Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  To say that Jerry Garcia wasn’t exactly “army material” would be putting it mildly. He related more to the rebellious Brando in The Wild One than to John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, and he wasn’t about to leave Kerouac and Chuck Berry behind just because his hair was short and he wore a khaki uniform. By his own admission, he was lazy and “pathologically anti-authoritarian,” but no doubt the military has made “men” out of tougher cases than his, and he was always such a genial and enthusiastic fellow that he probably convinced the recruiters, and maybe even himself, that this was the best move for him. Tiff says he tried to talk Jerry out of enlisting—after all, he knew both the military and his brother—but, as Jerry put it, “I wanted so badly to see the world; it was the only hope I had. The only reason I wanted to go into the army was to go someplace—Germany, Korea, Japan, anyplace.”

  From mid-April to July of 1960, Jerry did his basic combat training at Fort Ord, a scenic if slightly desolate base near Monterey, on the Pacific Coast 125 miles south of San Francisco. He wasn’t a total washout as an army man: at Fort Ord he earned decorations for carbine sharpshooting and for “Basic Missileman (Surface to Air Missile)” training. Clearly, though, he had things other than soldiering on his mind. There was his girlfriend, whom he visited in Redwood City whenever he could, and Laird Grant helped make sure that Jerry’s time at Fort Ord wasn’t too dull:

  “I’d go on base and we’d go to the PX and get a bunch of beer and put it in my ’47 Cadillac convertible and drive around and throw beer cans at the sentries,” Laird says. “I had a whole bunch of crazy people that were dressed in weird costumes, people from Redwood City, like his girlfriend. I drove around with a leopardskin vest and cutoff patent leather shorts and a top hat with a dead mole on top of it.”

  In July and August of 1960 Jerry was in an advanced individual training program at Fort Ord learning how to be an auto maintenance helper. He had always been interested in cars, but Laird Grant says, “The army said, ‘What do you want to do?’ and he said, ‘I want to do electronics,’ but instead they gave him motor pool! He told me, ‘If I’d asked for motor pool they would have given me electronics!’ That’s the way the army was in those days—if you were interested in something, they weren’t interested in you being interested in it. They want to mold you their own way.”

  When Private Recruit (PV1) Garcia completed his service school training in late August, the army gave him his initial base assignment: not to some exotic foreign port of call, but to Fort Winfield Scott in San Francisco’s Presidio, “a beautiful, lovely spot overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and all that, and these neat old barracks, and almost nothing to do.” Jerry said of that period, “Once you’re out of basic training, being in the army is like having a bad job. I didn’t take it seriously. They’re very tough about showing up for the morning roll-call trip—reveille. And if you’re not there, that’s called AWOL. You pile up nine or ten of those and it doesn’t look good on the record.

  “In the army you get involved in these soap opera scenes,” he continued. “I had this friend who I had met when I was in base training at Fort Ord. This guy had married the oldest sister of the girl I was going with [in Redwood City]. He was one of those incorrigible guys, one of those guys with a ‘Live Fast, Die Young’ tattoo; that kind of guy. A great guy but a total fuckup. So he was doing stuff like robbing banks and getting into tremendous big trouble, and the family was asking me to help out, because I was the way this guy had gotten into this little working-class family and [I] put him together with the sister he’d married. So [one time] I was hung up with this guy and he was threatening to commit suicide in a hotel room in Redwood City. So of course I was late the next morning to roll call. I thought it was more important to sit there and bullshit with the guy. It was stuff like that; things that I didn’t have that much control over. I didn’t do it on purpose, certainly, but the way it works is these things pile up.”

  The flip side to Garcia’s relationship with this acquaintance who was, in Jerry’s words, “trouble incarnate,” is that he was a good fingerpicking guitarist and “I was totally fascinated by it.” Garcia had brought his second electric guitar, a Sears Silvertone, into the army with him, but “I was just a three-chorder then” (a slight exaggeration; by all accounts he played competent rock ’n’ roll guitar), and learning the rudiments of acoustic fingerpicking opened up a new world for him. “That’s how I got into fingerpicking the acoustic guitar, country music, the banjo, folk music, the traditional stuff, all that,” he said in 1971.

  The episode in the Redwood City hotel may or may not have been the incident that actually led to Garcia’s being convicted at a Summary Court-Martial on October 19, 1960. That military court found that “On or about October 15, 1960, [JG] broke restriction to battery area.” It’s unclear how long he was illegally off-base, but cousin Daniel Garcia recalls a time during this period when “U.S. marshals came to my house looking for him because he’d gone AWOL. You can’t walk away from the army; they take a dim view of that. It scared the hell out of my mother, as you can imagine.”

  According to Jerry, not long after the court-martial, “My company commander asked me in one day and said, ‘Hey Garcia, would you like to get out of the army?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that would be nice.’” What might have gone on behind the scenes to expedite Jerry’s departure from the service—did his commander simply want this insubordinate bad egg out of the army?—we may never know; that sort of information is sealed in his military records.

  Thirty-five years later, Daniel Garcia is still incredulous that getting out of the military could have been that easy: “You can’t just say, ‘I don’t want to be here, bye-bye.’ Half the army would leave. It doesn’t work that way. It’s nearly impossible to get out of there unless you’re a Section 8, and you have to prove that you’re really a nutcase to get that.” Actually, there is another criterion, which might have been used in Jerry’s case: “Failure to Adapt,” which includes the category “Not suited to the military lifestyle.” Indeed.

  “You’ve got to remember that this is the guy who could fall in the proverbial bucket of you-know-what and come out like a rose,” Daniel says. “If he and his brother and I would get in trouble, Jerry would get out of it and Tiff and I would get in trouble; it never failed. We once stole some Silly Putty from a department store and his mother found this big stash of it in his room and I got in trouble because he told his mother I had given it to him. But you couldn’t stay mad at him too long because he was such a likable guy. He was always getting out of scrapes like that, and the service was probably just another one for him.”

  And so, on December 14, 1960, Jerry’s dubious military career came to an end, and he was out on his own for the first time—eighteen years old, with no plans, no family attachments (at last!), no commitments and no job prospects; finally free. Better take a page out of On the Road for this one:

  “It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of the mist. ‘Whooee!’ yelled Dean. ‘Here we go!’ And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved!”

  CHAPTER 2

  Recall the Days That Still Are to Come

  e’ll probably never know precisely what was going through Jerry’s head when he got out of the army, but one thing is certain—he made a conscious effort to disconnect from his family. Tiff had only sporadic contact with him over the next few years, his cousin Daniel didn’t see him at all for a couple of years and he completely ignored his mother and grandmother. Pop Clifford had died in February of 1960, and later that year Ruth split up with Wally and moved back into Harrington Street to be with Tillie, whose health and mental faculties had become somewhat precarious. Ruth sold her liquor license at some point, and later the building that housed the 40
0 Club was torn down to make way for a new entrance onto the Bay Bridge. Ruth returned to her first career—working as a pediatric nurse at San Francisco General Hospital—and Wally went back to being a seaman full-time for the Pacific Far East Lines. He and Ruth remarried and divorced again but continued to live together on and off at Harrington Street. Early in the afternoon of February 12, 1962, Wally was driving Ruth to work when he suffered a massive heart attack. Ruth had to wrestle the car to the side of the road and then drive Wally to San Francisco General, where he was pronounced dead at 3:20 P.M. After a funeral a couple of days later (which Jerry did not attend), Wally’s body was shipped to Jersey City for burial.

  “I broke off all communication with my family when I went into the army,” Jerry said, “and they didn’t even know that I was out of the army. . . . I just didn’t want to say anything to anybody. . . . I just wanted to be goofing off. I didn’t want to get a job or go to college or do any of that stuff. So there was nobody after me to do it. I heard from people who had heard from [my family]. They knew I was okay.”

  Jerry said that he migrated back down to the Peninsula after his stint in the army because “that’s where my friends were. I had a girlfriend in Redwood City when I was in the army and I met some people, this older couple, who lived in Redwood City—very nice people from Salt Lake City—and they moved down to Palo Alto and they offered me a place to stay when I was discharged. I thought, ‘Oh gee, that would be great.’ So I went to Palo Alto and I hung out there in the good graces of these nice people from Salt Lake City who put me up.”

  Located about forty miles south of San Francisco, Palo Alto is a genteel suburban city of about 59,000 (it had about 52,000 in 1960) with a nearly perfect climate and block after block of American-dream houses and Edenic yards brimming with an exceptionally large variety of trees, shrubs and flowers. There are long, wide roads lined with white-blossomed magnolias, and great grassy parks dotted with willows and rhododendron. It’s probably best known as the home of Stanford University, itself an incredible California dreamscape, not to mention one of the best schools in the world. There’s lots of old and new money in Palo Alto; it’s filled with professionals who have chosen to bring up their children in more idyllic surroundings than the big city offers.

  Of course there’s more to Palo Alto than that neatly manicured portrait. And that’s hardly the world that Jerry dropped into when he dropped out of the military.

  Like most progressive university towns, Palo Alto has always been home to a sizable bohemian element—artists, dancers, musicians and freethinking literary types either connected to Stanford in some way or attracted by the surrounding creative-intellectual milieu. There’s always a lot happening on and around campus, so it’s hardly surprising that the area was a magnet for bright, curious teenagers and young adults. And in those days it was easy to live cheaply by renting rooms in any of dozens of old clapboard Victorians near campus, or by moving away from the downtown area altogether: Menlo Park to the north has more affordable housing, and in Palo Alto the farther west you move from Stanford’s towering eucalyptus groves, date palms and golden-stoned buildings, the more you encounter ordinary middle-class homes that were built in the late ’40s and early ’50s to accommodate an influx of baby boom families. And then, east across Highway 101 as you approach the shores of San Francisco Bay, there’s East Palo Alto, mainly black and poor, a thousand miles away from lily-white Stanford culturally, if not geographically.

  It’s not clear how long Jerry stayed with the couple from Salt Lake City—whether it was a matter of days or weeks—but sometime right after he arrived on the Peninsula, his bad-news army buddy showed up unannounced at the house, parking his stolen car outside: “He’s got a fella with him, both of ’em dressed in suits and packing irons, and they had just done a string of bank robberies up and down the coast!” Jerry recalled. “I thought, ‘Hmm, maybe I’d like to not see so much of this guy and his crime scene any longer.’”

  Jerry had no visible means of support when he arrived in Palo Alto, but through his friend Laird Grant and his own natural openness and affability he managed to plug into several different social scenes almost immediately. The main one revolved around Kepler’s Books, on El Camino Real, just a few blocks from Stanford in neighboring Menlo Park. More than just a bookstore, Kepler’s was a serious hangout that attracted all sorts of interesting characters, and indeed, it was at Kepler’s that Jerry met a number of the people who would be part of his remarkable odyssey over the next three-plus decades.

  One person he encountered very quickly after moving to the Peninsula was a slight eighteen-year-old Englishman named Alan Trist, who had moved to Palo Alto in November 1960 when his father began a yearlong fellowship at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences. To occupy his days and keep his mind sharp for the three years of study at Cambridge he still had in front of him, Alan was auditing courses at Stanford, until fate intervened:

  “One of the other Fellows at the center had a daughter, Karen Kaplan, and they had a dinner party one night and she said, ‘Well, if you want something to do here, you should see what’s going on down at Kepler’s,’” Trist says. “So the very next day I went down to Kepler’s, where I met Jerry. He was sitting on a coffee table playing the guitar and we struck up an instant relationship. Jerry had this amazing way about him, and it happened the first time I sat across the table from him—he would just sit there and play and look at you and smile. His charisma was really attractive. After that I didn’t want to audit any more courses at Stanford, because here was a bookstore where Roy Kepler allowed people to sit around all day and read the books and play music and talk. You could even take the books home overnight if you wanted.”

  Kepler’s was more than just a boho hangout, for owner Roy Kepler was also one of the area’s best-known peace activists, so the store attracted people from that world, too. Both Kepler and Ira Sandperl, who worked at Kepler’s and also taught at the progressive Peninsula School nearby, had been instrumental in starting the Peninsula Peace Center in the late ’50s over on Stanford Avenue in south Palo Alto. The Peace Center became an organizing hub for all sorts of pacifist political activity during that era, such as mobilizing against further nuclear proliferation and testing. “Ban the Bomb” was the slogan of the day, when the devastation of the Korean War was fresh in people’s minds and the cold war was still heating up.

  To help pay the rent on the ramshackle house that was headquarters of the Peace Center, Kepler and Sandperl used to rent out most of the rooms, at first mainly to needy Stanford students, but then to anyone who could afford the dirt-cheap monthly rent. Sandperl says that the staff at Kepler’s also regularly helped its more indigent customers—which in short order came to include Jerry and most of his friends—to find places to live or crash for a day or two.

  “The Palo Alto Peace Center was a great place for social trips,” Jerry said. “The Peace Center was the place where the sons and daughters of the Stanford professors would hang out and discuss things. And we, the opportunist wolf pack—the beatnik hordes—would be there preying on their young minds and their refrigerators. And there would be all of these various people turning up in these scenes and it just got to be very good; really high.”

  One character he met at the Peace Center who became a lifelong friend was Willy Legate, a brilliant, red-haired, red-bearded College of the Redlands dropout and would-be communist—“I didn’t know Marxist theory then and I don’t know it now,” he says, “but I enjoyed giving the impression that I might be some kind of commie.” A deep-thinking and introverted historian, philosopher and theologist, Willy was also the first person in Garcia’s Palo Alto crowd to take LSD: In February 1959, he ingested about 100 micrograms of illegally obtained Sandoz LSD with a couple of acquaintances in his dorm at Redlands. “We listened to a lot of Bach,” he recalls. “I remember the dormitory’s hallway seemed to be miles long, and the chapel jutted out like gingerbread against the cut-glass sky.<
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  “These guys seemed to be saying that such hallucinogens were the answer, the end—a religious thing,” Willy says. “I considered the experience a mental act, not a spiritual reality.”

  Another group Jerry ran with during these first days on the Peninsula lived in rented rooms in a rambling old house known as the Chateau, on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park, a couple of miles from Kepler’s. “The Chateau was this large house that was probably built in the late ’20s or early ’30s on this little knoll there,” says Laird Grant. “At the time it was owned by a guy named Frank Serratoni, who was an artist. He’d do these drawings and then put a watercolor wash on them; they sold at the City of Paris [an elegant San Francisco department store] and places like that.”

  “The Chateau was mainly the various people from the Kepler’s crowd,” adds David Nelson, who met Garcia in the summer of 1961. “And defining that is kind of elusive, because a lot of them were people who had been traveling and used Kepler’s as a stopping point or meeting place. You’d be hitchhiking and coming from Big Sur or Monterey, where Emerson College was, and you’d be on your way to Oregon, where Reed College was, or to Berkeley, which had a scene, too. So there was all this commerce and traffic and different stopping places. Kepler’s was one because it was a public place. The Chateau was another because it was so loose—it was always filled with people staying with other people, and partly because of that it became a really serious party place. They were big affairs, with pot for the people who were wise to it, usually smoked out back discreetly, and big jugs of wine inside. People would play music endlessly and Frank Serratoni just let it all happen.”

  Yet another meeting place was one of the local folk music spots, St. Michael’s Alley on University Avenue in Palo Alto. It’s there that the area’s most celebrated singer and activist, Joan Baez, got her start while she was still a student at Palo Alto High School, and as Alan Trist puts it, “Kepler’s was the main spot in the daytime and at night everyone would go over to St. Michael’s Alley.” Besides drawing some of the Kepler’s crowd, St. Michael’s also attracted a number of Stanford students and even local high school kids, since no alcohol was served there. Garcia and Phil Lesh met at St. Michael’s during that year.