So Many Roads

by David Browne

  The Tangent hosted Garcia’s then-current bluegrass band, the Wildwood Boys (who also played at his and Sara’s wedding), and before long the new couple were also playing together there, singing folk songs as Garcia alternated between guitar, banjo, and other instruments. In the meantime Garcia continued jamming and performing with one or another acoustic band, including at a folk festival in Monterey. But those shows barely paid, if at all, and to earn something close to a living Garcia had begun teaching at the Dana Morgan Music Shop. One of his new students was Bob Matthews, a skinny Berkeley-born teenager whose mother, a grade-school teacher, happened to mention to a Stanford documentarian that her son wanted to learn how to play banjo. The filmmaker turned out to be none other than Ruppenthal, who tipped Matthews’s mother to her husband, Jerry, and his classes at Morgan’s store.

  As Matthews realized, Garcia was a commanding presence and impressive musician who didn’t let his students get away with slacking off. “He had a very sinister look to him,” he says. “He didn’t talk a lot, but his eyes would curse you. He’d be sitting there playing and looking to see how you were responding to his playing.” Matthews, who admittedly wasn’t as devoted to the instrument as was his new teacher, only lasted a few months: “Jerry was like, ‘You don’t practice, you’re not gonna learn this stuff.’”

  By the end of 1963 Garcia’s life had taken two different and potentially conflicting turns. His daughter with Sara, Heather, arrived in December, and on New Year’s Eve he found himself alone in a practice room in the back of Morgan’s store when Matthews and two friends popped in. At an earlier point Matthews had introduced Garcia to one of his classmates, Bob Weir, but that moment hadn’t amounted to much. Tonight’s get-together would be far more memorable.

  To no one’s surprise, Weir had arrived back in his hometown area months before. He’d been kicked out of Fountain Valley in Colorado at the end of the 1962–1963 school year, and after summering with the Barlow family in Wyoming in the middle of 1963, he’d returned to the West Coast to continue his attempt at conforming to the educational system. His efforts weren’t any more successful than they’d been in Colorado. He then attended Pacific High School, a period most distinguished by the forming of Weir’s first band, a folk group called the Uncalled Four that included his former Menlo School classmate Michael Wanger on banjo. “Rock ’n’ roll was pretty limp at the time,” says Wanger, who recalls talking with Weir about music as the two sat side by side for yearbook photos. “The only thing happening was the Beach Boys.”

  The group, named by Wanger’s father, landed at least one job at the Tangent, and Weir, whose fascination with folk and other vernacular forms of music was expanding, began spending time at Kepler’s and St. Michael’s Alley. Given Weir’s previously diagnosed case of dyslexia, Kepler’s was problematic: “I really couldn’t read very well, so I felt a little funny in a bookstore,” he recalled to writer Hajdu. St. Michael’s had an added attraction: women. It was, he said, “a good place to go and meet girls—and hang out with people who were the youth intelligentsia.” The Tangent also pulled in its fair share of female music fans.

  That New Year’s Eve at Morgan’s store Garcia apparently didn’t realize his prospective student wouldn’t be showing up, but when it hit him, he invited Matthews, Weir, and their other friend, Rich McCauley, inside. “Jerry asked us if we played and we said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Well, I got the keys to the front of the store, let’s grab some instruments,’” Weir has said. (In another retelling of the incident Weir thinks someone suggested, “Why don’t we break into the front of the store?”) For several hours they all made a carefree racket on banjos and guitars, and Garcia and Weir overcame their five-year age difference—Garcia was twenty-one, Weir all of sixteen—and connected by way of music. “It was like meeting an old friend,” Weir has said. “It was like taking up a conversation we’d left off.” Garcia must have been equally inspired, as he suggested they converge again the following week at the store. This time they brought along two other local friends, David Parker and a scraggly East Palo Alto blues-loving renegade named Ron McKernan, who went by the nickname Blue Ron, for his love of the blues. All of them gathered at least once more to play, this time at Parker’s house.

  In early 1964 Weir was enrolled in yet another school, Menlo-Atherton High School in his hometown of Atherton, and was already carrying himself like a musician. During lunchtime he could be seen toting a guitar, just like Dylan; when Bonner took guitar lessons from him at Guitars Unlimited Weir demonstrated his ability to blow smoke rings across the small room. In her world history class Swanson, a pert brunette, was yapping with a classmate about trying to get into a nearby Beatles concert—they’d just played the Ed Sullivan Show and had, to put it mildly, made a strong impression on the youth of America—when the boy sitting in front her turned around and said, “Well, I have a band.”

  By way of horse-riding lessons, Swanson had befriended fellow rider Wendy Weir and had heard mention of the kid others referred to as “Wendy’s weird brother Bob.” (“Blob Weird” was another nickname of the period.) Swanson too would also come to notice Weir’s eccentricities: the way he would fill in a drawing of an airplane instead of his name on a test exam or refuse to stand up for the morning flag salute. Here he now was, sitting in front of her and knowing precisely the right way to get a girl’s attention. And, it turned out, he did have a band, even if it sounded nothing remotely like the Beatles.

  Laird Grant, Garcia’s partner in mischief from middle school days, was among those who wandered into Magoo’s to watch the Warlocks take a crack at playing rock ’n’ roll. To no one’s surprise the acoustics inside a pizza parlor were pretty atrocious, and on the night Grant showed up the band was stuffed into a corner: “No stage, no nothing, flat on the ground.” But he was still delighted to see Garcia making music with the keyboard player with whom Grant had already bonded over drinks in bars in East Palo Alto. Whereas once he’d been called Blue Ron, thanks to his largely great-unwashed demeanor, he was now and forever Pigpen.

  Garcia and others on the Peninsula music scene wanted nothing more than to be viewed as authentic, not products of what they saw as the increasingly plastic, conformist society around them. (Garcia had a word for people in that world: “mugs.”) Yet here in their midst was someone who exuded dark-end-of-the-street realness in ways they never could. Ron McKernan had been born in San Mateo on September 8, 1945, and his father, Phil, was a recording engineer and DJ at KRE, a local radio station. (“Being a DJ was a side job to being the engineer at the station,” explains Phil’s daughter and Ron’s sister, Carol.) Thanks to his father’s interest in R&B and blues and vast record collection, young Ron quickly developed a deep, profound connection with those genres. That bond was only made stronger when the family moved and Ron began attending a largely African American high school in East Palo Alto. Neither surfer nor jock, he so identified with the African American community there that, according to one friend of the time, he wore a steel-chain bracelet to make sure he never forgot about slavery.

  In light of his funky hygiene habits and charming grubbiness, McKernan went from being called Blue Ron to Pigpen in honor of the unkempt character in Peanuts. By early 1964 Pigpen sightings were everywhere: he was spotted at Pacific High, at Kepler’s, at bars, and at the Dana Morgan Music Shop, where he was a teenage janitor. At one point he took a job delivering donuts to local stores, and his routine became part of his local legend: finishing a shift at three or four in the morning, he’d cap it off by pulling out a jug of cheap wine sold in grocery stores. (Whether it was the way he looked or the way he acted, no one ever seemed to question or card him.) In the early morning hours he’d sing and play the blues on guitar and harmonica.

  Despite his hardened, gruff-as-shingles exterior, Pigpen struck most of his friends as exceedingly shy. “He didn’t look like he was reputable at all,” says Bonner Mosley, “but he was the sweetest guy in the world.” Music became his way of exorcising his dem
ons, which would forever be mysterious to the members of the Dead. They knew little of his family or the tension between Pigpen and his father, Phil, who, they would later learn, wanted his son to take a non-arts-related career path, to become, in the father’s words, a “‘world renouned [sic] scientist.’ And so I fashioned a mold for Ron that was not of his choosing, but of mine.” In Phil McKernan’s eyes, Pigpen felt his father didn’t approve of his chosen life and so, in turn, “had to find some manner of coping with it.” That coping mechanism, Phil felt, was alcohol, and it would haunt the father for years.

  Pigpen and Garcia had crossed paths already; they’d both logged time in a local ad hoc rock band, the Zodiacs, in which Garcia did his best to play bass guitar. Pigpen had also taken guitar lessons with Garcia at Morgan’s store, and he appreciated Garcia’s knowledge of the blues. With his affinity for roots music, Pigpen was a natural for the band that began crystallizing around Garcia, Weir, Matthews, and seemingly anyone in their vicinity during the early months of 1964. For young guys who wanted to form a band whether or not they knew how to play an instrument, one option cried out: jug-band music, which was enjoying the briefest of vogues. To play this ribald younger sibling of folk music one needn’t know how to play an instrument (kazoos and washboards were easy enough to master) or even the history of the music (how it originated in the South in the twenties). Here was party music: bawdy songs bashed out on everything from banjos and guitars to actual jugs. “It wasn’t electric urban blues, but it was old-style urban blues,” Weir recalled. “Some of the jug bands were real good. Noah Lewis, the harmonica player, was phenomenal. There hasn’t been another harmonica player who could do what he could do.”

  After they’d bonded with Garcia at Morgan’s on New Year’s Eve, Weir and Matthews caught a Berkeley show by the leading jug ensemble of the moment, Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band. Both kids were so inspired that they decided they wanted to form their own combo, and the first person they told was Garcia. Now that they’d jammed with him, the two students would hitchhike over to the store on school mornings if they didn’t have a first-period class. When they mentioned the jug idea Garcia, noodling as always on a banjo, looked up: “Without missing a beat, he said, ‘Good—I’m in!’” Matthews recalls. Given his connections and contacts with musicians in the Palo Alto area, it was only natural for Garcia to take charge of the nascent project. Garcia would play guitar and banjo, of course, and Pigpen would handle harmonica. Parker scoured junkyards and thrift stores, eventually finding a used washboard and strapping a kazoo atop it; for a while Matthews also handled washboard and kazoo duties.

  Weir, the youngest and most eager of the lot, was especially intent on having a role in the band. “He was very persistent,” David Nelson, Garcia’s bluegrass-band guitarist, later said to Hajdu. “He kind of barged his way into the jug band by saying, ‘C’mon, I want to play in this band.’ We’d say, ‘Get out of here, kid.’” Almost as a way to drive him away for good, someone suggested Weir play jug. (Garcia had asked Hunter to hold down that role, but Hunter couldn’t attain the right tone and opted out.) The next day Weir appeared, bringing with him a wide array of jugs, clay and plastic, and asking everyone which one had the best tone. Weir settled on an empty plastic Clorox container, an improvement over an actual clay jug. “He just kept at it and kept at it when he didn’t seem to have a chance,” said Nelson. “From the start it didn’t seem like he knew how to do anything, but he just kept doing it. The kid had pluck.” The new band began practicing in a wooden garage behind Garcia’s cottage on Hober Lane, where Weir showed up one day with a pile of old jazz and ragtime records—“Look at these!” he exclaimed. Pigpen also brought along a slew of records nabbed from his father’s extensive collection, including jug-band recordings from decades before.

  Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions—the name was courtesy of Nelson, although it would change from time to time—played the first of many shows at the Tangent about three weeks after Weir and Garcia had reconnected at Dana Morgan’s. “We were putting on a party, and people would dance and stuff,” Weir recalled to Hajdu. “We owned the place, almost from the first night.” Over the next few months and a few dozen performances the band began attracting a loyal following; a local drummer, Bill Kreutzmann, saw them at the Tangent, sitting right up against the stage and mesmerized by Garcia—“I want to follow that guy, forever,” he said to himself. No one in the band considered jug music his first love, but it was a hoot to play, and a market existed, even in their part of the country. “As long as there was a living to be made or a buck to be made for us fledgling musicians,” Weir recalled, “we were more than happy to go into it and research it and come up with the stuff.”

  In the spring of 1964 Mother McCree’s temporarily shut down as Garcia made one last shot at fulfilling his dream of becoming a member of a renowned bluegrass band, that of mandolin legend Bill Monroe. By then the Wildwood Boys had morphed into the Black Mountain Boys, and as summer approached, Garcia and the Boys’ latest guitarist, Sandy Rothman, embarked on a road trip that took them as far south as Florida and north to Massachusetts. (In the interest of avoiding any harassment in the South, a part of the country far more suspicious of beards than Palo Alto, Garcia shaved off his facial hair before he left.) He and Rothman checked out bluegrass bands at clubs and festivals and hooked up with numerous musician friends, making the trip culturally rewarding. In the end Garcia wound up driving back home to California without a job; he didn’t have the confidence to apply for the gig in Monroe’s group, even if it were available. But by then it almost didn’t matter. Another reinvention cried out to him, one that promised far more imaginative journeys than those in bluegrass or jug bands. And perhaps it even offered the chance to make something close to a livable wage.

  The song list for the May 26 show at Magoo’s would be lost to history, although it most likely included a Chuck Berry cover and songs any well-meaning garage band of 1965 had to learn, like Sam the Sham and the Pharaoh’s deliriously silly “Wooly Bully.” The song embedded most in the minds of those who were there was Slim Harpo’s deep, slow, sexual blues “I’m a King Bee.” In another variation on the folk boom, white kids around the country were digging into the blues, forming bands and playing their own versions of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf songs. Some of those covers could be embarrassingly callow, but the Warlocks’ rendition at Magoo’s was on a different level, largely thanks to Pigpen, who growled it with a menacing seductiveness. “The vocal sound of that band was Pig—that’s what I remember,” recalls Jorma Kaukonen, who popped into Magoo’s on one of those May nights and was thrilled to see his friends plugging in. “He sounded so authentic. He was an old soul. It was like, ‘Man, what am I going to have to do to sound like that?’”

  Having grown up listening to electric blues, Pigpen became the first member of Mother McCree’s to encourage his friends to amplify. But they all felt the tug of rock ’n’ roll. When Garcia went on his southern expedition, Weir filled in for his friend at the Dana Morgan Music Shop, giving guitar lessons. Spending hours in the store, amid both acoustic and amplified fretted instruments, filled the teenager’s head with new, different musical visions. “All those shiny electric instruments were starting to give us the come hither,” he has said. The British Invasion had arrived on American shores that year, and the Beatles were far from the only overseas band on the charts; by the fall of 1964 the Dave Clark Five’s “Glad All Over” and “Catch Us If You Can,” the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and “Set Me Free,” and many other punchy, charged-voltage singles had taken over American radio. “Rock ’n’ roll seemed viable—it seemed less like prepackaged, marketed pap and more like there was some expansiveness to the music,” Weir recalled to Hajdu. “None of us had stopped long enough to think about taking rock ’n’ roll seriously until the Beatles came out, and they were downright musical.” The fact that the music made girls scream wasn’t lost on anyone, and neither were the rent-paying possibilities: at the Top of
the Tangent, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions would play three sets a night and end up with $15 dollars in each of their pockets. (A few months later in August 1965, Weir, Bonner, and Swanson jumped in Swanson’s car and chased the Beatles from the airport to a local show. Encouraged by his friends, Weir tried to climb up the chain-link fence and crash the show, but he didn’t make it.)

  Just as jamming in Morgan’s store had helped initiate their jug band, so did the store lure them into rock. Morgan’s son, Dana Jr., who helped run the shop and harbored his own dreams of becoming a musician, made them an offer: if they wanted to start a rock ’n’ roll band, the store would loan them instruments, as long as Dana Jr. could play bass in the group. Morgan wasn’t intrinsically one of them: with his reddish-blond hair and preppy wardrobe, he looked more like a member of the neat and tidy Kingston Trio than a fledgling rocker. He didn’t seem all that interested in pot. But Garcia, according to Lesh (who wasn’t there at the time), saw the value in free gear and “put a good charm offensive on Dana.” They now had a rehearsal space and free instruments. “What more could a boy want?” Weir told Swanson as he stood in the driveway of his family home in Atheron, leaning his new electric guitar against his equally new Fender amp.

  Overnight the jug-band fever dream broke—Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions would give its last performances shortly into the new year, 1965—and the washboard, kazoos, and other eccentric instruments were dispatched. (Garcia would continue playing banjo, but its days too were numbered as far as playing an integral role in his music.) Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, and Morgan began congregating in the front part of the Dana Morgan Music Shop, now accompanied by yet another musical soul mate.

  Of them all, Bill Kreutzmann, born May 7, 1946, had the most experience playing something close to rock ’n’ roll. The son of a lawyer and a dance teacher, he had both financial and artistic impulses implanted into his brain from an early age. Like many kids, Kreutzmann began banging on whatever was around when he was a toddler, but in his case, he never stopped; by grade school he was obsessed with rhythm and drumming. When he was still in high school Kreutzmann’s parents divorced, and for a time he was sent off to school in Arizona. Kreutzmann’s parents hoped he would attend Stanford as they had, but the academic life wasn’t Kreutzmann’s destiny. “Bill was a stud,” recalls John McLaughlin. “He had girls falling all over him.” Kreutzmann soon had a family of his own to support: he and his equally young girlfriend, Brenda, had a daughter in the middle of 1964 and were married. Increasingly drawn to music over school, Kreutzmann took the drum seat in a local R&B cover band, the Legends, who powered many a Palo Alto party with their covers of James Brown, the Isley Brothers, and others. Although not the frontman, Kreutzmann made his presence known: McLaughlin remembers that one of the highlights of a Legends show was the way it would wrap up with an extraordinary drum solo.