by David Browne
During his time at the College of San Mateo Lesh began making pilgrimages to the Palo Alto area, and like so many others, he was bewitched by Kepler’s, St. Michael’s Alley, and the grimier, R&B-inclined hangouts in East Palo Alto. “It was the only game in town,” he said years later to writer Hajdu. “There were just all these neat people who seemed to be congregated in one place. You could go to St. Michael’s Alley and play music all night long, and you only had to buy one cup of coffee. Every once in a while one of the girls would get up and dance flamenco on top of a table, and that was okay.” He’d also finally developed a taste for folk music, if not outright rock ’n’ roll.
By way of John “the Cool” Winter, another member of Garcia’s crowd, Lesh had finally met Garcia, most likely at the Chateau. At a party at the house around the time of Lesh’s twenty-second birthday someone brought along a sizable bag of weed to help him celebrate, and Lesh, Garcia, and anyone else around got blissfully stoned. “It seemed like enough to last a year at the time,” Lesh recalls. “I don’t think we went through all of it, but we tried.” Soon after, at a party in East Palo Alto, Lesh became entranced as he watched Garcia sing and play “Matty Groves,” the old English folk ballad about an affair between a lady of the manor and a servant that ends in death when the woman’s husband, a lord, learns about it. “It was absolutely operatic,” Lesh says. “It was a deadpan delivery and minimal guitar picking, but the whole thing was mesmerizing.” Afterward, in what Lesh calls “that adolescent hyperbolic way,” he told Garcia he was in the presence of greatness, and Garcia just snickered and said, “Yeah, right, man.”
Given his love of classical and experimental music, not to mention his barbershop-short haircut and height (he stood over six feet tall), Lesh distinguished himself in the scene in more ways than one. He seemed to talk at a quicker pace than everyone around him. For Meier’s sixteenth birthday Lesh wrote her a piece of music, a score, and told her it should be “played as fast as possible.” He seemed like the last person who would connect with Garcia, but for reasons both musical and personal, Lesh felt a bond from the start. “I have to confess, I always told my parents ‘Gee, I’d really love to have a brother,’” he says. “I guess I saw other families where there were two brothers. He was one of those guys you realize would be a friend for life.” To Constanten, the two were “complimentary and sympathetic, like strings on a guitar. Phil and I were into avant-garde, and Jerry was into the Carter Family. We hadn’t had enough of a map exposed to see where the roads would lead. But we knew there was a connection somehow.”
That connection grew sturdier when, after hearing Garcia perform “Matty Groves” that night, Lesh offered to make a tape of his new friend singing that and other traditional songs. By then Lesh was volunteering as a recording engineer at KPFA, a noncommercial talk and music station funded by listeners, and he sensed Garcia would be an ideal addition to the station’s folk show. After grabbing Constanten’s tape deck out of the apartment they were sharing, Lesh and Garcia raced back to the party, recorded Garcia, and soon played it for Gertrude (“Gert”) Chiarito, the host of KPFA’s folk show, Midnight Special. The friendship was mutually beneficial: thanks to Lesh, Garcia had the potential to be heard by more people than ever before, even if his own career plans were still uncertain.
Lesh was soon gone from the scene; dropping out of the University of California at Berkeley, he wound up living with Constanten and his family in Las Vegas during the summer of 1962. (In between, he and Constanten signed up for composer Luciano Berio’s composition class at Mills College in Oakland, which also fostered their mutual love of adventurous music.) Constanten’s parents took issue with Lesh—who, by then, was letting his hair grow out—and asked him to leave, although Constanten says he never understood what happened: “They would yell at me, and I never knew what I did,” he says. “It was a very old-world sort of thing.” Either way, Lesh wound up taking a job at the post office in Vegas, hoping to work his way back to Palo Alto when he could.
But that night on the Midnight Special show Lesh didn’t simply have another chance to observe Garcia’s musical prowess; he also noticed the way Garcia effortlessly bantered with Chiarito, whom everyone knew was no pushover. “She had a lot of local folkies kissing her ass, and Jerry didn’t do that,” Lesh says. “He was just himself. I was watching him win her over instantaneously.” Few others in their world, Lesh included, had those types of people skills at that point in their lives, yet Garcia already seemed to have mastered it. As Leicester would later tell Hajdu, Garcia was “a kind of natural bohemian, but he was a bohemian who knew how to find his way through the establishment. He had the ability to make people like him and get done what he wanted to do.” That ability to subvert from within would become increasingly useful as the years went by.
As dusk approached, Garcia and Meier sang “Go Down, Old Hannah” a few more times. Eventually the sun set, and they were still alive.
The two didn’t know it at the time—in the days before the Internet and twenty-four-hour cable news, few did immediately—but Kennedy and Khrushchev had already defused the situation with Cuba. At almost the same time the couple had climbed their hill, at 8:05 p.m. Eastern time, (5:05 p.m. Pacific time) Kennedy had offered a deal to Khrushchev: in a telegram he asserted that the Soviet Union “would agree to remove these weapons systems from Cuba under appropriate United Nations observation and supervision; and undertake, with suitable safeguards, to halt the further introduction of such weapons systems into Cuba,” while the United States would vow not to invade Cuba. (The United States would also remove its missiles from Turkey.) The Peninsula hadn’t been scorched by a nuclear mushroom cloud; the grass around them was still golden.
Garcia and Meier began making their way down the hill and back to their homes. When she arrived at her parents’ house late that night, Meier’s parents made her dinner and told her they’d been worried sick, and her mother hugged her.
For Garcia, who’d been deeply affected after reading George Orwell’s 1984 in grade school, the incident was yet another reminder that the establishment, especially the government, couldn’t be trusted. The mere thought that the world had almost ended over a macho showdown between two heads of state felt absurd to both him and Meier. A few years later, with the band that would finally make him more famous than he probably wanted to be, he would begin singing “Morning Dew,” Bonnie Dobson’s elliptical but haunting ballad about life after nuclear fallout, inspired by the novel (and movie) On the Beach. The song had a mournful and resigned tone to start with, even when pop star Lulu covered it later, but Garcia brought to its lyrics a palpable ache, stretching out some of the notes as if he were digging deep into that spooked side of himself and his past.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was also another reminder of the fragility and impermanence of the world. The planet hadn’t ended, but just as with the death of his father and Speegle, Garcia’s world could have been tossed on its head in a heartbeat. “It was the beginning of us realizing that there were forces that could whisk away the people you love and the whole freaking planet,” Meier says. “With the Cold War that became an ongoing subliminal message, which is probably one reason why Jerry never made any plans.” Years later, after she had reconnected with him, Meier would wonder about the impact of that night on Garcia’s later bad habits, as well as the culture of the Grateful Dead itself. The message couldn’t have been less ambiguous: it was best to live in the moment, do whatever one wanted, and find pleasure in it because that moment could be taken away at any time.
The Warlocks, 1965: Garcia and McKernan (top row), Kreutzmann, Weir, and Lesh (seated).
© HERB GREENE
CHAPTER 2
MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, MAY 26, 1965
It was pretty much the last place anyone expected to find a rock ’n’ roll band. Jammed between local business stores on Menlo Park’s main shopping drag, Magoo’s was a pizza parlor, not a nightclub or bar. It didn’t look all that different from the
thousands that had popped up around the country after World War II, when American soldiers returning from Europe talked up the delicious bread, tomato sauce, and cheese concoctions they’d wolfed down in Italy. Most of the American pizza chains and restaurants bore a resemblance to Magoo’s—long and narrow, picnic-style benches lined along the wall up front, a counter and oven to the right, florescent lighting overhead. But in a town teeming with college and high school students yearning for places to bond, Magoo’s was a gathering place for the emerging tribe.
On this Wednesday night the young band making a clanging racket inside was as idiosyncratic as the setting. The lead guitarist now had a helmet head of thick, curly hair; his goatee had been banished for the time being to his bluegrass days. Hunched over a portable Vox organ was a stocky kid with an equally unkempt mop, a spotty complexion, and a truculent gaze that dared anyone to mess with him. (The hair on both looked like it had been smushed down on their heads.) The other three—the drummer, the bass player, and especially the rhythm guitarist, so young looking he could easily have been on a middle school night out—appeared straighter and not quite as grubby. The sound they were making, bouncing off Magoo’s brick walls, was a clattering, exuberant, but not fully shaped mash-up of blues, jug band, rock ’n’ roll, and R&B. “They were still searching for their own sound,” recalls John McLaughlin, who’d taken percussion lessons from the Warlocks’ drummer, Bill Kreutzmann. “I thought, ‘This is weird stuff.’ Most of the local bands sounded like the Beatles or the Stones. The Warlocks sounded like music from the first Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker walks into the bar and they’re playing reverse jazz. It sounded really strange.”
The first time the Warlocks had set up musical shop at Magoo’s, three weeks earlier, a small group of friends had shown up along with a smattering of high school kids they’d enticed. “It wasn’t too hard to get the student population to come hear music,” says one of those friends, Palo Alto High School student Connie Bonner (later Bonner Mosley). “It was perfect timing: ‘Come over after school to Magoo’s—have a pizza!’ They all came.” It almost didn’t matter how the band sounded; with rock ’n’ roll experiencing a heady, joyful rebirth, the idea of the Warlocks would be enticing enough.
That first night at Magoo’s, May 5, the Warlocks’ lack of experience—the second guitarist, Bob Weir, had barely even held an electric guitar before—became amusingly apparent when they started playing. Some of them sat on stools, staring at each other instead of at the small crowd gathered in front of them. Bonner and her friend Sue Swanson, who’d become the band’s first two loyal fans, the original Deadheads, called upon their extensive knowledge of the Beatles’ stage craft and went over and offered the Warlocks advice: leave the stools, stand up, turn around, make eye contact. They were playing rock ’n’ roll now, not bluegrass or jug-band music, and the songs required more visceral skills. The musicians, especially the lead guitarist, Weir’s older buddy Garcia, seemed thankful for the suggestions. After all, what did they know about doing this? Tonight’s show had at least one slightly wholesome touch: because it was Swanson’s seventeenth birthday, her mother, much to her daughter’s embarrassment, showed up with a cake.
With each of the Warlocks’ weekly Wednesday shows that followed, Magoo’s grew a bit more congested, the crowd eventually spilling out onto the sidewalk on Santa Cruz Avenue. (Granted, it took only a few dozen people to do that, but it certainly looked impressive to anyone passing by.) Sometimes the Warlocks played in a corner in the back; other nights, like tonight, they were jammed into a space near the front window. Earlier, the local fire marshal had dropped by and been concerned about the overflow crowd. (Although May 27 has often been cited as the day of the Warlocks’ third Magoo’s show, that was a Thursday, so May 26 is likely the correct date.)
Among Garcia’s musician friends word had spread that he was secretly venturing into electric rock ’n’ roll. Some of his bluegrass-inclined buddies were dismayed, but another acquaintance outside that circle was curious to hear the makeover. As the band played that night Phil Lesh and his girlfriend, Ruth Pakhala, walked through the front door. Lesh had tried to see the Warlocks before at Magoo’s but had shown up so late that he’d only been able to join in on after-show party elsewhere. There he, Weir, and Garcia shared an ample stash of pot. Tonight, though, the couple had arrived on time.
By then a thought had been buzzing around in Garcia’s brain. He knew the bass player, Dana Morgan Jr., wasn’t cutting it: he was too square, too straight, too disinterested in getting stoned. The Warlocks needed someone more like them: adventurous, hard-headed, a little wild. As the band took a short break—and partook of the free beer and pizza the owners of Magoo’s offered in lieu of pay—Garcia put down his guitar and made a beeline for Lesh.
The calls from Garcia with another bluegrass gig would still come into Norm van Maastricht’s parents’ house. On the way to the job the players would scramble to concoct a new name: in the early months of 1963 the Hart Valley Drifters gave way to the Wildwood Boys. No matter where they were headed they found themselves in one of Hunter or Garcia’s scrappy cars, which chugged and wheezed their way around the Peninsula. After one particularly bumpy ride van Maastricht told Garcia he needed better wheels, if only for his safety. “Look,” Garcia told him, firmly but politely, “all I want to do is to live my own weird little life my own weird little way and play music for a living.” For decades to come friends and colleagues would hear a variation on that line emerge from Garcia’s mouth.
For Garcia weird was a compliment; by then he knew he was destined for some type of alternative lifestyle and sought out friends who’d made the same decision. Two and a half years had passed since the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet those days must have felt like another lifetime for Garcia. In the time since, one relationship had dissolved and another had begun; he’d become a husband, father, and to some degree a breadwinner. The days of the Chateau were over, at least for him, and it was now his job to put meals on the table every night. Maybe this new venture—a rock ’n’ roll band—would help his fiscal issues and even be artistically fulfilling.
Within months of the Kennedy-Khrushchev standoff Garcia’s personal life had been dismantled. When Barbara Meier’s parents learned she’d slept with Garcia, the couple suffered a serious setback. “Everything shifted,” Meier says. “Then it became very difficult and it wasn’t as wonderful as it once was. I had to get these geeky guys on so-called dates so I could then go with Jerry.” As much as she admired her boyfriend’s musical diligence, it was also becoming tedious for Meier to sit around patiently and watch him practice banjo for hours and hours on end. By early 1963, after she’d started seeing other boys, their relationship had soured and burnt itself out.
Whatever mourning consumed Garcia faded quickly. He soon met Sara Ruppenthal, a striking Stanford sophomore and fellow folk music fan who, like many men and women at the time, was taken with Garcia’s Hispanic-beatnik air. (In Lesh’s memory the future couple met in a parking lot as Garcia was walking and Ruppenthal was bicycling, and he hitched a ride with her.) Almost immediately the two fell into each other’s arms and then his bed in his room in a shack behind the Chateau. As Ruppenthal later told Garcia biographer Blair Jackson, Garcia called her within days of their first night together and told her, “I’m really fucked up. I need to be with you. I can’t eat. I can’t even play music, man!” The initial heat generated between the two became palpable in more than one way. Weeks later, hanging out with Nelson, Hunter, and van Maastricht at the Peninsula Creamery, a local diner, Garcia put both elbows on the table and said, “Well, guys, looks like I have to get married!” They were shocked and asked, “Are you kidding? To whom?” Garcia told them his new girlfriend was pregnant. “In those days,” van Maastricht says, “you did the right thing.” Garcia didn’t seem distraught or freaked out by the idea of becoming a parent, and in April the couple were married in Palo Alto.
Three months before the wedding a new club, the Top of
the Tangent, had opened in Palo Alto. Located on University Avenue near the front gates of Stanford, the Tangent was run by two local doctors who wanted to bring folk to the city on a regular basis. The space was located above the Tangent restaurant and only had enough space for about twenty tables, some of which bumped up against the stage, yet the club, which had a beer license, was more professional than anything else in the area. A staircase led into the middle of a low-ceilinged performance space where, “if we were lucky, there was one microphone,” recalls Jorma Kaukonen. “But they had a PA. It was a bit more glitzy. It was a real place, like one of the folk clubs in LA.”