Mountain Girl (“MG”) Garcia on Life with the Merry Pranksters, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead

any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today's guest is somebody who's both a remarkable historical figure but also very much active and in the present. Her birth name was Carolyn Adams, but she's much better known for the last fifty years or so as Mountain Girl or MG Mountain Girl Garcia, you know, the woman who was part of the Married Pranksters, was a partner and co parent with Ken Kiss of the Mary Pranksters and Jerry Garcia the Grateful Dead, and has continued to play a role in

this world really over the last fifty years or so. So, MG, thanks so much for joining me on Psychoactive. Oh well, you're welcome. It's it's nice to be here on this foggy day in Oregon. You grew up, right, It was at Poughkeepsie, New York, and then moved out west and you're about eighteen or so, that's correct. Yeah, I was an upstate New York kid, went to school there and you know, eventually got kicked out how that goes. And

then I went to California with my brother. Were you doing drugs in high school before even went to California or was it when you talked to California AJ teen that you started, uh doing all that stuff? Now? I was just I was just a prankster in high school. I mean, what's a prankster? Always a prankster? So I was pulling pranks and they got onto me and and got mad at me. But but no, I didn't discover the choice of ingestible substances until I was a little

bit older and had been working. And the job that I got out in California was a very unusual job. Based on my ability to read and write about science. I was hired by Stanford University to come and work in the mass spectrometer lab at Stanford University's Organic Chemistry building, which was a very unusual job for an eighteen year old kid. Yeah, no kidding, right, eighteen years old working in the lab at Stanford without any kind of college education or yeah. Just I was so smart though, because

I had read all this. I had read everything. You know. My parents were scientists, so I was good on science. So when they interviewed me, I I apparently aced the interview and it aid really well, you know, it was one of those jobs, you know, for an eighteen year old getting a job like that was really great. But I was on the night shift, which was kind of weird because I had to ride my bicycle around through Powell also after dark a lot. And and you were

talking nineteen sixty four, huh is that right? Yeah, sixty four, It seems like so long ago. Now, Oh my gosh, it is a big change. I mean, to come from from an East coast in a prep school like I did, and to just jump into a community on the other side of the country was pretty interesting. But I really liked it. I thought I thought it was beautiful. I

thought California was just heaven. So you're in the lab at Stanford, hanging out there at night, and I imagine you get your hands on some of the psychedelic drugs that are lying around Stanford in those days. Is that right? Yeah, that's true. And no. I was actually asked to process a sample that was labeled very cautious with this sample, and I ran into trouble with it. I had trouble with the mass spectrometer that night and wound up with

a half used sample. And I'm sitting there with this sample and me and it's you know, eleven o'clock at night, and I'm going to m hmmm, Okay, you know there's still more in the in the little jar. I'll just eat this one and see what happens. You know, because I've been reading, I've been reading about psychedelics and gotten really interested because, of course, even as a young person, I was a scientist. I was raised by scientists, and my science mind just looked at the stories about psychedelics

and said, I want to know what this is. So I realized there was only one way to know, and that was to partake. But in your case, if I read this quickly, it was an LSD. Was it began, Actually it was. It was the only people I know who was introduced to all of this you know through I gain LSD your mushrooms or something like that. That must have been a challenging experience. Well, it was very challenging.

Getting home was really hard on the bicycle, you know, at like four in the morning, I had to ride my bike backed across town and that was like a mystery tourycle trip. It does. Yeah, I had to like re remember everything all the time, re remember, re remember, re remember this corner that corner, like. But I made it back and by the time I got there, I was pretty messed up. So I had to like lie down and go to sleep or try to go to sleep for a long time. And I don't remember it

being any fun. I remember it being an ordeal because it was an unrefined sample of a e boga from West Africa, so it was just a little blob of green good and I mean a small blob. It was, you know, pretty small little blob and uh yeah, and it just it really messed me up, frankly, and I take it the job at Stanford did not last much longer there, you know, the problem being that it it messed with my mind in a very overt way. I

can't recommend it. I really can't and uh, this is not this was not a good idea on my part, although heck, what can I say now? Yeah it's a bad idea. How much there after was it that you're like hanging out in some cafe or something in Palo Alto and get picked up by Neil Cassidy. That was like about a month later. And for our listeners, just you know who don't know Neil Cassidy is he was

a key figure in the in the Beach generation. You know, somebody hooked up with Jack Carroll act and in fact the basis of the character Demoyarty in On the Road, which was basically the key character and on the Road but also friendly with William Burrows and and Alan Ginsburg and all those And now he meets you in this cafe and Palo alter you're all of what eighteen years old? Yeah?

What happens? Then? Well, it's late at night and I'm my boyfriend who I had been staying with his his mom had come and gotten him that day and taken all of his stuff out of the house, and suddenly he was gone and like completely gone, and I didn't have a place to be, so I thought I'd just pedal on over to St. Michael's and get a cup

of coffee and think things over. And I'm sitting there with my big cup of coffee and in walks Neil Cassidy and his sidekick Bradley, and they sit down at the table right next to me, and there, look, there's nobody else in the place. Meanwhile, the guy serving the coffee, who is kind of a famously annoying fellow, turns out to be Bob Hunter. In later years I found out that that was actually Bob Hunter who wrote the songs

for the Grateful Tet. Oh, he's the key were and he was the guy behind the counter at St. Michael's alley that night. So, um, that's a tidbit I didn't pick up from all the reading I was doing. Yeah, it's so amazing to me that this happened. So anyway, so these two guys say, hey, you know, we're trying to score some Benny's. You want to want to go out with us and try to score some Benny's? And I'm going Benny's. Okay, yeah, right, okay, Ben Citrine and

these guys look good. I said okay. Because I had nothing else to do, I said, okay, let's go. And we drove around all night, visiting all of Neil Cassidy's friends houses around Palo Alto and up up in the mountain, the San Bruno Mountains, and failed to score even a single Betty, to his great dismay, because he had just come back from the famous bus trip, which I knew nothing about. I knew nothing about these people. And he

winds up. We go all the way down the hill on the far side of San Bruno Mountain towards the coast, and he pulls in. He had to take the car back. He was driving ken Casey's car. So I wound up in ken Casey's parking lot wait at four in the morning, and that was okay. So now we got to back up for audience for a second, because some people know exactly who he is. But let's fill in this history, right.

So Ken Kesey was the person who first became famous for writing One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and it immediately catapults him into the you know, the echelons of the great up and coming American writers, and then becomes the movie with Jack Nicholson and all this sort of thing.

And so Ken KSI. Some years before you had your I began experience is doing you know, LSD as part of the MK ultra Cia experiments to investigate the potential uses of LSD for military and intelligence purposes, and gets into LSD in the early sixties, starts using it, then begins to create a group called the Mary Pranksters, and then has this trip across the country to New York in nineteen sixty four to go see the World's Fair and do other things like that that ultimately becomes famous

when Tom Wolfe, the novelist and non nonfiction writer as well, writes, uh, the Electric kool Aid asset test. So this is you know, Ken KISSI has taken this bus trip in sixty four. He's got this growing gang of people with him. LST is very much part of their world. Now we're in nineteen sixty five and you show up at his door, right, Okay, so take it away. Just to clarify, Yeah, the reason Neil was out looking for Benny's was because they had

just come back from the famous bus trip. In other words, they had only been back in the Bay Area for a few hours when I met Neil, and he had borrowed Kent's car to go look for look for some benditry and it couldn't find it. Had to bring the car back because it was time for Ken's kids to go to the first day of school that they were having. So I'm standing around in the parking lot and nobody's

up yet. It's really quiet. Neil is wandering around somewhere and Ken comes out and I meet him and we make a nice contact, you know, and uh, suddenly the car's gone, and I realized, oh, I'm here, you know, I'm stuck here. So Neil wanted to get back to go to work, so he hitchhiked away. And I got to meet Ken and Faye that very morning. So this was Mrs Kesey and and and their kids and their dogs, and they had docsins who came out and bit me on the ankle. But it was, you know, it was

so sweet. There was so sweet to me. But what I really got to see was the bus itself, which was standing sitting there in the yard. Is huge old school bus, you know, with the low ceiling that you have to duck and you have to like walk along with your head down because you're too tall for the bus. And it's just completely painted and decorated all over with

stuff glued to it. And I mean, honest to God, I wrote the bus when I was a kid to school every day and back and I was a bus monitor, and to look at this bus was like such such a radical twist on the concept of transportation. I was completely knocked out by it. So I had to like look at it for a long current on the top or something. So yeah, on the top of you blast out music or even or even magnify the sounds that were from outside the bus and all this sort of.

It had speakers up top, and then there was a they had built an area to what you'd think they'd put luggage up there in a big luggage truck, but actually there was mattress, two mattresses up there, and you could lie down as the bus was going down the road, which was really pleasant. And they cut a hole in the roof for a turret so they could close it up if it was raining, but you could climb in and out on a ladder and get up on the roof.

So I'm looking at this thing, right, it's just getting light, and I could see it, and I'm looking at it and I'm walking around it going Holy moly, because it was just covered with globs of paint and pictures and you know, it was like a total art project. And I come around to the front door, and the front door is kind of hanging off the side of the bus, you know, the little door you walk through to climb up into the bus to go to school. And it says on the top of the door says, nothing lasts.

And I just burst out laughing. I thought that was the funniest thing I ever see. Oh yeah, nothing less. And that was like their motto, you know, for the for the Hall Prankster Enterprise, nothing less and the bush further further f you r t h you are, which is a little different from for with an e er further is more of a sense of putting things in motion, but you know, giving giving reality a shove of some sort. You know. So you then what do you actually start

living up there? Then? Fairly soon at this in La Honda, I think outside of Palo Alto. Yeah, so there was a beach, you know, like ten minutes away, and it was a beautiful redwood trees, like it's just huge redwood trees out in the yard. I was fascinated, and these were such nice people, you know, they were all just

as nice as they could be. And when I finally met all the rest of the pranksters, I realized that not only was I safe with these people because they weren't going to attack me or whatever, you know, that I was really a lot like them, you know, I looked at things from a different point of view, and so did they, and we we bonded, you know, within a couple of weeks, there was a pretty strong bond

getting set up. So here I'm just going to quote two passages MG from Tom Wolves Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and the one and the one is page fourteen where he first introduces you as a character, and he says, Mounted Girl is a tall girl, big and beautiful, with dark brown hair falling down to her shoulders, except that the lower two thirds of her falling hair looked like a paintbrush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed

at blonde in Mexico. And then pages later, Mounted Girl was a big hit with the pranksters from the very start. She seemed always completely out front without the slightest prompting. She was one big, loud charge of vitality. Here comes mounted girl, And it was the thing that made you pick up as soon as you saw her mouth broadened into a grin and her big brown eyes open, open, open, until they practically exploded like sunspots in front of your eyes.

And you knew that wonderful country vide voice was gonna sing out something that was a nice description by Tom Wolf. Yeah he liked me, he did. Yeah. Did you think of him? Oh? He was okay, I mean he he interviewed me extensively and then wrote his own version of what I said. Right, But I thought he was somebody who lived in a in a greenhouse on the top roof of a New York skyscraper. You know. He seemed somehow not to know very much about anything. He had

grown up in a vacuum of some sort. You know that he just he was an open invitation to tell him stuff, you know, But he didn't ever give you anything back, you know what I mean. It was all input. He had very little output except just kind of as a nice guy. And I and the Mary Pranksters had become quite well known, like in the Bay are in the West Coast, but would probably never achieved the fame they had nationally, but for Tom Wolves writing about it

an electrical aid asset test. I mean, to the extent that fame served the interests of the pranksters, Wolf was great for them, and to the extent of the pranksters provided material for Wolf to become, you know, sort of nationally highly regarded all writer. It worked out in that regard, and you know, in observing his writing, you know, and reading it years later, I'm going like, Wow, this guy was a really gifted writer, and he honestly didn't know

what he was writing about. Really, you know, he refused to get high. He didn't want to sully his magical brain, which I have great respect for him because he managed to get the job done and he did a great job with it. It's still a really fun read. So let me see, there's another quote that I found. You said somewhere. You said about the Pranksters. They didn't know they were starting the sixties, obviously, but they knew they had a big secret and they were going to exploit

it to the full, that's right. And what was the secret? The secret was LSD that Ken had copped from the mental health place where he was working at Stanford at some point earlier in the year. But then then it kind of came on the underground market in the early sixties, it began to leak out and he managed to find some.

So we had we had LSD that came from Sandos, from the Swiss chemists, and that was what Ken had picked up in Palo Alto, which is a very clean and beautiful high actually, and people should know, until late nineteen six is LSD actually become illegally get scarce because Sandos the pharmaceutic companies in handing it out the way they did in late fifties early sixties. But you know, people could not get busted for it at that point,

right it was unknown. It was an unknown drug, and if you could keep your behavior under control when you were high, you can get away with it, of course, but it does it does have a tendency to change people's behavior. And you know, you'd say so. Plus we were clueless about dosage at that time, you know, we were we were experimenting. So basically, some LSD would go into a big picture of kool aid and you drink some of it. So how much LSD did you have? You had some, but I mean for all you know.

I mean, if you think about, you know, a hundred micrograms being a kind of fair not light does it's a real If you think about that's just okay, solid dose. But if you think about two D fifty or more being what you might call a heroic dose, but you're drinking it in kool aid, I mean, you have no idea if you're getting fifty micrograms or five micrograms. I guess the flight of faith faith is a strong, a

strong contender forgetting it in and out of trouble. But you know, uh, I feel like I did take too much one time, but I just went and gotten my sleeping bag and stayed there, And which is the best thing you can do if you've had a had a little bit too much. And were the other drugs I mean, was mescaline and psilocybin. Mushrooms also a big part of your life. Not so much those days, no, because they were rare. These were things. By the way, are you

still are you still doing it this year? I haven't taken any this year, but I usually take it three or four times a year. Mh. So listen, let's go back to the pranksters for a second. Here, now, which is that, you know, I'm reading about them, and I'm recognizing a lot of the names, and I was just real off a few. And then there was Stewart Brand who then comes up with a Whole Earth catalog, which is a major phenomenous seventies. There's Jim Fattiman, who has

now become sort of the godfather of micro dosing. Robert Stone who shows up, who's the novelist who wrote Dog Soldiers, a kind of award winning book about drug dealing during the Vietnam War days that became the movie Whole Stop the Rain. Larry McMurtry, who also famous novelists, right sixty novels, including Lonesome Dove, one of the most famous, you know, sort of novelized series on TV. Paul Krasner, founder of the Yippies, and of course Neil Cassidy. So you're hanging

out with this remarkable cast of character. So so I mean, just tell us about, you know, who is your favorites among this group. I think my favorite among that group was Alan Ginsburg. So Ginsburg was a special friend of Neil Cassidy's, and he came out and stayed for like a week and a half at Ken's and I just

thought he was absolutely charming, interesting guy. So for our audience, so that you don't know, Alan Ginsburg is one of the most famous American poets of the of the second half of the twentieth century, and he's a e pivotal to the Beats generation. Of course I'd heard about him before he got there. But but what a lovely guy Ginsburg was. He was just he was the sweetest fellow, just delightful and kind and Jewish, which is important, you know.

That categorizes him to me as as somebody with a with a good intellect and a grasp on who he is and what he's doing. And I thought he was the only Jewish guy in the in the Beats generation, among the prominent ones. I say, is that right, Well, he think so, because Carol A. Cassidy a bunch of Catholics, you know, So it's yeah. So Ginsburg was a revelation to me because he was he was somebody gifted with a lot of pace and calm. He had calmness and

patience that just flowed out of him. I had never read his poetry before, being clueless, and I read this stuff and I'm going, Wow, this is kind of interesting, but I don't really understand it. I had cognition problems with some of the stuff these guys were doing because I had not I had not lived their lives, you know, I had not lived in their shadow either, so I didn't know anything about them. But I found them all really interesting and fun to get along with. And Neil

was Neil Cassidy was the connector here. He was the spark that brought all these people together and brought them out to California. And we had a number of very lovely gatherings featuring Ginsburg and his friends, and it was just it was a whole literary experience that was never expecting and and very exciting. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad, so m I gotta as see these things. It's very much a guy's world, right. All the famous characters are almost all of them are guys.

You're probably the most famous of the women who are associated with it. But obviously with the pranksters, there's a lot of people different. You know, people sleeping not just with their wives and husbands and all sorts of people. And you get pregnant at what the age of eighteen, He's baby but meanwhile you're hanging out with him and his wife, Faye and their three kids. So just explain a little bit more about what was that, you know, the community like then, and also to what ways did

LST shape the nature of that community. Well, I think one of the ways l shapes a community like this is that a trust is a big issue. So we learned to trust each other other and to recognize what the boundaries are of what what we were doing, which was basically becoming like a family, but not really a family. You know. It's like the beginning of of living together in a non familiar situation where you're you're just good friends. And I think that just good friends describes the whole thing.

We were good friends. We worked on projects together, it was fun, you know it. We cooked and ate together, and to me it felt it felt like family. But it was different from my my natal family because these people were as weird as I was, or weirder. And I was learning from Ken all the time about writing, about reading. He would hand me stuff to read, he would hand me some of his writing to edit. He

actually got me to edit a couple of things. And I was already somebody really interested in writing, so I was fascinated by his process, and then I the poets. The poets started coming in with their writing. So it was an enormous learning opportunity for me about how to manage words and how to manage your expressions to you know, properly fill in the blanks about what it is you're trying to say. You know, how to color it up basically, how to make it resonate. And I think I picked

up some of that. Let me read another passage from Tom Wolfe and tell me if he got it right or not. Okay, he was. I doubt if any of the pranksters truly understood Mounting Girl, except for Casey. Most of the time, when she was so one out front, coming on loud and clear and candid as a mack truck. It never occurred to anybody the whole side of her

was hidden except for Kessy. As I say, sometimes Kessy and mount and Girl would disappear into the backhouse and lion mattresses and just talk Kesy rapping on about how he felt about all sorts of things like fate. Nobody was closer to Kessys, Amount and Girl, not even Faye off and seeing but there it was Kesey. Kesey was essential to Mount and Girl's whole life with the pranksters. Did you get that right part of it from you? Yeah, I would say it was pretty right. I was interested

in Ken. You know, he was a writer. I wanted to be a writer. You know. I kept finding his notes scattered around on the floor and stuff like that. And I would find this stuff and look at it, you know, his notes to self. You know, he he kept a lot of records of what his thoughts were. He would just right, he would just kept his hand moving a lot. And I realized pretty soon that that was the key to being a writer, was you write shipped down right, You keep keep notes, you constantly be

leaving the trail for yourself. Because nobody can remember that great thought that you had five minutes ago. You have to write it down, you know it really do. And so I I think I picked up something from him. But I was really interested in this process. I didn't really get to see him right very much. He would write at four in the morning, you know, on his little typewriter, So I didn't really engage with him on

that level. But by that time I had become friends with the keysies and baby sat for them a little bit and generally tried to make myself useful because I thought this was the most interesting couple I had ever met. And so did you and Fain not have to deal with significant issues of jealousy or stuff like that when you know, you get pregnant with her, you know, her husband. I mean, I was understand you stayed friends for decades thereafter, so obviously you made things work. But what was that

like at that point? Well, it was uncomfortable for both of us. But but if these things happen and you don't really mean for them to happen, however, that the results were good, so that complaints. You know, I have a beautiful daughter named Sunshine who is now in her fifties. For crying out loud, So the water onto the bridge has flowed into the ocean long ago, and Face is close by here in Eugene and loves to see in

our grandkids and the family and stuff. So we're you know, we still see each other occasionally, but it's just you know, we're we're getting old, you know what I'm saying. We'll get that. We'll get to that at the end of this At this conversation, tell tell us a little bit about the acid tests. I mean, these become famous gatherings, and then there's the big Trips festival, and it seems like a lot of the creative juices that can KISSI and the pranksters are doing at that point involves putting

on these festivals, and you're integral to these things. So what was the thinking behind that. Was it about introducing the broader San Francisco or Caligarnian communities to to LSD. I think that's actually you're quite accurate there. That was the point. The point was to get more people who were smart enough to have read about it an opportunity to try it in a in a situation where there were other people around. I think one of the worst things people can do is take psychedelics by themselves if

they've never had any before. This is not something you want to mess around with fires. You want to be with experienced people who can can walk you through some of the tricky parts of exploring your your other brain. You know that other brain you got that you don't use. I feel like he he already understood all that stuff. Ken already understood the mechanics of getting high and what was going to happen to people, and he could lay it out for you in a good way and keep

you out of the dark places. He was very good at that. And that meant music, that meant you know, friendly banter, that meant reading comic books, you know, various things that would propel the lighter side of life rather than the darker side. And that was a prankster ethic, and that was something that he taught and encouraged and

kept it going, you know. That was his His ethic was, Yes, it's important information, but we want it to be at least moderately entertaining, you know, so that at the same time, right, the prankster model was ever trust to prankster. Yeah, that was his thing. I never quite got that because I wasstworthy. Yeah that was Yeah. I didn't invent that one. I don't know where they got off with. I think it was part of the the jokes on you concept that

Ken liked. You know, he was an amateur magician among other things, and could do sleight of hands and he has a very interesting skills that he had worked on since his youth, and a lot of it had to do with with tricking people and so LSD was tricky too, and I think one of the reasons he liked it so much was that it had that prankster equality to it, you know, where you get kind of silly and funny and get outside yourself of your day to day self.

You come outside of yourself and play. So in order to rediscover play, you know, that was something he really liked to do. And the Ascetists were basically these multi media events. Then it was sound and poetry and reading and everything whatever it is. It was whatever it is we could pull together. And what was it called acid tests? That was Ken's idea. That was an old term, you know,

it was an old farmers term. I'm not sure it had to do with charging batteries or something like that, that you would have to put acid in the old tractor battery and you have to test the test the I don't know, I don't know where that came from, but anyway, that's what got used. And we called them acid tests, which I thought was pretty out there, but it worked and people came and people drank the kool aid, and we didn't put very much in at first, you know,

it just was. It wasn't till later that that other helpers showed up and clandestinely would add more to the kool aid, which was not fair of them, but that did happen. Um. So the first couple were very mild in nature. They were easily done. People had a good time. That music was played. We had a couple of different bands that played. Uh there was Mother mccree's Uptown Jug Champions, which was the early Grateful Dead before they were a

Great Dead. And then there was a couple of skiffle bands and uh proto bands that became became better known later. But these were nice parties, you know, where we looked after people. We made sure people didn't get lost on the way to the parking lot. You know, it was a little bit of hand holding from the folks that were doing the parties. And um, the whole point was to introduce people to a rather weak solution of LSD in these jugs of kool a and so they wouldn't

get they wouldn't get overloaded. But that turned out to be super fun. You know, that was just very lively fun and we realized, oh, this is gonna work now. One thing that Kissy and that you've shared in common was the fact of the illegality. I mean, some of this LSD was in yet illegal, but marijuana was illegal and sometimes punishable by quite serious things, seriously, and he gets busted twice and I think you're there for one

of them offered take the fall for the thing. So was it like dealing with the cops in the mid sixties, Well, they were. They really had a wonderful time chasing us around. I mean they they worked at it, and they had an informant on the ground there too that we didn't know about until later. So we we were being very, very cautious because we had gotten the message from the Cosmos that this was happening, that we were being investigated, and so we hid absolutely everything and you got it

off the property before the cops came. But somehow one little stash au got found that nobody knew about, and it was some suspicion that it had been planted, but we couldn't prove anything. So they marched us all off to the San Mateo County jail for a little visit, but it didn't really amount too much. Ken obviously took the hit because he was the one that got fined.

You know, every time he would get some whopping fine that he'd have to pay, and it really impoverished the Keisies because they had to pay for our fun and it wasn't fair. Just you know, they were the they owned the property, and it was it was just the way things were. And the cops used to park an empty cop car out front, you know, on the weekends, just to give us something to worry about. So it was it was uncomfortable. We all wanted to get out

of the discomfort zone. And uh that was part of the reason that the bus left and why Ken had to leave that property because the San Mateo County sheriffs were hot for him. They wanted to arrest him, and he lands up spending some time in jail, right, Yeah, he did. He did some months. Uh, I think he

did about seven months, and fleeing in Mexico for a while. Yeah, and the bus and all this thing, this one out to New York but to Line or something, and yeah, we went down to actually all the way down to us at Line and then we decided that wasn't far enough away and we went on to Manzanillo, which is less of a tourist town at that time and moreover just a residential fishing town, and we found a little place to live on the beach there and with not

quite finished house that we rented, and for six months, a whole bunch of us lived there and uh, just definitely evaded anymore interactions with the police. But at the same time, I'm sure we were being watched pretty closely by the locals, and we had a nice vacation on the beach. I loved it there. It was so nice, and the Mexicans were just great with us. They thought we were cool. They knew we were cool in fact, and so they treated us really well. They liked us,

so you know when you come back. I mean, so we're getting into sixty seven or someple And then there's two ways we could take this. I mean, one is obviously the hippie scene. I mean, the way in which the pranksters are described as the link between the Beats and the hippies. As you get the Summer of Love, you get hate Ashbury, you get that stuff. Becoming this incredibly dynamic cultural cultural countercultural community I think is kind

of out of hand in a way. And then the other part, which I think I'm more interested in pursuing you right here, is about the Grateful Dead. And you know, here's these young musicians, Jerry Garcia and a band called the Warlocks at that time. And I think, you know, hanging out with the pranksters, and you fall in and connect with Jerry Garcia. And at this point, well, you have a young baby, you're only what twenty one or so. Yeah, let's let's start back at the beginning of that thought.

So Keisy invited this rock band that he'd heard about to come down and play at one of his last parties there at La Honda. And so these guys come in and it's it's the band. It's the band that we now know and love. It's it's Jerry and Phil and Bob and pig Pen. And we're looking at these guys. I've never seen them before, and uh, I'm looking at these guys and I thought, Wow, what a scurling, scurvy bunch of rats. You know, they just they just look

like But they played great. So they lined up in Ken's living room and you know, without any p A or any of that kind of stuff. We did have a couple of little microphones that kind of worked. But they played for hours and had a wonderful time they partook of the tea, the special tea being being served there, and they had, as it turned out, they had all fiddled around with LSD already in Palo Alto, and uh, we're knew what they were doing, and we're very solid customers,

we thought, very solid, very likable. And so when when Ken came up with the brilliant idea of doing acid tests, which we all giggled at, they were the ones we called and and they said, sure, we'll play. I don't think we even had to pay them very much. They just wanted to play. Is he conceivable to you that they could have become who they were if they had never encountered the pranksters? No, I don't think they would have. I don't think they would have. I think they would

have gone their own ways. This cemented them. This brought everybody together in that very personal high way you know, where you're You're connecting with your brothers and sisters in this mental realm of LSD in a whole new way. It makes things weld, even meld and then weld together. And I think that welded the grateful dead um and

made them much more of who they were. But you gotta remember Bob Weir was like fourteen during all of this, you know, he was fourteen or fifteen years old, and uh, I remember going up to the Peninsula school where he was in high school and picking him up for a show one time. He was like, I think, fifteen years old at the time, but he could play and sing

and he was good. So these were all developmental, developmental steps that we were taking trying to get to the point where we could do an asset test and have it really be good and fun. So uh that they were an essential piece of the action. We needed that music, We needed the the pressure of the music to keep people up and not wandering off, and that really really worked.

And they would play these sometimes very abbreviated sets, depending on their level of inebriation, but usually it worked out and they would play these long, rambling tunes and they would just get longer and longer, like you know, violently blues could go for half an hour and they'd get so spaced out. But we loved them. They were wonderful. They were so game, they were ready for whatever we disstout.

They seemed to be able to absorb and work with, which was impressive, really it took them a little while to trust each other enough that they could just that they could just zoom out to the outer universe that way and and stay there for a while with each other, and it didn't seem to hurt the show at all. In fact, the audience loved it. So, you know, they got good feedback from taking those excursions, taking stuff outside the menu of songs that they had laid out for themselves.

Because they always worked with a set list. You know, they'd write the set list and they take it to the mics, and everybody knew what changes they had to do to get into the next two. But sometimes, you know, once they had given themselves permission to extemporize, they would just riff and wander out into outer space, which was heavenly God. They got great. They got huge applause for this. You know, this is the stuff that people really really wanted to do. They wanted to let go of the

format and just wander in space with music. It was delicious. I read this question is no one ever came close to Jerry Garcia in terms of manifesting the LSD experience. Well, I think that's a nice quote. Whether that's true or not.

I don't know that was in that person's experience probably, but Jerry took LSD often without realizing it when he got dosed, often at shows and stuff like that, so he he really probably had more of than he wanted often, But he managed to perform through that because there was a lot of this going on in those days. Or somebody would hand you something it and say, you know, try this, and I'm like, what, Well, what is it? After you've tried it, then you ask what it is.

But anyway, he seemed to be able to still find the right finger positions to play the music, although he said sometimes it was really really hard, especially if he couldn't see the neck of his guitar because it was too dark and he was too high, he would have trouble. But mostly his ear was so good that he could he could keep going through all that, and he would just play until his hands just swelled up like crazy.

He would play for hour when he was high, and the band would just keep going and keep going and keep going. And there's the other band members were presumably sometimes high as well. Oh yeah, definitely, what goes around comes around, as they say, So I know that Bill the drummer used to just get completely wiped out. He would be he would be a basket case, play for four hours straight without a break. You know they would

do that. They were our heroes, you know. They made they made the foundation hold together for the asset tests like nobody else could. Let's take a break here and go to an ad. Okay, so here you are, your with a young baby, UM with kN Casey, and you and Jerry fall in love and stay together for six or seven years or something like that and have a couple of kids. Yeah, what can you share about because it doesn't come up as much in the interview. You're

talking about you you guys falling in love? Oh about that? So when we came back from Mexico, UM, I didn't have any place to go except to move in with my brother Gordon, who was living in an apartment in San Francisco. I didn't have any options. Really, I with a baby. There was no way I was going back down into the woods at Ken's. I couldn't do that. It wasn't practical. It's too hard to find services and stuff.

So my brother said, well, you can stay with me, and so that worked out, but it also made me available to go over and visit at Grateful Dead house on Ashbury Street, which I promptly did. We were very familiar with each other. Really, I love the band. I love those guys so much. They were such cool people. So I trotted right on over to their house at seven ten Ashbury Street and made myself known, and and and Jerry just latched on and and was driving me

all around town with a couple of his friends. Within a couple of weeks, we were exploring the possibilities of being a couple. And uh, within a couple of months he asked me to come and move in with him over at and I did, and then realized that a lot of that had to do with cooking dinner. They needed more people to to to feed them. And that was fun. But he's essentially your first long term boyfriend. Absolutely. Yeah. I was too weird for most people. You know. I

was just too smart, too crazy. I had a kid, I mean, I had a lot of I had a lot of strikes against me as far as being a domestic partner. But once I had Sunshine, I had to sort of like change my wild ways and let go of my motorcycle and you know, become a mom and he was comfortable with that, which was really sweet, and he took us in and we had a great time together. We really really did. And it was to him it was I guess important. And he becomes more the dead

to your daughter's sunshine than even Ken is, oh much more. Yeah, because he was hands on, because we lived together and ken Ken was living elsewhere by that time. He had to get out of California and he moves back up to Oregon eventually. Yeah, he had to get out of California because the cops were mad at him for ever

more things. So I'm sort of like, you know, prepping for this, and I'm thinking, you know, there's a few things that Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia had in common apart from the commitment to LSD, But they were also

obviously creative geniuses, each in their own way. But beyond that, and maybe more uniquely, they were both leaders and teachers who had a commitment to not being perceived as the leader and others who were kind of anti Even as you had to have some hierarchy to function, they saw themselves as being anti hierarchical, and I think Kessy called

himself the anti navigator and Garcia. He's obviously such a teacher for his other bandmates, but there's an element in which he doesn't want to assert that power or role or doesn't want that focus on himself. And so what they did was they assigned pig Pen the role of the leader of the bands, which he didn't want that role at all, so he was very grumpy about it. But it was just a matter of being singled out as the person who could talk really well, which Jerry could.

I mean, he always had something to say about anything, and I think most of the rest of the band members were a little bit less inclined to kick out statements, you know, and kick out words. Jerry was was really good at that. And because he played the guitar and he did a lot of the singing, he was seen as body who needed to be interviewed frequently. Oh, the interviewers would just make a bee line for Cherry and he'd have to say, I'll talk to you, but but

I don't have time for anybody else. And that was all he could do, really, And how much are you going out on the road with him? I mean, obviously you're having a couple of kids with him, so you've got three young girls. Eventually after a few years and he's coming home periodically. But how much are you out going to concerts on the road, whether without the kids or well? I did. I did many times. I went out lots of times until I kind of got tired

of it. It's a grind, let's face it, you know, you it's motels, it's taxis, it's airplanes, and it's just like, you know, if you're not the performer, if you're not the performing person and don't have a role on stage, it's difficult. It's difficult to go out on the road if you don't have a job. Okay, so I didn't have a job. I just didn't really like being out

there because I didn't have anything to do. I just kind of they'd be doing a sound check and I'd be wandering around, you know, banging into doors and stuff with with no role. So that that wore me down pretty quick. But I just think that they worked so hard, and I can't really tell you how hard they worked, but it was really hard to get their sound right,

to get their instruments working right. You know, all this stuff was like crucial in that four or five hours before a show, and you just didn't even want to be around them during that period. You know, they were focused on what they were going to do, so it was difficult to just lounge around and watch them struggle with all that stuff. So I didn't really like like going out that much. And you'd have the girls with you as well at a very young age. Yeah, I

tried not to do that. That was just too much to deal with. You gotta remember, they were standing in motels and funky hotels. You know. It took a long time for them to reach an income level that would yield a more comfortable trip, so it was pretty bare

bones that first ten years. Meanwhile, I just got to ask you this, So back at home in Poughkeepsie, what do your parents think about what you're up to this whole time with the Preisters and the dead and Keithsi and Garcia, And what's their take on and how's your relationship with him during these years? Because they seemed like

they were great parents growing up. They were very good parents, and I got a great education from them and with them, but they did not approve of anything that I did after I was a certain age, so it was difficult to visit them and bathe and disapproval, so I didn't. I didn't visit them very much until I was about thirty and could bring home my kids and let them see that I actually was a mother that had nice children.

You know. That seemed to work better for them than the than the crazy lady that that I was when I was nineteen, you know, so they liked me better that Okay, So another question. You get to a point then around seventy three seventy four, and I guess a couple of things happened then. One is I think that's the point more or less when you and Jerry split up.

I mean, he's still showing up as as the father of kids and all this, and then meanwhile you start to see cocaine and heroin and other drugs much becoming much more part of the grateful dead scene and Jerry getting into using those drugs. What was going on to take Jerry first and foremost, because he was the fact of the leader. Why did he get so much into cocaine and then get into heroin in a way that he struggled with for you know, the rest of his

life to one degree or another. Well, I can't answer that because I don't really know I think he thought cocaine made him play better or longer, or which was really not true either. You know, you know how coke is. It makes you think you're better than you are. And I can't I can't speak to the heroine thing because because I don't really know, except that he would get really tired. He would get really tired and need to sleep and not be able to sleep. And somehow Heroin

worked into that. But he didn't overtly use in my presence because he knew my attitude towards that stuff. So he was secretive as he got into it, you know, as he became addicted, he became very secretive. But it was also obvious that something was terribly wrong because his behavior changed. But how he got into it and and why, I think it's the dangers of the road. You know,

people are handing you stuff. You go out there and people are hand you, handing you a beautifully rolled joint, they're handing you a little pile of coke, you know. And I just happened to be that person that didn't like cocaine at all and I thought it was weird and rather have a benny. Now I can relate on the same way more, or rather take a benny as anybody got a benny. You know, benz Atrien was much better as far as I was concerned. But you know,

there it was, and it was going around. It was the cool thing to give to the rock stars, I guess, and because I didn't go out on the road with him every time, I went out once in a while. But this was all going on where I couldn't see it, and I didn't really know about it until until I started hearing about it from people, because cocaine was not overt behavior changer, you know, it's subtle. It's a subtle drug, and I couldn't I couldn't read it in the room.

I couldn't feel its presence, you know. So it was something that I struggled with for a while and realized that no matter what happened or whatever drugs Jerry took, I still loved him. That didn't change the situation. It just meant that he was different, you know, he was different in his behavior and his actions, and he was also at risk. So I electured him about the risk and he didn't take that will but I kept I tried, but it just you know, he was already doing what

he did. This a little more forward that maybe a lot more, which is that when part of this is about your reflections now looking back. But the first thing I want to ask you, So, there was an interview in one of the came across, maybe from late nineties or something, and maybe this is one of your daughters and let me just read you here. You kids should do drugs. Jerry Garcia used to tell the Sensible Daughters quote.

It was sort of a running family jokes at Annibal Garcia McLean then twenty six, one of four daughters of of Jerry Garcia. She said her mother would also say, why can't you kids be more like us? We tell her mom, no, we don't want to. We learned from you guys by don Annabelle is a jokester. She's a prankster through and through. That is just that's her entire creation. She she would come up with stuff like that just to make us squirk, you know, just to make me squirre.

Michael like, no, come on, really, so so very funny ha ha Okay, okay, so let me frame it this way now now and the psychedelic renaissance we're in and Michael Pollen's book and the tremendous influence of maps and all the wonderful media attention. Everybody's very focused on harm reduction, whether it's in a dance scene or whatever it might be,

and and doing it all right. And I think whereas our parents were afraid that we would do things that they had never done, I think our generation is oftentimes afraid that our kids will do the same dumb things

we did do but they won't be so lucky. That's entirely possible, yes, because you know, think of the variety of substances out there now well exactly, but also think about when you were taking you know, LSD of unknown potency or purity back in the day, or like the whole notion of taking LSD, like with stroll lights out

in a concert. Like I tell my daughter and her friends that, you know, if they're gonna do stuff, don't do it at a concert, do it in a more safer environment or with friends you trust, not where you're surrounded by thousands of strangers and don't know where the exits are and all this sort of stuff. But back

in the day, you were part of a scene. In fact, the acid tests were all about taking acid and being this crazy multi media environment, taking some unknown amount of acid in an unknown amount of you know, kool aid. I mean, when you look now from the kind of responsible harm reduction frame of the psychedelic renaissance back on that day, what do you think. Well, I think we were taking a big risk, you know, with the but luckily, you know, nobody died, nobody jumped out a window. We did.

We did okay, because we kept the concentration pretty freaking low in those those buckets of kool aid. It was it was low dose all the way. Now, some people would bring their own stash to the thing and re up the kool aid. Other people would just use their own stash and not touch the kool aid. So it was really a free choice affair. And we felt that this was this was something that was an American right to get a little high and and adjust your own dose.

If you drink one cup, you're gonna get you're gonna get fifty mics. If you drink too you're gonna get an hundred, you know, so be ready for that. And I think that's kind of about where we were at with it was about thirty microgams for a for a full Dixie cup of cool. You know, it was low dos, but as the evening progressed, of course people would come back and get a little more. So it was cumulative.

And so it's hard to it's hard to figure how everybody survived the asset tests without a single catastrophic event. You know, we didn't ever have anything bad happened, so it was it. There was no reason to stop. In other words, no disaster appeared on the horizon. Let me

ask you this. So you got called made, whether it's a grandkid or a friends kid or somebody and they're you know, they're late teens or early twenties and they're going to their first they're going to burning Man for the first time, going to something that resembles them okay test, they're saying, Hey, MG, like I'm going you know, I've tried it a few times. But what's your advice to me and going into this environment where I definitely want

to be tripping, but I also want to come home. Fine. Yeah, I think the first advice is go with a friends who you trust and care about and that cares about you. That's number one. Number two is, you know, make sure your shoes are and shoes and socks are in good order. And number three is take a low dose. If you're gonna be offered something, to go for the low dose

because you could always take more later, you know. But it's really really good to be safe by going low and feeling, you know, people get people will grow their wings bit by bit. You don't have to go for the whole thing all at once, because that puts you in harm's way. And because you need to learn how to fly. You need to learn how to take off and fly safely before you take the big flight you really do. You need to check it out delicately. Be sweet to yourself. I think it's about how do you

treat yourself? Be sweet to yourself and and go low. That's what I say to people. Yeah, that sounds like good advice. But another thing you did right. You created something with some friends called the Women's Visionary Concoct a number of years ago. In fact, I think one last time I saw you was closing Paths at one of those events, which even though is the Women's Visionary Congressmen who are welcome to calm, But what was the vision behind that and what is uh, you know, the mission

of it and the importance of it. Well, my my two friends Anne Harrison and Hidden Mountain were instigators of this and they approached me as a as a co conspirator,

and I thought such a wonderful idea. So they were basically women's gatherings that involved discussions around psychedelics and about alternative lifestyles, about thinking about alternative lifestyles besides just the American style of high school, college, grad school, job you know that that that that that uh in a in a in a quick series as so it was really aimed at younger women that wanted to experiment a little bit with with some psychedelics in a safe setting, with

carrying people around, and that was what it was really all about. Most people that came to those were mostly in it just for the discussion, So the discussions were deep and varied. You know, women's circle is a very

revealing thing to do. To set up a women's circle, you don't know who you're going to get, you don't know what their stories are going to be, but you find out an awful lot about about what women's issues are, you know, and they revolve around parenting, lifestyle and consciousness razing. So we tried to be mentors I think the whole idea was to be mentors for younger women that were we're seeking a safe path to enlightenment of a type

of enlightenment, you know, about life. Yeah, you're making me think of a friend of mine who may be a friend of yours as well, who I think has organized years ago a grandmother's circle to get together for a number of days doing different psychedelics. That's a lovely idea, Yes, And I think that, you know, so as women, as as people that have babies and are bringing along the

next set of humans. You know, there's a special role there, not just for grandmothers, but for for mothers and daughters to perpetuate what women know and some women need to learn, and that those things can be shared in a women's circle setting in a really good manner, you know, a clear, clean manner without interference or interruption or or dogma. You know, we're trying to like get the dogma out of the discussions, you know, trying not to hang on to old ideas.

Let's just look at this clearly from a scientific point of view and a social consciousness point of view, and that seems to work in general, It really does, and young women were really grateful. And also it's a hook up. It's a place to meet people you can hang with and go get high with, you know. So these are these are valuable, valuable things, and I haven't been involved in in a couple of years, but I would like to be. M h, are you working on a book

these days? I'm supposed to be, but right now I'm talking to you, And uh, there's there's certainly a lot to finish in my life. I have to finish stuff, and I don't feel like i've finished yet. I'm nowhere near finishing. So that and how's your career in the cannabis industry venue? Oh pretty much? That say, go way back, right, you wrote a book on cannabis cultivation, you know, way back. That's true. I wrote a book called Primo Plant, which is still in print and I still have copies. It's

a book that you can get at your bookstore. They'll order it for you. But it's just a quick manual on how to grow pot because there wasn't one. There was only complex manuals on how to com to grow pot that kind of I thought, rambled all over the place and weren't really useful. So coming from a gardening family. I knew how to write that thing, so it was a best seller. I've sold over a hundred thousand copies of that thing, and I hope everybody's happy. I am well,

listen empty. I have loved this conversation. It's just the time is just flowing. Okay. I just want to say one more thing. I want to say, big shout, big shout out to Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm. I hope everybody's having a great time this summer, and everybody's healthy and good, and that life is life is doing what it's supposed to do, which means having fun with the kids. I just want to put that out there to Camp Win a Rainbow and all the good that

they've done for people's kids over the years. Fantastic. That is a nice note to end on Blue MG. Thanks ever ever so much for joining me. It's been fun. Thank you. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one, eight three three seven seven nine sixty

that's eight three three psycho zero. Or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Noam Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt

Frederick from My Heart Radio, and me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to Avi Brio, s F Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BP. Next week I'll be talking about Jews and cannabis with Eddie Portnoy, Senior researcher and director of Exhibitions at EVO, the Yiddish Institute for Jewish Research, where he just put together a fascinating exhibit on exactly that subject a few years ago.

I happen to see online really kind of beautifully sculpted glass bong in the shape of him An lura for the holiday of Hanukkah, and I thought, this manura bog is something that's representative of Jewish material culture. This should be in our collection. And as it sat at my desk, I thought to myself why would anyone smoke eight bowls of weed at a time. But the second thing I thought was could I feasibly make an exhibit on Jews and cannabis. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, an't miss it.