Gratefully After Dark: Hugh and the Bear, 1969

Shel’s close to Hugh Hefner. One day he asks if the Grateful Dead want to be on Playboy After Dark, Hefner’s TV show. We get the impression that Hef is trying to be part of the swinging sixties. Hippies! Free love! Mind-bending drugs! Even though he doesn’t get out of the Playboy Mansion too much, he knows that something is going on out there and he wants to be ‘with it.’ and what could be more with it than a psychedelic hippie band from San Francisco. Now, that’s swinging! Jerry’s for it totally: ‘What a goof! And a great way to shock people. So difficult to do these days, no?’

It’s shot at a sound stage in West Hollywood. This is our first encounter with any kind of network television (CBS) and Owsley, now affectionately known to one and all as ‘Bear,’ is really keyed up. This is his main chance to show the world the great Owsley’s contribution to modern audiophonics. Now they’ll see! The show could be a milestone in broadcasting but-the ignorant fools!-they won’t let him touch anything. They just want him to set it up and then they’ll mike it and they’ll do all that other, thank you. That’s the way it is, by law you know, union regulations.

He can’t get his way with the sound and he’s really pissed off. Owsley Stanley, regulated to the deep recesses of the studio! I’ll show them! Bear has his way with dealing with petty functionaries. He hit this big old coffee urn with an industrial dose of liquid acid and waits.

It’s a random sampling because you don’t know who’s going to have coffee out of that urn and who isn’t. But apparently before dinner everybody has at least one cup, which is quite enough. The ones that have a good time behind it never leave; the ones that leave never come back.

The LSD effect is soon all to apparent because Playboy After Dark is a very stiff-looking show. Hef walking around in his velvet smoking jacket sucking on his pipe like some bad actor in a faustian Brit upper-class drawing-room comedy. It’s all goofily phonied up. The cheesy set is meant to look like a Chicago lakefront penthouse full of suave rich guys and beautiful women of easy virtue. Everyone’s deperately trying to make it look like there’s a real fun cocktail party going on. Some swingers come by to check out the evening’s entertainment at Hef’s place. And who should drop by but the Grateful Dead (just like they do every Thursday).

The cast consists of stacked babes in evening dress. Upwardly mobile, secretarial-type women with the bouffant hair and big tits escorted by smooth, soigne, model-type guys in tuxedos posing, smoking cigarettes, and fingering their cocktail glasses as if they are little glass zebras. A tacky American middle-class diorama with uptight people in it! Everybody here is fully versed in the Playboy philosophy (which differs from Existentialism in important ways that, uh, I don’t think I’ll go into right here). Anyway, the show is all about achieving the ultimate after-shave attitude. Bunnies in their bunny outfits are running around with trays of hors d’oeuvres. The extras affect nonchalance, affluence, and sophistication. And in the middle of this robatic scenario one of the bunnies begins to strip (too many cups of coffee!). It’s a perfectly acceptable response to several hundred mikes of Owsley LSD. Hefner is used to seeing naked women too, but only under clinically controlled conditions. He sees his suave-to-the-max trip beginning to crumble and he freaks.

‘Shel! Shel!’ Hefner is shouting. ‘What’s going on? This isn’t in the script!’ Shel soon figures out what’s happening (Shel is hip), and calms Hef down: ‘It’s all part of the effect the Grateful Dead have on people. This is that Hippie Thing I told you about.’

Hef nods knowingly. ‘Oh well, if it’s all part of the, uh, psychedelic thing, that’s okay. Really neat.’

One of Shel’s jobs is to make sure that no one doses Hugh Hefner, which Owsley is trying like crazy to do. But Hefner only drinks Coca-Colas, sealed Coca-Colas (it’s in his contract). He does not want to take LSD-he’s paranoid as hell about the stuff. The Coca-Cola bottle-opening ritual is as elaborate as any at the Sultan’s court. Hefner’s valet sits on the royal stash of Coca-Cola bottles like a hen on eggs. When Hef wants a Coke, Shel goes over to the valet, who opens one and gives it to Shel, who hands it to Hef.

People are falling apart and leaving, right and left, saying, ‘I don’t feel well. I think Im got a fever, I gotta go home.’ You can see acid beaming out of people’s faces: the glow, the big, dialated pupils. Usually Hef’s swinging is a low hum rather than anything resembling an actual party, but by now people are seriously getting down.

Meanwhile, George, the cameraman on the boom, has stopped filming the show. He can’t take his camera off the babe. She’s unhooked her bra and she’s dancing loosely and seductively, and then starts to lift up her shirt. George’s eyes are wide open, as big as saucers, and he’s got a huge grin on his face. His boom has turned into a dinosaur’s neck that he’s riding across the set. He’s shooting overhead shots, extreme close-ups down girls’ blouses. It’s all to bizare. He’s stripped down to the waist and his headset’s all askew and finally the director comes out of the control room and shouts at him: ‘Put your headset on!’ But how absurd! Why should he? He’s having the time of his life, oblivious to the chorus of voices yelling at him; ‘George, watch it! What are you doing? Come on down from there!’

‘No I ain’t coming down.’ He’s right over the girl who’s undressing. You can see on the tape where she is getting crazy and now she has all of her clothes off and George up on the boom has positioned himself right above her and will not get his camera off her. You can see it start to happen on the tape where they can’t edit her out completely. For a change, some really crazy stuff gets on the show.

They’re now down to two cameramen. They have to string this show together out of bits and pieces. At this point they are so short-handed (and the soundman is dosed beyond all recall) that they have to recruit Owsley-which is just what Owsley wants.

Then we come to the interview with Garcia. Garcia is by now high, too, because-that’s right!-he drank a lot of coffee. You can tell it is going to pieces and Hugh Hefner is watching Jerry like an entomologist who has just spied a new species of dragonfly. Jerry’s sitting opposite him looking real wierd in a Guatemalan poncho-brilliant, psychedelic colors that vibrate right off the screen-and he’s just grown his beard, big muttonchops, and his hair is tied in ponytails. Hefner, sucking thoughtfully on his pipe, asks Jerry a perfectly ordinary question like ‘So where do you guys see yourselves going from here?’ But instead of the usual pitch (‘We’re doing two weeks at the Rally Room in Lake Tahoe and then on to the EZ-Boy Convention in Omaha’), Jerry gives him a long and convoluted psychedelic rap.

‘See, man, I don’t know where we’re going any more than you do, man. It’s like we’re not going anywhere, so much as we’re closing the circle…the ourobouros, dig? The snake that eats its own tail, y’know?’

Hef’s going along with it, even though he doesn’t understand a single word Garcia’s saying. Not even a hippie could figure it out, and here’s Mr. Leisure Wear trying to reconfigure his face into the ‘Hmmmmmmmmm, how interesting!’ expression but it just won’t go. He manages to get out a panicked ‘Yes, oh, I see-why don’t you play us a few songs?’ The people are clapping, and Garcia ambles over to the rest of the band and picks up his guitar, straps it on.

The Dead do a beautiful ‘Mountains of the Moon’ with Tom Constanten on the harpsichord. They play for almost an hour. We’ve got the crew and the cast so high that nobody stops us.

Shel pretends to be very mad at us: ‘Okay, who did this?’ Privately, he’s thrilled. Playboy After Dark is generally a stiff, weird-looking affair, like a cocktail party for the recently deceased. Tonight everybody’s telling us this is the closest thing to a party Hugh Hefner’s ever had.”

Rock Scully