Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Tiff didn’t feel like he was fitting in very well either in school or at home, so after he graduated from Sequoia High in 1956, “I was really anxious to get out of the house because I felt like there was some kind of tension there,” he says. “My mom and Wally would argue—nothing too heavy, but I didn’t like it. It hadn’t felt right to me since we moved out of the city, so as soon as I was eighteen I was ready to get the hell out of the suburbs. I wanted to go back to the city. Instead I went into the marines. The Korean War was over by then, but you still had the drill instructors who were Korea veterans; a tough bunch, boy. Mean. But I thought if I was going to be in the service I was going to be in the tough one. I wasn’t going to be in the army or navy.”

  Laird spent a fair amount of time at the Matusiewicz house (and later, at the bar) and he remembers Wally this way: “He was kind of like Popeye. He had a set of forearms on him—man, the last thing you wanted to do was piss this guy off because he’d reach out and grab you with a couple of canned-ham hands. He could get pissed off and rant and rave, but I never saw him raise a hand on anybody. He could go off—BAM!—like a firecracker, and then two minutes later he was cool.”

  “Wally was a no-nonsense, hard-nosed guy,” adds Daniel Garcia. “He had a temper but he also had a great sense of humor. He used to get pissed off all the time because Jerry and Tiff wouldn’t do enough work around the house.”

  And with Laird Grant in the picture, Jerry spent even less time at home than before. The Peninsula was their playground, and they darted around constantly—on bike, on foot and in buses, day and night. One of the duo’s favorite late-night activities was to sneak out of their houses and break into the nearby Golden State Dairy. “People at the dairy would be packing up the trucks for morning with ice cream and chocolate milk and all that stuff,” Laird says. “It was really easy to climb up these pine trees, throw a jacket over the cyclone fence and climb over into the place. We’d get chocolate milk and ice cream. The ice cream trucks were hard to get to, but we could always get chocolate milk.”

  In 1957 the family—minus Tiff, who was taking abuse from D.I.s down at Camp Pendleton in San Diego—moved back to San Francisco. They settled briefly in the Westlake district, on a steep hill overlooking the Pacific—“in the fog zone,” as Tiff calls it—before moving back into Harrington Street, and then into the large apartment Ruth had created above the 400 Club. Jerry was enrolled at James Denman Middle School, a notoriously tough place then and now. “Denman was sort of like an intermediate penitentiary,” says Daniel, only half-joking. “Then they’d parole you to Balboa [High] next door, which wasn’t much better.”

  Jerry said that Denman and Balboa in the late ’50s were “razor-toting schools. It was a matter of self-preservation. Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk. I was part of a big gang, a nonaffiliated gang. At that time in the 1950s, San Francisco was broken up into two loose groups, called the Barts and the Shoes. The Shoes were the white-shoe, Pat Boone– looking types, out on the Avenues among the upscale people. The working-class neighborhoods were where the Barts were—Black Bart greasers would be another expression for them. The city was divided bilaterally like that, and there would be incursions into other neighborhoods where you’d beat everybody up, or everybody would beat you up. It was a state of war, and I didn’t last long in that. I spent a lot of time in Mission Emergency Hospital, holding my lip together, or my eye, because some guy had hit me with a board.”

  Jerry Garcia, in fights? “It might have happened,” says Tiff, who was in the marines at the time. “It probably did a couple of times. Hey, it’s colorful. And there was definitely trouble to be found. When he left the Peninsula and came back to San Francisco and went to Balboa, it was a big change for him. It was going from the suburbs to the city, no doubt about it. I mean, when we first moved down to Menlo Park, I had a reputation for being a bad guy just because I was from the city. Thirty miles back then seemed like it was halfway across the state; it was just a different world. If we had stayed in the city back then, we probably both would have wound up in jail.”

  Daniel Garcia’s perspective is a little different: “Jerry liked to think of himself as a tough guy, but he was anything but. He had more of his mother in him than you’d think. He was a very benign guy, in fact. I can never remember being in a fight with him, and I was in plenty of fights. Tiff could knock your lights out at the drop of a hat. But Jerry wasn’t a tough guy. He went to a tough school. Jerry was a clean-cut guy, if you want to know the truth. We were into music and we smoked cigarettes and that’s about the wildest thing he did. I don’t remember him drinking booze; that wasn’t part of our lives at all. And I don’t remember Jerry dating at all at that time. We were too shy to go to dances.”

  On August 1, 1957, Jerry turned fifteen, and that’s when things really started to change for him. That birthday was the joyous occasion when his mother, finally recognizing the musician inside Jerry that was straining to be heard, broke down and got him what he’d always wanted: an accordion. Wait a minute! It’s a story Jerry told with relish to any interviewer who asked him about it: “I went nuts—‘Aggggh! No! No!’—I railed and I raved, and she finally turned it in, and I got a pawnshop electric guitar and an amplifier. I was beside myself with joy.” In another interview he said, “I [had] developed this deep craving to play the electric guitar. I fell in love with rock ’n’ roll; I wanted to make that sound so badly.”

  “The accordion came from one of the people who owed my mom money; that’s how she got it,” Tiff says. “There was an electric mandolin there, and a couple of other instruments my mom had taken on from other people. So it was like, ‘Here, Jerry, want this?’ It wasn’t that big a deal. Jerry liked to sensationalize that story a bit, but that’s okay; it’s basically true.”

  “I went over to Jerry’s one day and there he was fiddling with this guitar, an inexpensive, used guitar,” Daniel remembers. “He was plucking it but didn’t really know what to do with it. He knew how to hit a few notes, but he couldn’t form a chord yet. He couldn’t have had it more than three days. And I was so impressed that very day he and I went down to that hockshop on Third Street and I bought my first guitar for $25. He helped me pick it out—a lovely little acoustic guitar. So we started to learn it on our own and from a few books. We learned together and we played a lot together.”

  Jerry recalled that his stepfather taught him how to put the guitar in “a weird open tuning, and I learned to play a lot of stuff before somebody showed me how to tune it [normally] and some real chord positions and things like that.” Jerry didn’t take any lessons; didn’t even know anyone who played electric guitar: “I mean, the electric guitar was, like, from Mars, you know. You didn’t see ’em even,” he said. “I was stuck because I just didn’t know anybody that played guitar. . . . That was probably the greatest hindrance of all to learning the guitar. . . . I used to do things like look at the pictures of guitar players and look at their hands and try to make the chords they were doing: anything, any little thing.”

  His idols were the hot electric guitar pickers of the day—Chuck Berry, who pretty much defined rock ’n’ roll guitar in 1956–57, Gene Vincent and his guitarist Cliff Gallup, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, and though he didn’t know his name then, James Burton, who played on most of Ricky Nelson’s records. Also, “At the time, the R&B stations were still playing stuff like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Frankie Lee Sims, these funky blues guys,” he said. “Jimmy McCracklin, the Chicago blues guys, the T-Bone Walker–influenced guys, that older style, pre–B. B. King stuff. Jimmy Reed actually had hits in those days.”

  Jerry had always loved to sing—it was a singing family, after all—and he and Tiff and Daniel used to try to sing doo-wop and R&B tunes they heard on records and the radio, just like thousands of other kids across America in the ’50s. In fact, street-corner harmony became something of a national obsession among young people for a while. It didn’t require any instrumental p
roficiency, and everyone, it seemed, knew the songs of the day.

  “I remember teaching Jerry harmony to a commercial for S&W Foods,” Daniel says with a laugh. “Their slogan, which was sung, was ‘S&W Foods / S&W simply wonderful / S&W foo-oo-oods.’ It had this big Broadway ending and the last two lines were harmonized. So that was one of the first songs I used to illustrate harmony. That and some of the songs the family used to sing, like ‘Down by the Riverside’ and ‘In the Evening by the Moonlight,’ an old Stephen Foster song. Jerry and I spent a lot of time harmonizing on that.”

  * * *

  Two other seminal events in Garcia’s life occurred shortly after he got his first guitar—he discovered pot and he went to art school.

  “I was fifteen when I got turned on to marijuana,” Jerry said in a 1972 interview. “Finally, there was marijuana: Wow! Marijuana. Me and a friend of mine went up into the hills with two joints . . . and just got so high and laughed and roared and went skipping down the streets doing funny things and just having a helluva time. It was great, it was just what I wanted . . . that wine thing was so awful, and this marijuana was so perfect.” In the late ’50s scoring pot was fairly difficult, but he and Laird Grant occasionally managed to buy skinny little joints for fifty cents apiece. More commonly they dabbled in pills of various kinds—uppers and tranquilizers of indeterminate origin and potency; the gamble was part of the adventure.

  Jerry’s mother might not have known about his occasional weekend pot and pills escapades, but she did know that Jerry was doing badly in school and was getting harder to discipline at home. He kept his own hours, ignored most of his schoolwork and sometimes disappeared for the weekend with friends without warning. Ruth’s occasional attempts to crack down on his bad behavior were largely unsuccessful. He wasn’t exactly hostile to her; it was more his style to figure out ways around her attempts to control him by being charming for a while and then going back to doing what he wanted.

  And he wasn’t completely rudderless. After all, he spent hours diligently trying to learn how to play guitar, and in the summer of 1958 he suddenly became serious about studying art, too. “I was thinking I was going to be an artist, ’cause when I was a child, that’s where I showed the most talent,” he said. “As I grew up, most of the encouragement I got was, ‘Well, be in the arts. You’re obviously gifted.’”

  A teacher at Balboa spotted Jerry’s interest in art, and that summer, “He and a friend of his named Mike Kennedy came over to the Art Institute [then called the California School of Fine Arts] as part of a program that the Institute had to provide summer instruction for high school students who had been referred from their own school because they had some real aptitude in that area,” says Wally Hedrick, an artist who was teaching at the school then. “I remember these two guys walking in one morning and they became part of the class and immediately both of them began to paint up a storm. They were really quite good for their age. Of course at that time, to me, Jerry Garcia was just another student. During subsequent semesters he took more classes, not only with me, but other faculty members.

  “At that time there were two major directions the school was going, stylistically,” he continues. “One of them was abstract expressionism. But Jerry was more taken with the so-called California figurative style, which hadn’t been named at that time, but several people on the faculty were sort of known for starting it. He studied with at least one of them—Elmer Bischoff. But even before he did that, I think the idea of the figurative style was more evident in his work. I was on neither side, so whatever happened was fine with me.

  “Jerry never became a full-time student, but he did become a personal friend and we’d invite him over to our parties and various social activities.”

  The California School of Fine Arts was a vital bohemian hub in a city that was exploding with creativity of every kind in the 1950s. The wild, rapturous brushstrokes of the CSFA’s abstract expressionists found their musical analog in the soaring bebop flights of sweaty saxophonists blowing hard and free in a dozen big and small nightclubs around town. In the bold, imaginative forms and striking colors that burst or oozed or coolly glided off the canvases of the school’s great figurative painters, there was the same vivid sense of life and rhythm and release that flew like hot sparks off the pages of Beat poets working on broken-down Royal typewriters and ink-smeared notebooks and napkins at North Beach hangouts like Vesuvio’s, Caffe Trieste and the Place. Then there were the “Funk” artists at CSFA, whose constructions and contraptions and mixed-media whatevers had some of the bite, wit and absurdity of hipster word jockeys like Lord Buckley, Ken Nordine and the incomparable Neal Cassady.

  Wally Hedrick, Jerry’s mentor at CSFA, had been in the thick of the city’s bohemian renaissance since he arrived at the school as a promising painter at the dawn of the ’50s. As early as 1953 he experimented with a sort of proto–light show machine that projected splashes of color while he played music on a keyboard. The following year, he and Deborah Remington turned a former auto repair shop on Fillmore Street into a combination gallery/ performance space called the Six Gallery. It was there on October 13, 1955, before an audience of about a hundred cognoscenti and illuminati, including Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat paterfamilias Kenneth Rexroth and scores of others, that Allen Ginsberg gave his first public reading of “Howl.”

  By the time Jerry arrived at CSFA in 1958 some of the early Beat energy had dissipated or moved elsewhere, but there was still very much a scene in North Beach. Laird Grant remembers, “We’d hang out in front of the Anxious Asp, the Green Street Saloon, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, Coffee & Confusion, and we’d go to parties here and there—there was a lot of action around; this is still before they drove the beatniks out.” Jerry, Laird and their friends also devoured the latest books by Beat writers—a dog-eared copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was eagerly passed around as if it were some secret mystic text.

  * * *

  In the winter of 1958 Jerry’s mother had bought a vacation home for the family up on Austin Creek near the Russian River town of Cazadero, about sixty miles north of the city. Tiff Garcia, who visited the house only a few times while he was on leave from the marines, says the house was “rustic but modern. It had a nice big living room, a lot of windows; it was in a really pretty area.”

  Daniel Garcia recalls, “We used to go up to Cazadero and sit in the family room and smoke Bull Durham cigarettes and play our guitars for hours. Hours and hours until my fingers literally bled. We’d play Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, everything.”

  The family still went down to Lompico for part of each summer, too, though for shorter periods, and Tiff remembers a time at the Lodge there in the late ’50s when “Jerry and my cousin Danny and I played some Wilbur Harrison tunes up on the dance floor. They were playing guitars and I think I was beating on a cymbal and a box. It used to be the place for the kids to hang out, and for adults there was a bar, so they would go in there and get blasted. It was really quite a busy place; crowded.”

  Daniel says that he and Tiff and Jerry practiced and played together on a number of different occasions: “I seem to remember we called ourselves the Garcia Brothers among the bunch of us. Jerry and I played lead guitar and we’d argue about who was going to play what. Jerry used to kid me—‘Hell, I play better with four fingers than you guys do with five.’ Tiff would play bass sometimes. Mostly we played by ear and copied records.” Daniel also says that in Lompico he and Jerry would practice their guitars at a nearby dam “and a couple of times we’d even get a little group around us and people would actually clap when we were done, which surprised us.

  “When we were first learning, we used to go up to Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park and practice out there. We also practiced a lot at my mom and dad’s house, because they’d put up with it.”

  Jerry’s younger cousin Dennis Clifford recalls a big Garcia-Clifford Thanksgiving bash in ’58 or ’59 where Jerr
y entertained the families with his guitar playing. “I know he was self-taught,” he says, “but he was really pretty good.” Daniel Garcia also remembers a “family reunion at [Aunt] Lena’s house in San Francisco where Jerry and I played. Boy, we knocked ’em dead! They hadn’t heard us before and we played ‘Donna’ by Ritchie Valens.”

  During this period Daniel and Jerry also wrote a few simple songs together. “I still have a book where we wrote down the fingering and lyrics,” he says. “They were typical love songs. One was called ‘Fly Trap’—‘words by J. Garcia and D. Garcia.’ But mostly we played standard stuff—‘Church Bells May Ring,’ ‘Whispering Bells,’ Everly Brothers songs.”

  Sometime in the middle of 1959 Ruth decided that it would be in Jerry’s best interest to get out of the city, so they moved up to the house in Cazadero full-time and that fall Jerry was enrolled at Analy High School in Sebastopol, a thirty-minute bus ride away. Jerry was not pleased about this turn of events, though he acknowledged once that “things were just getting too intense for me in San Francisco. Then I started cutting school up there at Analy, and I’d steal my mother’s car and I’d go down to the Peninsula—I had a girlfriend down there [in Redwood City].”

  When the fall semester ended at Analy in late January 1960, Jerry decided he’d had enough. He was unhappy in school, unhappy at home and had no notions of getting a job, either. After bumming around for two months, splitting his time between his girlfriend’s house and various friends’ pads in San Francisco, he made a decision that obviously came more out of desperation than rational analysis: he joined the army, enlisting at a recruiting office in Oakland on April 12. Since he was still only seventeen at the time, his mother had to sign the papers; now both of her sons were in the military. At least it was peacetime.