Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  McKernan played some with both Jorma and Jerry, but mainly he worked alone, singing the blues at the Tangent, the Boar’s Head and at parties. Garcia and others noted that Ron didn’t seem to have the drive to be a real performer; mostly, he sang just because he loved it. Though not as overtly intellectual as a lot of people in the Kepler’s/Chateau crowd (which he became part of), he had read his share of Beat writers and poets, and he could quote Lord Buckley routines verbatim, not to mention make up his own weirdly imaginative stories, which he delivered in his characteristic black slang patois. As Laird Grant, who became one of Ron’s closest friends, said, “He wasn’t white. He had no color.”

  In the fall of 1962 Garcia formed his first true bluegrass band, the Wildwood Boys, with Hunter, Nelson and Norm van Maastricht. “This was a major configuration of relatively long duration for those days,” Hunter recalled. “We even had a professional promo picture.”

  It was in this group that Garcia honed his bluegrass banjo chops. He said that Earl Scruggs was “the number one, primo influence” on his bluegrass banjo work, but his playing was also informed by a number of other players, including Don Stover, who played with Bill Monroe in the ’50s, and then with the Lilly Brothers; Allen Shelton, who played with Jim and Jesse McReynolds; Ralph Stanley of the Stanley Brothers; and J. D. Crowe. “Those are my favorite banjo players,” he said. “I think there’s something about [three-finger] rolls—you know in those days, pre–[Bill] Keith banjo style, you either played rolls, or else there were guys who played single-string stuff like Don Reno [of Reno and Smiley] and Eddie Adcock [of the Country Gentlemen]. I preferred the kind of problem-solving thing of trying to figure out how to make melodies work out of rolls.”

  Speaking more generally about what attracted him to bluegrass banjo, he said it was “just the sound of the instrument, and then the fire, you know; the speed and all that. I was attracted by the intensity of it, really. And I was drawn to that incredible clarity—when something is going along real fast and every note is absolutely clear. That, to me, was really amazing—the Earl Scruggs instrumentals . . . the Mercury album that’s got ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ on it and ‘Pike County Breakdown.’ I just couldn’t believe the sound of it. It was just startling.”

  But Garcia refused to commit himself to just one style of music. Though bluegrass became his overriding obsession for about two years, he still dabbled in folk, old-timey and blues whenever the opportunity arose and there were players around. For instance, at the College of San Mateo Folk Festival in November 1962, put on by Rodney and Peter Albin, Garcia played as a solo act, in a duet with David Nelson, and then with a full group—one tape in circulation has him playing as part of the Hart Valley Drifters with Hunter, Nelson and van Maastricht; Hunter’s recollection is that the group was the Liberty Hill Aristocrats, with Hunter, Nelson and the Albin brothers. Whatever the particulars, over the course of a single day Garcia was onstage playing folk, old-timey and bluegrass.

  David Parker was a twenty-year-old student at CSM and a friend of the Albin brothers at the time of the festival. “It was the first time I’d ever seen Garcia play,” Parker recalls. “He was playing guitar and singing. It was funny, because he didn’t go over too well. At that time he was sort of exploring the roots of American music and playing a lot of old-timey stuff. He played a lot of songs by the Carter Family, for instance. Most of the audience was fairly clean college kids into the Kingston Trio and the slicker kinds of sounds, and this sort of authentic old-timey stuff was a little strange to most of them. Also, most of the acts playing then would come on, do two or three songs and then go off, but Jerry got up there and he wanted to play a full set. So people first of all couldn’t relate to the songs he was playing, and then they started feeling like he was staying on too long, and giving him a rough time. But he went along and finished his set, playing what he wanted to play. The reaction didn’t seem to bother him too much. Then the next group that came on started by saying, ‘This song we’re going to do is not by the Carter Family,’ and that got a big laugh.”

  “Jerry did bomb in his solo set,” Hunter remembered. “The sound system sucked to the point of inaudibility, and he just kept playing one ballade after another to the baffled crowd of scornful noninitiates. Too cool for words!”

  It seems as though nearly everyone in the boho/folkie scene was broke most of the time, and a running automobile was considered a luxury. At one point, an acquaintance of Jerry’s named Bob Fees even chauffeured Garcia around on a semiregular basis in exchange for guitar lessons. As David Nelson put it, “It was the usual thing where people would be working temporarily. Employment was a thing you did sort of like houses—you’d work for two or three or four months someplace and then change to something else, and then you might not work at all for a while, and somebody else you knew would have a little money.”

  Or not. David Nelson says that one of the staples of his diet during this era was ketchup sandwiches (twenty years before Ronald Reagan’s administration declared ketchup a vegetable!). “A box of Ritz crackers could be considered a meal. The refrigerator at the Chateau usually had like an old bottle of ketchup and something unidentifiable in a jar in it—like a science project, with three colors of mold on it.”

  Bob Hunter was one of the more motivated members of the gang. He took on a number of odd jobs to make ends meet, such as driving a truck for a photo developer and working as a busboy, and later as headwaiter, at St. Michael’s Alley. He spent his free time reading, working on a novel, playing music when he could and dissecting James Joyce’s famously impenetrable Finnegans Wake. “I can remember Jerry and Hunter would read some of it, and then they’d close the book and continue; just making it up,” Barbara Meier says. “Jerry would laugh so hard. He loved that; he loved wordplay and he was very good at it.”

  It was in 1962 that Hunter happily earned some money as a guinea pig in the government’s top-secret tests of psychedelic drugs at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park. He was given mescaline, psilocybin and finally LSD in a sterile, clinical setting that was somewhat hostile and forbidding; certainly a far cry from the tripping-gaily-in-the-redwoods model that would come into vogue when the lysergic genie came out of the (lab) bottle a couple of years later. Still, Hunter said, “I had no problems with acid. They gave it to me, and left me in a white room. I had no idea what was going to happen, although they had warned me about hallucinations, so I was prepared for that, psychologically.”

  Ever the writer, Hunter typed up his experiences while they were still fresh in his mind, and of course he raved about what he’d been through to his friends. David Nelson remembers sitting in a coffeehouse with Garcia after the experiments and pumping Hunter for information, never imagining for a moment that psychedelics would ever make it out of the white rooms.

  * * *

  Garcia and Barbara Meier broke up late that fall after Barbara’s father learned that they had been sleeping together and insisted that she not see him again. She “cut off from him completely,” she says. “I left Menlo Park the minute I graduated from high school [in 1963] and I moved to San Francisco,” where she drifted into a much different world after she became the girlfriend of jazz drummer Tony Williams, the powerful but exquisitely tasteful skinsman in Miles Davis’s classic Quintet of the time. She reappears in Jerry’s life much, much later.

  One evening in the winter of 1963 Jerry was hanging out and playing music at Kepler’s with Bob Hunter and David Nelson when he met nineteen-year-old Sara Ruppenthal, then in her sophomore year at Stanford. Their paths had undoubtedly crossed before, since Sara was good friends with Ira Sandperl and had done her share of hanging out at Kepler’s. “Ira was my mentor,” she says. “I loved that guy. When I went to Paly High there were a bunch of us intellectuals who were into folk music and the peace movement, working with the American Friends Service Committee.”

  Sara was also friends with Joan Baez, who was four years older: “She was an important person in my life in those day
s, and I idealized her powerfully. She and Ira were the only people I could talk to about my life, from the heart. I would go down with Ira to visit her at Big Sur Hot Springs, where she lived in a little cottage on the cliff—that place became Esalen.

  “Joan and Jerry weren’t really friends,” she continues. “He resented the fact that she had records out and he thought he was a better musician. He felt competitive with her and didn’t care for her nontraditional approach to music—the way she took from any source and personalized it.” During the early days of Jerry and Sara’s relationship, Baez approached Sara about accompanying her on what was to be her first European tour. “I’d traveled a lot and I knew how to get around in a foreign country,” Sara says. “She wanted me to come with her and be her companion, but that’s right when I was getting together with Jerry, so I made a choice between them.”

  Sara played music, too, though before she met Jerry she had been more interested in sociopolitical folk songs than the sort of rootsy, traditional fare being served up by Jerry and his buddies in the back room at Kepler’s. Still, that first evening she was intrigued and amused: “Jerry, Hunter and Nelson were this funny trio; kind of like the Three Stooges. They were all so funny and I loved their music. They were very smart boys and always going so fast and hot and heavy with the witty repartee. It seemed like they were sort of all the same person. I remember I went home with Jerry to the Chateau because I had my roommate’s car. That was a treat for him because none of them had cars. It was so interesting to me to see kids who were my age but already off on their own.

  “Hunter took me off the next morning out into the garden and said, ‘Here, try this, it’s a funny cigarette,’ and I didn’t know what it was; I was very naive. I had kind of a nice time wandering around the garden with him, high.

  “I don’t know where Hunter lived in that house, but Jerry had this little room—you went around from the front door off the porch, around to the back of the house, which was on a hill, and into this basement storage room. It could have been a root cellar or a can cupboard kind of place. I think it had a dirt floor. He’d stuck a bed in there and there was a box with a candle on it, and that was it. There was no electricity. There were spiders. It was really funky. He didn’t spend much time there. Shortly after I met them, Nelson talked his parents into letting him come to live at the Chateau. Since he had some money from his parents, he got the front bedroom, which had probably been the old sitting room.”

  For Jerry and Sara it was love and lust at first sight. Sara recalls, “He called me up a couple of days after we met—it was so sweet—saying ‘I’m really fucked up. I need to be with you. I can’t eat, I can’t even play music, man! You’ve gotta come and be with me.’ He was lovesick. He could be very sentimental.”

  And careless. Just a few weeks into their relationship, Sara learned that she was pregnant. She told Jerry the news one afternoon while they were window-shopping at Stanford Shopping Center. “It was probably a Sunday—everything was closed,” Sara remembers. “I was pretty miserable and scared. I didn’t know what to do. And he said, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to get married. Let’s get hitched.’ So then I took over and made the plans. I remember we went to Sears or Penney’s and bought him a suit. I think he was indulging my fantasy of having a white wedding, doing it up the way I wanted to do it. Everybody in his crowd was pretty excited that we were going to have a ‘shivaree.’”

  It would be an understatement to say that Sara’s parents did not greet the news of her daughter’s impending nuptials with quite the enthusiasm she had hoped for. “My parents were horrified!” she says with a laugh. “He hadn’t completed high school. He had no future whatsoever. When we came to them saying we wanted to get married—at first we didn’t tell them I was pregnant—my dad said, ‘Look, we’ll send you around the world for the year. Think about it. Anything but that!’ They tried to talk us out of it.

  “I had already gotten myself kicked out of school for being with him overnight, because in those days the dorms had very strict rules. This was a serious offense, to break the social honor code. It was pretty terrible for my family. But I was itching to have some life.”

  Meanwhile, back at Kepler’s and the Chateau, some of Jerry’s friends were almost as surprised as the Ruppenthals that Jerry and Sara were getting married. “I was just the sort of kid who didn’t want them to get married,” says David Nelson. “I wanted to keep Jerry as part of the boys in the parking lot playing music. I was thinkin’, ‘It’s not going to be the same. He’s not going to be one of the boys.’ He took me and Hunter to the coffeeshop and said he was thinking about getting married and he wanted our opinion. I’m saying, ‘Oh no, don’t do it!’ and of course Hunter was very serious, saying, ‘Well, you know, Jerry, it’s a big undertaking, but if you can do it . . .’”

  “When we decided to get married,” says Sara, “I insisted we invite his mother and grandmother, so we came up to the city and went to Harrington Street—just surprised Tillie out of the blue. He hadn’t been in contact with them for several years. Tillie and his mom were really glad to see him.”

  Sara’s white-wedding fantasy was fulfilled on April 25, 1963, at the Palo Alto Unitarian Church. Tillie and Ruth made it down from San Francisco. Tiff Garcia was there, too. David Nelson was Garcia’s best man, and many of Jerry’s friends were in attendance, including Hunter, Laird Grant and others from the Chateau scene. The wedding even made the Palo Alto Times: SARA LEE RUPPENTHAL WEDS was the headline over a nice story about the event featuring a lovely formal head-and-shoulders portrait of the bride and groom—she with a lace mantilla draped over her head, he in a dark suit and a flower in his lapel—looking happily and dreamily off into space, their heads nearly touching. The caption under the photo read, “Stanford student is bride,” and in smaller type below that, “Mr. and Mrs. Jerome John Garcia.” Ah, young love!

  The wedding reception was a big catered affair for about seventy-five people at Ricky’s, a ranch-style hotel on El Camino Real that Sara says was “the fanciest hotel in Palo Alto in those days.” Phil Lesh was among the revelers; it was he who summed up the reception in an oft-quoted remark: “It was priceless—all of her friends were at the booze; his friends were all at the food.”

  “I remember after the wedding reception,” Sara says, “we went to my parents’ house with his family members and mine for a little private family gathering. Then we went back to the hotel to spend the night. Suddenly it hit us that we’d gotten married and we had no idea what this meant. And we both started to freak out, big time. ‘Oh my God! What have we done?’ I had been seeing a psychiatrist—part of the deal of Stanford suspending me was if I went to a psychiatrist they’d let me back in—and he’d given me a sleeping pill because I was pretty anxious about all this wedding stuff. So Jerry and I opened up this one little capsule very carefully and we each took half of this foul-tasting powder so we could get some sleep.”

  The next morning, “We drove my parents’ ’59 Mercedes to Yosemite and we had a nice time there,” Sara says. “It was an adventure. We stayed in Camp Curry in one of those platform tent-cabins. We hiked around Angel Falls and bought him a cowboy hat. We stopped in the Gold Country. It was a sweet time; really, in a way we were just beginning to get to know each other. I think that was the most time we’d ever spent together up to that point.”

  Shortly after they were married, Jerry and Sara moved to Mountain View, south of Palo Alto, “into a nasty little one-room shack behind a house for $75 a month,” Sara says. “Jerry would go off with his guitar in one hand, his banjo in the other, in his white shirt and black pants and vest, and hitchhike in from Mountain View to Dana Morgan’s—if he could get a ride, because he looked a little disreputable. He missed many of his lessons just because he couldn’t get there. And I’d be home in this miserable low-ceilinged little space listening to old-timey music and memorizing it, learning it by heart.” Sara’s parents gave her $100 a month to encourage her to stay in school, and she al
so worked part-time for her father in the Stanford Business School, where he taught.

  Sara says she and Jerry started singing together almost immediately after they met. She was an eager pupil, learning the intricacies of the old-timey style for the first time. “I was never much of an instrumentalist,” she says, “but I always sang,” and their voices—his low tenor, her alto—blended nicely. As a duo called Jerry and Sara, they made a few public appearances, singing such nuggets as the Delmore Brothers’ “Deep Elem Blues” (which was later part of the Dead’s repertoire), “Long Black Veil” and the Carter Family’s “Foggy Mountain Top” at places like the Tangent and St. Michael’s Alley. But as she got further along in her pregnancy, Sara stopped playing. “I was feeling discounted and unappreciated,” she says. “We weren’t figuring out ways to connect well at all during the pregnancy. Motherhood became my primary preoccupation and that wasn’t interesting to him. Parenthood wasn’t something he could participate in—he had such ambivalent feelings about his mother that when I became a mother . . . you know, the madonna-whore syndrome: you can’t make love to your wife if you think of her as a mother. So he was running around and I didn’t know about it. And I was so innocent, so naive. And I got so uptight. It was not a happy marriage. We stopped being friends basically after we married.”

  Which isn’t to say there weren’t good times along the way. Their mutual love of music allowed them to form a deep bond, and she was always very supportive of Jerry’s musical aspirations. “He was very ambitious,” Sara says. “He wanted to do something big. The Rooftop Singers came out with this old Gus Cannon song, ‘Walk Right In,’ and we thought, ‘Oh, we can do better than that.’ That was our plan. The phrase we used then was ‘destined for greatness.’ It felt very apt. Everybody recognized that he had some genius that he needed to do something with. It was obvious to me. That’s why I signed on to help support him make something of himself. I thought if he had a good woman behind him he could go far,” she adds with a chuckle.