A Long Strange Trip by Dennis Mcnally Read Free Book Online Page A

destiny by your rash proclamations.”
    It was just sixteen years after World War II, and leaders from that era like Charles de Gaulle and Chiang Kai-shek remained in power. There was a young new U.S. president, elected among other reasons because he had made a phone call to the wife of that imprisoned Birmingham minister, Martin Luther King Jr. In his inaugural speech that January, John F. Kennedy had spoken of letting the oppressed go free, of assuring the “survival and success of liberty,” of exploring the stars, these deeds to be accomplished by a “new generation of Americans.” A world that had seemed so glacially predictable in the 1950s was rapidly shifting. Sexual mores would be challenged by the just-introduced birth control pill. Technology would begin to evolve at an exponential pace, beyond the wildest dreams of the average citizen, in ways even the science-fiction visionaries could not imagine. All bets were off, and these young men intuitively knew it.
    Early in March Garcia had volunteered as a lighting technician for a production of
Damn Yankees
at Palo Alto’s Commedia Dell’arte Theater, and was introduced to a young man named Robert Hunter. A couple of days later, Hunter walked into St. Michael’s Alley and came upon Garcia and his friend Alan Trist. The three of them began a conversation that would last their lifetimes. Though it was neither obvious nor immediate, Garcia and Hunter were perfect collaborators, two halves of a creative process.
    Born Robert Burns on June 23, 1941, near San Luis Obispo, California, Hunter had grown up a child of the West and of World War II. His father, said Robert, was a “potentially good man ruined by World War II, the navy, his subsequent alcoholism and inability to keep a family or a job.” Robert and his mother followed him to various navy assignments up and down the West Coast before he deserted them when Robert was seven. His parents divorced when Robert was nine. For two or three years he lived in a string of foster homes, and the period scarred him deeply. Add to that the dozen different schools of a rootless life, and the result was a boy—and man—who had major problems getting along with people. In his own words, “I had probably more than the usual load of sensitive bullshit as a young man.” He found solace in the Roman Catholic Church as a substitute for the family he lacked, but it did not last. On a different social plane, he tried the Boy Scouts, but was kicked out for calling the scoutmaster a son of a bitch.
    Books and music would be his salvation. At eight he read Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony,
then Howard Pyle’s
Robin Hood,
Robert Louis Stevenson, all the usual children’s adventure material, and later science fiction. He also went through a period of reading up on Wyatt Earp, marinating himself in the imagery of the West. It was an authentic impulse, since one of his grandfathers was a cowboy who occasionally lassoed him as Robert ran about the yard. What marked Robert as unusual was the novel that he began to write at eleven, a fifty-page handwritten fairy tale. He saw himself as a novelist. Even as an adult, though he would concede that his gifts as a writer were more suited to lyrics than to prose, he would maintain that “I have a novelist’s mentality.” He began playing music at age nine, when his grandmother gave him a Hawaiian steel guitar. In his teens he picked up cello, violin, and trumpet.
    Robert’s life improved considerably when his mother remarried when he was eleven. His stepfather, Norman Hunter, whose surname he adopted, was a national sales manager for the McGraw-Hill publishing firm, a stern and severe Scottish disciplinarian who would mark Robert’s life heavily with one incident. Mr. Hunter looked at a piece of Robert’s writing and saw the phrase “merciless north.” “He absolutely turned livid. He took my report and threw it across the room and said, ‘I don’t ever want to see you attributing human