Bear Read online

  As always, the Dead themselves just kept right on working. Finding themselves in dire financial straits early in 1969, the band decided to bring in a real businessman to manage their affairs. Their first choice to fill this position was Bill Graham. Based on his temperament and that he was then viewed as the Antichrist by those in the counterculture who still believed music should be free, his alliance with the Grateful Dead would have been in every sense a marriage made in hell.

  At a band meeting in the warehouse the Dead had rented in Novato in Marin County, Graham and Bear began to argue. Losing his temper, as he almost always did in such situations, Graham demanded that the Dead choose between him and their soundman. After the band made it plain that they were not about to get rid of Bear, Graham stalked out of the warehouse, thereby ending his brief career as their manager.

  At yet another band meeting in April 1969, drummer Mickey Hart suggested that the Dead hire his father, Lenny, to manage them. A champion marching-band drummer who had been born Lenny Hartman, he had deserted his wife and young son in Brooklyn and then worked as a drum salesman and a savings-and-loan executive before opening his own drum store in San Carlos, California. By the time Lenny Hart came to the Grateful Dead, he had forsaken Judaism and become a fundamentalist minister.

  Although the relationship between him and his son had never been smooth, Lenny Hart persuaded the Grateful Dead that only he could rescue them from their current financial crisis. During a meeting at Phil Lesh’s house, Bear told Lenny Hart, “We’re doing the devil’s work here. Are you sure you want to do this?” Answering yes, Lenny Hart assured everyone that making the Grateful Dead solvent was now his sole mission in life.

  Having always disdained all forms of organized religion, Bear was not about to buy into Lenny Hart as the band’s new savior. “I never trusted preachers anyway. I came back to the warehouse one day, and this guy was loading our speakers into a truck. I said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, I just bought these from Lenny Hart.’ I said, ‘No, you didn’t. Put them back inside.’ Lenny Hart also sold the engine from my MG to a junk dealer, and I never found out where it had gone. He was a piece of shit. He sucked. He was one of those guys like Reverend Billy Graham or Pat Robertson. Fucking creeps.”

  In April 1969, Bear set up a room at the Dead warehouse where he hoped to record the band playing live. After he had described his vision of using the room as a place where music could be played and studied, Bob Thomas said that this sounded to him like an alembic, a vessel where something could be refined or transmuted as if by distillation. Bear then brought in Ron Wickersham, who had been working at Ampex, and formed a company called Alembic to begin improving the mix whenever the band played onstage.

  On May 29, 1969, the Grateful Dead performed with Lee Michaels and the Youngbloods in Robertson Gymnasium at the University of California, Santa Barbara. During an utterly chaotic gig that Michael Lydon would later describe in great detail in his landmark article about the Dead in Rolling Stone magazine, Bear could be found lying flat on his back curled up among the amplifiers with his eyes “sightless as fog” as the band began to play.

  After having performed for forty minutes through Lee Michaels’s PA, Jerry Garcia suddenly stopped playing, ripped out his amplifier cord, and told the crowd that the Dead were now going to set up their own system so “we can hear what the fuck is happening.” In a backstage scene that was out of control even for the Grateful Dead, Garcia then began shouting that the band should give everyone their money back if they could not do a “righteous” show.

  After having been loudly summoned by Garcia, Bear wandered over to him “still lost in some inter-cerebral space.” Garcia then screamed, “Listen, are you in this group, are you one of us? Are you gonna set up that PA? Their monitors suck. I can’t hear a goddamn thing out there. How can I play if I can’t hear the drums?” Mumbling that it would take two hours to set up the Grateful Dead’s PA, Bear wandered off and disappeared into the night.

  By then, the band’s roadies had already begun dismantling the PA onstage. Because someone had turned up the houselights, the crowd began to leave. In Lydon’s words, “A good night, a potentially great night, had been shot by a combination of promoter burn and Dead incompetence, and at one A.M. it didn’t matter who was to blame or where it had started to go wrong. It was too far gone to save the night.”

  On May 30, the Grateful Dead were scheduled to perform at Springer’s Inn, a large dance hall in Portland, Oregon. At seven thirty that morning, Lenny Hart was beside himself as he sat waiting in a car outside the band’s motel. Although it was time for the Dead to leave, Bear was nowhere to be found. Drumming his hands against the steering wheel, Lenny Hart demanded, “What’s so special about Bear that he can’t get here like everyone else?”

  Suddenly, Bear appeared looking “sleepy but dapper” in a black leather shirt and vest, pale blue pants, and blue suede boots. Accurately, Lydon described Lenny Hart and Bear as being “like two selves of the Dead at war, with the Dead themselves sitting as judges.” Noting that Jerry Garcia had described Bear as “Satan in our midst,” Lydon wrote that he was a “friend, chemist, psychedelic legend and electronic genius; not a leader but a moon with a gravitational pull. He is a prince of inefficiency, the essence at its most perverse of what the Dead refuse to give up. They [i.e., Bear and Lenny Hart] are natural enemies, but somehow they have to co-exist for the Dead to survive. The skirmishing has just begun.”

  When the band arrived at the airport in Santa Barbara ten minutes after their flight had departed, Bear began puttering with his bags as a ticket taker called out for “Mr. Bear.” He then went into a long, involved rap about how the Hells Angels really had it down and could use a whip like a stiletto to slice open someone’s nostrils, first the right and then the left, just as neat as you please.

  After everyone had agreed that the Hells Angels were righteously ugly, the band spent the next few hours hanging out at the airport before finally boarding a flight that got them to Portland in time for the gig. As they all sat in first class enjoying the free drinks while some band members snorted cocaine, Bear proudly displayed the alarm clock he had bought to ensure that he would now always be there whenever the Dead needed to leave. Taking it as a joke, Lenny Hart told Bear that if he was not ready the next time the band had to go somewhere, he would be left behind.

  Less than a year later, the Grateful Dead discovered that Lenny Hart had absconded with about $155,000 of their money, a sum that would now be equal to nearly $1 million. The band eventually recovered a third of it, and although they did not press charges against him, Lenny Hart was convicted of criminal embezzlement and sentenced to six months in jail. As a result of this fiasco, Mickey Hart left the Grateful Dead and did not begin playing with them again regularly until 1974.

  On June 7, 1969, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. Janis Joplin came onstage to join Pigpen in a rendition of Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn on Your Love Light.” Before the show began, a well-known San Francisco acid dealer had dumped what may have been as much as a gram of LSD, worth $50,000 on the street, into a bottle of apple juice backstage.

  Cornelius “Snooky” Flowers, the saxophone player in Joplin’s new band, got so stoned that he had to be taken to a hospital. Losing all control, Janis Joplin charged over to Bear and began screaming, “You sonofabitch! You dosed my sax player and he’s had to go to the hospital.”

  After the show was over, Bear and Rhoney Gissen left the hall together, only to find Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter lying naked in the street. Stoned out of his mind, he grabbed Bear in a headlock and punched him while shouting, “I will annihilate you, Owsleystein!” (i.e., “Owsley/Einstein”). After getting Hunter into a car, Bear drove him to the dealer’s apartment. At dawn, Jerry Garcia showed up to help talk his old friend down from a nightmare trip that Hunter would later say “really did flatten me for a couple of years and made me seriously consider what the wisdom of this drug-taking had be
en.”

  What seems astonishing even now is how regularly during this period Bear himself continued to lose it while getting far too high on his own supply. After a performance at Winterland, Mickey Hart and Bill Graham walked back onstage only to find Bear talking to the amplifiers. As Hart told David Browne, “He was saying things like, ‘I love you and you love me, how could you fail me?’ He was addressing those electronics as if they were a person.”

  In Bear’s words, “I talked to the amps a couple of times. During one show, I was hanging on the curtain because I couldn’t get away from the amps, which sounded to me like the explosion at the end of the world. I could smell the smoke of the universe as we knew it collapsing, and I didn’t want to leave because I was too afraid. Bill Graham carried me outside and put me in his car. I had been taking too many things and I blew it and just got carried away.”

  With the Dead now performing at “a lot of festival style shows where the equipment would all wind up at the back of the stage in a muddle,” Bear found himself having to “spend a fair amount of time moving the pieces around so we could read the name on the boxes. I decided that we needed some sort of marking so we could identify our stuff from a distance.”

  While driving to the Dead warehouse in Novato one day in his MG, Bear saw a sign on a building along the freeway that featured a blue-and-orange circle with a white bar across it. Thinking it would be cool if the circle were red and blue and the white bar were a lightning bolt, Bear told Bob Thomas about it, and they then had someone spray-paint a logo that “was a quick way of marking our gear and that you could spot from anywhere.”

  A few days later, Bear suggested to Bob Thomas that “perhaps the words ‘Grateful Dead’ could be placed under the circle, using a style of lettering that would appear to be a skull if you saw it from a distance.” Thomas said, “Oh, that’s a good idea,” and “a few hours later he came down from the loft with the design.” The Steal Your Face logo, aka the Stealie, has since become one of the most well-known trademarks in the history of rock.

  Despite having come up with the idea for the basic design, Bear was never compensated for what he had done. “I didn’t get anything from it. It was my concept and Bob Thomas’s artwork, but he sold it to the Grateful Dead in 1969 for two hundred and fifty dollars for use as a letterhead. Are you kidding me? That’s the most powerful corporate logo that has ever been designed, and I’ve looked at them all. It should be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

  The logo was on the Grateful Dead’s equipment when they took the stage at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair at ten thirty at night on August 15, 1969, to play before a crowd of four hundred thousand people. Long before the band began a performance that, in Dennis McNally’s words, “would rank in their memory as one of their worst ever,” the setup itself was plagued with problems.

  To move each band’s equipment on and off the stage as quickly as possible, festival organizers had mounted large plywood circles on casters so everything could be rolled into place. From the moment he first laid eyes on them, Bear was convinced that they were a disaster in the making. “We arrived at Woodstock and saw these big cookies, and I said to Michael Lang, ‘This doesn’t work.’ He said, ‘What do you mean it doesn’t work?’ I said, ‘Our equipment is too heavy. This thing won’t hold us up. We have to set our stuff up on the stage itself.’ He said, ‘Absolutely not. You have to do it this way.’”

  After Bear and the other Dead roadies had set everything up on the plywood circle, the stagehands “hooked ropes up to it and turned the thing around and it moved approximately one foot and all the casters broke. Wham! All the two-by-fours ripped out, and down came the thing onto the stage. So we had to take everything down and set it all back up again, and that took like twenty minutes. Everyone was bitching that it was our fault, but it wasn’t.”

  Once all the gear had been hooked back up, Phil Lesh plugged in his bass guitar and “out came the sound of the helicopter radio. I said, ‘Take our cable and the PA cable and ground them all to the same one the helicopter is grounded on,’ but they didn’t want to do that. I said, ‘You either do this or the band is not going to play.’ I stopped the show because Phil had told me that he wasn’t going to play with the helicopter radio coming out of his amplifier.”

  After Bear had shown the first-class radio operator’s license he always carried around with him in his wallet to the festival’s electrician, he finally agreed to do this “and there were no more problems. The band came out and I went to the booth and it was not a good show. We were real tired and it was late and there was too much hassle and sitting around. Those shows were not easy.”

  For the Dead, this show proved to be far worse than any of them could have imagined. By the time the band took the stage, rain was pouring down in sheets. The wind was blowing so hard that holes had to be cut in the light-show screen to keep it from hauling the stage off its foundation like a giant sail. When Bob Weir leaned into his microphone to begin singing, a huge blue spark struck him in the lip and knocked him backward. As Jerry Garcia left the stage, he told Jon McIntire, the band’s road manager, “It’s nice to know that you can blow the most important gig of your career and it doesn’t really matter.”

  Despite how badly the Grateful Dead had performed at Woodstock, Bear himself had a fine time at the festival. Staying awake until Jimi Hendrix ended the event, Bear happily dispensed liquid LSD from his ever-present Murine bottle to one and all. His opinion of the festival itself, however, was far less favorable: “The wrong sorts of people got control of it and made it into a disaster. Instead of just flowing with it, they tried to control everything. All those weird announcements about things that could have been easily avoided.”

  Perhaps the single most notable announcement made from the stage at Woodstock was Chip Monck’s gentle warning that “the brown acid that is circulating around us isn’t too good. It is suggested you stay away from that. Of course it’s your own trip. So be my guest, but please be advised that there is a warning on that one, okay?” High as a kite on his own LSD at the time, the message was most definitely not one that Bear wanted to hear.

  Less than two months later, Bear appeared in the US District Court in San Francisco alongside Robert Massey, Bob Thomas, and Will Spires to stand trial for the bust at 69 La Espiral Street in Orinda. After a nonjury proceeding in which the government’s entire case against Bear “seemed to hang on a single fingerprint found on confiscated laboratory equipment,” Judge William T. Sweigert chose to believe the expert witness who testified that the print belonged to Owsley.

  Rejecting the somewhat ludicrous claim offered by the defense that Bear had been manufacturing LSD at the house strictly for his personal use, as well as numerous technical challenges concerning the legality of the search warrant that federal agents had obtained before raiding the premises, Sweigert found all four defendants guilty on charges of possessing, manufacturing, and conspiring to make and sell LSD.

  On November 7, 1969, Sweigert sentenced all four men to three years in jail and ordered each to pay $3,000 in fines. Bear’s high-priced lawyers immediately filed an appeal that began wending its way through the Ninth Circuit Court.

  Twenty-four days later, on Monday, December 1, 1969, the Grateful Dead performed at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, Michigan. Having already decided that marijuana could only properly be smoked in joints that had been rolled in Chanticleer papers, a brand that could then only be bought in Canada, Bear drove across the border to Windsor, Ontario, where he purchased a gross of them.

  On his way back to Detroit, American customs officials opened the trunk of Bear’s rented car and discovered that it was stacked to the brim with packets of rolling papers. “They found that suspicious,” Rock Scully would later say, “and so they looked all over for the dope and there wasn’t any, but it was obvious to them that this guy was a doper so they followed him back to the hotel and immediately began going through all the rooms trying to find him.

  “Expec
ting to bring some queen of the underground there, whenever Bear checked into a hotel room, he would set up Indian madras and paisley blankets on his bed and change all the lightbulbs to black lights and bulbs that flickered like candles. He would burn this patchouli incense so the room was always filled with smoke and looked like an old San Francisco bordello. He would also take the dresser apart and use it as a workbench and unfold this pantheon of tech gear, soldering guns, and scopes from his briefcases, and so his room was always bizarre beyond belief.

  “When the cops finally entered Bear’s room, it was all just so confusing for them because they couldn’t turn on any of the lights and Bear refused to be intimidated by them. ‘What do you mean? Of course, I bought cigarette papers! I can’t find them anywhere and I’m taking them home to California with me!’ I think we only avoided a bust there out of their sheer confusion. I just thanked my lucky stars that Bear was clean, because otherwise the cops would have gone through all our rooms.”

  Bear then ended what had already been an eventful year not just for him but the counterculture as well by setting up the sound system at Altamont Speedway in Alameda County for a massive free concert featuring the Rolling Stones on December 6, 1969. “I knew well ahead of time that we were heading into something that was not going to be easy, but I was committed. I took seven absolutely unrelated sound companies, each of which was run by a guy with an ego as big as the Eiffel Tower, and put it all together into one functional unit. The reason I was able to do this was because I was the only person who had worked with every single one of those different kinds of sound systems.”

  On the day before the concert, Bear was driving to the site over the Altamont Pass with Dan Healy. “We looked up, and all of a sudden there was this rocket blowing up in the sky and I said, ‘That’s got to be a strange sign.’ We couldn’t figure where to get off the freeway, so we took a turnoff and the road kept getting weirder and weirder and the trees kept getting closer, and eventually we went through some kind of tunnel and came out into the backyard of this place.