Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 4, Bonus Episode 1
BEAR DROPS: LA ‘66
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, Jerry On Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews, 1973.
- Owsley Stanley, by David Gans, Conversations With the Dead, 1/13/91.
- Wavy Gravy, Passing the Watts Acid Test.
JESSE: On December 10th, 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.
KEN KESEY [1/8/66]: Glittering… glowing… ever-flowing, neon… all the money that we’re owing to the electric company…
JESSE: Until the cops showed up. And then, somehow, it was still glorious.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE OF AUTHORITY [1/8/66]: Everybody out! The dance is over, clear the room.
KEN BABBS [1/8/66]: This is incredible — the chief security agent has suddenly taken over and informed —
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE OF AUTHORITY [1/8/66]: Everybody out! The dance is over, clear the room.
JESSE: It was also the first live recording of the Grateful Dead. 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.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: I thought, “These guys are fantastic.”
JESSE: David Gans continues to be the absolute undisputed Deadcast 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 revisited edition are available through David’s webstore. It’s one of the only extended interviews with Owsley, and we couldn’t be more thankful to David for sharing the original audio.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: But it was scary. The music was scary. Pushing me to the edge. I thought the sound of Garcia’s guitar was like the claws of a tiger. It was dangerously scary. Very, very to the point. You can’t talk about this stuff. I thought to myself, “These guys are going to be greater than The Beatles someday.” 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… not even that I actually thought about it in those terms, I did think that these guys are going to be greater than The Beatles. That was the way I thought, that was the way I recognized the thought I was having about it. It was the terms in which I subvocalized that to myself.
The next time I saw them was at the Fillmore Acid Test, and I met Phil [Lesh], I walked over to him and I said, “I’d like to work for you guys.” Because I had decided that this was the most amazing thing I’d ever run into. And he says, “We don’t have a manager… ” I said, “I don’t think I want to be the manager.” He said, “Well, we don’t have a sound man,” and I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about that, either, but I guess I could probably learn. Sounds like more fun.” That’s how that happened.
JESSE: What happened next is the subject of this Bear Drop. A few weeks later, Owsley and the Dead moved to Los Angeles.
AUDIO: “Promised Land” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (0:00-0:29) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the Grateful Dead doing Chuck Berry’s “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 Warlocks 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’d change has 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 tie-dyer. We talked to Rosie about her many 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. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, Rosie McGee.
ROSIE MCGEE: 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 Pranksters said, “Hey, let's go to LA and 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'll take care of it.” And he rented the house, and he paid for everything and controlled everything.
JESSE: There were surely many compelling reasons to go to LA. In the Bay Area, they were still having trouble finding an audience.
AUDIO: “Midnight Hour” [1/28/66] (0:39-0:59)
[Band plays, but is cut off abruptly.]
JERRY GARCIA [1/28/66]: … Shut us off again. That’s what happens, no place we can play.
BOB WEIR [1/28/66]: The story of our lives. You play somewhere and somebody turns you off.
JERRY GARCIA [1/28/66]: Shut us off again…
JESSE: 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 to head.
The week they went down, probably the last few days of January or first few days of February 1966, The Rascals were at the Whisky a Go Go on the fabulous Sunset Strip. At The Trip, Wilson Pickett was heading out and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs 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’.”
AUDIO: “Screamin’” [Paul Butterfield Blues Band, s/t] (1:48-2:10) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 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, No.”
AUDIO: “Caroline, No” session highlights [The Beach Boys, The Pet Sounds Sessions] (3:15-3:40)
JESSE: What followed over the next two months would be a foundational adventure for the young Grateful 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 Gans’s incredible interview recording, which is as Owsley as they come. Here’s David Gans, of the Grateful Dead Hour and Tales from the Golden Road.
DAVID GANS: I 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, a.k.a. 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 PZMs. But Bear 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 and sound just fine. After the interview was probably three or four in the morning, I think, and Bear and Sheila and I went off to Dave’s Coffee Shop 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.
JESSE: 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.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: Six months, or just a few months—I don’t remember how many months before I met the Grateful Dead—I bought a hi-fi. I went around and tried to figure out what was the best hi-fi, and I had a pretty good-sized place. It must have been a 55-foot long room, about maybe 35 feet wide, this big single room. And I wound up going around and listening to a lot of stuff. I decided to buy a Voice of the Theater system, which is about the ugliest hi-fi system you could possibly see. It had a cabinet in the bottom, it was a front-loading horn — wasn’t a back-loading horn, 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 an 800 Series horn, and the driver was maybe four inches in diameter. It was relatively small. One on each speaker — a bottom and a horn on each side. But it looked like something that someone had rescued out from behind the screen at the local small movie theater or something, it was basically that. But they were out there selling it and hyping it. It had a nice tight… rather, to me sounded tight — of course, later on, if it wasn’t, we learned things to make it tighter. But compared to the average run-of-the-mill speaker, it sounded okay. And it would get loud, and I wanted something that would get loud. And as it turned out, it wouldn't get loud enough.
JESSE: 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, 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 twelve months, they’ve put out music by Johnny Cash, Ali Akbar Khan, and Commander Cody and 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.
HAWK SEMINS: Our archive starts at ’66, early ’66. I think one of the interesting things about what we do have from that time period, are these questions of provenance: 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 Taper’s Compendium, or archive.org or on DeadBase? 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 actually pretty good. The tape quality was really good in ’66 and they were well preserved.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: But I’m not an engineer, and never was, so I thought “we gotta do something about this,” and so I started looking around for someone that could help. I ran into this kid Tim Scully, and he seemed to know about electronics. I thought, “Hey, I need somebody. Do you want to do it?” And he said, “Okay.”
JESSE: 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 Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, Tim Scully.
TIM SCULLY: There was more than one other underground chemist, although most of them weren't producing very pure LSD. Bear was known by his middle 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 had been making a good living doing electronics design work, good enough that I had 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.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: 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 of the operation of radios, and I had worked as a broadcast technician. But I wasn't a design engineer.
TIM SCULLY: 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.
JESSE: Over the past year, Tim and his friends had experimented with LSD in quite a different way than the Merry Pranksters.
TIM SCULLY: I was more into taking acid either in a park or at home in front of a fireplace with one or two friends, in a quiet, contemplating 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. And I had sort of a foretaste of what was going on.
JESSE: 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 and 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 coffeehouse that included Jerry Garcia. How’s that for cred?
DON DOUGLAS: 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 we lived in Berkeley there. We went to one Acid Test in the Bay Area, and then we went to LA.
TIM SCULLY: I loaded up all my electronics gear, my tools, my test equipment, and drove down to LA.
DON DOUGLAS: The band flew down.
JESSE: They were met at the airport by the artist Jean Millay, who’d recently made a film called The Psychedelic Experience, narrated by Timothy Leary.
TIMOTHY LEARY [The Psychedelic Experience, 1965]: The psychedelic experience is a voyage inside — a trip into the countless galaxies of your own nervous system.
TIM SCULLY: She also had produced a film called The Psychedelic Experience, a film that she made on Super 8. She had managed to recruit Ravi Shankar to do the soundtrack. She got some really great people to help her with this little film that she made.
JESSE: 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.
DON DOUGLAS: Bear had wanted them to house them at their place in Venice, but she didn't have room so someone else from I don't know, took them. I remember staying in a motel briefly.
JESSE: Arriving in LA that week was another band friend — Denise Kaufman, a.k.a. 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.
DENISE KAUFMAN: 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 UCLA. And 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 at UCLA to see if people who had taken LSD were more psychic than other people. It was really interesting. That was a whole ‘nother thing that I ended up there, which was really interesting and kind of far out. But anyway, I was staying at his house in Westwood while we did this program, this experiment that he was doing. But I was sort of getting into some…. [he] was like painting this big coffin in his living room. And it was just, like… okay, I'm done. And I didn't have a car or anything. And I didn't know LA really, but somehow I was able to reach Pigpen. I’m like: “Hey, I'm here, and it's a little strange.” And Pigpen’s like, “I’m coming to get you.” And so he did, he came out and picked me up and we got to go join up with the Pranksters. And that was the time of the Watts Acid Test.
JESSE: Held on February 12th, 1966 at the Youth Opportunities 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 longform 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.
WAVY GRAVY [2019]: We had these two enormous trash cans: “Brand new, filled with Kool-Aid. And hey, the Kool-Aid on the right is the Electric Kool-Aid. Kool-Aid on the left is for the children. Once more…” 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.
TIM SCULLY: When I went to LA, what I was expecting was we were going to set up for the Watts Acid Test at the Youth Opportunities Center.
WAVY GRAVY [2019]: “Wet” could mean a couple hundred [micrograms] a swallow, and people started to melt down.
TIM SCULLY: So we met there, and 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 [Marshall] Super Bass speaker that Bear had come across, which is very low frequency. And with a separate Big McIntosh amplifier for it, we hooked that up to Phil's bass. And you [could] hear [and] feel his bass in the sidewalk on the other side of the block, so it coupled really well on the ground. We didn't have the whole sound system together, but part of it. And that's mostly what I was doing, focusing on the sound system during the Watts Acid Test.
DON DOUGLAS: I went with Paul Foster out to a little store. I forget what we were going to buy, but something. And the proprietors of this store kind of pretended not to notice that half of his face was painted silver and the other half painted gold. We were very weird.
DENISE KAUFMAN: What I remember most was the Watts Acid Test. I don't think any big event had happened in Watts since the big civil unrest there, as far as I was told. And so we had this warehouse. It was this grungy warehouse. And outside was the Watts riot squad in helmets and batons. And they didn’t come in. I can imagine how that place was going…
WAVY GRAVY [2019]: And this, this woman started freaking out screaming: “Who cares!”
DENISE KAUFMAN: And that woman who, you know—”Who cares!”—this woman was just screaming, moaning: “Who cares?”
WAVY GRAVY [2019]: I found her in a little side room surrounded by, like, 15 people, a couple of which I recognized. And she's goin’, “Who cares?”
DENISE KAUFMAN: And Wavy put the mic in front of her and it just echoed through the room. And it was all of us, to our molecules, were like, “Who cares? Who cares?” It was deep.
WAVY GRAVY [2019]: And we joined hands, and turned into jewels of light. And she turned into jewels in light. And that's when I passed the Acid Test — when you get to the very bottom of the human soul, where the net is slamming into the grid and you're sinkin’, 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.
JESSE: 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 it gave name to — Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968.
DENISE KAUFMAN: 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.
TIM SCULLY: 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 plainclothes, but even some uniformed ones, trying to figure out what to arrest someone for.
DENISE KAUFMAN: And at the end, when we were, you know, it was sort of like a tail, I always envisioned it, 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 the end of the tail. And he was wearing this thing that was part white and part black, and he would have this whole Joker, opposites, melding energy.
TIM SCULLY: 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 arrested him for being drunk and disorderly. And he wasn't either, but I think they had to keep up their franchise somehow.
DENISE KAUFMAN: 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. And so they took him away. And that was it. I’m not sure who it was who eventually got him released.
JESSE: Paul Foster, arrested in silver and gold face-paint, 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.
BILL GANNON [Dragnet, 1967]: Stand still.
BLUE BOY [Dragnet, 1967]: Reality, man, reality. I could see the center of the universe — purple flame down there, the pilot light. All the way down… purple flame down there, the pilot light… pilot light of… creation, reality!
BILL GANNON [Dragnet, 1967]: He’s clean, Joe, except for these.
BLUE BOY [Dragnet, 1967]: Reality…
SGT. JOE FRIDAY [Dragnet, 1967]: What’s your name, son?
BLUE BOY [Dragnet, 1967]: You can see my name if you look hard enough.
SGT. JOE FRIDAY [Dragnet, 1967]: Come on now, what’s your name?
BLUE BOY [Dragnet, 1967]: Don’t you know my name? My name’s Blue Boy!
BILL GANNON [Dragnet, 1967]: What do you think, Joe? Cartwheels?
SGT. JOE FRIDAY [Dragnet, 1967]: No, sugarcubes. I’ll bet you he’s been dropping that acid we’ve been hearing about.
DENISE KAUFMAN: The rest of us got on the bus and we went to the Watts Towers, which was the Simon Rodia, beautiful towers. And on the way there, I was still, I don't know, I… my LSD was still very much coming on or was really strong at that point. But Neal [Cassady] kept looking at me and going, “Oh, my God, like…” And he was seeing ectoplasm come out of my mouth. And I didn't see that, but he was totally seeing this kind of spirit energy.
JESSE: Jerry Garcia talked about this moment with Dennis McNally in a 1973 interview included in Dennis’s book, Jerry On Jerry. This is from the audiobook, available from Hachette. Amir Bar-Lev made beautiful use of this quote in his incredible documentary, Long Strange Trip, which we’ll point back to here as well.
JERRY GARCIA [1973]: At the end of this particular Acid Test, we went and looked at the Watts Towers. The Watts Towers is interesting because this guy Simon Rodia, one guy, he went and picked up little pieces of flotsam and jetsam and junk, and glued them and cemented them and stuck ‘em together. And when he died, this county of Los Angeles couldn't pull the towers down. So they made them a park.
DENISE KAUFMAN: Watts Towers, we were climbing around the Towers. And that was beautiful, just to see the creation that this one man did. I was back there not so long ago, and it seemed bigger the first time, the later two times. Just that he did it himself — just art. It was a very Prankster appreciation, expression. It’s perfect for us to see.
JERRY GARCIA [1973]: He couldn't pull them down, 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 tear down. After you're gone.” But hey, what the fuck, you know. What I want to do is — I want here, I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art.
JESSE: Sorry, Jer. It’s definitely not a nuisance, at least. Somewhere around then, the band found their own digs in LA: 2511 Third Avenue, according to one receipt that has 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.
DON DOUGLAS: 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 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 were 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 smoke 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 were. And there was a cottage out in the back. I think Pigpen at first had one of the bedrooms on the second floor–what the British would call the first floor–where all the bedrooms were. I think he later moved out to that cottage in the back.
TIM SCULLY: I’m a pretty introverted kind of a guy. I've come to a conclusion since then that I'm on the Asperger's spectrum, although I didn't recognize that terminology at the time. I was completely out of my depth being in large crowds and noisy surroundings. It was an interesting experience, like being thrown into the deep end of the pool.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: 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 would be distortion of the speakers that wouldn't be controllable, and the guys would make a sound not what they wanted. So we went wholly the other way.
TIM SCULLY: The idea was that 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 McIntosh amplifiers and Voice of the Theater speakers. And he already had a couple of good microphones.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: I knew nothing when I started, I just said, “Hey, sure, I’ll be the sound man and we can use my hi-fi.” I did notice one thing straight away, and that was that the instruments that they were using looked like somebody built them in the 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 — I think it was Les Paul, who took apart a radio and put the parts in his guitar. Basically, the guitars in 1966 were identical. They still had a magnet with coil wire around it, six screws in the top of the magnet. And sometimes not even the screws, but often the screws. They had a wax capacitor, and a cheap potentiometer. And that was it.
DON DOUGLAS: 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, 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. So that was my role.
JESSE: 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 stoned wink at the House Un-American Activities Committee.
DON DOUGLAS: 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, he performs blues on a big Hammond organ in Seattle, where he grew up. It was actually [from] 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 just it's all flowing, but it's okay. I mean, not 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 in the brief period of time that I lived with the Grateful Dead.
TIM SCULLY: It seems to me that they were practicing every day. And I think that's why they grew rapidly as a group is because they spent a lot of time in the woodshed.
DON DOUGLAS: Every day the band played. 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 they’d just open up their cases and play.
AUDIO: “Stealin’” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (0:00-0:17) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
TIM SCULLY: 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. There was definitely 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.
AUDIO: “Stealin’” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (0:29-0:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s “Stealin’” from Rare Cuts & Oddities, very likely recorded in the Pink House by Owsley Stanley, with his own distinct stereo mix. From the Owsley Stanley Foundation, we’re also pleased to have with us today Owsley’s son, Starfinder.
STARFINDER STANLEY: 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 tracks. So even though he would set up all of his mics as stereo pairs, so every source had 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.
JESSE: As Bear described it in the liner notes to Rare Cuts & Oddities: “I used a stereo reel-to-reel recorder with the mono PA signal in the left channel, principally vocals and drums and a few instruments, with the instruments that were not in the PA—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 Pigpen.
AUDIO: “You See A Broken Heart” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (0:41-1:02) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Owsley was learning a lot about audio as he went.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: One of the Acid Tests, I don’t know which one it was, it might have been Watts. It was a very strange experience. All of a sudden, I was looking at sound — coming out of the speakers. This happened on several occasions, happened in the house that we were staying in, where I actually saw sound coming out of the speakers.
DAVID GANS [1/13/91]: I always wanted to have that happen.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: This thing called synesthesia.
DAVID GANS [1/13/91]: Yeah, synesthesia. I’ve always read about that, and I always wanted to hear color.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: I don’t know anyone else who has actually had that experience. But I actually had that experience. And it was funny, because I'm looking at the sound, 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 it would…” And I thought, “Huh.” But it was very funny, because the lady that I was with in those days was quite direct. Her name was Melissa [Cargill] — this is long before I met the Dead. But whenever we’d get high, and things would 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, right? And that was interesting, because that's different. It's different that way. You do a whole different… you have a whole different set, right? It's like the difference between driving a car and a video game, or getting in a car, right? And she wouldn't let me drive the video game car —
DAVID GANS [1/13/91]: She made you deal with it.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: Deal with it. On the screen. 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, than my everyday life, which I had come to believe was restricted consciousness — where I actually saw less, felt less, perceived less.
STARFINDER STANLEY: 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. He said it was astounding, and it wasn't at all what he expected sound should look like. 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 there are those revelations that come in the throes of an acid trip, not all of which stick around the next day.
JESSE: In some ways, Bear’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.
STARFINDER STANLEY: It really informed how he set up his sound systems. 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 a big 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 discouraging and muddying. And he recognized that to get clear sound you needed to have that synchronization of waves, 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 it from what he was saying.
JESSE: And a few weeks into the Dead’s LA sojourn, enter Rosie McGee, from the north.
ROSIE MCGEE: On February 25th, 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.” It was a very organic thing. We were all together in one big heap, making music and rehearsing and writing stuff.
JESSE: 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.
AUDIO: “Cream Puff War” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (0:21-0:46) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 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.
AUDIO: “Wandering Man” [1966] (1:41-1:59)
JESSE: 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 Weir. 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 Bear’s decks, and the point is the same — that the Grateful Dead were experimenting constantly, and weren’t yet sure who they were.
AUDIO: “Wandering Man” [1966] (2:00-2:15)
DON DOUGLAS: Some people have described the early Dead as Pigpen and his backup band, and that’s probably how I saw them. I mean, this is not to take anything away from the brilliance of Jerry 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?
AUDIO: “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (0:42-1:01) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
STARFINDER STANLEY: They were pretty much Pig’s band, right? They were a much more bluesy, bar band-y sort of musical experience. That was what captured Bear's attention when he first ran into them was that sound. And he was really tight with Pigpen. They were definitely brothers. Which is funny in some ways, because Pigpen favored alcohol as his drug of choice 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.
AUDIO: “Caution (Do Not Stop on Tracks)” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (1:09-1:39) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
DON DOUGLAS: I was over 21 and [Pigpen] was under 20. I was just over 21, he was under 21. Tim had a 1959 Hilman convertible. So we'd go out and I'd buy a bottle of Red Mountain — I mean, a gallon, a jug, of Red Mountain wine in the passenger seat. And Pigpen would have this between his legs to steady it. I would drive, and we’d go carousing around LA. I do not and cannot sing. But drunk, I could sing with him. So we'd be wailing away and having a good old time. And we would go to places like, for instance, there was a place, I think the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, it 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 we heard The Temptations. Pigpen said to me, “If you ever want to see what’s happening next, look at the Black acts.” 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 we would do that, and we would come back pretty late. At one point, we were all up together and everybody but Pigpen was stoned on acid. Owsley and Melissa, their bedroom was on the top floor of this house where the electronics equipment was also. We would sometimes gather there, because it was pretty big. They were saying something about you guys being out doing who-knows-what, and I made some joke about how we were looking for an all night harmonica store. They ended up using the name, I guess, for one of their dances.
JESSE: And Owsley had a special diet: red meat, all red meat, and nothing but red meat, and maybe some milk. We talked more about his proto-Paleo eating habits on our first Bear Drop, from last year.
TIM SCULLY: When I first signed up, I decided that I would submit to whatever I needed 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 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. I gave priority to what Bear wanted, and then the band members, and then the other stuff. It was my first experience of living with a communal refrigerator. So I rapidly learned that there wasn't much point to buying groceries for myself, because they disappear if I put them in the refrigerator.
ROSIE MCGEE: Tim was very quiet. Obviously smart enough to keep company with Bear. 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.
JESSE: You can see Tim Scully at work in Rosie’s photos of the band’s show at Trouper’s Hall on March 25th, 1966 — Tim set up at the rear of the stage, visible between Pigpen and Garcia.
ROSIE MCGEE: 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… my description of Bear is that the word “intractable” comes to mind. And somewhat humorless, in my opinion. 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. He always seemed to have an agenda. Like he was paying attention to how he was presenting himself. Of course, very smart, innovative ideas. And 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. Once I became aware that that was his m.o., I would refuse to take the bait.
JESSE: Though the Dead didn’t exactly break into the LA rock scene, they were hardly antisocial, as Don Douglas remembers.
DON DOUGLAS: The Jefferson Airplane had a house across town. And the groups didn't jam together, but Kaukonen 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, fooling around on their guitars. 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 [Blues] Band in a bar. Garcia said, “We're going to play with Paul Butterfield on Friday night.” Kaukonen says, “ I don't understand.” “We're going to play with Paul Butterfield on Friday night.” “I don't understand.” “We're gonna 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 ten minutes. Just repeated enough.
JESSE: That’s a gig unnoted elsewhere — the Dead and the Butterfield Blues Band, at a bar in LA in 1966. Officially, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band were ensconced at the Whisky 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 Whisky, but that Whisky 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 onstage with our guys.” End quote. Take that as you will. One person who ended up at band practice one day was Barry McGuire. You know, “Eve of Destruction” Barry McGuire.
AUDIO: “Eve of Destruction” [Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction] (1:15-1:38) - [Spotify]
ROSIE MCGEE: 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 point, 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. 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 [were] Tom and Lisa Law, who later became better known through Woodstock, being part of the Hog Farm. They were the owners of it. That's how I met them. It was this beautiful house that was reminiscent of the Arabian Nights, kind of a stage set or something. That’s how I remember it. Lots of tile work and exotic wood cutouts and different things. And a beautiful view, it 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.
JESSE: 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 10th, 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 tanpura drone on the Dead’s “Dark Star” single the next year.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [“Dark Star” 7-inch, 1968] (0:05-0:13) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Hetty would go on to marry original Velvet Underground drummer Angus MacLise. In 2008, she published detailed memoirs in blog form. 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 quote— “pushed his way to where Mr. Dylan 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 outa here.’ OH SHIT. Hetty blamed again. But how hilarious — two monomaniacs face to face.”
ROSIE MCGEE: I have 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 Bear, I don’t know. Maybe it was in a dressing room, or even in our living room or 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.
JESSE: But the center of the Dead’s life in LA remained the Acid Tests.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: For a long time, it was like no matter whatever else we were doing, we had to be at the Acid Test every week. A totally committed part of it. No matter what other shows we did or anything else, Saturday night, we were there. And 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. Every time 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 in 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, hooked you up and said, “The controls are yours!” [Cackles] Whoa! Barrel rolls! Immelmans! Tailspins!” Right into the ground sometimes. But psychically you recovered from all of this, I guess if you’re tough. 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 [micrograms] or more — Kesey preferred 400 or more. And Albert Hofmann told me that that was a substantial overdose. And he says, “Yes, in retrospect, I realize it was.”
DAVID GANS [1/13/91]: And what do you consider an optimum dose?
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: Well, I don't know. People nowadays seem to take around 100, 150 something like that.
JESSE: The Merry Pranksters were doing their best to work it in LA. Please welcome back to the Deadcast Merry Prankster Ken Babbs.
KEN BABBS: We were set up to do an Acid Test on UCLA campus. And so this was gonna be really a big deal, 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 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, and then Neal Cassady came on and did an impromptu rap for about five or 10 minutes, and he left. And then Tiny Tim came on and did his whole singing, “[Tiptoe] Through the Tulips” and all that. High voice — what’d he play, the ukulele I guess? And then we told them all that, “We’ll be at this place tonight, come and see the whole show, it starts at so and so, goes ‘til dawn.” Then we got up and went to leave, and we were going out and this guy comes up to me says, “Hey, Ken,” he says, “the boss wants to talk to you.” I said, “Well, what about?” “I don't know.” So he takes me up to this office, and there's these two stern looking dudes in there, with suits and everything.
JESSE: You can imagine where it goes from here. No more Acid Test at UCLA.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: They had to be at the party, they were the essential part of the party. In their minds, that was the 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. It was hard to control. Too much exposure and made too much heat. 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. 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.
DAVID GANS [1/13/91]: So you were sort of the impetus toward professionalism at that point?
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: I’ve always been that.
JESSE: The Dead played a few non-Acid Test gigs in LA. Don Douglas got involved in the organization.
DON DOUGLAS: I was out doing promotion and tacking up posters, because they didn't want to have gigs in nightclubs. 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.
JESSE: One show they booked was at the Trouper’s Hall, which they billed as the All Night Harmonica Store, throwing back to Don Douglas’s joke. Bear and Melissa drew a poster and the ads. Their initials are in the bottom corner.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: When we went and worked at the Trouper’s Hall or the Longshoremen’s Hall, whatever show, we’d be doing a show, we were being paid. It was different. 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 is paying to see them, it’s not a matter of having an audience that you’re performing for, it’s just a big party.”
JESSE: But acid was about more than the partying.
DON DOUGLAS: 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. And, you know, of course smoking pot daily.
JESSE: One book high on the collective reading list was Theodore Sturgeon’s science fiction novel, More Than Human.
TIM SCULLY: 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 way. Looking at it with hindsight from years later, and from 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. That 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 the thought that was in my mind.
JESSE: Tim quickly passed the Owsley test.
TIM SCULLY: 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 him tablet some acid.
JESSE: This was the reason that Bear got 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 is going to get technical now, and also very historical.
TIM SCULLY: 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 had written a story about it, and he had 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, ampules with crystalline grams of acid. And what we tableted in the attic that night 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 of equipment for doing that. There 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'd take the sheet of Bakelite with the holes and put it on a clean, flat surface like a mirror. And we went through a whole process to dilute the acid. Of course, LSD, when it's pure, one dose is about the size of a grain of salt or smaller, 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 in a bowl mill. He had a little machine with a small electric motor and some rubber rollers that wouldn't get caught. 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, and the ball mill, to run it for a number of hours to thoroughly mix up and turn into powder. 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 paste 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.
ROSIE MCGEE: There was always an awareness that the people upstairs were going to come down at any minute and they were gonna be high. They were gonna be high. That ended up taking us in some different directions. 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. We were just kind of getting by and hanging out, like I said, hanging out on the porch and everything. Or the guys would be rehearsing in the living room, just jamming. And then Bear and Melissa would come downstairs and it would turn into something else.
TIM SCULLY: We always got high. For the shows in LA, I don't remember any one [where] 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 to try them out. Bear put most of it into a peanut butter jar and sold it to a local LA dealer named Margie. And inconveniently, she took that jar and immediately bopped 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. Laurence Schiller and his crew were there. And so he 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, “Margie’s 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 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 [a different Marge] 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. 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 3rd of her film, which was followed by the band playing. And she also gave a talk, a 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 place — 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 school teachers in the neighborhood. But here are all these outrageous longhaired freaks. They were living in a house that was right on the beach, in Venice. So that was quite a memorable experience.
JESSE: 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.
DON DOUGLAS: There was this event with the Ouija board. Garcia I'm sure, everybody else kind of crowded around. I'd love to compare notes some time with someone who remembers better. I was just one of the people in the group standing around looking at it, doing this Ouija board. The one thing that I remembered about that was that they were going to leave the stage on July 9. That kind of mentality that we were back then, I thought they were gonna, like, everybody lift off the stage in some kind of like astral projection, kind of a hippie version of the Rapture. Anyway, I found it interesting that later on in the mid ‘90s, in fact, their last concert was July 9.
TIM SCULLY: There was a story that Don might have told you about a Ouija board and the idea that we would be leaving the stage on July 9th, I think it was. We thought that maybe we'd be traveling internationally with the band to play elsewhere, or possibly leaving the planet? Or possibly who knows?
JESSE: And in fact, the Grateful Dead’s last show would be July 9th, 1995. Heaviness. The time-flow always bent weirdly around the Dead.
DON DOUGLAS: 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.
JESSE: Don had been helping the band with promotion.
DON DOUGLAS: 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. So that didn't happen. I mean, it happened for a little while, but then stopped.
JESSE: 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. Rock Scully would be infamous for press briefings that were somehow both enthusiastic and sincere, and not alway 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 Rider” backed with “Otis On A Shakedown Cruise.” You probably know the A-side.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [11/3/65] (0:00-0:25) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 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.”
AUDIO: “You Don’t Have to Ask” [7/29/66] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was from July 29th, 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 Dead’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 and Lesh. The second verse has lead vocals by Garcia and Lesh, with answers by Weir.
AUDIO: “You Don’t Have to Ask” [7/29/66] (0:41-0:47) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’s a key change midway through the guitar solo.
AUDIO: “You Don’t Have to Ask” [7/29/66] (1:15-1:25) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And then there’s this section.
AUDIO: “You Don’t Have to Ask” [7/29/66] (1:35-1:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 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 perhaps might be called garage prog. 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’s setlists. 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.
KEN BABBS: Larry Schiller, he was not as well-known as he became, but he got the job of doing the cover for Life magazine and the story inside on LSD, 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 lights going and the music’s going, canned music’s going. And he’s going, “Alright now, you people, start dancing. Don't just stand there and talk, start dancing.”
ROSIE MCGEE: 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 [were] these big portrait lights, a whole photo shoot setup. The photos are 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 we’re posed like some kind of statues, we’re posed in these photos. You have to to look them up. They're really funny. So there's a girl in a green dress in that photo, and that's me.
KEN BABBS: As it got close to midnight, I went and tapped all the Pranksters on the shoulder and I said, “Let's go out to the Bus,” parked outside. I said, “So what do you say, let's go down to Mexico.” They all said, “Yeah, let's go to Mexico!” So George started the bus up, and we headed out and met Kesey down there in Mexico. We went on down south to this little town called Manzanita and stayed down there for six months. One of the best woodshedding [periods] that anybody's ever done in their lives.
JESSE: The Merry Pranksters reconvened with Ken Kesey south of the border. The Acid Tests were over.
ROSIE MCGEE: 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 with no gigs, no money. What do we do now? And that's when we did the one gig at the Trouper’s Hall, Rock and Danny put that together. And that's just a one-off. It's just kind of a fun memory. We did everything ourselves. It was kind of like those old movies with the kids going, “Hey, let's put on a show.” Owsley drew up a poster that we put on all the telephone poles. We rented this Trouper’s Hall, which was a small performance space in a home for retired actors. We all got high and had a good time, there were 100 people. But the Pranksters were long gone, it wasn't an Acid 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. We just said we’ve 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 reenter the Bay Area scene. And that’s when I found Olompali. And we ended up going there for six weeks and came back to the Bay Area.
JESSE: For Tim Scully, it had all been an eye-opening experience.
TIM SCULLY: I really came to like the guys in the band a lot. And I lived with them for several months. So that was a great experience and very broadening.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: It finally got to a point where it was just not working and everybody sat down and they said, “Hey, it's not working.” 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. I’ll buy all the stuff you have now, for the amount of money it takes to buy all this stuff you need.” So they went and got all of the stuff that they wanted, and I took all of the stuff and sold it off. I sold some to the Straight Theatre, some to Bill Graham, some to this, some to that—it all got sold. A lot of it I gave away.”
JESSE: And so went Owsley’s original stereo. Its last hurrah were the two performances in Vancouver in late July, the last of Bear’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 Babbs, and our buddy David Gans. We’ll let Tim Scully introduce this final bit.
TIM SCULLY: My favorite song that Jerry that the band played from that time was Jerry doing “Baby Blue.”
AUDIO: “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” [7/29/66] (4:00-4:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]