Free A Long Strange Trip by Dennis Mcnally

old friend Laird Grant. The furnishings ran from fine Chinese antique pieces in the living room to a refrigerator empty but for rotting mustard and moldy bread. David McQueen and Lester Hellum were regular visitors, joyfully slandering each other in ways that left onlookers gasping with laughter. And there were plenty of female visitors, like Suze Wood, Cherie Huddleston, and Joan Simms.
    And, of course, Brigid Meier. That fall, her relationship with Garcia changed dramatically. She had been “part of the cement of our scene,” Garcia thought, reminding him of his grandmother in her ability to love everyone. Now she enthusiastically gave up her virginity to Garcia. Perhaps because she was so exceptionally beautiful, Garcia would always cherish the relationship as the height of romance, twenty years later describing her as “the love of my life, really, in a way,” astonishingly still remorseful over the lust that had made their relationship a physical one. Their new romantic status bothered Hunter, who thought of Brigid in a protective way. Now in the throes of writing a novel about their group, Hunter used his feelings as an artistic goad, referring to himself as a “prophet of melancholy.” He took his title,
The Silver Snarling Trumpet,
from Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and in its first draft it was a good first novel. Unfortunately, he decided that the taut original version was too short, and he rewrote it, waxing ever longer and more philosophical.
    Sometime in 1961, John the Cool brought around a new guy by the name of Phil Lesh. Impressed by his sheer speed of mind and obviously forceful intelligence, Winter told Hunter that Lesh “could walk on your mind in three minutes,” which made for a bad first impression. But Lesh turned out to be less intimidating than that, and his musical gifts bridged the gap. He blew a little trumpet with Lester Hellum on alto, and his enthusiasm for music was endearing. He was then much more involved with composition than playing, and when Hunter and Garcia saw him sitting at a card table at work on “The Sun Cycle,” a piece planned for three orchestras, writing it out of his head without even a piano, they were stunned. At the time, one of his party parlor tricks was to turn his back and challenge guitarists, as one of the crowd recalled, to “come up with knuckle-busting perverse chords, seventeenths with flatted eighths with augmented—he’d tell me the notes, the order, whether or not my guitar was tuned standard.”
    Lesh had graduated from the College of San Mateo that June of 1961, and while taking an entrance examination for the U.C. Berkeley musicology department that spring, had met Tom “T.C.” Constanten, who would become his lifelong friend. Speaking with a young woman about serial music, Lesh was charmed when T.C. interjected, “Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950.” Lesh’s only response was to stick out his hand. Immediate partners in musical crime, the two of them took up residence in Berkeley, with Phil’s troll friend the con artist/poet Bobby Petersen as a regular visitor. For such a skinny fellow, Lesh had a remarkable facility for shoplifting, and in his persona as “Phil the Coat” he made sure, as he later put it, that “we ate pretty well for poor folks.” However, Lesh was less adept in his dealings with bureaucracy. He got into Cal by taking dictation, listening to a piece of music by Chopin and transcribing it. Alas, he wrote down what he heard, and he cared not how Chopin might have originally written it. When told that he would still have to take Ear Training, he concluded that university music departments were more oriented to obedience than creativity. By midsemester he’d dropped out to spend the winter reading Joyce and listening to Mahler, his and T.C.’s favorite composer. Then, early in 1962, they learned that Luciano Berio, the young (then thirty-seven) Italian modernist composer, a