A Long Strange Trip (6 page)

As it happened, Hunter was an extremely limited guitarist. In his own words, Garcia was already “getting serious. I was getting to be more and more impatient with Hunter’s guitar playing.” The turning point of his life that past February had begun to take solid hold of him. “I was just playing all the time,” Garcia recalled. “I just wanted to conquer that stuff. For me, it was little discoveries. I was just hungry to meet people to play. I was out on a limb like a motherfucker.” To another friend he remarked, “Man, all I wanna do is live my weird little life my weird little way—all I wanna do is play.” Hunter was a writer, already working on a novel about their lives, and wasn’t really interested in being a professional musician. Their sessions at Kepler’s and their friendship continued, but the duo billed as “Bob and Jerry” did not.

That June, Garcia met someone who could teach him. Marshall Leicester had just finished his sophomore year at Yale, where he’d been part of one of the first collegiate purist folk scenes, disciples of the New Lost City Ramblers (NLCR). Garcia was playing “Everybody Loves Saturday Night” as he strolled into Kepler’s, and though Leicester hated the song, he recalled Garcia from their seventh-grade class together at the Menlo Oaks school and borrowed his guitar to show him some real picking. They soon fell in together, with Garcia staying at Marshall’s home when Mrs. Leicester could be so persuaded. Like many moms, she thought Jerry was “shiftless.” Dazzled with Jerry’s verbal facility, Marshall enjoyed their relationship hugely. Together they followed Harry Smith and the NLCR’s lead and reveled in the manifold joys of the Carter Family songbook. Simple and expressive, A. P. Carter’s popular modulations of the mountain culture—since the material was recorded and then broadcast on radio, it was popular by definition—took folk music into the modern era with “Wabash Cannonball,” “Wildwood Flower,” and Mother Maybelle’s unique guitar technique (the “Carter Scratch”). Marshall also lent Jerry a copy of Flatt and Scruggs’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and he fell in love with it.

As summer came in, Garcia briefly followed Brigid to San Francisco, where she was living with her Aunt Muriel and modeling at I. Magnin’s department store while attending Jerry’s alma mater, the California School of Fine Arts, on weekends. He stayed for a while with John “the Cool” Winter at the Cadillac Hotel, in the seedy Tenderloin District, living largely on potatoes and carrots they stole from the produce market on the Embarcadero. Brigid fed him and gave him cigarette money, and occasionally Garcia gave lessons to an odd man named Bruce “the Nerd” Warendorf, who’d acquired an unusual semi-mandolin called a Waldzither and adopted Jerry as a mentor. Somehow Garcia had acquired a portable phonograph, and he spent the summer studying Elizabeth Cotten–style guitar, as well as Flatt and Scruggs.

Before going off to the Cadillac Hotel, Garcia had gotten an offer he couldn’t refuse. As usual, he was sitting in Kepler’s and playing—“Railroad Bill,” as it happened—when a young man named Rodney Albin approached him. As Rodney’s younger brother Peter and his friend David Nelson watched, peeking between shelves of books, Rodney asked Jerry if he’d care to perform at his new folk music club, the Boar’s Head. They were pleasantly surprised when Garcia, already possessed of an imposing local reputation, said, “Sure, man.” “Great,” said Rodney. “Can you bring anybody else? Tell everybody.” It was characteristic of Rodney Albin that the first Peninsula folk club would be his idea. An eccentric intellectual who carried a briefcase at the age of nineteen and was notorious for the dried bat hanging off his bedroom lamp at home, Rodney was definitely a leader.

The Boar’s Head was a tiny loft seating perhaps thirty or forty people above the San Carlos Book Stall, a metaphysical bookstore in a town halfway up the Peninsula between Palo Alto and San Francisco. There was a miniature triangular stage, with lighting provided by bulbs masked by cut-up coffee cans. Donations covered the cost of the coffee, and the musicians were unpaid, mostly performing hootenanny style—that is, one song per person or group at a time, with few long sets. A surviving tape captures what people recalled as a fairly typical night. Garcia, with Leicester on autoharp, played “Wildwood Flower,” and with both men on guitar and Hunter on mandolin, they covered “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” and so forth. They were more than competent, though not yet any threat to the Carter Family.

The Boar’s Head was small but popular, and Garcia adopted it as his home, bringing along Hunter, Leicester, David McQueen, and Truck Driving Cherie Huddleston to play. A local electric guitarist, Troy Weidenheimer, might play some Ventures or Jimmy Reed. A few nonlocals performed, including a calypso singer named Walt Brown, and the East Bay blues singer Jesse “the Lone Cat” Fuller. It was a highly sociable environment, not least because it had an “annex,” the Belmont home of Suze Wood, Leicester’s girlfriend. Their enormous house, built at the turn of the century by the magnate William Ralston for his daughter, sheltered a rowdy, individualistic household, and they welcomed the Boar’s Head gang to spread blankets in the backyard, drink wine, talk, and play. The Boar’s Head would also be significant as the place where Garcia’s East Palo Alto friend and future musical partner Blue Ron McKernan first performed in public, as a member of the Second Story Men, a one-night group with Rodney and Peter Albin and their friend Ellen Cavanaugh.

Ron McKernan always had depths. He was a serious child, and his mother, Esther, would recall that when she took him on carnival rides, he would sit stone-faced. She could never tell if he was truly enjoying himself or just pleasing her, because he was always sweet and considerate. “He’d throw me.” His father, Phil, played boogie-woogie piano until Ron was born in 1945, and then was a rhythm and blues disc jockey at KRE under the name “Cool Breeze” until the mid-fifties, when he went to work at Stanford as an electronics engineer. After an early fondness for Elvis Presley, Ron followed his father’s tastes into Presley’s black roots, and the early exposure to African American music became central to his life. He was a serious student of blues lore, well up on the musicians and the labels long before there were any reference books available. But his interest went far deeper than a taste for music. By the time he showed up at the Boar’s Head at the age of sixteen, he had left white middle-class life entirely behind. His first nickname was “Rimms,” as in the rim of a wheel, like steel. He had a motorcycle chain permanently bolted to his wrist and wore oily jeans, Brandoesque T-shirts, and greasy hair. He was never violent or mean, but the ugly boil on his cheek seemed to at least one friend to have made him a sensitive disfigured artist figure, like the Phantom of the Opera. He was certainly set apart in his bodily funkiness, so extreme that the officials of the local pool would not let him swim there. Along with his friend Roger Williams, also nicknamed Cool Breeze, he’d clack through high school with horseshoe taps on his shoes, such a sure sign of depravity in that era that his expulsion from Palo Alto High School seemed almost foreordained. He’d always played piano, though he refused lessons, but few knew that he wrote poetry, painted, and read science fiction.

What everyone did know was that he was the white kid who practically lived in black East Palo Alto, hanging out with a black man named Tawny Jones, who had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle as well as a bread truck that they called the Seventh Son. It came with a mattress in the back, and their sexual exploits went far beyond the average teen’s. It was also useful for their trips to a bootlegger in La Honda, in the mountains above Palo Alto, where they bought whiskey at $1.50 a gallon. That, a horrid cheap sweet wine called Hombre, white port and lemon juice, and anything else they could find were their drinks of choice—Ron claimed to have begun drinking at the age of twelve. Satisfactorily lubricated, he and Tawny would go down by the railroad tracks and write songs. They took to hanging out at the Anchor Club and the Popeye Club in East Palo Alto and the Aztec Lounge in San Mateo, listening to old blues players, corroding their stomach linings with booze and hot links while they absorbed the blues life. Ron picked up harmonica and acoustic guitar, and connected with Garcia for some impromptu lessons, which he quickly absorbed. He always had the feel of the blues, even before he acquired the technique. One of the Chateau guys, a black saxophone player named Lester Hellum, was their friend, and he later recalled taking Ron to see T-Bone Walker at a San Mateo club. Ron sat staring at T-Bone’s hands and then said to him, “I’ll see you in twenty years.” Aside from being known to steal any blues album not nailed down (Tawny took the jazz albums), he generally avoided breaking the law. Once a friend offered to sell him a nine-millimeter automatic pistol. Ron was fascinated by guns and borrowed it, saying he wanted to show it to his father. A few days later, he returned it, pleading, “Don’t tell anybody I had it.” Beneath the fairly fearsome exterior was what Garcia called a “real pixie quality. [He] was just really lovable, really fun. He was a sweetheart.”

In September 1961, Alan Trist returned from a month of hiking the John Muir Trail in the Sierras, and before leaving for Cambridge had what he remembered as a long, “apocalyptic” talk with Garcia. They walked about in San Francisco near the Palace of the Legion of Honor, on a bluff overlooking the Golden Gate and the Pacific, kicking pebbles and baring their hearts as young men will. What impressed Alan then and after was the positiveness of their outlook. He wasn’t too sure of the rest of the “hip” United States, with its emphasis on angst and torment, but in San Francisco they concluded, “this is a positive place, this planet,” rather in the sense that Kerouac derived the honorific “Beat” from “beatific.” They felt blessed. Hunter and Garcia saw Alan off at the bus station, and though they were not good correspondents, they would manage to stay in touch.

In October, Garcia returned to Palo Alto and moved into the Chateau. Though it was only a rooming house, it had a certain free-spirited quality that made it exceptional. Perhaps it sprang from the owner, Frank Serratoni, who liked to water the yard in a brief bathing suit, his old man’s paunch hanging out. Lee Adams was there first, then a drummer named Danny Barnett, then Rudy Jackson, a trumpet player. Rudy unfortunately made himself memorable by asking Miles Davis if he could sit in one night at the Blackhawk. “Hey, babe, want to do something together?” he inquired. Miles replied, “What you want to do, babe, fuck?” There was Page Browning, John the Cool, Robert Hunter, Willy Legate, and at times, Jerry’s old friend Laird Grant. The furnishings ran from fine Chinese antique pieces in the living room to a refrigerator empty but for rotting mustard and moldy bread. David McQueen and Lester Hellum were regular visitors, joyfully slandering each other in ways that left onlookers gasping with laughter. And there were plenty of female visitors, like Suze Wood, Cherie Huddleston, and Joan Simms.

And, of course, Brigid Meier. That fall, her relationship with Garcia changed dramatically. She had been “part of the cement of our scene,” Garcia thought, reminding him of his grandmother in her ability to love everyone. Now she enthusiastically gave up her virginity to Garcia. Perhaps because she was so exceptionally beautiful, Garcia would always cherish the relationship as the height of romance, twenty years later describing her as “the love of my life, really, in a way,” astonishingly still remorseful over the lust that had made their relationship a physical one. Their new romantic status bothered Hunter, who thought of Brigid in a protective way. Now in the throes of writing a novel about their group, Hunter used his feelings as an artistic goad, referring to himself as a “prophet of melancholy.” He took his title,
The Silver Snarling Trumpet,
from Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and in its first draft it was a good first novel. Unfortunately, he decided that the taut original version was too short, and he rewrote it, waxing ever longer and more philosophical.

Sometime in 1961, John the Cool brought around a new guy by the name of Phil Lesh. Impressed by his sheer speed of mind and obviously forceful intelligence, Winter told Hunter that Lesh “could walk on your mind in three minutes,” which made for a bad first impression. But Lesh turned out to be less intimidating than that, and his musical gifts bridged the gap. He blew a little trumpet with Lester Hellum on alto, and his enthusiasm for music was endearing. He was then much more involved with composition than playing, and when Hunter and Garcia saw him sitting at a card table at work on “The Sun Cycle,” a piece planned for three orchestras, writing it out of his head without even a piano, they were stunned. At the time, one of his party parlor tricks was to turn his back and challenge guitarists, as one of the crowd recalled, to “come up with knuckle-busting perverse chords, seventeenths with flatted eighths with augmented—he’d tell me the notes, the order, whether or not my guitar was tuned standard.”

Lesh had graduated from the College of San Mateo that June of 1961, and while taking an entrance examination for the U.C. Berkeley musicology department that spring, had met Tom “T.C.” Constanten, who would become his lifelong friend. Speaking with a young woman about serial music, Lesh was charmed when T.C. interjected, “Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950.” Lesh’s only response was to stick out his hand. Immediate partners in musical crime, the two of them took up residence in Berkeley, with Phil’s troll friend the con artist/poet Bobby Petersen as a regular visitor. For such a skinny fellow, Lesh had a remarkable facility for shoplifting, and in his persona as “Phil the Coat” he made sure, as he later put it, that “we ate pretty well for poor folks.” However, Lesh was less adept in his dealings with bureaucracy. He got into Cal by taking dictation, listening to a piece of music by Chopin and transcribing it. Alas, he wrote down what he heard, and he cared not how Chopin might have originally written it. When told that he would still have to take Ear Training, he concluded that university music departments were more oriented to obedience than creativity. By midsemester he’d dropped out to spend the winter reading Joyce and listening to Mahler, his and T.C.’s favorite composer. Then, early in 1962, they learned that Luciano Berio, the young (then thirty-seven) Italian modernist composer, a distinguished associate of Karlheinz Stockhausen, was about to begin teaching a graduate-level course in composition at Mills College in Oakland, a small women’s school with a classy reputation in the arts. Too nervous even to apply, Lesh was ecstatic when T.C. got them both in the class, which included the cream of the Bay Area’s young composers, among them John Chowning and Steve Reich. It would be a formative experience.