The blurry experience of the Grateful Dead’s first-ever Acid Test
If there were ever a band near impossible to pigeonhole into one specific genre, it would be the Grateful Dead. Much of their act relied on improvisation, and they were always bold in completely merging genres into whichever way they saw fit. A considerable contribution towards the ongoing freedom the band had creatively will no doubt be the Acid Tests.
The Acid Test is a simple enough concept. Like-minded people would get together, take a lot of LSD, and enjoy what they referred to as “permissive bedlam”. This meant utterly untethered displays of music and visuals. However, adequately constructed music was never part of the plan for the first Acid Test, and the band never even played.
Grateful Dead have always been a band keen on listeners opening their minds, and that’s precisely what happened at the Acid Test. Ken Kasey and the Merry Pranksters organised them, and the Grateful Dead (who at the time were called The Warlocks) rocked up to see what it was like. They didn’t bring any instruments but soon would become the house band for the Tests. These shows were a massive part of the band’s trajectory, allowing them to explore their creative side more and become the improvisational masters we now know them as.
“We were at the first Test not to play, but just to feel it out,” recalled Phil Lesh in his memoir Searching For The Sound: My Life With The Grateful Dead, “We hadn’t brought any instruments or gear.” Music was eventually made on that night, but the whole thing is a bit of a blur, and any recordings have been lost in the time that has passed since their conception.
Ken Babbs, a Merry Prankster at the time and host of the party, recalls the event well. “I remember the band,” he says, “the guys who later became the Grateful Dead, showing up and playing on our instruments… and us playing on our instruments and [Neal] Cassady being there and [Allen] Ginsberg and Bob Stone and being up all night lying on the floor with microphones rapping stuff into tape machines until dawn.”
During an interview about the band’s early days, when they were still The Warlocks, when asked what the music sounded like, Jerry Garcia said it “sounded like hell,” continuing, he added: “It sounded awful for the first few gigs.” This tends to be the case with most bands just starting out, and what is essential is perseverance and finding a comfortable environment to discover their sound.
That first Acid Test might be a blurry night, one of laying on the floor and rapping poorly into cassettes, but access to them gave the Grateful Dead the ability to further home the kind of music they wanted to make. In that sense, despite the blurriness of the first Test, it would give the band the ability to see things clearer than ever in the long run.
