fillmore Acid Test might be thought of as the Grateful Dead's lost debut album. Side A More Power Rap King B and Hog for your Baby side B Caution, do not Stop on the tracks. Death don't have no Mercy and the Meltdown we just listened to, ending with Jerry's Soliloquy. Ken Babs PRODUCER which is to say that Ken Babs took the full tape of the epic Fillmore Acid Test meltdown, used his best artistic judgment, and made the amazing and dramatic audio document that's become a part of the Dead's lore.
- [33:10]
D
We would put everything down into our two track apex. And that would be the one, that would be the master tape, and that would be the one that I would use for the editing, just cutting and pasting that on the actual, actual only tape. God, we made so many tapes. Keith and I started doing that when we met in Stanford in 1959. And I had a reel to reel tape recorder. And even then we'd stay up late at night wrapping stories and stuff into it. And then so we did that all the time we knew each other.
- [33:43]
B
And that's the story of the first Grateful Dead tape. And depending how you look at it, the first lost Grateful Dead album. That's a lot. Thanks, Ken. Ken Babs was and is a merry prankster and writer. He's got a few new book projects that Deadhead readers might enjoy.
- [33:57]
D
In Eugene, there's this bookstore called Tsunami Books, which is Eugene's version of City Light's bookstore. And so these books I'm selling, two of them we've done there. One is a book of poetry and another is a chapter from this big book I've written called Cronies all about the adventures with Cassidy and Kesey and the Grateful Dead and the Pranksters. And I'm still looking for a publisher for that. So I had. We published a chapbook called We Were Arrested. It Was Time We All Got Busted at La Honda. One of the chapters of the book.
- [34:30]
B
And coming soon, is a reprint of a title babs published in 1981.
- [34:34]
D
Back in the 70s, Kesey and I did a series of small literary magazines called Spit in the Ocean. And we did one through six, each one edited by a different person. And so I edited number six, which is called the Cassidy issue. It's all about Neil and stories by people who know him.
- [34:55]
B
It includes some stories by and featuring Jerry Garcia and the Dead, as well as an even rarer interview with Merry Prankster and Grateful Dead crew chief Ramrod. I found my copy at a used bookstore in the olden days of the 20th century and recommend it highly. Tsunami Books is at tsunamibooks.org and we've posted some links@dead.net deadcast. You can find Ken Babs on Facebook as well, oftentimes and perhaps at the Fillmore. Denise Kaufman had a role in helping to land the Acid Tests, and we'll let her do the same for today's Deadcast.
- [35:26]
F
A lot of times, my kind of what fell to me was as the Acid Test would wind down, I would just get on a mic on the stage or some, you know, like sit somewhere and play more kind of spacey or mellow, real calm music. So usually my own, you know, my. In fact, I think only my own songs like hey Terry was one of them, and just different songs of mine, and I would sort of play them as things were landing. Gemini was a song that Terry Wadsworth and I wrote. Terry Wadsworth was a wonderful singer, songwriter who was in the folk world. I knew him from when I was 14 in San Francisco, and he was like Kesey's age, but he was in the New Christie Minstrels. He was a beautiful songwriter. And so we wrote this song together called Gemini, and I used to sing it at the. At the. It was one of those things I would sing at the end of the Acid Test. I'm the first of the children of Gemini, you know, born in the wind. I was raised with the butterfly and I like little things, pretty things like Moonbeam Wine, if you don't mind. So when the Ace of Cups later got together, it brought that song in and we played it. And then. So when ace of Cups, 50 years later, was recording, we tried to do it on our record, on our new records, our second one as closely as possible to the old way that we used to do it. And so yeah, but yeah, that song kind of first had its first expressions out in the world at the acid test.
- [37:04]
C
And I like little things and I like grissy face like mo be mo beep if you don't mind.
- [37:27]
A
That was Gemini by Ace of Cups from their great new album Sing your Dreams out on High Moon Records. The album has an impressive list of guest artists including Bob Weir, Jackson Brown, Sheila E, David Fryberg, Steve Kimmock, Wavy Gravy, Jack Cassidy and Bukkithi Khumalo. We posted a link@dead.net deadcast so check it out. Stay tuned. The broadcast continues. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.