Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Jerry and Sandy spent about ten days with Rosenberg around Bean Blossom, making tapes and playing music together. They journeyed as far east as Sunset Park, a country music jamboree in Pennsylvania, where they encountered one of the hottest bluegrass mandolinists on the East Coast, a New Jerseyan named David Grisman. They also made a whirlwind trip south to Panama City, Florida, where Scott Hambly, onetime mandolinist for the Redwood Canyon Ramblers, was stationed in the air force.

  Sometime in June, though, Jerry abruptly decided to head back to California. Sara says, “Sandy tells me this sweet story about how they were going along and having this adventure when Jerry suddenly said, ‘I’ve gotta go home. I’ve got to get back to Sara.’ Jerry wrote wonderful letters to me while he was gone—funny, delightfully descriptive letters about their adventures. When we broke up I burned them, and I’m so sorry I did.” Rothman elected to stay longer in the East, and later that year he actually did get to play with Bill Monroe, but he says the main mission of the trip with Garcia had been fulfilled by the time Jerry left: “We got our pot of gold; we got a whole case filled with tapes.”

  Back in the Bay Area that summer, Jerry, Eric Thompson and a New York mandolinist named Jody Stecher formed a trio they called the Asphalt Jungle Mountain Boys, and played a few gigs at places like the Tangent and Curt’s Copy Cat in San Francisco before Stecher went back to City College of New York for the fall semester. It was during this summer, too, that Garcia hooked up with Bob Weir and Ron McKernan (now and forever dubbed Pigpen, after the unkempt character from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip) to form Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, or, as it’s invariably referred to in Dead circles, “the jug band.”

  Talk about a blip on the cultural landscape: jug bands had a very brief run as a popular form of folk music in the mid-’60s. As with the old-timey revival, the craze started in the East. The major proponent of the style was Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, which, like the late-’50s generation of string band players, went back to 78s by the original jug bands of the ’20s and ’30s for some of their material. In the years before the Depression, jug bands had sprung up like dandelions all over the South, though the most famous—like Cannon’s Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band—originated in Tennessee. While most of the popular jug bands from the music’s first era were black, in the ’60s revival the musicians were overwhelmingly white. Still, the instrumentation and the repertoire were similar. Jug bands invariably played a lot of humorous material—novelty tunes—and ribald blues-based numbers were also popular. Kweskin’s group also did a few rock ’n’ roll tunes jug band style, like Chuck Berry’s “Memphis.” Jug bands were usually loose and anarchic-sounding; they ended up having the perfect vibe for a place like the Tangent, filled with irreverent Stanford students.

  “The jug band didn’t have the egregious discipline that bluegrass required,” notes Marshall Leicester. “And there was no way to make a living playing bluegrass. Jerry was married, he had a kid, he was looking for a way to find an accommodation with adult responsibilities—a problem he had for the next thirty years. But he was genuinely trying, working for Dana Morgan, and he was always trying to get together some kind of band that would keep him playing. And it was a real strain. Mother McCree’s was fun for him and it allowed him to get in touch with musicians who had been on different paths. We’d known Ron McKernan for years, but aside from sort of playing Lightnin’ Hopkins backup to Ron at parties and the Boar’s Head and places like that, making him part of the same musical scene sort of hadn’t arisen before.”

  For a change, Jerry didn’t have to worry about whether this player or that was going back to school in September or after Christmas break: Mother McCree’s was mainly folks who were part of the same dropout culture he was from. The personnel was always changing: Bob Matthews thinks as many as twenty different people played with the group at one time or another; that may be an exaggeration. “I think I only lasted six months,” said Matthews. “I went from washboard to first kazoo, to second kazoo, to being out of the band. I think I was out of the band the night we were playing and Jerry leaned over to me in the middle of a tune and said, ‘Why don’t you take a break,’ and I got off the stage.”

  Sara confirms, “In music, Jerry could take people on and be very direct and actually quite cruel to bandmembers if they met with his displeasure. People were scared of him. He was a hard taskmaster.” Adds Dave Parker, “Jerry was definitely the leader. He pulled it together and made it the way it was. He went out and found the gigs. Jerry came up with most of the tunes, too, though Pig knew a lot of blues.”

  As for Bob Weir—well, he was spirited and kind of goofy and he played jug and Gary Davis–style fingerpicking guitar and sang decently, and already girls were crazy for his boyish good looks. “I was only sixteen at the time,” he said, “and I was kind of in awe of these guys I was playing with, because I was not any kind of journeyman musician at that point; I really had almost no experience.”

  “That boy is a real space case,” Sara says fondly. “He was kind of lost, a poor little rich kid. He was such an adorable kid. Jerry and I kind of adopted him. Actually, a lot of people seemed to idealize our little family. We were parental figures for a lot of young musicians.”

  The jug band rehearsed anyplace it could—at the Hamilton Street pad, Weir’s parents’ house or, as likely, in the garage of the cozy two-bedroom cottage Jerry and Sara rented after he returned from his eastern odyssey. Three fifty-one Bryant Court was a sunny little house with a small yard surrounded by a white picket fence, a great improvement over their previous residence.

  Like the Kweskin band (and New York’s Even Dozen Jug Band, featuring David Grisman), Mother McCree’s took its repertoire from everywhere, it seemed: They lifted liberally from Jim Kweskin and company (colorful tunes like “Borneo,” “Beedle Um Bum,” “Washington at Valley Forge,” “Overseas Stomp”); there was a dose of old-time string band tunes like “Cold Rain and Snow” and “Been All Around This World”; there were jug blues taken from Cannon’s Jug Stompers (“Viola Lee Blues,” “Big Railroad Blues”) and the Memphis Jug Band (“Stealin’,” “On the Road Again”); relatively modern folk blues, like Jesse Fuller’s “Beat It On Down the Line” and “Monkey and the Engineer”; and Pigpen brought in his own repertoire of popular and obscure blues songs by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf and others.

  Dave Parker estimates that Mother McCree’s probably played twenty-five to thirty gigs over the course of seven or eight months. “There was no way we were anything even close to commercial,” he says. “It was really just a good-time thing. It was a little eccentric even for what tastes were in folk music at the time. I don’t think it was conceivable to any of us that it could be recorded and sold. But it sure was a lot of fun.”

  At the same time the jug band was going, Jerry and Pigpen were also playing occasionally in an electric blues/rock group called the Zodiacs, fronted by a guitarist named Troy Weidenheimer. “While Jerry was teaching folk guitar, Troy was teaching electric guitar; he was known around town,” says Eric Thompson. “Troy had an R&B band that played Stanford frat parties and Jerry sometimes played bass in it and Pigpen was the singer. Troy could not only play exactly like Freddy King, he could move like Freddy King, too. During that period, Freddy had his blues song hits in the chitlin’ circuit and his instrumental hits in the frat circuit, and he was playing both kinds of gigs. So that was part of the Troy niche, those instrumental hits Freddy King had—‘Hideaway,’ ‘San Hozay,’ ‘The Stumble.’ The way white kids were relating to it it was like surf guitar in a way; instrumental music that you could dance to.

  “When Jerry got interested in the electric guitar again, he devoured the Freddy King stuff, but he’d already been watching Troy do it, so he already knew a lot about it. The way Jerry was, every new wave of stuff that came along, he’d get really excited about it and just devour it. When he got excited about old-time music he learned lots of old-time songs and he did t
hem with Sara and everything. When he got excited about bluegrass banjo he got all the tapes and dove into that. Same thing when he got back into rock ’n’ roll. He’d get going on something and there’d be no way to stop him—he’d get other people excited along with him.”

  It’s hard to believe that the same guy who’d driven across the country determined to become one of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys all but gave up the banjo and bluegrass by year’s end. Part of the problem, Jerry explained in 1981, was that “in the area I was in there were virtually no bluegrass musicians; very few, certainly nobody very good. I got to be quite a good banjo player, but I was really operating in a vacuum, and what I wanted was to have a great bluegrass band, but I only got occasional chances to put a bluegrass band together that was by my standards even acceptable. Although I had fun, none of them was serious or a very good attempt.”

  “I think he got disenchanted with bluegrass,” Sara says. “It was clear he wasn’t going to make it in that world. Socially, it was just too foreign. This was all these West Coast kids, some of them were Jewish, some of them had Hispanic surnames, and there was no way they were going to be part of the bluegrass establishment. It wasn’t a good match socially.”

  But there was something else tugging at Garcia as 1964 turned to 1965. For one thing, like half of America under the age of twenty-five, Jerry had been seduced by the Beatles, especially their film A Hard Day’s Night, which depicted life in a rock ’n’ roll band as just about the most fun that could be had on planet Earth. The Beatles were deliciously irreverent and in-your-face anarchic; untamable gadabouts on an endless lark, always living in a completely different universe than the pitiably straight forces that were constantly trying to control, or at the very least, restrain them. Certainly the jug band had some of that off-the-wall spirit, but the Beatles were a whole different level of fun—that was obvious. And the screaming girls were real.

  “[The Beatles] were real important to everybody,” Garcia said. “They were a little model, especially the movies—the movies were a big turn-on. Just because it was a little model of good times. . . . It was like [they] were saying, ‘You can be young, you can be far-out and you can still make it.’ They were making people happy. That happy thing—that’s the stuff that counts—was something we could all see right away.”

  “The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock ’n’ roll band,” said Bob Weir. “What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn’t think of anything else more worth doing.”

  But poking at Garcia’s other shoulder, all gruff and grumbly but still the essence of a different kind of cool, was Mr. Pigpen McKernan: “He’d been pestering me for a while; he wanted me to start up an electric blues band,” Jerry said. “That was his trip. Because in the jug band we used to do blues numbers like Jimmy Reed tunes and even played a couple of rock ’n’ roll tunes, and it was just the next step. . . . Theoretically it’s a blues band, but the minute we get electric instruments it’s a rock ’n’ roll band. Because, wow—playin’ rock ’n’ roll, it’s fun!”

  “It was always my impression that it was Jerry’s decision to form the electric band,” Dave Parker says. “That he was not that interested in playing the kinds of music he’d been doing before, and he’d done the jug band thing. That wasn’t something you could really do for a long time, and the excitement of electric rock ’n’ roll—what the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan were doing—was happening, and Jerry had this surge of energy to go and do that and make something happen.

  “There was a feeling all around—and I think a lot of it came from Garcia—that anything was possible, so just pick out what you want to do and do it.”

  CHAPTER 4

  I Can’t Come Down, I’ve Been Set Free

  kay, Jerry’s the lead guitarist; no question about that. Weir is certainly a good enough guitarist to take a stab at playing rhythm; after all, he’s already beyond the sort of simple chords required in most rock and blues songs. Pigpen’s been known to play some blues piano—get him an electric organ and you’ve got a double threat who can play keys and harmonica. Drums—that’s a sticky one. Dave Parker says, “I had good enough rhythm to play something like the washboard, but I hadn’t ever played drums, so when Jerry wanted to start an electric band, right at the first there was some thought maybe I could learn to play the drums—that’s how funky it was! But Bill Kreutzmann was already a skilled drummer who’d played around a bit and taught, so he was a much better choice.”

  Ah yes, Bill the Drummer, as he was known for the longest time. Bill Kreutzmann was another Palo Alto product. His father was a small businessman and his mother was a choreographer who taught dance at Stanford. He started taking drum lessons when he was about twelve, and he got his first drum kit shortly after that. Though teachers and friends urged him to get involved with his high school band, “I wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” he said. “I went and heard the band one day and said, ‘Are you kidding?!’ It was just lame orchestra stuff, with nothing for the drummer to do.” Instead he gravitated to rock ’n’ roll, which he’d loved since he was a tyke listening to Elvis and Fats Domino. He was in a band called the Legends for a while, playing rock ’n’ roll and R&B—“whatever was popular. It wasn’t too soulful, though, and I think I was probably the most serious about music then; we were just teenagers.”

  While still in high school, Kreutzmann started hanging out at the Tangent, where he heard Mother McCree’s on numerous occasions. “I went down there faithfully and listened to them all the time,” he said. “I really got off on those guys; I really liked them a lot. My heart just said, ‘This music is really cool.’” Bill also got a job at Dana Morgan’s as a drum teacher, so he and Garcia were tight by the time the jug band was winding down and the dream of starting an electric band was coming to the fore.

  For a bass player, the obvious, easy choice was Dana Morgan Jr., who already played electric bass, ran the music store his father had founded and also provided some of the equipment the band needed, as well as an after-hours rehearsal space. (The back room at Kepler’s wasn’t about to accommodate this noisy bunch.)

  The fledgling band called themselves the Warlocks, an appropriately sinister name for such a motley-looking group. Pigpen was the closest thing the band had to a frontman, and he looked like some tough mutha who’d just roared up on a Harley. His acne-scarred face was nearly obscured by dark bangs and a mustache, and he dressed in black chinos, boots and either a jeans jacket or a leather vest. Garcia was letting his hair grow longer, and he too went for the Keith Richards/Bill Wyman look, with long bangs and hair down over his ears, though it wasn’t quite to his shoulders yet. In fact, in look and feel there was definitely a parallel with the Rolling Stones, who were a strong early influence on the Warlocks, since they drew from many of the same musical sources—American blues, R&B and rock ’n’ roll. Of course the Warlocks also dug every Beatles album that came out, but they couldn’t really imitate the Fab Four. They didn’t have the looks or the vocal chops, to put it mildly. More to the point, the Warlocks were more in tune with the rough-and-tumble vibe of the Stones or the Animals or even Van Morrison’s band, Them.

  And let’s not forget that this group had metamorphosed from the jug band. A lot of the songs the Warlocks played came straight from the Mother McCree’s repertoire, which meant that even in the group’s nascent days it was stunningly eclectic and quite a bit different from most of the other electric groups on the scene. Yes, there were other bands around that played “Smokestack Lightning” and “Johnny B. Goode” and “It’s All Over Now,” but they weren’t playing “Stealin’” and “Overseas Stomp” (also called “Lindy”), “I Know You Rider” and “Viola Lee Blues.” And they didn’t have the same reckless abandon that nearly everyone who heard the Warlocks could sense immediately. “We were always motivated by the possibility that we could have fun, big fun,” Garcia said. “I was reacting, in a way, to my bluegrass background, which was maybe a little ov
erserious. I was up for the idea of breaking out. You know: ‘Give me that electric guitar—fuckin’ A!’”

  In retrospect, it’s remarkable that the Warlocks were able to survive their first few months together, because what they offered musically wasn’t what most kids going to clubs and dances were looking for in a rock ’n’ roll band in early 1965. There was no Bay Area “scene” yet, and most of the local rock bands that enjoyed any kind of commercial success were so heavily influenced by the British Invasion bands in look and sound that no one took them too seriously. The San Francisco group the Beau Brummels and the Peninsula’s own Vejtables rode the wave with enough panache to actually score regional hits on Autumn Records, the label run by the popular KYA disc jockeys Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue and Bobby Mitchell. But it was clear that most of these bands, in their imitation Brit threads or worse—hideous “theme” outfits (picture, if you dare, groups that looked like low-rent versions of Paul Revere and the Raiders)—were never going to get beyond the local CYO dance. There are still a few souls out there who speak with some fondness of groups like the Baytovens (a Beatles rip), William Penn and His Pals (with Gregg Rolie of Santana and Journey fame), the Syndicate of Sound and the Mojo Men, but by and large the bands were patently unoriginal, and none of them survived very long.

  For one thing, there weren’t many places to play. High school and YMCA dances were the big time for most groups. Some of the lucky ones got to play on the college fraternity circuit, but it was rare that bands played much outside their immediate area. In other words, Peninsula and South Bay (San Jose) groups usually worked that territory almost exclusively; same with San Francisco and East Bay bands. The really popular groups might get to play a couple of songs at one of KYA’s multiact extravaganzas at the Cow Palace, on the same bill with national headliners like the Righteous Brothers, Sonny and Cher and Phil Spector’s various aggregations (who themselves would play only a handful songs at the most). And then, of course, there were a million smaller “Battle of the Bands” shows all over the Bay Area, as Eric Burdon clones went up against George Harrison imitators and Gerry and the Pacemakers wanna-bes for that night’s and that club’s embarrassingly small cash prize (and the attendant bragging rights). Mike Shapiro, lead guitarist for William Penn and His Pals, said that “We used to battle-of-the-bands with [the Warlocks] at the Cinnamon Tree on Industrial Road in San Carlos. We actually lost to them and I thought they were the shits.”