side note: saw this a few days ago. who doesn’t love the dead! my favorite Jerry quote that Mickey brings up is, “That’s what we’re playing with. We’re playing with magic, music magic.”

With the Core Four of the Grateful Dead split up at this moment, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, took to the road with the latest incarnation of the Rhythm Devils. As has been custom for each of Hart’s non-GD musical excursions the lineup this time around varies the previous Devils’ roster. Besides Hart and Kreutzmann, they are joined by Mickey’s longtime drumming collaborator Sikiru Adepoju plus guitarist Davy Knowles and bassist Andy Hess. Living out a Deadhead dream, Keller Williams received his horns and joined the outfit during its first leg. The Mother Hips Tim Bluhm joins them for the second leg, which begins on Aug. 21 at the Hoxeyville Festival.

Speaking from his home during a break between tour schedules, Hart, as usual, is ebullient in tackling subjects that range from why the Dead aren’t touring to the current Devils lineup, the neurological element of the concert experience for artist and audience and the Jerry Garcia Tribute Night at the San Francisco Giants game which took place two days prior to our conversation.

JPG: Catching up on recent events, at the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark, At&T Park…

MH: We set the world’s record kazoo ensemble. It went great! It was good vibes all around. Giants won. And Rex Foundation made a lot of money. Now, we’re about to give it away and Jerry is smiling. He lost weight in heaven. They had the bobblehead Jerry dolls. He was thin. He must be working out in heaven.

JPG: Well, It’s heaven. The food doesn’t have calories.

MH: I guess not. I guess they don’t have the calories in heaven. Milkshakes and hamburgers either.

JPG: That’s why they call it ‘heaven’.

MH: I hope they treat me that good. (laughs)

JPG: Just curious. Why kazoos and not some sort of drum ensemble or rhythmic handclaps with the crowd?

MH: It’s not about the kazoos. It’s about “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” It’s really hard to drum “Take Me Out the the Ballgame.” It’s a waltz. Rhythmically it’s challenged, but it’s the anthem, and it’s doable. Kazoos cost pennies compared to drums, and 9,000 kazoos… It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It’s really hard to say. It was just a thought I had. And I thought Jerry would like the oddness, the weirdness, of doing kazoos. It just came to me in a moment. And then going for the Guinness record seemed like the right thing to do. I can’t really explain it more than that but he’s smiling.

JPG: Does it amaze that 15 years have passed quickly?

MH: It has actually. It seems like it doesn’t seem that long in some ways and in other ways it seems like forever. He’s always with me. When I think about him I can hear him. He’s with me. I can see him smile. I hear him all the time in my left ear, the ear he deafened.

JPG: I’ll get to Rhythm Devils in a moment but you reminded me of something. I was watching the Bruce Springsteen DVD and noticed how Max Weinberg maintained a laser like focus on Springsteen for 99.9% of the show. For you with so much happening onstage, your focus when you were playing with Jerry was it mainly on him or was your antenna moving to other places?

MH: The bands are very different. That’s Springsteen’s band and they’re playing Springsteen’s songs the way he wants to play ‘em. In the Grateful Dead it was more of a conversation, the way I see it. So, I listened as much to Bill and Phil as I did to Jerry. It was really important, first of all, to lock the rhythm in down tight. Phil was my first priority. Then there was Jerry and Bill, and Bobby’s in there in the middle. I try to listen to everybody. It’s really important. You can have a real intelligent conversation, something that’s interesting.

I don’t know if those guys jam very much. It’s a different kind of music. We’re more interactive, they’re playing the song. They play ‘em well. It’s not a jamband. You can get away with that and focus on the leader and locking up with the guy who’s writing the songs. I would assume he’s doing the right thing. Max is an excellent drummer and he knows his focus. Perhaps, if I was in a band like that I would be totally focused on Springsteen as well. It doesn’t serve us really well to do that because that’s an isolationist kind of a view, musically speaking. It isolates you from the conversation and everybody else’s thing if you’re totally focused on one person. Then, it’s just you two guys, and there’s the rhythm and there’s the lead and everybody else is tracking that. That is one way to do but it’s not our way.

We’re listening all the time and focused totally on the whole group. It’s all about the group if you don’t get a group sound then you’re just playing the song, and that’s fine. But it’s built for different things.

JPG: You mentioned Phil and Bobby, and it makes me want to cover this before we get to Rhythm Devils, the fun stuff. Did you expect to by touring this summer as part of the Dead and…?

MH: No, we didn’t have any expectations at all.

JPG: I guess after Spring Tour went so well, fans may have been thinking that something next would happen.

MH: Yeah. We just said we were going to do it when we did it. That’s all. Bill and I really want to do this. We have things to say and places to go that we wanted to do alone.

JPG: So, it wasn’t some phone call where you said, ‘What?!? You’re doing what?!?!?!’

MH: No, no, I wish them well and I feel that they wish us well. I just saw Bob, and we had a great time the other night.

JPG: I recently read some comments that Bob made in regards to Furthur moving forward musically and that such a thing couldn’t happen with the Dead due in part to expectations that come up when the four of you play together.

MH: I didn’t read anything. I don’t know anything about any of that. Expectations, I don’t understand.

JPG: Well, there’s a degree of expectations when you’re performing as the Dead as far as comparisons to the Grateful Dead whereas playing in Rhythm Devils some of that baggage isn’t there.

MH: They come to hear Grateful Dead music and they come to hear adventure and exploration and a fresh take on it. Expectations you only want to play into that so much because you want to grow and this is not the Dead. Their band is not the Dead either. These are both works in progress, different takes on the same music. But we also have a Rhythm Devils side which is we have our own songs, new songs by Robert Hunter. We’re stretching it. We’re taking it out there a little bit from where it was in The Dead. There were expectations in The Dead, yeah, if that’s what you mean. But, in this band there are certain expectations because you want to give people something that they’re familiar with and we love the songs. We think that we can really do the songs justice and really play ‘em the way that we think they should be played or else we wouldn’t be playing them. And then we work really hard on the Rhythm Devils songs, which are new and inventive, electronic, cutting edge stuff and having a great time at it. Smiling our way through it.

Bill and I are playing better than we’ve ever played before. I really mean it. We’re locked tight. Solid. Expectations, yes? But, there’s a bright future for the music that we’re making now.

JPG: Besides you and Bill, there’s Sikiru from previous Rhythm Devils lineups. How did you come up with the other musicians to bring into the current version?

MH: I asked for recommendations because we wanted to make a hot, snarling band. Then, I auditioned all of the on Youtube, talked to people and listened to what they played. Then, we put this band together. Bill and I just said, ‘Oh, Andy’s great. Let’s see if Andy wants to play. How about Keller? How about Davy Knowles or Tim Bluhm?’ We recruited all these guys, one-by-one. We just knew it was going to work, just clicked. As soon as we got in the room you could feel the energy. Bill and I would just really lock tight. It just worked. It was chemistry, right from beat one.

JPG: Now, Keller was with you on the first leg and you’re moving on…

MH: Right, he can’t make it. He’s got his own world. Time and Davy, wow, their vocal blend is beautiful. They get along well. They play like real devils. The devil’s in both of ‘em. That’s for sure. And Sikiru transfers some West Africa, that juju feeling. He’s just a love to play with, and, of course, he’s played with me in Global Drum and Planet Drum and he’s been with me for many years.

JPG: I see that you’re playing the first show on the second leg in a little over a week, so have you had rehearsals with Tim?

MH: Oh yeah, we had rehearsals a month ago with Tim and then we’re going to have some more in Chicago hit the trail again. It’s gonna be a well-rehearsed band. This is not like a thrown together thing. We’re on it. Just to reiterate that we put a lot of time into it.

Before that we sent mp3’s back and forth. So, everybody is totally on board and we have a lot of songs. We’re adding some more songs that I’ve been writing with Hunter. We’re going to have some big time fun in the second leg, especially because we now know the songs and expand.

And Keller did grr-eeat. Keller’s a delightful guy, a beautiful creative musician and we honor his Devil service. He’ll always be a Rhythm Devil and we’ll be meeting up with him, maybe Steve Kimock, maybe Mike Gordon, all the people who have been a part of the Rhythm Devils experience over the years. Once they have their horns they are always welcome.

JPG: I like that, “once they have their horns”…

MH: Yeah, I mean, these are good Devils. These are very happy, creative Devils. The Devil made me do it. Devildom.

JPG: This is the third Rhythm Devils lineup. Is there anything you seek with each one, whether it is continuity in some areas or differences you seek?

MH: There is a continuity. Bill and me and Sikiru are the core of it. Rhythmically speaking. It’s not the Guitar Devils. It’s not the Vocal Devils. It’s the Rhythm Devils stupid (laughs) As long as you got the rhythm, you got it. You got the songs. We’ve got all of our Grateful Dead songs and all of our Rhythm Devils songs, we work really hard on ‘em to make it a new and exciting experience. We’re not just playing the catalog.

JPG: I was listening to the Gathering of the Vibes show on archive.org prior to receiving your phone call. Let’s go through a few titles here I’m not as familiar with. There’s “Strange World…”

MH: I wrote that with Warren. I wrote the words and Warren Haynes and I wrote the music.

JPG: “Wrecking Crew”

MH: I wrote that. Hunter wrote the words, I wrote the music.

JPG: “This One Hour”

MH: I wrote the music, Hunter wrote the words. I’m doing good so far.

JPG: “Comes the Dawn.”

MH: Hunter wrote the words and I wrote the music.

JPG: “Voodoo Zombies” and “See You Again”

MH: Me and Kimock, I think, wrote that one. And Hunter wrote the words.

JPG: Since his name keeps cropping up. The new material written by Robert Hunter. Tell me about the writing process with him because one usually thinks of a songwriting team of, for example, a lyricist and a guitarist or keyboardist. Do you play other instruments?

MH: I play bass. I compose mostly on bass or on a keyboard.

JPG: With these newer songs, how did it come about?

MH: How it happened was I sent him music, that’s one way to do it. Sometimes he’ll send me a lyric that he thinks I should use. But most of the time I send him a few songs, sometimes one song, and then I just wait by the computer for the songs to pop up. There was a time when he sent one back in an hour. Other times it’s days or weeks. But he’ll always respond. Then we talk on the phone and so forth. We’re friends. That’s usually the way it happens. But there are also time when he’ll have a lyric and he’ll just think it’s for me. I think that happened with “Wrecking Crew.” I don’t know if I sent him the music first. “Wrecking Crew” is really one of my favorites. We have a lot of new material we’re trying out. We’re working on the Dead material as well. We love it and we want to play it and we know the fans come for a good shot of the Dead.

JPG: As far as adapting the material for each lineup. You can take one particular Dead song, how does it work itself out with the new players?

MH: Bill and I just picked out the songs we wanted to play and we gave ‘em to different people who wanted to sing those songs, whether it be Keller or Davy. They made their preferences known and then we evened it out. They came into rehearsal knowing the song. That’s the best way.

JPG: Does it become some amorphous being where you just feel that it works right away in rehearsal and then it morphs into something else when it’s played live?

MH: That’s right. Then it grows and matures in performance, just like the Dead. That’s how the songs really become songs, they become personalized. The song is the song, anybody can play the song. To get at the essence of it, to own the song that takes time playing it and finding things that make it peculiarly your own and make it very personal. And that’s what Bill and I like and we do. And that’s what these folks have the ability to do as well. So, that’s what we expect and that’s what happened.

JPG: You were brought up performing in concert and that reminds me of something I read where you brought up the idea of “entrainment” (synchronizing the rhythms of two separate entities). I think you were getting towards the idea of the concert experience and how a sense of entrainment between performer and audience.

MH: there are a lot of different kinds of entrainment. There’s visual, there’s sonic. There’s entrainment with the people you’re playing with onstage, to be able to be in sync with that. And then there’s the connection or entrainment that you have with the audience. Once you have yourself together on the stage and you’ve created an intimate musical moment, then you can give it away. If you don’t have it you can’t give it to anybody. The idea is to get it onstage, make yourself feel good, and get the feeling. Once you get the feeling then the audience catches on and then you play with the audience. You become one big throbbing organism. And when that happens, you’re there.

JPG: How does that link to Trance?

MH: Redundancy is the basis of trance. A certain kind of redundancy where the mind, the ear relaxes and it’s able to go with the groove. And then you start moving into altered states. That’s what trance is all about. It’s about transforming the consciousness using in this case a social and sonic element. So, the sonic mode is really important. Once you get that feeling, and the mind and the ear relaxes you can start moving into different stages of trance or ecstasy. If it’s a quiet zone you’re moving into another kind of trance, the quiet side. What we do is more like auditory driving, like driving the whole nervous system and once that’s all pulsing then the body entrains with itself and its mind. It’s a neurological function, basically. You’re stimulating the synapses that fire and move you in and out of these consciousnesses. And that’s what trance is all about. It’s not something that we invented but when you go in and out of it as a musician you really can feel it. Also, when people have experienced that in concerts, they understand when they’re moving in and out of these very precious moments.

JPG: I’ve lost count but I think this is the fifth time I’ve interviewed you over the years. And through all those times it always seems as if you have developed a strong balance between the two sides of your brain, bringing creativity and analysis together. Would that be a good description of how you live your life?

MH: Yeah, it’s a balance. You have to be able to balance that spirit and make it come out in some way, but you can’t see spirit. You can’t really see emotion. It’s invisible, just like music, and you’ve got to translate that in another form. In this case it’s music. So, that’s really the right/left brain kind of thing. You have to be able to realize the stuff that’s invisible and be able to share it with somebody, not only yourself but those people out there. It all starts at home. If you’re not able to do this and be able to devote a lot of time to this…It doesn’t come easy. You’ve got to really focus to be able to play. You have to work to play (slight laugh), you know what I mean. It doesn’t come free. There’s always work to be done— skill, being able to relax at very important moments, intense moments perhaps, stay in shape physically and mentally and spiritually and be able to address the drum, your instrument whatever it is, in the most meaningful way. Every time you touch, it has to have meaning in your life. It’s a turning system. That’s what music is, and that’s what gives you the ability to move in and out of these states without getting hurt, without losing it. Remember, these are very delicate places. Now, you’re dealing with deep consciousness stuff. The music does that. And you’re able to navigate in those waters and then you have some real fun. I’ve been able to practice it for a long time, so I’m getting it now. (laughs)

It’s about all of those things. To live a healthy life you have to be in rhythm. To me it’s all about the rhythm, stupid. That’s what happens when I open up my laptop computer. “Morning Mickey! It’s the rhythm, stupid.” That sets me straight. So, I realize what priority is, get the good rhythm in life. Be happy. Be healthy. Do good things, good things will happen to you. Be nice to people when you can. And all those things help. Drum well. Take your music seriously, but not too seriously. Don’t take yourself too seriously. You’ve got to take it just right in order to be able to be on the edge.

Garcia always liked that. He called me an “edger.” He said, “You like the edge.” That’s one of the things that we had in common. As a matter of fact, that’s where I got the name for “Drumming at the Edge of Magic” [Hart’s second book]. He came up with it. We were riding in a limousine and I go, “Wow, what am I going to call this book?” At the time it was going to called…“The Art of Percussion” or something like that. He said, “No, no. You’re on the edge of magic, man. That’s where it is. You’re on the edge.” And I go, “Yeah, right. Exactly.” And he said, “That’s what we’re playing with. We’re playing with magic, music magic.” And he was right on. That’s how I look at these things. That’s how I play it. Looking for magic. Magic is the big payoff. You have to be playing the songs to do it. That’s where you start, and then, hopefully, it moves into those alchemical zones, what we call “magic,” things that you can’t explain that is happening that are just marvelous and mysterious.

JPG: That move beyond you.

MH: Yeah, it’s beyond you. It’s not exactly what it looks like. It’s something, perhaps, larger.

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Anyways…if you haven’t noticed, the corporate media has been beating the war drums lately when it comes to Iran. I know President Obama isn’t a dumb guy…..but after awhile, even the smartest folks could end up believing that if Iran gets a nuke, then the world as we know it will change forever! We have heard this before……and we’ll hear this again. Just remember, when you hear this mass display of yelling about the end of the world……they did this with Iraq, we heard it with North Korea…we heard it with Afghanistan…..just remember that the same people who own 95% of our media outlets also have a big financial stakes in the defense industry. War is very profitable for some folks….and those same folks couldn’t give a fuck about the people who are directly affected….these include the victims in the war zone, and the soldiers who have to leave their families in order to fight.

A few Target Corp. and Best Buy Co. institutional shareholders weighed in Thursday on the flap over the companies’ political donations in Minnesota, urging the boards of both retailers to increase their oversight of campaign contributions.

Walden Asset Management and Trillium Asset Management Corp., both of Boston, and Bethesda, Md.-based Calvert Asset Management Co. filed shareholder resolutions with both companies. Together, the three firms control less than 1 percent of each company’s outstanding shares — 1.1 million Target shares worth $57.5 million and 344,000 Best Buy shares worth $11.3 million — but they are moving the debate over the political giving to a new arena.

Target gave $150,000 and Best Buy $100,000 to a business-focused political fund helping a conservative Republican gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, triggering a national backlash from gay rights groups and liberals. The companies made the donations after a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling freed them to spend corporate funds on elections. The candidate, state legislator Tom Emmer, opposes gay marriage and other rights for same-sex couples.

“A good corporate political contribution policy should prevent the kind of debacle Target and Best Buy walked into,” said Trillium vice president Shelley Alpern. “We expect companies to evaluate candidates based upon the range of their positions – not simply one area – and assess whether they are in alignment with their core values. But these companies’ policies are clearly lacking that.”

The shareholders said the donations don’t mesh with corporate values that include workplace protections for gay employees and risk harming the companies’ brands. Walden senior vice president Tim Smith said such giving can have “a major negative impact on company reputations and business.”

The Target resolution urges the board to review the effect of future political contributions on the company’s public image, sales and profitability and to consider the cost of backing a candidate whose politics conflict with the company’s public stances.

Spokeswoman Amy Reilly said Minneapolis-based Target had nothing to add to previous statements on the matter, including an apology from Chief Executive Officer Gregg Steinhafel.

A spokeswoman for Richfield, Minn.-based Best Buy didn’t immediately respond to a message.

The three investment companies together submitted the resolution to Target, while Calvert and Trillium filed the Best Buy shareholder proposal. One of Trillium’s clients, the Portland, Ore.-based Equity Foundation, divested a small Target holding of 170 shares on Wednesday.

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Progressive action committee MoveOn.org has released a TV ad urging Americans to boycott Target, in its latest swipe against the company for spending money on the Minnesota Governor’s race.

“Target and other big corporations are trying to buy our elections,” the ad states.

The 30-second ad calls for viewers to boycott Target for donating over $150,000 to conservative Rep. Tom Emmer’s bid for Minnesota governor. The money was reportedly put toward this political advertisement supporting the anti-gay-rights candidate, made by business interest group Minnesota Forward.

“Target’s refusal to acknowledge its customers’ outrage at their attempt to buy elections is scandalous,” said Justin Ruben, Executive Director of MoveOn, in a statement. “Americans have spoken: we don’t want corporations meddling in our democracy. Corporate money in elections is nothing more than political bribery and we’re not going to stop targeting Target until they stop trying to buy our elections.”

Last week MoveOn fulfilled a threat to launch a full-scale campaign against Target. So far it has circulated a petition– which has gained over 260,000 signatures– and started a heated Facebook group urging followers not to shop at Target until the retailer stops donating to political campaigns.

The latest TV ad will run on national cable and Minnesota local channels for a week.
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Just think of the possibilities…Imagine H.G. Wells’ most celebrated vision—the time machine—as accessible as a Hertz Rent-a-Car. Where would you go? And when??

For the millions of rock fans who have seen the Grateful Dead perform live, that decision would be made with very little deliberation. Quicker than you could say “Casey Jones,” the controls would be set for the Fillmore West in San Francisco.

The year? 1967, since on any given night at Bill Graham’s storied Bay Area auditorium, there was the distinct likelihood of witnessing the hall’s three “house bands”—the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane, all sharing the same bill and presenting their new material to a small but fanatical audience.

As most music fans know, other San Francisco groups who eventually used the same Fillmore stage as their springboard to national prominence include The Doors, Santana, Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish and Big Brother and the Holding Company, which featured a transplanted Texas tornado of a blues singer named Janis Joplin. The combined notoriety that each of these acts achieved marked San Francisco as arguably the most fertile spawning ground for rock and roll of any city in the U.S.

Looking back from a 1988 vantage point, those Fillmore performances will never be forgotten by those lucky enough to have witnessed them; the fact that the passage of time has left them behind in another dimension (unfortunately H.G. was a novelist rather than an inventor) makes them seem magical.

But, for the Grateful Dead, it’s the other way around. Those are the magical times. Twenty-two years after the release of their debut album the Dead are more popular than ever. Their latest album, In The Dark, shocked everyone in the music business (and probably the band themselves) by becoming their largest-selling record ever. A long, strange trip? They couldn’t even have imagined how long or strange it would be.

In 1974, I was the music critic for the Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper. Being a regular writer for a major-city daily newspaper at the age of twenty-four was rewarding and gave a certain satisfaction to a young rock fan’s life. Getting paid to see and interview bands like the Grateful Dead, was, at times, so much fun, it almost seemed illegal. But someone had to do it, so…

Anyway, that summer of ’74 the Grateful Dead were booked for two nights at Philadelphia’s Civic Center. My job was to do a preview story in the Sunday Bulletin on the band. Their publicist approved an interview with Bob Weir (Jerry Garcia, I was informed, “wasn’t talking to the press”), and provided me with ticket to see a show in Providence, Rhode Island, a couple of weeks before Philadelphia, and off I went.

The interview with Bob Weir before the concert was terrific. Weir, as most people know, is a friendly, witty man and gave me more than I needed for the story.

The show that night, at the Providence Civic Center, was a five hour extravaganza, leaving everyone, band and audience alike, drained and exhausted but in a state of euphoria. A few minutes after the last encore, I noticed Jerry Garcia, wearing a dark green t-shirt, Wranglers and Acme boots, leaning against a wall backstage, winding down. I went over to say hello and asked him about a new (at the time) song from Mars Hotel they had closed the show with.

Spotting the tape-recorder I was carrying, he said “I’m not doing interviews this year,” in the same tone of voice he might use to order an after-dinner wine. “I hate all my records,” he added as an afterthought. “The Grateful Dead don’t make good records.”

Was he satisfied with the performance they had just given?

“If I was ever satisfied,” he added totally seriously, “I’d quit playing.”

Two years later, in a New York hotel room, on appropriately April Fool’s Day, 1976 (he has always appreciated a good joke), Jerry Garcia has agreed to an in-depth interview. Following two years of low Grateful Dead activity (which were filled with rumors of retirement), Garcia is in town with a solo band featuring John Kahn, Ron Tutt and Keith and Donna Godchaux. Being into gadgets, he inspects with interest, a new tape recorder I had just bought, and we begin…

I spoke with you briefly at the Providence Civic Center two years ago. You told me, “I’m not doing interviews this year,” and then you said, “I hate all my records. The Grateful Dead don’t make good records.

(Laughs) Yeah, that’s true.

You mean, that’s true that you said that or that’s true that they don’t?

Well, both of them are true. But it’s a matter of objectivity. It depends on which side of the coin you’re on. For example, if I buy somebody’s record—a Rolling Stones record or something—what I hear obviously is the finished record, the finished music and the whole thing that’s already happened. In other words, with a Grateful Dead record, part of what I’m dealing with is the dissonance between the original version, the original flash as a composer. When a song comes into my head, it comes with a complete sound to it, a complete arrangement, a complete format and a complete thing more often than not, which represents my relationship to a personal vision. So, for me, comparing the record to the vision, I always feel that it fails.

That doesn’t discourage you to the point of not wanting to make records?

It could. But it doesn’t, because there’s enough to making records or making music that there are enough other ways to get off. So I’m not that hung up on the relationship to the vision except that it produces sort of a feeling of disappointment. You want it to work a certain way and sometimes it doesn’t work as well as you want it to. Like I had a whole long thing I was working on as far as Blues For Allah was concerned that was a technical trip and it required a certain amount of developing hardware to go along with the idea, which is often the case with things I get involved with. Often I want to do something that you can only do by developing or interfacing a certain number of existing possibilities.

With Blues For Allah there was a thing I wanted to do that had to do with an envelope shaper and stuff like that didn’t come together the way I wanted it to. And so, when I listen to it, I think, “Well shit, it isn’t quite where I wanted it to be.” But in the long run, after, like, however many records—nineteen records or something like that—you feel that at least your percentages are getting closer and you’re able to score on other levels. Like on our earlier records, if I listen to them now, they are embarrassing for reasons like they’re out of tune.

And your recent records are never out of tune.

JG: (laughs) Now they’re much more together on those levels than they used to be. We’re much more able to pull off the technical aspect without having to sacrifice feeling. In terms of Blues For Allah, the latest Grateful Dead record I can talk about in this frame, I think that’s the first record we’ve made in years where we really had fun. We laughed a lot and got good and crazy. We had an opportunity to get weirder than we normally get to getting. First of all because we didn’t have the pressure of having to go out and tour and travel and thus break the flow.

Why didn’t you have the pressure?

Because we decided not to perform.

You didn’t need the money?

Well, it wasn’t the question of needing the money or not. That was…well, say we didn’t need the money.

Most of your money comes from performing, obviously…

Well, yeah. Sure. That’s been our main thing. ‘Course, most of our overhead and expenses are also the result of that too. It’s a lot easier for us to survive on some levels by not touring just because our expenses aren’t so huge. And with me going out and Kingfish going out (with Bob Weir), we were able to pretty much keep ourselves together.

Anyway, a couple of years ago you weren’t doing interviews. Now you are. Why the switch?

I like to do ‘em when I feel like I have something new to say. Every couple of years my viewpoint changes, you know what I mean? So I have something to say. I have some substance. Also, at the end of a year of rapping—if I have only one rap (laughs), one good thing to say and I spend a year saying it—pretty soon I’m burned out and I can’t stand to listen to it any more. But the fact that I haven’t been out traveling a lot and I’m not road weary also has something to do with it.

In our brief conversation two years ago, you said—in response to whether you were satisfied with the show—“If I was ever satisfied, I’d quit playing.”

Yeah, I think I might, in the sense that part of it is the thing of trying, taking chances.

So why now, at this point in time, do you have something to say? Your solo album?

The solo album is one thing. I think the movie is the thing ( The Grateful Dead Movie_).

Tell me about the movie.

JG: When we decided we weren’t going to perform anymore, our farewell show, so to speak, was five days at Winterland. It was after we got back from our second trip to Europe—October ’74. About a month before the Winterland dates I got the idea that it would be neat to be able to film it, just because I didn’t know if we were going to perform again. Or if we were going to perform in that kind of situation again. And that five nights in a place would at least give us the possibility, numerically anyway, that we would have one or two really good nights. In about two or three weeks the whole production thing came together to make the movie.

At first we thought, let’s just make a record of the idea, and I wanted it to look good. I wanted it to be really well filmed but I didn’t really know a lot about film when the idea got under way, but when it was time for the show to start, we had about nine camera crews and a lot of good backup people, good lighting people and the whole thing was already on its way to happening. It was chaotic but well organized in spite of the relatively short preproduction time we had. After the five days were over—and during that time I involved myself mostly with the music, I didn’t really get into the film part—we had a couple of hundred thousand feet of film in the can. So then it was, what’s going to happen to this? Originally, we were thinking in terms of what about a canned concert. Would something like that work? Could we send out a filmed version of ourselves? Then, after getting involved and interested in the movie as a project, I started looking at the footage and the concert stuff and I felt that there was a movie there. A movie in a movie sense rather than a movie in a canned concert sense. Then there was the thing of putting all that together and that’s what I’ve been working on the last year and a half, ever since the filming was over, really.

So it’s coming out not as a concert film.

It’s coming out as a movie.

Is there a plot to the movie?

(laughs) No. I mean, it’s a movie for Grateful Dead freaks. I think you could enjoy it from a perfectly normal moviegoer standpoint. I think it’s a very fine movie, but I don’t want to get into waving a flag about it. I want to see what kind of response there is to it first. Now we’re in our last series of fine cut stages. And I’ve tried to structure it in the same sense that Grateful Dead sets are constructed, so that it goes a lot of places. The concert footage is tremendously beautiful.

To be shown in the proverbial theater near you?

So far, we haven’t ironed that out, but I think we’re gonna try, like we always do, to distribute it ourselves. At least the first flash, so that we’ll have some control over the kind of playback system there is in the theaters.

I’ve noticed your concerts don’t change as much from show to show as your albums do.

That’s true. That’s because albums get to be a certain time and space and the concert thing is a flow.

And you always know what to expect from a Grateful Dead concert.

In a way. But we’re trying to bust that too. That’s one of the reasons we dropped out.

Is this it for the Grateful Dead as a touring entity?

No. We’re gonna start playing again.

You have so many members of the Grateful Dead on your solo album (Reflections), it could almost be a Grateful Dead album.

A lot of the energy from that record is really a continuation of the Blues For Allah groove that we got into. We sort of continued the same energy because we were having a lot of fun doing it.

One of my favorite things that you’ve been involved with in the last few years is the Old And In The Way bluegrass album you did with Vassar Clements, David Grisman, and Peter Rowan.

That was a good band. It was satisfying and fun to be in.

Was the reason you only put out the one Old And In The Way album and didn’t do a whole lot of touring with that band, because of the fact that there’s only a certain amount of acceptance bluegrass can get?

That and also we ran into a really weird problem in terms of dynamics which was that bluegrass music is like chamber music: it’s very quiet. And if the audience got at all enthusiastic during the tune and started clapping or something, it would drown out the band and we couldn’t hear each other.

What an album though. I didn’t know you were such a hot banjo player.

(laughs) Oh I was real hot when I was a kid. Now my reasons for playing banjo and my reasons for liking bluegrass music are completely different from when I started, ‘cause then I was really hot.

I think that Old And In The Way album may be the best bluegrass album ever recorded.

Wow. Thank you. I’m happy with it too, but the truth is, we had much better performances than were on that record.

That’s hard to imagine.

Oh yeah. We had performances that were heart-stopping. And perfect, you know, but there weren’t as many that were recorded that well.

That banjo solo you did on “Wild Horses” and Vassar’s violin solo on “Midnight Moonlight”…Jesus.

Well, that was really a thrilling band. And I think that was the nicest that Vassar’s played, too. When he was playing with Old And In The Way, he played the maximum of mind-blowing but beautifully tasty stuff, and the music had enough interesting kinds of new changes and new things happening—Pete’s good songs for example—so that Vassar had a chance to blow with a lot of range. More than he does normally. That was neat.

The Grateful Dead have been a strange band for my taste, in that, if I like a band a lot—and some of your stuff I’ve liked an awful lot—I normally like just about everything the band does. But with the Dead, some of the stuff you’ve done has just gone right by me, while other stuff just blows me away. And it’s the same way with your concerts. Say, you’re in the middle of a jam. I’ll be half asleep for a few minutes, and all of a sudden, you’ll do something for five or ten seconds on guitar that will make my hair stand on end.

See, I have that same kind of reaction to the Grateful Dead myself. The Grateful Dead is not anybody’s idea of how a band or music should be. It’s a combination of really divergent viewpoints. Everyone in the band is quite different from everyone else. And what happens musically is different from what any one person would do. For me, the band that I have right now, I’m real happy with. I haven’t been as happy with any little performing group since Old And In The Way in terms of feeling “this is really harmonious, this is what I want to hear.” This band that I have now is very consonant. The Grateful Dead had always had that thing of dissonance. It’s not always consonant. Sometimes it’s dissonant. Sometimes it’s really ugly sounding and just drives you crazy.

Do you spend a lot of time in San Francisco?

Yeah. I spend most of my time just working. I’m very taken with our scene. It’s very interesting.

Your records are getting softer. In fact, there’s only one uptempo song, “Might As Well,” on your new solo album.

That’s true. That’s probably the worst thing about it, the lack of balance of material.

You thought it was too quiet?

Yeah.

When I listened to it, I thought maybe you didn’t like to rock and roll as much anymore.

No, uh…it’s not that. All these things have to do with luck. And timing. For example, the way that solo record was recorded, really a lot of material was performed with the intention of using it on the record, but of the takes that I felt were acceptable, they tended to be more of those softer tunes. So I decided to go with those because I felt the feeling of the tracks was better, not because of wanting it to be that way.

You guitar playing has remained fairly constant the last few years. The only real deviation was on this new album on the track “Comes A Time.” You used a mild fuzz.

I just used a small amplifier.

There were some real nice sustain on your playing. It sounded terrific.

Yeah. I do those things more on other people’s sessions than I do my own. I tend to be real off-handed about my guitar playing on my own records. In fact, on Grateful Dead records too.

What other records are you referring to?

Well, when I just go and do sessions with somebody more or less anonymous.

You don’t do session that often, do you?

Not any more.

Who are the last few people you’ve done sessions for?

I did a whole spasm of local ones, like all those Merl Saunders ( Live At Keystone, Fire Up ) records. Tom Fogerty’s records. And the Airplane sessions. Stuff like that. I used to do more than I do now.

Kingfish and your band are both on similar—and sometimes identical—tours at the moments and sometimes even cross paths, but you never share a bill. Are the two bands’ identities so different that it would hinder playing together?

Well, it’s just that neither one of us wants to cash in on the Grateful Dead notoriety. And also the people that are in our respective bands have identities of their own to support. So rather than get everybody under the big Grateful Dead umbrella, it’s better if everybody can have their own little shot. Because, for example, it would be possible for Kingfish to go out and work without Weir. They’re a band without him as well as a band with him. There are those kinds of considerations, because when we start working on Grateful Dead stuff, which we’ll start doing pretty soon, those bands will have their own survival problems. Not so much my band, because Ron (Tutt) works with Elvis. John (Kahn) does studio stuff and he’s always got stuff going on.

Are both you and Kingfish ending up your tours at about the same time?

Yeah. The Grateful Dead has to start rehearsing.

Are you going to do a big summer tour like everybody else?

We’re going to approach it differently. We’re going to try and do small places. We’re going to do theaters. We’re not going to do any barns.

Why, at this point have the Grateful Dead decided to get back together?

We’re horny to play. We all miss Grateful Dead music. We want to be the Grateful Dead some more.

What kind of material will you be doing?

Probably some old stuff but more new stuff, and I think probably the biggest change will be that we have Mickey back in the band.

When you look back on your records—you still probably maintain that you hate all your records…

I don’t listen to ‘em. I can’t (laughs).

Are there any that you hate less than the others?

Well, I always like the one we’re working on, or the one that we’ve just finished. That’s the one I feel closest to. But after that, I have to disqualify myself. I can’t judge them against anything but an emotional situation that I’m in, in relation to the Grateful Dead. Either they recall to me what was going on at the time we recorded or something else. It’s more personal than anything else.

When you work on songs, can you tell which ones maybe become classics with your audience, like “Sugar Magnolia” or “Truckin’?”

Uh…not really. I can’t. ‘Cause often, the ones that get me don’t get anybody but me (laughs).

Which ones have gotten you that haven’t gotten many other people?

Well I don’t know, but there are some songs that I really loved…like I really loved “Row Jimmy Row.” That was one of my favorite songs of ones that I’ve written. I loved it. Nobody else really liked it very much—we always did it—but nobody liked it very much, at least in the same way I did.

“U.S. Blues” got real popular in the summer of ’74 and became a big number for your live shows…

Well that kind of figured to me. Some of ‘em, you can say, “Well, this’ll at least be hot, if nothing else.”

I like “Scarlet Begonias” a lot.

Yeah, that’s another song too. That’s a song I like. “Ship Of Fools” is a song I like an awful lot. But my relationship to them changes. Sometimes I really like a song after I’ve written it and I don’t like it at all a year later. And some of them, I’m sort of indifferent to, but we perform it and find they have a real long life. For me to sing a song, I really have to feel some relationship to it. I can’t just bullshit about it. Otherwise, it’s just empty and it’s no fun. There has to be something about it that I can relate to. Not even in a literal sense or a sense of content, but more a sense of sympathy with the singer of the song. It’s a hard relationship to describe, but some songs have a real long life and you can sing them honestly for a long period of time—years and years—and others last just a while and you don’t feel like you can sing them anymore.

When you write with Robert Hunter, you write the music and he writes the lyrics?

More often than not. But also it’s a little freer than that, too. I edit his work an awful lot and, for example, a tune like “U.S. Blues” really will start off with 300 possible verses. Then it’s a matter of carving them down to ones that are singable. Other songs are like stories. A lot of time I edit out the sense of Hunter’s songs.

So you’re the reason he seems so deranged.

Yeah (laughs). I’m an influence in that. And when I edit his stuff, he really treats it with skepticism, but we have a thing of trust between us now so that he usually laughs when I hack out the sense of the song. Dump it. We have a real easy relationship.

By the way, you have one of the strangest record company bios I’ve ever read. It was credited to Hunter.

I actually think that bio was written by Willy Legate.

Who is he?

Willy Legate is this guy who’s an old, old friend of me and Hunter’s and Phil’s and out whole scene, and he’s a lot of things. And one of those things he is, is sort of a bible scholar. And he’s a madman. We were exposed to him really a lot during a formative period of our intellectual life. And he’s still around in our scene.

He’s the guy who wrote “There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead concert” and he wrote the little blurb inside the Europe ’72 album about the bolos and the bozos. We also call on him to do various things. One time we asked the Deadheads to send us their thoughts, just to get some feedback from them. And they sent us lots and lots of letters and we gave ‘em all to Willy. And he ended up with, like, a two page condensation of all the letters, with every viewpoint, that was just tremendously amazing to read. It was just so packed with information.

Willy is someone who has a lot of different kinds of gifts. He also even wrote some lyrics to some of our early songs before we started recording, but we’ve subsequently stopped doing the tunes. But he’s another creative head in our scene that operated way back from the public.

What kinds of things do you care a lot about these days?

(Pauses) I think the thing I’m most into is the survival of the Grateful Dead. I think that’s my main trip now.

Was there ever a point when you didn’t care a whole lot about that?

Yeah, always.

So this is pretty new?

Yeah, pretty new.

How long has this been going on?

I would say about a year.

Why is that?

Well, I feel like I’ve had both trips, in a sense that I’ve been in the Grateful Dead for ten or twelve years and I’ve also been out of it, in the sense of going out in the world and travelling and doing things just under my own hook. And really, I’m not that taken with my own ideas. I don’t really have that much to say and I’m more interested in being involved in something that’s larger than me. And I really can’t talk to anybody else either (laughs). So sometime in the last year, I decided, yeah, that’s it, that’s definitely the farthest out thing I’ve ever been involved in, and it’s the thing that makes me feel best. And it seems to have the most ability to sort of neutrally put something good into the mainstream. It’s also fascinating in the sense of the progression. The year to year changes are fascinating.
I would say that’s the thing I’m most concerned about now. Everything else has gotten to be so weird. And I’ve never been attracted to the flow politically.

Never?

No. It just isn’t interesting to me.

Do you vote?

No. Vote for what? Even looking for decently believable input from that world is a scene. So I haven’t developed that much interest in the motions of the rest of the world. I’m mainly interested in improving the relationship between the band and the audience, and I’m into being onstage and playing.

How about causes, like the legalization of marijuana, that kind of stuff?

It’s all passing stuff. I don’t know. I don’t have anything to say about moral things. Or legal things. I think there’s a lot of confusion on those levels. Basically my framework politically or anything like that is, I’m into a completely free, wide open, total anarchy space. That’s what I want (laughs). Obviously I’m not going to be able to sell that to anybody (more laughter). Nobody’s going to dig that.

You can’t even give that away…

Exactly. So I don’t even bother. If I have a flag to wave, it’s a non-flag. But as a life problem, the Grateful Dead is an anarchy. That’s what it is, it doesn’t have any…stuff. It doesn’t have any goals. It doesn’t have any plans. It doesn’t have any leaders. Or real organization. And it works. It even works in the straight world. It doesn’t work too good. It doesn’t work like General Motors does, but it works OK. And it’s more fun.

I’m curious to see what effect your new-found attention for the Grateful Dead is going to have on your music.

It’ll be interesting. See, I’ve always been real ambivalent about it. It’s like one of those things that, I’ve always wanted to work out, but I never wanted to try and make it do that. And, in fact, everyone in the Grateful Dead has always had that basic attitude. So we’ll see what happens.

(Steve Weitzman is a freelance music critic who has written for Rolling Stone, Musician, Billboard and others.)

The city of Oakland, California on Tuesday legalized large-scale marijuana cultivation for medical use and will issue up to four permits for “industrial” cultivation starting next year.

The move by the San Francisco Bay Area city aims to bring medical marijuana cultivation into the open and allow the city to profit by taxing those who grow it.

The resolution passed the city council easily after a nearly four-hour debate that pitted small-scale “garden” growers against advocates of a bigger, industrial system that would become a “Silicon Valley” of pot.

“This is going to grow as an industry. And someone is going to have a high-tech producer,” Council Member Jean Quan said during the debate.

Oakland already taxes sales of medical marijuana, but cultivation has existed in a legal gray area. Council members plan later action to levy new taxes on growers.

The city’s decision is separate from a statewide ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use which Californians will vote on in November.

Polls put support for the November state legalization measure at about 50 percent of voters, and if it passed, the state would be the first to broadly legalize its use. Many jurisdictions tolerate some personal use and small sales, but none allow major-scale growing, sales and recreational use.

U.S. Federal law bans marijuana use of any sort but law enforcement authorities have turned a virtual blind eye to medical marijuana.

Large-scale cultivation in California so far has been dominated by criminals who grow marijuana in national forests or complexes of grow houses, law enforcement officers say.

The toughest opposition at the Tuesday city council meeting in Oakland came from the small-scale marijuana growers who feel they will be squeezed out of the market by the new ‘agribusiness’. Outright opponents to marijuana use were silent.

side note: I do think that California will pass this come November. In case anyone is not aware, the state will be voting to basically treat Marijuana like tobacco or alcohol. tax it and regulate it. if this happens, not only will be see other states follow, but something that never gets discussed, is all of the other ways we can use Hemp. whether it’s for making paper, clothing, fuel, or food (just to name a few, there are literally thousands of uses), this will provide jobs and opportunities for so many others, including people who choose not to smoke. it’s all good, all the way around

By , California Watch
http://www.alternet.org

A flourishing and unregulated industry of pot delivery services is circumventing bans on storefront dispensaries and bringing medical marijuana directly to people’s homes, offices and more unconventional locations across the state, records and interviews show.

The unfettered delivery of marijuana through hundreds of these services highlights how quickly California’s fabled pot industry is moving from the shadows and into uncharted legal territory. These new couriers include enterprising farmers, business entrepreneurs and even a former Los Angeles pot dealer methodically switching her former clients to legal patients.

In newspapers and on the Internet, hundreds of “mobile dispensaries” advertise a wide range of strains and other products, such as brownies and cookies laced with THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. One service delivers organic vegetables along with medical marijuana, as part of a “farm-direct” service.

Some operate in multiple counties, including jurisdictions where storefront dispensaries are banned, or make local deliveries to drop-off points, such as Starbucks parking lots and gas stations. At least three ship to clients around the state using private prescription-drug couriers.

Although delivery of medical marijuana is not a new phenomenon, advocates say the growth of these services could be a game-changer in the state’s pot war, which pits law enforcement, elected officials and community groups in some localities against dispensary owners and patients.

And these businesses could increase in popularity if voters approve an initiative on the November ballot that would legalize pot possession.

“They’re delivering the product better, cheaper, more discretely and probably at a higher profit rate than dispensaries,” said Allen St. Pierre, director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which advocates legalization. “These delivery services are starting to grab more and more market share.”

A question remains on whether these services are legal. Some local and federal officials say delivery services violate the 1996 Compassionate Use Act that legalized medical marijuana in California for qualified patients, as well as other laws. The services are viewed as a way to circumvent local regulations clearly banning dispensaries.

“They’re transporting drugs,” said Tommy LaNeir, director of the National Marijuana Initiative, which is funded through the White House’s drug policy office. “It’s a trans-shipment operation that’s trying to bypass the ordinances that have been set up by cities and counties. It’s as simple as that.”

The exact number of delivery services operating in California is unclear, since the state does not keep a registry of medical marijuana distributors or outlets. In April, 758 services advertised direct delivery of marijuana to patients on Weedmaps.com, a commercial listing service.

Those numbers have nearly tripled in the past 18 months and grown by 39 percent since February, as more counties and cities began regulating storefront dispensaries or banning them outright, according to Justin Hartfield, owner of Weedmaps.com.

More than half the couriers who advertised in April said they were located in the Los Angeles region. Other services clustered around metropolitan regions, such as San Francisco, San Diego and Sacramento – with most regions experiencing steady growth. The number of couriers advertising within L.A. has jumped from 110 to 161 since February. San Diego saw an increase from 68 to 101 over the same period.

A total of 129 cities and nine counties in California have all banned medical marijuana dispensaries. An additional 96 cities and 13 counties have moratoriums, according to Americans for Safe Access. Yet, in many of these “dry” communities, pot delivery services appear to be flourishing. The number of couriers advertising in Riverside County, for instance, has increased from 76 to 105 since February.

For the state, the trend has caught officials flat-footed and unable to pinpoint any legal guidelines that directly address the delivery of medical marijuana by courier or mail. It’s clear that sending drugs through the postal service and cultivating pot for sale violates U.S. law, but most marijuana growers know federal prosecutions are rare these days.

“Delivery services are a relatively new creature, one that has not been directly addressed by the courts or in legislation,” said Peter Krause, a California deputy attorney general who helped write the state’s landmark guidelines on medical marijuana in 2008.

The state’s 1996 initiative and a companion law approved by the Legislature in 2003 granted cities and counties most of the authority over implementing the Compassionate Use Act. But no city council or board of supervisors has explicitly outlawed or legalized delivery services, according to Americans for Safe Access.

Senate Bill 420 – signed into law by former Gov. Gray Davis during his final weeks in office – appears to protect individual patients from prosecution for “possession, transportation, delivery, or cultivation of medical marijuana” under legal limits. The law also allows patients and their primary caregivers to “associate” with each other to “collectively or cooperatively” cultivate pot for medical purposes.

To some law enforcement officials, the law is unambiguous. John Hall, a spokesman for the Riverside County district attorney’s office, said the county has banned storefront dispensaries and that delivery services are prohibited, although he could not site a specific law or regulation on the subject.

“It is the position of this office that based on current law, all mobile medical marijuana operations are illegal,” Hall said. “That would include those that may be based in Riverside County as well as any which may be based elsewhere and come into the county to attempt to do business.”

Hall said the Riverside district attorney’s position is based on a September 2006 legal analysis written by the DA’s office that concluded “medical marijuana is not legal under federal law, despite the current California scheme.” The white paper is silent on the subject of delivery services, but concluded that storefront cooperatives and dispensaries are illegal.

Other law enforcement officials said California law clearly does not allow the distribution of medical marijuana to hundreds of people by a service or any single person.

“I don’t see anything that suggests that when voters passed the Compassionate Use Act, they envisioned (marijuana) delivery services,” said Joseph Esposito, head of narcotics for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office.

Dispensaries under pressure

Nowhere is the boom in pot delivery more evident than in Southern California. Until recently, Los Angeles was ground zero in the rapid growth of medical pot outlets, with dispensaries outnumbering Starbucks locations along some commercial strips.

That era may be ending. In January, the Los Angeles City Council approved an ordinance that led city attorneys to order the closing of 439 dispensaries. An estimated 135 will be allowed to remain if they follow new regulations, but action could be imminent on the others.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office has warned dispensary owners in violation of the ordinance that they could face civil or criminal penalties if they do not close by June 7.

In the face of the crackdown, some dispensaries have already shuttered their storefronts and rebranded themselves as delivery services. “They tell us, ‘we still want to be listed on your website. We’re just turning into a delivery service,’ ” said Hartfield of Weedmaps.com.

Dann Halem, a former freelance journalist, founded the Artists Collective delivery service 18 months ago after he started using marijuana to treat a rare hormone condition. He quickly saw the benefits of distributing marijuana directly to customers rather than running an expensive storefront.

“You don’t have to rent property,” he said. “You don’t have to deal with security cameras. You don’t have to have a security guard. We have glass dealers calling us, thinking we’re a storefront, asking us if we’re interested in some bullet-proof glass. You could spend money left and right to start a store.”

Together with a business partner, Halem logs hundreds of miles each week to fill phone and Internet orders for 500 or so clients. He said he doesn’t charge extra for delivery, but sets a minimum amount of marijuana a patient must buy, depending on the distance. If the customer is within 10 miles, the minimum is one-eighth of an ounce; within 20 miles, one-quarter of an ounce; within 30 miles, three-eighths of an ounce.

“The more gas we have to use, the more wear and tear on the car, the higher the minimum is,” Halem said.

Just days after Los Angeles ordered a crackdown on the city’s teeming medical marijuana dispensaries, Halem drove to a downtown residential hotel to deliver half an ounce of high-grade pot. At the hotel, Halem met up with Leonard Lombardo, a 50-year-old Gulf War veteran undergoing treatment for throat cancer. The two men spoke casually and then Lombardo paid for the marijuana, which his doctor had recommended to treat chronic pain and stimulate his appetite.

“These are people who don’t have cars. They can barely walk,” said Halem, who nevertheless acknowledges that most of his clients are not severely ill. “So it’s absolutely critical for there to be delivery services in some way.”

Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access, said if delivery services are operating as collectives or cooperatives they are protected under state law. He said all members must be qualified patients or caregivers, the operator must verify each patient’s status under legal guidelines and the delivery services must organize as nonprofits.

For his part, Halem is still taking precautions. He hired a lawyer and an accountant to help him establish his collective as a nonprofit California public benefit corporation. Profits are donated as grants for artists, he said.

Late last year, he moved his base of operations out of Los Angeles in the run-up to the city council vote. He now has an office in West Hollywood, which has well-established medical marijuana regulations. But he delivers to patients living throughout Los Angeles. Still, he conceded that a lack of regulations covering delivery services has left open the possibility of abuse.

“To start a delivery service, whether your intentions are good or bad, you need a car, a cell phone and marijuana,” he said. “That’s not the way we operate. But I’d say the majority of delivery services are just that. And they really are in a lot of respects glorified drug dealers because there’s no oversight, there’s no accreditation, there’s nothing.”

Halem said he’s sent e-mails to the city councils in West Hollywood and Los Angeles urging members to regulate the marijuana delivery trade. But officials in Los Angeles told California Watch that the issue was not raised during the debate over medical marijuana.

Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine said the council’s decision to restrict storefront dispensaries was driven by complaints from community groups and law enforcement. So far, the council hasn’t received any complaints about delivery services, he said.

“Who’s going to complain?” Zine said. “The person who’s receiving (the marijuana) is not going to complain. The person who’s delivering is not going to complain. The neighbor is not going to complain because they don’t know what’s going on.”

Low overhead, lax regulations

In Northern California, there are fewer delivery services but some of the operations cover large areas, spanning multiple counties and cities.

One new company, Mediharvest, promises to deliver marijuana to qualified patients anywhere in the state via commercial carriers. Mediharvest promotes its service to people who “don’t want to be seen at the store,” who want high-quality pot, who don’t want to support illegal drug cartels, and who “want to change the attitude of medical marijuana use in America.”

Another new online dispensary, C420, says it will ship pot overnight to qualified medical marijuana users at “almost any legal address in California.” The owner, who goes by the assumed name of Matthew Lawrence, said the Bay Area-based company is registered as a nonprofit collective and has signed up 1,000 qualified medical marijuana users across the state since its launch in April.

Lawrence said he distributes marijuana from hubs in Northern and Southern California using third-party carriers “who adhere to pharmaceutical delivery protocols.” He declined to name the carriers, but claimed the operation was in line with state law.

“We’ve done our homework in terms of what is allowable and legal,” he said.

Avoiding the costs associated with operating a storefront saves his operation money, but Lawrence said running a delivery service isn’t cheap. And robbery is a real threat. That’s one reason he expects only a few operations could grow into large-scale businesses – unless pot is legalized.

“To set up a delivery service that could go corner to corner around the state would be hugely expensive,” he said.

Elsewhere, some operations are modeling themselves on organic farms that deliver distinctive boxes of fruits and vegetables directly to customers’ homes. Matthew Cohen, owner of Northstone Organics, pioneered what he calls “farm-direct medical marijuana.” The Ukiah-based cooperative grows and delivers marijuana to a network of some 500 qualified patients in the nine Bay Area counties.

On a recent afternoon, Cohen stood in a rain jacket and muddy boots, scanning a large garden patch at the rear of his 10-acre farm. Surrounding the area was a network of laser trip lines and high-resolution cameras.

Marijuana from last year’s crop is stored in small canning jars in a nearby warehouse. Each week, after taking orders from Northstone’s website and over the phone, Cohen packs the jars into small paper bags.

Northstone’s business has grown briskly. Six months ago, Cohen was driving into the Bay Area twice a week and making the deliveries himself. Now he’s hired new workers who make deliveries five times each week.

In some Bay Area newspapers, Northstone advertises its product as “sustainably grown” in greenhouses, unlike much of the marijuana offered at storefront dispensaries, which is cultivated indoors under powerful, 1000-watt grow lights.

By keeping production and distribution costs low, Cohen said he could offer his medical marijuana at a discount of 30 to 40 percent. And Cohen’s operation recently got a boost when Mendocino County passed regulations increasing the number of pot plants that can be legally grown on a parcel of land, from 25 to 99. This allows him to compete more effectively against large, urban storefronts.

“It’s a competitive marketplace,” he said.

Cohen said he has obtained business licenses for every county he operates in. And officials from eight Bay Area towns and counties said their current regulations do not apply to delivery services based outside their jurisdiction.

“We are not regulating those types of operations,” said Jim Soos, a spokesman for San Francisco’s health department.

From dealing drugs to ‘dispensing medicine’

Marijuana delivery services are attracting a wide range of players. Some sold drugs on the black market for years and now see an opportunity to bring their operations out of the shadows.

“In some people’s minds, I’m a drug dealer,” said one woman who runs a delivery service in Los Angeles and agreed to talk about her business under the condition that her name and specific areas of operation within Los Angeles County not be revealed. “But what I’ve tried to do is comply to the laws of Los Angeles County so that I am not just the average pot dealer, but am dispensing medicine to my patients.”

Like most delivery services, the woman’s business operates as a nonprofit collective, with members making “donations” in exchange for marijuana cultivated by growers in the Los Angeles area and rural regions of California.

But to transform her former customers into legal patients, the woman holds unusual gatherings: Sunday brunches at her home where a doctor evaluates the invited guests in a private room at a discount rate and then signs off on recommendations for medical marijuana.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, about 40 people gathered at the woman’s home for a “doctor’s party.” They ranged in age from early 20s to around 60, included slightly more men than women and appeared to include mostly young and middle-age professionals, and a few stereotypical-looking stoners.

The invited guests paid $100 apiece to see the doctor – less than the $175 he normally charges for an office visit.

“It’s what you would normally go through in the doctor’s office, only in a much more comfortable environment,” said the operator of the collective.

She and her small, all-female staff are on call noon to 8 p.m. every day and deliver anywhere in Los Angeles County. She says she employs female drivers because they are less threatening to customers. On an average week, the service delivers one to two pounds of marijuana packaged into colored packets usually weighing an eighth of an ounce and costing between $50 and $70.

“I have doctors. I have lawyers. I have (school) principals,” she said on a recent delivery run, which included a Starbucks parking lot and a film production studio. “I have teachers. I have nurses, doctors, who don’t want to be seen going into a dispensary.”

As the wait to see the doctor stretched to an hour, the hostess led guests to a backyard buffet of mimosas, bagels and lox, chili and marijuana-infused edibles, including blueberry crumble bars and assorted cookies.

At the rear of the property was a free-standing garage converted into a studio living area. Inside, a card table displayed thick, neatly rolled joints, grouped by marijuana strain. Two bongs – one of them almost two feet high – stood alongside bowlfuls of trimmed, high-quality buds.

While becoming a collective has perhaps legitimized the woman’s business, it has not led to many additional customers. The woman said she has fewer clients and had to drop her prices to be competitive with storefront dispensaries. When she sold pot on the black market, she had about 500 clients. She now has about half that amount. But with hundreds of dispensaries facing city orders to close, the woman is hoping to recover lost business as dispensary clients move instead to delivery services.

“I absolutely believe it will help my business,” she said. “People will return who have been going to dispensaries out of sheer convenience.”

This story was reported in collaboration with KQED public radio, with assistance from the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. It was edited by Robert Salladay and copy edited by William Cooley. California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting with offices in the Bay Area and Sacramento.

The past decade saw an increase in the thought that government, in any form, was a bad idea. Why let the government fix education, lets give it to private contractors (no child left behind). Lets privatize Social Security….the government can’t do it! Lets privatize the war effort, this got to a point that there were more private contractors then soldiers in Iraq. There’s no need to regulate the markets, it’ll correct itself! So on and so on and so on…..

Well, look what this got us? We now have a government that is being put back together, piece by piece because the GOP and all their fuckin idiotic followers, ya Tea Party…that includes you, decided they’d follow a monkey who resided in the White House. Now this monkey, who had already had a shitty track record in Texas…was allowed to trample a lot of safety measures that were put into place to avoid the bullshit we’re now experiencing.

I look back on the 2008 campaign and remember the chants of “drill baby drill”. And how that ditz Palin was screaming daily why we should drill off the coasts…and how safe it was. Now…you look at what states went to the GOP in that election, and guess what, a lot of them are on the Gulf Coast.

For years, we have been telling people who read NT that for a majority of Republicans….they actually vote against their own best interests. Here is just another example!

My message to Republican and those fucking morons who have tea bags hanging off of their hats at these rallys: OPEN UP A BOOK, READ A MAGAZINE, READ INDEPENDENT THINKERS WHO WRITE ON REAL DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN TOPICS, TURN OFF FOX NEWS, ACTUALLY, TURN OFF THE TV. IT’S ALL GARBAGE! TURN OFF THE CONSERVATIVE RADIO. THEY MAKE MAD $$$$ OFF OF YOUR STUPIDITY! WAKE UP AND REALIZE THAT YOU ARE BEING SCREWED!

If you’re one of those folks who says: I don’t know where to start! Well, I know we don’t post as much as we should, but go through our archives. Read about what happened over the last 6 years. Learn how the GOP and the Dems divided this country and then conquered us…which allowed them to put through legislation that was only good for the rich and elite…and fucked over the rest of us. As one of our founders of this country said:

This Nation was founded on the hope that the people would always question the government

–Thomas Jefferson

By Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner, Brain Waving

http://www.alternet.org/story/146942/

LSD is a drug that produces fear in people who don’t take it. –Timothy Leary

It’s now almost half a century since that day in September 1961 when a mysterious fellow named Michael Hollingshead made an appointment to meet Professor Timothy Leary over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. When they met in the foyer, Hollingshead was carrying with him a quart jar of sugar paste into which he had infused a gram of Sandoz LSD. He had smeared this goo all over his own increasingly abstract consciousness and it still contained, by his own reckoning, 4,975 strong (200 mcg) doses of LSD. The mouth of that jar became perhaps the most significant of the fumaroles from which the ‘60s blew forth.

Everybody who continues to obsess on the hilariously terrifying cultural epoch known as the ‘60s – which is to say, most everybody from “my gege-generation,” the post-War demographic bulge that achieved permanent adolescence during that era – has his or her own sense of when the ‘60s really began. There are a lot of candidates: the blossoming pink cloud in the Zapruder film, Mario Savio’s first speech in Sproul Plaza, the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Beatles’ first appearance on the the Ed Sullivan Show, the first Acid Test, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, the release of the song “Good Vibrations,” the day Jerry Garcia got kicked out of the army. But as often as not, if you are a Boomer, the ‘60s began for surreal on the day you dropped acid. And if that is when the shit hit your personal fan, you may owe a debt of ambiguous gratitude to the appealingly demonic young sociopath who conveyed the Stark Bolt of Chemical Revelation to the nice young gentlemen of the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

The essential tameness of the group that was to become so notorious is only one fascinating feature of discourse to follow between the Project’s second and third most celebrated veterans: Ram Dass ( who as Richard Alpert, PhD, was Tom Sawyer to Tim Leary’s Huckleberry Finn) and Dr. Ralph Metzner (who began as an acolyte and wound up presiding over the remains).

In some of the photographs of members of the Project, taken prior to the arrival of Mr. Hollingshead and his Magic Mayonnaise Jar, the learned investigators are actually whacked on psilocybin and yet, their narrow black ties are still neatly knotted, their horn-rimmed glasses are on straight, their earnest civilization is still visibly intact.

Consider that Dr. Alpert’s first impulse, upon regaining the ability to walk during his first psychedelic experience, was to head off through the snow to his parents’ house and start shoveling their driveway. Upon being discovered, his defiant response was to dance a jig. This is truly a rebel without claws. But a few days after that fateful lunch with Hollingshead, Timothy Leary dropped acid and everything changed. The sober, scientific center of the Harvard Psilocybin Project lost its hold on the centripetal edge. The past started to end and the future started to begin. Their ties loosened and disappeared, along with belief in any such prosaic artifact as objective reality and the social conventions that accompanied it. As Leary later wrote in High Priest ( p. 256-257 ): “From the date of this session it was inevitable that we would leave Harvard, that we would leave American society and that we would spend the rest of our lives as mutants, faithfully following the instructions of our internal blueprints, and tenderly, gently disregarding the parochial social inanities.”

Ram Dass had a somewhat more alarmed reaction. “When Tim first took LSD, he didn’t speak for weeks. I went around saying, ‘We’ve lost Timothy, we’ve lost Timothy.’ I was warning everybody to not take that drug, because Tim wasn’t talking and he was sort of dull … When I took it, I felt it went so far beyond the astral, beyond form, to pure energy. It showed me that in previous psychedelic sessions, I had been screwing around in the astral plane. LSD was no nonsense. If you weren’t grounded somewhere, you’d go out on this drug.”

They were both right, of course. These were by no means unusual responses to the experience. Thanks in very large part to the subsequent exertions of Drs. Leary, Alpert and Metzner, the experience was one shared over the following decade by tens of millions of Americans, the larger part of whom found it difficult ever after to take seriously the verities that few in Eisenhower’s America would have questioned. Our paradigm got fucking well shifted. At least mine certainly did. And so, I would venture, did that of the United States of America, during the trip we took between 1961 and 1972.

One can make a non-ludicrous case that the most important event in the cultural history of America since the 1860s was the introduction of LSD. Before acid hit American culture, even the rebels believed, as Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman implicitly did, in something like God-given authority. Authority, all agreed, derived from a system wherein God or Dad (or, more often, both) was on top and you were on the bottom. And it was no joke. Whatever else one might think of authority, it was not funny. But after one had rewired one’s self with LSD, authority – with its preening pomp, its affection for ridiculous rituals of office, its fulsome grandiloquence, and eventually, and sublimely, its tarantella around Mutually Assured Destruction – became hilarious to us and there wasn’t much we could do about it.

No matter how huge and fearsome the puppets, once one’s perceptions were wiped clean enough by the psychedelic solvent to behold their strings and the mechanical jerkiness of their behavior, it was hard to suppress the giggles. Though our hilarity has since been leavened with tragedy, loss, and a more appropriate sense of our own foolishness, we’re laughing still.

Birth of a Psychedelic Culture is a saga of holy heroism. The people in it were like the Lewis and Clark of the Mind. But it is also a cautionary tale and contained within it is a lot of the real reason that America had such a visceral immune reaction to our sudden, terrifying and transforming “Otherness” in the middle of its consciousness.

Before delightedly steering the train off its rails, we were given a glimpse of grace and infinity. But like all that is utterly true, the lightning was brief and the thunder rolls still. In the beginning for me – and for many of us – there was the realization that religion was mostly the creation of God in man’s own image. Just as Tim Leary became furious at Catholicism shortly after hitting West Point, I bought a little Honda motorcycle and found that my dopily consoling Mormonism couldn’t seem to ride along. Like the maddeningly glib Dick Alpert – and believe me, he was a man of many words in those days – I left monotheism for sex and velocity. But there had been, even in a book as weird as the one the Angel Moroni purportedly gave Joseph Smith ( Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print”), a spark of something. It was not religion, but you could almost see it from there.

I sped around with a longing for the Spirit that seemed inaccessible until sometime in 1964 when I read about the “Good Friday Experiment” in which, on Good Friday of 1962, Walter Pahnke, Tim Leary and the two battle-scarred saints of the Unnamable whose reminiscences you can read in the book (Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner), had given psilocybin to some divinity students in Boston University’s Marsh chapel and – mirabile dictu! — they fucking saw God or something like It. And all because somebody gave them a pill.

Like most people raised by hick kids in the mountains, I was a mystic without ever having heard the word. If I could have a direct experience of The Thing Itself, without all that regulatory obligation wrapped around it, I would become whole again. After that, I read everything I could find about mystico-mimetic chemicals: Gordon Wasson’s 1957 article for Life magazine about magic mushrooms, Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Bill Burroughs’s Yage Letters, etc. I wanted a piece of that communion wafer and so did a lot of other kids raised around the dreary wasteland of American piety.

In the fall of 1965, I entered Wesleyan University where both the man who was to become Ram Dass, as well as the man who sheltered and then spurned the Harvard Psilocybin Project, Dave McClelland, had taught shortly before. I knew about Leary, Alpert and Metzner and had my own copy of The Psychedelic Experience. But I thought they were still at Harvard. I was going to go find them.

Before I could get around to that pilgrimage, I found myself at a Vassar mixer one late night in late 1965 and met a strangely luminous Indian Brahmin fellow who stood apart. He asked me if I could give him a ride to the “religious retreat” where he was staying not far from Poughkeepsie and I agreed. So we wheeled around shiny narrow roads to Millbrook in a truly Biblical downpour and the next thing I knew I was looking at the headquarters of the Castalia Foundation.

He invited me in. I didn’t know who lived there. Now, at that point, my heroes had not only been cast out of Harvard, but paradise as well. Inside the house it was not such a pretty sight. The social order had been whupped upside the head too many times already, but that didn’t bother me. I had Forrest Gumped my way into the Temple of Delphi.

Not long after that, I was fully enrolled in the Eastern Orthodox Church of LSD. A great deal more could be said about my initiation and the adventures that followed, but this is not about my long, strange trip. Besides, there are better stories about the perception of mysterium tremendum and its effect upon mere mortals. (Understanding the legend of Dr. Faustus might not be a bad start either. )

I will say that there was a night in late 1966, I think, when I rode a motorcycle from Millbrook to Middletown during an ice storm and was, because of the acid, convinced that I could no more leave the road than an electron could escape the centerline of a linear accelerator. I will also say that by then I’d switched my academic focus from physics to phenomenology with a particular focus on Medieval Christian mystics like St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart. I had a sign on my dorm room door displaying the following formula: [picture of me] + [skeletal schematic representation of the LSD-25 molecule] = [ picture of the Buddha ].

The acid was working. What I didn’t know then was that my best friend from prep school, a kid named Bob Weir, who had been strangely incommunicado since shortly after he worked on my family’s ranch, had been right next to another great fumarole of pharmaceutical whacketydoodah, the Acid Tests. His little band, the Grateful Dead, had been part of an experiment in mass hallucination which seemed, from our East Coast view, to make Millbrook look like a Trappist monastery. It sounded to me like what these West Coast people were doing was a particularly blasphemous form of drug abuse, the spiritual equivalent of breaking into Chartres Cathedral and getting drunk on the communion wine.

But, while we were looking down our long patrician noses at these barbaric shenanigans, they were apparently producing transformations similar to our own. Five years later, Hunter S. Thompson recalled 1965 and 1966 in San Francisco like this (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, pg 68):

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.”

Yes. That seemed right. Even as we were dismantling the monotheistic model of God as Abusive Father, we were assembling another one – in our own image of course – more personally available through mysticism and generally more immanent than the Previous Dude, but still inclined to lend special sanction to the actions of a particular socio-political cohort which, happily, turned out to be ours. God, or Something Like It, was on our side this time. The fact that God might turn up looking like a fat guy with an elephant head or as an aperture into pure, spirit-scalding Light, or even as Michael Hollingshead on a bad day, didn’t matter to us. The Apocalypse was nigh. The Age of Aquarius had dawned, and God was no longer in his Heaven but getting down, right there inside of us and our holy pills.

By spring of 1967, Leary, Alpert, and Metzner had already started to feel the arrogance of this premise. All three had gone to India and two had come limping back. Personally, I was still accelerating into the radiant fog, and so was a large percentage of my swollen generational demographic.

The Gathering of the Tribes had taken place in Golden Gate Park in January of that year. Leary and Allen Ginsberg had turned up there along with the international press, and the coastal schism in the Church of Acid had been officially healed. Somewhere in there, Time magazine ran a cover story on “The Hippies.” A more attentive cultural observer than I would have known by that sign that we’d reached our high-water mark. Whatever my earlier misgivings about the Acid Tests, I had learned by then that my dear Weir had been part of this heresy.

I was tickled to hear that the Grateful Dead were going to play their first New York gig at a Bleecker Street disco called the Cafe Au GoGo in June. Early June 1967 was a mighty time, the reverberations of which are now as ubiquitous in American cultural history as is the Big Bang in the rest of the universe. As I remember it, the Dead played on June 6th. The Six Day war had broken out the day before. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released five days before, as had the Grateful Dead’s eponymous first record. I had helped make arrangements to take the Dead up to Millbrook the day after.

After the show, which was kind of forgettable, Weir and I wandered over to Washington Square Arch and were trying to debrief one another. It was steady work. It wasn’t obvious that he had entirely passed the Acid Test. His eyes were all pupil, it seemed. He had the longest hair I’d ever seen on a human with a penis. And he’d become a fellow of very few words.

While we were struggling with the acquisition of a common language, a pale green Ford Falcon station wagon leapt the curb fifteen feet away and, like evil clowns emerging in platoon strength from a tiny circus car, some ten Long Island toughs poured out of it and headed toward us. You could see with one eye that they weren’t from our side of a culture war that had already gotten ugly in America. Like T cells in jackboots, they took us for antigens and meant us harm. As they were circling, Weir looked up and said mildly, “ You know, I sense violence in you guys, and whenever I feel it in myself, there’s a song I like to sing.” ( And I’m thinking, “??!” ) All of a sudden he’s chanting “Hare Krishna,” and what with my wondering ears should I hear but the toughs singing along. For about fifteen seconds. And then they beat the crap outof us.

So, as I drove my 550 horsepower Chevy Super Sport up the Taconic to Millbrook the next day, both Bobby and I looked like Wiley Coyote after a bad run-in with an Acme product. Also on board was a girl named Bos ( over whom I was totally goofy at the time), Phil Lesh, and Frank Zappa’s star chick singer, a hot number who called herself Uncle Meat. We listened to war news from the Holy Land on the radio and we had on board a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s, which I’d bought on the way out of town and which none of us had heard yet.

I was trying to explain to my inamorata Bos, both of whose parents were Jewish psychiatrists, why I felt so moved by St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. It was a moment in the ‘60s, that day was. When we got to the Hitchcock Mansion, it was pretty clear that whatever else the charming Dr. Leary was trying to tell the world, housekeeping tips were not being integrated into it.

Few of the regulars remained. Ralph, Tim, and even Michael Hollingshead had reached a point the year before when they’d found Dr. Alpert’s manias so alarming that they’d sent him packing off to India. (Where he was, by this time, already in a dhoti and well on his way to becoming Baba Ram Dass. He dropped the Baba as soon as the wisdom actually kicked in.)

That night we all gathered in the second floor library and, with ecclesiastical ceremony, we put on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nobody said a word while the record played. Many of us couldn’t have if we’d wanted to. I was so high I could taste the music and found the purple notes a little hard to chew. When the London Philharmonic’s last cacophonous notes trailed out of “A Day in the Life,” there was a portentous silence and … Timmy intoned solemnly, “My work is complete.”

Little did he know how right and how wrong he was. I say this because while he and the rest of us crazy angels had truly delivered some form of apocalypse, it could not actually take effect in a couple of years or even a couple of generations. No revelation so culturally shattering was going to be universally accepted overnight. No generation that called itself now was going to find lengthy evolution palatable, but that was what was on our plate nonetheless.

Yes, the Beatles had dropped acid and the whole world had noticed, but not everyone was pleased. The Empire was about to strike back. Moreover, we had, with our giddy carnival frenzies and darker madnesses soon to come, sown the seeds of our own disaster. There was a moment in the fall of 1967 that I myself became convinced, with passionate intensity, that we were that “rough beast” Yeats had described. We were leading society into such a quagmire of narcissistic, self-reaffirming subjectivism that if we continued to “Storm Heaven,” as Jay Stevens put it, little of what might be a reasonable basis for polity or even what passes for civilization would survive our selfindulgence.

I went unhinged. I became psychotic and grandiose and decided to become what would have been America’s first suicide bomber. I was prepared to sound a warning with my own spattered flesh and that of innocent others. I would be the admonition on the front page of every paper that would slow the juggernaut of hideous Truth. I had the means and the moment. Fortunately, praise Providence, I was found out and stopped forty-five minutes short of my own vile apocalypse. I lived on Thorazine for a while after that. But my intended mission attracted other willing soldiers. In my stead, we got Charlie Manson and Altamont. We got the behavioral sink of the long autumn that followed the Summer of Love. We got the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Front, the communes that turned into rural slums overnight.

What we got was the Bill. Hunter S. Thompson put it very harshly but with some accuracy a few years later in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (pgs 178-179): “All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody … or at least some force — is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

Who can blame the Rotarians of America for being alarmed? We became terrifying enough to scare ourselves. The Babbitry came down with a not ill-considered immune response that, however draconian its methods, was nevertheless their Apollonian duty just as appropriately as the creation of Dionysian chaos had seemed to be ours. But perhaps even more unsettling to the Powers That Had Been was the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, in addition to calling into question their version of God-given authority, we now found them amusing.

Since there is nothing authority hates worse than being laughed at, the authorities resolved to make themselves even less funny. The harder the acid heads laughed, the more bellicose, pig-headed, and, well … authoritarian the Powers became. And thus, instead of a quick abdication by the cultural forces that had been in charge of Western “Civilization” for two thousand years and a peaceful transfer of power to the laughing Aquarians, there commenced the forty year Mexican standoff that I call the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties.

Of course, this conflict had a lot of other names along the way, most of them delicious with the kind of dark irony it takes an acidhead to properly savor. There was the Viet Nam War, the War on Poverty, The War on Terror, both Wars on Iraq, and throughout, interwoven into every inch ofAmerican life, there was the War on ( Some ) Drugs. There was also, implicitly, the War on the Bill of Rights.

Whatever its other depraved social consequences – the millions jailed, the military dead and maimed, the deceit and denial at all levels of American society, particularly within the nuclear family – the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties endowed us with a golden age of irony. If you didn’t have a sense of irony, you were missing most of the fun, and, um, ironically, just about the only Americans who did have one were the acid heads. This created yet another badly hung loop as various iterations of “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” concatenated through the culture and, once again, we were the only ones laughing.

And then, lest we forget, throughout much of this period, and scarcely mentioned by anybody, acid head or Republican Whip, was the greatest surreality of all: the almost universal belief that somewhere and some time soon, someone would foul up and launch the nuclear storm thatwould glaze the planet with our elemental constituents. And if you couldn’t laugh at that, what could you laugh at?

Now, it seems many of these horrors may be consigned to the history of a future that never happened. While new horrors surely await us, very few still believe we’re likely to go “toe-to-toe with the Russkies” in nuclear combat as Slim Pickens put it in one of the most immortal lines of the 1960s.

Better still, the worst of the authoritarian prigs have so magnificently shot their wad during eight long years of Cheney/Bush that only those savagely beaten by their own fathers or the clergy support them now.

Aside from the coming kerfuffle over war crimes indictments and ongoing skirmishes along the Mason-Dixon Line, the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties may be finally drawing to an end. Indeed, as I write these words, the President of the United States, in addition to being black and self-admittedly smart and well-educated, strikes me as a fellow who probably dropped acid at some point. At the least, when asked if he “inhaled,” he replied, “I thought that was the point.”

Now that the worst of it may be over, perhaps it may become possible for various members of Congress, federal judges, ranked military officers, prominent clergy, and captains of industry — aside from the peculiarly honest Steve Jobs – to do as most of these, had they been brave enough, ought to have done decades ago and say in public: There was a moment, years ago, when I took LSD. And, whatever the immediate consequences, it made me a different person than I would have been and different in ways I have been grateful for all this time.

That would be a mighty moment. Those who still live are all now older and wiser than we were in those literally heady days, and we may finally be ready to tell such truths without setting off another round of conflict.

Ram Dass has come a long way along the path of the profound since I first met him as the maddeningly manipulative Dick Alpert. Indeed, at one point some years ago, I was having dinner with him and confessed to a moral dilemma that I was having a hard time teasing apart. I can’t even remember what it was now, but he cut through it snickety-snack, like a sword through the Gordian Knot, with a few well chosenwords.“That’s the problem with you, man,” I said, and continued with a concession I would not have made even to Baba Ram Dass, who turned up first at Wesleyan when he returned from India, still pretty full of self-promoting nonsense, “You’re just a lot wiser than I am.” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you lay that wisdom shit on me, Barlow,” he retorted, thereby defeating his own argument with its refutation.

But even before then, he had uttered a motto that has been far more important to carrying the essential message of the sixties than “ Turn on. Tune in. Drop out” ( which was actually coined by Marshall McLuhan and given toTim Leary since it didn’t fit McLuhan’s rap). Ram Dass said, “Be here now.” And here we all are. Now. Ready at last with the patience, forgiveness, contrition and self-amusement necessary to continue the work in earnest.

It is a good time to go back to the beginnings of the revolution still under way and take stock. It is a good time to read this book.
see original

GREG BLUESTEIN | AP
huffingtonpost.com

Federal scientists said Wednesday that a small portion of the oil slick from the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico has reached a powerful current that could take it to Florida.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists said they have detected light to very light sheens in the loop current, which circulates into the Gulf and takes water south to the Florida Keys and the Gulf Stream.

The agency says that any oil would be “highly weathered” and could evaporate before reaching Florida. And it might never reach the state at all. But scientists said diluted oil could appear in isolated locations if persistent winds push the current toward Florida.

The Coast Guard announced Wednesday that tar balls washing ashore in the Florida Keys were not from the Gulf spill, but that did little to soothe fears the oil could spread damage along the coast from Louisiana to Florida.

The U.S. and Cuba were holding talks on how to respond to the spill, U.S. State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said, underscoring worries about the oil reaching the loop current and being carried to the Florida Keys and the pristine white beaches of Cuba’s northern coast.

BP said Wednesday it hopes to begin shooting a mixture known as drilling mud into the blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico early next week.

Engineers would like to start the procedure known as a “top kill” by Sunday. If it works, it should stop the oil that has been gushing since the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded off the coast of Louisiana April 20 and sank two days later.

“This is all being done at a depth of 5,000 feet and it’s never been done at these depths before,” said Doug Suttles of BP PLC, the oil giant that was leasing the rig when it exploded.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee addressed the spill at a hearing Wednesday where leading Republicans including John Mica of Florida sought to pin blame on President Barack Obama’s administration. He cited Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s acknowledgment Tuesday that his agency could have more aggressively monitored the offshore drilling industry.

Outlining what he called the “Obama oil spill timeline,” Mica said the administration failed to heed warnings about the need for more regulation and issued “basically a carte blanche recipe for disaster” in approving drilling by the Deepwater Horizon, leased by oil giant BP PLC, and several dozen other wells.

He also said the spill could have been contained more quickly if the Coast Guard and other agencies had a better plan.

“This went on and on,” he said. “I’m not going to point fingers at BP, the private industry, when it’s government’s responsibility to set the standards.”

Committee Chairman James Oberstar, D-Minn., took issue with the criticism, saying the drilling was approved early in the Obama administration, essentially continuing practices from President George W. Bush’s administration, and that decisions were made by career officials.

“I think it’s inflammatory to call it the Obama oil spill, and wrong,” Oberstar said.

Questions remained about just how much oil is spilling from the well.

New underwater video released by BP showed oil and gas erupting under pressure in large, dark clouds from its crippled blowout preventer on the ocean floor. The leaks resembled a geyser on land.

BP and the Coast Guard have said about 210,000 gallons of oil a day is gushing from the well, but professors who have watched the video and others say they believe the amount is much higher.

Steve Wereley, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, told The Associated Press that he is sticking with his estimate that 3.9 million gallons a day is spewing from two leaks.

“I don’t see any scenario where (BP’s) numbers would be accurate,” he said at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

His estimate of the amount leaked to date, which he calls conservative and says has a margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent, is 126 million gallons – or more than 11 times the total leaked from the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989. The official estimate is closer to 6 million gallons.

Another researcher, Timothy Crone of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said the latest video suggested a leak of at least 840,000 to 4.2 million gallons a day, though poor video quality made it difficult to come up with an accurate figure.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. called on BP to release live video feeds of the the oil so independent scientists can more accurately calculate the flow rate. He questioned why such data isn’t readily being made public.

Government agencies have set up a task force to focus on how much oil is spilling, but BP America President Lamar McKay said under questioning at Wednesday’s House hearing that officials still don’t know which estimates are correct.

“It’s theoretically possible,” that the larger estimates are accurate, he said. “But I don’t think anyone who’s been working on this thinks it’s that high.”

BP has tried several unsuccessful methods to contain the oil, but earlier this week managed to insert a tube into one of the leaks and says that as of Wednesday it was sucking 126,000 gallons a day to the surface.

Another strategy being considered along with the top kill is the “junk shot,” which involves shooting knotted rope, pieces of tires and golf balls into the blowout preventer. Crews hope they will lodge into the nooks and crannies of the device to plug it.

___

Associated Press Writers Paul Haven in Havana, Ben Evans and H. Josef Hebert in Washington, and Matt Brown in New Orleans contributed to this report.

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By Luis Amate Perez
alternet.org

If you were a cynical 12-year-old boy like I was, then the words Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers will bring to mind bitter thoughts of cheesy dialogue, bright spandex uniforms, and choreographed live-action anime fight scenes, all overdubbed and irritatingly formulaic. Other children (many, actually) fell in love with the show, and its popularity continues to grow as new generations are taken in by the bright colors and trademark teamwork of the heroes. I hadn’t thought about the Power Rangers in years until I learned that one of the show’s stars, Jason David Frank (who played Tommy Oliver, The Green Ranger) is the founder of a Mixed Martial Arts clothing line for the Christian Fighter/MMA enthusiast called Jesus Didn’t Tap.

Jesus as the One True Warrior

The thought of a man who spent his formative years delivering campy dialogue and roundhouse kicks (all while wearing a fierce ’90s ponytail) now marketing the Lord with Mixed Martial Arts was intriguing, to say the least. The Mighty Morphin’ alumni already boast a convicted murderer, an actress who died young in a car crash, and now, with Jason David Frank, an anointed fighter and proselytizer.

Frank has swapped the full-body Power Rangers getup for MMA shorts, four-ounce gloves, and a muscular frame with so many tattoos the man looks graffitied. He has a 2-0 record in the cage (his wins coming via omoplata submission and TKO) and according to TMZ, Frank even has his eyes set on fighting Jean Claude Van Damme.

Back in November of 2009, I spoke with Frank on the phone. He lives in Texas and managed to squeeze my call into a 15-minute window, between his training and a “meeting,” which might have been for either Jesus Didn’t Tap, his chain of Rising Sun Karate schools, or one of the other projects he has in the pipeline. As he told it, one day Frank and a partner “did statistics on Christian numbers” and decided that it was a huge market to tap into. According to Frank, in their first year alone (2008), they did over $250,000 in sales, and the J.D.T. line is only growing.

In February the New York Times published R.M. Schneiderman’s article “Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries” about the “growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts—a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling, and other fighting styles—to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low.” Jesus Didn’t Tap offers the newly converted Christian-inspired threads that won’t clash with the Affliction and Tap Out gear already in their wardrobes.

There’s no doubt that Jesus Didn’t Tap was a great business move, but what Frank tries to make clear is that it’s not all about the money. For a long time the 36-year-old “wanted to come up with something strong to show people that really there’s only one true warrior in life, and it’s Jesus. And Jesus never complained”—i.e. never tapped. In summa, what Frank is trying to say is “There was a guy by the name of Jesus Christ and he was positive.”

Giving the Prince of Darkness a Noogie

Frank’s “positive Jesus Christ” shows up on the J.D.T. “Street Wear” (crewnecks, long-sleeves, hoodies, sweats, beanies, fitted hats), “Fight Wear” (MMA fight shorts, gloves, rashguards), and other accoutrements (stickers, patches, and dog tags). The images are often cartoonish and evince a simple mythology of anthropomorphized good vs. evil: Jesus (w/ halo) battles Satan (w/ tail, goatee, and skin the color of like Jesus is both choking Satan and giving the Prince of Darkness a noogie.

Some of the shirts are cute, like Jesus Loves Me and My New Tattoos. (Frank’s an obvious fan of the ink; even his left forearm, from wrist to elbow, advertises the Jesus Didn’t Tap line.) Other messages seem as if they were lifted from a generic self-help book. The Break Your Bad Habits shirt has an image of Jesus arm-barring the Devil, who, for some reason, is wearing a pair of cutoff shorts.

The wordplay on the Putting the Jew in Jiu-Jitsu T-shirt is off-putting; yet on the same shirt you have the silhouette of a crucified Jesus looking down at the shadow the cross is casting: a shadow made up of two men grappling in the formation of the crucifix. The surreal image is almost a revelation.

Some may think that choosing to market Christianity with MMA—a sport where the goal is to beat the shit out of your opponent—is contradictory. But Christian MMA fans have their apologists. Sites like Anointed Fighter provide answers to questions like “Can a true Christian compete in a full contact sport like MMA? What does the Bible say?” While I’m sure many would be interested to know whether or not Jesus would order the next Ultimate Fighting Championship event on Pay-Per-View, there are larger issues at stake.

As Schneiderman writes in his New York Times piece, “the outreach [of churches to MMA fans] is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.”

In a blog post, Eugene Cho, a Christian who was interviewed for the Schneiderman article, writes “have a problem with is when we have Christians, churches, and pastors who now begin to blur the line in equating MMA to Jesus; that we somehow speak with great conviction that Jesus would have endorsed MMA or other forms and expressions of the growing hyper-machismo culture.” In Cho’s view,

“To reduce Christ to pop culture images of manhood seems wacky—theology and Bible exegesis gone bad. Rather than focusing on external appearance, shouldn’t we focus on our ‘heart, soul, body, and mind’?”

With the inclusion of “body” in the list of four, Cho manages to undercut his point just a little—because if MMA focuses on anything, it’s definitely the body. The strongest connection between the high-contact sport and Christianity may lie here. Christianity has always had what could easily be called a masochistic relationship with the body and a bit of a fetish for blood. Although it is not unique to Christian sects, members of monastic orders have used methods like starvation and self-flagellation to achieve states of transcendence and ecstasy. For them the body’s suffering (and its effects on the mind) has been an effective vehicle to God. (Of course, this is never separate from the New Testament’s tales of Jesus’s own trial, suffering, and death.)

So it is not hard to see how a Christian may view MMA, with its grueling training regimens and bloody bouts, as simply another method. A three-round match becomes a kind of Passion play, where the fighters experience the ecstasies of physical torment directly before a mostly male congregation.

The Elbows of Sin

Frank is aware of the controversy, yet, rather than take part in a theological dialectic—even though there is a J.D.T. Bible—he seems content to let the product do the talking and the selling. Because whatever the product lacks in nuance it makes up for in its unflagging allegiance to its message: Jesus is the “one true warrior.”

The problem comes when that message is adhered to so strongly that it verges on self-satire. For example, the front page of the Jesus Didn’t Tap Web site features the following from Anointed Fighter’s Danny L. White:

When Jesus stepped inside the cage of life to take on the cross, human legs did not kicked [sic] his out from under him. It was not human hands that broke his arm during the arm bar of adversity. It was not a human fist that knocked him to the mat for our sins. It was not a human that kept him inside the triangle choke of suffering. It was not the fighter’s [sic] sent by Satan to tap him out that beat him.

God gave him strength while on his back being pounded in the face by the elbows of sin…

[italics mine]

It is hard to imagine a potential convert needing a metaphor to be laid on this thick. That’s not to say that everything Jesus Didn’t Tap makes is as over-the-top. One of the more moving images can be seen on its How Do You Train? T-shirt. The rhetorical question is accompanied by the image of Jesus carrying the cross—on his way to Golgotha, no doubt.

Frank tells me a joke he hears often: “Jesus didn’t tap… because he couldn’t.”

I get it. Jesus’s arms and legs were tied (and/or nailed) to the cross, so he couldn’t have tapped.

“Ha-ha,” Frank says, about to deliver a rhetorical punch. “Well, he could have verbally tapped.”

Frank notes that in the cage one can verbally tap or give up. As an example, he mentions a UFC fight between Matt Hughes and Georges St. Pierre. At one point in the fight St. Pierre had Hughes’ limbs incapacitated, so Hughes was forced to verbally tap, which brought an end to the fight.

For a second I wonder whether the Jesus/MMA metaphor has become literal for the former Green Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger. Does Frank actually think the same rules applied to First Century A.D. Roman crucifixion as to a sport currently sanctioned in most of the 50 states?

But then I close my eyes and think of Jesus on the cross, and I can’t help wondering what would Jesus wear? The Warriors of God crewneck? Or the Jesus Didn’t Tap, Neither Did Our Troops crewneck?

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But the show’s point was that the earth has been through much worse then anything we can do to it. if we don’t clean up the mess, the planet will be unlivable for us. because if we cut down a forest, it will just take a few thousand years to grow back. the air will eventually be cleaned, and the water too. the animals, earth will produce new ones. But if we keep on this track, we’re the ones that are going to be in trouble, not earth.

by William Rivers Pitt
Truthout.org

“I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have,” wrote Chuck Palahniuk in his novel,”‘Fight Club.” “Burn the Amazon rain forest. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom … I wanted to breathe smoke. I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.”

This is our world now, indeed. All those terrible things Palahniuk’s protagonist wanted to do, well, most of them are happening or have already happened. The Louvre is still there, for now, and neither the Marbles nor the “Mona Lisa” have been violated, but as for the rest of that rant … yeah, they’re pretty much fact.

Our world.

The Boston Globe web site put together a series of pictures detailing the inexorable advance of spilled petroleum in the Gulf, the slow dread of aftermath from the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon nearly a month ago. I’ve been staring at them for the last hour, and I’m beginning to believe I have lost the capacity to weep.

We’ve been through so much in the last ten years. So much damage has been done in so many places and in so many ways. Millions of people have died in wars and acts of terrorism, of disease and starvation and neglect and atrocity. Our Constitution has been ravaged, our economy pillaged, New Orleans was shattered and Detroit has been left to rot. The Supreme Court sealed the deal and made us all slaves to the corporate ethic, which scantly exists beyond a profit motive devoid of morals or genuine patriotism.

But something in those pictures makes me feel worse than I have in a long time, even after encompassing every other horror we have endured. I can’t explain why; worse things have happened than this Gulf spill (maybe), but my heart hurts and my gut feels hollow when I look at the pictures, and I cannot weep.

“According to a news release from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, reported the Times-Picayune over the weekend, “Capt. Lyle Dehart of the shrimping vessel Rocking Angel caught oily shrimp around midnight on Friday in Bayou Severin, near Sister Lake. Shrimpers on the boat reported that their fingers stuck together when they touched the shrimp.” The report went on to state that large swaths of fishing grounds, both offshore and inshore, are being closed. The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals has allowed several previously-closed oyster beds reopened, so fishermen can race in and harvest what they can before the oil arrives and annihilates the ecosystem.

Their fingers stuck together.

Our world.

I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the information we’ve been given about exactly what is happening at the site of the leak, 5,000 feet below the surface of the sea. British Petroleum and government officials have pegged the amount of oil spillage at 5,000 barrels a day, but there are a whole lot of voices claiming the number could be several times higher. On Monday, the UK Guardian reported:

Ocean scientists in the Gulf of Mexico have found giant plumes of oil coagulating at up to 1,300 meters below the surface, raising fears that the BP oil spill may be larger than thought – and that it might create huge “dead zones.”

Members of the National Institute for Undersea Science and Technology have been traversing the area around the scene of the Deepwater Horizon, the rig that exploded and sank on 20 April.

Using the latest sampling techniques, they have identified plumes up to 20 miles away from the Deepwater Horizon well head that continues to spew oil into the water at a rate of at least 790,000 liters a day. The largest plume found so far was 90 meters thick, three miles wide and ten miles long.

Samantha Joye, marine science professor at the University of Georgia, who is working on the project, told the Guardian, “The plumes are abundant throughout the region. I would say they’ve become characteristic of this environment.”

Characteristic of this environment.

Our world.

Every effort by BP to stop the leak has failed, and from some of the more preposterous proposals they’ve floated – one involved filling the hole with garbage, if you can believe it – there is little reason to believe the oil company responsible for this is doing anything more than making it up as they go. They’ve undertaken a process to siphon 1,000 barrels a day from the leak into oil tankers, but if the leak is in fact worse than reported, the effort is tantamount to cleaning up a million-pound hay bale one piece of straw at a time.

There is something in the Gulf called “the loop.” It is a belt current 3,000 feet below the surface that carries the Gulf’s waters in a circle, up the western coast of Florida, past the coastlines of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Mexico, and then back out and over to Florida again. If it hasn’t happened already, oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill will soon hit the loop, be carried over to and then around Florida, before proceeding up the coastline of the Eastern seaboard. What is, for the time being, a disaster for the people in the Gulf region will very soon become a deadly serious problem for tens of millions of people, and could rampage through tourism and fishing industries in a dozen states.

“Don’t think of this as extinction,” said Palahniuk’s Tyler Durden, before he knew he was Tyler Durden. “Think of this as downsizing. For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and land filled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.”

Our world, now.

Welcome to the future.
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