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05/13/2002 Archived Entry: "4/11/02 - Grateful Dead 1"

"Trouble ahead, trouble behind." A fragment of a Grateful Dead song comes to mind, as I think about what is going on about us. And, I find, at the moment, that I would rather think about the Grateful Dead, and how I came to be with them, than about the other stuff.

The second time I took LSD was at a concert at the Polo Fields, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I have lost track of the date, either late 1966 or early 1967. The "longhair" (as Rolling Thunder later dubbed us) community, was still pretty small back then. There were seven different bands playing at the same time, each from their own flatbed truck around the field. Each perhaps with 100 to 350 people listening to them play.

I was standing with my friend, Ron Thelin (founder of the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street), watching the Anonymous Artists of America (AAA) play a Mothers of Invention song. The main chorus was: "I’m dying. I’m going out of my mind." This was accompanied by one of the first synthesizers, called a "Buchla (sp?) Machine," which wailed and shrieked with a cacophony of horrible sounds. This was not the best possible accompaniment to coming onto one’s second LSD experience.

In my mind, I was dying and going out of my mind. I crawled away. I do not know whether I literally crawled or figuratively crawled, as the distinction was a bit fuzzy. Anyway, down the field I went.

After a while, I began to feel somewhat better, then pretty good, very good, and, finally, extremely excellent. I stood up. There was Danny Rifkin, one of the first (two) managers of the Grateful Dead, leading a long snake dance of several hundred people, in front of the Grateful Dead. The music, and the moment, was overwhelming. It was my first experience of awe. Not as in the expression, "that was awesome," but in its literal meaning. I was awed. Moved profoundly. It seemed to me that all magic that was flowing around us in the Haight-Ashbury emanated from the Grateful Dead, and most particularly, flowed out of Jerry’s guitar. . I thought to myself, "imagine being a manager of that band, being around that music all the time."

Not very much later, I was a manager of the Grateful Dead. How that came to be, and where that went, is a very interesting story about those times, which I hope to tell soon.