A Long Strange Trip (12 page)

The other high point of his August was the opening of the Richard Lester Beatles film
A Hard Day’s Night.
A wondrous combination of antiauthoritarian humor, fabulous music, and simple, leaping joy, it was, Jerry thought, a “little model of good times,” fun, but consciously artistic, with a simple message: “You can be young, you can be far-out, and you can still make it.” Suddenly, rock and roll made a little more sense to him, although he did not attend the Beatles’ show at the Cow Palace on August 19.

Sara was then attending film classes at Stanford, and they borrowed an eight-millimeter camera from David Parker to make their own movies. Humor was their keynote: Garcia filmed Parker and Eric Thompson pushing Eric’s motorcycle around town, grunting and groaning until at the end they hopped on and sped off. Garcia shot Hunter spinning in circles in stop-action at the zoo, Pigpen fooling around down by the bay, and a stop-action chalkboard cartoon that was quite funny. The only nonhumorous piece documented something going on across the bay, at U.C. Berkeley. It was called the Free Speech Movement. Berkeley was supposed to be the American dream fulfilled, a great university that was public and effectively free. But the students, some of them civil rights movement veterans, felt that they were being treated like factory product. They demanded that Sproul Plaza, traditionally a free-speech area for students, remain open, and in the course of the fall brought the university to its knees with a strike. In December at yet another gathering in the plaza, student Mario Savio said, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part . . . and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels and you’ve got to make it stop.” As Joan Baez sang “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a thousand students, many of them the academic cream of the school, illegally entered the administration building. More than six hundred were arrested for trespassing, but the American educational system would be reacting to the Free Speech Movement for the next decade.

Hunter had a delivery job that brought him into Berkeley every day, and though he felt it was “too violent-feeling,” he sympathized with the demonstrators. Less sensitive to violence, Weir directly modeled his point of view on Savio. Sara had been part of the peace movement since her teens and was making antiwar placards throughout the fall. And Garcia watched, fascinated. Though always on the side of the dispossessed, he was apolitical, distrusting demonstrations on principle. That fall he voted for Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater. It would feel morally wrong to him, and he would not vote again. Instead, he figured, he would live a life that was a daily vote for freedom.

7

The Warlocks

(11/64–6/65)

The new band was primarily Pigpen’s idea. He’d been telling Garcia for months that they should start an electric blues band, and as the fall of 1964 passed, Jerry came to agree. Pig’s point was that much of the jug band’s blues material could easily be electrified, on the model of his favorite new rock band, the Rolling Stones. The Beatles had turned out to be the forerunner of what came to be called the British Invasion, and although all the new English bands played a music derived from American rock and roll, the Stones were the closest in spirit and playing to the root blues that preceded rock. At age twelve, Mick Jagger had lived near an American army base, where a black cook introduced him to rhythm and blues. Keith Richard heard Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and fell straight out of his choirboy suburban London childhood. Childhood friends, Keith and Mick heard Brian Jones play Elmore James material at the Ealing Club in 1962, added Charlie Watts on drums and Bill Wyman on bass, and became the Rolling Stones.

Despite the initial outcry over the Beatles’ stylized haircuts—American males had kept their hair short for the previous seventy years or so— U.S. opinion had largely come to see the Beatles as charming if irreverent, lovable, and surely no threat. The Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, decided to sell his clients with a darker, more controversial vision. Mixing bohemian rebelliousness with “campy” sexual ambiguity, Oldham challenged current mores with a wink and a snicker. Should one not have the purchase price of their first album, England’s Newest Hitmakers, he wrote in the liner notes, “see that blind man, knock him on the head, steal his wallet, and lo and behold, you have the loot.” That was worth a chuckle to Pigpen and Garcia, but the material was of greater importance—Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Willie Dixon’s “I Just Wanna Make Love to You,” Slim Harpo’s “King Bee.” The harsh, driving sound took Garcia back to the twin guitar rhythm and blues radio sounds of his childhood, the sound of Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf.

Rock and roll was in the air. Night after night, they’d close up Dana Morgan’s, borrow from the new instrument stock in front, and play. Pigpen was now the janitor at Morgan’s, and his voice and harmonica (“harp”) were as good as any rock and roller’s. He also began to pick away at a little Farfisa organ. Bob Weir, Garcia’s summer teaching replacement, had stuck around and was thoroughly absorbed by the Beatles. Electric instruments were fun and, he thought, “seductive.” He picked up the rhythm guitar. It seemed to him that “we just knew an electric band was coming, and then Dana Morgan’s son, Dana Junior, picked up the bass.” The band seemed about complete when they turned to one of their fellow teachers, Bill Kreutzmann, who was Palo Alto’s hottest drummer. “The only drummer I had really played with around that area that I thought really had a nice feel was Bill,” said Garcia. “By now he’s eighteen, so I talked to him and he was just as weird as ever, and I really, really didn’t understand anything he said. He was just like ‘Rcty rcty shdd.’ You know, what? ‘Rrrrou.’ Okay, you know. I asked him if he wanted to play and he was delighted. He was all over the place, so we played and it was great, you know. He worked out fine. I didn’t realize what a truly straight person he was until we finally got high together and that was a whole other Bill jumped out, you know. That Bill was a total imp.”

Grandson of the famed Chicago Bears football coach Clark O’Shaughnessy, Bill Kreutzmann was born on May 7, 1946, and grew up in a prosperous home on the Peninsula. His father was an attorney with the Emporium, a San Francisco department store, who for some reason listened to the black radio station KDIA. His mother taught dance at Stanford University, and from his earliest years Bill would pound a little Indian drum for her as she prepared choreography for her classes. His career had its bumps: in the sixth grade, his music teacher told him, “Bill, you have to leave class because you can’t keep a beat.” But he persevered, and the beat became part of him. He was the sort of kid who never stopped practicing his drumming, whacking on the handlebars of his bike as he delivered newspapers.

In 1959, in the eighth grade, he found his savior in a drum teacher named Lee Anderson, a Stanford graduate student in physics, and he began taking lessons every Saturday. A resident of Perry Lane, Anderson also acted as a raffish bohemian role model for the boy, teaching him how to mix elaborate drinks at his home bar, draped in Hawaiian nets, and exposing him to the creative graduate-student bohemians who were his neighbors, like the writer Ken Kesey, the psychology student Vic Lovell, and the dancer Chloe Scott. Kreutzmann’s homelife was difficult, and his parents eventually divorced after years of dissension. Meantime, the drums offered relief. “When I was a kid, I’d have fights with my parents, then . . . beat the shit out of my drums for hours.” And when it counted, the folks came through. During one of those drum marathons in the garage, Kreutzmann became aware that a neighbor, objecting to the racket, was pounding on the side of the garage with a bat, “out of time and everything . . . I’d stop, it’d stop. I’d begin, he’d hit some more.” Dad came out and confronted the neighbor. “Leave my son alone—and that’s
my
garage you’re hitting.”

Family tensions finally made it best for Bill to go away to school, and he spent a year at the Orme School in Arizona. He found it difficult, until his parents sent out his drums and he was able to resume daily practice. One day, the headmaster brought that night’s distinguished visiting lecturer into the auditorium where Kreutzmann was practicing, and signaled for him to stop. But Aldous Huxley asked the boy to continue, and although Kreutzmann didn’t particularly understand that night’s lecture on the impact of psychedelic drugs on human culture, he would remember the validation the man had given him.

Big, sometimes aggressive, Kreutzmann was also a reader, from Kerouac’s
On the Road
to Mezz Mezzrow’s white hipster guidebook,
Really
the Blues,
to John Steinbeck, whose character Lenny in
Of Mice and Men
became an important personal reference point to him. His reading also helped him with the other prime activity at Morgan’s, which was the ongoing seminar in everything, led by Garcia, insatiably curious about the world around him and ways to understand it. In addition to riffs and jams, they discussed Martin Heidegger and existentialism. Initially, the younger guys, Weir and Kreutzmann, would mostly listen, and Pigpen would periodically flap his wings and crow “bullshit,” just to keep things real.

Kreutzmann was already a working band veteran when he joined them at Morgan’s, having played for a local band called the Legends for some time. Fronted by a black vocalist named Jay Price, the Legends were more a rhythm and blues than a rock band, covering James Brown, Junior Walker, Freddie King, the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” and Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” They wore red coats, black pants, and black ties, and played YMCA dances, fraternity parties, and shows at the local navy airstrip, Moffett Field, which frequently ended in brawls. Though he was only eighteen that fall, and a senior at Palo Alto High School because he’d stayed back a year, Kreutzmann was already married and a father. At sixteen he’d met a young woman named Brenda at a Legends dance. Neither had much of a family life at home, and it brought them together. After their daughter, Stacey, was born in July 1964, they married, moving into a tiny apartment near East Palo Alto. Brenda went to work at the phone company, and since she was legally an adult because she’d graduated from high school, she was able to sign for Bill’s absences from school. He worked in a wig shop and taught drumming at Morgan’s and sometimes at people’s homes, with Brenda and Stacey waiting in the car. They seemed an utterly conventional couple.

Having a drummer catalyzed the young group as a band, and although they were all broke, Dana Morgan, Jr.’s participation as the bass player solved the immediate problem of paying for electric instruments. They set to work. One day in December Randy Groenke, one of Garcia’s banjo students, came into Dana Morgan’s and was stunned almost to tears to see Jerry playing an electric guitar. The change had come. In fact, change seemed positively to accelerate as the new year 1965 began. Early in January Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions played its last gig at yet another College of San Mateo Folk Festival. In one of the first overt post-Beatles signs that big business was coming to recognize rock’s financial power, the archetypal Fender Guitar Company was purchased by CBS for $13 million.
Hullabaloo,
the first national rock television show, began broadcasting on January 8. At the end of the month there was a typical-for-the-era rock show at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, featuring the Righteous Brothers, the local Beau Brummels, the Supremes, the Temptations, Sonny and Cher, the Ronettes, and several other bands, each doing three to five tunes in front of a packed house whose aisles were patrolled by sheriffs waving flashlights. The truly important events of the early year were in the realm of civil rights: the assassination on February 21 of Malcolm X, the March 7 attack by Alabama State Police on civil rights marchers in Selma that killed a visiting Boston minister, and the response by President Johnson, who quoted the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome,” and pushed a voting rights bill through Congress. The South that Garcia had visited only the previous summer would never be the same.

Early in April in Palo Alto, Jerry Garcia and David Nelson were helping their friend and former jug band mate David Parker and his girlfriend, Bonnie, move. One of their banjo buddies, Rick Shubb, had scored a bottle full of LSD and had shown up that day with Butch Waller, Herb Pedersen, and Eric Thompson. When the move was over, Jerry grabbed two doses, ran home, and gave one to Sara. The day turned magical. “Mostly it was that wonderful feeling you get of ‘suspicions confirmed,’ ” said Garcia.
“Haha hahahahaha.
A perfectly wonderful time, that soft psychedelia, sweet, great fun . . . tremendous affirmation and reassurance.” At another time, he spoke of the day in terms of destiny. “Yeah, this is what I’ve been looking for. You know I’ve been a seeker all along, and this is at least part of what it was I was looking for and maybe even more.” And again, “There’s more than anybody ever let on. We
know
that.” As the trip evolved, Sara entered a period of doubt, and then looked in the mirror and grew uneasy. Separately, so did David Nelson. Instinctively, both Sara and David turned to the experienced Hunter for reassurance, walking over to his home at different times. Hunter told Nelson, “Do you always jump out of airplanes without a parachute?” but was kindlier to Sara, smiling: “It’s all right.” And it was.

LSD’s impact on all of them would be positive and liberating, Garcia most of all. Bluegrass banjo was a massive exercise in precision and control, and the combination of LSD and electricity would set him free. He reflected later that he’d been too serious before the LSD experience, and that his vision of music had been too small. The essence of his approach to playing had always been rhythmic, and now that the strictures of his own limited imagination were gone, he would enter a more fluid realm, where anything was possible.

This included something never before contemplated: rock music with intellectual content. In February, Bob Dylan had played on
The Les Crane
Show,
singing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and Garcia had thought it beautiful. His folkie prejudices against Dylan started to melt. Then Dylan began to talk with Crane, “and just rapped insanely. Beautiful mad stuff. And that like turned us all on,” Garcia told a friend. “We couldn’t believe it. Here was this guy, it was almost like being in the South and seeing a spade on television.” A few days after the acid trip, Garcia dropped by Eric Thompson’s house and heard Dylan’s new album,
Bringing It All Back
Home,
for the first time, playing it over and over. “Using a blowtorch in the middle of the candle,” said one critic, “is less aesthetic than burning it at both ends, but more people see the flame.” “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “She Belongs to Me,” and “Baby Blue” were not just songs, but lightning bolts that illuminated their lives.

That he not busy being born
Is busy dying . . .
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
it blows their minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

Garcia and his friends understood, in their minds, their hearts, their souls.

Jammed into a tiny, dark rehearsal room at Morgan’s, they practiced away, setting the snare drums that hung on the wall to rattling. Garcia was studying Freddie King as he began the process of translating precision bluegrass playing into blues-based guitar licks. From the beginning, his style would retain the clarity of the banjo note, but electric guitar allowed for a freedom of expression, particularly of rhythm, and for emphasizing individual notes, in a way that bluegrass banjo never could. One reason the room was crowded was their audience. The first rehearsal had been closed, but a friend of Weir’s, veteran Beatlemaniac Sue Swanson, had elected herself fan for life and found a corner from which to watch the second rehearsal, and those that followed. She was soon joined by her sister in Beatleism, Connie Bonner. Fairly soon, Sue also found herself a job, that of playing the 45s from which the band learned new songs. At length, it came time to choose their name. Weir was reading Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings,
and there was much talk of wizards and magic. Some combination of Weir, Garcia, and Pigpen came up with the name “Warlocks,” and it stuck. On May 5 the Warlocks played their first public show, at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park. It was a quiet night, with an audience that was primarily Menlo-Atherton High School students, since Sue, Connie, and another of Weir’s friends, Bob Matthews, had talked up the show there.