Rock Scully book: SF Chronicle review, 12/3/95
Michael Z.
Dead by former manager Rock Scully. The review was written by Chronicle
editor Regan McMahon, who was co-editor/publisher of The Golden Road, the
GD fanzine.
You can find the review at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/chronicle/article.cgi?RV1820.DTL:/chronicle/today
MZ
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Sunday, December 3, 1995 · Book Review Section Page 1 San Francisco Chronicle
A Wild Ride With the Grateful Dead
REVIEWED BY REGAN McMAHON
LIVING WITH THE DEAD
Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead
By Rock Scully with David Dalton Little, Brown; 369 pages; $24.95
Jerry Garcia once told an interviewer that while other men have war
stories to tell, he and his crowd -- members of the Grateful Dead and
their extended family -- have drug stories.
Now comes a memoir from Rock Scully, who helped manage the band for its
first 20 years -- and it is just that: tales of wild, shared adventures,
from the beginnings of the San Francisco rock scene, when LSD was legal
and pot was wafting through the Haight and Golden Gate Park, to the dark
days of the mid-'80s when Garcia and Scully
were housemates secluded in Marin, strung out on Persian base heroin.
Scully and co-writer David Dalton (co-author of last year's Marianne
Faithful biography) skillfully capture the excitement of the early days,
when the band came together to pioneer a mix of psychedelic improvisation
with the American roots music of jazz, blues, folk and bluegrass.
Scully was a grad school dropout who had been promoting concerts for the
Family Dog when he first saw the motley, scruffy group -- ``the kind of
random sample of unregenerate human types you'd find in a lineup, say, or
a Greyhound bus terminal''-- at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco
in December 1965.
This was also his first acid trip, courtesy of Owsley Stanley, the
notorious LSD chemist, Grateful Dead benefactor and sound engineer, who
had invited him to the concert. After the acid kicked in, Scully writes,
``the room is breathing. . . . The words . . . are sweating, liquefying
back into the images whence they came. Mississippi Delta
dioramas -- shotgun shacks, live oaks, gris- gris conjure women with
yellow teeth, rotting porches, bo weevils, demon-haunted crossroads,
rootless, horse-mad heroes -- popping up between the words.'' The next
night, Scully writes, Owsley asked him to manage the Dead as they drove to
one of the famed Acid Tests put on by novelist Ken
Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
Scully and the band began living communally in 1966 -- briefly in Los
Angeles and rural Marin and ultimately in a Victorian at 710 Ashbury.
After the Haight became overpublicized and overcrowded, the band moved out
to separate homes in Marin in 1969. There's a great momentum to the first
half of the book as Scully chronicles the
band's passionate experimentation and growing popularity. His takes on
seminal events such as the Trips Festival, the Human Be-In, the Monterey
Pop Festival and Woodstock are full of colorful insider's details (Paul
Simon trying to persuade the suspicious Garcia and Scully into playing at
Monterey Pop as they walk down Haight Street; Scully directing traffic
into Woodstock in the rain with Orange Sunshine acid running down his
leg). He also offers his side of the debacle at the 1969 Altamont
festival, where a man was killed by a Hell's Angel. The Dead (who never
performed that day because of the ominous goings- on), and Scully in
particular, have been blamed by some for what happened at the hands of
their associates, the Angels, whom headliners the Rolling Stones had hired
as security -- over Scully's objections, he says.
The second half of the book is less cohesive as it dwells on often-
hilarious, sometimes pathetic road anecdotes (groupies, greedy promoters,
risky border crossings, ``dosing'' on-duty German fire marshals with acid
at a show, partying with John Belushi). ``I'm as coked up as a Taiwan
freighter,'' Scully writes of the Europe '74 tour, ``and the vibes are
getting just as quaky. When you're brain crackles and your eyeballs burst
out of their sockets, it's usually a sign that you're overdoing it just a
wee bit.'' The Hunter S. Thompsonesque hyperbole of the tales makes for
great reading, but one wonders how much has been embellished to give the
stories maximum punch. And the glaring errors in geography (Corda Madeira,
Tamalpais Mountains), band history (he tells an elaborate tale of Weir's
writing ``Playin' in the Band'' with John Barlow, when the co- writer was
Robert Hunter), dates (he captions an Us Festival photo as 1980, when the
concert was in '82), names (he misspells mandolinist David Grisman as
David Grissim) and other facts (he dedicates the book to deceased Dead
family members and includes the alive and well Zane Kesey -- it was his
brother, Jed, who died in a car crash) cast doubt on Scully's exactitude.
Surprisingly, the band members, with the exception of Garcia, remain only
caricatures rather than fully fleshed-out characters. Since Scully was
intimate with these people for 20 years, one expects more in-depth
portraits. But here Phil Lesh is reduced to a wine snob, Bob Weir a space
case, Bill Kreutzmann a hothead, etc. Scully clearly has tremendous
affection and respect for the hard-working, prolific Garcia, whom he
describes as ``enthusiastic, big-hearted, incredibly outgoing, and above
all curious.'' But after Scully and Garcia became partners in Persian
heroin during the late '70s-early '80s, they began to withdraw. ``Drugs
isolate you,'' he writes. ``You go off and do them by
yourself.'' Scully's focus on using and scoring limited his perspective on
the band during the latter part of his tenure -- and of the book.
Scully attributes Garcia's descent into hard drugs partly to his buckling
under the weight of what became a multimillion-dollar operation. The band
took a hiatus in 1975-76 to regroup, and by 1980, Scully suggests, Garcia
wanted to do it again. ``But any murmur of taking a break . . . was met by
a huge guilt trip on Jerry,'' he writes.
``There's a huge jones there for the money. Everybody who works for the
Dead has been paid so well for so long they can't let the cash cow go to
pasture.'' The story ends in 1985 when Scully was fired over accusations
of stealing money, a charge he claims was baseless. He says the real
reason was his perceived bad influence on Garcia, due to their mutual
addiction. Scully immediately went into detox and says he has not touched
heroin since.
The next 10 years were full of achievement and drama for the Grateful
Dead, but Scully makes no mention of that; instead, in the epilogue, he
fast-forwards to Garcia's death this past August. ``Jerry was the heart
and soul and magic of the Grateful Dead and in the end that was too much
of a burden for him to bear. It was already getting too much for him at
the time I left the band in 1985. Ten years later it killed him.''
© The Chronicle Publishing Company
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______________________
Michael Zelner
Oakland CA USA
e-mail: mich...@zoka.com
______________________
Kelly Humphries
(seriously), "The Wisdom of Jerry Garcia" (Wolf Valley Press, about nine
bucks). From the quickie blurb, looks like it's a bunch of one-line
maxims tossed together quickly, oh, say, since August or so. Haven't
purchased it, and since it is described as very slim I probably won't
bother, especially with the generic tie-dye front cover featuring a circa
'72 photo that makes me think they didn't even have time to tell an art
department that they were rushing it to press. If someone finds a copy
for 50 cents at a garage sale, though, then maybe we could have ourselves
a 1996 "Jerry-a-day" page posted right here, a fresh quote to read
upon login each day. I'll start:
"I indulge myself." Yes, that's typical of the incisive, personal quotes
that Wolf Press has scrounged and would now like ten bucks for passing
your way. Believe it if you need it...