Free A Long Strange Trip by Dennis Mcnally Page B

Touring professionals stopped by for strings and repairs, and everyone else who was interested would visit for talk and the swapping of tapes, which they made in the back of the store. One day Frankel heard a young picker named Garcia making a tape he coveted. It was easy to initiate a conversation, and when Garcia remarked that he was looking for a fiddler, Ken claimed experience he actually lacked. A couple of weeks later, he was a member of the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers.
    A year and more of constant practice had qualified Garcia to obey the central drive of his entire musical career, which was to play with other people. From the very beginning, he sought communication and collaboration, not performance-as-theater. He’d already come across Joe and Jim Edmonston, who were a few years older than he. They were regular working guys, union men, but they loved to play, which was what counted. It didn’t hurt that their mother was a terrific cook. On May 11, 1962, the Tub Thumpers, with Joe Edmonston on banjo, Frankel on fiddle, Garcia on guitar, and Hunter chucking chords on the mandolin on three days’ practice, led off the Stanford University Folk Festival. Under various names and with a shifting cast of characters that included Marshall Leicester and Jim Edmonston, they played wherever else they could, including the Boar’s Head. Lacking any financial motive, the musicians simply enjoyed each other’s company and playing. “Everybody took the time to listen to everybody else,” said Jim. Garcia took most of the vocals and was dominant, but he also listened, and his bandmates recognized him as their most capable member. Their best gig came as the Hart Valley Drifters. With Frankel on banjo, Garcia on guitar, Hunter on mandolin, and Jim Edmonston on bass, they went to work in the interests of one Hugh Bagley, a candidate for Monterey County sheriff. Playing on the back of a flatbed truck, their job was to attract a crowd for Hugh to speechify and handshake. It was a hilarious, goofy day, and when they couldn’t even find Bagley’s name in the election results, it mattered not at all.
    Just at this time Hunter underwent a most extraordinary experience. He’d been making some money by taking psychological tests at Stanford, and somehow that gave him the opportunity to earn $140 for four sessions, one per week, taking psychedelic drugs at the V.A. Hospital under the auspices of what would prove to be the CIA. He received LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly called acid) the first week, psilocybin the second, mescaline the third, and a mixture of all three on the fourth. Danny Barnett told him he was crazy, but he ignored the doubts. Instead, he told Ken Frankel, “It’ll be fun! I’ll take my typewriter and no telling what’ll come out.”
    Indeed. He’d read a bit of Huxley and tried the notorious cough syrup Romilar, but otherwise this was the first expedition into the world of the psychedelic by any of them, and what he brought back transfixed them all. His first session generated six single-spaced pages of notes, a remarkable document of a mind trying to remember paradise. “Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly-mist . . . and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resoundingbells.” Other people were enmeshed in “the most GODAWFUL prison of concrete and veins and consciousness,” while he could feel “PURE WHITE SPIRIT” pouring from each vein. It was not all ooh and ahh. He saw that “from this peak of Darien” he could unravel any riddle, but if it was brought to him and stripped down, “it would reveal itself to be simply its own answer . . . By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain