Quote:
Ken Babbs with a trombone and furry friend with the Merry Prankster bus “Furthur.”
(Via Ken Babbs)

CITY LIFE

Pranksters, LSD and the Dead: Ken Babbs was there at Santa Cruz County’s most famous (or infamous) party

BY WALLACE BAINE
Source:  Lookout Santa Cruz 

Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and the crew immortalized in “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test,” not to mention the band that became the Grateful Dead, got the party started at Ken Babbs’ Soquel digs. And it’s all in Babbs’ new book, which he’ll discuss in an upcoming Bookshop Santa Cruz event.

JAN 27, 2022

Surely, there have been more than a few epic parties that have gone down in Santa Cruz County over the years.

The wild, illicit, molly-addled ragers and the boozy, depraved, all-night bingefests, as well as the smart, performance-art, “Eyes Wide Shut” freak shows where great art, ideas, relationships, and even a few babies were conceived — that catalogue of carousing is likely to never be written. Those who will talk about those parties can’t remember them, and those who remember won’t talk.
But at least one party has lived on in legend for more than 50 years, and is likely to be remembered for 50 more years, or even longer.

That was the one that included the guy who wrote the novel on which Jack Nicholson’s greatest movie was based, several musicians who later would come together under the name the Grateful Dead, the most famous poet of his era, and copious amounts of pharmaceutical-grade, laboratory-pure LSD, which at the time was every bit as legal to use and consume as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

That party, and others like it that followed, was immortalized in the hippy-trippy Tom Wolfe book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” first published in 1968. In the annals of the 1960s counterculture, the “Acid Tests” were a series of parties thrown by novelist Ken Kesey (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and his ragtag, eccentric group of friends known as the Merry Pranksters. Before LSD was declared illegal in 1966, Kesey and the Pranksters put together a series of events designed to enhance the psychedelic effects of LSD, or acid.
And the first one, in the fall of 1965, happened just a few miles from Santa Cruz, in Soquel. Ken Babbs was not only there. He was the party’s host.

Babbs, 86, was a central figure in the Merry Pranksters. Indeed, he could be characterized as Kesey’s lieutenant. He will be part of an online event Feb. 9sponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz to promote his new book “Cronies, a Burlesque: Adventures with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead” (Tsunami Press).

Ken Babbs tells his side of the Merry Prankster story in “Cronies.”
(Via Ken Babbs)

The Pranksters’ center of gravity was at Kesey’s place in La Honda, 45 miles to the north of Santa Cruz in San Mateo County, on the thumb’s knuckle of the Peninsula. Babbs, at the time, was living on what Wolfe’s book called a “run-down chicken farm” in Soquel known as “The Spread.” In “Electric,” Wolfe, avatar of a style then called “New Journalism,” described The Spread in less-than-glowing terms: “There were fat brown dogs and broken vehicles and rusted machines and rotting troughs and recapped tires and a little old farmhouse with linoleum floors and the kind of old greasy easy chairs that upholstery flies hover over in nappy clouds and move off about three-quarters of an inch when you wave your hand at them.”
In a phone interview from his home in Oregon, Babbs said there was no plan for that particular party in Soquel to become the first of a historic series of counterculture happenings, though ultimately that’s exactly what happened.

“It was actually just a Halloween party I was putting on,” he said. The owners of the Hip Pocket bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz, in roughly the same footprint where Bookshop Santa Cruz is today, were Merry Pranksters themselves. It was in the window of the Hip Pocket where a handwritten sign proclaiming “Can you pass the Acid Test?” advertised the party at the Babbs place. Among those who attended was Kesey, Babbs, poet Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac muse and literary cult figure Neal Cassady, newspaper reporter Lee Quarnstrom, and a group of San Francisco musicians calling themselves the Warlocks.

“I don’t know how they heard about it,” said Babbs of the band that would soon become the Grateful Dead. The Pranksters themselves were musicians, he said, and they had their instruments set up in Babbs’ living room.

“We were out in the yard,” said Babbs of his first encounter with the Warlocks, “we’re communing with the moon, holding hands, and levitating off the ground. And then we hear this music. We realized it was coming from the house, and we went in and these guys were all playing our instruments. They ended up playing all night.”

In his new book, “Cronies,” Babbs writes of that night: “We sprawled on the floor, held microphones, rapped long nonsensical poetic free jazz wordplay that morphed into deep religioso, talking about meeting on the other side—whether we believed in it or not.”
Today, there is a bus stop on Soquel Drive near where the party happened that tells its history in appropriately psychedelic graphics. Babbs was among the surviving Pranksters who attended the bus stop’s dedication in 2015.

A second party followed in San Jose, but it was still not widely known as an Acid Test. That name and the notorious LSD-laced barrels of Kool-Aid served at the parties all came later. The “Acid Test” tour reached a fever pitched with the three-day Trips Festival in San Francisco a few months later and then moved into Southern California with the Pranksters making the trip in a day-glo colored school bus called “Furthur.”
Kesey died in 2001, but Babbs today lives near where Kesey grew up outside Eugene, Oregon. Kesey’s widow and adult children still live nearby, as does another famous Merry Prankster, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia.
Babbs said his wife was a local high school teacher who taught Kesey’s novels in her classes. Every year, for almost 20 years, Babbs would visit the classes to tell the stories of those years at Kesey’s side.

“I would make some notes before I went in to those classes,” said Babbs, “just to remind myself what I was going to talk about. So, about a year and a half ago, I started looking back through those notes and I thought, ‘By golly, this would be a good book.’”

Ken Babbs.
(Via Ken Babbs)

He didn’t want to write fiction and he was uncomfortable with the idea of a memoir, so he uncovered a literary form called “burlesque,” popularized 200 years ago by Washington Irving. Burlesque, as Babbs sees it, exists somewhere in the no man’s land between fiction and nonfiction. It’s in the service of the story, where strict adherence to the facts isn’t nearly as important as delivering a satisfying story. (Indeed, Babbs claims that the Santa Cruz party was a Halloween party, but historical consensus puts it in late November, almost a month later. Then again, maybe every Prankster party was a Halloween party, regardless of what the calendar said.)
“It’s like what Kesey said, and I put it in the front of the book: ‘We don’t need facts; We need stories.’ And that’s what I am, a storyteller.”

Tom Wolfe’s book itself fudged the lines between fiction and nonfiction, and later in his career Wolfe moved freely from nonfiction reportage like “The Right Stuff” to novels such as “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

As for that first Acid Test in Soquel among the “fat brown dogs and broken vehicles,” it might have been a widely documented party, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we know much about what actually happened there. By Babbs’ account, the party was rather light on the depravity, unless you count the ingestion of not-yet-illegal psychedelic drugs. Babbs said he and his illustrious guests chilled and talked on weighty spiritual subjects until dawn. The culmination was when someone asked Allen Ginsberg about what awaits us on the “other side” (Ginsberg himself embarked to the other side in 1997):

Allen didn’t hesitate. “There was a chicken on the side of the road who saw another chicken on the other side. ‘How do I get to the other side?’ he yelled. The other chicken yelled back, ‘You are on the other side.’” He smiled benignly. 

Yep, sounds exactly like a Santa Cruz party.
Ken Babbs will be on hand for a virtual event celebrating the release of his book “Cronies, a Burlesque.” Things get started at 6 p.m. It’s free, but requires registration. 

Quote:APRIL 8, 2022 2:30PM ET
The Long, Strange Trip Is Over: Dead and Company Will Stop Touring After 2022
Dead and Company announced their 2022 summer tour at the end of March, and ticket sales for the shows went live Friday morning
[i]By[/i] 
ETHAN MILLMAN 





Dead & Company
Danny Clinch*
2022 will be the last year Dead and Company tours together, sources confirm to [i]Rolling Stone. [/i]
Dead and Company started in 2015 with three of the original “core four” Grateful Dead members, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann (bassist Phil Lesh didn’t join), alongside John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti. The group has been one of the most consistent live acts in the music industry ever since, playing each year from 2015 until the pandemic struck in 2020 before returning once again for another tour last summer.
Mayer’s love for the Grateful Dead went back several years before he joined Dead and Company, telling [i]Rolling Stone [/i]in 2013: “This free expressive sort of spirit — I listen and I want to find a mix of that openness. I kind of want to go to [a show like a Dead] show, if it still existed,” Mayer said at the time. “But I wish that there were tunes that I was more familiar with. I wish that I could be the singer. I wish I could have harmonies.” Two years later, the band formed with him standing in for the legendary Jerry Garcia.
While Deadheads have often speculated how many more tours the band would embark on, rumors had been circling among fans recently that this tour would be the last. The band’s management declined to comment on the end of live touring.
Dead and Company’s most recent tour last fall had some shakeups as Kreutzmann missed several dates over non-Covid-related health concerns. At the start of 2021, he had to pull out of the later-canceled Playing in the Sand shows in Mexico citing health concerns related to his heart.
Dead and Company announced their 2022 summer tour at the end of March, and ticket sales for the shows went live Friday morning. The band will kick off their final tour on June 11 at Dodger Stadium, and their final show will be about a month later at Citi Field in New York on July 16th. Tickets for the shows are available on the band’s website.

Quote:Minyvonne Burke
Tue, April 19, 2022, 10:18 AM



The mummified body found in the wall of the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, California, was identified as a 42-year-old man who vanished nearly two years ago, the coroner's office said Tuesday.
The body was found in March by a construction crew doing remodeling work at the historic downtown building. A worker noticed what appeared to be a human body in a wall that was being deconstructed, according to Lt. Ray Kelly of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office.

Kelly said the conditions in the walls helped preserve the body, identified by the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau as Joseph Edward Mejica. A cause of death is pending.
Authorities previously said they believed the death was accidental and that the person died toward the top of the wall.
"Over time his body slowly decayed and slipped toward the bottom of the cavity space," Lt. Frederick Shavies said in a March news conference. "No obvious trauma was observed to the victim's skeletal remains. No obvious or unnatural trauma was found indicating foul play. Based on the positionality the victim's body was found in, this tragic death is most likely an accidental death."
Mejica was reported missing in August 2020, the coroner's office said. In a 2020 Facebook post, the Oakland Police Department said Mejica was known to visit homeless encampments in the city. His family had offered a $5,000 reward for information.

(03-10-2022, 04:57 PM)Drunk Monk Wrote:

Quote:9 MARCH 2022/SF NEWS/JAY BARMANN


Ack! Mummified Body Found Inside Wall of Old Oakland Convention Center

Construction workers tearing down walls at the long defunct Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland made a gruesome discovery Wednesday: a mummified corpse of indeterminate age or sex.
We're likely going to be hearing a lot about this story in the next few days, as surprise corpses that no one can identify tend to make for good headlines and TV news segments. 
The mummified remains could date back decades, or at least since walls were last moved around inside. As KPIX reports, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed the presence of the human remains, and the county coroner was on the scene Thursday evening. 
Sgt. Ray Kelly, the spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, told the Chronicle that the body was likely in there "for many years," and that it had been partially "preserved" inside the wall. Going further with his explanation, Kelly said, "Under ideal conditions a body will harden and become like leather, similar to a mummy."
The construction workers who found the body are with Orton Development, Inc. Orton has plans to rehabilitate and reuse the old convention center as a performance venue, and will be leasing it back from the city — the City of Oakland entered into an exclusive agreement with Orton going back to 2015, and this project was supposed to get underway in 2020.
The building, which sits next to Lake Merritt, was built in 1914, but it closed as an event space back in 2005.
As Wikipedia notes, the building was used as a makeshift hospital during the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. The space was home to the Roller Derby throughout the 1950s and 60s, and on December 28, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there to an audience of 7,000 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was also a regular venue for the Grateful Dead from the late 1960s to the 1980s.

Went to many a Dead show here (with some of you even) and worked this venue for years. I have many fond memories.

I am NOT surprised.

Quote:CT man working to build full-scale replica of Grateful Dead's 'Wall of Sound'
[/url]
Andrew DaRosa
May 5, 2022Updated: May 5, 2022 6 p.m.
[url=https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ctinsider.com%2Fentertainment%2Farticle%2FGrateful-Dead-Wall-of-Sound-Connecticut-17147223.php%3Futm_campaign%3DCMS%2520Sharing%2520Tools%2520(Premium)%26utm_source%3Dt.co%26utm_medium%3Dreferral&text=CT%20man%20working%20to%20build%20full-scale%20replica%20of%20Grateful%20Dead%27s%20%27Wall%20of%20Sound%27&via=insider_ct]

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[img=0x0]https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/25/45/77/22437879/3/1200x0.jpg[/img]1of5
Coscia's version of the "Wall of Sound" set up at Garcia's at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY. 
Contributed by Anthony Coscia[img=0x0]https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/25/45/77/22437878/3/1200x0.jpg[/img]

In 1974, the Grateful Dead, the stalwarts of the counterculture music scene, unveiled to the world its latest creation —  a three-story PA system that would pioneer the advancement of modern concert sound amplification.
Originally tested out in 1973, it wasn’t until the following year that the “Wall of Sound” made its official touring debut at the Cow Palace in Daly City, Calif.
The rig, which at its height included 600 individual speakers and took a whole day to build, would see a quick retirement by the end of the year as the associated costs to maintain the “Wall” made it virtually impossible to keep on the road, according to Vice.  
“I don’t think that it necessarily ever crossed their minds that it might nearly bankrupt them, which it did. I don’t think they gave much thought to how much gas prices were in 1973 and 74,” said Anthony Coscia. “They just kept going until it naturally burned out."
Almost 50 years later, Coscia, a Southbury resident and Deadhead who saw the band a number of times between 1988 and 1994, is on a mission to slowly build a fully functional, full-size replica of the “Wall of Sound” — one model at a time.
“To me, the ‘Wall of Sound’ was essentially the ethos of the Grateful Dead. It was the physical representation of the metaphysical Dead,” Coscia said. “When they did something, they did it because it was a direction that they just wanted to explore to produce the best product or explore new boundaries.” 
Coscia started his original model in early 2021, which was a small-scope version of the “Wall.” That version was essentially “a two-channel stereo” that Coscia said was more like “a toy” in which “no speaker cost more than $1.”
However, the little model, which became known as the “Le Petit Mur De Son” (which translates roughly to “The Little Sound Wall”), quickly drew national attention, getting coverage in the Wall Street Journal and InsideHook.
Coscia, a luthier who specializes who specializes in making guitars and guitar cabinets in the vein of the Grateful Dead’s instruments, expected that fellow gear-focused Deadheads would cling to the build, but what surprised him was the thousands of fans that went to follow his builds on social media.  
“I didn’t have any doubts that the community would embrace the project but I think I misinterpreted how big the community is,” Coscia said. “[Some people] probably weren't even born at the time that the ‘Wall’ was being used.” 

The Grateful Dead (L to R: Bill Kreutzmann, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh) perform on May 25, 1974 at Santa Barbara Stadium in Santa Barbara, California with an early version of their Wall of Sound. 
Ed Perlstein/Redferns
After the success of the first model, Coscia went on to build the fully-functional quarter-build last summer; three of which are currently in existence. One model was sold to a private individual, one model remains with Coscia and the last one that was given to Headcount, an organization that promotes voting registration, and fundraised $100,000, Coscia said. 
Last October, one of the quarter-builds was set up at Garcia’s at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y. during a run of shows by Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. 
Deadheads looking to experience Coscia’s “Wall of Sound” in person will have the ability to on May 21 when local jam band supergroup Z3 perform its Zappa Meets The Dead show at the Bijou in Bridgeport. 
Building the “Wall of Sound”
Coscia’s next phase for the “Wall of Sound'' is a half-build of the original version. Coscia said that he is a “fair ways into the half-scale wall,” which is expected to measure 17 feet in height and 35 feet in width.
He said that he is currently putting in upwards of six hours of work a day outside of his job in order to complete a half-scale version of the “Wall of Sound.” When completed, the half-scale version will be 100 percent functional and will feature 24 input and 11 output channels, ensuring that “every musician will have their own dedicated speakers for themselves.”
The half-build is expected to cost roughly $100,000, according to Coscia, which he says is being funded through private events and fundraising concerts, his own self-funding and donations made through his GoFundMe.
Coscia said the more that he can crowdfund for the project, the less it will cost for venues to have it. Ideally, Coscia said the intent of the half-scale version is to move it around for monthly increments to music venues across the country in order to give “large acts, regional acts and give local musicians an opportunity to try playing through it.”
[img=840x0]https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/25/45/77/22437877/3/1200x0.jpg[/img]
Building is in progress for the half-scale version of the "Wall of Sound."
Contributed by Anthony Coscia
Additionally, Coscia hopes that the half-build will only further “prove the concept that doing a full-scale wall in a museum or venue would be ideal.”
This “community project,” as Coscia calls it, harkens back to the “ethos” of the Grateful Dead. For Coscia, that ethos was best exemplified in the Dead’s determination to experiment in order to progress the sound and longevity of the band.
“Sometimes it’s going to work. Sometimes it’s not. But when it does work, it’s perfect,” Coscia said. “It’s a great way to live your life.”
Rocking for charity
In the spirit of giving back to the music community, Coscia's "Wall of Sound" will be used and on display at the Bijou at the end of the month for Z3's performance.
The group is composed of guitarist Tim Palmieri (Lotus, The Breakfast), drummer Bill Carbone (Max Creek, Melvin Sparks) and keyboardist Beau Sasser (Kung Fu). The band will be playing a variety of Frank Zappa songs through the quarter-build version of the “Wall of Sound.”
[img=840x0]https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/25/46/67/22441421/3/1200x0.jpg[/img]
Z3 during rehearsals with Anthony Coscia's "Wall of Sound."
Contributed by Jessica Pollison/BCS Interactive
The concert will also double as a charitable event, with 100 percent of proceeds going to music education in Connecticut. The two beneficiaries of the concert are SpreadMusicNow, a Redding-based organization that funds music education and promotes the development of careers for budding musicians, and TeachRock, an organization launched by Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band multi-instrumentalist and ‘The Sopranos’ actor Stevie Van Zandt, that offers free teaching curriculum for classrooms looking to incorporate the arts into other disciplines. 
Carbone, who serves as the Executive Director of TeachRock, said that proceeds from the concert will go directly to “art-integration curriculum” in Connecticut classrooms. Carbone said that TeachRock has partnered with the state’s Department of Education and is currently working through a pilot with 15 districts that aims to work directly with teachers in order to find areas where art can help educators better teach their material. 
“When I was a kid, there was the attitude of ‘learn this and someday, you’re going to use it.’ Now, kids have the internet in their pocket,” Carbone said. “Why should they listen to us? Wouldn’t they have an answer in their pocket?”
Some of that material includes using Beyonce’s social media metrics to understand graphing and ratios in algebra and even building an operational speaker that replicates the sound technology of the “Wall of Sound.” Currently, there are more than 300 free lesson plans that teachers can access online for their classrooms. 
As for the “Wall of Sound,” Carbone said he was excited when he found out about Coscia’s project. “I love the Dead. I grew up on that music,” Carbone said. “Immediately I was like ‘I have to meet this guy.’”
Carbone said that the band has already had a practice run with the quarter-build ahead of the Bijou concert, which the drummer said sounded like he was “swimming in the sound.”
However, there is a deeper meaning to the “Wall of Sound” for Carbone.
For Carbone, pioneering the “Wall of Sound” was the Grateful Dead exemplifying “the pursuit of a moment and the idea that everyday is a new day.” On a scientific level, the work that went into making the “Wall of Sound” a revolutionary pioneer in modern concert sound design shows that science is “something you don’t need a lab coat on to do.”