A Weir'd Memory
By Bob Loomis
So, RIP Bob Weir, now jammin' with Jerry, Phil and Pigpen in the Paradise Band, learning even more chord inversions, the Celestial variety. Not that his music here n Earth wasn’t heavenly!
Aside from listening to the music he made while among us for more than 60 years, I have one up-close-and-personal memory of Bobby, and I have to stretch the definition of "up-close-and-personal" to make that compound adjective applicable.
It dates from quite a way back, around 1966, as I recall -- a period of intense hippie-wannabeness on my then 26-year-old part, a desire that my always more sensible spouse cautiously endorsed.
The bugaboo for us was financial: how to earn enough as dropouts to at least equal our one-salary, barely making it level in those early years of my newspaper "career." The only way I could see to finance being a full-time Hippie was to deal dope but I had a serious fear of jail.
At the time, I had a close friend, Mike G, whom I'd met in a summer class at San Francisco State College around 1963 and who was a computer programmer back in the days of punch-card programming. He and several friends of his worked at UC Med Center's San Francisco data processing department as programmers. They could work their own hours, dress any way they liked (at a time when the tie-and-dress-shirt were required by most office employers), earn two or three times the $140 a week I was making as a reporter/rewrite person/copy editor at the Martinez Morning News-Gazette.
It came to pass that sometimes six, sometimes as many as 10 of these data giggers, who were the first of my personal acquaintances to become big partakers of LSD, moved into a commune at a former summer camp facility in Lagunitas, a rural west Marin County village west of San Rafael and east of the ocean. This camp, it seems, had been for a time the residence of the Grateful Dead, so it had huge Hippie Cred. It had a main house and a number of outbuildings including a large kitchen and some bunkrooms and a swimming pool.
Always cautious, I and spouse had not yet dropped acid even though I knew these partakers and previously had attended one or two of their monthly parties at the Berkeley home of one of their number where the "in" friends dropped and danced to music and put on slide shows and light shows way before we went to our first Ken Kesey Acid Test at the original Fillmore Auditorium.
Understand that by the time they moved into the camp, this group of acquaintances had become very careful about how much they ‘d share of any aspect of their counterculture. They didn't want too many people hanging out at Lagunitas. Weed was still illegal and by then, other drugs like DMT and STP were being shared.
But at some point after they settled in, Mike got the OK from Security Chief and Head Guru Joe X and the other communers to invite us over for a summer's day swim in the camp pool.
Yee-HAW! The first sign of progression into what was the closest thing to an "in crowd" in my life at the time. I'd always been an outsider, existing at best on the peripheries of what was left of the Beat scene in North Beach, and now the Hippie Crusade that was engulfing the Bay Area. How lucky I feel now to have been here to be at least a part-time participant. This was the social/cultural group I felt felt truly akin to, and remains so to this day.
So, Beverly and I went to Lagunitas to swim in the nude, smoke dope (no acid that day) and see what real Hippie life was all about.
Lo and behold! While we were sitting beside the pool, a cream-colored convertible with red leather seat covers (a Cadillac in my memory, which could be faulty) pulled up and parked off the road next to the fence. It's a guy with two young women. It’s Bobby Weir! He jumps out of the car and comes to the gate of the property. Asks the gatekeeper if he can show the girls around. The gatekeeper says, "Wait here, I'll check."
He waits. The gatekeeper comes back and says, "No, you can't come in," explaining that the landlord stipulated one all-important condition on the rental: that no one associated with the former tenants the Grateful Dead be allowed back on the property.
So, looking hurt and puzzled, and after a vain attempt to persuade the Gatekeeper to let them in on their word of honor not to cause problems, Weir and the two ladies got back in the car and cruised on out of there. Nice knowin' y', Bobby ... sorry about the off limits.
Thus ended our chance to hobnob with a member of one of the earliest, most inner sanctums of San Francisco Hippiedom. Our friends’ story, as they were told by the landlord, was that the camp had been badly trashed by the GD and/or their friends.
That was as close as I came to knowing Bob Weir aside from his music. I did later meet and talk with Phil Lesh, the Dead's bassist, and with Jerry Garcia and drummer Bill Kreutzmann. But never with Bobby.
Maybe next time, in some other reality.
I thank the Universe for all the times we saw/heard him and the Grateful Dead and some of his other bands play music! Life would have been a great deal greyer without them and their music.
Rock on on the Paradise Band, Bobby, thanks for all the good times.
