A Long Strange Trip (5 page)

Graduating in June 1958, he went off to the University of Connecticut, where he joined the Folk Music Club and became a Pete Seeger fan. College did not engage him, and in his second semester he drifted away. He worked for a while and then decided to return to Palo Alto, largely because of an old flame from high school days. He considered taking the bus, then flew, dreaming of plane crashes all the way to the West Coast. Back in his old hometown, he found and soon left his no-longer-true love, and fell in with a fairly dubious lot of old friends. He felt himself sinking into potentially serious trouble, and escaped by enlisting in the National Guard, where he spent six months training at Fort Ord and then Fort Sill, first in the artillery and then as a Teletype operator. In March 1961, about ten days after Paul Speegle’s death, he completed his initial six-month tour of duty and returned to Palo Alto.

In the course of their first conversation at St. Michael’s Alley, Garcia and Trist learned that Hunter had a functioning car, and the next morning they were
bangbangbang
on his hotel room door. The ’40 Chrysler took them to Berkeley, where they searched for the animated film
Animal
Farm.
They never did find the movie, but it mattered not at all. Not long after, the Chrysler came to rest next to Garcia’s Cadillac, and for a time that spring, they shared the same vacant lot in East Palo Alto. Hunter had liberated several enormous tins of crushed pineapple from the National Guard, while Garcia’s car was stuffed—in the glove compartment, under the seats, everywhere—with plastic forks and spoons. As though from an O. Henry story, but for real, spoon met pineapple and helped the two young men bond. Along with Alan Trist, they became inseparable.

“Like any proper Englishman,” Trist later observed, “I was a bit of a renegade.” A bohemian literary intellectual who was up on Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas and had not only read the Beat bible, Don Allen’s
New
American Poetry,
but had visited the legendary Beat Hotel in Paris, Trist was enthusiastic, stylish, and catalytic. Hunter would recall the thrill of absorbing “Howl” for the first time at Alan’s, thinking “someone was going to bust in and arrest me for reading it.” Enjoying a year off between prep school and Cambridge, Alan had time and a twenty-five-dollar weekly allowance that left him free to pursue whatever he chose, and that meant a daily circuit of Kepler’s Bookstore in the daytime, St. Mike’s in the evening, and a coffee shop called Stickney’s for the late hours.

Kepler’s was a wonderful place. Probably the second paperback bookstore in America, it was a faithful reproduction of City Lights, and was founded in the mid-1950s by Roy Kepler, a onetime Fulbright scholar who had been a founder of the left-wing radio station KPFA and national secretary of the War Resister’s League. With his close friend and fellow pacifist Ira Sandperl, Roy ran a store that featured unlimited browsing, coffee, and hang-out rights, even for the bedraggled young beatniks like Garcia, who became, he said, “a fixture . . . a bum, virtually.” Instead of ejecting this bum, Roy felt he “could protect him.” Kepler was more political than most Beats, but the store welcomed the poets Ferlinghetti, Rexroth, and William Everson for readings. It was a lovely, nurturing institution, closely linked to Ira’s other occupation, which was running the Palo Alto Peace Center, home to one of the strangest and most interesting persons in the whole scene, Willy Legate. Garcia and company paid almost no attention to the politics of the Peace Center. Rather, it was, as Hunter said, “Willy’s gift to us.” “We were like the back door of the Peace Center,” said Garcia. “The front door was Joan Baez, Willy, and Ira.” Later, Garcia would reflect that “we all learned how to think a certain kind of way from Willy . . . things that come out of sequence—nonlinear, Zen, synchronistic thinking. How to think funny, the cosmic laugh.”

Willy Legate was tall and stooped, with an enormous head, a bulging forehead, and thick glasses. Raised in Arkansas, he’d begun reading up on psychic research, the Rosicrucians, the theosophist Annie Besant, and yoga in high school, and while in college in 1959 he learned how to elicit vials of LSD from the manufacturer, Sandoz Pharmaceutical. He never, Hunter wrote around that time,

said a great deal, or, if he did, it was mainly incomprehensible. He smoked many cigarettes and attempted to write books which were, if anything, as incomprehensible as Willy . . . When asked a question of greater or lesser import, he was prone to answer “Won’t tell ya,” but he could, on occasion, wax eloquent . . .

“For Christ’s sake, must you always be so damned difficult?” [Hunter] asked, becoming irritated.

“Difficult . . .” [Willy] muttered . . . “D-i-f-f-i-c-u-l-t. D as in diphthong, I as in ichthyology, F as in flagellation and again as in fornication, I as in infantile paralysis, C as in communist, U as in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, L as in lacerations of the head and kidneys, T as in Chinese Religion.”

“Chinese Religion?”

“Taoism, obviously.”

“Oh; and what is this all supposed to be indicative of, other than an obvious crying need for psychiatric assistance?”

“You’ll find it in Zechariah 2.6: ‘Ho ho, saith the Lord.’ ”

. . . if Willy had a bed, everyone had a bed; if Willy had cigarettes, everyone had cigarettes . . . maybe even more of them than Willy took. Willy was the kind of person who somehow made you wonder just who you were and where you were going, and if maybe he didn’t have the right idea after all.

It was a sweet time. Garcia and his circle were too poor to have much of anything, so they cherished what they found. The occasional taste of pot was memorable, leading to fabulous conversations and movable parties. They’d gather up a gang, perhaps a couple of the Chateau’s wastrels or some of the people from Norman “Pogo” Fontaine’s house in East Palo Alto. Pogo was an artist and a conga player, a bit older than they, and a fine party-giver. They’d load a pickup truck with people and go off to the beach at Half Moon Bay on the other side of the coastal range, or to San Francisco, to the Beat scene in North Beach, or to see the Vatican organist play Bach on the Grace Cathedral organ, or to feed Garcia’s cinephilia with strange art-house movies, especially Jan Potocki’s
Saragossa Manuscript.
Both Jerry and Robert read the book it was based on before going up to the Cento Cedar cinema to see the film, in which story after story unfolded in a perfectly mythic world. There were potent forerunners of their lives in the film; characters drink magic potions from a skull, as door after door opens to an ever more surreal world.

Their cultural tastes fed a continuous stream of conversation, for all of them had something to say and an exquisite joy in listening. Many years later a friend of Garcia’s would call him quite possibly the world’s greatest conversationalist, and he surely took immense delight in the art, recognizing, as the friend put it, that “thought is the most ductile source of pleasure, because you can construct all pleasures from it.” Hunter and Trist would sit with their notebooks open, each capturing the moment in some prose or poetic fashion, while Garcia sat with a guitar, always a guitar.

There were lots of young women in their scene, including Alan’s friend Karen “K.K.” Kaplan, an ardent Zionist, and Hunter’s love, Christie Bourne, a flamenco dancer with an exotic Brigitte Bardot aura. But soon there would be a woman who, though quite young, would be a peer. Barbara “Brigid” Meier was an extraordinarily beautiful fifteen-year-old high school student when she met Garcia in March on her way to a hike in the Los Trancos Woods with Jerry’s friend Sue. When Sue invited him along, Garcia was quick to join them, and on the way home, he sat in the backseat playing a song to Brigid from Joan Baez’s first album, “Don’t Sing Love Songs, You’ll Wake My Mother.” Brigid had read Kerouac the year before, and this daughter of left-wing bohemians whose lives closely resembled Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s was totally ready for the Garcia-Hunter-Trist scene. It did not represent “coupling,” as she later put it, but “mayhem. Where’s the scene tonight?” After school she’d go to Kepler’s, and then to who-knows-where. She met one of Garcia’s other friends, an older woman named Grace Marie Haddy, who seemed like someone from a Doris Lessing novel. Grace Marie lived alone and was, Brigid recalled, “arch, erudite, practiced free love, smoked pot, drank wine, and had something to say about everything.” It was at this point a very literary group, and Garcia was reading all the time:
Finnegans Wake,
poetry from the Beats and Kenneth Patchen, science fiction, and lots of other things that fell off Kepler’s shelves. Naturally, Brigid expressed it in a poem.

He [Patchen] speaks of angels and snowy hillsides
But I am in rapture of the thing
where we are all in love
with life and each other
Never before and perhaps again
will it be so
with such youthful vigor
and wild eyes
He who creates such magical music [Garcia]
radiates it upon us
The one of poetic words [Trist]
encourages
and overwhelms us with faith
The blind man in the corner [Hunter, in his glasses] sees all
even though he believes not in himself today
and I, follower of each
cry beautiful tears of joy.

Something was happening, and they knew it. It would be presumptuous, thought Brigid later, to even call it avant-garde. But there was a wave, and they were riding it. It was May 1961, and the image of the moment was “Camelot.” Representing youth, style, and virile Hemingwayesque manhood, John Kennedy and his beautiful, elegant wife defined a current that suggested change, though Kennedy’s politics were as much a part of Cold War rationalism as his opponent Nixon’s. Americanism and technology would see us through, and on May 5 Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Other, even more powerful events were not entirely controlled by the government. On May 4, the civil rights movement, its leadership taken over by youth, sent the Freedom Riders into the deep South to challenge segregation in bus stations. When they arrived in Anniston, Alabama, on May 14, their bus was attacked and later firebombed, and the Freedom Riders were beaten. Attorney General Robert Kennedy intervened, and National Guard troops and helicopters flanked the riders as they proceeded to New Orleans. A change could be felt, and it was captured in a song: “We Shall Overcome.”

Faddish dance songs like “The Twist” dominated pop music, and to many, folk music seemed more authentic. A purist approach had catalyzed itself out of the commercial adaptations of the Kingston Trio, first in 1958 in Boston’s Club 47 through its house band, the Charles River Valley Boys. Soon after, Palo Altan Joan Baez became a regular at the club, and when she captivated the Newport Folk Festival in 1960, she became an icon. There was always a collegiate link between Cambridge and Berkeley, and shortly after Club 47 opened, Rolf Cahn, a young radical musical heir to Woody Guthrie who was married to the folksinger Barbara Dane, moved West and began the Blind Lemon there. The Lemon joined a couple of other Berkeley institutions that encouraged Bay Area folk music. There was the annual folk music festival, which began on a large scale in 1958. Most important was
The Midnight Special,
a live, late-Friday-night hootenanny on the radical Berkeley radio station KPFA.

Not long after they’d met, Hunter and Garcia were at a party and Robert picked up a guitar, playing about half a song before, Hunter recalled, “Jerry said, ‘Hey, give me that,’ and grabbed it away from me and kept it. That’s how it’s been ever since. He could play better than I could.” Garcia was clearly the dominant musical partner. The political side of folk—Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly—did not move him. From the beginning, Garcia was an apolitical artist, certainly pro–civil rights and intuitively liberal, but at heart concerned only with music and its performance. He and Hunter would sit in the back of Kepler’s all day, at first playing what he would later shamefacedly dismiss as “dippy folk songs” like “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” or “Banks of the Ohio” or tunes from early Joan Baez albums. Hunter and Garcia even wrote a song together, “Black Cat.”

Tell you a story about my old man’s cat
A cat whose hide was uncommonly black
Fame and fortune and good luck hath
the man who would cross the black cat’s path . . .
My old man’s cat went out one night
the moon and stars were shining bright
crossed the path upon his way
of the man who’s president today.

But in those days, folk music was to be taken from the masters, not newly created, and they didn’t write any more songs.

Instead, Garcia and Hunter turned to a fundamental source, Harry Smith’s magical and peculiar
Anthology of American Folk Music,
on Folkways Records. Early in the 1950s, Smith had tapped into American popular culture from the twenties and thirties to assemble the anthology, selecting songs that had been commercial enough to release on record, exotic but not esoteric. He put eighty-four tunes on six long-playing discs, then wrapped them in alchemical quotations and decoration. In so doing, he gave young folkies like Garcia and Hunter a passageway into the heart of the old, eccentric, gnarly, lovely America. A homosexual dope fiend whose body was stunted and humped, Smith was the ultimate outsider, the ideal person to introduce a new generation to something
truly
authentic. Garcia and Hunter would be indebted to him for life.

Their real scene remained the back room at Kepler’s, but on May 5, 1961, Bob and Jerry made a foray into public performance, playing for the Peninsula School’s graduation. Willy’s girlfriend, Danya, got them the gig, for which they earned five dollars. Later in the month they got another job, this time lined up by some fans who asked them to come to their Stanford dormitory to play. Hunter would remember the sweet sound of the applause, and Garcia’s jocular introduction. “The next number is an old Indian work song, translated from the original Slavic by the head of the Hebrew department at Sacred Heart University.”