Just to assure libraryman's mother that I have not ping-ponged wildly from the Grateful Dead to Richard III (well, I have but not irretrievably)--

Over the weekend, whilst reading about Richard (and more on that in a minute!) I got thinking about his supposed crimes and the glossed-over ones committed by Henry VII to shore up his own rule.

And I got thinking about crimes that are taken seriously, or possibly overly-seriously. And that led me right back to the famous bust at 710 Ashbury Street in 1967.

710 Ashbury was the "Grateful Dead house," where the band and a number of its friends and family lived at the time. As you can imagine, there was a certain amount of, ahem, drug activity going on. And the San Francisco police were in a mood to make some high-profile busts. So they made a deal with this guy who was part of the Merry Prankster scene, who they had on child molesting charges, and offered to give him a break on that if he helped them with some pot busts.

Let me repeat that: the police made a deal with a child molester to bust a few potheads.

Got that? Thinking about who you would prefer to live next door to? Me too, and I don't even have children!

So the guy dropped in, made sure there was in fact dope in the house, waited until Jerry and Mountain Girl left (he had a crush on Mountain Girl--as far as I can tell everyone did) and then the police arrived and arrested everyone present. This would not be the last time Pigpen was arrested because someone else was holding (Pigpen wasn't a pot smoker, nor at the time was Weir) and apparently he was pretty pissed about it.

When Jerry and Mountain Girl got home the police were still there, but they were rescued by the neighbour across the street who called to them to come over to her place. Jerry and Mountain Girl didn't go into their house and weren't arrested. The neighbour, apparently, had reasons of her own for looking out for the folks across the street: apparently she had spent the previous couple of weeks so sick she couldn't get out of bed, and the "Dead family" had been looking after her. According to Dennis McNally's book, they had a signup sheet and everything, with all the chores listed, from meals to bedpans, to make sure nothing got missed. Pigpen used to come by last thing in the evening to say goodnight and switch off the lights.

Anyone out there want to change their votes regarding who you would rather have living next door? Me, neither.

What was funny was, the police apparently missed a big block of Acapulco Gold sitting in a cupboard in the kitchen. In the end the smokers got fined a couple of hundred dollars each, and Weir and Pigpen got fined a hundred dollars just for being there, and I have no idea what became of the child molester although I hope whatever it was, it was what he deserved.

Anyway. Speaking of crimes that may be taken more or less seriously depending on the times.

Right--Richard again. I spent the weekend reading Richard III by Paul Murray Kendall. I'm nowhere near through with it (just flipping between the text and the end notes can slow you down considerably) but I have a few comments.

I remembered this book as being pretty thoroughly pro-Richard, so I was a little surprised in reading The Murders Of Richard III to find some of Peters' Ricardians referring to Kendall almost as bitterly as they do the old anti-Richard historians who were ridiculously influenced by Shakespeare and the tame Tudor historians.

Well, I get it now.

( And so will you! )

And now, since I've been working on this endless entry since early this morning, I think I'll let it go for now.

But! Expect more when I finished the Kendall book. It's a good book, really it is. It just seems like he has moments where he refuses to see what conclusion he is actually drawing, or he goes a little too far in interpreting evidence in an anti-Richard way, to the point where it stops making sense. (I suppose he doesn't want to be identified with the more extreme pro-Ricardians any more than with the extreme "he was an evil hunchback" gang.)

And also when The Sunne In Splendour arrives at my local library!