How the Grateful Dead “fell in with the acid tests”
In the 1960s, the peace and love generation split into two. There were the stoners, and then there was the crowd dabbling in something more serious.
Not serious in terms of the intensity, but still intense because, back then, the drug was brand new. So new in fact that the tests were happening there and then, with the bands of the moment soundtracking it – like the Grateful Dead.
The story of how the Grateful Dead fell in love with acid is also basically the story of how the Grateful Dead formed, as Jerry Garcia himself would admit that they weren’t really the band until they were tripping.
Before that, he recalled, “We were playing the divorcees’ bars up and down the peninsula. You know. Our booking agent was this guy who used to book strippers and dog acts and magicians and everybody else.” It’s a pretty insane thing to imagine that one of the most influential groups in history played at some crappy joint to no one, booked by their local loser promoter. But then everything changed, and the kicker really all comes down to LSD.
While the band were hoping for a break, they just happened to be dreaming in the same town and at the same time as Ken Kesey, the acid academic who was utterly obsessed with messing around with the drug and documenting the places the mind could go to. With Garcia and his crew bored and looking for kicks, they quickly fell into his orbit as he said, “We knew a lot of the people in Kesey’s scene, because it was all part of the Palo Alto scene, which we were a part of. And they knew of us.”
Then one night, the invite came to meet the man himself. “The one guy, named Paige, who was one of the Pranksters, came to one of our late-night sets at one of the bars we were playing at,” Garcia remembered. “He said, ‘Hey, you guys, we’re having these parties up at Kesey’s place in La Honda [California] every Saturday night, why don’t you guys come?’”
The problem was that the band were booked and busy with their bad shows, but then fate stepped in. By the time the next week came around, they’d been freed up and fired from their post as the backing band to a bad scene. “We had nothing to do. So Saturday night came around. We went to the first one of those parties, which later became the Acid Tests,” Garcia said, as what started as a weekly hangout quickly evolved into culture-shaking moments.
But Garcia would attest to the fact that Kesey’s acid tests weren’t just parties; they were genuine experiments, and the band, who were then still called The Warlocks, was a key part of it. “We just set up the equipment. Everybody got high. And stuff would happen. Now Kesey and his Pranksters have been doing this for a long time, so they had instruments, and they played weird music,” he said.
However, they were the first experiment merging acid with classic rock and roll. Before, it had all been more psychedelic until Garcia and his crowd “played for about five minutes, but it completely devastated everyone.”
Fascinated by the reaction as a new insight into the drug, Kesey wanted to know more. Garcia said, “They begged us to come back to the next one. And that’s how it happened essentially,” marking the start of their obsession with acid and the start of their evolution into the Grateful Dead from a low-stakes small-town dive bar band.
But even more than that, the acid tests seemed to unlock a whole new world for the band. “When we fell in with the acid tests, we started having the most fun we’d ever had,” Garcia said, introducing them to Kesey, his trippy pack of pranksters and the various other countercultural icons that spiralled around him, who would all become friends.
