JIMI HENDRIX’S IDEA OF “SERIOUS FUN”: ‘People wake up to bubbles moving across the ceiling (one of the light companies installs a liquid light projector) and here’s the Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix cranking through “Walkin the Dog”‘

Rock Scully, the Grateful Dead’s manager from 1965 to 1985,  tells his version of the fabled story of the Monterey Pop Festival to David Dalton, author of numerous rock music history books, including Piece of My Heart: Travels with Janis.

In this excerpt from the 1996 book Living with the Dead, Scully recalls a quasi-mythical free jam with Jimi Hendix, David Crosby, and various members of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the Who.

- Goyo de la Rosa, Editor

LA ROSA

 

The festival rolls for June 15-16-17.

I get to the fairgrounds early to help take care of all the stuff the promoters forgot about.

We know from the Be-in that people will be coming in from all the communities up and down the coast: Big Sur, Shasta, the communes in Oregon.

Two days before the festival opens, the buses begin arriving filled with people who want to know where they can pitch their tents and tepees.

We realize that we’ll have to look after them because the L. A. contingent certainly isn’t going to.

The kind of people who come to see the Grateful Dead will most likely want to camp out.

We get the Monterey Peninsula College to provide free camping on the football field and open up the showers and turn on hot water and all that good stuff.

We make arrangements with the people who run the floral show to use their pavilion to accomodate the overflow people who have nowhere to stay and no tents either.

All of which is right next door to the fairgrounds.

Just walk under the highway and you are there.

When you walk through the fairgrounds at twilight with the tepees painted with Sioux symbols, people playing guitars, and children and dogs running around the tents, it’s worth all the hassles in the world.

We’ve infiltrated the enemy camp, turned it into our own event.

A Digger underground action.

The promoters are busy catering to Brian Jones and the Monkees and all the people who aren’t even playing.

We have have our peyote-ceremony tents set up just as you walk in the gate.

The Laws are there, they started the New Buffalo commune in New Mexico.

Also Steve Gaskin, who started a commune down in Tennessee and wrote a great book, and whose self-styled messianism is satirized in “St. Stephen.”

There are bonfires going, and smoke coming out of tepees.

Meanwhile, backstage the sharks are busy scheming and maneuvering.

All those L. A. record company types.

Man, are they scary.

Bill Graham is a Boy Scout compared to them.

Holy cow, here comes Albert Grossman – the Band’s manager, Dylan’s manager.

Grossman’s trying to snag Janis and is doing it in the most ruthless, shabby way.

Dangling Bob Dylan, whom Janis worships, right in front of her eyes.

Very soon we dream up a new piece of folly.

It starts, like so many great ideas, with a simple desideratum.

Jerry says, “A jam or something might be nice.

“Yeah, a jam might be real nice. . . .”

Stop the presses!

The great Barcia has spoken (I think).

“Well,” say I, “what about the floral pavilion?

“Or even the football field?

“It’s full of all those people who couldn’t get into the shows.”

Garcia is up for it, so is Pig.

The plot hatches at the Jokers Club (where the musicians hang out behind the main stage).

And as soon as it’s been conjured up, Hendrix says, “Hey, now that sounds like serious fun!”

Pigpen, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townsend, David Crosby.

They’re all into it.

And as soon as the other musicians hear about it they’re going yes, yes – count us in too.

At one end of the floral pavilion we set up the PA system on a little platform that is already there.

The quippies skank the electricity and get juice into the hall, and we borrow some amplifiers off the stage and move them in.

All this is done furtively, as people are going to sleep, so nobody will twig.

The lights are off, so the whole setting-up process is done with flashlights.

We get everything ready and then Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Garcia, and Jimi Hendrix (all of them high on acid) come tripping out onstage.

With the first chord the lights go on and the projectors start flashing their amoeba-like images.

People wake up to bubbles moving across the ceiling (one of the light companies installs a liquid light projector) and here’s the Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix cranking through “Walkin the Dog.”

The Dead are like grease.

Here take another tab, and everybody knows “Good Morning Little School Girl,” right?

 

LA ROSA TRANSCULTURAL PACIFICAN HISTORY 1965 – 2009