Dark Star (9 page)

David Nelson:
Garcia was working at Dana Morgan's and he called me up and said, “We've got to go down to St. Mike's Alley now. They're playing this group, the Beatles. They've got the album and I want you to check it out.” So we went and got coffee and sat there looking at each other listening on the sound system to the Beatles' first album. The “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” album. After every song, we'd look at each other. I was going, “This is going to make me puke, man.” He said, “Oh no, give it a chance. Let's listen with an open mind.” I said, “Okay, okay. I like rock 'n' roll but I don't think those British punks can play it, man. Do they know who Jimmy Reed is? Come on, man.” Garcia would say, “Calm down, man. They probably do, you know.” I'd say, “You can't put it past me, man. I don't hear no Jimmy Reed in that. I don't hear no Hank Ballard and the Midnighters or Fats Domino.” Because I loved those people so much. I was angry that these British guys had come and now people were going to think that was it. Now people were going to think that that was where rhythm and blues was at. This pissed me off. He wanted a good perspective on it because I think he could sense that it was going to be big. The British invasion was coming.

After each song, it was like, “Pretty good. Good harmony. Like in the bluegrass band. Yeah, they do sing good harmony.” We finished the album and we both looked at each other and said, “Okay, what's the verdict? What do you think?” And we both gave it the iffy sign. Not the okay sign. It was iffy. And we got up and left. I was thinking, “So that's the story on the Beatles.”

A year later, the movie
A Hard Day's Night
came out. A friend called me up and said, “You gotta see it, man. I think they smoke pot.” So I went to see it and I went, “Oh, my God! I think they do. They're smoking it.” It hadn't come above ground then and so anything about pot was like the cat that ate the canary. Any time you laughed, you'd cover your mouth because nobody knew what you were laughing about. Only we knew.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
When
A Hard Day's Night
came out, we started changing our mind about the Beatles. They were a trip and there was something inspiring about these smart adorable talented guys our own age getting to make a movie about themselves being very silly. We could identify with that kind of irreverent off-the-wall zaniness. By the end of 1964 or in early 1965, we got turned on to acid. That changed everything. By the time
Help
came out, the Beatles and their music were part of big changes going up for a whole group of us. Sue Swanson and I saw
Help
about twelve times and memorized every line. Things were still very innocent in Palo Alto then. Taking acid and tripping out, we felt like we owned the sidewalks downtown. It was a sweet time.

Mountain Girl and Jerry

 

Walk into splintered sunlight Inch your way through dead dreams to another land.

—
Robert Hunter, “Box of Rain”

We had enough acid to blow the world apart. We were just musicians in this house and we were guinea pigging more or less continuously. Tripping frequently if not constantly. That got good and weird.

—
Jerry Garcia, interview with author, 1988

 

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
I had always wanted to do psychedelics. I'd read Aldous Huxley's
Doors of Perception
when I was a teenager and really wanted to expand my consciousness. As far as I knew, it was different than grass. I'd smoked some grass with Hunter and gotten kind of silly and it was okay. But grass made Jerry irresponsible and that was why I didn't like it.

David Nelson:
We all took acid together the first time. Me and Jerry and Sara. We were moving into this place on Gilman Street in Palo Alto. I believe it was probably in the spring of '65. We'd always been talking about if we could get some LSD. LSD was something in the Sunday supplement of the newspaper in some weird psycho article. The drug that made you go psychotic. People would see lions and tigers and stuff. We all said, “Yeah. I want that! I want that!” I thought, “If I hallucinate, I want to see a full life-size cartoon of Mickey Mouse. I want to see Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Only as life-size cartoons actually walking up to me.” Then somebody said, “I want to see myself. I want to hallucinate and see myself walk in the room!” The only one with personal experience with it was Hunter because he did that Veterans Administration program where you were a guinea pig and they tried you out on mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD. When Hunter told us that in the Wildwood Boys, me and Garcia went, “We're going for coffee. Come on!” We went down to this coffee shop and sat there and just pumped him. “Tell us all about it. Every detail. Every gory detail.” I remember him telling us about the deificoition plane. He was allowed to have his typewriter so he did some writing on psilocybin or something and came up with this plane of writing or thought that was called the deificoition plane. As far as hallucinations, he said he didn't see too much except on one occasion he looked around and the seat of this chair that was in the room looked like a mouth and lips and it went “Whoaff!” at him. Another time, he said that he was really getting deep into a nightmare trip where he was being chased by this demon with a dagger. A crystalline dagger that was this long and he was running and couldn't get away. Finally there was nothing else to do but turn and face the demon. He turned and he grabbed the dagger out of the demon's hand and stabbed himself in the heart and licked the blood. Me and Garcia went, “Ahhhh, yeah. That's my man!”

Rick Shubb from Berkeley, a Sandy Rothman friend, a bluegrass guy, who now makes those Shubb capos, had found a place in Palo Alto where we could share the rent. On the first day we were moving into Gilman Street, he said, “I can get LSD.” We went “Okay” and everybody coughed up their money. It was twelve dollars or something that he had to have from each guy. It was Jerry and Sara, me, and eight or nine others. We all dropped acid at the same time for the first time. It was everybody's first time.

It was white powder in a capsule and it was just amazing. Everybody walked off into their own thing for a while and then came back and we were looking at each other in the mirror and going, “That's incredible!” It was you but only different. It was like the archetype of you. The basic you coming through. I was saying, “Everybody looks like animals. Like the human version of their animal.” We were saying, “Jerry, you look like a bear, man.” And he did. He looked like a big brown bear. Sara looked like a swan or a goose. At some point, I suddenly thought, “Does anybody know if there's something we ought to know about this? Some of the dangers? Does anybody know anybody who's experienced?” I said, “Hunter's experienced. Let's go see him. And find out if we should be tipped off to anything.” So we ran over to Hunter's house. I told him about it and he went, “Oh, are you always in the habit of jumping out of planes without parachutes?” We all looked at one another. “Oh, my God!” He said, “No, no. Relax. Sit down.” So we sat down and he was talking and I remember when he was talking, I stopped listening to what he was saying because he was gesturing with his hands. He went, “And then you get to that point and then it's
peeeuuuuuu!
” And he made this gesture. But I saw it in stop motion. He made this fanning motion with his fingers and I saw it
click click click click click click click click
. Like that photography thing. It was amazing.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
Taking acid was wonderful for me. It was like coming home. I just loved it. That first time we took it, I remember Jer and I jointly freaked out in the middle of the night when we were off by ourselves. Big-time freaked out. We drove to Hunter's and woke him up because he had the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
. So we figured he would be able to help us. We woke him up and said, “We're freaking out, man, you gotta help us.” Hunter looked at the book for a while and then he said, “It's okay.” “It's okay? It's okay.
It's okay!
Oh,
yeah
! It's
okay
!” What a relief. Everything was okay. That revelation saved our lives.

David Nelson:
In the evening, we went and played basketball. We were just fooling around, throwing the ball to one another, not really playing hard or anything. The thing about the basketball and the light was that the ball had a jet trail about six feet long. It made it easier to hit a basket and definitely easier to catch. Because it had this trail you could see like a big pointer. It was like Disneyland. It was the first-time realization that we could go to Disneyland any time, man. It was great. We were all remarking about how there was no hangover. There was this feeling of great energy to stay up and do things without being speeded. Without being like raped. It was really great.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
We had such wonderful times on these early group trips. We just had wonderful wonderful times. They were so magical. This was large amounts of pure pharmaceutical acid. We were having very profound and deep contact, not with spirits but with the basic energetic components of life on earth. I do remember that after the Muir Beach Acid Test, Bob Weir and Jerry and I and maybe Sue Swanson went up on top of Mount Tam and we all had a joint hallucination that scared the shit out of us. Somebody else who was there actually took off and ran across the countryside. We had all seen something in the path. It was probably a gnarled tree branch. But to us, it was a dark malevolent being in the predawn light. We all had the same scare. But usually it was pretty positive. Considering we were taking acid, we did quite well. We had wonderful times. Just so high and delightful.

Suzy Wood:
Sara would write to me about acid. “Hitch your scrotum to a star,” she'd say. That was what acid did to you. It was an interesting thought. Considering it was coming from a woman.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
But I don't have a scrotum. How would I know?

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
Jerry had finally taken acid. That was my attitude. Because I'd already been taking it for a year or so before he was taking it.

 

Laird Grant:
There were parties all the time and then the whole Kesey thing started happening in La Honda. It had been happening down on Homer Lane and Perry Lane in Palo Alto. Sometimes there would be parties in all three places. You'd spend half an hour or an hour here. Then you'd go over to another party. Tripping openly at parties was still six months to a year away. Then it was really secretive. People were feeling, “Should we let other people know about this?” Then the thing was, “Yeah. Everybody should do it.” Which again changed everybody's life into a whole different larger, stranger circle.

David Nelson:
We all actually came in contact with the Kesey bunch there at Gilman Street when Page Browning who also used to hang out at the Chateau but now was living at Perry Lane came by one afternoon and told us about the first bus trip. Garcia was there. He had a ringside seat. Page was actually there to score some pot. Phil Lesh had moved into Gilman Street and Page was a friend of Phil's from the Chateau days. We used to smoke pot and go to drive-in movies. We started talking and Page said, “Have you heard about the bus?” And I said, “No.” He said, “They painted this bus just like a Jackson Pollock painting and then they got Neal Cassady to drive it.” We were going, “Yeah?” They'd gone east with the goal in mind to meet Kerouac and to get in contact with Timothy Leary and those people at Millbrook and they'd encountered complete stuffiness and snobbiness from the Timothy Leary people. Leary himself wasn't even there. Jerry was sitting there listening to this and then I remember Page saying, “So what we did was, we went to a nearby Army and Navy store in town and got some surplus smoke bombs, red and green smoke dye marker canisters, and we went and lobbed it over the wall at them.” We were laughing and he told us great stories about this bus trip. About Neal Cassady with headphones on being stopped by cops and the cops just being completely nonplussed and straight people across the nation being totally nonplussed by this outrageous bus and this guy with headphones on driving. “God,” we said. “You mean Neal was taking acid and driving, too?” We were going, “Wow! How do you drive when you're hallucinating?” And Page said, “We asked him about that too and Neal said, ‘You just pick out the hallucinations from the real stuff. Then you drive right through the hallucinations!'”