Taking a trip: the Grateful Dead’s country ranch drug retreat
At the dawn of the ‘Summer of Love’, minds were just beginning to expand. After the British invasion set the country on fire, the focus soon shifted to the West Coast of America, with everyone imagining themselves going into San Francisco with flowers in their hair. The Grateful Dead may have thrived in that sort of environment, but even they needed to spread out from the city when going to drummer Mickey Hart’s ranch.
So why would one of the biggest names in rock and roll want to get out of the city that birthed them? Simple: drug busts. As much as the psychedelics may have been flowing around the time the band made their classics, that didn’t stop law enforcement from sniffing around their facilities, which meant resorting to the wilderness.
Although going away to a cottage feels like the kind of optimal trip that musicians take to write songs, there was a lot more than rehearsing going on at the ranch. When being interviewed by different radio stations, what a lot of newcomers walked into seemed like the kind of environment that Woodstock forgot about.
Since no one was around to monitor them, one San Francisco radio DJ talked about the pure debauchery going on, recalling, “Everybody’s walking around stoned, and the chicks are naked. Topless women. Horses. It was unbelievable.” It wasn’t limited to just the kids, either, with Hart being known to feed psychedelics to his horse while on the property, which no doubt made for some interesting rides through the forest.
Although the thought of this kind of drug den feels like it was ripped out of a fever dream, it served as a way for the band to decompress. The Haight-Ashbury scene was bound to do a lot on anyone’s peace of mind, so being able to move out into the wilderness and not have to worry about neighbours for ten miles at a time was the ideal way to escape the noise coming out of the city.
While the original foundations have since burned down, the site is now used as a state park, almost like a testament to the kind of outrageous living that the Summer of Love was always meant to be. Even though the days of eating acid for breakfast and walking around naked might be a thing of the past now, ranches of this kind seem to be used in a different capacity these days.
Considering how many narcotics were in everyone’s system at the time, the entire mindset of a ranch has been turned on its head, usually used as a way for druggies to detox from their different vices. When listening to various celebrities who have gone through rehab, even they have confessed to going down to this style of ranch as a form of therapy, using the surroundings to bring a sense of calm to their surroundings.
If anything, the way that everything has turned on its head is what the Grateful Dead was doing in reverse. While Jerry Garcia and co. were talking about embracing the countryside to get away from the stresses of law enforcement, the idea of a recovery ranch today is helping millions of struggling addicts melt away the stresses of the world that make them turn to their vices.
