A Long Strange Trip (8 page)

By now they were back at Suze’s, and as they crossed her front lawn, they began to notice the dewdrops in the grass, and the moon, and the beauty of the night, and Rick turned to Nelson and whispered, “David, have you noticed this lawn? David, you know what I think? I think this stuff works.”

The Tangent started as an amusement for two bored young doctors, but it became, for two years, the home of folk music on the Peninsula. Stu Goldstein and David Schoenstadt were Stanford Hospital residents who knew nothing about folk music, but Max and Bertha Feldman’s Palo Alto deli had a room upstairs, and it occurred to Stu and David to open a club there, using Pete Seeger’s songbook,
How to Make a Hootenanny,
as their blueprint. They opened in January 1963, with open hoots on Wednesdays and the winners playing weekends. The charge was a dollar fifty, and the performers got five or ten dollars. It quickly became Garcia’s new musical home, “a little community . . . a sweet scene.” It also produced some remarkable music. One night in a moment of boredom, Rodney Albin and Garcia gathered up four other guitarists, broke out some sheet music, crowded onto the stage, and played Tchaikovsky’s “March Slav.” On another night, a new woman blues singer from Texas, Janis Joplin, was a no-show. Her accompanist, a guitarist from Santa Clara by the name of Jorma “Jerry” Kaukonen, allowed as how he could play some blues, and proved it. Both became regulars, and part of a widening folk network. Joplin had read about Jack Kerouac in
Time
back in her hometown of Port Arthur, Texas. After apprenticing in Austin at a club called Threadgill’s, she’d hit the road, eventually getting to San Francisco. Her circles of association included the North Beach scene and also a crew of young folkies at the Charles Van Dam houseboat in Sausalito that included Dino Valenti, Paul Kantner, and David Crosby, all of whom would come to be famous in due course.

The Tangent was part of an informal network of folk clubs that included Coffee and Confusion in San Francisco and the Cabale in Berkeley. The Cabale had more national acts, including Lightnin’ Hopkins, though it was largely dominated by an in-group purism. Ego was also not unknown at the Tangent. One visiting musician, Herb Pedersen, thought of himself and Garcia as “two gunfighters” when they met, warily checking out each other’s skills. Butch Waller, then of the Westport Singers, saw Garcia as “the surly guy drinking coffee who wouldn’t talk to us” at first, although once Garcia saw their essential seriousness, he loosened right up. On February 23, 1963, Garcia brought his band, now named the Wildwood Boys, to its new home.

Shortly after that appearance, Jerry returned to the Tangent with a new friend, Sara Ruppenthal. After a year of what she termed “playing second fiddle to a banjo,” Brigid Meier had had enough. There was a new young man in her life, one her family even approved of—her dates with Garcia had been undercover—and in the fall of 1962 Jerry had found the two of them together, producing an ugly, near-violent scene. Garcia had no money, so they couldn’t go anywhere. He was prey to black moods, and as Brigid remarked, “I’m just sitting and he’s playing, and he’s playing and I’m sitting. I was seventeen and a lot of people wanted to take me out.” At Christmas she joined her family in Mexico for a vacation and enjoyed a flaming new romance, which she inevitably disclosed to Jerry on her return. Garcia spent the season sitting on the Chateau porch drinking, and though they theoretically still saw each other in January, he hooked up with Sara Ruppenthal in February, and his romance with Brigid was history.

The daughter of a former airline pilot who’d served on the Palo Alto City Council and then taught at Stanford’s business school, Sara grew up in the pacifist/bohemian tradition, listening to folk music as well as a recording of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings, and reading Kerouac and Zen philosophy. She entered Stanford in 1961, an extremely lovely Earth Mother beatnik in sneakers, tights, and a turtle-neck, her hair in a braid. She had gotten to know Joan Baez through Ira Sandperl at the Peace Center, and spent time at Baez’s shack in Big Sur. “I used to take great pleasure in signing Joan Baez as the person responsible for me while I was gone from my dorm . . . I wanted nothing more than to be just exactly like her.” One day in late February she wandered into Kepler’s, and Garcia caught her eye. He had a mustache and goatee, longish hair, and a dashing, “renegade” quality. “A channel opened up between us,” she said, “and we both fell in.” She ended up at the musicians’ table at St. Michael’s that night with Garcia, Hunter, and Legate, laughing so hard her stomach hurt. “It was just like falling into a whole ’nother world, but that was the world I wanted.” She spent the night at Garcia’s grubby shack behind the Chateau, and while it lacked electricity, the candles seemed romantic to her. The next morning she enjoyed a “funny cigarette” with Hunter and Legate as they walked around the garden. Sara had a “Wendy complex,” as in
Peter Pan,
and the Chateau was full of lost boys.

The first complication in their lives came early in April, when Joan Baez invited Sara to accompany her as a secretary/assistant on a tour of Europe. Garcia was jealous of Baez, both emotionally in connection to Sara and professionally as a competing musician. As a picker, he told Sara, “I’m king.” In the end, romance won, in more ways than one. Around that time Jerry’s co-resident at the Chateau, David Nelson, loaned them his room for the night, complete with a double bed, clean sheets, and central heat. Shortly after Sara turned down Baez’s invitation, she discovered that she was pregnant. Her parents were no more impressed with Garcia than Brigid’s had been, and offered Sara a round-the-world trip as an alternative to marriage. The young couple—he was twenty, she nineteen—had no idea of what they were getting into, but after missing out on a complete family life as a child, Jerry was willing to take the chance, and Sara was eager to be a mother. So they decided to get married.

Shortly before the wedding, they went to see Bobbie Garcia, Jerry’s first visit with his mother in years. She was very sweet to her daughter-in-law-to-be, taking her to her heart. In a fox fur collar and high heels, she seemed “a real sport” to Sara, a woman who “liked a good drink” and wasn’t terribly maternal. After a delightful visit, Bobbie stopped at the bank and sent each of them home with a hundred-dollar bill in their pockets. By now, Jerry’s grandmother Tillie Clifford was senile, so for Jerry the feminine side of his life was going to have to come from his wife.

Jerry and Sara were married on April 27, 1963, at the Palo Alto Unitarian Church, with a reception following at Rickey’s Hyatt House that included the music of the Wildwood Boys. It was the sort of wedding, several friends later observed, where the groom’s friends could be found stuffing their empty bellies at the food line, while the bride’s family members soothed their shaken nerves with drinks at the bar. The wedding was “tense,” Garcia recalled. “As far as the parents of my girlfriends . . . I’ve always been like Satan.” Sara “was such a delicate fawn in my jungle.” His best man was David Nelson, who felt scruffy around the Ruppenthals, although Willy Legate trumped him by attending in a T-shirt.

For Garcia, one of the best aspects of the wedding was that it brought Phil Lesh back to the Bay Area. Late the previous year Phil had moved to T.C.’s home in Las Vegas, and after being instantly evicted by Mrs. Constanten, moved in with T.C.’s friend Bill Walker, whom they dubbed “the ambassador plenipotentiary from the land of zonk.” Their slogan, “It’s always ten to six in the land of zonk,” would endure as a sly reference to their pot-smoking habits. Lesh was briefly a keno marker at the Horseshoe Club on the graveyard shift, and then found work at the post office. He had torn up his “Sun Cycle” as derivative plagiarism, but continued his efforts to compose, working on a monstrous polytonal piece called “Foci for Four Orchestras,” which would have required 125 musicians and four conductors and included a chord in four keys at once. It required sixty-stave music paper. One of his favorite places to compose was the post office latrine, where he would sit nodding his head in contemplation before going home to write it down. With “Foci” finished, he took the bus to Palo Alto, staggered into Kepler’s, then landed at the Chateau, the only refuge he could imagine, just a bit before the wedding.

Five days after their ceremony, Jerry and Sara played together at the Tangent, singing tunes like “Deep Ellum Blues,” “Will the Weaver,” “Long Black Veil,” and “The Man Who Wrote Home Sweet Home.” Sara had a good voice and they blended nicely, although she lacked Garcia’s obsessiveness, which he demonstrated by playing, in the course of the evening, guitar, banjo, mandolin, and even a decent fiddle. Two weeks later the Hart Valley Drifters, with Garcia on banjo, Ken Frankel on mandolin, Hunter on bass, and Nelson on guitar, performed at the Monterey Folk Festival in the amateur division, winning Best Group. Garcia was also awarded Best Banjo Player.

The focus of the festival was on Peter, Paul and Mary, a group assembled by its manager, Albert Grossman, to promote the work of one of his other clients, a new singer named Bob Dylan. Dylan had scandalized the purist Garcia by writing new songs outside the folk canon, including “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which would turn into a radio hit in the next month. Dylan also performed at the festival, and Garcia would recall leaving early in his set. Hunter attributed their departure to the lousy sound system, though Garcia’s sententious purism may well have played a part. It was the first time they’d really heard of Dylan, though it would certainly not be the last.

Born Robert Zimmerman in 1941 in Minnesota, Dylan had grown up listening to Hank Williams and the great Shreveport, Louisiana, disc jockey Gatemouth Page, who played Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Jimmy Reed on the night radio waves, and then early rock, especially Little Richard. Arriving in New York in 1961, he created a fantasy identity with his new name, and soon became the most important artist the folk scene would ever know. In April of that year he opened for John Lee Hooker at Gerde’s Folk City, and ten months later he had his own eponymously titled album, though it sold only five thousand copies in the first year. In 1962 he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and it quickly became one of the anthems of the burgeoning civil rights movement. Just as he appeared at Monterey, Columbia Records released his second album, the immediately successful
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
which included the topical yet brilliantly universal “Oxford Town,” “Masters of War,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

The summer of 1963 saw Garcia make a certain effort to be a family man, distancing himself for a brief while from his friends. Hunter was convinced that Sara was trying to “make something of him,” and the two men drifted apart. Garcia even took something resembling a job, teaching guitar at Dana Morgan’s music store in Palo Alto. His timing was impeccable.
Hootenanny,
a television folk music program, had debuted in April, and kids were flocking to learn guitar. Physical fitness was all the rage, especially one’s capacity for a fifty-mile hike. In April, the United States had sponsored an aborted and failed invasion of Cuba at a place called the Bay of Pigs. News from Vietnam dominated television with images of monks immolating themselves to protest the local regime. In June, Medgar Evers, an NAACP field-worker in Jackson, Mississippi, was murdered, and shortly after, President Kennedy proposed a Civil Rights Act. In Palo Alto the Chateau was sold, sending Nelson, Hunter, and Legate fleeing to a new home at 436 Hamilton Street, a block away from St. Michael’s Alley.

Steeped in domesticity, the Garcias lived in suburban Mountain View, with Jerry hitching to work carrying his instrument cases. His tiny, smoky room at Dana Morgan’s had two chairs and a music stand, which seemed quite sufficient. He was a good, if unconventional, teacher. “I tried to teach them how to hear,” he said, making tapes of relatively easy but good-sounding material like the Carter Family for his students. Benignly encouraging, he answered the stock question “How long should I practice?” with “Play when you feel like it.” At least one student was so delighted by that response that he played all the time. Some of the lessons would involve simply listening to Garcia play and then asking questions. His sense of time as it applied to lessons was unreliable. A student would knock, Garcia would call out, “I’ll be with you in a minute,” and half an hour later the student’s mother would be there, and he’d still be enthusiastically describing something new to his first student.

Morgan’s led him to another musical diversion, his first foray into rock and roll since the Chords. Dana Morgan’s store manager was Troy Weidenheimer, an electric guitarist whom Jerry had known since the Boar’s Head. Troy had a band called the Zodiacs, and that summer he invited Garcia to join it—as the bass player. It was great fun, Jerry would say, despite the fact that he was “out of my idiom” playing rock and out of his instrument with the bass. But “Troy taught me the principle of ‘hey— stomp your foot and get on it.’ He was a great one for the instant arrangement . . . fearless for that thing of ‘get your friends and do it,’ and ‘fuck it if it ain’t slick, it’s supposed to be fun.’ He had a wide-open style of playing that was very, very loose, like when we went to play gigs at the Stanford parties, we didn’t have songs or anything, and he would just say play B-flat, you know, and I’d play bass, and we’d just play along and he’d jam over the top of it, so a lot of my conceptions of the freedom available to your playing really came from him. He would like take chorus after chorus, but he directed the band like right in the now . . . we never rehearsed or anything ever, we would just go to the shows and play—and he was so loose about it, he didn’t care, he just wanted it cookin’ so he could play his solos, and he was just a wonderful, inventive, and fun, goodhumored guitar player. One of the first guys I ever heard who exhibited a real sense of humor on the guitar. He was quite accomplished. I mean, in those days he was certainly the hot-rod guitar player of P.A., as far as electric guitar was concerned. While I was a folkie and all that . . .” The band also included a young local drummer named Bill Kreutzmann, and Jerry’s old friend Ron McKernan, on harmonica.