Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Garcia also struck up close relationships with a number of high school students who hung around the scene, including Charlotte Daigle, a senior at Palo Alto High School whom he dated on and off for about a year after they met at Kepler’s; Barbara Meier, a sophomore at Menlo-Atherton High in Menlo Park, who would become one of his first serious loves; Danya Veltfort, a bright, politically active Peninsula School alumnus and Willy Legate’s girlfriend; and a sixteen-year-old Menlo-Atherton student named Paul Speegle Jr., whom Garcia and Laird Grant knew from their time at Menlo-Oaks.

  Speegle was by all accounts a very interesting character. He was the son and namesake of the well-respected drama and music critic for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin newspaper, and he certainly had a taste for the theatrical himself. A painter of considerable renown, he regularly dressed in elegant, semi-Edwardian finery, and he was active in two local drama groups, the Teen Players at the Palo Alto Community Center, and the Comedia Theater. “Paul and Lowell Clukas were totally into Rimbaud and they were just flaunting it,” says Barbara Meier. “Menlo-Atherton High School at the time was so ’50s preppy—white bucks, crewcuts. They were definitely effete young men, but very, very bright. They were cultured. They were erudite. They had very refined taste and I think they were appalled, as I was, by our high school.”

  Garcia and Speegle spent a fair amount of time together in early 1961. Jerry greatly admired Paul’s painting and his colorful personal eccentricities (this was no typical sixteen-year-old), and it was through him that Garcia became briefly involved with the Comedia Theater group. “I was just getting to be good friends with Paul,” Garcia said of this period. “We didn’t know each other that well yet, but it’s like how you know you’re going to be good friends with somebody. It’s just getting hot. I could feel that coming. We were starting to cook. . . .”

  At about 1:30 in the morning on February 20, 1961, a party at the Chateau was breaking up and Garcia, Speegle and Alan Trist all piled into a 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawk owned by one of the Chateau’s residents, Lee Adams, to drive Paul back to his mother’s house in the Los Altos Hills. Jerry, Paul and Alan had been playing charades—with Paul and Alan donning black cloaks at one point to mime what Trist calls “a game of death”—and they’d all had a lot to drink, including Adams, the driver. At about 1:50 A.M. the car was speeding south on Junipero Serra Boulevard near the U.S. Veterans Administration Hospital at about ninety miles per hour when Adams failed to negotiate a curve and lost control of the Stude, which slashed through a fence, rolled over several times and finally came to rest on its wheels—on top of Paul Speegle, who was pronounced dead at the scene. “It was just wham!” Garcia remembered. “We went flying, I guess. All I know is that I was sitting in the car and that there was this . . . disturbance . . . and the next thing I was in a field. I went through the windshield and landed far enough away from the car where I couldn’t see it. It was night. It was very, very quiet, you know. It was like a complete break in continuity—from sitting in the car roaring down the road, to lying in a field wondering what had happened; nothing in between.”

  The force of the crash was so severe that Garcia was literally thrown out of his shoes, and Adams and Trist were tossed clear of the car as well. All three were taken to Stanford Hospital—Jerry with a shoulder injury, Alan a hurt back, and Lee Adams with a mild head wound and various cuts on one side of his body. The story of the calamity made the front page of the Palo Alto Times: Under a brooding photo of Paul Speegle Jr. was a headline that read SPEEGLE’S SON KILLED IN CRASH, and the accompanying story gave the vital stats on the car’s other occupants, mentioning “Jerry Garcia, 18, 1339 Willow Road, Menlo Park, ‘fair’ condition with a shoulder injury.”

  In interviews Jerry often spoke of the crash as one of the early turning points in his life: “This was crushing. This was serious. For me—I was not really going anywhere special. I wasn’t going to art school anymore, but I was playing the guitar an awful lot, sitting around and poking around the guitar. But I wasn’t thinking about myself as a guitar player or musician. I was still thinking of myself as an artist. But that was really drifting away from me and I hadn’t really admitted it to myself one way or another. . . . I was awfully happy to be alive, certainly. I was a changed person. It was cosmic. In fact, it affected our whole little community. . . .”

  In another interview Garcia went even further, saying the crash was “where my life began. Before then I was always living at less than capacity. I was idling. That was the slingshot for the rest of my life.”

  Sara Ruppenthal, whom Jerry would meet and marry two years later, says that “He would talk about the accident a lot. I remember him driving me by the V.A. and saying, ‘Here’s where the accident was. I remember going through the barbed-wire fence.’ He’d broken his collarbone and was in a lot of pain but managed to walk to the V.A. hospital, but they told him, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any emergency services; we can’t help you.’ That was such an awful part of his life. It was something that was still weighing heavily on his mind when we met.”

  Garcia didn’t really make any radical changes in his life after the crash. He was still essentially a homeless drifter with no money, bouncing around to different friends’ houses for as long as they would have him. Alan Trist’s parents let Jerry stay off and on in the small Spanish-style house they were renting for the year and, as Trist puts it, “He always had a graciousness about him that you never felt imposed upon.”

  “In those days,” adds David Nelson, “you could basically walk around with some stuff—maybe just a knapsack, or a little bag and a guitar—and you’d set it down somewhere and that’d be where you were. There were occasional nights one place and then you’d move on to another place, and you really didn’t have to sweat it that much; you’d always wind up someplace.”

  Shortly after the accident, Garcia met Barbara Meier, a bright, vivacious fifteen-year-old student who was already an entrenched member of the Kepler’s/Peace Center crowd. As she puts it, “My parents knew they could call up Kepler’s pretty much any time to find out where I was, or [the Kepler’s clerks] would cover for me and tell them I was fine.” She describes her parents as “very cool, bright, extremely literate and politically liberal.

  “Part of why I flowed into [the Palo Alto beatnik] scene so easily is that at the same time my parents were in Menlo Park, my aunt, who was a fashion executive at Joseph Magnin [department store] in San Francisco, had an apartment in North Beach so I would go and spend weekends up there. I think the turning point for me, when it really fell into place, was 1959, somewhere around my fourteenth birthday. I read On the Road and then I got what that scene in North Beach was all about.”

  Through her aunt, Barbara started to land modeling assignments, and her career was in full swing when she met Jerry—she often appeared in Macy’s and Magnin’s ads in the San Francisco newspapers, and nationally she appeared in Life magazine and in a Pepsodent toothpaste commercial. Jerry mocked her modeling but was more than willing to reap the benefits of the hundred dollars a day she made doing it. Barbara gave him money in dribs for nearly two years, and even bought him two guitars during that time.

  * * *

  In March 1961 Garcia was filling some of his evenings working the lights for the Comedia Theater’s production of Damn Yankees when he met a very interesting, seriously intellectual, similarly bohemian nineteen-year-old who had been bumming around town looking for adventures and kindred spirits following a stint in the National Guard. This was Robert Hunter, who was, coincidentally, a former boyfriend of one of the girls Jerry was dating at the time, Diane Huntsburger. Hunter and Garcia hit it off immediately, discovering they had many interests in common, including Beat culture, mysticism, James Joyce, drawing, poetry, singing, playing guitar, girls and getting high. Just a couple of not-so-regular American teenagers on the prowl for good times.

  Like Garcia, Bob Hunter had been bounced around by fate most of his life. “I’m from up and down the West Coast,”
he said. “I’ve lived in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Long Beach, all that, a couple of years in Connecticut, in my growing-up period.” At age nine he went through a traumatic family breakup that led to his being placed in a series of boardinghouses for a couple of years: “Made a melancholy lad of me,” he once wrote. “I was never in one place too long. I think Palo Alto about the longest of all—I spent between eighth and eleventh grade there. Up till then I think I went to a different school every year, which certainly helped develop my outsider feelings; always the new kid in school.”

  One way Hunter dealt with his loneliness was to dive headlong into both reading and writing: “I always had my nose in a book,” he said. “I was getting away from it. . . . I thought that a lot of [the other kids] were just better than me. I didn’t feel that I was particularly smart, and I felt they didn’t like me for some reason. I think the reason they didn’t like me was that I was too defensive and I would strike first. But I’d just forget it all and bury my nose in Robin Hood or something like that. I think my real life was books, in my growing up. So it was only natural that I started writing. I started my first novel when I was eleven.”

  Certainly there were plenty of books around the Hunter household. His stepfather, Norman Hunter, was a book salesman for Harcourt Brace and later a prominent book editor, whose high-profile authors included William Saroyan among others, “so we had a splendid library around the house.” He said, “My father certainly didn’t discourage [my writing] . . . although he told me there was no money to be made in the profession. I wasn’t as discouraged from that as I was from my trumpet and violin, which after a hard day at work, he would tolerate but not encourage.”

  Besides his stabs at those instruments, Hunter took up the guitar, but it was trumpet that he played in a group called the Crescents during his senior year of high school in Stamford, Connecticut, forty-five minutes north of Manhattan on the venerable New York–New Haven Railroad line. It was an unusual quartet—drums, electric guitar, trumpet and bass clarinet. “We played Dixieland and I played trumpet and we played rock ’n’ roll and I even wrote a song called ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Moon.’ We used to play for dances on Saturday afternoons over at the Jewish Community Center and at the Veterans Hospital, where I had a good fantasy trip: ‘Blue in the Night’ with a blue spotlight on me. I got some of my Harry James fantasies out of my system.”

  After graduating from high school in Stamford, Hunter had a brief and ignominious stint at the University of Connecticut: “It was my first taste of real freedom. I arrived for freshman year a week early and spent all the money my father had given me for textbooks on pinball. Fortunately, I flunked out.” Before that happened, however, he played in a folk music trio at UConn, and his second semester there he was president of the folk music club. After dropping out of school, Hunter traveled to California to pursue a girl he was in love with, but when he finally found her she was no longer interested in him. Heartbroken, he attempted to join the Coast Guard, but they weren’t accepting enlistees, so he signed on with the National Guard, which required just six months of active duty, followed by five and a half years as a reserve.

  So there he was, fresh out of Fort Sill, living on his meager mustering pay in a room in the Palo Alto Hotel, when he met Garcia. Within a month of their meeting the two of them were living side by side in their cars in a vacant lot in East Palo Alto—Jerry in an old Cadillac (with the words CALL PAM written in the dirt on the back window) and Hunter in a 1940 Chrysler straight-eight he’d picked up for fifty bucks a day or two after he’d arrived in town. “Hunter had these big tins of crushed pineapple that he’d gotten from the army,” Garcia said, “and I had this glove compartment full of plastic spoons, and we had this little cooperative scene, eating this crushed pineapple day after day and sleeping in the cars and walking around.

  “He played a little guitar; we started singin’ and playin’ together just for something to do. And then we played our first professional gig. We got five bucks apiece.” Their innocuous little folk act was billed as Bob and Jerry, but they performed only two real gigs—at the Arroyo Lounge on May 5, 1961 (for a payday of five dollars, which Hunter says “we decided to frame as the first musical earnings for either of us, but spent on cigarettes instead”); and a concert at the Peninsula School’s eighth-grade graduation ceremony in early June. That gig had been arranged by Danya Veltfort, whose younger sister was matriculating. Danya says Bob and Jerry took home fifty dollars for their troubles, good money for those days (and that crowd). The only known tape of Bob and Jerry was recorded by Barbara Meier’s father in the living room of her house at her sixteenth birthday party. As Danya says, “It was a big deal to be able to make a tape in those days; not like today where everyone has recorders.”

  Alan Trist viewed his new friend Bob Hunter as “another fellow traveler. Like me he was really into reading; we’d spend hours having literate discussions, picking books off the shelves and getting into them. Jerry was carrying his guitar around and Hunter and I had our notebooks and we’d go places and Jerry would play and Hunter and I would write. Or we’d go to a cafe somewhere and we’d write and sometimes Jerry would sit there and draw. We’d talk and then move on to some other place.

  “Hunter tells me now that Jerry and I were the ones who were raving around at the time, full of theatricality and spouting lines of poetry and being totally wild, and he was more circumspect. I think his recollection is probably correct, but what’s interesting to me is that’s not the person I later became. But Jerry was always outgoing and always had a very positive outlook on life. That’s the thing that was most important to me during that period—a pure positiveness that we were all experiencing with each other, and affirming back and forth.”

  When one of them had a working car, they often would go up to San Francisco to wander around North Beach and soak up what was left of the Beat scene at places like City Lights Books and the Coffee Gallery. “It was still a vital scene, especially to those of us who were just coming of age,” Trist says.

  But their outlook on life was always much sunnier and more optimistic than that of the Beats they so admired. As Barbara Meier explains, “We weren’t sitting around in our black turtlenecks, smoking Gauloises and talking about existentialism. We weren’t doing that. We were raving. The music was happening; we were singing. We were partying. We were running around the beach or the mountains. The age difference [between the Palo Alto crowd and the original Beats] was crucial. I don’t think we were saddled with that morose energy at all.”

  “It’s funny, you know,” Hunter remarked. “Back in those days there weren’t a lot of people on the street, and I thought me and Garcia and Trist and the people who were hanging around there were really unique. I thought we were the new thing. It was quite arrogant: we felt that we were the legitimate rulers of the world.”

  At least they were rulers of the back room at Kepler’s for a while. Garcia had traded his Sears electric guitar for an acoustic model shortly after arriving in Palo Alto, and late that spring Barbara bought him a better guitar, and shortly after that, a lovely sounding Stella twelve-string. Jerry spent hours in the back room at Kepler’s practicing and playing the limited folk repertoire he had mastered, which consisted mainly of straight-ahead popular tunes by the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, the Weavers, Pete Seeger and other leading lights of the burgeoning folk revival movement.

  Of course folk music wasn’t exactly new in the late ’50s and early ’60s, but its widespread popularity in America was, particularly in urban areas. This renaissance was driven largely by college students who had rejected rock ’n’ roll as the anointed musical voice of their generation. By 1960 rock’s initial flash had dimmed considerably, as the first generation of ’50s rockers all but vanished from the scene (Chuck Berry went to jail; Jerry Lee Lewis was tainted by scandal; Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Elvis was in the army), replaced by bland teen idols whose white-bread take on rock ’n’ roll was se
riously lacking in soul and grit. And then there was the matter of rock’s lyrical content, which was mainly limited to teenage love, lust and heartbreak. Folk music, on the other hand, drew from a wide variety of established traditions, including American blues, Southern mountain music, songs from the labor movement and the dust bowl diaspora, ballads from the British Isles, sea chanteys and tunes from around the world. In an America that was furiously promoting The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best as visions of the perfect postwar world, folk musicians—like the Beat writers all through the ’50s—provided an alternative vision of the world to thousands of kids who believed that the gray-suited Madison Avenue man paradigm was just smoke and mirrors obfuscating a darker national reality that included McCarthyism, segregation, an aggressive, even jingoistic, foreign policy and an unhealthy compulsion to manufacture a perfect cookie-cutter culture.

  “Having been born at the beginning of the ’40s and coming of age during the ’50s, there was an expectation of conformity,” says Suzy Wood, who met Jerry in 1961. “My sense is that there was a huge feeling of unrest, starting with those of us who had that ’50s kind of background: This is what we expect you to do—go into advertising, go into engineering, wear a suit, wear a skinny little tie, wear a dress with petticoats under it. You never fuck anybody except somebody you’re married to. And in real life people weren’t doing that. And so instead of saying, ‘Here’s the structure we’re going to fit into,’ we said, ‘Let’s trash the structure entirely. Let’s just do anything we want.’ And that was the appeal of people like Jerry, because he was doing exactly what he wanted. He certainly wasn’t being in the army and wearing a suit.”