"When The Grateful Dead Joined The Columbia Strike"
by Hilton Obenzinger
Bob Merlis was part of the Board of Managers, sort of a collective that staged concerts by the Byrds, Martha & The Vandellas, and others on the Columbia campus. Merlis knew that the first Grateful Dead album came out in 1967, they were a known national act, and they played in New York in 1967 at the Café Au Go Go and in Tompkins Square Park and the Village Theater, and he thought it would be terrific if they played on campus. Merlis spoke to their manager, Rock Scully, about the band playing at Columbia. Earlier, Alan Senauke, a musician and a veteran of the Low Library Commune, had spoken with Jerry Garcia and other band members at a concert. Senauke suggested that the Dead do a gig at Columbia, mentioning mutual musician friends. Scully supported the Columbia strike, and when Merlis spoke with him he gladly offered to hold a free concert. The Grateful Dead would be right for this moment.
After the Dead agreed, Bob Merlis went to Frank Safran, who was Associate Director of Student Activities, and told him that the concert was coming to pass the next day and that they already had flyers announcing the performance. Safran protested but it was a fait accompli and Merlis “suggested” that it would be the path of least resistance to let the Dead through police lines when so many on campus already expected the band to show up. This was an implicit threat of disruption and further unrest. Safran relented and the band was let through to play on May 3rd.
On the night of April 30th the police had broken through the barricades of the five buildings that students occupied for a week for two main goals: to stop the university from building its gym on public land in Morningside Park (which smacked of Jim Crow, with an entrance for the overwhelmingly white students on top of the hill and a separate entrance for the overwhelmingly Black community on the bottom) and to extract Columbia from research that aided the Pentagon’s war in Vietnam. Just a couple of weeks earlier Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and the grief was deep and anger raw. The Students’ Afro-American Society occupied Hamilton Hall by themselves, after telling the white students to take their own buildings, which they did. SAS and the other Black students were arrested in a careful manner with their lawyers present and no violence. The Black students knew they were literally risking their lives in any confrontation with the cops. The city and the university also feared that if police mistreated the Black students Harlem would explode. But, as the deputy mayor said, the cops had been cooped up in buses “chewing on their nightsticks” for nearly a week as the university negotiated with the occupiers, and they were pissed, seething with rage at the white Ivy League kids, spoiled brats committing treason in their eyes. So when given the green light the cops charged into the four other buildings with blood in their eyes. Hundreds of students were beaten and hauled off, with more than a hundred students (and even faculty) injured, and over 700 arrested. The next day the vast majority of students and faculty went on strike. All official classes shut down, and “liberated” classes were held in professors’ apartments, in the West End Bar, on the lawns, classes taught by students on Herbert Marcuse, Buddhism, on the history of U.S. imperialism. A Grateful Dead gig just a few days after the bust would add a joyous sound track to the new era; it would be one more revolutionary act.
The Dead drove their rented truck to the 114th Street entrance of the university where they unloaded the band’s equipment and wheeled their gear in on dollies to the student union, Ferris Booth Hall. The band needed power, and Steve Goldfield, familiar with the steam tunnels underneath Columbia from long experience, knew that there was an electrician’s shop there. He went over to the shop in the tunnel and borrowed a very long extension cord. The electrician didn’t ask for any ID or anything. Goldfield just said he’d return it, which he did. The Dead were set up on the terrace in front of Ferris Booth Hall, the student union. Right behind the terrace was the lounge. The lounge didn’t have any outside doors, so Goldfield plugged the extension cord into an outlet in the lounge and ran it out the door of Ferris Booth to the band. They had no electrical problems during the performance. After the Dead played for two hours Goldfield returned the cable. The next day, he noticed that the door to the lounge was locked.
Jerry Garcia, Pig Pen and the others set up their equipment, some students chanted slogans, and Bob Merlis stood before the small crowd to introduce the band. The crowd grooved with the Dead’s Music, with its complex weaving guitars and voices, and the band was so amplified that their sound filled the campus, drowning out all conversations. “It was sunny,” the Columbia Spectator reported. “People were dancing or just moving their bodies where they sat. Students lounged on the ledges of dorm windows, smiling, waving strike signs; even three-piece suits in the journalism school windows looked pleased.”
Before that day Mark Rudd had never heard of the Dead, just like some of the other students in the crowd, since their first record had come out only a year before. Rudd was the president of SDS and one of the leaders of the strike, and he watched the concert from the roof of Ferris Booth Hall with Nicholas Von Hoffman, who at that time was writing for Newsweek or the Washington Post, or both. Reporters were always sticking their heads into the student offices in Ferris Booth, especially Strike HQ.
Two of the editors of The Columbia Review, Les Gottesman and Hilton Obenzinger, also went out on the roof. They climbed out a window of one of the offices – it wasn’t the literary magazine’s office. They spent the entire concert up there, seeing a lot of familiar faces (and hair) facing the band, very happy. They could see other Low Library Communards swaying with the music, law student Barry Willdorf with his mustache and beret and Bonnie Offner. Alan Senauke, another one of the editors of the literary magazine, sat on the ground with Nancy Werner, right in front of the band, both of them with goofy smiles, no doubt stoned. The Dead had grown out of the folk scene, reworking old recordings of roots music, and a number of his friends, such as Peter Wernick and Winnie Winston, played with Jerry Garcia in bluegrass and jug bands. Senauke was excited by the move to electric was natural and right on time. He felt that the band was his voice at that moment.
It was not a great view of the Dead, seeing the backs of their heads, from above. They were right below, and once Jerry Garcia turned around and looked up and they could see his muttonchops as he bobbed and swayed. But it was hard to be at the every edge of the roof. Gottesman was a little afraid of heights and stood back. Obenzinger was also afraid of heights. He worried that he would be swept away in the torrent of sound and simply float off the edge of the roof – and hang in the air for a split second like the Coyote tricked by the Roadrunner, then drop down headfirst into Mickey Hart’s drum set. Obenzinger was actually afraid of himself, not heights.
Bob Feldman only listened to the Grateful Dead for a few minutes, from the back of the audience on College Walk, and then continued walking to post leaflets for an upcoming Strike Committee event. He suspected that inviting the Dead to campus was a way of “cooling people down” after they had become enraged by the police invasion, encouraging a less confrontational, more “turn on drop out” liberal white youth response. Feldman thought it could have been an attempt to coopt the developing revolutionary student trend.
Beverley Kane had been busy mimeographing flyers on a Gestetner, helping to publicize the event. She thought the event was terrific, except her mom was visiting and she winced when students yelled, “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!” Kane had little sleep, kept awake with joints and cigarettes, working with the Strike treasurer, who later turned out to be a government agent. Thulani Davis was too busy, didn’t pay attention to the concert. Kathie Knowles was too shattered by the explosion of events during the occupation and bust to pay attention. Besides, she was a Carter Family girl, and then there was Janis and Odetta. Knowles felt that boys with electric noise boxes were just beyond her ability to comprehend. Paul Auster didn’t pay much attention either. He could tell they were electric, and he was so angry at America he thought electric was a betrayal.
Tom Hurwitz had already seen the Grateful Dead at the Panhandle in San Francisco, among other places. He felt that they were, like Country Joe and the Fish, a movement house band, that they were naturally part of the revolution. Susan Brown, his girlfriend, danced. Hurwitz was stoned and bopped his head to “Morning Dew.” But there was more happening than the Dead. By the time the Dead played for the strikers, Harlem had marched on Columbia; the peace marchers had ascended from Central Park in the tens of thousands; the neighborhood, even buses, stopped and people would feed and clothe the young revolutionaries. What looked like the entire campus, all of intellectual New York (or at least all that mattered), students from everywhere at home and abroad, in Paris and Berkeley, everyone had rallied to their side. “That was the important stuff,” he said.
Rock stars didn’t seem all that important to the young revolutionaries, at least as “stars,” according to Hurwitz. In the folk scene in New York, they would all bring their banjos or guitars to concerts and played outside, afterwards. Sometimes, they had wanted to hear their contemporaries more than the headliner. Tom Hurwitz had played with Bob Dylan in Washington Square one Sunday - and that was normal. Turn a corner and there was Jack Elliot, or Gary Davis, or Allen Ginsberg. Folk singers sang at their marches. Even stars like Joan Baez or Judy Collins could be marching next to any of them. Rock bands were in their graduating classes. The performers who Tom Hurwitz cared about came out of the ranks of the movement and returned to them; the stars were contiguous with the movement. To Hurwitz, and to many others, the spirit at Columbia was one of a democracy so deep that it challenged the new pop stardom, along with the local power structure. If the Rolling Stones had performed for them, they probably would not have been more impressed, Hurwitz believed. “Of course the Dead would play for us,” he thought. Only years later did he realize that he had taken the Dead for granted, that he had assumed that everyone was with them, including the Dead. “That was the arrogance of revolution,” he would realize.
Woody Lewis grooved to the Music, swaying ecstatically, his substantial Afro bobbing, sunglasses tilting down his nose, smiling with a cigarette dangling goofily from his lips, the fringes of his buckskin jacket dancing wildly to “The Other One” and “Cryptical.” Earlier he had leaned against a tree, brushing up against moist tar that left a permanent stain on his buckskin, but that didn’t matter. He was in a festive mood that day and he didn’t mind. Music was the most important part of his life – he played in a rock band and just a little while later he would fill in on the drums for Jimi Hendrix. At that time the Dead unleashed a sense of freedom at a time of tension. In his case, that freedom was enhanced by mescaline.
Only a few other black students were in the crowd. There was a gulf between the white and Black students of Hamilton Hall. The Black students occupied Hamilton by themselves, a liberating act of Black Power; they felt the SDS crowd wasn’t serious, were only out to party, when they were risking their lives in a concerted political effort that united Black students from conservatives to Marxists. Woody Lewis had been in Hamilton, but he left to play a gig the night before the assault. He might have chosen to return to another building, to be with his SDS friends, a decision that might have cost him dearly. As the only Black student in Low or Math he would have been much more of a target of the cops.
Even before the occupation and the bust in Hamilton he had a sense of survivor’s guilt. Campus cops didn’t harass him as much as the other Black students. He was a New Yorker, went to Stuyvesant, and knew all the codes. He wasn’t oblivious to the day-to-day ugliness, of course, and Lewis used Music to counteract fear and alienation. As the Dead played, several of the Black boys from the neighborhood, nine or ten years old, danced and goofed, mocking the way the white college kids twisted and bopped, their lack of cool. Some of the kids had gone into one of the buildings before the bust, and the cops pulled them out first, beating them for being there. Woody Lewis grinned at the little kids, his head swiveling back and forth, off into a zone of Grateful Dead euphoria. The kids still wanted to laugh, and so did he.
Later there would be other performers who would come to the campus, often smuggled through police lines with fake student IDs, Alan Ginsberg, Jerry Jeff Walker, the New Lost City Ramblers, the Pennywhistlers, Barbara Dane, Phil Ochs, many others. Steve Goldfield and the head of logistics for the Strike met with the manager of the Jefferson Airplane, but nothing came of it. Around a week after the Dead, Goldfield went to see Jimi Hendrix play at a large cavernous club in the Village after he did a big concert at Fillmore East. The owner donated the receipts to the Strike. First B. B. King played, then Jimi Hendrix came in late, at two in the morning, and played until four. Beverley Kane wanted to see Jimi Hendrix desperately, and she had a front row seat, but she dropped to sleep almost immediately. She had been up for three days straight, mimeographing and doing the other AA (Administrative Assistant) tasks that fell to “chicks” at that time, working just as she did when the Dead played, doing publicity. She was exhausted, though, and Hendrix came on so late that she slept soundly through his entire set minus a few riffs. After the gig, well after four in the morning, she stood groggily between two front row chairs when she felt someone gently tap her shoulder and say softly, “Excuse me.” It was Jimi.
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