A Long Strange Trip (4 page)

As his life slid further and further out of control, music became the only stabilizing force available to him. The one thing that he could hold on to was the guitar, which he played constantly. But his music was handicapped, and not by the missing portion of the middle finger on his right hand; almost from the first, he’d chosen to use a pick (although he did acknowledge later that with a full hand he’d have played piano or classical guitar). No, his limit as a musician at that time was his lack of a partner. Very early on, he intuitively realized that he needed someone else to play with, a companion, a musical cohort. Over the years he would have many collaborators, but in terms of playing music, as apart from composing it, there would be one supreme pal, and he hadn’t met him just yet.

Phil Lesh found his future one Sunday in 1944 at the age of four, when his grandmother discovered him intently listening from the next room to the New York Philharmonic’s broadcast. Having already taught him to read, she was happy to expose her grandson to more. The next week she inquired, “Philip, would you like to come and listen to the nice music on the radio?” Bruno Walter conducted Brahms’s First Symphony, and from then on, Lesh’s life had focus. His father, Frank, was an office equipment repairman, and their lives were generally comfortably middle-class, except for a rather rarefied taste in music. From the third grade on, Phil took violin lessons, and when his braces were removed at fourteen, he took up the trumpet. Except for a fascination with racing cars, music occupied most of his life. He was not athletic, and his intelligence had set him apart from his peers. In the second grade, word had gotten out at a PTA meeting that Phil Lesh had the highest I.Q. in school, and more than a few of his classmates were asked why they couldn’t be as smart as he was. He would never hear the end of it, and it made for an extremely difficult adolescence. The incident turned him inward, and the combination of brilliance and isolation made him focus powerfully on his own values, in the tradition of an elite artist.

His parents, Frank and Barbara, supported the musical ambitions of their only child, and in the middle of his junior year in high school the family moved so that he could transfer from El Cerrito High School to Berkeley High School, where the music program was infinitely better. He seized the opportunity, joining the band, the orchestra, the dance band, and the Pro Musica. He also acquired an affectionate surrogate musical father in Bob Hanson, the conductor of the distinguished Golden Gate Park Bandshell unit. Eventually, Lesh would play second trumpet for Hanson in the Oakland Symphony and earn the first chair in Hanson’s Young People’s Symphony Orchestra. Hanson would remember a thin, restless boy with a marvelous ear who lacked wind, but not persistence. By graduation in June 1957, Lesh’s ability to transpose keys on sight would earn him the first chair at a high-quality college-sponsored music camp and send him that fall to San Francisco State University. Less developed as a personality than as a musician, he soon dropped out of State and returned home.

As demanding and critical of the world as he was of himself, Phil was troubled by what he perceived as the raw deal that life had given his father, who had worked brutally hard and had little to show for it. At this juncture Lesh was certain that whatever he did with his future, he didn’t want to be stuck in his father’s trap. Commitment to anything conventional was to be avoided, and he fully identified with the artistic tradition.

A year later, in September 1958, he resumed his studies, this time at the College of San Mateo (CSM), on the peninsula twenty miles south of San Francisco. An eccentric, intellectual loner, Lesh found his first good friend in a local young man named Mike Lamb, the son of a Stanford administration staff member who had become acquainted with the local cognoscenti. Lamb groomed him a bit socially, and then a succession of intellectual encounters further opened Lesh’s life. First, Morse Peckham’s
Beyond the Tragic Vision
defined the philosophical underpinnings to his inner certainty that only the arts could be free of the fraud that was society: “Absorbed in the work of art, we can for a moment experience life as pure value . . . Aesthetic contemplation is our only innocence.” Then Peckham made these words visible by introducing him to the pre-impressionist English painter J. M. W. Turner, whose hellish, prophetic Rain
Steam and Speed
depicted light as a shining thing in itself, the music of the spheres put down on canvas. When Lesh’s student job turned out to be evaluating new records at the library, his intellectual menu was complete. He discovered the experimental
Music Quarterly,
and learned that music could be created, stored on tape, and fully controlled by the author. Beethoven and Charles Ives were his heroes. He wanted to be a Komposer.

Meantime, he was caught up in the highly competitive world of the CSM music department. The school’s contest-winning jazz band, a powerhouse group that played the cool West Coast jazz exemplified by Stan Kenton’s arranger, Bill Holman, featured five trumpets, saxophones, and trombones each, plus four rhythm instruments. In his pursuit of the first trumpet chair, Lesh generally found himself behind William “Buddy” Powers, who would take eight years to graduate from CSM due to his habit of dropping out to work with groups like the Woody Herman and Benny Goodman bands. Still thin and lacking the blasting lung power the genre demanded, Lesh increasingly experimented with composition. Fortunately, the band’s rehearsals were wildly open. He would create ten-bar exercises for bizarre orchestrations like the “mother chord,” a dissonant blast that included all twelve chromatic tones, or his first chart, in which the bass player had to tune down his instrument for the first line and then retune it for the remainder, while the brass players began in the highest register, and each section of the band was in a different key. He would recall the piece as resembling “blocks of granite sliding together . . . pretty weird for a junior college.”

His best exercise title, at least, came from James Joyce’s
Finnegans
Wake:
“The Sound of a Man Being Habitacularly Fondseed” (i.e., being tapped upon the third eye). Lesh had gone down the coast to Partington Ridge in Big Sur to look for Henry Miller, but the master proved not at home. In a ritualistic way, Phil decided to pay homage to the act Miller described in
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch,
and pissed off the ridge. Standing in Miller’s metaphorical shoes, he experienced an epiphany, one that he was able to replicate aurally in a four-bar exercise for the largest orchestra he’d ever get to write for. After writing out the parts on tiny exercise pages, he brought it to the band, which, after protesting, “Fuck you, Lesh, we need a magnifying glass on this stuff,” fought through it, produced an obscene chord, and received his thanks. He’d been able to hear what he’d written, and that was a singularly fulfilling experience.

His jazz composing career peaked in May 1959, when the annual CSM jazz band “Expressions in Jazz” concert at San Mateo High School featured his lead on the Bill Holman chart of “I Remember April” and “Jeff’s Jam,” and the band’s performance of his own tune “Wail Frail.” Shortly before this time he’d encountered a diminutive ex-convict blues poet named Bobby Petersen, who turned him toward poetry and Allen Ginsberg–style illuminated (spiritual) politics, essentially inducting him into the Beat Generation. Petersen was an experienced hipster who wrote poems about Billie Holiday and the “high sad song of spade queens / in pershing square / hipsters of melrose fade / into wallpaper.” They became roommates, and their first sharing came when Bobby stole a volume of Henry Miller from City Lights Bookstore, and they went home and read it aloud to each other. Petersen introduced Phil to pot, and to the broad sweep of avant-garde and Beat literature. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” so consumed Lesh that he began to set it to music. They also studied James Joyce, which gave Phil the title for his last tune at CSM.

In spring 1960, Lesh at least mentally completed his stay at CSM when the band performed his tune “Finnegan’s Awake.” He had moved up to the first chair by then, but would later admit with his typically brutal self-honesty that he never played as well as Powers, and consequently quit playing the trumpet after his graduation in June. He celebrated his graduation in the tradition of another of those City Lights authors, taking a Kerouacian journey to Calgary in search of work in the oil fields. Though he made it only as far as Spokane before riding the rails back to Seattle and then taking a bus home, the experience confirmed for him his place outside the conventional American life. He was a part of the Beat Generation, too.

Back at the Presidio in December of that year, Garcia’s multiple absences caught up with him. An army psychiatrist decided that his priorities were neurotic, and a superior officer asked him if he’d like to leave the army with a general discharge. “I’d like that just fine, sir.” It marked his last attempt to fit in.

3

Roots

(1961–2/62)

Discharged from the army in January 1961, Garcia moved down to East Palo Alto, the African American side of Palo Alto, where his friend since junior high school, Laird Grant, was staying. Jerry had acquired a 1950 Cadillac with one of his last army paychecks, and the heap made it to Laird’s place just before it died, there being no money left for gas. In between couches and garages and other donated beds, the car became Garcia’s apartment. Getting by in Palo Alto was easy. The weather was warmer than in foggy San Francisco, and people were kind to a charming minstrel, especially the (female) residents of Stanford’s Roble Hall, who could frequently be counted upon to smuggle minstrels into the dining commons. His first new friend was Dave McQueen, a black man who was a neighbor and friend of Laird Grant’s, and for a little while they hustled odd jobs together, becoming what Garcia later thought of as “the Laurel and Hardy of East Palo Alto.” “Here, take the heavy end.” “No, goddamm it! You take it.” “No, no, no, no, oh! Lookout for that—” Then McQueen heard Garcia play some blues. McQueen said, “I never heard a white man with . . . soul like you got, man. Come on, I’m going to take you around.” Very quickly, Garcia was a comfortable citizen of East Palo Alto, and with its allied party circles, including a bunch of guys who lived on the other side of Palo Alto near the Stanford University campus at a rooming house called the Chateau.

The Chateau sheltered a bizarre collection of young black and white bohemian proto-artists, musicians, and weirdos, and parties there more closely resembled a Fellini film than a campus sock hop. A visit in 1961 typically included being greeted by the nonresident Joe Novakovich, a lunatic vagabond known to wear a hangman’s noose for a necktie, who happened to be missing half his fingers and consequently insisted on shaking hands with everyone. Or one might meet John “Page” Browning, who had just left the U.S. Marine Corps equipped with a bullwhip and a double set of fast-draw handguns, or John “the Cool” Winter, whose favorite occupation, when not playing Lord and Master of Chance at the kitchen poker games, was to sit in his black cloth-lined room reading flagellant novels while sipping white port and cherry Kool-Aid. John F. Kennedy had been in office for a month and the rising energy of the new decade could already be felt, but these lads were ahead of their time in many ways, bentness perhaps foremost. The gathering of February 20, 1961, had a particular edge to it, caused oddly enough by a visitor, an actor named Gary who had wandered about the party relating intimations of imminent disaster to all who cared to listen. He’d finally narrowed down his premonitions to four guys who ignored him and climbed into a Studebaker Golden Hawk to scare up some pot or go home, whichever.

In the backseat was Paul Speegle, who three years before at the age of fifteen had quit high school to paint and liked to observe, as he extinguished a candle, “That’s the way I’m going to go.” Flamboyant wearing a cape and carrying a silver-tipped walking stick, he was a prominent figure in the Palo Alto art scene, working on sets at the Commedia Dell’arte Theater as well as making jewelry and painting. Next to him sat Alan Trist, a tweedy Anglo-American student spending a year’s pre-Cambridge holiday with his father, then on sabbatical as a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Just before leaving the Chateau, Speegle and Trist had been acting out what Trist later called “death charades,” Paul in his dramatic black cloak fencing with Alan, who was using a fireplace poker for a sword. Their driver was the Chateau house manager, Lee Adams, a smooth-talking black man whose taste for expensive suits and Alfa Romeos had earned him the nickname “Reginald Van Gleason,” after a suave television character played by Jackie Gleason. Jerry Garcia rode shotgun next to him.

Lee had a heavy foot on the accelerator and Speegle encouraged it as they drove down toward campus from their start on the first ridge of the coastal range between Palo Alto and the Pacific Ocean. The grade was gentle and the evening pleasant, but as they passed the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, there was one wicked curve. The Hawk was cruising at around 90 mph when it slammed into the curve and clipped the chatter bars, fishtailed, and took off like a fast but clumsy bird. Whirling end over end, it ejected three of its passengers before landing in the field next to the hospital. Speegle remained in the car and died, the smash reputedly breaking every bone in his body but those of his hands.

Lee’s abdomen was laid open and Trist suffered a compression fracture of the back that would cost him some height. Garcia limped away with a broken collarbone and bruises after being blown through the windshield by a crash so violent and furious he would never be able to recall it. All he knew was that he had been seated in a car and next found himself squatting barefoot in a field. A hundred feet away he could see the car, a lump of twisted metal which closely resembled a flattened beer can, sod and dirt drilled into its roof. His shoes were underneath the front seat. No one seemed to be responding to the accident, so he eventually walked over to the hospital and reported it. A little later Gary (no one could ever recall his last name), the psychic party guest, left the Chateau and on his way home had to pull over for an ambulance. He knew immediately whom it was for.

Since Garcia had no veteran’s benefits, he spent a long and painful night without medication reading ancient copies of
Life.
Eventually, an ambulance took him to a local clinic, where X rays ascertained nothing was too horribly smashed. Executing a swift exit before someone tried to make him pay, he laid up on a friend’s couch for a few days and healed.

Not the least of the reasons Garcia had been attracted to Speegle was that, of his new Palo Alto crowd, Paul had developed his art the most deeply. The excitement of a new comrade and brother was replaced by grief, a slingshot that whirled Garcia into a new seriousness and gave his life a profound sense of urgency and purpose. The delayed gratification of painting lost its meaning, and he gravitated to the real-time immediacy and dynamic interplay possible in making music. This second of the deaths in his life had an enormous impact. Instead of crippling him, as had his father’s death, Speegle’s death gave him focus. His life after the accident would be a lucky bonus to be cherished. Even though there were no obvious immediate changes in his behavior, the accident marked a fundamental turning point in his life. Garcia would remain an amusing, gregarious bum, living a life as far from the nine-to-five pattern as possible. He would still be undisciplined, but now he would become obsessive. The guitar would become an extension of his hands, ears, and mind, and for years few would remember him without an instrument in his hands. Implicitly, Paul Speegle would be memorialized with every song.

It was a normal afternoon in the spring of 1961 at St. Michael’s Alley, a coffeehouse on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Vern Gates, the owner, was tired of Jerry Garcia, Alan Trist, and their new friend Robert Hunter, their long conversations and infrequent purchases. Named after the location of the first London coffeehouse, the Alley was media bohemia for the early sixties, offering chess, a lovely and aloof young woman singing esoteric folk songs, and instant coffee sold from an elaborate brass pot. The three friends were working on a play.

As Hunter depicted it in a contemporary but never-published
roman
à clef,
“The dialogue’s beginning to drag a little,” Trist said, “so we’ve decided to write in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius for act twelve.” Then he described how amid decadence and enough action for ten normal plays, a small black beetle at center stage would contemplate the eternal truths until, about to utter them, it would be squished by an elephant.

“We expect to run through several beetles in rehearsals,” Garcia admitted.

“The essential strategy will be to charge no admission but lock the doors and charge a fee to get out,” concluded Alan.

“You all sit here and don’t buy anything,” griped Gates. “That alone costs me more than you’re all worth . . . but you not only scare away potential customers, you
drive away
any that have been paying.”

“But look at it this way,” Jerry answered. “It’s your
business,
but it’s
our
home.”

Alan added, “Besides, sir, the colossal scheme of things seems to dictate that we sit here, which, in due course, we do. You stand in danger of jeopardizing the whole structure of destiny by your rash proclamations.”

It was just sixteen years after World War II, and leaders from that era like Charles de Gaulle and Chiang Kai-shek remained in power. There was a young new U.S. president, elected among other reasons because he had made a phone call to the wife of that imprisoned Birmingham minister, Martin Luther King Jr. In his inaugural speech that January, John F. Kennedy had spoken of letting the oppressed go free, of assuring the “survival and success of liberty,” of exploring the stars, these deeds to be accomplished by a “new generation of Americans.” A world that had seemed so glacially predictable in the 1950s was rapidly shifting. Sexual mores would be challenged by the just-introduced birth control pill. Technology would begin to evolve at an exponential pace, beyond the wildest dreams of the average citizen, in ways even the science-fiction visionaries could not imagine. All bets were off, and these young men intuitively knew it.

Early in March Garcia had volunteered as a lighting technician for a production of
Damn Yankees
at Palo Alto’s Commedia Dell’arte Theater, and was introduced to a young man named Robert Hunter. A couple of days later, Hunter walked into St. Michael’s Alley and came upon Garcia and his friend Alan Trist. The three of them began a conversation that would last their lifetimes. Though it was neither obvious nor immediate, Garcia and Hunter were perfect collaborators, two halves of a creative process.

Born Robert Burns on June 23, 1941, near San Luis Obispo, California, Hunter had grown up a child of the West and of World War II. His father, said Robert, was a “potentially good man ruined by World War II, the navy, his subsequent alcoholism and inability to keep a family or a job.” Robert and his mother followed him to various navy assignments up and down the West Coast before he deserted them when Robert was seven. His parents divorced when Robert was nine. For two or three years he lived in a string of foster homes, and the period scarred him deeply. Add to that the dozen different schools of a rootless life, and the result was a boy—and man—who had major problems getting along with people. In his own words, “I had probably more than the usual load of sensitive bullshit as a young man.” He found solace in the Roman Catholic Church as a substitute for the family he lacked, but it did not last. On a different social plane, he tried the Boy Scouts, but was kicked out for calling the scoutmaster a son of a bitch.

Books and music would be his salvation. At eight he read Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony,
then Howard Pyle’s
Robin Hood,
Robert Louis Stevenson, all the usual children’s adventure material, and later science fiction. He also went through a period of reading up on Wyatt Earp, marinating himself in the imagery of the West. It was an authentic impulse, since one of his grandfathers was a cowboy who occasionally lassoed him as Robert ran about the yard. What marked Robert as unusual was the novel that he began to write at eleven, a fifty-page handwritten fairy tale. He saw himself as a novelist. Even as an adult, though he would concede that his gifts as a writer were more suited to lyrics than to prose, he would maintain that “I have a novelist’s mentality.” He began playing music at age nine, when his grandmother gave him a Hawaiian steel guitar. In his teens he picked up cello, violin, and trumpet.

Robert’s life improved considerably when his mother remarried when he was eleven. His stepfather, Norman Hunter, whose surname he adopted, was a national sales manager for the McGraw-Hill publishing firm, a stern and severe Scottish disciplinarian who would mark Robert’s life heavily with one incident. Mr. Hunter looked at a piece of Robert’s writing and saw the phrase “merciless north.” “He absolutely turned livid. He took my report and threw it across the room and said, ‘I don’t ever want to see you attributing human attributes to nature again.’ ” Hunter laughed. “He busted me on the pathetic fallacy, which is the absolute sine qua non of the poor writer.” The short-term result of his improved writing was an F on a book report because the teacher said it was far too good for a seventh grader. Mr. Hunter had edited William Saroyan and could recall seeing T. S. Eliot in the office, and he brought to Robert’s life not only stability but a stimulating intellectual atmosphere. When McGraw-Hill considered putting out
Animal Farm
in a children’s series, Robert was asked to read it to see if he could comprehend it. With a little help—he was told that Snowball the Pig represented Trotsky—he did fine. Though Mr. Hunter was conservative in his private life, the political atmosphere at home was liberal.

They settled first in San Francisco and then in Palo Alto, where Robert attended Wilbur Junior High and then Cubberly High School for the tenth and eleventh grades. Slowly, he began to fit in, joining the band and orchestra, and the Free Thinkers Club. It was “the first I’d heard of atheism,” and it gave him a fascinating new idea to play with. Even better for a young man wanting to be accepted, he discovered that he was a good wrestler and got some peer “credit for being an okay guy at that point, maybe the first time that ever happened to me.” Then his world turned upside down again, as he and his family moved to Stamford, Connecticut, and he went from Palo Alto’s superb and liberal school system to “conservative Connecticut, where you learned everything by rote and wore suits and ties to school.” An outsider once more, he passed a dismally unhappy senior year, ameliorated only by being able to play trumpet in his first band, the Crescents. It was a rather old-fashioned combination of Dixieland and rock and roll, and Hunter’s trumpet models were Harry James, Ray Anthony, and Louis Armstrong—he’d yet to hear of Miles Davis.