In the early 1960s, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Robert
Hunter were playing in a number of folk, rock and country bands. One of them, Mother McCree's Uptown
Jug Champions" also included Pigpen McKernan. In 1965, Mother McCree's changed
its name to The Warlocks. As fate would have it, there was another band in the
Bay Area with the same name, not to mention a little band back east that would
become The Velvet Underground (having used the Warlocks name before becoming The Falling Spikes).
At the end of '65, The Warlocks rechristened themselves The Grateful Dead. Garcia,
sitting in the front room with Phil Lesh at 710 Asbury, the band’s home base,
randomly opened a dictionary (precisely, Funk
and Wagnall's New Practical Standard Dictionary, Britannica World Language
Edition) and put his finger on the entry "Grateful Dead": "a dead person, or
his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged
their burial."
Garcia said, "I opened it up and the first thing I saw was 'The
Grateful Dead.' It said that on the page and it was so astonishing. It was
truly weird, a truly weird moment. I didn't like it really, I just found it to
be really powerful." Everyone recognized that power. As band associates Bobby
Petersen and Alan Trist later wrote, the name "struck a chord of mythic
resonance, with a contemporary ring, echoes in the past and ripples in the
future." Phil Lesh remembered that "it hit me like a hammer –
it seemed to describe us so perfectly. I started jumping up and down, shouting, 'That's it! That's it!" Kreutzmann and Weir were more skeptical, but Garcia and
Lesh's relentless enthusiasm banished any qualms, and in December, the Grateful
Dead made their formal debut at a house on
South 5th Street in San Jose. It was a quick walk from the San Jose Civic
Auditorium, where the Rolling Stones were playing, and flyers were passed out
afterward inviting attendees to an Acid Test where the Grateful Dead would play. Specific accounts of the
raucous shindig are, not surprisingly, blurry, but some versions have several of The Stones attending.
Earlier that Fall, bankrolled by LSD kingpin Owsley
Stanley, the Grateful Dead and their extended families moved into their communal
house at 710a Ashbury Street, becoming a fixture on the local music scene and
building a large fan base on the strength of their many free concerts. Across
the street at 715 was the headquarters of the San Francisco Hell's
Angels chapter. Like nearly every San Francisco street, Ashbury is on a hill. Garcia
said, "I heard that Ken Kesey was
driving down it one day and his brakes gave out and he had to make a quick
decision: he could crash into the Grateful Dead house, or he could crash into
the Hell's Angels house. He chose the Hell's Angels. Wise choice from our
perspective, but perhaps questionable from any other." Interestingly, before it became the Hell's Angel’s house, Sue
Swanson and Ron Rakow, both Grateful Dead employees, lived there. So
did Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, the famous psychedelic poster artists.
On October 2, 1967, narcotics
agents raided 710 Ashbury Street with a dozen reporters and television crews
tagging along. Pigpen, Bob Weir and nine others were arrested for possession of
marijuana. Charges were later dropped, but the case got national attention when
it was covered in the first issue of Rolling
Stone. With the increasing commercialization of the Haight during 1967 (In
October ’67 the “Diggers” declared
the death of the hippie with a mock funeral), the Grateful Dead decided to leave 710, vacating the house in March 1968.
