by David Browne
As 1961 began, Garcia had no job, no prospects, and few instruments, but at least he found a thriving community to welcome him when he followed friends down to the Peninsula. Stanford, which had opened in the late 1800s, had established itself as a leading hub for scientific research and intellectual thought; just as Garcia arrived, the school built a $1.2 million medical lab. The area was crammed with students, academics, and the children of professors along with the attendant bohemians, artists, and liberal thinkers. With its coffeehouses and book stores, Palo Alto held an ambrosial lure to those who felt they didn’t fit in with the rest of the country or their own households. Garcia began spending time at Kepler’s (in its original location in Menlo Park—a second Kepler’s opened in Palo Alto in 1962) or St. Michael’s Alley, the high-ceilinged coffeehouse known for its Danish open-faced sandwiches, wine, and beer. That space also became known for Joan Baez, the unswervingly pure-voiced teenager who played there when she was a high school student in Palo Alto before her family moved east in 1958.
From almost the moment he arrived in the area Garcia befriended similarly offbeat characters, sometimes at Kepler’s. One was Trist, and another was Paul Speegle, a high school friend of Barbara Meier’s who would prance around school in a cape just, in her words, to “outrage the straights.” The three men, along with Lee Adams, an African American who worked at the Chateau, were driving in the area on the night of February 1961 when the car, going far over the speed limit, hit a tricky curve and crashed. Speegle was instantly killed; the other three sustained a range of injuries, with Garcia, violently ejected from the car, winding up with a broken collar bone and other wounds. Although Garcia wasn’t as close to Speegle as he was to his own father, it was yet another example of the way lives could change, dramatically, on a dime. “It set Jerry back on his heels,” says Grant. “It brought the reality of, ‘Oh, shit, you can die.’ Until it happens to someone close to you, it’s just something that happens to others. That’s a hell of a reality sandwich, a big bite.”
At the same time, a replacement of sorts for Speegle appeared in their lives. At a local production of Damn Yankees Garcia’s girlfriend of the moment was working the lights and introduced him to one of her exes, Robert Hunter, a nineteen-year-old with horn-rimmed glasses and a clenched grin. A few nights later Hunter wandered into St. Michael’s, looking for someone to hang with, and ran into Garcia again. Hunter, who’d lived everywhere from the West Coast to Connecticut, had in a way lost his own father too. Born Robert Burns in June 1941, Hunter had suffered through the breakup of his parents when he was young, which resulted in him spending time (being “boarded out,” as the phrase went at the time) with families between the ages of nine and eleven. His mother eventually remarried, and his new stepfather was a national sales manager for the college division of McGraw-Hill as well as an editor at Harcourt. Growing up in different locales—from Palo Alto to Connecticut—made him feel like “always the new kid in school.”
Despite their differences in family backgrounds and schooling (Hunter had logged some time at college at the University of Connecticut), Hunter and Garcia were natural allies. At Kepler’s, the Chateau, or other local digs, they could be seen playing guitars together, singing Weavers’ songs, riffing on Finnegans Wake, and chewing over whatever else they were reading and devouring at the time. “Hunter was often bummed,” Meier says. “He had some sense of things being tragic. He never seemed all that happy except when he was singing—then out came this rousing, exuberant voice.” He and Garcia’s respective cars were parked next to each other at one point, and each slept in his own vehicle and lived off whatever food they could scrounge up (sometimes from female students at Stanford, whom Garcia would charm into nabbing grub from the cafeteria). Before long they’d even formed a loose duo, Bob and Jerry, and performed at Stanford and Meier’s sixteenth birthday party, right after she’d met Garcia. As her parents cooked a barbeque, Garcia and Hunter, along with a slew of friends who all seemed to have beards, strummed and sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and other summer-camp favorites.
The move to folk music was a natural one; even though groups like the Kingston Trio were amassing hit singles and earning a small fortune on tour, the music represented everything seemingly authentic at the moment, the antidote to the commercial culture. The year 1962 was far from barren for earthy early rock ’n’ roll; Dion’s “The Wanderer,” Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion,” and Booker T. and the MG’s “Green Onions” shook up the radio, but the music felt at an impasse, and schlock like Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red (My Love)” continued to dominate the airwaves. The high school days when Garcia would play intermittently with a band called the Chords must have felt even farther away in light of how rock ’n’ roll had faltered. It wasn’t uncommon to see Garcia walking around with a banjo or with one of the two guitars Meier had bought for him. A few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis he’d been introduced to the banjo by another member of the scene, Marshall Leicester, a sophomore at Yale who’d known Garcia at school in Menlo Park and reconnected with him in the Palo Alto area in the summer of 1961.
Folk music also led Garcia to the next, even purer form of acoustic music, bluegrass and string bands. Thanks to Leicester, Garcia had become fascinated with the banjo, playing on it for hours at a time at the Chateau, Kepler’s, or anywhere that would have him. “I don’t know if you’ve spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly,” Meier says. “He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” It would be the first indication that making music could take priority over attending to his personal life.
Garcia’s musical partners in crime—Hunter, Leicester, Nelson, and another bluegrass-obsessed local picker, Sandy Rothman—shared his passion for acoustic genres. What followed, with varying lineups, was a succession of unplugged bands with ever-changing names: the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers, the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, the Hart Valley Drifters. Hunter logged time in some of them, but Garcia didn’t consider his friend a serious enough musician and didn’t think he practiced mandolin nearly enough. Before long the two had had their first major falling out. Hunter had already begun writing his first novel and was seeking his own adventures at the time. To earn extra cash he volunteered for a psychology experiment at the local veterans hospital in 1962. One week he was given LSD, followed by psilocybin the next, mescaline the third week, and all four together the last week. The military wanted to know whether people who took those drugs could be easily hypnotized—the drugs were seen as potential weapons—and Hunter only told a few people about it, including Garcia and Meier. None of them could believe he’d done such a thing: it sounded so mysterious and enticing that everyone wanted in.
The string band names may have been gags—white kids gently mocking the real string bands of the South—but the fledgling musicians took to the music with an unabashed earnestness. “It was some kind of search for authenticity, for real American music,” Meier says. “That’s what was at the heart of it, finding something unsullied.” As one newcomer to the scene noticed, the boys looked straight and dressed the same way. The previous fall a Washington, DC–based guitarist named Jorma Kaukonen (who went by Jerry for a while) had arrived in California to attend Santa Clara College. His first night on the campus he wandered into a folk club and met Garcia and a young, throat-shredding Texas transplant named Janis Joplin, and eventually he would share the bill with one of Garcia’s acoustic bands in Palo Alto. “The bluegrass guys at the time dressed nicely,” Kaukonen says. “We hadn’t cultivated the jeans-and-T-shirt look yet. Jerry had that bluegrass ambience of the period.”
Norm van Maastricht had also arrived in the Bay Area shortly before, following his parents, who’d moved from Michigan. Considering himself a s
erious country-style guitar player in the vein of Chet Atkins, he wanted to meet other musicians and take lessons, and he kept hearing about a teacher who worked out of a music store in Palo Alto. The business, the Dana Morgan Music Shop, was known for its impressive, jammed-to-the-ceiling collection of acoustic instruments for sale. In one of the practice rooms in the back of the store van Maastricht finally caught up with Garcia, the first bearded person he’d ever met. Given Garcia’s missing digit, van Maastricht felt a strange sensation when he shook Garcia’s hand, and he also noticed Garcia liked to talk while playing his banjo, making it hard to hear him over the clatter of the instrument.
Van Maastricht became part of Garcia’s inner circle of bluegrass musician friends. Every so often he’d get a call asking whether he wanted to play and would soon after find himself in a car with Garcia and whoever else constituted the band, all of them making their way to a club, house party, or anyplace that would have them. “We felt almost driven to play anytime, anywhere, with anyone,” he says. “The hunger was never satisfied.” By the fall of 1962 the latest lineup had dubbed itself the Hart Valley Drifters and featured Garcia, Hunter, Nelson, and van Maastricht. Practice would sometimes take place at the Chateau. Every so often the same dedication and drive Meier saw in Garcia would also arise in the band too. One day the other Drifters were yapping away about this and that, all talking at once. Garcia was increasingly irked. “Guys . . . guys . . . fellas . . . boys,” he said, his voice growing ever so slightly more assertive each time.
“You could tell he was irritated and wanted them to shut up and get on with it, but he didn’t want to say, ‘Shut up and get on with it!’” van Maastricht says. “He had that low tone.” Garcia’s insistence helped. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis the Hart Valley Drifters were scheduled to play an art gallery at San Francisco State and also headline a folk festival at the College of San Mateo.
A month before Garcia and Meier made their way up through the fields near Sand Hill Road, John Perry Barlow sat in his first day of English class at the Fountain Valley High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Hearing a leg thrumming behind him, he turned around and saw a classmate with nerdy black glasses, short hair, a thin face, a monobrow, and a look that was slightly cross-eyed. He seemed like a bit of an oddball, but equally strange was Barlow’s initial feeling that they were kindred spirits and had known each other already.
One thing was certain: both were troublemakers who’d been shipped off to their all-boys boarding school for a reason. Barlow had been raised in Wyoming, where he was part of a Boy Scout troop whose members turned borderline delinquent when they began riding motorcycles. Because Barlow’s father was a Republican state legislator who didn’t want to attract that sort of attention, Barlow, an only child, was sent to Fountain Valley. There he learned that many of his fellow students, including this strange-looking one behind him, had also been kicked out of one school or another. The kid’s name turned out to be Bob Weir, and as Barlow learned that same day, Weir was living right across the hall from him in one of the Fountain Valley dorms.
Weir, Barlow soon discovered, had grown up in a lovely house with a long driveway and a swimming pool in Atherton, an affluent suburb west of Palo Alto. All that were missing were his birth parents. Weir’s father, a military man named John Parber who years later would wind up an Air Force colonel, had been involved with a woman in his native Tucson, Arizona; when she became pregnant she went to San Francisco and had the baby on October 16, 1947, without telling Parber. The baby would later be adopted by another military man, Frederick Weir, and his wife, Eleanor, and named Robert Hall Weir. “It was an idyllic place,” recalls Matthew Kelly, an Atherton buddy who met Weir during a Halloween trick-or-treat playtime one year. “No crime. A great place to grow up.” According to Bob, Frederick Weir was amiable, a “consummate gentleman” who was more than capable of holding his liquor; his son never saw his father drunk, just with “a twinkle in his eye.”
Bob would be similarly civil, but something inside him was incorrigible and offbeat, perhaps the result of a spinal meningitis illness during his childhood or simply the way his brain was wired. In the fall of 1960 Weir began attending the Menlo School for Boys, a quasi-military academy where students wore gray flannel pants, blue blazers, and ties. Even in that setting Weir’s head seemed to operate at a different speed from his fellow students’. In class he’d deconstruct sentences and reconstruct them backward. “He’d sit there and look off into space for a second,” recalls Vance Frost, a classmate, “and you knew he was working on something. Then it would come out where the object would come first and the subject would come later. It was very unusual. I’d go, ‘Wow, his mind is different.’”
Weir was also a jock, a member of the football team, as he would be at Fountain Valley. (When the football coach at the Menlo School ordered everyone to go home that night and tape their name to the backs of their helmets, Weir, in a subtly rebellious gesture, returned the next time with his name in old English calligraphy; he did the same with Frost’s helmet too.) But participating in team sports was one of the few ways he would conform. If students heard about a firecracker being set off outside a classroom or a prank pulled on a teacher, they naturally assumed Weir had something to do with it, even if he only flashed a sly smile and never admitted to anything. In eighth grade a group of Menlo School boys were asked to be escorts at a debutante ball. Weir and Frost tolerated it as best they could, but during a break they skipped out a back door. Weir had girls on his mind, but in other ways: another classmate, Michael Wanger, recalls that Weir could sketch a naked woman in seconds.
Weir had started playing guitar at thirteen, and by the time he’d enrolled in Fountain Valley he, like Barlow, had immersed himself in vernacular music. The two would trade records by the Greenbriar Boys, Cisco Houston, and other authentic or semi-authentic vernacular types. Neither kid was much interested in what amounted to modern rock ’n’ roll, which seemed a spent force by 1962, what with Buddy Holly dead and Elvis still getting his career back on track after serving in the army. “I was fifteen, sixteen years old at the time and very much attuned to the trends,” Weir said to David Hajdu. “[Folk music] was in vogue among the artsy-fartsy kids set. There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.”
Even though they were holed up in the middle of the country, far from their homes, Weir and Barlow had no interest in leaving their wild streaks behind. “It was a Godless subdivision where everyone went to sleep at ten,” Barlow recalls. “There wasn’t too much trouble to get into, but we managed anyway.” One night the two jumped a fence, wandered out into the prairie that surrounded the school, and dug a lavish tunnel complete with underground lairs. The boys were proud of their feat, but when they found the spot, school officials were less than impressed. A biology class semi–food fight—where dead frogs, not luncheon meat, were hurled—would become legendary. Both kids were now under scrutiny. Weir was clearly a misfit, albeit a mild-mannered one. As 1962 drew to a close he just needed a better, more welcoming outlet for that sensibility.
It wasn’t until he made one of his trips to Kepler’s in early 1962 that Phil Lesh made the connection. Among the rows of paperbacks he’d spotted a biography of French composer Claude Debussy. With his goatee and short hair parted to the right, the man on the cover looked very much like that guy Lesh had met at the Chateau the previous fall. Lesh was neither folkie nor rocker—he’d been raised on classical music, hence his interest in the likes of Debussy—but the book jacket and the physical resemblance made Garcia seem somehow more accessible and intriguing. “It made me want to listen more closely to what Jerry was doing musically,” Lesh says. “How curious is that? Sometimes things work that way, those kinds o
f associations.”
Born Philip Chapman Lesh on March 15, 1940, he, like Garcia, was the child of an industrious father—in his case, Frank, who was so adept at repairing office equipment that he opened his own shop in the Bay Area. Like Garcia, young Lesh was the offspring of two working parents and spent quality time during his childhood with his grandmother. But the outward comparisons ended there. Lesh’s grandmother had helped raise him on a regular diet of classical music, and before long Lesh was learning to play violin in grade school. The blond crew cut he sported during this time made him look like the band geek he inherently was, and sure enough, he landed a seat in the kids’ orchestra at age ten. Compared to classical music, rock ’n’ roll seemed crude and unappealing. “I detested it,” Lesh says. “I thought it was totally infantile. Three chords over and over and over again. I’m coming from Beethoven and Mahler.” (Talking about his early antirock prejudices in a radio interview in 1990, Lesh added, with a laugh, “I’m happy to eat those words now and forever.”)
Whether it was a result of his brain, his personality, or his dismissive attitude toward rock ’n’ roll, Lesh not surprisingly became a loner during his teen years. “I didn’t have many friends in the fifties,” he says. “I wasn’t very popular at all.” In a sense his best friend was music, so much so that his parents moved to Berkeley so he could attend that city’s high school, which had a far better music program. By then he was specializing in trumpet. After graduating high school he enrolled in San Francisco State but left halfway through his freshman year and soon returned home. Finally, in the fall of 1958—the same time Garcia began his difficult year of tenth grade at the rough Balboa High School in San Francisco—Lesh began classes at the College of San Mateo, which introduced him to experimental modern music, Beat writing (by way of a classmate and new friend, Bobby Peterson), and pot. Taking entrance exams for UC Berkeley in 1961, Lesh met Tom Constanten, a fellow classical music fanatic and outlier. Born in New Jersey in 1944, Constanten had relocated with his family to Las Vegas ten years later. He recalls Lesh as “strikingly blond” and similarly inclined to avoid pop music. “The music we were into was off the beaten path,” Constanten says. “It was rare to find someone else who was into that. It was almost like a secret society, and we didn’t know we were members until we met.”