Manager of the Grateful Dead, father of Courtney Love, the hallucinated Hank Harrison is dead

American journalist and author Hank Harrison managed the Grateful Dead, one of the most stoned bands of all time, writes books about them, as well as about Kurt Cobain, whose death he finds suspicious . Suffice to say that the history of the parent of Courtney Love with music and drugs is colossal. We found his trace to evoke the demons of the past.

Through a Facebook post written on the night of Sunday to Monday January 24, 2022, his wife Catriona Watson announced his death at the age of 81, “peacefully in her sleep”.

Article from Tsugi 142: music and drugs (July-August 2021), still available to order online

You can put away your threadbare Guns N’ Roses and Metallica t-shirts today. If you look at “trendy” fashion sites, two groups take the lion's share of adorning cotton tops: the Grateful Dead and Nirvana. A priori, not much connects the flagship group of the psyche era from Palo Alto and the antiheroes of the Seattle grunge movement. Kurt Cobain even sported a t-shirt that read "Kill The Grateful Dead." Except that these groups have had leaders whose veins have absorbed a lot of heroin, as well as one man in common: Hank Harrison. Controversial figure, the publisher passionate about Celtic and Irish history, Neolithic archaeology, stellar mounds or even archaic astronomy briefly managed the Grateful Dead when it was called The Warlocks. He drew several books full of interviews and anecdotes about them in the 1970s and 1980s. The Californian is also the father of Courtney Love, born in 1964. Now 82 years old and living in Sacramento, Hank claims, in his last self-published book Love Kills: The Assassination Of Kurt Cobain (2017), as he already mentioned in the much maligned documentary Kurt & Courtney (1998), that the singer of Nirvana did not commit suicide. “I spoke to members of the US underground scene from several cities, explains Hank, who had sent me emails or called. I have also been in contact with people who work in the police. Too many things don't fit. »

Not tender with his daughter, to whom he no longer speaks, Hank has often portrayed Hole's singer in the press as an aggressive and diabolical junkie. But he also recognizes his talent as a poet. "People are mad at me because I criticize my child," he admits. But I'm just saying what I saw. She can be really mean. She lacks compassion. I saw her do it with Kat Bjelland from Babes In Toyland, who she had a band with and stole her “kinderwhore” look from. I ran into Courtney with a lot of boyfriends and girlfriends. But she never let me see Kurt, because she thought I was after her money. She also wouldn't let me near my granddaughter, Frances Bean. And for that, I blame him. But whatever people say, I love my daughter and I have respect for her.”

The estrangement between father and daughter goes back a long way. In several interviews, Courtney has recounted hearing that her father gave her LSD when she was 4 years old in an attempt to develop her imagination. Hank, who has always denied this scary episode, lost custody of his child when this example was pinned down by Linda Carroll, Courtney's mother, during her divorce from Harrison.

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Janis Joplin as the perfect housewife

To better understand these rumours, you have to go back to the San Francisco of the early 1960s where Hank lived, then a student in psychology and anthropology, and more precisely in the Haight-Ashbury district. This corner of the city of forty-two hills sees evolving, in the wake of the beatniks, a generation ready to experiment with everything: LSD, community life, free sexuality, esotericism, lysergic poetry, happenings. The soundtrack to this unbridled quest for utopia? Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Hank remembers those years like this: “What they say about the freedom of that time is not a cliché. It was really a time when everything seemed possible, when you could achieve all your dreams. »

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Hank finds himself at the heart of the counter-cultural revolution. He smokes joints in the car or in bacchanals in the apartment with Neal Cassady, the one who inspired Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. “Brilliant minds to whom we were just 'baby beatniks',” he recalls. One of her current best friends is Janis Joplin. “He was a great person you could talk to for hours. On stage, she was a diva, but in reality, she did the dishes and made the coffee, in a very normal way. She always carried a small suitcase with her. She gave it to me and I treasure it, with her letters and contracts inside. I am a living museum. I also keep letters from Kurt and Courtney. Hank, who donated his Grateful Dead records to the University of California, Santa Cruz, also counted Charles Manson's girlfriend who hung out at some parties among his friends at the time. “We said he was completely crazy. Fortunately, I never met him. »

Personal chemist

But the real star of parties in the sixties was LSD. As the Grateful Dead's first manager and school buddy and then roommate of Phil Lesh (the band's bassist and Courtney's unofficial godfather), Hank shared quite a few packets of small lysergic acid cubes with the early Dead. . The group led by Jerry Garcia – one of the best guitarists in the world despite a fingertip missing following an ax accident in childhood – was known for its messianic and experimental concerts which could last more than three hours. These lives were tracked by the authorities as benchmarks for dealers. A stubborn rumor also wanted that the group had the habit of drugging those they met without their knowledge, to better open their chakras.

But Hank never thought the band owed its genius to substances. He deciphers: “Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the group's personal “chemist” who made LSD in his lab and was also his sound engineer, was both an idiot with whom I was never friends, but also a clever because he was trying to take control of the group by reinventing its storytelling. He had every interest in making musicians believe that their inspiration came from trips to have power over them. But the Dead was above all talent, an explosive chemistry between each of its members and a lot of work. They were naturally more gifted. And their sound owes more to jazz, Miles Davis and r'n'b than acid. »

Sniffing the ashes of Notre-Dame?

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In the mid-1960s, Hank founded one of the very first LSD Rescue Centers to inform people of the risks inherent in this molecule. “We weren’t talking about overdoses or the destructive aspect of drugs. In the Bay Area, LSD was seen as a cure for alcoholism, depression and a whole host of other problems, in a therapeutic approach. That was the big concern. Today, LSD is experiencing a revival, especially among artists and rappers, exemplified by a Netflix documentary called Have A Good Trip. In the sixties, and the famous Acid Tests evenings organized by Ken Kesey, to take it was either to have the impression of living in a few hours the equivalent of four years in art school, or to find oneself in the grip of terrifying hallucinations. For Hank, taking LSD was above all like an abyssal metaphysical experience: "You had to stay at home to relax, because for the first time in your life, you found yourself truly alone with full awareness of nothingness, of emptiness. , a total white. »

Since then, Hank is said to have intervened in lawsuits to discuss the harmful effects of hard drugs, and to have exchanged on the subject in emails with ex-president Clinton. He admits that it's a small miracle, with everything going around in the days of the Dead, that he's still alive, talking to us for over an hour. “It’s due, I think, to continuing to write. I also exercise, I eat natural foods, I keep myself in shape. I also try not to watch TV too much, but rather out the window. The street, behind the glass, is still there. It does not disappear, unlike many other things. But if you want to live old, I advise you above all to go to Notre-Dame and eat some ashes. It's called alchemy. It may sound crazy, but some people think that by eating or drinking certain things, by exposing yourself to the sun for a certain time or by sleeping for a certain number of hours, you live a long time. This is what a lot of people have done to get through several decades. We will try to follow the advice.