San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Brian Rohan: Attorney for bands like Grateful Dead
The driveway of attorney Brian Rohan’s Larkspur home was often decorated with the psychedelic school bus belonging to Ken Kesey, in the mid1960s. “Furthur,” as the bus was notoriously named, was the perfect billboard for the type of law Rohan practiced — “dope law,” as he called it.
And there was plenty of demand for his services. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters who lived with Rohan during Kesey’s infamous 1965 trial for possession of marijuana; Jerry Garcia, who conveniently lived a mile away; the Beat bus driver Neal Cassady; and the chemist Owsley Stanley were all among his clients.
As the ’60s unfolded, Rohan was so connected and counted upon that his name was on the lease for one of the acid tests at the Fillmore Auditorium. Rohan died Tuesday, March 23, at his home, in a different neighborhood of Larkspur. He was 84 and died in his sleep, after living with cancer for six years, said his daughter, Kathleen Jolson of Nicasio.
“He worked until the last day of his life, clutching his phone in one hand and his iPad in the other,” Jolson said. “He fought for his clients, he fought for his friends, and he fought for what he thought was right.”
The fight started when he joined the criminal defense firm of the notoriously pugilistic Vincent Hallinan and escalated when he coformed the HaightAshbury Legal Organization during the Summer of Love, setting up a table in the Grateful Dead house on Ashbury Street to service livein and walkin clients.
Later, Rohan’s fighting spirit became legend when he punched powerful record producer David Geffen at Clive Davis’ 1977 Grammy Awards party, an act that earned the admiration of Chronicle columnist Herb Caen.
“Brian Rohan, the feisty San Francisco attorney ... has been stewing for sometime because Geffen refuses to return his phone calls and besides that ‘has stepped on my clients’ ... so Rohan grabbed him by his handstitched lapels, picked him up and belted him,” wrote Caen, “an act applauded by Jann Wenner, Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan’s lawyer who said ‘I wish I’d done that.’ ”
It is one in a long line of literary credits for the outrageous and charismatic Rohan. His legal heroics are sprinkled throughout Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric KoolAid Acid Test” and earned coverage in David Talbot’s “Season of the Witch,” Joel Selvin’s “Summer of Love” and Dennis McNally’s “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead.”
“A feisty Irish drinker, he was no hippie, but his lifelong hatred of bullies made him a good attorney,” McNally wrote, “and he was in the right place having joined the San Francisco firm of the legendary socialist, atheist, and allround noble rabblerouser Vincent Hallinan.” Brian Donald Rohan was born July 24, 1936, in Tacoma, Wash., where he grew up. At Stadium High School he was on the swim team, but his outstanding activity was debate. He also cochaired the Senior Talent Show, a precursor of his career.
After graduating in 1954, he went to Stanford University, where he got into his first tangle with authority when he was suspended for allowing some friend on the football team to copy his answers on an exam.
He was exiled to the University of Oregon, which turned out to be a fortuitous punishment because it was where he met Barbara Papulski, introduced by a mutual friend at an Oregon Ducks basketball game. “He was wearing hornrimmed glasses and stuffing popcorn in his face from a huge bag,” she said. “It made me laugh. He had a wicked sense of humor and kept me laughing for over 60 years.”
The two married in 1959, and even after their divorce eight years later they stayed close and raised two children.
Rohan never remarried, but he had two more sons in subsequent relationships.
Rohan was later readmitted to Stanford, and after graduating he moved on directly to UC Hastings College of Law, where he was in the same class as Patrick Hallinan, Vincent’s son.
After passing the California bar exam, Rohan was invited to join the Hallinan firm, in 1963. At the firm he met Michael Stephanian, with whom he would later split off to form their own firm.
Rohan and Stephanian liked to take a lunchtime drive to West Portal Joe’s for hamburgers, a route that took them through HaightAshbury, which intrigued Rohan.
“My father grew up very straitlaced, and he was fascinated by what he saw in the Haight,” Jolson said. “He was looking for somebody to help, and he saw that nobody was there to protect the kids flocking to San Francisco.”
His greatest legal maneuver was getting Kesey, already famous for writing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” out of a jam that could have sent him away to prison for a long stay. Two felony charges for marijuana possession and one charge of international flight to Mexico were “magically reduced to six months on a county work farm,” said McNally, the official historian of the Grateful Dead.
It was Kesey’s recommendation that brought Rohan to the attention of the Grateful Dead.
“He wasn’t a business attorney, but they trusted him, and that was always the thing with the Dead,” McNally said.
It started with the Grateful Dead’s first album contract, which Rohan negotiated with Warner Bros. in 1966.
After the Human BeIn, in January 1967, the police swept down Haight Street and made around 100 arrests on charges of loitering and “being hippies,” McNally said. Rohan and Stephanian threatened to tie up the courts forever with this and got it brought down to one trial, which they won. All the other charges were dismissed. They then got the members of the Dead off when police busted the band’s house on Ashbury Street, one of the most widely publicized arrests during the Summer of Love. Charges were dropped, and Rohan became part of the Dead family.
He also represented Jefferson Airplane, Santana and Janis Joplin and was a partner with Bill Graham in Fillmore Records and San Francisco Records, two shortlived labels.
“Brian Rohan was the smartest guy in the world and invented music representation for the San Francisco Sound,” Stephanian said. “He had extreme loyalty to his clients and would not allow one of them to be hurt by anybody. In a Shakespearean sense he had ‘a slight dram of evil.’ ”
But his reach went beyond San Francisco. Rohan got Kris Kristofferson his first record deal. He also represented Aerosmith and Boston, two of the biggestselling acts of the 1970s and ’80s.
After Rohan’s divorce, he bought an old church on Belvedere Street in the Upper Haight and moved in, taking on Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart as tenants. Also roadies and hangerson. He financially supported musicians and their children, if things went south.
Neil Hallinan, a thirdgeneration defense attorney, keeps a picture of Rohan on his office, along with his father and grandfather.
“Brian was like a dad to me, a constant loving, loyal figure in my life,” Neil Hallinan said. “He was loud, foulmouthed and fun, and you knew he would lay down on the tracks for you if you needed it.”
Every morning between 6 and 7, he called Selvin to see what the music industry news was. The last time they talked, Selvin said Rohan told him he was “improving.” He died the next morning.
Survivors include his exwife, Barbara Rohan; daughter Kathleen Jolson of Nicasio; sons Brian Rohan Jr. of San Anselmo, Chris Ray Rohan of Santa Rosa and Michael Lonan of Yuba City; and three grandchildren.