A Long Strange Trip (11 page)

Besides, they were busy. Hunter, Nelson, and Legate, for instance, had briefly settled in Los Angeles, where they were studying Scientology, looking for what they later described as science-fiction magical powers. For some time they had been experimenting with Legate’s e-meter, a primitive type of lie detector, and it had been fascinating to monitor their own inhibitions and limits. Down at Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles, complete with security checks and rules about things like pot smoking, the game grew less interesting to everyone. As Legate said, “I didn’t feel myself accountable to them, and walked away.” Hunter was also sampling various other spiritual practices, including Subud, a neo-yogic form of meditation with modern origins in Java, and the Gurdjieff Fellowship, essentially looking for a nonchemical version of what he’d found in the V.A. Hospital drug tests. He got an invitation to join the jug band from Garcia, but he decided that he couldn’t play jug well. Truth be told, he was still nursing something of a grudge over his ouster from the Black Mountain Boys—grudge-holding being one of his obdurate character traits— and so he declined. Instead, he grew deeply involved with amphetamines and prose word-painting, trying to create an Ur-language, a language beyond language.

Lesh, too, disdained the Beatles for lacking in intellectual substance. Living in San Francisco and driving his mail truck, he joined his Berio classmate Steve Reich and worked on a hip project, Event III, which brought together their music, the light projections of artist Elias Romero, and the theater of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The evening was a fundraising benefit for the civil rights activists then seeking to integrate the workforce of the Sheraton Hotel, a protest that came to involve two major sit-ins, hundreds of arrests, and the hotel’s complete capitulation. Reich was part of a number of avant-garde collaborations at this time, including the Tape Music Center, founded by Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick, located first at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, then at a site on Divisadero Street, and later at Mills College. The center allowed electronic composers to work in an open, nonacademic atmosphere, and one of its programs might include a reading by Beat poet Michael McClure, a performance by the Mime Troupe, and tape music. For Event III, the musicians wore white sweaters on which their age appeared in numbers. Lesh played a bit of trumpet, and the music was a combination of tape and live performance, as well as a section for multiple pianos. They were followed by the Mime Troupe. Founded by R. G. “Ronnie” Davis, the troupe was highly political theater out to challenge the power structure, but it was saved from extremist tedium by its sense of humor. A collection, in one member’s words, of “dockworkers, college students, socialist organizers, market analysts, musicians, opera singers, vegetarians, drug addicts, ballet dancers, criminals, and bona fide eccentrics . . . It was the troupe’s expectation that America should live up to her promises and play by her stated rules—and we intended to provoke her until she did.” It would have a considerable impact on San Francisco, although at Event III, when Davis took questions from the audience, Reich and Lesh found them so obtuse that they felt the need to repeat their performance, and did so.

Working with Reich had been stimulating, and it inspired Lesh’s last Komposition, a part of the “New Music” series held late in May at the Capp Street performance space in San Francisco. Lesh would dismiss his piece, “6 7/8 for Bernardo Moreno,” as Gebrauchsmusik, or filler, something he’d done only because not participating was unthinkable. He described it as a questing piano in the midst of a cosmic background of strings. Zen-like and relatively simple, it was performed by a group that included Reich, with the piano played by Tom Constanten, who thought it resembled middle Stockhausen, a “Zeitmasse” or “Time Measures” type of piece in twelve-tone serial technique. What was most amusing for T.C. was that during the performance, thumps from the judo classes upstairs intruded, and T.C. was able to find a pattern in the score that resembled the thumps, blending them nicely. The same intersection of music and reality was repeated when car sounds outside faded into the piece. It seemed to T.C. a most synchronous evening, perhaps because the day before, he and Phil had taken LSD for the first time, spending the night listening to their beloved Mahler’s complete symphonies with extremely fresh ears. For Lesh, it was his father’s teasing remark that absolutely made his evening at the New Music event. “Hat size, huh? For a pinhead? 6 7/8 is pretty small.” Lesh later reflected, “I don’t think I ever loved him more.”

As the summer of 1964 came in, Garcia confronted his love affair with bluegrass. He’d gotten exceptionally good as a player. Moreover, the first nonsouthern, nonrural, “citybilly” picker, Bill “Brad” Keith, had already passed through Bill Monroe’s band, so the idea of an outsider “making it” in bluegrass no longer seemed ridiculous. In March, the Black Mountain Boys had played the Tangent with Jerry Kaukonen opening, and one of their best tunes was Keith’s “Devil’s Dream.” Although the Black Mountain Boys were inclined to play too fast, much of their show was technically excellent. Garcia had a wonderful ear and great sensitivity to what others were playing, although at times he was perhaps a bit too pyrotechnical and overconfident in his abilities. In May they played at the San Francisco State Folk Festival, meeting two Ozark pickers then living in Stockton, Vern Williams and Ray Park. Vern would recall Garcia as a “damn good banjo picker,” although he did think it strange for a “Mexican” to play bluegrass. The problem was, there was no significant audience for bluegrass in the Bay Area, and even when bodies filled a room, it was not a sophisticated group of patrons. There weren’t enough high-caliber musicians to go around, and there certainly wasn’t enough money to be made to support Sara and Heather. If he was going to be serious about it as a career, he’d have to consider leaving San Francisco. First, though, he had to investigate the home of the art form, the American South.

His friend Sandy Rothman had spent the previous summer around the Valhalla of bluegrass, Bill Monroe’s “Bean Blossom” facility, and was looking for a companion to accompany his return, so Garcia had a travel partner. Sandy was four years younger than Jerry, a Berkeley kid who’d played guitar since the age of eleven, and who’d heard the Redwood Canyon Ramblers in junior high school. When Eric Thompson had gone off to the East Coast late in 1963, Sandy had replaced him in the Black Mountain Boys. As his and Sandy’s departure approached, Garcia turned over the bulk of his students to Bob Weir, who would enjoy the challenge of teaching young kids with small hands. Early in May, Garcia and Rothman bought a bunch of blank seven-inch tapes for Jerry’s Wollensak recorder, climbed into Garcia’s car, and hit the road.

The summer of 1964 was a hell of a time for a Jew and a “Mexican” driving a car with California plates to go into the deep South. It was the Freedom Summer, and the South was writhing with change—and danger. A month after Jerry and Sandy passed through the region, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—would vanish near Meridian, Mississippi. Their bodies would be found in August. For reporters and other visiting outsiders, the car of choice that season was the biggest, heaviest vehicle possible, with windows and doors controlled from the driver’s seat, and that meant a Chrysler Imperial. Jerry’s ’61 Corvair wasn’t remotely in that league. Still, he shaved his goatee and cut his hair short, and in his new windbreaker he looked, Sara thought, like a gas station attendant. He and Sandy managed to traverse the South without overt incident, but Jerry would remember it as “creepy,” based on the reactions they got to their license plates and “foreign-sounding” names. His first sight of “colored” drinking fountains and bathrooms was shocking, and grew no easier with repetition. He realized he was naive in his San Francisco tolerance, and the South’s legacy of bigotry and fear overwhelmed him. Garcia and Rothman’s timing was remarkable, for they passed through the South at a pivotal time in American political history, as a southern president directed the passage of the Civil Rights Act in May and then listened to socialist Michael Harrington and ramrodded the Economic Opportunity Act through Congress in August, creating what he called the Great Society, the apotheosis of American liberalism.

More concerned with music, Garcia and Rothman went first to Los Angeles, where they saw Hunter and David Nelson, and then met up with their friends the Kentucky Colonels, the bluegrass band that featured Clarence White. They crossed the country together in a small caravan, and their first memorable stop was a trailer park near St. Louis, where they met an old friend of the Colonels named Slim, a big handsome hill-billy of French Canadian descent, the king of the trailer park, and the kind of character one might find in a book half
On the Road
and half
The
Grapes of Wrath.
They spent the night picking and singing in a Cajun-like party atmosphere, and then Jerry and Sandy broke off and headed for their first stop, Bloomington, Indiana, home of Neil Rosenberg, the original banjo player of the Redwood Canyon Ramblers and now a graduate student in folklore at Indiana University, and his wife, Ann.

After a few days they decided to give the Rosenbergs a break and took off for Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida, the current duty station of Neil’s friend Scott Hambly, also of the Redwood Canyon Ramblers. Scott was impressed with Garcia, who was by then “gobbling up” every bluegrass banjo lick possible, “boiling away” as he spent four to five hours a day practicing alone, analyzing and recasting finger positions with a “tremendous power of attention.” After that, the three of them would play for four or five hours, and although Hambly felt that Garcia sometimes neglected the “holistic concept of bluegrass as a united sound,” he was extremely taken with Jerry’s development. The three of them even played a show at the Noncommissioned Officers’ Club at Tyndall, but after a few days the vicious insect life of Florida drove Jerry and Sandy away, and they set off for Dothan, Alabama, to hear the well-known players Jim and Jesse McReynolds.

Around May 20, they returned to Bloomington. Neil, too, was impressed with Garcia’s musical growth, and enthralled him with his sweetness and generosity. Neil took the boys, armed with Jerry’s Wollensak, to a treasure vault, Marvin Hedrick’s radio-TV repair shop. Marvin also sold tape recorders and had been doing so since the fifties, a seminal time for bluegrass. Tape recorders were then a rare commodity, so his tapes of early bluegrass were a precious trove. Jerry and Sandy spent what Jerry recalled as several days dubbing tapes like kids in a candy store with no stomachache to follow.

On May 24 they arrived at bluegrass Valhalla, Bill Monroe’s Brown County Jamboree, otherwise known as Bean Blossom, after its location in that tiny town near Bloomington, Indiana. Shows were at 3 and 8 P.M. on Sunday, price one dollar. The parking lot was really part of the show, and it appeared that half the audience brought instruments to jam with before the performance. Bean Blossom the facility was in fact a long, low horse barn, heated by coal-fired stoves, the floor half gravel and stained by the end product of Bill’s free-roaming roosters. Bill was frugal, but he was still the Creator, and seeing him up close and not onstage struck them speechless. They were too terrified to take out their instruments in front of him, and Garcia’s charm evaporated into a tongue-tied shyness that left him incapable of promoting himself. Garcia never would be able to bring himself to apply for the job, although later that same summer Sandy would join Monroe on guitar. Aside from treasured memories and a rich educational experience, the only thing Garcia would get out of the day at Bean Blossom was the tape he and Sandy made, and it turned out to have an electronic hum that ruined it.

They did much better a few days later. Garcia would always feel that in the course of his journey he saw some essential essence of bluegrass, “the where-it-comes-from hit,” and one of the best moments was in Dayton, Ohio, home to many displaced Appalachians, where they recorded the Osborne Brothers at the White Sands Bar. Early in June they reached Sunset Park, Pennsylvania, a bluegrass showplace. Among the many Amish who crowded the place, Garcia spotted a young man by the name of David Grisman walking across the parking lot with his mandolin case. He knew about Grisman from Eric Thompson, and they quickly fell in with each other, picking a few tunes. It was an excellent start to a friendship. But Garcia and Rothman were still on the road and headed for their last two stops, Marshall Leicester in New Haven and Bill Keith in Boston. There was an interlude when they got lost and found themselves on the streets of Manhattan, but it was exceedingly brief. “We left
immediately,”
Garcia said, laughing. “I didn’t want to drive in that mess.”

After seeing Marshall, they wound up sharing a Cambridge attic room with the Kentucky Colonels, who’d managed to beat them to New England. They spent some richly fulfilling time with Bill Keith, one of Garcia’s primary hopes for the trip, and then Jerry realized his odyssey was over. His letters home had been detailed, full of his encounters and emotions, complete with pictures in the margins for little Heather. Now he wired home to Sara for funds, hopped into the Corvair, said good-bye to Sandy in Bloomington, and drove straight back to the Bay Area, stopping only for gas and naps. He would play more bluegrass upon his return, with two different bands. The first was the Asphalt Jungle Mountain Boys, with Eric Thompson and his friend Jody Stecher, and then what Garcia thought was his best bluegrass playing yet, a December gig at the Offstage with Sandy and Scott Hambly in a one-night band that combined members of the Black Mountain Boys with a member of the Redwood Canyon Ramblers. But his dream was over. There was no way for him to be a San Franciscan and a full-time bluegrass musician, and life in the South was simply not a practical possibility for him.

There was still the jug band, and it remained satisfying, but a couple of nonperforming activities also enriched his life that August. The dark genius/social critic/humorist Lenny Bruce was then being pursued by a coalition of local police and elements of the Roman Catholic Church for his use of “obscenity” in his act, and he needed transcripts of his shows to use in the many legal cases he was confronting. Joe Edmonston’s wife was Lenny’s lawyer’s secretary, and she thought of Garcia. After all the time he’d spent with old music tapes, his ear was acute, and he became a transcriber. “[Lenny] had a shorthand way of talking when he was mumbling like a speed freak, but it was real content, real stuff,” Garcia said. “I learned so much, it was incredible. What a mind. He’d thumb through a magazine and riff. I’d find the article . . . I swear to God, he could condense all the key stuff in like three or four paragraphs . . . It would be a mumble in seven syllables but it had bits and pieces of everything in the article.” It was an extraordinary opportunity for Garcia, and he enjoyed it to the fullest. It placed him in the very heart of American cultural criticism from an absolutely unique perspective. He was already a full-fledged American outsider—one cover of
Life
that month concerned the unprecedented prosperity then sweeping America, and he certainly had no part in that. But he also stood outside the intellectual culture of that time, centered on
Evergreen
magazine, which was all existential coolness and detachment—Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, and Warhol. Lenny Bruce’s crucifixion was about passion and caring, not alienation, and Garcia knew it. Not that he was humorless.