LOS ANGELES — Before his loss of life, the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia tried to get clear after years of freebasing cocaine and different medicine, so he gifted a marijuana pipe to a fellow musician who socked it away in his San Francisco residence.
About 31 years later, the handmade pipe has resurfaced in a Marin County vintage store, whose proprietor considers it a novel rock ‘n’ roll artifact.
“My shop is fun and a lot of fun stuff walks in the door,” Steve Cabella, proprietor of the Modern i Shop in San Anselmo, California, informed the Los Angeles Times. “But when this walked in the door, it was simply one of the more interesting things that have walked through that door.”
Cabella declined to say if the pipe might be on show at his store, solely that he hopes to donate it to a museum.
Few folks could be stunned to listen to that the guitarist for the eclectic California rock band acquired excessive or that he owned a pipe. With his hen’s nest beard and spectacles, Garcia captivated legions of followers along with his mix of blues, people and psychedelic rock whereas taking part in with the Grateful Dead. But by 1985, Garcia was arrested in San Francisco for freebasing cocaine in his automobile.
In an effort to get clear, Garcia determined to provide away his pot pipe. According to Cabella, the pipe was created and given to him by Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the band’s audio engineer and apparently one of many first folks to mass produce massive portions of LSD within the Sixties.
In some ways, the pipe could possibly be considered as a relic from the psychedelic rock period, however Cabella stated he doesn’t plan to promote the pipe and even smoke out of it. He views it as an artifact, one which extends past the drug paraphernalia historical past.
The Grateful Dead had legions of devoted followers, often known as Deadheads, who adopted the band because it toured the world. Sotheby’s public sale home appealed to such devotees final yr when it auctioned off musical devices, gear, clothes, live performance posters, guitars and different memorabilia from the band.
The pipe — made from bone and leather-based — was final seen after longtime collaborator and keyboardist Merl Saunders and Garcia labored on the album “Blues From the Rainforest” in 1991, based on Cabella. Garcia saved the smoking pipe at Saunders’ San Francisco residence whereas the 2 recorded the album, the household informed Cabella. Then it was fully forgotten.
The pipe is adorned with a carving from Garcia’s 1978 solo album “Cats Under the Stars” and a second carving of a tiger. Cabella believes the pipe predates one among Garcia’s custom-made guitars he named “tiger” and provides one other notch to the pipe’s place in music historical past.
“Owsley [Stanley] had a lot of sources for imagery that he used on the [pipe],” Cabella stated. “So he bestows the name on Jerry and Jerry is so into that he names his guitar tiger.”
Stanley picked up his abilities at making jewellery and different crafts in a jail interest store throughout a three-year jail sentence following a police raid on his LSD lab in Orinda, California, based on Tim Scully, who traveled with the Grateful Dead because the band’s digital designer.
“Bear wanted to be known more for being an artist than for being an LSD manufacturer,” Scully wrote in an electronic mail to the L.A. Times.
Stanley not solely influenced Garcia later within the band’s profession, however he additionally financed the band and designed its “Wall of Sound,” a literal wall of audio system that accompanied the band’s dwell units in 1973. He would go on to construct a large archive of dwell classes from quite a few bands he combined sound for through the years.
Born Augustus Owsley Stanley III in Kentucky on Jan. 19, 1935, he was the grandson of a Kentucky governor and son of a naval commander.
Dubbed the “Acid King” by the media, Stanley was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s e-book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” The nonfiction work detailed a collection of events thrown by creator Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, who got here to epitomize a louder, extra vibrant sect of the beat technology that used LSD provided by Stanley.
More than 30 years after the pipe was final seen, it reappeared when Saunders’ household was clearing out his San Francisco residence. The pipe was in an envelope dated 1985 in a hideaway mattress constructed right into a wall, Cabella stated.
Although Garcia gifted the pipe to Saunders, the keyboardist didn’t use medicine and hid the pipe.
When reached by telephone, Saunders’ son declined to remark.
When Garcia died in 1995 at age 53, he was staying at a rehabilitation facility attempting to get clear from his years of drug habit. His loss of life reverberated throughout generations of music followers. At the time, President Bill Clinton informed MTV he and then-15-year-old daughter Chelsea have been followers of the Grateful Dead.
Stanley died in 2011 after he crashed his automobile whereas driving in a storm close to the city of Mareeba, Australia.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”