A gathering at his house was simply
the best.
When I was there, I felt as if I'd been transported back to the salons held by Gertrude Stein. Artists told each other elegant lies and engaged in spirited arguments over the integrity of some author or other. Listening to music through the pleasant alteration of hashish, we were young enough to think that we were the first group of people to really have a handle on IT—the next level of perception in human consciousness. And we thought that all those other “poor suckers” were just plodding along in the old survival grind. Arrogance, indeed—but it was fun buying into our self-created storylines.
Along with the regular jazz musicians, macramé artists, writers, and students gathered at Baxter's, there was also a chemical engineer named Nick who worked for a big oil company. A twenty-two-year-old Brit with pink cheeks, a placid grin, an easy manner, and a Rolls Royce (an appreciation gift from his deep-pocketed employer), he'd invented the glue that adheres those plastic disks (road bumps) to street dividing lines. But industrial-strength glue was not the only powerful stuff Nick knew how to make. After loading us up with all the existing information on the subject, he gave us “homemade” LSD.
Up to that point our group's experience with psychedelics had been pretty much confined to taking peyote, which was a “natural” plant—and that had only occurred a few times. It was at Baxter's house that we'd had our first taste. Peyote (a cactus that was already well known by the desert tribes of Native America), when boiled down to a concentrate, became a vehicle for going out of our minds. Or, in a more gentle interpretation, going from one plane of reality to another (and another and another). Our first peyote experience varied from person to person, but as well as I can use words to describe my earliest psychedelic shift in consciousness, this is how I remember it.
After swallowing the bitter-tasting cactus concentrate with a chaser of water, I sat still and enjoyed the initial sensation, a very subtle tingling or vibrating. Then I became aware of a large, inner area of air that was automatically collecting in my lungs and releasing over and over, without any help or thought behind the process. It reminded me of smoking cigarettes, so I pulled a pack of Marlboros out of my purse. After marveling at the ugliness of the art design, a pathetic blatant red-and-white attempt at flashy modern packaging, I took out a cigarette and lit it, just as I'd done hundreds of times before. But this time, it seemed like a very strange thing to do. As the smoke funneled down my throat, I felt a dry heat and then an interference with the air that was already in my lungs. I put the cigarette out and didn't light up another until I'd come down, about sixteen hours later. Feeling sort of nauseous (people usually throw up at the beginning of a peyote high), I went to the toilet bowl and arranged myself in the kneeling position, but nothing happened and the nausea slowly disappeared.
Since flying off the edge of a cliff or trying to embrace a moving vehicle is not an uncommon desire for psychedelic drug participants (it's not that people become suicidal, it's just that in such a state anything seems possible), just before the six of us had ingested the drug, we'd designated one of the girls, Dana, to be our “straight” person. That was fortunate indeed, since in the middle of our high, we decided to climb a mountain that was close to Baxter's house. Before giving us the okay, Dana discreetly scanned everyone's faces, trying to determine if we were capable of comprehending the functions of simple things like doorknobs, curbs, traffic lights, and so forth.
She finally voiced her approval, and after stepping out of the house (a monumental move into another world), it took us fifteen minutes to arrive at the sidewalk. There were just so many familiar objects that had suddenly taken on new importance, new vibrancy—and each flower, each square of cement, had to be appreciated at length. Children do this. Animals do this. Most adults forget how incredibly complex and beautiful the ordinary world is, but peyote was reminding us.
As we lay on our backs in the tall grass on the mountain, each person made a brief awestruck remark about the diversity and synchronicity of the clouds, the air, the trees, and the animals. Unlike the Marlboro package, it all looked as if it had been perfectly designed.
It and I became
this.
This and them became
us.
It was on that mountaintop where I first understood that you and I are only separated by one channel of a limited thought process. If I looked long enough, colors on the same object would slowly change in accordance with my ability to take in the transformation. My usual focused perspective was expanded. Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything and everyone seem equally important. Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was all just energy, exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.
We returned to relax at Baxter's house for a while, and waited until we got to a point where we could shift in and out of the various levels of phenomena. Then we decided to head back out to attend some other parties. On the way to the car, as I passed through the kitchen to go to the front door, I noticed a fat sweet potato on the ledge by the sink. I picked it up and watched it radiate. Yup, I could
see
a kind of living force in the usually dull-brownish appearance of that ordinary vegetable. It felt warm, as if the detachment from its ground home had done nothing to drain its own energy. I liked the feel of it in the palm of my hand, and even though I knew it was a thing separate from my body, it became an extension of me, like my arm or foot.
I took it with me to the various parties; I damn near introduced it a couple of times. But because many of our friends were moving in the same direction as far as the acceptance of unusual conduct, no one was particularly surprised about the inclusion of a sweet potato in the evening's guest lists. As a matter of fact, a few people asked if they could look at it for a while, and I'd watch as they sat in a chair and studied it. Perhaps they'd ingested some kind of chemical themselves that made them potato-friendly.
When I started to return to a narrower consciousness, my body felt puffy, as if my insides were too big for my skin. My nervous system was alert but worn out at the same time—a polarized condition that I balanced by eating some freshly baked bread and drinking two glasses of wine. All in all, it was a highly pleasant experience. Throughout the day, no one had experienced a freak-out or hyperventilation or any other symptom of chemical imbalance, so that ingestion at Baxter's turned out to be a perfect excursion into alternative planes of observation.
I've since learned that, like mutating viruses, psychedelic drugs such as peyote or LSD seem to match their performance to an individual's makeup. The risk varies depending on a person's emotional, physical, and spiritual state. For that reason or perhaps for some other, what a person experienced last week might not necessarily be what he or she will experience next month. Unfortunately, some people have taken acid either alone or in a situation where their vulnerable aspects were triggered, and the resulting hellish hallucinations took them off a rooftop—or to the nuthouse. In short, psychedelics can offer a spiritual gift or issue a death sentence.
Aren't you glad there are extremist human guinea pigs like me who've already performed the nuts-and-bolts experimentation?
The Scene
M
ost big cities are gray—out of necessity. Who can imagine an all-red city? The gray stuff is cheap and unjarring; cement is light gray, asphalt is dark gray, buildings are constructed in shades of gray in between, and most of the inhabitants are wearing muted colors so as not to offend at the workplace—browns, navy blues, dark greens, grays and beiges. City people don't talk to each other because everybody is a stranger; their faces look preoccupied with some kind of struggle, and their speedy pace suggests, usually rightly, that they're five minutes late to wherever they're going.
Big cities look like that now. They looked like that in the sixties, too.
In 1965, though, on the corner of one of those gray streets, Geary and Fillmore in San Francisco, the color scheme seemed to be changing. …
Imagine it's Saturday night, and there's a line of what looks like a bunch of young multicolored circus freaks waiting to go into one of those gray buildings, the Fillmore Auditorium. It's hard to tell the girls from the boys. No one is wearing a suit, the crowd is animated, and everybody is talking to each other, even though they may have just met for the first time. The only visible sign of color on the outside of the building, besides the clothing, is a poster drawn in Day-Glo swirls. It reads,
Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Moby Grape, and The Great Society.
Jerry, Darby, the rest of the guys from The Great Society, and I play the Fillmore quite a lot, opening for some of the more popular groups like Jefferson Airplane. Before a performance, we stuff our gear into a station wagon, haul it up to the backstage area, and some of the kids come around from the line in front of the building to chat with us as we go in through the side entrance. There are no metal detectors, no security guards, no backstage passes, no VIPs at all. Everybody is “us.”
When the door to the building opens, the last of the gray vanishes. At the top of the steps that lead to Fillmore's main hall is a wall of bright, intensely colored posters. They're so numerous, the wall itself is invisible. Art Nouveau has influenced these elaborate, colorful portraits of ladies with winding garlands of flowers in their hands, pointing to the elongated letters that spell out the names of the bands. The now familiar rose-crowned Grateful Dead skull can be seen on one poster, on another is the sepia-toned, oval-framed, Old West photo of The Charlatans. And in front of the wall stands a young man with long hair, blowing bubbles toward no one in particular.
As you walk onto the dance floor, you have the feeling you've just entered seven different centuries all thrown together in one room. The interior of the building is turn-of-the-century rococo, and a man in red briefs and silver body paint is handing out East Indian incense. A girl in full Renaissance drag is spinning around by herself listening to some Baroque music in her head, while several people in jeans and American Indian headbands are sitting in a circle on the floor smoking weed. Close by, a good-looking man in a three-musketeer costume is placing ashtrays on the cheap fifties Formica tables that circle the edge of the room. Over in the corner, people are stripping off their clothes, and while the acid is taking effect, they're getting body-painted so they'll glow in the dark as the night progresses. As for the ones who remain fully dressed, the predominant look for the boys is Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western or just T-shirts and jeans—but the flashing black lights make all the clothes, even the more normal outfits, look irradiated.
Rather than work for a big concessions company, the hawkers are self-employed, peddling their own handmade beads, vests, hats, drawings, and a variety of leather items. They don't yell at anyone; easy bartering is expected. There's no curtain on the stage, so people are moving equipment and wires around in full view of the audience. Sometimes they just stop what they're doing and jump off the riser to hang out for a minute with someone on the dance floor. Sometimes there are chairs, and sometimes there aren't, so people sit, dance, or lie down on the floor. Electronics and Indians, disco balls and medieval flutes. Day-Glo space colors and Botticelli sprites. The howl of an amplifier and the tinkling of ankle bracelets.
This is
not
Kansas, Dorothy.
But this
is Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland,
Oz, Long John Silver,
Stranger in a Strange Land, Naked Lunch,
and
Be Here Now.
This is the American dream (for a few hours), with no color barriers, no ethnic rivalry, no dress code, no moral imperatives, no political hustling, and only one keeper—the show's intense but smiling dark-haired promoter, Bill Graham.
For everyone to be able to step out of the gray and into the circus, there has to be a human switchboard. That's Bill, the one who calls the shots so the carnival can explode into life. He's running around talking to fifteen people at once, pointing and yelling, laughing and frowning, one hand on his hip, the other on his forehead, eyebrows furled, when he suddenly spins around and yells up to the balcony, “Tell Garcia he can't do another goddamned three-hour set next week or the cops are going to shut some barred doors on my ass!”
Bill's shouting at Jerry Garcia, or his angry hurling of chairs, or his being upset with Paul Kantner for being the unruly lion in the center ring is all taken in stride.
Someone
has to make sure the Fillmore stays friendly with city regulations or they'll close it down.
Someone
has to make phone calls and weasel the suits into thinking it's a “clean” venue for young people.
Someone
has to organize the flying objects into a business that eliminates the GRAY—that's Bill.
We do the experimenting, and he gives everyone the space to enjoy it.
By the time the Fillmore was in full swing, most of the musicians had moved out of San Francisco to live in Marin County. In juxtaposition to the crowded gray city, just twenty minutes north across the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin was a flourishing community full of fish restaurants, town halls, yacht clubs, cowboys, big sprawling farms, rich-guy enclaves, and small bookstores/bars for the resident artists. The Grateful Dead had a ranch in Marin where the various members of the music scene liked to gather, and I remember seeing Pigpen leaning on the ranch gate when we drove up the dusty road and parked up near the barn for one of their famous parties.
Pigpen, aka Ron McKernan, The Dead's first keyboard player, had a brief affair with Janis Joplin and was, in fact, the one who introduced her to Southern Comfort. Not as easy to get to know as other members of the band, he'd nod without saying anything, but he wasn't stupid or shy. Pigpen was just a quiet man who felt and looked more comfortable in this country setting than he ever did in the city.