So Many Roads (10 page)

The calls from Garcia with another bluegrass gig would still come into Norm van Maastricht's parents' house. On the way to the job the players would scramble to concoct a new name: in the early months of 1963 the Hart Valley Drifters gave way to the Wildwood Boys. No matter where they were headed they found themselves in one of Hunter or Garcia's scrappy cars, which chugged and wheezed their way around the Peninsula. After one particularly bumpy ride van Maastricht told Garcia he needed better wheels, if only for his safety. “Look,” Garcia told him, firmly but politely, “all I want to do is to live my own weird little life my own weird little way and play music for a living.” For decades to come friends and colleagues would hear a variation on that line emerge from Garcia's mouth.

For Garcia
weird
was a compliment; by then he knew he was destined for some type of alternative lifestyle and sought out friends who'd made the same decision. Two and a half years had passed since the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet those days must have felt like another lifetime for Garcia. In the time since, one relationship had dissolved and another had begun; he'd become a husband, father, and to some degree a breadwinner. The days of the Chateau were over, at least for him, and it was now his job to put meals on the table every night. Maybe this new venture—a rock 'n' roll band—would help his fiscal issues and even be artistically fulfilling.

Within months of the Kennedy-Khrushchev standoff Garcia's personal life had been dismantled. When Barbara Meier's parents learned she'd slept with Garcia, the couple suffered a serious setback. “Everything shifted,” Meier says. “Then it became very difficult and it wasn't
as wonderful as it once was. I had to get these geeky guys on so-called dates so I could then go with Jerry.” As much as she admired her boyfriend's musical diligence, it was also becoming tedious for Meier to sit around patiently and watch him practice banjo for hours and hours on end. By early 1963, after she'd started seeing other boys, their relationship had soured and burnt itself out.

Whatever mourning consumed Garcia faded quickly. He soon met Sara Ruppenthal, a striking Stanford sophomore and fellow folk music fan who, like many men and women at the time, was taken with Garcia's Hispanic-beatnik air. (In Lesh's memory the future couple met in a parking lot as Garcia was walking and Ruppenthal was bicycling, and he hitched a ride with her.) Almost immediately the two fell into each other's arms and then his bed in his room in a shack behind the Chateau. As Ruppenthal later told Garcia biographer Blair Jackson, Garcia called her within days of their first night together and told her, “I'm really fucked up. I need to be with you. I can't eat. I can't even play music, man!” The initial heat generated between the two became palpable in more than one way. Weeks later, hanging out with Nelson, Hunter, and van Maastricht at the Peninsula Creamery, a local diner, Garcia put both elbows on the table and said, “Well, guys, looks like I have to get married!” They were shocked and asked, “Are you kidding? To whom?” Garcia told them his new girlfriend was pregnant. “In those days,” van Maastricht says, “you did the right thing.” Garcia didn't seem distraught or freaked out by the idea of becoming a parent, and in April the couple were married in Palo Alto.

Three months before the wedding a new club, the Top of the Tangent, had opened in Palo Alto. Located on University Avenue near the front gates of Stanford, the Tangent was run by two local doctors who wanted to bring folk to the city on a regular basis. The space was located above the Tangent restaurant and only had enough space for about twenty tables, some of which bumped up against the stage, yet
the club, which had a beer license, was more professional than anything else in the area. A staircase led into the middle of a low-ceilinged performance space where, “if we were lucky, there was one microphone,” recalls Jorma Kaukonen. “But they had a PA. It was a bit more glitzy. It was a
real
place, like one of the folk clubs in LA.”

The Tangent hosted Garcia's then-current bluegrass band, the Wildwood Boys (who also played at his and Sara's wedding), and before long the new couple were also playing together there, singing folk songs as Garcia alternated between guitar, banjo, and other instruments. In the meantime Garcia continued jamming and performing with one or another acoustic band, including at a folk festival in Monterey. But those shows barely paid, if at all, and to earn something close to a living Garcia had begun teaching at the Dana Morgan Music Shop. One of his new students was Bob Matthews, a skinny Berkeley-born teenager whose mother, a grade-school teacher, happened to mention to a Stanford documentarian that her son wanted to learn how to play banjo. The filmmaker turned out to be none other than Ruppenthal, who tipped Matthews's mother to her husband, Jerry, and his classes at Morgan's store.

As Matthews realized, Garcia was a commanding presence and impressive musician who didn't let his students get away with slacking off. “He had a very sinister look to him,” he says. “He didn't talk a lot, but his eyes would curse you. He'd be sitting there playing and looking to see how you were responding to his playing.” Matthews, who admittedly wasn't as devoted to the instrument as was his new teacher, only lasted a few months: “Jerry was like, ‘You don't practice, you're not gonna learn this stuff.'”

By the end of 1963 Garcia's life had taken two different and potentially conflicting turns. His daughter with Sara, Heather, arrived in December, and on New Year's Eve he found himself alone in a practice room in the back of Morgan's store when Matthews and two friends
popped in. At an earlier point Matthews had introduced Garcia to one of his classmates, Bob Weir, but that moment hadn't amounted to much. Tonight's get-together would be far more memorable.

To no one's surprise, Weir had arrived back in his hometown area months before. He'd been kicked out of Fountain Valley in Colorado at the end of the 1962–1963 school year, and after summering with the Barlow family in Wyoming in the middle of 1963, he'd returned to the West Coast to continue his attempt at conforming to the educational system. His efforts weren't any more successful than they'd been in Colorado. He then attended Pacific High School, a period most distinguished by the forming of Weir's first band, a folk group called the Uncalled Four that included his former Menlo School classmate Michael Wanger on banjo. “Rock 'n' roll was pretty limp at the time,” says Wanger, who recalls talking with Weir about music as the two sat side by side for yearbook photos. “The only thing happening was the Beach Boys.”

The group, named by Wanger's father, landed at least one job at the Tangent, and Weir, whose fascination with folk and other vernacular forms of music was expanding, began spending time at Kepler's and St. Michael's Alley. Given Weir's previously diagnosed case of dyslexia, Kepler's was problematic: “I really couldn't read very well, so I felt a little funny in a bookstore,” he recalled to writer Hajdu. St. Michael's had an added attraction: women. It was, he said, “a good place to go and meet girls—and hang out with people who were the youth intelligentsia.” The Tangent also pulled in its fair share of female music fans.

That New Year's Eve at Morgan's store Garcia apparently didn't realize his prospective student wouldn't be showing up, but when it hit him, he invited Matthews, Weir, and their other friend, Rich McCauley, inside. “Jerry asked us if we played and we said, ‘Yeah,' and he said, ‘Well, I got the keys to the front of the store, let's grab some instruments,'” Weir has said. (In another retelling of the incident Weir
thinks someone suggested, “Why don't we break into the front of the store?”) For several hours they all made a carefree racket on banjos and guitars, and Garcia and Weir overcame their five-year age difference—Garcia was twenty-one, Weir all of sixteen—and connected by way of music. “It was like meeting an old friend,” Weir has said. “It was like taking up a conversation we'd left off.” Garcia must have been equally inspired, as he suggested they converge again the following week at the store. This time they brought along two other local friends, David Parker and a scraggly East Palo Alto blues-loving renegade named Ron McKernan, who went by the nickname Blue Ron, for his love of the blues. All of them gathered at least once more to play, this time at Parker's house.

In early 1964 Weir was enrolled in yet another school, Menlo-Atherton High School in his hometown of Atherton, and was already carrying himself like a musician. During lunchtime he could be seen toting a guitar, just like Dylan; when Bonner took guitar lessons from him at Guitars Unlimited Weir demonstrated his ability to blow smoke rings across the small room. In her world history class Swanson, a pert brunette, was yapping with a classmate about trying to get into a nearby Beatles concert—they'd just played the
Ed Sullivan Show
and had, to put it mildly, made a strong impression on the youth of America—when the boy sitting in front her turned around and said, “Well,
I
have a band.”

By way of horse-riding lessons, Swanson had befriended fellow rider Wendy Weir and had heard mention of the kid others referred to as “Wendy's weird brother Bob.” (“Blob Weird” was another nickname of the period.) Swanson too would also come to notice Weir's eccentricities: the way he would fill in a drawing of an airplane instead of his name on a test exam or refuse to stand up for the morning flag salute. Here he now was, sitting in front of her and knowing precisely the right
way to get a girl's attention. And, it turned out, he did have a band, even if it sounded nothing remotely like the Beatles.

Laird Grant, Garcia's partner in mischief from middle school days, was among those who wandered into Magoo's to watch the Warlocks take a crack at playing rock 'n' roll. To no one's surprise the acoustics inside a pizza parlor were pretty atrocious, and on the night Grant showed up the band was stuffed into a corner: “No stage, no nothing, flat on the ground.” But he was still delighted to see Garcia making music with the keyboard player with whom Grant had already bonded over drinks in bars in East Palo Alto. Whereas once he'd been called Blue Ron, thanks to his largely great-unwashed demeanor, he was now and forever Pigpen.

Garcia and others on the Peninsula music scene wanted nothing more than to be viewed as authentic, not products of what they saw as the increasingly plastic, conformist society around them. (Garcia had a word for people in that world: “mugs.”) Yet here in their midst was someone who exuded dark-end-of-the-street realness in ways they never could. Ron McKernan had been born in San Mateo on September 8, 1945, and his father, Phil, was a recording engineer and DJ at KRE, a local radio station. (“Being a DJ was a side job to being the engineer at the station,” explains Phil's daughter and Ron's sister, Carol.) Thanks to his father's interest in R&B and blues and vast record collection, young Ron quickly developed a deep, profound connection with those genres. That bond was only made stronger when the family moved and Ron began attending a largely African American high school in East Palo Alto. Neither surfer nor jock, he so identified with the African American community there that, according to one friend of the time, he wore a steel-chain bracelet to make sure he never forgot about slavery.

In light of his funky hygiene habits and charming grubbiness, McKernan went from being called Blue Ron to Pigpen in honor of the unkempt character in
Peanuts
. By early 1964 Pigpen sightings were everywhere: he was spotted at Pacific High, at Kepler's, at bars, and at the Dana Morgan Music Shop, where he was a teenage janitor. At one point he took a job delivering donuts to local stores, and his routine became part of his local legend: finishing a shift at three or four in the morning, he'd cap it off by pulling out a jug of cheap wine sold in grocery stores. (Whether it was the way he looked or the way he acted, no one ever seemed to question or card him.) In the early morning hours he'd sing and play the blues on guitar and harmonica.

Despite his hardened, gruff-as-shingles exterior, Pigpen struck most of his friends as exceedingly shy. “He didn't look like he was reputable at all,” says Bonner Mosley, “but he was the sweetest guy in the world.” Music became his way of exorcising his demons, which would forever be mysterious to the members of the Dead. They knew little of his family or the tension between Pigpen and his father, Phil, who, they would later learn, wanted his son to take a non-arts-related career path, to become, in the father's words, a “‘world renouned [
sic
] scientist.' And so I fashioned a mold for Ron that was not of his choosing, but of mine.” In Phil McKernan's eyes, Pigpen felt his father didn't approve of his chosen life and so, in turn, “had to find some manner of coping with it.” That coping mechanism, Phil felt, was alcohol, and it would haunt the father for years.