A Long Strange Trip (3 page)

Another aspect of black American life stirred at this time, the precise connections to the music uncertain but impossible to dismiss. In December 1955, a young Birmingham, Alabama, minister named Martin Luther King Jr. united his passionate nonviolent moral leadership with the organizational genius of the city’s local civil rights leader and the communications system of television to sustain an antisegregation bus boycott. It would trigger the greatest American social movement since the organization of labor. Not least of the civil rights movement’s effects would be to give the future politics of American protest a spiritual rather than an ideological base. And the spirit was in the songs.

Jerry had been a bright but fairly indifferent student to this point, excelling in art and the occasional subject that took his interest, but an underachieving “wise guy” the rest of the time. He seemed to his friend Mary Brydges to be pretty much “in his own world,” doodling skulls and crossbones and monsters, always funny and fun, sarcastic but not cruel, somehow “more worldly, faster” than the rest of the kids, but also a little lonelier. Then in the fall of 1955 he entered the Fast Learner Program in the eighth grade at Menlo Oaks school. His new teacher, Dwight Johnson, an iconoclastic bohemian who was regularly in trouble with the school administration, was the perfect inspiration for students like Jerry. When Mr. Johnson roared up to school on his Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle or MG TC, he instantly drew his students’ attention, and when he threw open the class to discussion and introduced them to D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell, Jerry delightedly followed him into the intellectual world. Johnson noticed Jerry’s facility as an artist, and soon the boy was absorbed in murals, the sets for school plays, and the school newspaper. He did not exactly become a well-behaved Good Student, however, and continued with one of his favorite games, mock switchblade duels in the school corridor with his buddy Laird Grant. When he dug in his heels over retaking certain tests toward the end of the year, he was required to repeat the eighth grade. Finally, in June 1957 he graduated from Menlo Oaks and moved back to San Francisco, where he lived some of the time with Nan and Pop and some of the time with his mother and stepfather at their new apartment above the new bar at 1st and Harrison.

Bobbie’s fifteenth-birthday present to him that summer would turn out to be quite special, although at first it was a giant disappointment. She’d purchased a lovely Neapolitan accordion for him from one of the sailors at the bar, but after plenty of adolescent moans and whines, she agreed to swap it for the Danelectro guitar he’d spotted in a pawnshop window at the corner of 3rd and Folsom, a few blocks from the bar. He’d had years of piano lessons before the move to Menlo Park, but his personality resisted formal teaching, and he’d lost interest. Now music consumed him. Whatever his other deficiencies were, Jerry’s stepfather happened to have mandolins and other stringed instruments around the house, even electrical instruments, amplifiers, and a rare (for that time) tape recorder. Mr. Matusiewicz tuned the Danelectro to some odd open tuning, or perhaps it merely became that in Jerry’s hands. Working only with his ear and the Chuck Berry tunes on the bar jukebox, Garcia began the practice that would turn out to be the focus of his life.

His cousin Danny saw him with the guitar and followed suit, going to the same pawnshop for his own. Though Danny, Joe’s brother Manuel’s son, had been part of Jerry and Tiff’s life from their earliest days, music proved an especially unifying common bond in their mid-teens. Jerry’s father had not been the only musical Garcia. Their grandfather “Papuella” ( Joe’s father) had insisted that his sons and grandsons learn to play an instrument and sing, and though, as Danny recalled it, “it wasn’t an option,” the boys liked music anyway. Jerry, Tiff, and Danny would spend a good part of their teens singing on street corners, learning how to harmonize. Now Danny, who knew some music theory, taught Jerry the conventional tunings for rock, and he found them “a revelation . . . the key to heaven.” He began to gobble up the styles of Eddie Cochran, Jimmy Reed, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, and, as always, Chuck Berry.

The summer of 1957 was a memorable one. In addition to the guitar, Jerry discovered cigarettes, a lifelong habit, and marijuana, two joints shared with a friend that sent them laughing and skipping down the street. Tiff had graduated from high school in 1956 and enlisted in the Marine Corps, so Jerry was more on his own now, and his world began to expand. He and Danny would take the 14 Mission bus downtown to see movies, go shopping at the Emporium, sometimes with a “five-finger discount” (shoplifting), or out to the Cliff House, a restaurant and sight-seeing complex that overlooked the ocean, and the Playland amusement park down the hill. Jerry spent the ninth grade at Denman Junior High School in the outer Mission, and then in the fall of 1958 began tenth grade across the street at Balboa High School. Balboa was frequently a rough place, filled with Barts (“Black Bart” Italians with “greaser” hair-cuts) and Shoes (Pat Boone white-shoe-wearing prep types). Later, Garcia would tell more than a few tall tales about his career as a street fighter, but his family and friends of the era didn’t recall it that way.

His more natural environment was at Joe Garcia’s, where he worked “pearl diving” (washing) dishes and “decorating” (stocking) the joint with beer. Music remained his passion, and he often worked with a transistor radio earplug wedged firmly in his ear. Just as often he’d take a break and play along to the jukebox with his guitar. Although the old-fashioned original Joe Garcia’s had been replaced by a modern fifties circular bar with mirrored columns for glasses, slick Naugahyde booths, and chrome fixtures, it remained a lively place, its clientele a mixture of longshoremen and sailors from the Sailors Union of the Pacific on one corner, and Union Oil executives from the other corner. It was a verbal ambience, one that welcomed Joe Garcia’s son as an equal. He was gregarious by nature, but this aspect of his personality was greatly encouraged by example. “I’ve always wanted to be able to turn on people,” he said later, “and also I’ve always taken it for granted that if I like something, that other people will like it, too . . . the bar world established that kind of feeling; it engulfed me like a little community.” He joined the conversational mix with pleasure, listening to tales of the 1934 general strike, Harry Bridges, and other local legends. The founder of the Longshoremen’s Union, Bridges was an Australian and former Communist Party member who was a hero in San Francisco, but only there, and only in San Francisco were the latest rebels, the members of the Beat Generation, a source of civic pride.

In fact, San Francisco had an institution that served as a direct channel into this alternative world, the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). It was the only school Garcia would ever be proud of attending. On Saturdays the school had an extension program, Pre-College Art, taught by its regular faculty. Garcia’s teacher was the well-known funk (assemblage) artist Wally Hedrick, who would serve Jerry as a model not only as a painter but as an expositor of a way of life. He taught the boy, remembered Garcia, that “art is not only something you do, but something you are as well.” A working-class military veteran who’d once, on the strength of his beard, gotten a job sitting in the front window of the Beat North Beach bar Vesuvio’s, Hedrick had found his first conventional job as a teacher at the School of Fine Arts. It was he who had asked poet Michael McClure to organize the 1955 Six Gallery reading that introduced Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to the world. Struck by Garcia’s native intelligence and sense of hipness, Hedrick told Jerry that he and his friends were the real Beat Generation, and sent them down the hill to North Beach and its coffeehouses to, as Garcia said later, “pick up my basic beatnik chops,” listening to Lawrence Ferlinghetti read at the Coexistence Bagel Shop, along with other poets at other clubs.

And on the way, Hedrick sent Garcia over to City Lights Bookstore to pick up Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road,
a book that changed his life forever. Kerouac’s hymn to the world as an explorational odyssey, an adventure outside conventional boundaries, would serve as a blueprint for the rest of Garcia’s life. And it plugged him consciously into a continuous line of alternative American culture going back to Thoreau and Walt Whitman and up through the current eminence of Bay Area bohemia, Kenneth Rexroth, the master of ceremonies of that seminal Six Gallery reading. As McClure, one of the other Six readers, put it, Rexroth promoted “serious Buddhism, Eskimo poetry, radical social movements, physics, and even esoteric Christianity. He was a mountain climber, a hiker, and he knew how to fix his own car.” It was a very different vision of life and culture than one might find in the heavily intellectualized New York City of the same period.

As one of Garcia’s classmates in Pre-College Art, Ann Besig, would later recognize, he was more mature and “comfortable” in the bohemian environment than most of the other students. Hedrick described Garcia’s work as “figurative but with freewheeling brushwork . . . strongly painted, heavily textured . . . not talented, but [he had] understanding.” To Laird Grant, Jerry’s best painting was of a man sitting destitute in the gutter, a jug in his hand. Aside from introducing the exalted mysteries of art, the school was a direct connection to fun, like the costume party they attended, Jerry as a vampire and Laird as a monster. They arrived in time to see a young woman, nude under a fur coat, step out of a limo to enter the gathering. The raisin in her navel identified her as a cookie.

Despite the stimulation of art school, Garcia continued to get into trouble. Many of his friends from before Menlo Park were now hoodlums, and though he probably wasn’t all that involved in violence or crime, he was certainly diverging from the straight and narrow. More often than not, his journey to Balboa High School concluded instead downtown at the movie theaters on Market Street, where he stoked his lifelong fascination with film. Formal education became increasingly irrelevant, and his rare appearances at Balboa were chiefly punctuated by getting caught— for smoking in the boys’ room, minor fights, or cutting classes, all the usual dreary detritus of high school life. In the summer of 1959, Bobbie Garcia made a last-ditch effort to restore her son to conventional behavior and moved the family to Cazadero, a tiny town in the redwoods eighty miles north of San Francisco. It was futile, of course. Garcia’s problems were centered on his boredom with regimented life, and adding a lengthy commute to his day at Sebastopol’s Analy High School did not help.

However, Analy did have a band called the Chords, and Jerry soon joined it. Their business card read “featuring the Golden Saxes,” and their material was largely 1940s big-band tunes, including “Misty” and songs by Billy Vaughn. It was, Garcia would say, “kind of easy-listening stuff. Businessman’s bounce, high school version.” They played at youth canteens, high school dances, and once at a Sea Scouts graduation ceremony. With only limited experience at playing with others, Garcia was an extremely primitive musician, so crude that his bandleader had to shift the capo on his guitar so that he could transpose keys. Jerry’s attitude didn’t always help, either. He played a great deal with his cousin Danny at this time, and Danny was a sober, steadying influence who wanted to rehearse regularly and learn chords and structure. But Jerry’s invariable response was “Let’s just play, man.” Years later Garcia would, inevitably, regret his lack of formal knowledge and discipline. But even in 1959 he showed an ability to play convincing rock and roll on the Chords’ occasional contemporary tunes. The band even won a contest and got to record a song, Bill Doggett’s “Raunchy.”

Garcia’s facility with rock was ironic, because the form was at a low ebb, with each of its creators distracted by circumstances: Elvis Presley was in the army, Chuck Berry was on his way to jail for a Mann Act violation, and Little Richard had entered the ministry. The predominant institution in pop music at the time was Don Kirshner and Al Nevins’s Aldon Music, which focused on the songwriting of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Highly professional New York City production-oriented pop had replaced the original performer-created rock.

Early in 1960, Jerry got into his final bit of trouble, as he would recall it, by stealing his mother’s car. In the tradition of the era, his options were simple—jail or the army. Though Tiff begged Jerry to delay his enlistment until he could get home from the marines and talk his younger brother out of it, Jerry was in no mood to wait; he decided to join the army and see the world. He got about 150 miles away from San Francisco, to Fort Ord, near Monterey, where he endured basic training. Somehow, it was not terribly surprising that his squad leader turned out to be a jail veteran who happened to be able to fingerpick acoustic guitar. Jerry had first heard acoustic music from Jimmy Reed on the radio, and then again when Wally Hedrick played Big Bill Broonzy during class, and now he started to listen to Joan Baez’s incredibly beautiful voice, which sent him into old-time southern white music. It was a move in line with hip taste.

Folk music had entered the American mainstream a year before in San Francisco, at a club called the Purple Onion, with a group of good-looking college boys in striped shirts called the Kingston Trio. With five no. 1 albums and hits like “Tom Dooley” and “Scotch and Soda,” they knocked off traditional tunes with smooth harmonies and good humor, and started a rage. Rock had been professionalized and made boring, whereas folk was direct and authentic, seemingly the genuine product of a community rather than a manufactured commodity. It was part of a continuum that included the New Deal, Woody Guthrie, and the ongoing civil rights movement, and it swept the country.

It was easy for Garcia to observe the San Francisco folk scene, since it had moved to North Beach’s hungry i, the hippest club in America, and after basic training at Fort Ord he’d landed in the choicest duty in the entire United States Army, the Presidio of San Francisco. He might just as well have been back hustling on Mission Street, because the army was just a party. In between working at menial tasks, he would sit up all night with the armorer filing the serial numbers off .45 automatics in order to sell them. Surrounded by old army characters now safely ensconced in the heavenly confines of the Presidio, he correctly saw his military career as a joke best expressed by the old saw “the incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary in an unbelievable amount of time.” His inglorious military career revealed an utter lack of talent for either mindless obedience or artful dodging, and it was bound not to last. His friend the squad leader had taken up with the sister of one of Garcia’s former girlfriends, and late in 1960 he was holed up in a Palo Alto hotel threatening suicide as well as trying to sell Garcia a Fender Jazzmaster guitar he’d stolen somewhere. Garcia spent more time sitting up with his friend than making it back to the Presidio in time for roll call, and he began to collect multiple counts of AWOL (absent without official leave).