Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Adds Eric Thompson, who became one of Jerry’s musical partners later that year, “The people of our generation looked up and said, ‘Wait a minute. We’ve got enough to eat. We’re not at war. Everything seems to be fine. Why do I have to anesthetize myself? Why do I have to strive for this? Why can’t I strive for something that actually interests me?’ This was not something that previous generations had really done on any kind of wide scale. I think folk music’s popularity was partly a response to the repression of real life that was happening. When all of a sudden you came across this wealth of emotional music, it seemed like it was coming from a different world than the one my parents talked about, and it seemed a lot more real to me and a lot of other people.”

  A musical turning point for Jerry came in the late spring of 1961. Marshall Leicester, who’d had a passing friendship with Garcia back at Menlo-Oaks Middle School, returned to the Peninsula from a year at Yale. One day, “I walked into Kepler’s and Jerry was sitting there playing a twelve-string guitar and singing tunes like ‘Everybody Loves Saturday Night,’ which was one of those kind of Pete Seeger ‘love-your-worldwide-neighbors’ songs in which the verses are the words ‘everybody loves Saturday night’ in about fifteen languages—sort of the last gasp of the politically oriented folk music of the ’30s and ’40s. I think I asked to borrow his guitar and play some of my kind of music on it, and I think we were mutually impressed with each other. We remembered having met before and we hit it off.”

  Leicester taught Garcia the rudiments of the fingerpicking guitar style and also introduced Garcia to the main traditional white folksong forms of the South—old-time string band music and bluegrass. “He was playing more strum stuff, Kingston Trio–oriented songs,” he notes. “He wasn’t playing melodically oriented guitar at all. I think he’d gotten away from rock ’n’ roll, too, so he wasn’t using a flat pick, either. So I taught him how to play stuff like [Elizabeth Cotten’s] ‘Freight Train,’ and he just took it and ran with it on his own—I never saw anybody learn how to do something as quickly as he picked up on that. So from there he went and made himself into someone with a sense of style.”

  The model for Garcia and many other aspiring old-timey music pickers in the early ’60s was the New Lost City Ramblers, a trio of New York City boys who were faithfully devoted to uncovering, preserving and performing rural folk songs. One of the founding members of that group was Mike Seeger, Pete’s younger half-brother, who had learned how to play fiddle, guitar, banjo and autoharp mainly from listening to old Library of Congress recordings made in the South as part of the library’s Archive of Folk Song project. In the mid-’50s Seeger had traveled through the South himself with a tape recorder, capturing dozens of obscure folk and blues performers in their living rooms and back porches.

  “In those days we all wanted to be Mike Seeger, so we were all trying to learn to play five or six instruments,” says Marshall Leicester. “I played guitar, banjo, autoharp and a little mouth harp. I didn’t become a fiddler, which is mostly what I am these days, until a couple of years later. Jerry was just playing the guitar at first, but then of course he took up the banjo and got really good at that, too.” By 1963 Jerry was trying his hand at mandolin, dobro, fiddle and autoharp as well.

  Another huge influence on nearly everyone playing folk music at this time was Harry Smith’s multivolume Anthology of American Folk Music, which brought dozens of folk tunes that had been originally cut as 78s between the ’20s and the ’50s to a new audience. “Back in 1961 there was only one copy around our scene, belonging to Grace Marie Haddie,” Robert Hunter said. “The six-disc boxed collection was too expensive for guitar-playing hobos like me and Garcia, even if we had a record player, or a place to keep a record player. Grace Marie had a job and an apartment and a record player. We would visit her apartment constantly with hungry ears. When she was at work, we’d jimmy the lock to her apartment door or crawl through the window if the latch was open. Had to hear those records.”

  Early in the summer of 1961 a pair of folk music enthusiasts, Rodney Albin and George Howell, launched a small coffeehouse called the Boar’s Head in a loft above a bookstore called the Carlos Bookstall in San Carlos (north of Menlo Park). “George was a renegade high school student and a wanna-be beatnik,” said Peter Albin, Rodney’s younger brother, later a founding member of Big Brother and the Holding Company. “My brother played banjo and fiddle and guitar; I played a little guitar, and a lot of our friends played various instruments. So we opened the Boar’s Head and we had little get-togethers there on Friday and Saturday nights.”

  Besides the Albin brothers and George Howell, one of the other key members of the Boar’s Head scene was David Nelson, who in June of 1961 had graduated from Carlmont High School in Belmont. Nelson was another bright, well-read kid with music in his soul. He began taking guitar lessons when he was in second grade and even studied steel guitar when he was in grade school.

  It was through the Albin brothers that Nelson met Garcia: “I still remember that moment at Kepler’s when Pete and I were peeking through some books, and we saw this hairy, swarthy guy with an open Levi’s shirt and a real brooding look and an olive wreath in his hair, playing a Stella twelve-string. It was Garcia, and he had some notoriety even then. There was something scary about him; something awesome, some invisible quality. We talked to him and Rodney put a banjo in my hand and I thought, ‘Oh no!’ I had learned a little bit of banjo from a Pete Seeger book Rodney had given me, but here I was playing with Garcia the first minute that I met him!

  “So we asked him to come play at the Boar’s Head. That night at the Boar’s Head it was Garcia, who played some songs on guitar, and then Bob Hunter came on wearing his army boots, as he always did in those days, and he sang a couple of songs. And there was also David X [David McQueen, a black man in his forties who was part of the Chateau scene] and Sherry Huddleston, who’s the one who gave Pigpen his name [the next year]. It was very low-key. The Boar’s Head always seemed more like a party than a real gig. It became another place for friends to get together and play and sing.”

  After Boar’s Head gatherings, Suzy Wood, Carlmont High class of 1960, often hosted parties at her parents’ large, lovely home on Debbie Lane, on a hill above the College of Notre Dame in nearby Belmont. “The way the house was set up, there was an extra lot behind the house, sort of secluded by fences and bushes, and we’d go hang out back there and pass hats and collect change and somebody would go off and buy gallons of wine,” Wood says. “That was a place that summer where there was a lot of partying, for as long as anybody could stand to lie around drinking wine. I don’t remember Jerry being into drinking particularly.

  “My father was very intrigued by him,” she continues. “Even though Jerry was a dropout, because of the kind of intelligence and charm and insight that he had, he always seemed more like a leader than a bad guy. My dad thought he was a wonderful person but he’d say, ‘Why doesn’t he do something with his life?’ If there was any disapproval of Jerry back then, it was usually from the parental generation, but even so he was charming enough that they kind of threw up their hands—‘Oh, the darling boy! Whatever will become of him?’”

  Marshall Leicester’s parents were a little more negative in their assessment of Jerry’s character. After the ever-homeless Garcia spent a couple of weeks crashing at the Leicester family pad, Marshall’s parents made it clear to their son that it was time for this charming “freeloader,” as they branded him, to move on.

  Bob Hunter spent most of July 1961 in a National Guard summer training camp at Hunter-Liggett Military Base in San Luis Obispo, a few hours down the coast, but when he returned, he, Garcia and Willy Legate all lived for a time at the Peace Center. Willy, at least, had a political streak, but Hunter and Garcia had little interest in the center’s activities, a fact that was not lost on Ira Sandperl and Roy Kepler, who tolerated them there and at Kepler’s but never really warmed up to them personally.

  At Jerry’s urging,
Barbara Meier attended the California School of Fine Arts that summer of 1961, and, like Jerry before her, became close to Wally Hedrick. Unlike Garcia, however, Barbara stuck with art through the years; indeed, she is still a painter. Garcia spent quite a bit of time in San Francisco that summer, too. “Jerry lived with John ‘The Cool’ [Winter] in this hotel on O’Farrell Street, which was just down from Magnin’s,” Barbara says. “So I’d walk those five blocks from Magnin’s down to the hotel to see him. It’s hard to say what they were doing. I think they had a little benzedrine and they were kind of racing around the city. I remember being with them and we’d rave around. We’d go to parties or drive over to KPFA [in Berkeley]. Little impromptu gigs and parties would turn up.

  “They’d do crazy things like go down to Fisherman’s Wharf and boost [steal] a big fifty-pound bag of carrots, for instance, and they’d live on that! He never had any money, but I was sort of supporting him. I remember that I made a point of never showing up to see Jerry without first stopping to pick up a pack of cigarettes, for instance, because he never had cigarettes. Once he had a car he could never afford gas, so I was always filling up his gas tank, too.”

  Eventually Garcia and Winter moved briefly into a nice attic apartment on Noriega Street, in the Sunset district of San Francisco, that was shared by Jerry’s occasional girlfriend in this era, Phoebe Graubard, and Elaine Heise, the former girlfriend of Paul Speegle (as Elaine Pagels she went on to write The Gnostic Gospels). Phoebe had grown up in Palo Alto, where she was close friends with Danya Veltfort, but she moved up to the city to attend San Francisco State. She thought nothing of having Jerry, John and sometimes others crashing at her pad for days at a time. “It was part of that wave of Beat energy,” Phoebe says. “If you read a Kerouac book, like On the Road, it was like that. They just kind of arrived, there was this frenetic On the Road kind of energy for a while, and some of those On the Road kind of experiences and these characters, and then one day they were gone.”

  Phoebe says that Jerry spent nearly all his time on Noriega Street playing guitar, trying to master old-timey fingerpicking styles, and even gigging occasionally as a solo act: “Jerry was playing in dives in North Beach, these remnants of the Beat Generation’s places, but no one was going to them anymore. He would walk in at seven-thirty or eight and there might be nobody there, and sometimes nobody ever came and he’d play his set and go. But he had an amazing perseverence.

  “Jerry used to take his guitar with him wherever he went, and one time we went down to Aquatic Park on the bus. We were sitting on the grass and he was playing the guitar and this old Basque man, who worked in a restaurant or something, had a pot full of food that he was going to feed to the birds, but he said he liked Jerry’s guitar playing so he gave us the big pot of food instead. It was very sweet. And this was at a time when none of us had any money; we were very poor.”

  * * *

  Alan Trist bid a fond farewell to his Palo Alto mates in September of that year and returned to England fundamentally changed. He had spent the year “experiencing life in the moment,” he says. “We weren’t thinking about the future. We were aware that we were experiencing something deep at that time. There was a lot of coherence to that little scene. It was this bunch of us going all around and hanging out just for the purpose of enjoying each other and sharing intellectual and artistic experience. We were all, in the broadest sense, involved in the arts—writing or drawing or both; playing music, listening to music. We were proto-artists; that was our sense of ourselves.”

  “Jerry, John, Alan, Phoebe and I stayed up all night rapping at Phoebe’s before driving up to Twin Peaks at dawn, then driving Alan to the airport for his return to England,” Robert Hunter recalled. “I consider that the end of our old scene. We all thought so. Alan was really the prime mover of our group cohesiveness. Without Alan’s social focusing skills, the main group splintered, by main force of entropy, into several scenes rather than one.”

  Also departing at summer’s end was Marshall Leicester, who returned to Yale. Leicester pops back into the scene during Christmas and summer vacations for the next couple of years, but his absence forced Garcia to look for new playing partners, as he dug deeper into the old-time string band repertoire and also began to explore bluegrass a little more.

  Despite the generosity of Barbara Meier, who became Garcia’s girlfriend that autumn, Garcia was perennially broke, but his friend David McQueen reveals that from time to time Jerry would do odd jobs to earn a little scratch:

  “Aside from my regular job, I used to do yard work for extra spending money. I knew Jerry was broke and I enjoyed his playing at Kepler’s, so we’d go on these yard jobs so he could earn some money for cigs. It was fun for both of us. Jerry used to call me a lousy blues singer, and I said he was equally lousy at yard work. Neither of us got offended; it was the truth.

  “Jerry always had a guitar with him wherever he went,” McQueen continues. “One day, after doing a yard job, we were on the way back to my house in East Palo Alto. It was summer, kids were out playing in the streets, and Jerry was playing guitar and we were singing as we walked. I looked behind us at one point and saw there was a whole group of little black kids following us and dancing, like in those great but politically incorrect Marx Brothers movies. I was impressed—those kids were for real! When we stopped, they were all over Jerry: ‘Play some more! Play some more!’ Jerry loved it.

  “He was listening to a lot of Reverend Gary Davis at that time. But blues, gospel, jazz—he’d play it all. He used to jam with the drummers who came to play at Pogo’s [Norm Fontaine’s] house. I’m sure Jerry was influenced by some of the music he heard in East Palo Alto. Sometimes he’d go to the Anchor Bar—white owned, black run—which had music on weekends. There was a house band, but anyone with a union card could sit in, and name players would come by and jam after hours for drinks.”

  That fall Garcia moved to the Chateau. Actually, he moved into a broken-down car that had its windows whited out and was collecting dust behind the main house. He already knew all the Chateau’s denizens, having partied there on numerous occasions since his arrival in the area, and no doubt he’d crashed there before, but this was the first time he’d actually lived there. By the middle of November, Bob Hunter was living there, too, having managed to snag a room in the main house when Carl Moore moved out. A while later Garcia moved inside to drummer Danny Barnett’s old room.

  It was in that autumn, too, that Jerry first encountered twenty-one-year-old Phil Lesh, who’d been kicking around the Peninsula on and off for a couple of years, and, like nearly everyone in the area with a rebellious streak and boho tendencies, eventually found his way to Kepler’s and the Peace Center. Phil came from a very different world from Garcia’s, and there was nothing in the early days of their relationship that would have suggested they would someday become musical soul mates.

  Phil, who grew up in El Cerrito and Berkeley—the East Bay, as it is known—was initially interested in classical music almost exclusively. In third grade he began violin lessons and he stuck with it long enough to become second chair in a local youth orchestra after a few years. At fourteen he dropped violin and took up the trumpet, playing in the El Cerrito High School marching and concert bands. Midway through high school Phil’s parents moved to neighboring Berkeley so Phil could go to Berkeley High, which had a much more serious music program.

  Although he mainly played the classical repertoire, Phil also became a jazz aficionado during his high school days. At first he was attracted most to the music of Stan Kenton and the big, horn-heavy bands that were popular on the West Coast in the late ’40s and early ’50s. But at age seventeen, he met a bassist at a summer music camp who turned him on to John Coltrane (whom Phil dismissed initially: “I was incensed—How dare he play like that?”). It took him a while to warm up to the hot (or should we say cool?) jazz trumpeter of the day, too: Phil found Miles Davis’s sound too airy and breathy at first—“not the kind of trumpet tone I’d be
en taught was the hip thing,” he said.

  After high school he moved to the Peninsula to attend the College of San Mateo, where he played in the school’s jazz band for two years. During his second year there, Phil wrote a pair of original compositions for the jazz band, an experience that opened up a new world to him: “That was the first real flash that I had of having ideas and writing them down.” Eventually he dropped the trumpet completely because he had decided that what he really wanted to do was become a composer—“with a capital C,” as he put it.

  Throughout his time at CSM he’d become increasingly interested in both the pioneers of electronic music such as Stockhausen and Berio, and modern composers like Schoenberg and Charles Ives, who was Phil’s favorite. Operating under the mistaken belief that the University of California at Berkeley’s music program was more plugged in to this progressive world, Phil enrolled there for the fall semester. It wasn’t until he got to Berkeley that he discovered that the music department was geared to musicologists rather than composers. But on the day he was registering for classes in the department he met a fellow intellectual and modern-music freak named Tom Constanten, who became his roommate in Berkeley, and, several years down the line, the Grateful Dead’s second keyboardist.

  That fall of 1961, on November 18, the crowd at the Chateau got together to throw a giant party, dubbed the Groovy Conclave, which was attended by Lesh, Constanten, Bobby Peterson and about two hundred other people—intimates from the post-Beat and folk worlds, as well as friends of friends of friends. The party lasted nearly three days. Laird Grant, who didn’t actually live at the Chateau but instead was settled in the wilds of the nearby Los Trancos Woods, even printed up “tickets” for the party. Garcia and others played music in the front room. Pot was smoked discreetly in the backyard, and the crowds went through gallons and gallons of jug wine and white port–and– lemon juice. It truly was a “groovy” scene; it was also the first time that nearly everyone from the bohemian/beatnik community on the Peninsula had gotten together in one place. These were pre-hippie days, but already some of the freak mindset was established in this crowd: they disdained the straight nine-to-five workaday world; they helped each other survive their sometimes desperate poverty; their scene was always more inclusive than exclusive, embracing misfits and outcasts as long as they were interesting; they enjoyed eclectic tastes in books and music; and they certainly seemed to share a hedonistic bent.