Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  By conventional standards, the Warlocks likely were “the shits.” There were probably fifty local bands who could play Kinks and Beatles covers more faithfully, who could nail the drum and bass parts off the first couple of Stones records exactly, who could hit the high notes of those tight British Invasion harmonies with ease. Fortunately for the Warlocks, right from the start they attracted a decent-sized following of like-minded dropouts, crazies and adventurous party animals who didn’t care for note-for-note reproductions of 45s that were on the radio and weren’t interested in lead singers wearing ruffled Edwardian shirts, but who wanted something a little rawer and more real. Many of the people who had supported the jug band also followed Garcia, Weir and Pigpen when they started playing electric music.

  One of the group’s original fans, Sue Swanson, remembers early Warlocks rehearsals at Dana Morgan’s where the group would listen to records and try to learn songs. “My job was to change the 45s,” she said. “‘Play that part again!’ It was a crummy little phonograph that would sit on the counter. I’ll never forget the sound of them practicing in there, and all the cymbals and everything in the whole room would be going. The whole room would be making all this noise.”

  It was mainly a big contingent of Peninsula friends and a few curious onlookers who made the scene at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park, where the group played some of its first gigs in May of 1965. Pigpen and pizza: what a combination! It’s hard to say whether Magoo’s was a step up or a step down from local haunts like the Continental Roller Bowl in Santa Clara or Big Al’s Gas House in Redwood City, but at least it was a place to play, and the fans turned out in force. “When we were in the Warlocks,” Garcia said, “the first time we played in public [at Menlo College], we had a huge crowd of people from the local high school, and they went fuckin’ nuts! The next time we played it was packed to the rafters. It was a pizza place. We said, ‘Hey, can we play in here on Wednesday night? We won’t bother anybody. Just let us set up in the corner.’ It was pandemonium, immediately.”

  During this time, Jerry and Sara were living in the cottage on Bryant Court with baby Heather, now a year old, and trying to keep the marriage together despite Jerry’s overriding obsession with his music and his apparent lack of interest in being a family man. “Before Heather’s first birthday, sometime that fall, my mom said, ‘Why don’t you guys go away together?’” Sara says. “She was worried about us because clearly we weren’t spending much time together. ‘I’ll take Heather,’ she said. So we drove down to Disneyland and just played.”

  There were a few changes in the inner circle of friends. David Nelson returned from his Scientology training in L.A. as the new guitarist of a fine, already established bluegrass band called the Pine Valley Boys, which included an L.A. fiddler named Richard Greene and two hot Bay Area pickers, banjoist Herb Pederson and mandolinist Butch Waller. Nelson says he had intended to return to L.A. for more Scientology courses, “but we got more and more gigs with the Pine Valley Boys. Then one day I was in Palo Alto seeing Dave Parker and we were talking and he brought out a joint. He said, ‘You’re going to tell me you’re taking Scientology over this?’ And I said, ‘Uh, no!’” he laughs. Willy Legate and Robert Hunter stayed with Scientology a little longer before arriving at the same decision.

  And then along came LSD. “One time Rick Shubb got some,” relates David Nelson. Rick Shubb was from the Berkeley bluegrass world, a friend of the Redwood Canyon Ramblers and a talented banjo player himself. “It coincided with Rick needing a house, and Dave Parker and I needed a house, too. He found this place on Gilman Street [in downtown Palo Alto], right across from this piano store. We got the rent money together and Rick said, ‘I’ve also got some LSD.’ We thought, ‘Great, we’ll take it on the day we move in.’

  “So we all go down there—me, Rick, Butch Waller, Dave Parker, Bonnie [Guckel, later Bonnie Parker, Dave’s wife], Garcia, Sara and Eric Thompson. We were all taking it for the first time. We’d seen that book The Psychedelic Experience, which gives you information like, ‘You might want to be by yourself for a while.’ So we all started out alone and then we came together slowly. ‘Hey, you look different.’ ‘Yeah, everything is in Technicolor.’ And all of a sudden we were just this house full of insane kids giggling and saying, ‘Hey, man, look at this!’ ‘Wow, man. . . .’” We had a superball inside that we were playing with, and later we played basketball outside. That was a great day. I think we listened to Ravi Shankar. I thought that was appropriate.

  Sara says, “I remember after the evening was over and Jerry and I went home, we freaked out badly; the two of us. It was another one of those ‘Oh my God, what are we gonna do?’ situations, just like when we got married and when Heather was a newborn. We drove over to Hunter’s house, not realizing that we were capable of doing something if we could drive and find our way. But we were absolutely freaked out. We beat down the door, woke up Hunter and said, ‘We’re scared. We don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know what to do.’ We went to him because he had The Tibetan Book of the Dead, so clearly he could help us. So he kind of pontificated and after maybe consulting the book, he said, ‘It’s okay.’ ‘But you don’t understand—’ ‘It’s okay!’ He just cut through the freak-out and we were so relieved. ‘Of course it’s okay! Thanks, man. Sorry we woke you up!’”

  “The world was really innocent then,” Garcia commented. “Or at least innocent of those experiences. So you could go around and be completely crazy, and the most people would suspect you of was being crazy. They didn’t think it was drrrrugs! I was glad to be in on that. That was a remarkably lucky moment historically; that was fun.”

  Explaining psychedelics to someone who has never taken them is nearly impossible; it’s as difficult as it is to use words to describe a piece of music so a person can “hear” it. Descriptions of acid trips, in particular, invariably just sound scary and weird, to the point where the uninitiated undoubtedly wonder why anyone would put themselves through such an unpredictable and potentially frightening experience. There are as many answers to that as there are people who have tried psychedelics—and at this point that would have to be millions of people worldwide. Some are seeking some sort of spiritual fulfillment or enlightenment, some are intent on exploring unseen corners of their own minds, and some are just thrill-seekers out for what they hope will be a good time.

  Various natural psychedelics—peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, morning glory seeds and others—have been used for more than ten thousand years by different peoples and tribes, mainly for religious purposes. “This particular chemical family has always been a key to a spiritual dimension or a parapsychological dimension,” says Steve Silberman, a Grateful Dead scholar and veteran psychedelician. “You don’t have to even speculate about whether there is a God out there; it’s obvious from accumulated cultural evidence that these chemicals are a key to the experience of the sacred.”

  The use of psychedelics in Western culture was rare until the mid– twentieth century, when knowledge of the revelatory properties of psilocibin mushrooms, peyote and LSD (which was synthesized by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman in the late ’30s) began to spread among the ranks of researchers and intellectuals. The British writer Aldous Huxley wrote glowingly of his transformative experiences with psychedelics in the widely read books The Doors of Perception and Between Heaven and Hell. Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, took LSD a number of times, and in May 1957 he personally approved a seventeen-page Life story by the American ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson about his ecstatic experiences in Mexico with “magic mushrooms.” That article, in part, inspired Timothy Leary, a young clinical psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, to make his own journey of psychedelic discovery to Mexico, and later to use psilocibin as a psychiatric tool. Not surprisingly, psychedelics spread into the Beat world, too. Through Leary, Allen Ginsberg obtained a large quantity of psilocybin, which he distributed to various Greenwich Village poets, artists
and jazz musicians.

  Most of the people in Garcia’s crowd had already read writings on psychedelics by Huxley, Leary and philosopher Alan Watts, so they were tuned into the spiritual possibilities of the experience. Perhaps what they didn’t expect, however, was that psychedelics would provide hours and hours of funny-scary goofball fun.

  Garcia said, “That first trip . . . we just wandered ’round and ’round the streets bumping into each other and having these incredible revelations and flashes. It was just dynamite; it was just everything I could hope for it to be for me.

  “It was like another release, yet another opening. The first one was that hip teacher when I was in the third grade; and the next one was marijuana and the next one was music and the next one was—it was like a series of continually opening doors.”

  * * *

  In May 1965 Phil Lesh reenters our story. He was living in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco with Tom Constanten (T.C.), and working for the post office as a driver—shooting speed and driving aggressively through downtown rush-hour traffic, blasting a little transistor radio he smuggled onto his truck, digging Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones, the Lovin’ Spoonful and all the other hip groups that were suddenly transforming AM radio and a lot of the people who were tuned in to it. This was a relatively new world for Lesh, who, after his unhappy tenure in Berkeley’s music program in 1962, had studied at Mills College in Oakland with the eminent modern composer Luciano Berio, then drifted to Las Vegas (T.C.’s hometown), where he took odd jobs and spent his days composing. From Las Vegas, Phil moved to Palo Alto, and then to San Francisco, where he began his wild ride as a driver for the post office. Phil’s career as a postal worker came to an abrupt halt one afternoon after his superior complained that the haircut he’d forced Phil to get wasn’t short enough. “I said, ‘Fuck you,’ and I quit,” Phil said. “And the rest of that spring I spent letting my hair grow and taking acid and fuckin’ off, having fun, and being supported by my girlfriend.”

  Then, “somebody came in with the word that Garcia’s band was playing such-and-such a night at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor,” Phil said. A week earlier, in what he called “a stoned moment” at a party in Palo Alto, he’d told Garcia that he’d been thinking of taking up an electric instrument, possibly the bass. He and a few friends dropped acid and bopped down to Magoo’s to check out the Warlocks, and “During the set break, Jerry took me off to a table and said, ‘How’d you like to play bass in this band? Our bass player’s not a musician and we have to tell him what notes to play.’ I said, ‘By God, I’ll give it a try.’” Phil had been duly impressed by what he heard at Magoo’s that night: “It was really happening. Pigpen ate my mind with the harp, singing the blues. They wouldn’t let you dance but I did anyway.”

  Around the first week of June, Phil moved down to Palo Alto to devote himself full time to the Warlocks. At first he borrowed an instrument; then his girlfriend, Ruth, bought him his first electric bass—“a single-pickup Gibson with a neck like a telephone pole,” he said—and he picked up pointers on the rudiments of the instrument from whoever was around: Garcia, a young folk picker named John Dawson (who would later form the New Riders of the Purple Sage), David Nelson, Eric Thompson. “I remember exactly when it was clear that Dana Jr. was not exactly with the program on bass,” says Eric Thompson. “Jerry said, ‘We’re gonna get Phil.’ Phil moved to the room across from me in this house and he’d never touched an electric bass before. I remember him picking up the bass for the first time and saying, ‘Oh, how does this work?’ and he started figuring out how to play scales on it immediately, very methodically.”

  One of the things that made Phil such an interesting player from the start is that he didn’t have any preconceived notions about what the bass’s role in rock music should be. This is not someone who had studied James Jamerson’s solid, steady bass work on Motown singles, or Bill Wyman’s thick grooves with the Stones. Nor had he spent time investigating the more inventive rock bass players of the era, like Paul McCartney, whose melodic approach made the instrument sing in ways it never had before, and the Who’s redoubtable thunder machine, John Entwistle. What Phil had heard, and no doubt subconsciously absorbed, were some of the great acoustic bassists in jazz—Charles Mingus, Scott La Faro, Jimmy Garrison, Ron Carter and others—who succeeded in moving the bass beyond a mainly rhythmic supporting role into complex and sophisticated new realms that more fully exploited the instrument’s broad range of sonorities. Even so, Phil said in 1990, “I don’t study other bassists, and I don’t think I’ve really drawn much from them. In my own style of playing, I’ve been influenced more by Bach than any bassists. Actually, you can go back even further—Palestrina, sixteenth-century modal counterpoint.” That’s all well and good, but at the beginning Lesh had to work his way through some of the basic blues-based progressions just like anyone else, if only to understand them well enough to be able to discard them with confidence on his way to finding something more interesting and challenging.

  Garcia and Weir would have to have been considered novices on their instruments, too. Weir had never played electric guitar before, and Garcia hadn’t played it since he moved to the Peninsula at the end of 1960, more than four years earlier. And in between his stints playing electric, Garcia had ventured far afield from the chugga-chugga simplicity of his Chuck Berry days into various acoustic country and blues fingerpicking styles, and then on to banjo, with an evolution from frailing to Scruggs-style, with a daring dash of Bill Keith thrown in there at the end. The Warlocks’ eclectic mélange was a new world for Garcia, as was his axe, a red Guild Starfire. He said that in his early days with the Warlocks he listened extensively to Freddy King and B. B. King, and indeed, those influences can easily be heard in his playing from 1965 through the middle of 1967. But the country and bluegrass influences were also present in his electric work.

  “I put my first real energy in music into the five-string banjo,” Garcia said. “That was the first time I ever said, ‘How do you do this?’ It was like cracking a combination lock. I slowed the records down and painstakingly listened to every lick and worked them out. I did a complete breakdown—as close as I was able—to learn how to play bluegrass banjo. And having gone through that process with banjo, when I went to electric guitar I knew how to learn it. And my taste in music is kind of informed by the banjo in a way, too. I like to hear every note. I like that clarity and separation of notes. And that characterizes my guitar playing, too. So I came at it sort of backwards.”

  On the other hand, Garcia noted, “For me, just going and playing the electric guitar represented freedom from the tremendous control trip that you have to have to be a banjo player.

  “I’d put so much energy and brainwork into controlling the banjo that, after psychedelics, what I wanted to do more than anything was not be in control nearly so much. And playing the electric guitar freed me! So for me, it was a combination of the times, a lucky moment, and it was much easier putting together a rock ’n’ roll band or an electric band than having a bluegrass band.”

  Garcia didn’t completely turn his back on bluegrass when he started playing electric music. He’d occasionally do some acoustic pickin’ around Gilman Street with David Nelson and the other members of the Pine Valley Boys, and on a couple of occasions in 1965 he traveled down to the Ash Grove in Los Angeles to see his friends the Kentucky Colonels. During 1965 the Colonels added fiddler Scott Stoneman, the troubled black sheep of the famous Stoneman Family of country musicians (whose lineage stretched all the way back to the ’20s), and this player made a lasting impression on Garcia:

  “I get my improvisational approach from Scotty Stoneman, the fiddle player. [He’s] the guy who first set me on fire—where I just stood there and don’t remember breathing. He was just an incredible fiddler. He was a total alcoholic wreck by the time I heard him, in his early thirties, playing with the Kentucky Colonels. . . . They did a medium-tempo fiddle tune like ‘Eighth of January’ and it’s going al
ong, and pretty soon Scotty starts taking these longer and longer phrases—ten bars, fourteen bars, seventeen bars—and the guys in the band are just watching him! They’re barely playing—going ding, ding, ding—while he’s burning. The place was transfixed. They played this tune for like twenty minutes, which is unheard of in bluegrass. I’d never heard anything like it. I asked him later, ‘How do you do that?’ and he said, ‘Man, I just play lonesome.’”

  Garcia definitely saw the connection between what the Warlocks were playing and his former life as a bluegrass picker: “It’s a string band fundamentally, even though it’s electric. And the addition of drums made it more like bluegrass, which is a more intensely rhythmic kind of music. I viewed the Grateful Dead from the beginning, or the Warlocks, as a blues band in one sense, in other words the instrumentation is traditionally what a blues band has had. But it’s also a kind of mutated bluegrass band on a certain level. Bluegrass is a nice metaphor for how music can work as a group. Bluegrass is a conversational music and I thought it would be nice to have an electric band that was conversational—where the instruments talked to each other. It’s a way to organize music.”

  The coup that ousted Dana Morgan Jr. from the Warlocks and installed Phil Lesh as the new bassist signaled the end of the bandmembers’ association with Dana Morgan Music, too, so the action shifted to another instrument store, Guitars Unlimited in Menlo Park. After the group was forced to return some of the equipment they’d borrowed from Dana Morgan’s, Garcia’s mother and Bill Kreutzmann’s parents helped the group buy some new gear, and for a while Billy acted as their de facto manager, dealing with club bookers trying to get them gigs. Later, Phil’s friend Hank Harrison did a brief stint as their manager. The Warlocks rehearsed wherever they could, including in the homes of various friends’ parents. Garcia drove the band hard, insisting they practice nearly every day, even though gigs were scarce for a while.