A Long Strange Trip (10 page)

A final moment, this from the band’s attorney, Hal Kant. At a meeting about crew bonuses, comment was solicited from Ram Rod, who said, “Well, I can’t say anything logical about it.” Lesh replied, “Just ramble. Just rave awhile.” A patient encouragement of communication is not part of the average set of business procedures.

6

Something New (12/31/63–10/64)

Late on the afternoon of December 31, 1963, three teenagers named Bob Weir, Bob Matthews, and Rich McCauley were aimlessly wandering around the streets of Palo Alto when they heard the sound of a banjo coming from Dana Morgan’s store. They followed the notes in and began to talk with Jerry Garcia. When they pointed out that it seemed unlikely for any of his students to appear on New Year’s Eve, he agreed, then opened the front of the store and lent them some instruments. They began to jam. It was an appropriate beginning; for much of the rest of his life, Garcia would have Weir off to his side. One was homely, one was handsome. One was a self-educated intellectual, one was severely dyslexic and though intelligent, barely literate. One was physically lethargic, the other athletic. One was born to the laundry workers’ union, and one grew up in Atherton, an extremely wealthy enclave south of San Francisco. Yet they were brothers.

The adopted son of Frederick Utter and Eleanor Cramer Weir, Robert Hall Weir was born October 16, 1947, and grew up in a world of wealth (earned, not inherited), forever carrying himself, as he put it, “like a Republican.” An engineering graduate of Annapolis, Frederick Weir was a “mild-mannered and easygoing” father, with an extremely dry sense of humor he passed on to his son. Unable to serve aboard a ship due to deathly seasickness, Lieutenant Commander Weir had returned to San Francisco to establish the engineering firm of Beyah, Weir and Finato, eventually settling at 89 Tuscaloosa Avenue in Atherton with Eleanor, his son Bob, another adopted son, John Wesley, and their natural daughter, Wendy, born in 1949. Eleanor was a strong woman, “driven,” as Bobby put it, and “not about to let the kids . . . be anything but successful.” She was a volunteer at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and its symphony, and the family was listed in the city’s social register.

Atherton’s single greatest virtue, in young Bob Weir’s eyes, was that it was essentially an oak forest, and it was in the trees that he grew up. A childhood bout with spinal meningitis left him with a lifelong inclination to spaced-out dreaminess, something he described as the occasional need to sit and stare at a TV screen, turned on or off, and “bubble my spit.” Thirty years later, a writer would note that his “eyes open wide when he talks, like he’s experiencing a revelation, or there’s a murder going on over your left shoulder and he’s too polite to interrupt the conversation.” The meningitis also, Weir thought, burned an early horrible temper out of him. This, combined with an upbringing that expected him to be pleasant and civil, made him an extraordinarily nice person to be around. But not necessarily an obedient one. His sense of fun was highly developed and his respect for rules was not. “It wasn’t like he was a sociopath,” said his best friend, John Barlow, somewhat later, “he just did not understand [the rules of conventional behavior] . . . he could never quite get the idea that fun was wrong.” And so he became, Weir said, the “only guy I ever knew who was drummed out of the Cub Scouts.” He also managed to be ejected from preschool.

From early on he was an athlete, inspired by the local legends, Willie Mays of the baseball Giants and Y. A. Tittle of the football 49ers. He ran track, played football, and enjoyed a rather normal childhood with summers in a cabin above Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada. He and his slightly older brother wrestled and generally got along, while sister Wendy was “Mama’s little angel.” The family was not musical, and Bobby’s most stimulating early exposure to music came from his nanny, a black woman named Luella, who shared with him Duke Ellington, big-band music, and a little bop. He briefly took piano lessons, but when his teacher showed him a boogie-woogie bass line for the left hand and a simple pattern for the right hand, he proceeded to hammer it so incessantly that his parents soon disposed of the piano. They got him a trumpet, but he practiced outside and the neighbors complained. His life changed totally at the age of thirteen, when the son of a family friend stopped by the house one day carrying a guitar. An acoustic guitar could be practiced quietly in one’s room, and this time his parents approved. His first was a seventeen-dollar Japanese model, bought to celebrate his graduation from junior high school, and he christened it with the Kingston Trio’s tune “Sloop John B.”

Guitar did nothing for his problems at school. Dyslexia was not a recognized syndrome in 1962, and although bright enough to fake his way through his classes, he was barely able to sit still as he did so. After public school in Atherton and then two years at the private Menlo School, he was sufficiently difficult that his parents decided to send him to Fountain Valley, a school in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that specialized in boys with behavioral problems. There he encountered John Perry Barlow, his pal for life, and teachers who were idiosyncratic enough to keep up with him. The choir leader, Mr. Kitman, had once water-skied in a tuxedo, and that was enough to impress the boys. Mr. Barney, the English literature teacher, inspired Weir with a reverence for the clean “economy of speech” of Twain, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Even though Weir had a problem with reading, he’d worry his way through the classics. He had a great year in Colorado, but his behavior remained problematic: the legendary biology lab spitball war in which the spitballs were frog internal organs was definitely initiated by Weir. In May the school administration concluded that either he or Barlow, his partner in crime, could return—but not both. Barlow elected to return, but first, Weir spent that summer of 1963 with the Barlow family at the Bar Cross Ranch in Cora, Wyoming. Even there, he had problems with his span of attention. He drove the scatter raker, and because of his habit of amusing himself by jumping off the still-running tractor to chase field mice, it had a tendency to wind up in a ditch. He was sufficiently faster than the machine to get away with it most of the time, but “about every fiftieth time, there’d be a little drainage ditch that I hadn’t foreseen.”

His summer’s labors earned him a Harmony classic nylon string guitar and a Mexican twelve-string, and they evolved into a seventy-nine-dollar steel string Harmony Sovereign. Showing the first signs of a tinkering mentality, he shaved down the inside struts to make it boomier, later impressing the great folksinger Doc Watson with its tone at a jam session at Lundberg’s. His new school was Pacific High School, a progressive school in Los Altos Hills, but he lasted only six months because his entire program there consisted of “playing guitar and chasing chicks.” Other than conveying a certain sense of beatnik life, Pacific was useful only for giving him time to practice his instrument. His next school, the public Menlo-Atherton High School, was considerably less welcoming. He entered M-A in the spring of 1964, and his guitar and longish hair marked him as an oddball at a high school that worshiped madras clothing and fitting in. Shy, a little peculiar, he was nicknamed Blob Weird, and he delighted in proving his nickname true. As always, he was popular with the girls, taking the head cheerleader to the prom, but the boys didn’t know what to make of him, and his gadfly tactics with the teachers put off most of his classmates. A natural-born iconoclast, he had read the
Communist Manifesto,
and his year at Fountain Valley had taught him a great deal about Native American history. The civics teacher would turn him loose just to get the class stirred up, and his new friend, Sue Swanson, liked to egg him on. “Traitor. Traitor,” she’d whisper from the seat behind him. Actually, he came to realize, he was an aspiring beatnik.

Now sixteen, he had his own gang, which included his friends Bob Matthews and Rich McCauley and his girlfriend, Debbie Peckham. McCauley and Peckham also had guitars, and they all played together. Their main influences were a mix of (mostly) folk and rock, with an emphasis on fine vocalists: Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, the Everly Brothers, and John Herald of the Greenbriar Boys. Lessons were out. Guilty over the trumpet fiasco, his parents had hired Troy Weidenheimer to teach him guitar. But Troy taught a straight-ahead big-band style, and it did not appeal to Weir. Instead, he studied with his ears, down the street at the Tangent, and the player he followed most closely was Jorma (though still known as Jerry) Kaukonen. He and his friends circulated tapes of Jorma, learning and trading licks, he later said, like “baseball cards.” Garcia was also around, but banjo was too exacting, too rigorous, for Weir. He correctly concluded that “you can’t just blow” with Scruggs-style banjo, and although he listened closely to bluegrass singing, it was the guitar players Eric Thompson and David Nelson that he most appreciated. One hoot night that spring at the Tangent, he even stepped up and performed in public for the first time. The Uncalled Four, with Weir, Debbie Peckham, and their friends Rachel Garbet and Michael Wanger, played two or three tunes, including a Carter Family version of “Banks of the Ohio.” What Weir would remember was a paralyzing stage fright that only dissolved after he had embarrassed himself as much as possible. His bright orange thumb pick fell off, and it seemed to him that every eye in the audience tracked its slow-motion flight to the floor. After that abyss, their turn onstage was a delight.

One reason that it had been easy for Weir, Matthews, and McCauley to barge into Morgan’s on New Year’s Eve was that Matthews was one of Garcia’s banjo students, although admittedly an extremely lazy one. Matthews did contribute a good idea to the circle—it was he who suggested they begin a jug band. Raucous, frequently lecherous, always fun, jug music was a black dance form that came out of Memphis and other southern party spots in the 1920s. Among the leading bands were Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band and Cannon’s Jug Stompers, featuring Noah Lewis on harmonica. In 1963, Jim Kweskin had assembled a group from the Cambridge-Berkeley folk network that included Geoff Muldaur and Fritz Richmond, and their ensuing Vanguard album was something of a hit. Consequently, Sara would write, she and Jerry “practically lived in Berkeley the week” in January 1964 that the Jim Kweskin Jug Band was at the Cabale. Playing in a jug band was a relaxing and amusing interlude for Garcia from the rigors of bluegrass banjo, although he remained serious about musical quality. As Matthews recalled his own less-than-spectacular career in the band, he began on banjo at the first rehearsal, moved to washboard for the second, then kazoo, and was then fired. At least twenty-two people had passed through the band by May.

Among the main settled personnel were Garcia on guitar and vocals, Weir on washtub bass and jug, for which he had an unusual facility, his friend Tom Stone on banjo, and another pal, Dave Parker, on washboard. With Garcia and Weir, the third regular was Jerry’s friend Ron McKernan, on harmonica and vocals. Ron’s semibestial persona had only ripened since the Boar’s Head days just three years before. Now eighteen, he was beefy, grubby, and fearsome-looking, although Weir swiftly realized that he was the sweetest guy around. To top things off, he’d acquired a new nickname. One night at the JCC Boar’s Head, milling about in the postshow consideration of where to go next, Truck Driving Cherie Huddleston lifted a line from the
Peanuts
cartoon and cracked, “All right for you, Pigpen,” and Blue Ron was “Pigpen” forevermore.

Studying the canon of jug was enormously entertaining. They began with Kweskin’s records, and then his Folkways sources. Then Weir’s friend Michael Garbet discovered a trove of original Bluebird Record Company 78s in his mother’s attic. Their repertoire soon included Cannon’s “Goin’ to Germany,” the Memphis Jug Band’s “Stealin’ ” and “Overseas Stomp,” and two tunes that they’d play for a long time, Noah Lewis’s “Viola Lee Blues,” and his version of “Minglewood Blues.” Other blues classics filtered in, like Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster” and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” Tom Stone brought in records by the East Bay one-man-band blues singer Jesse Fuller, and “Beat It on Down the Line” and the “Monkey and the Engineer” became Weir staples. Later they would add Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” and Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man.” Whatever the material, Weir was ecstatic, barely able to believe his good luck in finding musicians who could teach him. Sara thought of him as “real pretty, real eager,” and so he was. David Nelson gave them their name, dubbing this new band Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Just to keep it loose, they changed the spelling with each gig.

Their first show was at the Tangent on January 25, 1964, and their performances throughout that year were always down-home, with a “certain level of chaos and disorganization, slightly loony and chaotic,” said David Parker, much funkier than Kweskin’s band. Weir he saw as goofy but lovable, well meaning, the baby of the bunch and the main butt of the traditional male ribbing. Pigpen, on the other hand, needed to get slightly, but only slightly, drunk to perform. Oddly enough, or perhaps not, the band began to grow in popularity. “Somehow,” Jerry mused, “the sheer fun of it made it successful.” Lacking the anxiety-producing perfectionism demanded by bluegrass, jug certainly had that effect on him.

Fun is always a popular commodity, but early in 1964 it was especially desirable. Still reeling emotionally from the assassination of John Kennedy, a significant portion of the entire country, 70 million people, glued itself to a television on the night of Sunday, February 9, to watch the new British musical sensation, the Beatles, on
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Even muggers watched: police reported the lowest crime rate in fifty years for the hour of the program. By the end of the following month, the top five songs on the
Billboard
charts were all by the Beatles, with seven more in lower positions. The word “phenomenal” was actually an understatement. Four boys from Liverpool, heavily exposed to American rhythm and blues music brought home by their town’s sailors, had created their name in homage to Buddy Holly’s Crickets and John Lennon’s social heroes, the Beats, and reenergized the rock and roll music that had fallen quiet in 1960. Their timing was exquisite. On the heels of the Profumo scandal and the great mail train robbery, Britain, too, needed a happy diversion, and its newspapers were entirely ready to collaborate in creating one. In October 1963 the papers covered the Beatles’ appearance on the top English TV entertainment program,
Sunday Night at the London Palladium,
as though it were a riotous second coming, though in fact the audiences outside had been well behaved. When Fleet Street was finished, Britain was awash in what they dubbed Beatlemania, and by the time it reached the United States, Beatlemania was real. The media adored the lads’ cheeky wit and recognized their basic wholesomeness, and were happy to run with a good story. It swept young America, although not, initially, Garcia and his friends. Jerry was a purist folkie, and he and his peers were skeptical of any fad.