Authors: Robert Greenfield
Rock Scully:
We weren't the kind of a band that had this following of groupies or anything like that. With Pigpen in charge of the kitchen and Garcia at the top of the stairs, we were a pretty frightening bunch. It was not like we were mobbed there. It did start up, though. First of all with druggies. Pot dealers. People who wanted to get high. People who wanted to finance it. Six months earlier, we were having dances in these Victorian houses on Page Street. We'd have the band in the kitchen banging on pots. Red Mountain burgundy. That was about it.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
I went to visit him there. On some level, we both really wanted to bring the family back together. But there was no privacy at 710 and people were coming in at all hours of the night. There was noise and who knew what was going on. It wasn't a family. It wasn't a place where I could do family. Although we both felt the pull to get back together, it just didn't seem like it would work. By this time, I was singing with the Anonymous Artists of America. We were living up at Rancho Diablo off Skyline Boulevard. There were couples and there were children and there were dogs. We lived in the redwoods and we ate meals together. It was family.
Ken Kesey:
We were planning to do this Acid Test Graduation. It happened in a place called the Warehouse. The Dead were supposed to play but because it all got too tacky, they didn't play and we got a group called the Anonymous Artists to play for the Acid Test Graduation. Which in its way was appropriate because it was the dénouement of something.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
When they let Kesey out of jail, the band I was in, the Triple A, played for the Acid Test Graduation. The Dead was supposed to play but they were worried about jeopardizing their record contract. Because it might be bad for their reputation to be associated with the drug scene. “Cleanliness is next”âthat was Kesey's new motto to impress his parole officer. But in case it didn't turn out to be too clean, the Dead couldn't afford to be associated with it. They dropped out at the last moment.
Joe Smith:
I was doing some A and R stuff and promotion at Warner's and Tom Donahue tipped me about the Grateful Dead, who had this very offputting name. I didn't know much about them. I went up to San Francisco and they were playing the Avalon Ballroom. My wife and I were having dinner at Ernie's and I was in my Bank of America blue suit with the striped tie. My wife was in her basic black with the pearls and Donahue called. He said, “The band would like to see you now.” I said, “I'm all dressed up.” He said, “It won't matter. Nobody will notice.” We went over to the Avalon Ballroom and went upstairs. This was something so removed from anything I had ever known or seen in my life before. It was Fellini on stage. People lying on the floor. Body painting. Light shows. Incense. And this droning set from the Dead. One of their eleven-hour shows. With a twenty-nine-minute space guitar solo from Jerry Garcia. As soon as I started talking to them, I got calls from people around the country. “Wow. You're going to have the Dead? Okay!”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
The focus became the performances and how to get them there. Where to play and how to get some freedom in the system. How to close the street so we could do the gigs in the Panhandle and in the park. The scene was based around the music, which was powerful. They were playing amazing, compelling music. Very compelling.
Sue Swanson:
I think we all got twenty-five dollars a week. Jerry got twenty-five dollars a week. I got twenty-five dollars a week. That was the way it was. But there was nothing more fun than just going out, getting in the flatbed truck, getting the generator, and going down to the Panhandle to play. It was the greatest.
Rock Scully:
No one was supposed to be in charge. That was one of our rules in those days. That way, they could never put the finger on anybody. When the Grateful Dead started doing free concerts in the park, we never went and got permits or anything. We didn't get permission to play in the middle of the street on Haight Street. We just did it. One of the ways that we got away with another hour's worth of music before they finally shut us down was that they could never find out who was in charge.
Mickey Hart:
Every time we looked around, somebody was into something. Nobody was saying no. Every day, we were exploring. We'd get up in the morning and say, “What are we going to do? Let's play free in the park. Rock! Benny! Get the trucks and get the generator! Call Sweet William! Call Badger! Let's get it on!” We'd get a couple of flatbed trucks and the Hell's Angels to run the lines to make sure that the cops didn't pull the plugs. That was the way it worked in those days. We were spontaneous and looked forward to it. The Grateful Dead would play on Haight Street. And when we played, we closed the street down.
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Rock Scully:
Jerry was such a curious intellect that he always questioned everything. He was reading all the time and asking questions and meeting people and very outgoing that way. The crew wanted to protect him because he'd always say yes to everything. Which was why we did so many benefits for so many years. Garcia would say yes to almost everyone. The Zenefit. HALO, the Haight-Ashbury Legal Organization, and on and on and on and on. Somebody died, we'd do a concert. The Zen Buddhists wanted to take over this piece of property? We'd do that. The creamery was failing in Eugene or Springfield? Let's go fix that. We got to the place where we were going, “There is really no such thing as a free gig.” We had to drive there, buy the gas, and rent the generator.
Owsley Stanley:
On numerous occasions at 710, I would come across this little notebook that Jerry had which was full of doodles. They were just doodles that he would sit down and draw. These intricately drawn beautiful pen-and-ink figures of all the things you would see when you got high on acid. Beautifully detailed interlocking motifs that faded in and out of each other on different levels and mutated and all beautifully done and exquisite. The finest artwork you've ever seen. The stuff you could never do once you came down. But he could draw them perfectly.
Ron Rakow:
Garcia wanted to go into business with me. I said, “How can I go into business with somebody I can't even talk to about the business?” He said, “You can talk to me about anything.” I said, “No. The language of business is accounting.” He said, “How hard could it be?” So I brought up a bunch of financial statements and went over them with him and he said, “Oh, this isn't going to be hard. I'll get this.” I bought an elementary accounting textbook from the NYU bookstore and sat down with him. Over the course of some months, I taught him about debits, credits, non-cash charges. Assets, liabilities, and net worth. I taught him formal accounting. When we were done, he could analyze a financial statement.
Sue Swanson:
Those were glory days, man. Did you ever hear about the Thanksgiving dinner at 710? It was Quicksilver, the Dead, and the Airplane and I'm sure there were other people there as well. At 710, there was a front room, a middle room and then Pig's room, all with sliding doors. We opened all the sliding doors, even Pig's room, pushed all his stuff out of the way, got the TV over to the side, and put a table that snaked all the way through. Everybody cooked something. That was the first time I ever baked bread. Jack Casady rolled a joint for each place. Every plate had a joint. What a great night. That was sort of what the place was all about.
Jon Mcintire:
My take on what I think was really important about the hippies was not the political stuff but the avowedly apolitical stuff, the more authentic experiments with the new. There was an avowed duty to experience joy and Garcia personified that. The flip side of that was also there because just like when you get close to any family, the surface seems all neat and together, but there are a lot of snakes underneath. You got too close to Garcia and all these positive things that he personified, he was. But there was also a lot of stuff totally contradictory to that. Which he also was.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
We were taking psychedelics and smoking great weed. When I moved into that house, they had a kilo of Acapulco Gold in the kitchen and I had never smoked anything like that in my whole life. It was just fabulous.
Sue Swanson:
They were the first couple I had ever been around who were so magically together. He was very affectionate. Very touchy touchy touchy. And Sunshine was this beautiful child. She was the reason I had children. She was blond-haired and blue-eyed. I carried her around and I thought she was mine. I thought, “Gotta have one of these.”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
At the time, Pigpen was very much an enigma to me. I didn't understand him at all. Jerry seemed really wide open and completely accessible. Pigpen was very mysterious and stayed up all night a lot and drank cheap wine. I didn't understand that. I don't think any of us understood how much he was drinking except for the people who drank with him. None of us drank. Are you kidding? It was totally the antithesis to what we were doing.
Jon Mcintire:
The most recent musical turn-on for me before the Grateful Dead was
Moses and Aaron
by Schoenberg. I couldn't quite get the Dead and then all of a sudden, I was hearing this incredible voice, this amazing sweet voice, and I was trying to figure out where was it coming from and it was Pigpen. He was the only one back then who could sing well. And he was the only one who could really play. Jerry wasn't that good on the guitar as I remember and as he remembered it, too. We talked about that. And Pigpen really played the organ well and he really sang well because Pigpen came from a blues background from his dad.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
The worst stuff that happened was Pigpen keeping us up all night singing. We'd be stomping on the floor. “
Pig!
For crying out loud,
shut up!
” I had a little baby. I was on baby time and we had regular bedtimes. We were down by eleven. Jerry would be out of bed chipper at six-thirty in the morning, practicing. The first thing I'd hear when I woke up would be Jerry plinking away.
Plink, Plink, Plink, Plink, Plink
. Going a mile a minute and he'd already been up for two hours. Apparently, he didn't need a lot of sleep. He practiced religiously every day until nearly noon. He had started with the banjo. My feeling about his banjo thing was that he was such a gifted musician that he'd taken his banjo, which was a really clanky, clunky, basically rhythm instrument on which you play these weird patterns, as far as he could go. It had been his mission to excel at the banjo to a point where he was better than everybody else and he was there. He'd nailed that one.
Jon Mcintire:
Back when Jerry had really been into the banjo, he told me that he'd considered himself one of the best banjo players in America. In terms of the guitar at that time, which was about 1968 or '69, he didn't consider himself to be that good yet. Back then, his playing didn't stand out for me the way it did later on. It was like they were all learning, and of course Phil really had just barely taken up the bass.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
When he moved on to the electric guitar, that was a whole new instrument. It took him a good deal of time to get proficient with it. He was busy learning in the midst of the Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service, all of them claiming to have some musicianship. Jorma Kaukonen was a really strong influence because he was such a good musician as well. There was some rivalry there and Jerry felt the need to really push himself.
Jorma Kaukonen:
Jerry was a leader. When I look back on it, I realize that Jerry was always the leader. When he worked with us on
Surrealistic Pillow
, he really helped discipline us. Because he had come from a band and as a band leader and an arranger, he just really knew what was important. He was really important in the formation of that record and I know that personally he taught me a lot about playing in a band. I remember one evening he said to us, “It's not what you play. It's what you don't play that's important.” In terms of dynamics and just plain letting the music speak for itself. As a band leader, he was really ahead of the rest of us.
Jon Mcintire:
I remember Phil Lesh's story about the first time he met Garcia. He hated him. “Really?” I said. “Why?” He said, “This guy has too much power.” There was this thing about Garcia that had been there from the get-go. An aura of personal power that could not be explained by any single thing. Although he was extraordinarily lucid when speaking, he didn't play on that very much. But he just emanated an authority. What was also going on was a redefinition of what cool was. An expansion of what cool was. And Garcia personified that.
Bill Thompson:
The Jefferson Airplane were playing the Matrix and two guys came in wearing leather who I thought were Hell's Angels. Marty Balin started laughing. He said, “Bill, you're not going to believe it. Those guys have got a band.” It was Pigpen and Jerry Garcia.
Grace Slick:
The Grateful Dead looked like they were almost dead. They were only just twenty years old. But a bizarre-looking group of people.
David Freiberg:
He sure did help the Airplane with
Surrealistic Pillow
. I don't know what that would have been without him. He was on every track, pretty near. I can hear him playing on “Today.” I always thought the sweetness thing that got put on that whole album never would have been there if it wasn't for him. Because it wasn't on any other album they ever did.