Augustus Owsley Stanley III had just taken a hit of acid. The effects were coming on as he parked his white Dodge Lancer and entered the Muir Beach Tavern. The Marin County venue normally hosted banquets and weddings, but that night in late 1965, the oceanside lodge welcomed a newly formed Bay Area rock band.
The event had come together somewhat last-minute. Handbills plastered around San Francisco and Berkeley asked, “Can You Pass the Acid Test?” The bills advertised Beat figures Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady and the New York City rock group the Fugs; jazz musician Roland Kirk was also rumored to be swinging by. None of them showed, but one listed act did actually appear at Muir Beach. They were called the Grateful Dead—having recently changed their name from the Warlocks—and they would blow some 300 minds that frigid Saturday evening, especially Stanley’s.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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These were embryonic days in the ’60s counterculture. But the occasion marked a watershed in psychedelic music, a genre rooted as much in the Dead as in California itself. Stanley would soon be supercharging both, as the band’s patron and soundperson and the hookup for many of the Bay Area’s consciousness-expanding substances.
Muir Beach was an early Acid Test—one of the formless, psychedelic-fueled audiovisual happenings held along the West Coast between 1965 and 1966. The exact date for Muir Beach has long been disputed; some sources say December 11, others December 18. The previous Test, the Dead’s first public appearance, had occurred in San Jose on December 4. The Tests were organized by One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey, a friend of the Dead’s, and his Merry Pranksters, a performance art troupe then based in La Honda who ritualistically took LSD and also “played” at the events. The Dead were the only proper band to perform at the happenings, with the exception of the San Francisco Trips Festival in January 1966, and were given $100 a week by the Pranksters to be the Acid Test house band. Audience members paid a buck, received a dose, then tripped out with fellow travelers; one “passed the test” by lasting until morning. Otherwise, there were no rules. At the time, LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, had not yet been criminalized.
TAKE A HIT
At the Muir Beach Tavern entrance, Prankster George Walker administered 100-microgram doses to attendees. According to Walker, he procured the “bulk” batch from East Coast psychedelic figureheads Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (soon to be Ram Dass), who sourced the LSD from an overseas laboratory. Walker portioned the individual doses, mixed with reagent-grade methyl alcohol, into gelatin capsules. “Put ’em under black light and about half of it, which is about how full they were, would glow wildly,” Walker says, “like a little light bulb.”
Everyone at Muir Beach dosed—accepting a capsule was required to gain entry—except Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the Dead’s organist and original frontperson. (He preferred alcohol.) “I remember watching everybody having to help Pigpen carry in the big B3 Hammond,” Walker says of the then-roadie-less band. There was Pigpen, bassist Phil Lesh, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, Bill “the drummer” Kreutzmann, and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, whom Walker clocked walking in guitar case in one hand and Fender amplifier in the other.
Weir recalled the band entering “a horse race to get set up before the LSD came on,” reports Dennis McNally, the former longtime Dead publicist, in his 2002 history, A Long Strange Trip. “Some of them lost the race.” Kreutzmann’s dose, for instance, teleported him: “All of a sudden, boom, that’s it, set’s over,” Kreutzmann recalls in the book. “And I proceeded to tear down my drum set for two hours, and the night was just begun.”
Stanley had never seen the band play. He’d recently been introduced to Kesey and the Pranksters, to whom he gave some doses of his own product. “Owsley had just begun his brief career as King of Acid,” Lesh later said, referring to him as an aspiring “Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” Prankster Ken Babbs, Kesey’s best friend, calls Stanley “a scientific nerd, a skinny little guy with thick glasses,” then spinning up a clandestine and lucrative LSD operation. Stanley’s lab eventually produced millions of hits of some of the most famous high-quality acid varieties, like Blue Cheer, Monterey Purple, and White Lightning. Muir Beach would be his first Acid Test and transformative Dead experience. In Kreutzmann’s words, it’s where Stanley entered “the Grateful Dead story.”
For the first time, then, under one roof stood three pillars of an emerging West Coast psychedelic scene: the Dead, Stanley, and the Pranksters. In a signal moment, these catalytic forces interlocked inside the tavern, what one attendee called a “funky” structure, stilted over marsh grass a hundred yards from the shore. “It kicked everything off,” Babbs says. “Without any planning or anything, what came together there was kind of the format for what would happen afterwards.”
THE TRIP
The Dead began their set, which in that era was mostly covers like Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour” and the traditional blues song “I Know You Rider.” In Lesh’s memory, the band “played most of our standard repertoire at the Test—usually featuring Pigpen as the lead vocalist, since he wasn’t too stoned to sing.” Their best music that night, Lesh felt, was their take on “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” by gospel blues musician Blind Gary Davis. “Seeing Kesey and Babbs, sweat pouring off them, gyrating and undulating and screaming, ‘Yes!’ ‘Righteous!’ and similar ecstatic exhortations of approval,” recalled Lesh, “I thought that if we could grab those guys like that, we just might have something going.”
Exactly how long they played is unclear. According to Garcia, it was only five minutes. They weren’t obligated to perform if they didn’t want to. But others remember the band going for hours. “All night,” Babbs says, just like the Pranksters, who were creating echo loops and feedback with their own audio equipment on an opposing stage. “Sometimes they’d be going, and sometimes we’d be going,” Babbs adds. “And sometimes we’d be going together. But they’d take breaks. And we’d take breaks.” That’s how Walker remembers Muir Beach too. The Dead played until dawn. “You don’t fall asleep on acid,” he says. “I was high and having a wonderful time!”
But the experience shook Stanley. Garcia’s guitar sounded like tiger claws, as if it had emerged from the cosmos to maul him. Heightened by strobe lights and Prankster home movie projections, the music was “pushing me to the edge,” Stanley told David Gans, author of Conversations with the Dead. “It was, like, dangerously scary. Very, very to the point.” He thought, “These guys are going to be greater than the Beatles someday.” It was revelatory, “like looking into the future.”
Stanley responded to the “screeching” by dragging a wooden chair over the dance floor. The scraping noise overtook the space. “People stopped dancing,” Walker says. “They were just kind of standing there, watching it.” Garcia later got a sense of Stanley’s headspace that night. “His mind was completely shot, he thought they’d come and taken it from him,” Garcia told Rolling Stone.
Stanley claimed to have picked up another attendee’s paranoia. “Because we were all linked together, it was this total telepathic loop,” he remembered. “This guy saw somebody come into the place that he thought was a narc. He thought, ‘Narcs!’ I thought, ‘Narcs!’ ” Stanley bolted. “I saw one set of the Grateful Dead…and I was gone. I was running up the road.” (There were no narcs.)
The Test resumed.
DEADWORLD
The Muir Beach Tavern would become a node in the region’s network of rock venues as the decade unfolded and the Grateful Dead’s psychedelic jams rippled up and down the coast, across the country, and beyond. Though the Dead performed there just that once, the tavern soon hosted many of their local buddies, bands like the Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Blue Cheer—likely named after Stanley’s LSD—plus touring acts like Chicago’s Electric Flag, among others. The building was razed in the late ’60s when California State Parks acquired the beach.
Decades later, Kesey recounted the morning after Muir Beach in a posthumous tribute to Garcia, who died in 1995. “I remember standing out in the pearly early dawn,” Kesey wrote, “leaning on the top rail of a driftwood fence with you and Lesh and Babbs, watching the world light up, talking about our glorious futures. The gig had been semi-successful and the air was full of exulted fantasies.”
No recording of the Dead’s performance exists. But the legacy of Muir Beach, and Tests thereafter, is that the event provided “the template that permanently defined the Grateful Dead’s view of its audience,” writes McNally in A Long Strange Trip. Barriers between musician and crowd dissolved under the influence. Everyone occupied the same sonic envelope, traveling together (if still in their own internal worlds), a hallmark of psychedelic music.
“Everybody there was as much performer as audience,” Garcia said of the Tests in a 1988 interview. That’s a model, chaotic at times, that the Dead would follow over the next 30 years, in which anything could happen. By going through this crucible, the Dead evolved into the improvisational institution now synonymous with “psychedelic.” “It was like we discovered at the event,” Walker says. “We kind of came to the realization of what it was that we were doing and what this could be and what the Dead were.”
The Pranksters and the Dead sensed that if they kept going, the results would be “big time.” “It was the start of something that grew worldwide,” Babbs says. Every Test was different, “except the Grateful Dead became bigger and bigger, and the Merry Band of Pranksters kind of backed off and didn’t do much, except put the show on and do the gate.” Yet a scene “where the participants and the artists were one group, intermingling and both respectful of each other,” represented a shift away from bands and audiences being separate entities. Generations of bands to come, especially those influenced by the Dead, would adopt this approach.
Stanley likewise got hooked. The Dead’s Muir Beach set was “enough to really impress the living shit out of me,” he later said. The LSD group mind, that elemental organizing energy in California’s Deadworld, is what really scared him, not the band themselves. Stanley vibed more with the Dead than with the Pranksters, who he thought were dosing recklessly. He decided “to go to work for the most amazing group ever and have a fabulous time of it,” he said. “I just hitched a ride and tried to make a positive contribution.”
He would further the Dead’s efforts through his financial largesse, supplies of now-legendary LSD, and obsessive questing for the purest sound through their equipment. Stanley helped launch what Lesh called the Dead’s “collective transformation program,” an allusion to the band and their devoted followers “traveling” together through the sound. That would make them one of the biggest and most singular musical acts of all time, a genre unto themselves.
But not before Stanley fled the Muir Beach Tavern, peeled out in his car, and crashed into a ditch. Stanley walked away unharmed. As he later told the band, he saw his life flash as if on a tape loop. “That’s birth and death,” he said. •
Brian A Anderson is a journalist, a Pulitzer Prize–winning editor, and the author of Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection.
