Alcohol was still the main drug then, but, as Bob Hunter said, “Those were seriously demented times. We were taking anything to get high: Asmador, Contac capsules—you could open them up and separate the little white caps out and take them; God, anything. There was hardly any weed around—maybe a matchbox or so every now and then. And it was nothing like what came along later; it was brown Mexican.” As the early ’60s wore on, the route from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles, and even all the way to Mexico, became increasingly well-traveled by couriers smuggling cellophane-wrapped bricks of Mexican pot back to an ever-expanding base of customers. There was also a fair amount of methedrine in the scene, which laid waste to more than a few promising souls back then, and on occasion strange things like the cough medication Romilar and various prescription drugs would turn up and be eagerly ingested. The truly desperate might even eat the cotton wadding from the insides of nasal inhalers, which were reputedly soaked in a mild upper.
Of his own preferences during this era, Garcia said, “We did a lot of playing around with these weird drugs, cough medicine kind of drugs. I didn’t like to drink ever and drugs were always much more fun for me. I loved pot. Pot was just right up my alley. Anything that makes you laugh and so you love to eat—that’s fun. To me there was no contest. That constituted our scene—we laughed a lot, really a lot. Still do. That was part of the orientation. We were basically looking for something, too. Seeking. And determined. And there was nothing pressing us to be any more structured than that, really.”
As the months passed, Garcia devoted more and more of his time to practicing the guitar and his new love, the five-string banjo, a legacy of Marshall Leicester’s influence. In fact, many days went by when Jerry literally played all day and well into the evening; this was a passion that bordered on the obsessive, no question about it. And the better he got, the more like-minded pickers he encountered.
One friend he made in the folk and bluegrass world around this time was a guitarist named Eric Thompson, a precocious and very well-connected fifteen-year-old who was a high school senior bound for UC Berkeley when he met Jerry. Though he lived on the Peninsula, Thompson had been floating around the more established Berkeley folk and bluegrass scene for about a year.
Berkeley had been the birthplace of the first Bay Area bluegrass band to come out of the folk boom in the late ’50s, a group called the Redwood Canyon Ramblers, who amassed a small but dedicated following and influenced many other aspiring players. Berkeley had a few choice nightspots that catered to the string band music crowd, including the Peppermint Stick, the Jabberwock and the Cabale; an annual folk festival put on by guitarist Barry Olivier; a couple of music stores where pickers could hang out and swap licks—Jon and Deirdre Lundberg’s Fretted Instruments and Campbell Coe’s Campus Music Shop—and even a radio station, listener-sponsored KPFA, that regularly featured folk and bluegrass programming. Indeed, Barry Olivier had started the acoustic music program The Midnight Special in 1956—before the New Lost City Ramblers hit with their eclectic mélange, and well before Flatt and Scruggs came through town in 1961 and blew away every would-be picker from Marin to San Jose, leaving them slack-jawed and envious.
KPFA was also very supportive of avant-garde and modern classical music, which is one reason Phil Lesh did some volunteer engineering work for the station during his time in Berkeley. Among the programs he regularly engineered was The Midnight Special, and one night at a party at the Chateau Phil was listening to Garcia singing and playing the guitar when he had a flash that Jerry should play on that radio show. Phil recalled, “I said, ‘Hey Jerry, if we could make a tape of you playing and singing, would you mind if I took it to Gert Chiarito [host of The Midnight Special] and played it for her?’ He said, ‘Shit no, man.’ . . . He rode with me back to Berkeley to get the tape recorder—this is when we had all the time in the universe!—and he sang and played five or six songs.”
Phil played the tape for Gert Chiarito, who was so impressed that she arranged to do an entire hour-long program with Garcia, which was called “The Long Black Veil,” after the classic murder ballad that was part of Jerry’s repertoire at the time. “After that he was almost a regular,” Phil said. “Then he started to bring his buddies up from Palo Alto.” The exposure on KPFA helped established Garcia as one of the premier pickers in the area.
“Bluegrass had kind of a shock value, like rock ’n’ roll had shock value in a way,” says Neil Rosenberg, a founding member of the Redwood Canyon Ramblers. “Electric instruments were considered outré by all of us. So if you wanted to do something that really set people’s teeth on edge and kind of kicked butt, bluegrass was it. It was an exciting ensemble form and it appealed to the jazz sense—there was improvisation and trading of licks back and forth. There was a whole bunch of us young guys learning together and being very excited about it.”
Actually, there was a fair amount of enmity between some hard-core bluegrass musicians and some old-timey string band players—“people looking down their noses at each other and being sort of cliquish,” as David Nelson puts it—but Garcia and his crowd embraced both disciplines and basically played anything that caught their fancy. Jerry’s first forays on the banjo had been influenced by the frailing style he heard on old-timey records, but as he investigated bluegrass more closely he naturally gravitated to the incredible picking of Earl Scruggs, who had popularized his rolling banjo technique first as part of Bill Monroe’s seminal band in the mid-’40s, the Blue Grass Boys, and then with fellow Monroe alumnus Lester Flatt in the Foggy Mountain Boys. Actually, 1962 was a high-water year for Flatt and Scruggs and bluegrass in general. The duo’s theme song for the hit television series The Beverly Hillbillies hit number 1 on both the country and pop music charts and spurred a brief bluegrass craze and some attendant grassploitation in the form of commercials using bluegrass music.
“It’s hard to learn how to play bluegrass,” says Marshall Leicester. “It’s got a lot of rules and it’s complicated music and that creates a kind of natural elitism around it. The banjo player has to learn to play Scruggs’s three-finger style and that’s a rather complicated and demanding way to play the instrument. It takes a lot of practice, it takes a lot of thinking. You have to get around the fingerboard in a way that an old-timey banjo player normally doesn’t. And you have to learn to play fast and loud, which is also difficult.”
Records and tapes were one way to learn about old-timey and bluegrass—Jerry said he spent hours listening to records slowed down to 16 rpm to learn solos off them—but he and his musical friends also took advantage of every opportunity they could to see touring acts from the East and South. Since Berkeley had always had an active folk scene—it was sort of “Cambridge West,” though it didn’t have a venue as established as the East Coast folk mecca’s Club 47—the big folk and bluegrass acts would generally pass through on their infrequent tours. But the real action was down in Los Angeles at a club called the Ash Grove, which was run by a string band enthusiast and political activist named Ed Pearl. “He was one of the early guys to bring roots music to the West Coast,” says Brooks Adams Otis, a musician and record collector in the Peninsula folk scene. “Not only bluegrass, but blues. He brought out the Stanley Brothers, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe. He brought out this succession of great people and you’d go to the club and then later Ed would have parties at his house with the musicians. A lot of people from the Bay Area went down to the Ash Grove.”
* * *
Jerry and his friends made the pilgrimage south to L.A. many times, and in the process they befriended the members of what was unquestionably the best homegrown bluegrass band in L.A., the Country Boys, who changed their name to the Kentucky Colonels in 1962. The Colonels are probably best remembered as the group that launched the influential flat-picking guitar wizard Clarence White, but all four core members were hot pickers—Clarence’s older brother Roland White, who played mandolin and guitar, banjo player Billy Ray Latham and bassist/banjoist Roger Bush. Though Garcia
was friendly with the entire band, he later became closest to Clarence White, and many years later he said, “Clarence was important in my life both as a friend and a player. He brought a kind of swing—a rhythmic openness—to bluegrass and a unique syncopation. His feel has been incorporated by a lot of other players, but nobody has ever quite gotten the open quality of his rhythm. Clarence had wonderful control over the guitar. He’s the first guy I heard who really knocked me out.”
When Marshall Leicester returned from Yale in the spring of 1962, he and Garcia and a classically trained violinist turned fiddler named Dick Arnold, who had gotten the string band music bug from hanging around the Chateau, formed a group called the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers (“Jerry and I had a mutual taste for that kind of absurdity,” Leicester says of the name). “Our repertoire was always about 80 to 90 percent from the first few New Lost City Ramblers records and reworked; and then a few other things from elsewhere, like the tapes that Adams Otis had and Chris Strachwitz’s records. So we got a pipeline directly into the music and not just as mediated by a band like the Ramblers.”
Garcia finally found a way to make some money on a semiregular basis when he started teaching guitar and banjo at Dana Morgan’s Music Shop in downtown Palo Alto. This wasn’t about to make him rich, but it allowed him to make enough to keep the wolf away from the door while still devoting most of his time and energy to practicing and playing music. And as Barbara Meier says, “That’s all he did. That’s it. He played music. He was totally dedicated. He would play all day long. If he was trying to learn something, he would practice it until he got it. And it wasn’t something he ever had to force himself to do. For some reason, he was absolutely charmed, in the sense that it never occurred to him that he would have to earn a living. He was totally content.
“I did two paintings of him at that time, and in each one of those he’s wearing the same shirt. Do you know why? Because it was just about the only shirt he owned. There was a short-sleeved white shirt that he wore when he went to Dana Morgan’s to teach, and he had this other shirt. And he did not care. He did not care about anything, as long as he had that guitar, as long as he had cigarettes. There was always somewhere to stay, food always manifested somehow. He lived on less than nothing for a long, long time. And he allowed himself to have this incredible space, this time to devote to his craft. And he had no plan, either. This was just what he liked to do and this is what he was interested in. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to do whatever he wanted.”
CHAPTER 3
There Were Days Between
he Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers played at the Boar’s Head, which had moved to the San Carlos Jewish Community Center in the summer of 1962, and a few other places on the Peninsula, but they could never get too serious because they knew that come fall Marshall Leicester would be going back to Yale. Still, Suzy Wood, who would later marry Marshall, says, “I remember making vests for the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers—they looked so clean and straight playing this straight old-timey music. Even at the time I couldn’t help thinking that the kind of morality, the kind of emotionality that the people who originated that music—these Appalachian, old-timey people—was very different from the people who were picking it up and saying, ‘Oh, this is the kind of music we’re going to learn how to play.’ The real old-timey lifestyle could not have been nearly as much fun as the imitators of the old-timey music probably thought it was. The [original players] were mainly poor people, rural people—farmers and millworkers—whereas this crowd was filled with intellectuals and kids from the suburbs, although a lot of them were genuinely poor—I guess you could say by circumstance—too.”
There’s no point in getting too hung up on the names and membership of the various acoustic bands Jerry played in during the period between 1962 and 1964, because the personnel was always fluid, depending on who was around and available, and there were relatively few real gigs—mainly at Peninsula folk haunts and a few in North Beach at places like the Coffee Gallery and Coffee & Confusion. Among the short-lived aggregations were the Hart Valley Drifters (Garcia, Leicester, Ken Frankel and Worth Handley were one incarnation; there were others); the Badwater Valley Boys (Garcia, Frankel, Leicester and Hunter) and the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers (Garcia, Nelson, Hunter, Joe and Jim Edminston). Other players who turned up in groups with Garcia at this time include Brooks Otis, Norm van Maastricht, Eric Thompson, Ellen Cavanaugh and a golden-haired fiddler named Kathy Ledford.
At the same time that Garcia’s friends were delving deeply into string band music, other players on the scene were intent on exploring country blues, which became popular in folk circles around the same time. Just as old-timey music had never really enjoyed much popularity outside of the rural South before the late ’50s, country blues had rarely been heard at all by whites before musicologists such as Mike Seeger, Alan Lomax, Sam Charters, Kenneth Goldstein, Frederic Ramsey Jr. and others scoured the South looking for surviving musicians from the first generation of “race record” artists, who’d recorded in the ’20s and ’30s. Many players were long gone, having died broke and in obscurity; others had given up music and taken jobs outside of music to survive. But there were great rediscoveries, too, and the same white, urban college audiences that propelled the folk and old-timey boom heartily embraced a legion of country blues greats, many of whom were able to make a good living playing music (most for the first time in their lives) on the folk club and festival circuit. This group, which also had a profound influence on many rock musicians who came up in the mid-’60s, included Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, Sleepy John Estes, Reverend Gary Davis, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins, Eddie “Son” House, Gus Cannon and Scrapper Blackwell.
Ever the musical omnivore, Garcia tried his hand at some of the popular fingerpicking blues styles of the day, but not with the same dogged determination he brought to his old-timey and bluegrass playing. It helped that Barbara Meier’s father had given him a stack of rare blues 78s, which Jerry dutifully studied in that obsessive way of his. But the best blues picker on the Peninsula in 1962 was probably twenty-year-old Jerry Kaukonen (whose real first name was Jorma), a Washington, D.C., native who had been playing blues guitar since the mid-’50s and had come west to attend Santa Clara University. He quickly became a regular at various local clubs like the Folk Theater in San Jose, the Top of the Tangent in Palo Alto and St. Michael’s Alley, and Garcia was duly impressed. “Jerry said to me, ‘You gotta hear this guy Jerry Kaukonen,’” says David Nelson. “Here was a guy playing Blind Boy Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis stuff the real way. We were totally blown away by him.
“One of the great aspects of the whole folk thing,” Nelson continues, “was you could be in a room hearing somebody playing and then say, ‘Here, let me try that.’ And if you have a good memory like Garcia, you can retain that. He could hear a song once and remember all the words and the chords and put together a rough idea of the picking stuff.”
By this time Jerry was already good friends with a blues-loving Peninsula kid named Ron McKernan, who had started hanging around Kepler’s, the various folk clubs and the tough bars over in East Palo Alto when he was still in his mid-teens. Ron was the son of one of the Bay Area’s original R&B/blues deejays, Phil McKernan, who was known by the colorful name “Cool Breeze” on KRE in the ’50s. By the late ’50s, though, the senior McKernan had quit the radio business to become an engineer at the Stanford Research Institute and he moved the family into a tract house in a working-class section of Palo Alto, near the East Palo Alto border. Ron became obsessed with the blues and R&B at a very young age, and he learned the rudiments of guitar and harmonica on his own. Most of his friends in school were black, and in his teens he started frequenting the bars of East Palo Alto. He had always looked older than his age, and he fit into the black street culture surprisingly well. He even acquired a nickname in East P.A., long before he was dubbed Pigpen:
Blue Ron. He started drinking cheap screw-top wines like Ripple, Thunderbird, Hondo and Night Train when he was twelve or thirteen, to fit in with his black friends and to emulate the blues musicians he admired so much.
“When I first met Pigpen,” Garcia said, “he was hanging around Palo Alto and I was the only person around that played any blues on the guitar, so he hung out with me. And he picked it up, just by watching and listening to me, the basic Lightnin’ Hopkins stuff. . . . All the black people [in East P.A.] loved Pigpen. They loved that he played the blues. And he was a genuine person—he wasn’t like a white boy trying to be black. And he was pretty good, too. You know, Pigpen’s best shot was sitting around a room with a bottle of wine and an acoustic guitar, playing Lightnin’ Hopkins. He could improvise lyrics endlessly; that was his real forte.
“I spent a lot of time over at the Pigpen house, but it was mostly in Pigpen’s room, which was like a ghetto! I sat in his room for countless hours listening to his old records. It was funky, man! Stuff thrown everywhere. Pigpen had this habit of wearing just a shirt and his underpants. You’d come into his house and he’d say, ‘Come on in, man,’ and he’d have a bottle of wine under the bed. His mom would check in about once every five hours to see if he was still alive. It was hilarious! We’d play records, I’d hack away at his guitar, show him stuff.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 9