MO4952 Student ID: 140007740

Acid Trips and Guitar Riffs:

The Birth of the Dead from the Warlock’s Spell

The Heavenly Decade propelled the rock & roll revolution through the
rhythm and rhymes of musical prophets who captivated and defined a
generation. While the Stones never stopped rolling and Beatlemania swept the
nation, few bands embodied the spirit of this decade more than the Grateful
Dead. Melding bluegrass, R&B, folk, and rock through its long, improvised jams
inspired by mind-bending psychedelics, the Dead were able to create a
distinctively American sound. The Dead continued on until one fateful summer
day in the ‘90s brought the death of Jerry Garcia and an end to the band. On this
long strange trip, the Grateful Dead have certainly earned their place in the Rock
& Roll Hall of Fame, and like many great bands, the Dead had humble beginnings.
In 1965, the band, then called the Warlocks, began to develop the Dead’s
patented voice and lifestyle. This early incarnation of the band remained obscure
because it had recorded only six songs and had little promotion. Nonetheless,
through the alchemy of their diverse musical backgrounds and the acid-tabs
under their tongues, the Warlocks transmuted their style into an innovative,
hybridized folk-blues-rock sound that tapped into and helped create the nascent
counterculture.

The saga of the Grateful Dead begins with the story of how a group of
alienated, young, middle-class kids, each with unique musical interests and
expertise, came together and revolutionized music. It centers around famed
front man Jerry Garcia. During his youth in San Francisco, Garcia listened to
bluegrass, and as a teenager, his tastes expanded to rock, blues, and jazz. After
buying his first banjo in 1962, Garcia played in a number of bluegrass groups that
would serve as key musical apprenticeships, most notably Mother McCree’s
Uptown Jug Champions. In order to make a living, Garcia took a guitar-teaching
job at Dana Morgan Music, but little did he know that this would lead him to his
future band-mates.

In this small Palo Alto music store, Garcia met another musician working
there, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. While Garcia played bluegrass, Pigpen came from
a different musical heritage. Inspired by his father, an R&B DJ, McKernan was a
talented blues guitarist, pianist, and harmonica player. He soon joined the jug
band. On New Year’s Eve 1963, sixteen-year-old Bob Weir, hearing music,
knocked on Morgan’s backdoor and was invited in by Garcia to jam all night long
to ring in the New Year. Shortly after, Weir joined Mother McCree’s, bringing his
skill in folksy rhythm guitar and vocals. The final two members of the band were
added only after the start of the Warlocks, and each brought a diverse skill set.
Bill Kreutzmann, an R&B drummer with a background in the improvisational
traditions of jazz, was intoxicated by Garcia’s free-flowing music. Phil Lesh began
his career performing avant-garde classical music and jazz before Garcia
suggested he learn electric bass. Despite having no formal bass training, Lesh
innovated the conventional beat-keeping by adding improvised solo riffs.

With a bluegrass lead guitarist, a blues pianist and harmonica player, a

folksy guitarist, an R&B drummer, and a classically trained bassist, the band came
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from all walks of American musical life. In March 1965, Pigpen convinced them
to create an electric folk-blues band, and on April Fool’s Day they performed for
the first time as the Warlocks at Menlo College. In a later interview, Garcia
discusses the transformation electrified sound brought: “Theoretically [the
Warlocks are] a blues band, but the minute we get electric instruments, it’s a rock
and roll band.” By going electric, the Warlocks merged American R&B, bluegrass,
and folk with British Invasion rock & roll. Garcia observed, “We were kind of
patterned along the same lines as the Rolling Stones,” and at gigs, the Warlocks
performed covers of the Stones, Kinks, Bob Dylan, and others. While the
Warlocks were mainly a cover band, their jam-band future was already apparent.
As Garcia asserts, “We’d do songs and suddenly they’d be ten or fifteen minutes
long. Really, the phonograph record is the thing that says, ‘Hey, a song is three
minutes long,’ not music itself.” Defying the definitions of rock, the creative
improvisations of jam-band style made the Warlocks musical pioneers.

In the summer of 1965, the Warlocks were hitting their stride while
Haight-Ashbury was becoming incandescent with LSD. Before Garcia and his
posse even met Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the Warlocks were driving
the train of this countercultural phenomenon because of their early
hallucinogenic experimentation. After taking acid for the first time in 1964,
Garcia recalls, “The whole world went kablooey.” On November 27, 1965, the
Warlocks attended Kesey’s first Acid Test. Although Kreutzmann asserts, “it
wasn’t a gig,” the Warlocks played improvisational instrumentals at the party and
were able to captivate the audience with their psychedelic sound. This was only
the first of many Acid Test performances, which, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia
said, helped develop the Dead’s signature style: “In the Acid Test format….you’d
get these long, drawn-out, peculiar [passages] where they would be sort of
fooling around with their instruments…And it had a lot to do with the way they
are today.” Through acid trips and musical experimentation, the Warlocks
unlocked their collective consciousness and found themselves at the forefront of
the burgeoning counterculture movement.

Warlocks pose on Haight-

Ashbury, 1965: Kreutzmann
(left), Weir, McKernan,
Garcia, Lesh
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In late October 1965, the Warlocks began writing their own songs. On
November 3, they recorded four original songs, “I Can’t Come Down,”
“Mindbender,” “The Only Time Is Now,” and “Caution (Do Not Stop On The
Tracks),” and two covers of popular folk songs, “I Know You Rider” and “Early
Morning Rain.” The two most important stylistically are “I Can’t Come Down” and
“Caution (Do Not Stop On The Tracks).” Although, as Phil Lesh admits, these
songs were “embarrassingly amateurish,” they show the Warlocks fusion genres.

“I Can’t Come Down,” begins with a loud vibrato on the harmonica over a
riff on the guitar, which shows the band’s heritage in the blues. The lyrics
describe an acid trip that has the user “flying down deserted streets” until
policemen on “night time beats” question him. In response to the officer, the
user states, “I can’t come down till it’s plain to see/I can’t come down, I’ve been
set free,” proclaiming the liberation from reality that LSD can give. The song
proceeds to reinforce its anti-establishment, anti-rational stance by stating,
“someone’s trying to tell me where it’s at/And how I do this and why I do that.”
This line would resonate with disaffected youth who saw society as
authoritarian, with its rules, laws, and rigid logic. The song continues with the
user’s “hold on reality is starting to slip” and despite being told, “to get off this
trip,” he concludes that “Life is sweet it’s too warm to sip/and if I drink, I’ll chug
and flip.” Here, he is telling the audience to embrace the psychedelic experience
wholeheartedly, but warning it comes with the risk of flipping out on a bad trip.
The song ends with an intricate jam in classic Dead fashion. Although the
Warlocks were still influenced by more famous bands--for example, some of the
vocals have Beatles-like harmonization-- the song shows they were beginning to
establish core elements of their own style: psychedelic folk-blues-rock.

The most innovative of the recordings, “Caution (Do Not Step On The
Tracks)” transcends the genre boundaries of pop songs and presents a funky,
free-flowing instrumental blues sound. The inspiration for this came from
Kreutzmann and Lesh listening to trains while tripping: “We were...entranced by
the rhythm of the wheels clickety-clacking over the welds in the rails; Billy and I
looked at each and just knew… ‘We can play this!” The song contains a few lyrics,
but is primarily vibrato harmonica notes coupled with a quick drum, guitar, and
bass beat. While this song has one of the simplest beats, Lesh argues it was the
Warlock’s “farthest-reaching musical exploration.” Unlike “I Can’t Come Down,”
which leans toward a British Invasion style, “Caution” was much more about
immersion in the flow of pure sound rather than conveying meaning through
words, and is a far better representation of how the Warlocks actually played at
gigs and Acid Tests.

The Warlocks were on their way toward finding their voice as the Grateful
Dead. In late November 1965, the Warlocks learned of an established band with
the same name and decided to change theirs. Over a DMT-fueled session, Garcia
picked up Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary, flipped to random page, and put his
finger on the entry Grateful Dead. The term is defined as a motif in folk tales of a
hero helping with a burial and later receiving aid from the deceased in a future
challenge. In a later interview, Lesh discusses the significance of the name
change: “[The] concept embraced all of the spiritual rebirth aspect of what we
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were trying to do and what we experienced at the Acid Tests. This is who we
are…. We’re grateful to be dead because now we are gonna be born anew into
this incredible world.” It seems appropriate that the band performed for the first
time as the Greatful Dead at Kesey’s 1965 Acid Test in San Jose.

Throughout the 1960s, they were risk takers and revolutionaries. Anthem
of the Sun brought hallucinogenic sound collages, Aoxomoxoa delivered the Dead
to their experimental zenith, and later in American Beauty and Workingman’s
Dead, the band created its most famous folk harmonies. From their early days
playing in Magoo’s Pizza Parlour as the Warlocks to their full-fledged glory
truckin along as the Grateful Dead at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East and West, they
were pioneers of the jam band, initiating a free-flowing, improvisational style
that tapped into the thirst for liberation in the counterculture. Through
experimentation with mind-bending drugs and genre-blending musical styles,
the Warlocks set the Grateful Dead on a long strange trip to creating an
authentically American yet genuinely new sound.

Works Cited
MO4952 Student ID: 140007740

De Groot, Gerry. The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of A Disorderly

Decade (Pan Books, 2013)

Jackson, Blair and Gans, David. This Is All A Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History
of The Grateful Dead (Flatiron Books, 2015)

Kreutzmann, Bill. Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with
the Grateful Dead (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016)

Lesh, Phil. Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (Little Brown
and Company, 2005)

McNally, Dennis. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead
(Corgi, 2003)