The stories about the grateful dead are insane. Singer guitarist Jerry Garcia dose unsuspecting film crews with LSD. drummer Bill Kurtzmann reportedly slept with 13 women in one night. The band was arrested in New Orleans with enough acid and assorted drugs to fuel and alternate moon landing. The grateful dead were born out of the sonic boom of 1960s counterculture and carried the mantle further and longer and with more significance than any of their 60s counterparts. And they were also kept under the watchful eye of the CIA, who along with the indirect help of the grateful dead and their patron saint slash sound man Augustus Ausley Stanley III were directly responsible for the mainstreaming of hippie idealism and ethos of tune in turn on and drop out styled freedom. The grateful dead believed in freedom to their core and adhered to this belief throughout one of the longest and most successful runs in music history and they made great music along the way. Some of the greatest music ever made. That music you heard at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my melotron called mellow flute hoedown BK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Mrs. Browne you've got a lovely daughter by Herman's Hermits. And why would I play you that specific slice of adolescent shindig cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on May 5th 1965 and that was the day that mother recrees uptown jug champions walked into McGoo's pizza to play their first show. A band that would soon change their name to the warlocks and then to the grateful dead and become one of the most influential bands the world has ever known. On this episode, a mellow hoedown, adolescent cheese, way too much LSD in the grateful dead. I'm Jake Brennan and this is this great slant. Charles Manson, the psychotic cult leader behind the tape La Bianca murders. Murder so brutal they gripped the nation. Once said, the giving someone LSD without their knowledge and act known by hippies as dosing was something that he would never do, not even to his worst enemy. Jake Manson's murderous and manipulative behavior dosing someone was a bridge too far. Why? Well because it was just too fucked up. Unsuspecting individuals suddenly under the influence of insanely powerful psychedelic chemicals were in for a terrifying ride. Perhaps one they'd never re-emerge from. The high of being on acid, the trip is so intense that it is life punctuating. You ride a rollercoaster of emotions. You see yourself and everything around you differently and I don't mean figuratively, I mean literally, that's why they call it hallucinating. You're never the same afterward. Those who willingly drop LSD know this already. It's a choice they've made, one that is born sometimes out of a great notion of self-exploration to open previously unknown doors of perception to become a more enlightened version of oneself. That's the theory anyway. The reality is that you trip balls, your mind scrambled like yesterday's eggs, you laugh nothing and everything. You feel connected to the world, the universe, of a stronger, more visceral way. For the first four hours you ascend the great cosmic ladder, until you peak midway through the eight hour high, your body and mind literally buzzing in harmony with the entirety of your surroundings and then the road you're on turns. It's darker, bumpier. You question everything, including yourself. Nothing makes sense. It's all some sick joke, you hate yourself because you're unrecognizable, just like all that surrounds you. You hold on for dear life, white knuckling your way through the remaining hours of your trip, descending down Jacob's ladder past the horrifying screams of your psyche, praying to God that you land in a place where you can still recognize the person you used to be, swearing to your Lord and Savior the whole way down that you'll never ever touch this stuff again. Then, hours later, you crash. Emerging from the trip with the worst hangover you've ever experienced and the feeling that the only thing that will save you from its debilitating grip is strong grass and quite possibly more acid. And thanks to the CIA, Americans have plenty of acid at their disposal. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency theorized that if LSD was capable of altering one's perception, then it could be used by the military as a form of mind control and intelligence, ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union. So, under a top secret government program known as MK-Ultra, the CIA began testing the new drug on military personnel and even civilians to measure its effectiveness and thus calibrate its usefulness as a weapon. Unsuspecting military contractors, mental patients, prisoners, streetwalking Johns and sex workers were experimented on, dozed, decoded, and disregarded despite whatever lasting effects the acid had on them. Noted and alleged subjects of MK-Ultra experiments included Boston Gangster, Whitey Bulger, eventual unibombered Ted Gizinski, future grateful dead lyricist Robert Hunter, an author of the best-selling novel One Flore the Cookews Nest, Ken Kizzi. One military scientist, unaware he'd been dosed by his CIA colleagues, believed he could fly, and so famously jumped through the glass window of his bedroom on the 13th floor of the Staple Hotel in New York City. That was in 1953. In 1969, Jerry Garcia, guitar player and singer of the world's pre-eminent psychedelic band The Grateful Dead, knew nothing of the flying Staple scientist. He did, however, know the effects of dosing someone with LSD, but he didn't care. To Garcia, it wasn't about fucking with someone so much as it was about enlightening them, getting them on his level. The Garcia's level was high as fuck. He and his bandmates made sport out of tripping on powerful LSD. The dead were professionals who used the drug to explore the outer limits of where their music could take both them and their live audiences together further. Which is precisely why Garcia, aka Captain Trips, was hunched over the coffee maker on the set of Hugh Hefner's cheesy television studio, secretly mixing high-octane LSD into the hot black Java. Most of his grin on his mug. He was dosing anyone who'd be on the set or in the made for TV audience that his band was about to perform for. Because if the Grateful Dead were going to perform, Garcia wanted the audience to be on his level. A level that this audience was far from naturally inclined to be on. Playboy After Dark was the brainchild of Hugh Hefner, editor of the men's magazine, Playboy. Another TV version of the Playboy philosophy of free-flowing televised salon of 60-Zike guy staged in Hef's small-screen bachelor pad. Sudo intellectualism, subversive sex, as much skin as the sensors would allow, rocks, glasses, and stems for days. Hefner positioned himself at the center of mid-century masculinity, a reimagining of sexual norms and personal freedom. Not unlike the thinking of the Grateful Dead. But where the band and the man differed was in style. Grateful Dead presented themselves as a rag-tag group of music surrealists. Hefner presented himself as magazine in his television show as, Sophisticate, far more dawn draper than Salvador Dali. And that difference in style was seen by the dead as being square, and squares made for shitty audiences, so Garcia dosed them. The result was wild, unhinged freedom, accumbing together two seemingly different pipes of people, ascending the cosmos on the sounds of psychedelia. Pre-dead performance, the set was humming, Garcia tripping waxing poetic with Hef on the Aurora Boris. Sidd Cesar hung back, banged down brabidjuits in Strait Vodka, and felt an unknown buzz settle about his brain. And the show's PA is searched frantically for that night's guest astrologist who was last seen circling unknown rabbit holes backstage. The rest of the Grateful Dead sat on the Playboy after dark stage, patiently waiting for their singer, Jerry Garcia, who was now making his way through the manufactured television audience, wearing his familiar shitting, all-knowing grin, the one that perfectly matched the green and orange drug-rugged he was wearing. Cam was rolled, the crowd cut into the imminent performance, and their applause grew louder. Someone confused by the acid boot, someone else yelled out, you're the dead! Garcia's shoulder is acoustic, and slightly responded, right you are. Laffes, giddy pitch to anticipation, a quick check of the tuning on the six-string and straight into mountains of the moon. When the song ended, the audience, having suffered through an uninspired version of the tune, leaned a bit too heavily into their applause. Excited more for what they hoped was to come than what they just tolerated. And what was to come was worth the wait. The Grateful Dead fell in soulfully to St. Stephen. Garcia now swung an electric SG in its sung a wildly psychedelic and different tune than his acoustic. Playboy buddy swayed with a bandin on the edge of three-four time. Horn email bachelors, all black ties and bril cream, did their best to keep cool within the staunchy confines of their stashed white collars. A fundamental lack of understanding for anything that was going on. Reeling from the sting of LSD and the sharp jabs of pheromones, Fernette, and pent-up sexual aggression. Garcia hit the solo. The band swung. The pocket was big. It sucked in everyone. While the television cameras rolled and speeded for sound, heath lured it over the scene he created. The modern man forever turned on and decidedly tuned into the hipness of the Grateful Dead. Heath rocked. Garcia killed. One man gathered with the other man spilled. America got laid that night. T'Jerry Garcia and his bandmates, Bob Weir, Phil Les, Bill Krutzman, Mickey Hart, Ron, Pigpin McEaron, and Tom Constantin. On stage that night, it was magical. It all reminded Garcia of a sort of ready-for-prime-time version of the acid test from a couple years back, but not as dark or scary. This was pure freedom. A type of freedom that was impossible to imagine in the beginning days of the band when they sweated over regimented bluegrass scales and pitch perfect harmonies. Here in the psychedelic present, they were free. Free to take the audience wherever they wanted and free to let the music they were making take them on a very long and very strange trip. Very long, very long, very long, very strange trip. It is not hard to destroy a college. Last season, the podcast Campus Files brought you stories of fraternity drug rings, stolen body parts, campus colts, and more. And now, Campus Files is back for another season. There's a guy screaming into his phone. He's like, I just saw Charlie Kirk just assassinated right in front of me. Every week is a new episode and a new story. It was okay, I like, it's almost like a university on a siege. Listen to and follow Campus Files, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Free will in Frank was freaking out. Nobody knew who it was. All they could hear was his voice along with the spectral tape sounds being looped out of a small DIY tower of high-fi equipment. Something the heads all called the nowhere mine. And it was bleeding out from behind a raggedy army blanket hanging from the ceiling. Frank was behind it too, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the psychedelic public-addressed system he'd comment here. Walking back and forth and repeating his mantra over and over again into a cheap microphone. Fuck God, I'll pick the devil. Frank was spooked by the square on the scene. His unconscious registered something odd about the dude. His hair was long, well long enough it was blonde, parted on the side, and growing over his ears in that disheveled but still conservative kind of way that Robert Redford was making famous. But his clothes were hip, kind of at least. Baggedy blue jeans in an untucked Oxford, standard college kick-carb, but his boots, his boots, that was it Frank thought. The boots, too black, too shiny, dude was a nerc, had to have been. Fuck God, up with the devil. Frank normally would have confronted the guy. Frank was no shrinking violent, he was a hell's angel, a real outlaw. In another life he was a pirate and in a life previous to that of Viking but here and now, he was a stoned, paranoid, diminutive version of his otherwise badass. And the acid was just too strong, even for free will in Frank. This Ausley dude knew what he was doing. His acid was next level, literally. He and his old lady Melissa, a Berkeley chemistry major, formed a quote unquote research group and paid cyclochemical corporation for bottled by Sirge Monto Hydrae to make professional grade psychedelic drugs, which was all perfectly legal at the time. But the acid Ausley was making was far better than anything being amalgamized in dirty bathtubs by heads scattered about Northern California. Ausley's acid was legend, the best in the world, and it fueled Ken Keezy's acid tests. A psychedelic social experiment where partygoers would gather to blow their minds on acid and large rooms full of strobe lights, sound effects, music, and other sensory delights or terrorists depending on what kind of trip any particular person might be having. In the acid tests were the vanguard of what was becoming the hippie movement. The sonic boom of what we now refer to in shorthand as the 60s, and this movement was fueled by Ausley's powerful LSD. Sometimes too powerful for even him to handle, but he had a trick. Whatever the trip would get too heavy, he would lean into the music that the acid test house band was playing. The band was incredible, and that band was the grateful dead. Ausley had never heard anything like them before. Their sounds seemed to chase itself around in a circle underneath the pulsing strobes and in between the blinking tracers. It was one exhilarating high straight into another, sonic clarity of the highest order. It was grounding and compelling at the same time. But Ken Keezy had no tricks, and there was no such thing as any trip being too heavy for Keezy, so there was nothing to trick himself out of other than reality or insanity. Keezy was a lost cause, Ausley thought. The CIA got to him early. That early acid they shoveled into him was too strong. It changed him for good. There was no coming back from it, so the acid test were his way of bringing in as many squares as he could onto his level, because the rest of the real world was now closed off to him. The acid tests were Keezy's attempt at bending the world to his bend reality. But if it weren't for Keezy, Ausley never would have met the grateful dead, so he owed the no-necked prankster that much. But other than that, he regretted ever meeting him. He was more troubled than he was worth, a walking cop magnet, rolling up and down the PCH and a psychedelic school bus, detailed with a diglo-hallucinatory mural, with beat icon Neil Cassidy at his side and a group who called themselves the Mary pranksters. Always on road trips and always on acid trips, handing out LSD to civilians like Candy. He might as well have had free will on Frank's prison buddy tattoo a rest me across his forehead. It was Keezy who first introduced Ausley to Ben to Ben spooked Ausley out. Something about his intense stare and a disregard for all things hip that was so effortless that it was somehow cool. Ben was post-hip and it's scared, Ausley. Even his name, Ben, the hell kind of name was that. So cool. Squares can't be that cool. Something was up with that guy. Ben was death at his door, Ausley knew it. When Ausley could have sworn he saw Ben milling about the crowd a stone heads earlier, which if it was true, would have been entirely fucked up. Ausley was paranoid, spiraling. So he queued in on Jerry Garcia who was spiraling himself, musically, in the best way possible. Through the opening risks of death don't have no mercy, or foreboding Blues Durg originally done by Reverend Gary Davis. The band had emerged from whatever far out plane they were on previously and settled effortlessly under the dark star. Garcia was nearly whispering the lyrics. The rest of the band stirred menacingly beneath him. Garcia's guitar, every note, pitch perfect and pointed straight at Ausley's temple. Ausley could feel it. Garcia hit the second chorus, gave death his due, and then exploded into the guitar solo. The band rose up below him like a seaquake, whipping him into a tidal wave of sad. Ausley held on tight, scammed the room for a lifesaver, found none, felt the pull of the acid undertow, tumbled over backward into some deep oceanic void, past free will and frank spectral madness until he landed flat on his back. So hard that he got the wind out of him. He gasped for air, his jaw ached like he'd been punched hard by someone who meant it. He could feel the cold floor on his cheek. His chin perched over his left shoulder, he blinked open his eyes. There, inches away from his nickel-sized pupils, black, shiny boots. He turned his head, looked up, and there he was. Death, staring down at him, in the form of Maximus Bentley Scottsdale III, aka Bent. Ausley closed his eyes and prayed for another tidal wave. We'll be right back after this word, word, word. The backside of the hill was steep, and there was no doubt about it. The brakes on this Volkswagen shipbox were shot. Behind the wheel, Ken Keezy stomped on the brake pedal regardless. What else was he gonna do? The tall Victorians on Ashbury Street were quickly becoming a passing blur, as Keezy's borrowed VW Bug gathered speed, each revolution of its wheels more reckless than the last. Keezy held on, and there was only one choice. Crashless Bug into something forgiving before someone namely himself got hurt. He knew what he had to do. Midway down the hill, he could see them both. Both houses coming up quick. On one side of the street, 710 Ashbury, on the other, 715 Ashbury. Keezy had a choice. 710 was the home of the grateful dead. They wouldn't mind a small German economy vehicle in their living room with that. Keezy hated to do it. He loved Garcia and the boys. The 715 was the home of the local hell's angels. Keezy had soured on the angels recently. Free will in Frank was freaking everyone out. Fuck God, I'm gonna die. The Bug gathered speed. The Victorians zipped by. Local hippies stood up on their stoops wondering why in the hell some dude was speed racing through their mellow. Fuck it. Frank had it coming. Keezy cut the wheel to the left the last minute and crashed the car dead into the bay windows of the hell's angels rented home at 715 Ashbury Street. About 20 yards up the street, Ben shook his head and discussed through his cigarette to the ground and walked off an anger. It would only be a matter of time before the local cop showed up and that was all he needed. Some mouth-breathing baton twirling blue meany stumbling blind to the accident scene and blowing his cover. Inside 710 Ashbury, I'll Zangarcia ran to the window to catch what all the commotion was about. Oh shit, Keezy fucked up good this time. They decided to split before the angels got too heavy. They'd seen this movie before so they bailed for the hate. Hate Ashbury in 1967 was the epicenter of American counterculture. The effect caused by the sonic boom of Keezy's acid tests. It's where a tie-dye and two-fingered peace signs were invented. It's where the first ever head shop opened its doors. In short, it was Plymouth Rock for hippies. And they were fueled by Osley's acid. All of their psychedelic dreams, their idealistic counterculture delusions sprung from the influence of Osley via his spiritual interpretation of chemistry. And it was all soundtracked by the grateful dead whose presence on the scene was ubiquitous. They played constantly, whenever and wherever they could. Pizza places, acid tests, free public concerts, house parties, the filmore, the Avalon, at Winterland, at the human being. In the dead, we're in large parts surviving as a band because of Osley. She bankrolled them, paid for their equipment, their sound system, their travel when they needed it, and even their rent from time to time. Therefore, Osley's influence on what would become known as quote unquote the 60s, that sprawling Ketchall phrase used to describe not only the turbulent decade, but also everything the baby boomers affected afterward, politics, media, social programming, advertising. In all of that, Osley's influence is undeniable. The 60s were America's tipping point. In Osley through the manufacturing of his illicit LSD and patronage of the heavily influential grateful dead, was the one shoving the culture off into the deep end. Authorities were understandably in a panic. Their world was no longer recognizable to them. Men dressing like women, women dressing like men and children suddenly asking questions. It was all spinning out of control. Authorities had only themselves to blame because it was a CIA who turned on Kesey, who turned on Ausley, who turned on the grateful dead, who turned on the world, which was why Bent was there, to keep it eye on it all, and to report back to his CIA higher ups if and when things started to spin out of control. So Bent made Ausley a pet project. He knew Ausley would trip up bad enough and when he did, Bent would be there to make sure he didn't get up. Oxy met Bent at one of the first Kesey parties he'd attended. At least he thought he did. He remembered his name, Maximus Bentley Scott stale the third, so similar to his, Augustus Ausley Stanley the third, and he remembered his dress, jeans, Oxford, also similar to what Ausley wore. The Oxford gave away his blue blooded background, the shiny boots gave away his profession. Bent read Nark to Ausley from the second-e-late eyes on him. And there he was, leaning casually against the lamp post in broad daylight, right there on the heat. Ausley grabbed Garcia by the shoulder. There Garcia turned to look toward where Ausley was pointing, but saw nothing. Bent if he was there at all was gone. Garcia was used to this. Bent was Ausley's white whale. Garcia heard a lot about him, but never saw him, though Ausley swore at least two, three times a week that he'd encountered this square-jodd Nark who threatened to bring the whole shithouse down. This one on for years is bent clocked Ausley in the dead, reporting back to Langley any and all transgressions and trying in vain to keep a lid on the spiraling counterculture, to prevent it from spilling out any further into the mainstream. Ausley was eventually arrested for possession of 100 grams of LSD, but a sympathetic judge let him off easy with probation. Then, in New Orleans, Ausley was busted down on Bourbon Street with the Grateful Dead. The band got off easy, but Ausley, because his own probation was sent to federal prison for two years. Bent and his CIA hammers back in Langley were satisfied. But the band played on. Jerry Garcia came down with the rest of the band after the solo. He always loved the song, Morning Dew, the post-apocalyptic day after stroll through nuclear annihilation. Despite the song's subject matter, there was something so peaceful about it. Garcia stabbed his strings lazily and played off of Bobby's open chords. The band kept the song moving behind him, and they were all feeling it. Then, Garcia did something he seldom ever did. You walked out from behind his mic to the center of the stage. He took a pass at a lead fill. The crowd, pitched by this slight aberration in form, was at full attention. Jerry passed at another lead riff. The crowd responded on mass with loud but spattered cheer. A conversation had begun. Between one man and 50,000 fans, it was a conversation that began some 20 years ago and suffered through fits and starts. Over the years, more people joined in. However, lately, the conversation had grown old and uninspired. But not tonight. Something about tonight's rendition of Morning Dew had Jerry playing on his front foot. He scaled the neck of his guitar again, another beautiful lead riff. This one, pulling the rhythm section up underneath him. And when it did, the whole stadium seemed to levitate for a split second. Garcia pulled back. He let Brent house them on the keys and surveyed the crowd as he waltz slowly over to stage right. He could see them now. Every last one of them. When they were all part of this free counter-culture he created almost by accident. Though he'd never take credit nor did he want it. And there were many to credit for what the grateful debt had grown into or to blame for what the grateful debt had grown into. It all depended on Garcia's point of view on that particular day. He felt Brent wrapping up his solo. But when the band landed Garcia plucked at his strings playfully. He was teasing them now, and they loved it. It was almost showmanship, but not quite. The connection was too real. The connection between the musician and the crowd. Between the crowd and the band. Between the band and the culture. They sounded great. And Garcia thought of Ausley because Ausley deserved a lot of the credit for the greatness of the debt's lifestyle, a crazy fucker that he was. After he got out of prison, he applied his alchemy skills to sonic engineering and designed to build the grateful debt's famed wallow sound. A 40 foot high state-of-the-art stereo sound system comprised of more than 600 speakers. Technically speaking, the wallow sound was years ahead of its time. It was a towering monument to creativity and imagination, and it allowed the grateful debt to develop their life sound faster and better than any other contemporaries. And to therefore reach and develop a much larger and more impassioned audience through their live shows. Throughout the 70s and early 80s, even after Ausley had long since departed, split off the grid to live in the rainforests of Australia. The debt's popularity exploded, largely because of the way Ausley helped them envision their on-stage sound. First, it was his patented LSD, and in the 70s it was his patented sound system. By 1985, thanks in part to Augustus Ausley's family the third, the grateful debt were bigger and more influential than ever. It drove bent mad, and with Ausley off the grid, he set his sights on Garcia. By now, hard drugs had firmly established themselves in Jerry Garcia's daily routine. Jerry Garcia got high a lot. When he wasn't on stage, it was just about all he could do. The band's popularity made it so he couldn't leave his hotel when they were on tour, and there were too many fans milling about who wanted something from him. An autograph, a joint, tickets to keys to life, some answered questions, you name it. He seldom left his property, but when he did, he could be spotted zipping around Marin County or greater San Francisco in his new-ish black BMW 3 series. Ben, knew this. And so, Garcia was easy to spot on January 18, 1985. He rolled into the parking lot at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, killed the engine, checked the rear view. There was a man at the payphone, dark sunglasses, waferers, rubber red from looking quaff, Oxford jeans, black boots. Garcia heard Ausley's voice in his head, and in a moment of paranoia, looked down to his stash on the passenger seat, then back to the mirror again, and the dude was gone. He shook it off, probably nothing. Garcia dipped into his briefcase where he kept his drugs. He pulled out a brown paper bingo of heroin, keyed its contents. Dipped his nose to the car key, snorted and tilted his head back and let the smack slide down the back of his throat. He then grabbed the tinfoil and tongs he had in the briefcase. He took another bingo. This one, made of paper torn out of an old Playboy magazine, courtesy of his old friend Heff, and dumped its contents cocaine onto the tinfoil. He took a glass straw, placed it between his lips, fastened the tinfoil with the tongs, held it over his lap, lit the lighter below, and it quickly heated up the coke, turning it into smoke. Garcia proceeded to suck the smoke through the straw, perched between his lips. The cocaine hit his bloodstream hard, it tangled immediately with the heroin and his system, together the two pushed and pulled at his consciousness, and then a hard fill of nox in the BMW's passenger side window. Garcia took a second to register what was happening, and then turned his head, expecting to see wayfarers, but instead saw his reflection in a pair of aviators resting on the baby face of some John Panturo looking motorcycle cop shouting at him to roll down the window. In his stupor, Garcia made a half ass attempt to hide his stash, but it was no use. He was busted. As he was being cuffed, he looked up and swore he saw the cough redford clone grinning at him from the other side of the parking lot. He blanked three focused desires and the square was gone. Garcia was hauled in and in no time released on $7,000 bail, he received a relative slap on the wrist for possession of heroin and cocaine. The harmony sounded great, everything sounded great when the dead played the song. It was that good, a perfect pop song, five minutes long when it felt like three, a hook to beat the band any band, a monster riff and lyrics that kept on giving. In those harmonies, they conjured some of the dead's best work, working man's dead in American beauty. But those records were a long time ago, 17 years in fact. It was now 1987, and the dead were in the middle of five sold out shows at Madison Square Garden. They were bigger than ever, thanks to this song, Touch of Grey. I hit number nine on the Billboard pop charts and rocketed the album appeared on in the dark to number six. More importantly, it sold and sold again eventually going double platinum. The grateful dead to this point were massively popular, stadium headline popular, but with the release of Touch of Grey, they went from being a popular touring band to being one of the world's highest grossing bands and transformed into a cultural institution. The dead's were no longer survivors of the 60's holding on to some bygone era. The dead, now with a top 10 hit, appealed to a whole new generation. The size of their crowds swelled immensely. They played the packed stadiums and indirectly presided over massive parking lot parties that sprung up around their shows. When the dead came to town, it was a party unlike any other, and they were drawing almost as many fans to the party outside of their shows as kids who couldn't get tickets, as they were drawing paying customers. For the grateful dead, they simply didn't make stadiums big enough anymore. And it didn't matter how many nights they performed. From 87 to 94 on, they did five and six night stands at Madison Square Garden. In December of 1992, continuing through February 1993, they completed 11 sold out shows at the massive Oakland Coliseum. And of course, throughout the 80's and 90's, right across the street from Whitey Boulders and Lane Caster Street Garage, the grateful dead invaded Boston for multiple five and six night sold out stands at the Boston Garden. One can only imagine what was going through the mind of the Boston Gangster, who, while a prisoner at Alcatraz in the 50's, willingly participated in the government's acid tests as part of the MK Ultra program in exchange for a reduced sentence. But I digress. When it came to the grateful dead's power to sell tickets, you get the feeling that if it weren't for city officials crying uncle, enough already with the free love, drugs, and sex happening on our city streets, that the dead could have kept on playing and selling tickets for months at a time and any venue they chose no matter the size. And here was the result. Spread out before Jerry Garcia as he hit the chorus and touch a gray. He could see them all, the spinners, the warfrats, the frat boys, sticker nippleheads, tapers and bassheads in the Phil Zone. They were all there as they were every night and they were free. That's what it all amounted to, freedom. That's all the dead wanted to be free. That was the whole point. Jerry Garcia and his bandmates saw the grateful dead as being wholly American. It wasn't that what America was all about, freedom, the freedom to do what you want, to be who you want, live how you want, for the band up until this point that it worked. They avoided the straight world their entire adult lives and created something totally unique and that thing inspired millions to reject the society that they believed and fringed upon their freedom. So dead heads followed the band on tour, lived off the grid outside of society's clutches and by their own code, freedom, absolute, just as they had seen the band live for their entire career. So the band played on. And for most of their time as a band, despite the copious amounts of drugs they're on, they sounded great and achieved a state of musical transcendence through improvisation that no band before or since has ever achieved in rock music. But don't take my word for it. Lenny K. Guitar player for the great patty Smith group, literally one of the coolest and most influential guitarists ever said to the grateful dead that their music touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists. Lenny was right, but that sacred ground was seldom reached by the time that early 90s have rolled around. Physically, despite their success, they were all walking corpse. But the dead heads didn't matter. The music wasn't as important as the lifestyle. A roving carnival. Ken Keezy's married pranksters by way of PT Burnham. Dead heads were chasing an experience and idea, something they heard their cooler older brothers and sisters talk about. Something they too needed to experience, something they'd never quite be able to grasp and would destroy millions of brain cells chasing through football, stadium parking lots and European hostels in search of. Capturing it didn't matter, so long as they remained free in their pursuit. But now, what the band had created was so big, so encompassing that it had become a prison of their own making and Jerry Garcia felt at the most. After all, he was the mayor of Crazy Town, the jolly psychedelic teddy bear that fans looked up to, emulated it, wanted to be and worshipped, having literally elevated him to godlike status. It freaked him out. He became even more shut in and descended deeper into hard drug use, which was making it harder to deliver at night after night. It harder to bear the weight of responsibility that he felt for his bandmates who counted on him, for the fans who believed in him, and for the grateful dead's expansive crew and their families, over 50 and counting who relied on him. He couldn't just quit, let them all down. He couldn't fuck off at night after a show and walked the city streets to clear his head. He couldn't even go for a ride in his beamer, be driven around by his bodyguard in his caddy. He'd be recognized, harassed, arrested or worse. The only place he was safe was the stage, and that had become a rough slog. The crowds were so massive that making any connection with the audience was near impossible. It was so unlike the Assetess, and a far cry even from Playboy after dark, and it wasn't like Garcia could dose a stadium of 60,000. Besides, Assetess was long gone, so there was nothing left but blues in the key of bum the fuck out. Garcia was trapped, imprisoned, by the freedom monster he had created. In early 1993, he told Bridget Meyer, you know, I can do it. I can quit, leave the band I can, I can live off the ice cream money. Garcia was referring to the royalties from the popular Ben and Jerry's cherry Garcia ice cream flavor that was named after him, from which he received an estimated $200,000 a year for the rights to his likeness. But it was all talk, he would never quit. He felt too much obligation, that or straight up trapped. For Garcia, there was no more freedom in playing in the band, it was a sell. The irony was rich given that the band's motivation for being a band in the first place was the pursuit of freedom. A grateful dead had formed a group mind when they began living together on 710 Ashbury, bound by powerful psychedelic trips they'd taken together. Nothing bonds a group of people like shared psychedelic experience, and nothing strips life to its purest goals in psychedelia. You find out who you truly are and what you truly want, and what the dead wanted was freedom, freedom through music, and what the dead wanted was to be playing in a band together and not to have to answer to anybody. In pursuing freedom, they created their own sovereign nation of dead heads, flying a freak flag of red, white, and blue, a stilier face skull with the white lightning dividing the red and blue parts of the brain, a logo which Aussie had originally designed by the way. The dead's philosophy of freedom is the type of American beauty that is more closely aligned with what the founding fathers had envisioned than what American reality has become, where we are divided into the safe highs of groupthink rather than freed by the power of our individualism. Jerry Garcia knew this. In the end it was all too heavy for him to shoulder, the crowds, the fame, the failing musicianship, the paranoia, the man in the mirror and the man behind the man in waifers. Garcia was freaked out, paranoid, and hurting, a physical mess from years of heroin, cocaine, and LSD use, cigarette smoking, a poor diet, and diabetes, but still quitting the grateful dead was not an option. So he attempted to quit drugs instead to clean up his act before agreeing to go back out on the road for another tour. He checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic in 1995, and then, motivated and sensing a new beginning, doubled down and checked himself into the Serenity Noles Rehabilitation Center. But it was too late. On August 9, 1995, eight days after his 53rd birthday, Jerry Garcia's heart gave up and quit everything for him. Alas, he was totally free. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is The Scraight Sland. The Scraight Sland was created by yours truly and has produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod.com. If you're listening as a disgrace land all access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelampod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Discretslant Add Free. Plus you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook at disgracelampod and on youtube.com slash at disgracelampod. Rockerola. He's a bad bad man.
