135 - The Dead, and the Sixties

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia

In this podcast we hear a talk given at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland in March of 2008. The speaker is the one and only Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, who has been a legendary figure in the psychedelic world since the early 1960s. Here is part of what Wikipedia has to say about Mountain Girl:
Carolyn Adams, (born May 6, 1946),[1] later known as Mountain Girl and Carolyn Garcia, was a Merry Prankster and the wife of Jerry Garcia. After growing up near Poughkeepsie, New York, Adams met Neal Cassady in 1964; who introduced her to Kesey and his friends, one of whom gave her the name “Mountain Girl”. Cassady took her to La Honda, Ken Kesey’s base of operations, where she quickly joined the inner circle of Pranksters and was romantically involved with Kesey, having a daughter by him named Sunshine.[2] The Grateful Dead song “Here Comes Sunshine” may or may not be an allusion to Adams’ and Kesey’s daughter (the Dead were fond of lyrics having double, often personal meanings).

Before actually marrying in 1981, Jerry Garcia and Adams had two daughters.[1] Garcia and Mountain Girl ultimately divorced in 1994,[1] however, they remained personal friends right up until Garcia’s death a few months later.
In her talk, Mountain Girl told many stories linking her time with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to the evolution of the Grateful Dead and her life with Gerry Garcia and the rest of the band. This is perhaps one of the best encapsulations of The Sixties you will hear.

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136 - A Few Conclusions About Life

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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Well, here we are back

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together again in less than a week. As I mentioned in the last podcast, I’m taking a little road trip

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and might not get another podcast out until the end of next week. So this way we won’t go over

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seven days between our little get-togethers here in the salon. And before I forget it, I want to thank Charlie H. and our regular donor,

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Dr. Laura, for their donations to help offset the expenses that come up with these podcasts.

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I really appreciate your help, Charlie and Laura, as well as what many of our fellow salonners are

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doing in the way of posting their thoughts and comments to our blog and over on the forums at

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thegrowreport.com. There’s a lot of interaction going on in these forums, and I think you’ll find them quite

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interesting if you get a chance to surf over there someday.

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Well, as you can see from the title of today’s podcast, I’m going to be playing one of the

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talks that was given at the recent psychedelic conference in Basel, Switzerland last week.

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And thanks to Otto Weidel and his brave little MP3 recorder,

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many of the talks given in English were captured and placed online.

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And if you’ve been surfing the psychedelic salon forum over at thegrowreport.com,

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you’ve probably already downloaded and listened to some of them.

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And over the next few months, our friend Max Freakout,

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over on the Cannabis Podcast Network at Dopetheme.co.uk is going to be podcasting most of these talks, which he also recorded.

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So eventually you’ll be able to hear them all in podcast format over at Psychonautica.

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But as I said, if you go over to our forum, you can find the link to download many of them directly right now.

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Now getting on with today’s talk, we’ve got a real treat. go over to our forum, you can find the link to download many of them directly right now.

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Now, getting on with today’s talk, we’ve got a real treat. In fact, this is the one talk from the conference that I’ve heard the most comments about, and it’s by Carolyn Garcia, who is also

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known as Mountain Girl. And to introduce her properly would actually require several podcasts,

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and so I’m going to take the quick and easy way out and read a few lines about her that I found on Wikipedia.

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And while I realize that we can’t trust everything we read on Wikipedia,

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I think that these basic facts are at least in the ballpark of being correct.

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And here’s part of what they have to say.

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Carolyn Adams Garcia was a merry prankster and the wife of Jerry Garcia.

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After growing up near Poughkeepsie, New York,

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Adams met Neil Cassidy in 1964,

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who introduced her to Kesey and his friends,

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one of whom gave her the name Mountain Girl.

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Cassidy took her to La Honda,

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Ken Kesey’s base of operations,

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where she quickly joined the inner circle of pranksters

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and was romantically involved with Kesey, having a daughter by him named Sunshine.

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Before actually marrying in 1981, Jerry Garcia and Adams had two daughters.

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Garcia and Mountain Girl ultimately divorced in 1994.

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However, they remained personal friends right up until Garcia’s death a few months later.

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Now, I’m going to warn you ahead of time that this recording isn’t all that clear.

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I’ve used all of the tools that I have to clean up the sound as best I could,

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but it’s still a recording of a talk given over a loudspeaker system in a large room.

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However, for a lot of reasons, I want to play it anyway.

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And should I ever come across a clear recording

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of Mountain Girl’s talk, I’ll replace this one that we fortunately have thanks to the

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good work of Otto Weidel and his brave little MP3 recorder. And in a way, I really like

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the way this talk sounds because it reminds me of some of the old bootleg recordings I’ve

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heard of dead concerts, which seems very appropriate when you think about it.

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So now let’s join Carolyn Mountain Girl Garcia as she reminisces about the pranksters, the Grateful Dead, and the 60s.

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Well, thank you for coming.

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Thank you, Dieter.

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Dieter asked me to write my speech in advance.

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So I did.

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And I sent it in three weeks ago to be translated for this event.

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I’ve never done anything like that before, so these are not my words of today, they are my words of three weeks ago. And I will be showing

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some pictures. In 1964, I was working at Stanford University in my first real job, away from home. I was 17. Running the immense mass spectrometer that occupied the basement of the organic chemistry department, analyzing organic compounds from many sources.

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Although I was very young, at 17 years old I had a good job, my own apartment, and an independent life. Life seemed very secure and steady. The international graduate students, who were working in the laboratory upstairs,

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were having all-night parties amid the terrible smells of their research projects. There was an uneasy

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edge to these celebrations, not from the vodka, but from other compounds they were biologically

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assessing. My work environment deteriorated and I began to lock the door as I worked late

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into the night. My boss, an urbane Austrian,

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brought to my attention a certain sample

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that he wanted me to process quickly

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for a research fellow working in West Africa.

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It was an extract of iboga,

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a plant used in rituals by witch doctors, he said,

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and was likely a hallucinogenic drug.

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I was instructed to handle this particular sample with great care. Late one night, as the party upstairs

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was in full swing, my curiosity about hallucinogens intensified, and I ran the sample, ingesting a small portion of it that’s filled by…

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X.

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The effect was swift and sent me into a new world of imaginary distortions and a deep, dreaming sleep.

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Unable to complete the analysis, I shut down the spectrometer and spoiled the results.

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My boss awakened me in the morning and sent me home.

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Staggering out into the brilliant sunshine, I had no idea where I was.

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I couldn’t remember where I lived or how I got there.

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I got on my bicycle to make it look good, and began to pedal.

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My body remembered where to go. If I carefully disengaged my brain, I could make the correct

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turns. Even though I had no conscious memory of ever having gone there before. Somehow I found my way home, across town, over by the freeway.

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I had had dreams of jaguars, of pyramids, jungle foliage, birds, and feathery beings.

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If there were messages, I don’t recall.

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But I did bring back an unwelcome visitor.

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Powerful auditory hallucinations.

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For many months afterward, sudden loud voices came straight into my ear, speaking in a language I didn’t understand. I had no translator or guide, and no one to talk to about my experience.

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or a guide, and no one to talk to about my experience.

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And there were other changes.

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The spectrometer became alien and unfriendly.

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The 14 steps necessary to prepare the machine and insert the sample were now unworkable.

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My unreliable work performance was now under scrutiny.

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I had been the star of the lab, but now too confused to perform necessary complex tasks, and so lost my job.

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After a year of working nights, I began to look for friends and to expand my social life. Stanford University fostered a rich,

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youthful mix, a frothy stew of artists, writers, new bookings, and musicians. It was 1964,

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a golden, easy time, that I fell into a good place with a group of people, now my lifelong friends.

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Intrepid Traveler and Mary Vandal Cranston had existed for a summer’s high adventure,

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penetrating America on an old bus.

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I had heard of them as a legendary party gang in the hills near Palo Alto, California. In September, I met Neil Cassidy at the local

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coffee shop and went exploring with him for a whole night, driving around the mountains,

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exchanging stories, searching for his friends who had some bennies, and eventually came

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to Ken Keady’s house in the redwood forest west of Palo Alto.

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At the first light of morning, we drove down the dark mountain valley road,

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bumped over a little bridge, and rolled to a silent stop in front of a huge, wildly painted bus.

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It was glowing and the flaming red lights dawned, the most amazing, wonderful thing I had ever seen.

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A sign at the top proclaimed the name further.

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Here was an article, a mystery, worked on by many, many hands with layer upon layer of paintings.

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Even the wheels were multicolored.

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A normal school bus is plain yellow with the

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purpose of safety for children. This bus was not yellow, and its vertical was mysterious,

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with cracked windows and a broken, flapping door, but certainly not safe. The paintings

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were both meticulously detailed and random in an unplanned, playful style.

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I sensed the ripples of the great mystery.

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And as I touched the rough paint, I felt the stinging challenge to ordinary ways of seeing and being.

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Over the door, a loose painted sign read,

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Nothing lasts.

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those painted signs read, Nothing Lasts.

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Tim Kesey and his friends swept me into their circle. I immediately realized that these were the friends I had been looking for.

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Active, bright, adventuresome characters, full of fun, and strongly linked on many new levels.

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They embodied a concept of personal artistic freedom,

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license, a license they freely gave themselves,

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and they also had an LSD.

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Ken Kesey impressed everyone with his intelligence,

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his brilliant writing, and his cascades of ideas.

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With two prize-winning novels,

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he was already a celebrity.

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As a dramatic public speaker,

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he curved with energy and personality

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and possibly multitudes of possible personalities.

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He had a lot of extra parts to his lines,

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and they were not necessarily always working together as one.

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His book, One Flew Over His Cuckoo’s Nest, was his first writing success,

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but it was deeply enriched by Keating’s exposure to mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD

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as a student test subject in a government-sponsored study,

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and his work as an assistant at the local mental hospital,

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and he worked nights. He always had an abiding, intense interest in the plight of schizophrenics

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and institutionalized people labeled as insane. With his three young children, his wife, Faye, and a series of dachshunds and cats and birds,

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their simple home was a warm, welcoming, and boisterous place.

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The enormous, round, rustic table filled one end of the living room.

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It easily seated 15 people or more, and all were welcome in the bed.

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We were part audience, part family, as Keeley led discussions late into the night.

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As the children went to bed, the all-night conversation moved out into the Keeley’s

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writing studio, the little cabin by the creek, out past the colorful bus parked outside under the

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giant redwood trees.

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Kesey and his friends were practicing transformation.

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First, transforming their original selves into super personalities for the super drums

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they were kicking.

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for drums they were kicking.

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Developing new personas for mutually supporting transformed states of mind.

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New characters manifested and evolved

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and mutated and played together in the circle of trees,

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illuminated also by the colorful bust

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and the continuous repainting. Laughter was our sign of success.

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It was funny. It was good. Keezy would announce a party. His real love beyond drama and tale telling was transformation.

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He loved to create a space and transform it into something that cracked the boundaries of normal time.

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We lived outside of time and he’d invite people into it to amaze and delight them.

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Saturday night parties brought the most cross-fertilization

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from Berkeley to Stanford to San Francisco, and all manner of poets, musicians, and artists,

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friends and travelers, were driving down. Speakers in the high end of the trees softly

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played Miles Davis, John Coltrane. Keeley and the Pranksters had recorded a huge tape like this.

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Then the forest rang with readings by William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg

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mixed with music from Beethoven, Ray Charles, Paul Horn, then Bob Dylan.

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New audio recordings were made at each event

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with fun feedback and tape looped lag.

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Movie cameras captured the peak moments from each play at the next event as part of the time-sending exercise. Kiki was obsessed with recording all the events,

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and I was pressed into editing

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and creating short pieces of film.

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Seventy-five hours of film in cans

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was stacked inside the studio,

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shot during the pranksters’ earlier bus trip to New York

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earlier that summer. I’ earlier bus trip to New York, earlier that summer.

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I missed that bus trip, but I met them shortly after they returned.

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The boxes of tapes and shelves were spilling all these recordings,

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and it needed attention labeling and cataloging.

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And further itself was wired for sound with stereo headphones, which you can see in the picture hanging behind Neil Cassidy’s head.

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Stereo headphones and microphones for communications between crew, driver, and anyone riding on top of the bus.

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Of course this stuff only works some of the time.

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An anti-text stereo tape deck wired to a mixing panel

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created feedback loops, echoes,

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and we broadcast from speakers on the roof deck

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as we rolled along,

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tootling on flutes, whistles, and horns,

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singing and commenting on everything as we passed.

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Driver and mail casting kept up a deep, philosophical conversation with all of us at once,

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when everything was working.

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We made a great deal of mapping tape, electrician’s tape, recording tape,

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wire, spotter, film, with a noisy generator and a wavering electric current.

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We somehow made it all work.

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Technical complexity, bus breakdowns, and crew instability

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all were threatened to upset the plan at the hour.

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Managing to get all this working while tripping on the excellent stand-up at LSD

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was the further challenge.

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working while tripping on the excellent stand-up LSD with the further change.

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Keeley steered our wrestle against the guidance of the Ching.

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He often threw his kind daily, frequently giving each line, the throw for each line to a different person.

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They recorded both questions and readings in a big book.

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different person. They recorded both questions and readings in a big book. The judgment of the I Ching was often correct, in-depth, and set new directions. They gave very clear advice.

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We depended on it for clarifications and community-building insights. There was also an ever-changing crew, as people came for a few journeys of us again.

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In the summer of 1965, the gatherings intensified, drawing visitors to weekend-long explorations,

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bringing in new players and challenges from police. Alex Lee Stanham came with his retinue and shared his products and his ideas for future events.

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We attracted writers.

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Ginsburg, Hunter Thompson, Robert Stone, and biker poet freewheeling Franklin brought the entire

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Oakland Hells Angels

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motorcycle club

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for a three-day

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campout

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as police

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watched from the road.

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Every expedition

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to San Francisco

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on the furtive

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attracted new people

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back to home base

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eager to continue

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their exploration

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with psychedelics and the crimesters.

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Yet the events continued, growing larger and longer, until King’s people finally realized

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that chaos, while not exactly the enemy, was overwhelming the the home in the forest.

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Evolution dictated change.

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We moved the events over the hill and into the city. In 1965 in November, the first acid tests blossomed very briefly at a private house in San Jose, California.

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Quispered word to a few people. The information spread and the right audience appeared.

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They appeared with an air of secret vision.

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Well, we couldn’t advertise ahead of time, or too many might come.

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We put up elaborate hand-drawn posters at bookstores.

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We put up wonderful hand-drawn posters at bookstores and coffee houses that we knew were good places where people we knew would congregate.

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And they had no location written on them. And we would fill in that information at the very last minute, and possibly just by word of mouth.

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We manifested about a dozen of these events all altogether as 1955 rolled over into 1966.

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The answer test succeeded as a format for all night events.

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Music, lights, costumes, dancers, toys, spontaneous and raw, lasting until dawn spreads its teeth.

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The Big Beat Lounge in Palo Alto, the Near Beach Community Center,

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the Civil War Auditorium, and Portland Allergan,

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all boomed with the Prankster Orchestra Sound Collage,

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which was really ahead of its time.

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You’d like it better now.

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And the rhythm and blues sound of the pro-aget.

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We also had escalating legal problems.

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Keezy, of course, was the target of law enforcement.

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They were determined to imprison him as a drug ringleader.

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And his resistance

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demanded a lot of time

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and money

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and personal energy.

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And in January of 1966,

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we were fully mobilized

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and in collaboration

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with a wonderful group

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of artists in San Francisco,

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we spent three days working at the Trips Festival. The first event of its kind, it brought together rock and roll musicians, poets, early liquid light shows, experimental movies, projections, mystics, and an array of gadgetry and artists and trippers

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even offered places to plug in for people bringing their own gadgets to the event.

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We were all inside a giant pinball machine together.

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Audience participation was very high and our inner cyclotrons were fully charged

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with the excitement of everything happening at once.

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Howling chaos and jubilant participation ruled for three nights

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to change the perception of what life could be for all who were there.

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And there’s an excellent film that’s been made about the Church Festival recently

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by my friend Eric Christensen.

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It’s a short documentary, about an hour long,

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and then he included a panel discussion also

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that had some of the organizers of the TRIPS Festival.

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And you should be able to find a source for that online.

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It’s just simply called the TRIPS Festival.

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It’s a very good documentary.

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It’s quite new.

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So our Prancer crew worked hard at the Trips Festival despite an unfortunate encounter with the San Francisco Police the night before. We were arrested on a rooftop and spent a couple days in jail just before the Trips Festival.

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And afterward, after the Trips Festival, disruption overtook us.

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Keezy was obviously going to go to jail this time,

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and he decided to leave the country to avoid prosecution.

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Leaving the bus and the pranksters and his family behind to sort out all the details.

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His fate is on suicide.

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And then to Mexico with Ron Boyce, an infamous sculptor who knew the backcountry roads.

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Further, and our prankster crew kept going on.

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We went forward.

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We didn’t know what else to do.

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Without Keedy, it felt rudderless and sort of anxious.

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And we just decided to follow the route we had laid out for ourselves

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and continue to perform after tests.

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Despite the immense wave of bad publicity

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and surrounding TV harass and disappearance

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out in the world, we were pretty notorious.

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And we began to host acid tests in the Los Angeles area.

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It seemed too dangerous to return to the San Francisco area for quite a while.

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And winter in warm Southern California was very appealing.

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Even without TV’s and operational guidance, the asset tech was so much fun,

00:25:59 ► §

we kept doing them wherever we could find a safe place. And this card is what we carry, and this is our card, and this is how the back of the card looks.

00:26:12 ► §

We all also have mine.

00:26:16 ► §

Sunset Drift, Pico Boulevard, Hollywood, Hollywood & Vine, La Jolla, San Juan Capistrano, Asilomar, and Laurel Canyon became our new locale.

00:26:31 ► §

We had no money, or very little money.

00:26:35 ► §

It became a debt to dumpster divers just to stay alive.

00:26:40 ► §

We charged one or two dollars for admission to our events, which barely covered the expense.

00:26:47 ► §

And here’s a poster from one of those events.

00:26:52 ► §

You can see that it’s pretty old now.

00:27:00 ► §

We shared a space with a group of new friends.

00:27:04 ► §

Hugh Romney, who became ay greatly at Woodstock years later,

00:27:09 ► §

and his beautiful wife, Miss Bonnie Jean,

00:27:12 ► §

Tiny Tim, Del Close, and other performers from the Second City,

00:27:18 ► §

and the Samson Circus joined us.

00:27:21 ► §

Our brave band of friendly musicians who had followed us down from Palo Alto to see at our events would set up and play.

00:27:28 ► §

They enjoyed the chaos and the free form of those corporate events.

00:27:33 ► §

And they didn’t care how crazy things got. They were reliable and game to come play with us.

00:27:40 ► §

They dragged their equipment into whatever tiny space we had for them, plugged in, and worked with us with the blown fuses,

00:27:53 ► §

the broken microphones, the tape running out on the floor, wires writhing everywhere, and goofy altered people running through it all.

00:28:03 ► §

and goofy, altered people running through it all.

00:28:08 ► §

They persisted, and they played.

00:28:12 ► §

Sometimes they were a bit too far gone to play and would just begin a few notes and stop.

00:28:16 ► §

In amazement at the chaos, however, they were ready for this

00:28:19 ► §

and easily entertained themselves.

00:28:22 ► §

Our friendship grew strong and solid.

00:28:25 ► §

They were Pigpen, Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir,

00:28:29 ► §

and Bill Christman of the Grateful Dead.

00:28:35 ► §

We had meetings to try to organize these events

00:28:38 ► §

ahead of time, but I was so busy running the sound system

00:28:42 ► §

and the equipment, and loading loading tape and soldering microphones.

00:28:48 ► §

There’s the original Warlocks, which became the Grateful Dead, set up at an acid test in Los Angeles.

00:29:01 ► §

And they would play play when they could.

00:29:12 ► §

You know, I was so busy running everything,

00:29:15 ► §

I just had to limit myself to a very small dose,

00:29:18 ► §

to a very small working amylopathy dose,

00:29:20 ► §

around 75 to 100 micrograms.

00:29:23 ► §

And tuning into the path made them enough to keep me aware of everything on all levels around me,

00:29:30 ► §

but responsibly functional as well all night long.

00:29:35 ► §

I also needed to have enough energy to be able to help load up the bus in the morning.

00:29:41 ► §

So I never really got all that high at a massive test. I never got the down. I was working. I had a serious mission.

00:29:50 ► §

I wish I could have gone up the floor, but it just wasn’t available to me.

00:29:55 ► §

You know, focus was far too important to carry the events forward. Without focus, it pretty much would have fallen apart.

00:30:07 ► §

We recorded the dome as much as we could afford to.

00:30:11 ► §

Some of this material still exists

00:30:13 ► §

and is available at kini.com, but it is pretty fragmented.

00:30:19 ► §

You know, I look back on it now,

00:30:23 ► §

and I have to ask myself, what were we doing?

00:30:29 ► §

We were short-sighted. We had no plan about where we were going or what we would do,

00:30:34 ► §

or how we were going to put gas on the bus.

00:30:40 ► §

We charged about a dollar, sometimes two dollars, to get in.

00:30:44 ► §

And if you had a good costume, you probably could get in for free.

00:30:48 ► §

Folks did dress up. Costuming was easy in L.A.

00:30:53 ► §

And stuff was a great place for costumes.

00:30:56 ► §

And I remember we were drawing plenty of new people in.

00:31:01 ► §

And we were deliberately eliminating…

00:31:04 ► §

I’m going to go back. And we were deliberately eliminating the audience performer boundary and inspiring free expression and open participation.

00:31:14 ► §

We encouraged it. It was the only thing that kept it going. The audience became the show.

00:31:20 ► §

We had pots of fluorescent paint in day-glow colors under powerful black lights for people to paint themselves and transform their body.

00:31:29 ► §

A brilliant strobe light that I liberated from Stanford Research Institute pulsed at the far end of our spaceship.

00:31:37 ► §

It had a huge dial with flash intervals of up to 1,000 per second, and we could reset the beat to any level.

00:31:42 ► §

up to a thousand per second. And we could reset the beat to any level.

00:31:45 ► §

We rigged lights and screens for liquid projections.

00:31:51 ► §

And we mixed this with cells and slides and primitive color wheels

00:31:56 ► §

and sheets of mylar that you would hold up and wave around.

00:32:00 ► §

All projected onto the whole room.

00:32:03 ► §

We didn’t use screens. We just projected onto the whole room whatever we had.

00:32:08 ► §

And onto people’s faces and bodies and the floor, the bus, anywhere, anything that we could project onto.

00:32:17 ► §

Stuart Brand, who was the main organizer of the TRIPS Festival, joined our crew for the Los Angeles test.

00:32:25 ► §

And he had a stack of slide projectors filled with images of Native Americans

00:32:30 ► §

mixed up with film loops of old bus trips and more of these wobbly model art reflections.

00:32:39 ► §

Our patched together sound system linked it all together with rotating feedback loops, which I wish I had one. We

00:32:47 ► §

can play with it here if you’d like it. And pre-recorded music samples mixed in with whatever

00:32:54 ► §

sound the open microphones took in. We had open microphones out on the floor so people

00:33:00 ► §

could extemporize or wail or scream as the energy moved them.

00:33:07 ► §

The musicians jumped in at intervals, or whenever the cure broke, as it always did.

00:33:13 ► §

They would perform sporadically and heroically as the spirit moved them

00:33:18 ► §

amid the spinning lights and the pulsating dancers in a completely altered reality. A basket of hand-drawn bells

00:33:30 ► §

and whistles was there for us all. We spoke cryptic and poetic over the sound system.

00:33:38 ► §

We tried to keep the energy inside the building in balance or even in a rhythm, so that there were rests and peaceful, quiet parts.

00:33:51 ► §

We organized one of our final onset tests in the city of Watts, which is a ghost town suburb of Los Angeles,

00:34:00 ► §

where terrible economic riots and race riots had burned buildings and destroyed neighborhoods only four months before.

00:34:10 ► §

There were empty streets and abandoned stores and homes, and it seemed like a fine place for an outsider’s event.

00:34:19 ► §

Prankster Malfunction rented an empty breakfast hair shop right on Watts Main Street.

00:34:26 ► §

And we’d come up to posters in bookstores and they weren’t busy.

00:34:31 ► §

By now, we were a track of a repeat audience. We were seeing the same people week after week.

00:34:37 ► §

We knew we were in a kind of a danger zone.

00:34:41 ► §

So we took caution to stay to the events far away from normal white affluent entertainment areas in the city.

00:34:48 ► §

The room was large, reasonably clean, and had adequate power.

00:34:55 ► §

And as we loaded our equipment into the building it seemed almost too large.

00:34:59 ► §

It was a little bigger than this room.

00:35:03 ► §

We enclosed our central space with wires and sound gear, but there was no comfort. It was a little bigger than this room.

00:35:05 ► §

We enclosed our central space with wires and sound gear, but there was no comfort.

00:35:10 ► §

Just hard concrete floors and walls.

00:35:14 ► §

As the crowd came in and silenced the noise, the room warmed up and seemed safe.

00:35:20 ► §

About an hour later, it became obvious that there was too much medicine in the Kool-Aid.

00:35:27 ► §

After a quick recalculation, the only answer we found was to give out smaller cups.

00:35:33 ► §

We put a lot more Kool-Aid and added in to dilute the mix.

00:35:38 ► §

Many people ended up on the floor in oblivion and some were in distress. Yet the music was playing, the night was peaceful,

00:35:48 ► §

and the engine was very loving.

00:35:51 ► §

And as people came back to themselves, they smiled as they left

00:35:54 ► §

and walked out into the sunrise.

00:35:57 ► §

Two police officers looked in on us as we poured the leftover Kool-Aid drink

00:36:02 ► §

down the storm drain outside.

00:36:05 ► §

They thought we were crazy drunk.

00:36:07 ► §

They were well rid of us.

00:36:10 ► §

They did arrest a few pranksters who were very high flyers that night,

00:36:15 ► §

which kept the police busy as everyone else packed up and left.

00:36:19 ► §

These sacrifices were sitting back among us,

00:36:23 ► §

but the police didn’t want them after all.

00:36:32 ► §

And we learned something about grace from these events.

00:36:36 ► §

A kind of peaceful glow emerged as people reentered their normal time and drifted back to their lives, sharing so close to and with

00:36:48 ► §

told strangers, sharing playful, intimate, and deep moments as even if we never spoke,

00:36:57 ► §

we all knew.

00:36:59 ► §

We knew that it was right, necessary, and productive, also revolutionary and radical in the importance of the experiences

00:37:09 ► §

of that time, when our society was so at odds with itself.

00:37:14 ► §

We also felt the intensifying hot breath of police interest.

00:37:21 ► §

The magical substance itself was so rare and precious, the jewel that opened the doors.

00:37:28 ► §

The unifying experience of the architects was needed to bring along as many people as we could during the very short window of time.

00:37:38 ► §

And so, in early 1956, LSD was made, at some point, was made illegal to possess or use.

00:37:49 ► §

And what was left of the Merry Prankster crew, minus K the night, fearing imminent arrest. Seriously. It was scary.

00:38:13 ► §

We were being followed. And you could just feel it. It was like a pressure. You could feel it on the back of your neck. And we drove all night long through the desert on the back roads, going to the smallest town we could find, a tiny, tiny town to cross the border.

00:38:32 ► §

The many pranksters who were left behind were angry and self-abandoned.

00:38:37 ► §

The truth was there was little room left on the bus, and we had 12 people that went with us, with all the snow money and all the gear.

00:38:47 ► §

I felt very crowded and hot. Everything we had was used up in the acid tests.

00:38:54 ► §

We were a hungry, raggedy, colorful lot as we unloaded everything off the bus for the two Mexican word guards

00:39:02 ► §

who finally were satisfied that our beat up gear contained

00:39:06 ► §

nothing of interest and let us pass.

00:39:10 ► §

Then we drove on south for days and days.

00:39:14 ► §

The furrow was heavily loaded and very slow.

00:39:18 ► §

The gas was of terrible quality and with failing brakes and vapor lock and bad clutch.

00:39:25 ► §

And first the throttle linkage broke a long mountain hill

00:39:28 ► §

and we had to push the bus up the hill.

00:39:32 ► §

And then the fireball caught on fire

00:39:34 ► §

where the battery cable shorted out on us.

00:39:36 ► §

That kept us somewhere for a long time.

00:39:39 ► §

Delay and delay.

00:39:41 ► §

Everywhere we went, the adults would cross themselves

00:39:44 ► §

and look away quickly.

00:39:47 ► §

They would all push on low-cuff.

00:39:50 ► §

And their little children would cheer as they went up and down the way.

00:39:56 ► §

I was eight months pregnant and very uncomfortable.

00:40:01 ► §

Nineteen years old and unable to focus on what was happening to me.

00:40:06 ► §

We were very, very tired.

00:40:09 ► §

I cried for days as we pushed on in the heat.

00:40:13 ► §

America receded.

00:40:15 ► §

With all its politics, we don’t have no courtrooms, unpleasant attitudes,

00:40:21 ► §

unconscious, poorly managed wealth, wars, attitudes, and advertising.

00:40:27 ► §

Mexico began to feel relaxed, humble, and genuine.

00:40:33 ► §

Our one thought was to find healing and go somewhere safe and inexpensive and remote and pleasant.

00:40:41 ► §

We were so stressed and strained about what had happened that we began to fight for ourselves.

00:40:47 ► §

We didn’t have individual money. We had a can with money in it.

00:40:54 ► §

If somebody got to me, the money went into the can and we took out individually what we needed.

00:41:00 ► §

Often money would be there one night and be gone the next morning.

00:41:05 ► §

Finally, near Mazatlan, we caught off with Keating, who had gone before us, fleeing from

00:41:14 ► §

prosecution after the church festival. We caught off with him and blew the cover completely. He was disguised as a mild-mannered ornithologist doing bird research in the jungle.

00:41:32 ► §

But he was crazy and paranoid and imagined a federal agent behind every cactus

00:41:38 ► §

and was so very upset with us and refused to get aboard the bus. So, further after much discussion, further drone was south to Montanillo,

00:41:50 ► §

which at that time was a sleepy little resort town on a beautiful Pacific beach.

00:41:56 ► §

The depleted primesters holed up in an old compound that we’d rested on the beach.

00:42:03 ► §

We found some hammocks, and we served off it.

00:42:08 ► §

And the Kesey family all joined us later.

00:42:13 ► §

Six months later, it was time to return to the U.S.,

00:42:19 ► §

believing that things had died down.

00:42:23 ► §

Even with all the aftertests behind us,

00:42:25 ► §

having shattered the possibility of these normal responsible

00:42:29 ► §

citizens in the US, but we still had to go back.

00:42:34 ► §

We drove further through Texas, and we crossed the border

00:42:38 ► §

without incident.

00:42:41 ► §

And Keezy rejoined us a few miles up the road,

00:42:44 ► §

disguised as a country western musician

00:42:47 ► §

who was drinking problems.

00:42:55 ► §

In fact, we went to California on the bus and some of us were really sick by now.

00:42:59 ► §

So, we headed to San Francisco, to San Francisco State College, where it was a Grateful Dead show,

00:43:08 ► §

Keely, unfortunately, was inspired to do an interview broadcast on the college radio station

00:43:15 ► §

and made rude remarks about the FBI director, saying that his return to the U.S. was to rub salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds.

00:43:27 ► §

Alert and angry, the FBI agents arrested him a few days later.

00:43:33 ► §

The Pranksters were exhausted with no money.

00:43:37 ► §

We really had no center or mission.

00:43:41 ► §

Our mission was completed, and we had no place to be together.

00:43:46 ► §

Keefie’s family drove further to Oregon to start a new home in a dairy farm near their family’s.

00:43:55 ► §

That’s the Keefie home outside of Eugene, W.A.

00:43:59 ► §

Getting off the bus was the next problem. Once the bug had gone to Oregon, I was off the bus too.

00:44:09 ► §

Luckily, my brother was living in San Francisco, and I stayed with him for a few weeks,

00:44:15 ► §

adjusting to a solo existence, motherhood, and a stationary life,

00:44:22 ► §

and discovered where the Grateful Dead lived, over on Ashbury Street,

00:44:26 ► §

and had an emotional reunion with those dear friends.

00:44:32 ► §

I soon moved in with Jerry Garcia as our affection blossomed, and I plunged into living in a

00:44:39 ► §

wonderful old Victorian house with a nine-bed, some with a bleak amount of chairs because

00:44:44 ► §

there were no beds.

00:44:47 ► §

So at age 20, with a baby in my arms, on Haight Street just two blocks away, I began cooking

00:44:54 ► §

for the Great Dead Crew. Cooking what I was calling the brown rice and burned pork chops diet. We ate communally and we pooled the money. The musicians each got about

00:45:11 ► §

$50 a week in allowance from Danny Griffin, our manager. I was beginning again in a relationship

00:45:21 ► §

that would last for like 30 years, Jerry was charming and talented,

00:45:27 ► §

and the center of a strong civic enterprise.

00:45:30 ► §

The Haney-Nashbury was a budding alternative community of artists.

00:45:35 ► §

There they are.

00:45:39 ► §

So the Haney-Nashbury was just below me, right at that moment, in late 66.

00:45:44 ► §

A community of artists and shopkeepers and artists and musicians, The Haydash Buried was just blooming right at that moment in late 66.

00:45:48 ► §

The community of artists and shopkeepers and artists and musicians, it was at that just beginning to crest moment. Everybody knew each other.

00:45:55 ► §

And when summer came, so did everyone else.

00:46:00 ► §

The media had spread an image of San Francisco Haydash Buried,

00:46:03 ► §

that one could go to the HaydashAshbury and a magic would unfold in your life. Or maybe John Lennon would show up.

00:46:13 ► §

The community in the Haight-Ashbury was completely overwhelmed in very short order by thousands of mourners from all over America.

00:46:33 ► §

from all over America, who similarly had nothing but expectations and were sleeping on the sidewalks, sleeping in homeless kids with their little puppies and sad faces.

00:46:50 ► §

It was no safe place to be.

00:46:53 ► §

And as they began to experiment with various psychedelics and other drugs, the streets became ever more unsafe.

00:47:10 ► §

1967 was both charming and pathetic on history, and new heroes emerged. The caring people in the neighborhood were now organized to care for and feed them, to find them who loved me, a safe place to be as the chaos roams around us like an angry ocean.

00:47:33 ► §

The mayor declared war on the unruly streets.

00:47:38 ► §

As media crews prowled the parks looking for stories, the police arrested hundreds and the smell of tear gas blew up into the hills.

00:47:47 ► §

The alternative community responded with free food programs in the park, a free clinic, free stores, free boxes.

00:47:57 ► §

We called for meetings in our house to plan benefits and free concerts, trying to create a better vibe, to manifest a kinder world.

00:48:08 ► §

Organizers came in from the free speech movement, from civil rights groups and anti-war groups,

00:48:14 ► §

and jubilation resurfaced as an ideal. Oh, jubilation resurfaced as an ideal.

00:48:22 ► §

In other words, we put that out there let’s celebrate and we

00:48:26 ► §

celebrate with parade and free concerts without permits to the dismay of the civic elders without

00:48:36 ► §

police music through thousands out to the parks and out to the green grass.

00:48:48 ► §

The Grateful Dead was part of a community of local music, high since the San Francisco Sound.

00:48:52 ► §

Big Brother and the Holding Company,

00:48:54 ► §

Jefferson Airplane,

00:48:55 ► §

the Quicksilver Messenger Service,

00:48:58 ► §

and we all had groups in the earlier Bay Area Club Music scene,

00:49:02 ► §

and they all knew each other.

00:49:05 ► §

And the musicians would freely exchange songs and stage shows and play with each other.

00:49:12 ► §

It was really a lot of fun.

00:49:14 ► §

It was so easy to cooperate as tribal units, we discovered,

00:49:18 ► §

and to put together last-minute plans for events.

00:49:22 ► §

Energy and enthusiasm for what we could throw together in the face of serious police action

00:49:28 ► §

buoyed the whole community.

00:49:31 ► §

Communities, group living, free newspapers, and a sense of vital connection and social evolution

00:49:38 ► §

welded the chaos into common purpose.

00:49:42 ► §

Free expression, free experimentation, free will, sparks flew in all directions.

00:49:51 ► §

As we already know, nothing lasts. The Grateful Dead focused on their performances, on developing

00:49:57 ► §

the music, and their careers as hate-experience phenomenon faded away like a rainbow after a hurricane.

00:50:05 ► §

The music began to develop some entrancing qualities as they rehearsed day after day,

00:50:11 ► §

working to create new songs and new recordings.

00:50:14 ► §

They had a deep need to succeed.

00:50:17 ► §

We all believed in the vitality of the band’s music, and we felt the creative juice flow. Our fearless band of acid testers began improvising,

00:50:29 ► §

creating new material, and co-creating in the moment. Taking psychedelics together for

00:50:35 ► §

concerts, their music flowed into new and unpredictable places. Using the songs and

00:50:41 ► §

plot forms, patterns patterns and substructure,

00:50:46 ► §

they realized they could just let go and play what was in the now,

00:50:50 ► §

and then come back to the organized song.

00:50:54 ► §

Elements of jazz, folk music, rock and roll,

00:50:58 ► §

and sometimes jagged, unplanned, exciting things,

00:51:02 ► §

fused and fragmented, flew apart, reformed into mysterious journeys.

00:51:11 ► §

Technical problems, feedback, hums, random events, and cosmic interference were all part of the show,

00:51:20 ► §

and enhanced the playfulness and changed with each little musical landscape.

00:51:26 ► §

Jerry said that each note had a little spirit, a little life in it.

00:51:31 ► §

And because of their skill and all that endless rehearsal, they were able to make it sound good.

00:51:38 ► §

The audience loved it. The audience was that other element, responding, filling the air with energy, calling out, leaping

00:51:48 ► §

into ecstatic dance, reacting to each change in the music, in close communion and exchange

00:51:55 ► §

of energy. Energy rolled around the concerts, spinning the audience into higher and higher states.

00:52:05 ► §

Alasdair Stanley took on a role as the band patron early in 1966.

00:52:12 ► §

He supported them through the ends of the asset tests and their early recording sessions.

00:52:18 ► §

Determined and single-minded, he pushed them to expand and bought all new stage equipment, guitars, instruments, and amplifiers.

00:52:35 ► §

He traveled with the band, fanned the flames of their invention, and by his very presence,

00:52:42 ► §

confounded any attempt to participate in the conventional corporate music business.

00:52:49 ► §

His will was a force to be reckoned with. He was opinionated, independent, stubborn, and righteous.

00:52:57 ► §

He saw the future clearly. His dream was to be the sixth musician,

00:53:03 ► §

and be a limb of the creative force monster that was manifesting on stage.

00:53:09 ► §

His vision of sound as architecture drove him to expend his capital building the new technology for on-stage monitors

00:53:20 ► §

so the musicians could hear each other on stage mixing and he built a whole new main PA which I showed you a minute ago.

00:53:30 ► §

That thing.

00:53:32 ► §

The same candling microphones.

00:53:35 ► §

And endless loops of new stuff clogged up the flow of the concerts when the gear didn’t work functionally.

00:53:42 ► §

And the band suffered gut-wrenching delays and interruptions too frequently.

00:53:45 ► §

There was much friction.

00:53:47 ► §

But there was no stopping the creative flow.

00:53:51 ► §

The music edged into the unseen worlds, and people changed their lives to go to Grateful

00:53:59 ► §

Dead concerts.

00:54:00 ► §

People joined up, went on tour, started to add up how many concerts they made it to.

00:54:11 ► §

Unlike other performers, the Grateful Dead didn’t repeat themselves.

00:54:15 ► §

Each concert was very different. An experimental feeling is never the same.

00:54:21 ► §

And that created interest and excitement in the audience. Focused on

00:54:26 ► §

developing the musical rapport, we were all astonished and a bit dismayed at the ever-growing

00:54:33 ► §

clan of enthusiasts. By 1972, all around the Corps, a large circle of support moved with us everywhere, carrying a new cultural consciousness and

00:54:48 ► §

a fascination with all things psychedelic. An island was forming in the mainstream of

00:54:55 ► §

American culture. Our messianic vision was fading and changing into a business entity, driven by the need for income to offset the

00:55:07 ► §

expense of an ever-growing crew and family.

00:55:12 ► §

Trucks were bossed.

00:55:13 ► §

Housings of the crew created the wall of sounds to fill the bigger halls.

00:55:19 ► §

As the challenges got bigger, the band had to increase their size.

00:55:24 ► §

As the challenges got bigger, the band had to increase their size. The dead continued to play. The college campuses had revert as political storms of wars and assassinations swirled outside.

00:55:33 ► §

The band always remained sympathetic, but deliberately apolitical.

00:55:38 ► §

They focused on their long, experiential events, often playing for six hours in the night.

00:55:45 ► §

Imagery of dancing, winking skeletons, red roses, and outrageous costumes

00:55:53 ► §

enticed these new converts to events resembling a religious revival meeting.

00:56:02 ► §

The band provided access to a mended bridge, leading to a distraught

00:56:07 ► §

of love and affirmation. Many strong hits felt the first stirring of religious feeling.

00:56:16 ► §

Feedback between the ecstatic audiences and the musicians gathered energy. The entranse

00:56:22 ► §

grew stronger, the events larger, as more energy pulsed through

00:56:27 ► §

in a long, slow gathering of momentum. Their talent grew for bringing a huge room full

00:56:34 ► §

of people into the same psycho-spiritual space, bringing everybody in together. I was caught

00:56:41 ► §

in that too, and supported it from my spot behind the amplifiers, projecting the energy, helping the room to flow.

00:56:50 ► §

As an extended family, our support for the art grew to the point where it people-seeded everything else.

00:56:58 ► §

We were locked in. We worked. It was all about the work. Now I look back and wonder why we were so intensely dialed in, so unfocused.

00:57:11 ► §

Because it was so compelling.

00:57:14 ► §

What they co-created on stage with so many others just did not always work.

00:57:19 ► §

It would fall apart and then the depression and anxiety kicked in.

00:57:24 ► §

You can kick this into working harder the next time.

00:57:27 ► §

Everything depended on that unified force, it seemed.

00:57:32 ► §

I remember one time the band played at the Stanford University in the mid-1980s during the worst of the Reagan years.

00:57:40 ► §

When nothing else was happening, all festivals had shut down.

00:57:46 ► §

There was nothing to go to.

00:57:49 ► §

Every other festival had been shut down.

00:57:54 ► §

And here was a Grateful Dead show, outdoors, in the trees,

00:57:58 ► §

with 15,000 people greeting each other, loving each other,

00:58:03 ► §

recreating their community and creating this beautiful alternative community that’s now cross-pollinating.

00:58:07 ► §

And I’m really proud of all that. We made a place for everyone.

00:58:14 ► §

Well, everyone’s meat and oil is not exactly a safe place.

00:58:18 ► §

It was attractive enough to generate the impulse to get them. And these slides that I’ve just been showing you

00:58:25 ► §

are the envelopes that people send in in the lottery

00:58:30 ► §

to get tickets to the shows during the 1980s.

00:58:35 ► §

The better the envelope, the better your likelihood

00:58:38 ► §

of getting the ticket from our in-house ticket office.

00:58:42 ► §

And so people just made the most wonderful, wonderful collection.

00:58:48 ► §

I’m so glad I photographed these before they all disappeared.

00:58:54 ► §

Anyway, so I’m grateful to show it.

00:58:56 ► §

At Stanford, it was a real watershed for me because I suddenly saw it.

00:59:00 ► §

I saw it on our island.

00:59:02 ► §

I saw it in the midst of the police and the new college kids with their fresh minds and fresh faces.

00:59:11 ► §

In astonishment, meeting this herd of committed deadheads there under the trees.

00:59:19 ► §

So that place was attractive enough to generate the impulse to get there, and it gave a place for people to find each other and bond. And I hope that all those babies that were made there now know that

00:59:30 ► §

this was a real community as well as the biggest circus in the world for years and years and

00:59:36 ► §

years. After Jerry’s death in 1995, it has all sort of evolved. It began to let us all go and to remember what we were doing before we got engaged in

00:59:49 ► §

this gigantic enterprise.

00:59:50 ► §

I look back on that long, long period of effort.

00:59:56 ► §

Our children were born amidst a multitude of adventures that superseded family vacations,

01:00:03 ► §

adventures that the children don’t remember.

01:00:06 ► §

And what now?

01:00:08 ► §

How to deal with the aftermath?

01:00:12 ► §

The gigantic energy and goodwill

01:00:15 ► §

thrown out by the concerts cannot be remade.

01:00:24 ► §

Even the best recordings are not going to recreate that communion.

01:00:29 ► §

I know that our hearts were opened by the fountains.

01:00:33 ► §

There is no way to close them anymore.

01:00:35 ► §

Excuse me.

01:00:37 ► §

We can’t go back to society the way it was.

01:00:41 ► §

We have changed.

01:00:43 ► §

We are new people.

01:00:44 ► §

We are old now. and lost and aggressive,

01:00:49 ► §

and kindness that is the path. Community is a spirit, an effort, an art. We don’t know

01:01:00 ► §

when we are going to meet again. I look forward to that day very much.

01:01:05 ► §

Thank you. Oh, my God! Well, I’ll take questions.

01:01:56 ► §

Thank you.

01:02:04 ► §

Your reaction to Humboldt’s book, The Electric Toilet Asset Test? I really liked that book.

01:02:07 ► §

I interviewed before an extensive number of Tom Wolf and he got me to do the interview

01:02:15 ► §

by buying me food.

01:02:16 ► §

And hamburgers, which we were pretty hungry for.

01:02:17 ► §

But he got it.

01:02:18 ► §

I think he got it.

01:02:19 ► §

The part he didn’t get was the spiritual connection part.

01:02:34 ► §

He claimed never to have gotten high, and he avoided drinking or eating anything whenever he was around us.

01:02:42 ► §

eating anything whenever he was around us. He was a great writer.

01:02:44 ► §

But you know, he’s a good guy and a fabulous writer.

01:02:50 ► §

He captured the fun part.

01:02:52 ► §

He understood the fun and he understood the color and the art very well.

01:02:57 ► §

And I enjoyed that book.

01:03:02 ► §

What was Neil Cassidy like?

01:03:04 ► §

I mean, I’m rereading now, they just republished On the Road, the real name, but I’m going to try it again.

01:03:13 ► §

Well, Neal was born a poor child in Denver, Colorado to a bum, basically. He grew up on the railroad tracks. And he was a seeker. When he finally met Kerouac and Ginsberg and so on, they all sort of fell in love with each other.

01:03:32 ► §

And he realized he had this tremendous gift for storytelling and conversation. And not only that, but he was dazzlingly handsome and energetic and they all fell in love with him.

01:03:49 ► §

And as a person, he could carry on conversations with people over time.

01:03:51 ► §

He had a real knack for remembering,

01:03:54 ► §

even a year later, exactly what you had been talking about

01:03:57 ► §

the last time he saw you and would pick up

01:03:59 ► §

just right where you were at the last conversation.

01:04:04 ► §

And he liked to talk about everything from race car driving

01:04:09 ► §

to whatever Mladen Blavatsky was doing with her seances.

01:04:15 ► §

And he was fascinated. He studied the Theosophical Society.

01:04:21 ► §

He was interested in astrology.

01:04:23 ► §

And he could just… He could re-associate about this stuff endlessly.

01:04:28 ► §

And when he got high, he would carry on with a microphone for hours and hours and hours.

01:04:34 ► §

And there’s a word for this, I forget what retired from Hermes. He was the person that transported people to the new place. He certainly did that for me.

01:05:09 ► §

I was curious about how you felt about the increased corporatization of the Grateful Dead, which really had become a money-making machine at the end.

01:05:11 ► §

I was very much a part of it, too.

01:05:19 ► §

It felt very different than what you were describing later on, when everyone looked kind of like a dollar sign in the audience.

01:05:28 ► §

And it felt that any of that new expression and sharing, the audience had its own separate thing and the band had its separate thing, and everyone was separate, you felt the band didn’t even like each other.

01:05:31 ► §

Yeah, and I think that’s fair. I think that the audience by that time was so dance sensitive

01:05:37 ► §

that they could pick up on all of those signals and fully understood.

01:05:41 ► §

However, if you go out now and listen to some of the music they were doing in 89, 1990, it was brilliant.

01:05:49 ► §

It was some of the best stuff they ever did. But you’re correct that the corporate music business is a pitfall snake.

01:05:57 ► §

It’s an awful place to find yourself and none of them were happy about it.

01:06:01 ► §

And they really felt like they had lost their independence.

01:06:05 ► §

And for free-welded maniacs like them to have to know where you’re going to be on August 17th,

01:06:11 ► §

and six months in advance you’re going to be sweltering on the stage in Wisconsin,

01:06:17 ► §

it’s not that much fun anymore.

01:06:20 ► §

You could see they weren’t having fun.

01:06:22 ► §

But my thoughts to them were carrying it forth, even though it became something very different.

01:06:28 ► §

What would you say is back on the experiential difference of the Sandoz acid and the Osmea acid?

01:06:37 ► §

Oh, I think they’re completely different.

01:06:39 ► §

I’d be happy to talk about them.

01:06:42 ► §

The Sandoz acid is all in the Cadillac of a truck.

01:06:47 ► §

It seems like an outlier would be the Mercedes with two flat tires.

01:06:55 ► §

That’s a bumpy ride.

01:07:11 ► §

Any parallels between your experiences then and the rave scene in the 90s? Oh, very much so. In fact, some friends of mine and I went to a rave in the mid-90s.

01:07:18 ► §

And we were the only people there with gray hair.

01:07:21 ► §

And I just thought it was the greatest thing. It was just wonderful. And people were

01:07:26 ► §

just dancing with the freeness of it. I loved that. I don’t know that all raves are that

01:07:32 ► §

way, but I think it’s a direct, you know, we all have this need to move through space

01:07:37 ► §

and time and our bodies free of the usual constrictions of social grades, and boy, grades are great for that. And I didn’t miss the band at all.

01:07:50 ► §

You know, that thing of not having a band to look at, and suddenly your 360 degrees again. You’re not in the situation. We saw, I guess it was when concerts became the thing and events fell away, the promoters only wanted to put’t dance. They worked through all that stuff year after year after year

01:08:28 ► §

and continued to put on the shows, but it was very, very difficult

01:08:34 ► §

to give up the freedom and find yourself in a concert situation.

01:08:40 ► §

Nobody really liked it, but the money was really good.

01:08:45 ► §

First of all, crazy respect for cooking for nine men.

01:08:55 ► §

Thank you so much for that.

01:08:59 ► §

I just wonder, in all of your experience, everything that you carried, I heard you say a lot.

01:09:03 ► §

And then you came to the end, which was this incredible heart opening, that’s what it’s for.

01:09:09 ► §

And that we should all come to that place and recognize that and all of our cultural communities coming together from that place.

01:09:16 ► §

So what’s one thing that you could…

01:09:28 ► §

A tool.

01:09:30 ► §

An experience, a something.

01:09:32 ► §

Well, I think it’s recognizing that everybody is the same and that all souls are the same weight.

01:09:40 ► §

And nobody’s bigger or smaller than anybody else, is that there’s actually, in our new quantum universe,

01:09:48 ► §

there’s no distance between us.

01:09:50 ► §

And I think the only tool you can really carry there

01:09:52 ► §

is to recognize that that stranger is really you too.

01:09:59 ► §

Back there.

01:10:01 ► §

How often do you think the members of the Grateful Dead were actually on LSD while they were playing music?

01:10:08 ► §

During the acid test, and then in the following decade?

01:10:11 ► §

The acid test, always.

01:10:15 ► §

In the following decade, probably for the first decade after that, pretty regularly.

01:10:20 ► §

Not all the time, because they would do three or four shows a a week and you just can’t get away with that.

01:10:27 ► §

But very often, very often, and recreationally as well.

01:10:34 ► §

I don’t find it works.

01:10:42 ► §

Kat.

01:10:43 ► §

Hi, Bill.

01:10:48 ► §

Thank you for sharing so much of your story.

01:10:56 ► §

And we were very curious and happy to hear your story. And I wonder, having been the creative partner with two great men, culture changers,

01:11:04 ► §

I wonder how you see yourself in the art world. I don’t really think about that.

01:11:10 ► §

Maybe I’m going to get to be an interpreter for them now that they’re gone.

01:11:17 ► §

Pretty much I’m a support for them.

01:11:21 ► §

You know, that was plenty for me at the time. And now if I can help keep that,

01:11:29 ► §

all those ideas flowing, I’m happy to do that.

01:11:36 ► §

Yes, Montague, pardon my English. I want to thank you for your tears and you showed us your feelings.

01:11:46 ► §

And, yeah, I think that’s very strong, strong feelings.

01:11:50 ► §

And how maybe you can tell me how you make it a positive part of your life nowadays in this moment.

01:11:57 ► §

Well, after Jerry died, it was about five years before I could really listen to the music again. I think it was maybe…

01:12:06 ► §

One of the things I wanted to get across in my speech was the emotional…

01:12:12 ► §

um…

01:12:14 ► §

I don’t know.

01:12:16 ► §

The right word.

01:12:18 ► §

The emotional baggage that came with being around that music all the time.

01:12:24 ► §

We were so connected. We were so entrained, entrained to it.

01:12:28 ► §

In other words, I hear it and my whole nervous system reacts instantly.

01:12:33 ► §

I know instantly what it is.

01:12:36 ► §

And I have a whole set of trained responses to it.

01:12:41 ► §

And it’s taken me this long to be able to talk about it openly. I don’t know how

01:12:50 ► §

to describe it other than to say it was a kind of enchantment, a modern enchantment.

01:12:56 ► §

And possibly not safe to be like that. It was so, you know, it had all this amplification, but it also had this amazing liquid quality of being in the moment.

01:13:09 ► §

Momentary change. Boy, it was very hard to break away from.

01:13:14 ► §

I was a slave to that. An emotional slave, I think.

01:13:19 ► §

So that’s my confession.

01:13:22 ► §

That’s my confession.

01:13:29 ► §

I went to shows a lot and I know I bring my own piece. You used to call it, Grateful Day 18.

01:13:32 ► §

Something would come up and it would be like a song or a word or phrase and I would give you an answer and I would choose one.

01:13:39 ► §

And I always sort of wondered, were the dead aware of that?

01:13:43 ► §

I mean were they aware that there was…

01:13:45 ► §

I mean, I don’t want to put a name on it, but there was a real synchronistic thing going on.

01:13:51 ► §

There was tremendous synchrony going on between the music and the audience.

01:13:55 ► §

The audience was like the sounding board, the emotional sounding board.

01:13:59 ► §

I mean, you can feel emotions from people without even having to look at them.

01:14:03 ► §

You know, it interacts,. This is all real stuff.

01:14:08 ► §

We don’t really know how in the quantum universe emotion exists,

01:14:14 ► §

but it’s a palpable source.

01:14:17 ► §

So when they would go up on stage and the audience would leap up,

01:14:21 ► §

they could feel that as a rush of energy.

01:14:24 ► §

That’s fairly addictive, if you believe.

01:14:27 ► §

But luckily it wasn’t directed at me, but I could feel it anyway.

01:14:33 ► §

It was a lot to deal with, and sometimes it was completely overwhelming.

01:14:36 ► §

But they very consciously created those songs to harmonize with that emotional state in the audience and then to reinforce it.

01:14:49 ► §

And when they felt the reinforcement coming from the audience, they knew they were on the right track.

01:14:54 ► §

And so they would proceed in that direction. That was the signal.

01:14:59 ► §

And they changed their musical style from R&B, from rhythm and blues,

01:15:04 ► §

when they were trying to sound like the Rolling Stones. They changed their musical style from R&B, from rhythm and blues,

01:15:05 ► §

when they were trying to sound like the Rolling Stones,

01:15:08 ► §

and then it went off into this other space of improvisation,

01:15:14 ► §

and these songs that they wrote to have emotional content,

01:15:19 ► §

it turned into this whole other thing.

01:15:23 ► §

And they would always come back to the celebration songs.

01:15:28 ► §

They would come back to the songs that everybody had dancing.

01:15:31 ► §

But there was a tremendous consciousness of that emotional force in the room.

01:15:40 ► §

If somebody currently lives in Haight-Ashbury,

01:15:43 ► §

you know, I still find it to be a really enchanted place.

01:15:47 ► §

But I’m curious, what contemporary cultural movement do you see best continuing on the spirit of the pranksters today?

01:15:58 ► §

Hard to say.

01:16:01 ► §

I can see the little sporadic bits of pranksterdom here and there.

01:16:06 ► §

I’m really not sure.

01:16:09 ► §

I think the whole Internet thing has got a pranksterish element about it.

01:16:14 ► §

It’s pretty good.

01:16:24 ► §

I don’t really know where to,

01:16:25 ► §

I have to assume it’s useful and dizzily,

01:16:27 ► §

it will always be resurgent.

01:16:30 ► §

Each group of young people that find each other

01:16:34 ► §

and create events and they have,

01:16:37 ► §

they reciprocally enjoy each other’s company,

01:16:40 ► §

they all are going to have a little spirit

01:16:43 ► §

of pranksterism about them and I think that

01:16:47 ► §

it’s largely a humor based philosophy.

01:16:50 ► §

Where did the Mountain Girl handle come from?

01:16:55 ► §

Well, when I first encountered these guys back in, whenever it was, 65, I think, 64,

01:17:02 ► §

65, everybody took a name.

01:17:04 ► §

But you didn’t invent it yourself.

01:17:07 ► §

Somebody had to give it to you.

01:17:09 ► §

And they asked me where I lived, and I just pointed up

01:17:12 ► §

and I said, well, I live up there on top of that mountain.

01:17:15 ► §

Because I had a little cabin up on top of the mountain.

01:17:17 ► §

Said, oh, you must be Mountain Girl.

01:17:20 ► §

And they’re like, oh, no.

01:17:24 ► §

Now, we’re never gonna be able to get rid of it.

01:17:27 ► §

And it’s okay now.

01:17:31 ► §

I’m not worried about it anymore.

01:17:35 ► §

But one of the cragsters gave me that name that first day I was there.

01:17:40 ► §

Do you think Burning Man carries on that spirit a little bit?

01:17:44 ► §

I love Burning Man and on that spirit a little bit? I love Burning Man, and I go over it every year.

01:17:47 ► §

I think Burning Man is one of the most outstanding events ever.

01:17:50 ► §

It does have some prankster energy, but it also has such intense organization about it.

01:17:57 ► §

But there’s a lot of trust in play at Burning Man.

01:18:01 ► §

People trust.

01:18:03 ► §

They have to trust each other. And so I think most people

01:18:09 ► §

that go to Burning Man are not new to psychedelics. They’re already pretty seasoned heads who

01:18:16 ► §

know how to survive in that environment because it’s not an easy environment. At least I would hope so. But I think that the most hopeful and cheerful,

01:18:28 ► §

for me, I got very excited when I went to Burning Man for the first time.

01:18:32 ► §

So did others. And I recommend it highly.

01:18:36 ► §

I’m interested in your

01:18:40 ► §

comments about the liquid quality of time and I’m thinking about

01:18:44 ► §

the nature of experience

01:18:46 ► §

and the fact that this is a, you know, we’re talking about an experience of a long time ago.

01:18:50 ► §

Now here’s the thing, what happened to all that film?

01:18:53 ► §

And how do you manage the kind of documentation process at the time of happening to afterwards?

01:19:01 ► §

Well what we used to do is get the film developed and then show it at the next party.

01:19:05 ► §

There would be three or four parties in between when the film would come back from the lab.

01:19:12 ► §

The film was really slow and it was really expensive to get it processed.

01:19:18 ► §

So with the LSD and the parties, we kind of got lost by what it can and the leader that said what it was would fall off.

01:19:27 ► §

So it’s a cataloging blogging problem. A lot of that film is launched I believe at the LA Film Archive right now.

01:19:35 ► §

Mostly being transferred to digital format. But it’s really jumbled and cut up.

01:19:41 ► §

We used to cut events a little bit, some little special movies.

01:19:46 ► §

I used to cut triple screen pieces that would show on three screens at once.

01:19:51 ► §

That was a lot of fun.

01:19:53 ► §

But, you know, I had lots of tape all over it and it just, you know, it’s going to take a lot of effort.

01:20:00 ► §

And who’s got the time? By the time I caught up with these guys in 1964, there

01:20:08 ► §

was already 75 hours of film in cans. And by the time we quit, that was triple. So it’s

01:20:15 ► §

just too much for anybody to deal with, really. It’s pretty huge. And a lot of this is not very well photographed. So it’s going to require a team of people with a lot of patience to sort it all out.

01:20:32 ► §

I don’t know if that will ever happen.

01:20:35 ► §

So I don’t think it’s even really important.

01:20:37 ► §

I’m not sure.

01:20:38 ► §

Back there.

01:20:40 ► §

There’s such a monopoly of different drugs and the quality of the LSD and the things that’s really happened over the years. Do you think that’s changed the vibe of the whole

01:20:49 ► §

sort of music thing?

01:20:51 ► §

I don’t know. I sort of don’t go home much. I live on a little sheep ranch in Oregon.

01:21:00 ► §

Recently, however, in the last couple of years, there’s definitely been some better quality products.

01:21:05 ► §

But I really don’t know the ins and outs of that.

01:21:10 ► §

It may be, I mean, obviously the landscape has grown a lot larger when it comes to new varieties.

01:21:20 ► §

But most of them I have not experienced myself.

01:21:24 ► §

Good question. But most of them I have not experienced myself.

01:21:28 ► §

Good question. Matt?

01:21:30 ► §

Is there anything you’d like to share about Jerry as you knew him?

01:21:34 ► §

Maybe some of his personal qualities.

01:21:37 ► §

Just that he was a workaholic.

01:21:40 ► §

And he wasn’t going to help you if you didn’t have a show within the next 24 hours

01:21:45 ► §

or someplace to go play.

01:21:47 ► §

He always felt like if he stopped playing for 48 hours,

01:21:50 ► §

he would lose his skill.

01:21:52 ► §

He would lose his ability to play.

01:21:54 ► §

So he was very driven.

01:21:56 ► §

He was driven to be the very best.

01:21:58 ► §

That was what he wanted to be.

01:22:00 ► §

And I don’t think that they had the idea

01:22:02 ► §

that they would do this kind of music. I mean, who would ever know how to develop this kind of music?

01:22:07 ► §

You can only develop it under certain extraordinary circumstances.

01:22:12 ► §

And they, you know, somehow the cosmic forces aligned to create this culture,

01:22:20 ► §

this experimental culture of music.

01:22:22 ► §

And when I talked for the music monster,

01:22:26 ► §

it really was a monster because it had so much

01:22:28 ► §

of a life of its own.

01:22:30 ► §

And it was.

01:22:32 ► §

Jerry didn’t claim that those very experiential parts

01:22:36 ► §

of the music were anything that he had authored.

01:22:41 ► §

For as far as he was concerned, it just

01:22:43 ► §

came in from the noosphere.

01:22:49 ► §

And we had endless discussions, philosophical discussions,

01:22:50 ► §

about where the music was coming from.

01:22:54 ► §

And we all know that it was just coming.

01:22:57 ► §

When you set the stage up right,

01:22:59 ► §

when everybody could hear each other, when the microphones were good,

01:23:01 ► §

this is what happened with these people.

01:23:04 ► §

And the experience became one that drew everybody in.

01:23:07 ► §

You have some favorite songs?

01:23:09 ► §

Oh yeah, I have a lot of favorite songs. I really wanted to, and I just didn’t get around to it,

01:23:17 ► §

I had so much trouble with my slideshow because I had never done anything like this before.

01:23:21 ► §

And I was pulling material from everywhere and I. I had so much trouble with my slideshow, because I’d never done anything like this before.

01:23:26 ► §

And I was pulling material from everywhere, and I wanted to pull in the lyrics to Addicts Online,

01:23:31 ► §

because that’s probably my favorite song, and I think it fits very well with this conference.

01:23:39 ► §

And I wanted to have that, but it just didn’t happen.

01:23:44 ► §

That one, to me, is the one that really kind of sums it up.

01:23:50 ► §

Did you ever experience downsides of your drug use?

01:23:54 ► §

Oh, you bet.

01:23:56 ► §

You know, the next morning, you know,

01:23:58 ► §

oh, I’m really tired.

01:24:01 ► §

I mean, you know, and living on a block, it’s block, there really isn’t any place to rest.

01:24:08 ► §

You’re sort of resting, standing up.

01:24:11 ► §

A lot of the time we’re curled up on a pillow somewhere, like a cat.

01:24:17 ► §

But I think the worst downside for me was, as far as drugs were concerned,

01:24:24 ► §

was anything that had any speed in it at all.

01:24:26 ► §

It was just so difficult to deal with.

01:24:30 ► §

You know, a couple of days of that, and you’ll ruin your life.

01:24:34 ► §

Because everything just, it turns into something dark and miserable,

01:24:40 ► §

and that is continuously devolving rather than evolving.

01:24:44 ► §

And it’s a very strange thing that happens. and that is continuously devolving rather than evolving.

01:24:48 ► §

And it’s a very strange thing that happens.

01:24:52 ► §

You can take all the brightest and loveliest things in the world and turn them dark and awful in a few hours.

01:24:56 ► §

So I think avoidance is a good piece of the puzzle

01:25:00 ► §

for people who want to live a happy life.

01:25:03 ► §

Avoid many others.

01:25:05 ► §

Well, I think we’ve run out of time pretty thoroughly,

01:25:08 ► §

and it’s lunch, and maybe you want some.

01:25:20 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:25:23 ► §

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:25:29 ► §

Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.

01:25:32 ► §

I know that there are a few of our fellow salonners who were actually living in San Francisco during the times Mountain Girl just described.

01:25:40 ► §

And so this should really bring back some interesting memories.

01:25:45 ► §

I was about to say fond memories, but recently I saw the film Aquarius Rising,

01:25:50 ► §

which is a documentary that was shot during the time Mountain Girl just described.

01:25:54 ► §

And from the looks of it, well, all I can say is that it wasn’t as romantic as it may seem right now.

01:26:01 ► §

In fact, at times it seemed as if those hippies had to struggle just to survive.

01:26:07 ► §

And the never-ending series of adventures that Mountain Girl lived through,

01:26:11 ► §

even before she became the den mother to the Grateful Dead,

01:26:15 ► §

well, that’s a path that not many people could handle.

01:26:18 ► §

It was interesting, I thought, that she ended with a warning about speed.

01:26:23 ► §

You know, let’s face it, Mountain Girl has survived more of a drug scene than any of us will ever get close to,

01:26:29 ► §

and yet here she is, smiling, laughing, and still exuding joy and caution about safety wherever she goes.

01:26:36 ► §

As we just heard, by 1967, when Tim Leary says the 60s really began,

01:26:43 ► §

Carolyn Garcia had already lived through the Mary Prankster experience,

01:26:47 ► §

which is something that many people also associate with the 60s.

01:26:51 ► §

And by the time she moved in with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead,

01:26:55 ► §

she’d already lived a more legendary life than most of us can even dream of.

01:27:00 ► §

And then came the years with the dead.

01:27:02 ► §

What a truly amazing and unique woman she is. I’m sure

01:27:07 ► §

that a thousand years or so from now, she’ll most likely be worshipped as the goddess of the

01:27:12 ► §

mountains or something like that. I’m still blown away by the compassion in her voice just now as

01:27:18 ► §

she recalled the sad faces of all the young people who descended on the hate during the summer of 1967.

01:27:29 ► §

And what touches me so much about her empathy for those young people is that here she was, only 20 years old or so, a single mom,

01:27:33 ► §

and yet it was still the young people who she so wanted to help during that summer of love.

01:27:39 ► §

She’s definitely a bodhisattva in my book.

01:27:43 ► §

And as for the World Psychedelic Conference itself,

01:27:45 ► §

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about it in the weeks ahead.

01:27:49 ► §

And you’ll certainly be able to hear many of the talks,

01:27:52 ► §

if not all of the English talks, over on Psychonautica from Max Freecott.

01:27:56 ► §

But here are a couple thoughts about it from Otto Weidel,

01:28:00 ► §

who recorded this talk for us.

01:28:02 ► §

He says,

01:28:03 ► §

As a conclusion about the conference,

01:28:06 ► §

what I’ve said two days after the event

01:28:07 ► §

and to what I stick today

01:28:09 ► §

is that something was missing.

01:28:11 ► §

First of all, I’ve been deeply troubled

01:28:13 ► §

by lack of drinkable water for free,

01:28:16 ► §

not to mention really expensive meals.

01:28:18 ► §

I suppose for Swiss people,

01:28:20 ► §

those were not expensive at all,

01:28:21 ► §

but that’s just it.

01:28:23 ► §

Switzerland is the most expensive country I’ve been to, and food and drinks at the

01:28:28 ► §

conference should have been a lot cheaper. But that’s my opinion. It has nothing to

01:28:32 ► §

do with the speakers nor the whole format, but still a pain in the ass

01:28:36 ► §

when one spends 12 hours listening. Translation was extra

01:28:39 ► §

and came with a price. Half of the conference has been done in German, which

01:28:43 ► §

I don’t understand.

01:28:45 ► §

This way I’ve missed Christian Rasch,

01:28:47 ► §

who I’d love to hear,

01:28:48 ► §

and Ralph Metzner,

01:28:49 ► §

who also did his speeches in German.

01:28:52 ► §

Last thing is that I had this slight hope

01:28:54 ► §

that there would be some powerful ideas

01:28:56 ► §

presented by ingenious pioneers

01:28:58 ► §

of the psychedelic movement.

01:29:00 ► §

And, well, none of those I’ve heard.

01:29:03 ► §

Nothing to really think about in the end.

01:29:04 ► §

No far-fetched suggestions, stories, etc of those I’ve heard. Nothing to really think about in the end.

01:29:07 ► §

No far-fetched suggestions, stories, etc.

01:29:10 ► §

The whole conference, besides things I’ve mentioned, was great.

01:29:11 ► §

Don’t get me wrong.

01:29:15 ► §

The atmosphere was awesome, but still not magical.

01:29:19 ► §

I don’t know, or maybe I’m just a die-hard fan of Terrence’s talks.

01:29:22 ► §

Well, Autovital, I know what you’re saying.

01:29:26 ► §

And it’s too bad that you didn’t get to hear Christian Rasch speak.

01:29:29 ► §

He’s one of my all-time favorite presenters at conferences like this.

01:29:35 ► §

I’ll have to see if I can dig out some more of the old tapes of him and Palenque for us here in the salon someday.

01:29:41 ► §

But in any event, thanks again for making these recordings, particularly this one of Mountain Girl,

01:29:47 ► §

as it definitely ties up a few of the loose ends in the little history of the 60s that we’ve been playing around with here in the salon.

01:29:50 ► §

And I’d like to go on a bit longer,

01:29:52 ► §

but if I’m going to get this podcast out before we leave on our little trip,

01:29:55 ► §

I’m going to have to bring this to a close for now.

01:29:58 ► §

And as always, I want to close by saying that this and all of the podcasts

01:30:02 ► §

from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creativeons attribution non-commercial share alike 3.0

01:30:08 ► §

license and if you have any questions about that just click the creative commons link at the bottom

01:30:13 ► §

of the psychedelic salon web page or you can also find the program notes for these podcasts and

01:30:18 ► §

that’s at psychedelicsalon.org and for now this is lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.