Immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s famous book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Merry Pranksters were a pivotal link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and both the Grateful Dead and the hippie generation that emerged later in the 1960s. Mountain Girl was romantically involved, and had children, with both the Pranksters’ leader, Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and the Grateful Dead’s, Jerry Garcia. She thus was both witness to and participant in many of the central events of the 1960s counterculture, including the famed Acid Tests. MG and I talked about the incredible cast of characters she got to know, the role of LSD and other drugs, and the challenges of raising young children in the midst of it all. And we discussed her more recent involvement with cannabis and psychedelics, including co-founding the Women’s Visionary Congress.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
views expressed here do not represent those of my Heart Media,
Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, Heed, as
(00:23):
an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
even represent my own and nothing contained in this show
should be used his medical advice or encouragement to use
any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today's guest is
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:31):
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
(01:52):
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
(02:14):
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,
(02:34):
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.
(02:55):
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
(03:16):
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
(03:38):
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,
(04:02):
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
(04:23):
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
(04:44):
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.
(05:06):
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,
(05:26):
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
(05:50):
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
(06:11):
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
(06:31):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:15):
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
(07:37):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:26):
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
(08:50):
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
(09:10):
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
(09:31):
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
(09:54):
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,
(10:17):
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,
(10:38):
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
(10:59):
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
(11:22):
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,
(11:47):
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.
(12:10):
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
(12:33):
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
(12:55):
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
(13:16):
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
(13:38):
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
(14:01):
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
(14:22):
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
(14:43):
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
(15:05):
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
(15:28):
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.
(15:51):
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
(16:14):
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.
(16:34):
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
(16:54):
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,
(17:17):
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
(17:37):
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.
(18:00):
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
(18:22):
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
(18:42):
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
(19:05):
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
(19:28):
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
(19:49):
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
(20:09):
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,
(20:32):
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
(20:54):
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
(21:15):
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
(21:35):
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
(21:56):
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
(22:17):
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
(22:38):
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
(23:15):
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,
(23:38):
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
(23:58):
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.
(24:19):
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
(24:40):
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.
(25:01):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:46):
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,
(26:06):
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
(26:27):
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
(26:48):
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
(27:09):
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,
(27:30):
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
(27:52):
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
(28:13):
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.
(28:37):
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
(28:59):
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
(29:20):
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,
(29:42):
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
(30:02):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:46):
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
(31:08):
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,
(31:30):
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
(31:51):
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
(32:13):
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
(32:34):
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
(32:55):
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
(33:16):
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
(33:40):
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
(34:01):
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
(34:24):
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
(34:46):
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
(35:08):
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
(35:29):
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
(35:51):
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
(36:11):
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
(36:33):
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
(36:55):
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
(37:15):
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,
(37:40):
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
(38:02):
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.
(38:23):
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
(38:45):
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
(39:09):
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
(39:29):
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
(39:51):
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.
(40:13):
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.
(40:38):
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.
(40:59):
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
(41:21):
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
(41:42):
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
(42:04):
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
(42:26):
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
(42:52):
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?
(43:13):
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.
(43:35):
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.
(43:55):
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
(44:19):
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.
(44:39):
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
(45:02):
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
(45:24):
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
(45:45):
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
(46:07):
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
(46:29):
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,
(46:50):
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
(47:10):
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
(47:32):
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
(47:54):
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,
(48:16):
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
(48:37):
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
(48:59):
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
(49:21):
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
(49:45):
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
(50:07):
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
(50:29):
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
(50:52):
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
(51:12):
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,
(51:35):
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
(51:56):
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,
(52:21):
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
(52:43):
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
(53:04):
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
(53:25):
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
(53:46):
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
(54:06):
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
(54:27):
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
(54:47):
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
(55:09):
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.
(55:29):
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
(55:51):
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
(56:13):
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.
(56:35):
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
(56:57):
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
(57:20):
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
(57:45):
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
(58:06):
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
(58:27):
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
(58:48):
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
(59:12):
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
(59:34):
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.
(01:00:00):
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
(01:00:24):
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
(01:00:45):
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,
(01:01:07):
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
(01:01:29):
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
(01:01:53):
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
(01:02:13):
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
(01:02:36):
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
(01:02:59):
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.
(01:03:19):
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
(01:03:45):
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.
(01:04:09):
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
(01:04:38):
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
(01:05:00):
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
(01:05:21):
and cannabis. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, an't miss it.
Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
views expressed here do not represent those of my Heart Media,
Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, Heed, as
(00:23):
an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
even represent my own and nothing contained in this show
should be used his medical advice or encouragement to use
any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today's guest is
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:31):
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
(01:52):
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
(02:14):
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,
(02:34):
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.
(02:55):
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
(03:16):
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
(03:38):
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,
(04:02):
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
(04:23):
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
(04:44):
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.
(05:06):
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,
(05:26):
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
(05:50):
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
(06:11):
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
(06:31):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:15):
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
(07:37):
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
(08:02):
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
(08:26):
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
(08:50):
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
(09:10):
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
(09:31):
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
(09:54):
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,
(10:17):
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,
(10:38):
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
(10:59):
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
(11:22):
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,
(11:47):
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.
(12:10):
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
(12:33):
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
(12:55):
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
(13:16):
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
(13:38):
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
(14:01):
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
(14:22):
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
(14:43):
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
(15:05):
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
(15:28):
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.
(15:51):
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
(16:14):
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.
(16:34):
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
(16:54):
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,
(17:17):
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
(17:37):
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.
(18:00):
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
(18:22):
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
(18:42):
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
(19:05):
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
(19:28):
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
(19:49):
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
(20:09):
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,
(20:32):
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
(20:54):
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
(21:15):
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
(21:35):
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
(21:56):
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
(22:17):
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
(22:38):
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
(23:15):
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,
(23:38):
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
(23:58):
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.
(24:19):
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
(24:40):
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.
(25:01):
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
(25:23):
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
(25:46):
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,
(26:06):
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
(26:27):
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
(26:48):
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
(27:09):
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,
(27:30):
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
(27:52):
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
(28:13):
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.
(28:37):
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
(28:59):
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
(29:20):
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,
(29:42):
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
(30:02):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:46):
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
(31:08):
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,
(31:30):
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
(31:51):
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
(32:13):
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
(32:34):
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
(32:55):
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
(33:16):
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
(33:40):
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
(34:01):
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
(34:24):
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
(34:46):
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
(35:08):
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
(35:29):
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
(35:51):
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
(36:11):
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
(36:33):
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
(36:55):
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
(37:15):
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,
(37:40):
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
(38:02):
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.
(38:23):
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
(38:45):
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
(39:09):
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
(39:29):
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
(39:51):
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.
(40:13):
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.
(40:38):
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.
(40:59):
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
(41:21):
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
(41:42):
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
(42:04):
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
(42:26):
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
(42:52):
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?
(43:13):
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.
(43:35):
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.
(43:55):
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
(44:19):
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.
(44:39):
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
(45:02):
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
(45:24):
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
(45:45):
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
(46:07):
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
(46:29):
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,
(46:50):
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
(47:10):
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
(47:32):
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
(47:54):
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,
(48:16):
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
(48:37):
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
(48:59):
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
(49:21):
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
(49:45):
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
(50:07):
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
(50:29):
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
(50:52):
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
(51:12):
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,
(51:35):
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
(51:56):
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,
(52:21):
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
(52:43):
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
(53:04):
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
(53:25):
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
(53:46):
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
(54:06):
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
(54:27):
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
(54:47):
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
(55:09):
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.
(55:29):
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
(55:51):
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
(56:13):
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.
(56:35):
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
(56:57):
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
(57:20):
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
(57:45):
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
(58:06):
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
(58:27):
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
(58:48):
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
(59:12):
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
(59:34):
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.
(01:00:00):
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
(01:00:24):
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
(01:00:45):
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,
(01:01:07):
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
(01:01:29):
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
(01:01:53):
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
(01:02:13):
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
(01:02:36):
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
(01:02:59):
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.
(01:03:19):
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
(01:03:45):
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.
(01:04:09):
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
(01:04:38):
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
(01:05:00):
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
(01:05:21):
and cannabis. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, an't miss it.
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