Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out

I’d never touch anything they gave me. I’d never hug them. Their ladies used to want to kiss me because they had first put a blotter of acid in their mouths. I used to say, “Kiss the back of my hair if you want.” It became a big running thing. It got to the point that whenever I brought food from home, I would put wax paper around it and seal it with tape. So they couldn’t dose anything.

On the job, somebody had to be in control, and I decided that it should be me. In that era, I was going through my 7-Up and Coca-Cola phase, where I would be drinking from a can of soda all day long. What I would do in the dressing room at Fillmore West was take garbage bags of ice and fill them up with cans of 7-Up and Coke.

One night they decided to go for it. What they did, unbeknownst to me, was warn all their people, “Don’t touch the soda cans in our dressing room.” Then they took hypodermic needles and shot acid through the top of every soda can.

I went through the dressing room, took a can of 7-Up and drank it. Twenty minutes later, snap! I started feeling weird. I looked in the mirror and all I saw was green and yellow and blue. I looked backstage and I saw Mickey Hart. Mickey was the one.…He was thrilled and I could have killed him. “You sonofabitch,” I said. And he said, “We’re going on, Bill. You want to play?” I said, “Sure.” I was on stage for four hours. Playing the gong.

Excerpted from Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out, by Bill Graham with Robert Greenfield, © 2004. Reprinted with permission from Da Capo Press.