A Long Strange Trip (7 page)

Berio was omnivorous about his sources, using jazz and Dante among many streams. His “Omaggio a Joyce” had established him as a leader in avant-garde composition, and Lesh was even more stunned when he came in with the actual “fuckin’ five-channel tape that Stockhausen made for performances” of “Gesang der Jüngliche,” a composition in which boys’ voices were electronically modified. There was a performance at Mills that also involved five channels. “We only had four in the room, so we put one in the hall. I got to run the knobs. The fifth speaker was supposed to be out there, somewhere . . . I got to control the positions of all the music in space, which meant trying to learn this piece, just from hearing it. No score, just the tape.” Lesh did so again at a performance of a Berio piece at the Ojai Festival. His own contribution to the class was a small piece that went over poorly in formal performance, but he’d heard it done beautifully in rehearsal, which was all that mattered to him. While taking Berio’s class, he also volunteered as an engineer at KPFA so that he could continue his involvement in music even without performing.

One Saturday night in the spring of 1962, Lesh and Garcia connected. They’d seen each other around, but at a party at Pogo’s, Lesh remarked, “Jerry, you sing and play good, I work for KPFA, how’d you like to be on the radio?”

“Why not? What do we have to do?”

Lesh replied, “Well, first, my roommate has a tape recorder, and as long as you’re sittin’ here pickin’ and singin’, and the party is yet early, I’ll go up to Berkeley and get this tape recorder, and we’ll make what amounts to a demo, and I’ll play it for Gert [Chiarito, the producer of
The
Midnight Special
folk show].”

Jerry agreed and added, “Well, shit, I’ll ride with you.”

Out to T.C.’s Oldsmobile they went, and by the time they’d returned to Palo Alto they were lifelong partners. Lesh would remark that Garcia had a “raw,” really powerful personality, “and people were just awed by him, sitting at his feet—and I’m the kind of guy who distrusts people like that.” But they bridged their mutual barricades of personality, and something important happened between them, a lovely flowering of trust and connectedness that they would celebrate two months later on the ides of March on Lesh’s twenty-second birthday, sitting in Garcia’s room at the Chateau as they smoked the entire bag of weed Page Browning had brought to celebrate.

On the night of Pogo’s party, they returned and recorded the demo. Gert Chiarito was so impressed that she had Garcia do an entire show solo, a virtually unprecedented event on
The Midnight Special.
She interviewed him about his music, and then he played. He was just nineteen, and yet somehow musically mature. His voice was not a great instrument, but it was evocative and right for his material. She remembered that he sang “Long Black Veil,” and the “sad, distant country” tone of it moved her. Normally she had a dozen people in the studio for the show, but she could concentrate at this solo session, so she was particularly startled toward the end of the hour to notice his missing finger. “He was playing as though he had everything and a few extras.”

4

A Fine High Lonesome Madness

(3/62-12/63)

Ken Frankel was a U.C. Berkeley physics student and guitar player who lived across the street from Lundberg’s Fretted Instru-ments, the Berkeley store that was a locus for acoustic music in the Bay Area. Touring professionals stopped by for strings and repairs, and everyone else who was interested would visit for talk and the swapping of tapes, which they made in the back of the store. One day Frankel heard a young picker named Garcia making a tape he coveted. It was easy to initiate a conversation, and when Garcia remarked that he was looking for a fiddler, Ken claimed experience he actually lacked. A couple of weeks later, he was a member of the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers.

A year and more of constant practice had qualified Garcia to obey the central drive of his entire musical career, which was to play with other people. From the very beginning, he sought communication and collaboration, not performance-as-theater. He’d already come across Joe and Jim Edmonston, who were a few years older than he. They were regular working guys, union men, but they loved to play, which was what counted. It didn’t hurt that their mother was a terrific cook. On May 11, 1962, the Tub Thumpers, with Joe Edmonston on banjo, Frankel on fiddle, Garcia on guitar, and Hunter chucking chords on the mandolin on three days’ practice, led off the Stanford University Folk Festival. Under various names and with a shifting cast of characters that included Marshall Leicester and Jim Edmonston, they played wherever else they could, including the Boar’s Head. Lacking any financial motive, the musicians simply enjoyed each other’s company and playing. “Everybody took the time to listen to everybody else,” said Jim. Garcia took most of the vocals and was dominant, but he also listened, and his bandmates recognized him as their most capable member. Their best gig came as the Hart Valley Drifters. With Frankel on banjo, Garcia on guitar, Hunter on mandolin, and Jim Edmonston on bass, they went to work in the interests of one Hugh Bagley, a candidate for Monterey County sheriff. Playing on the back of a flatbed truck, their job was to attract a crowd for Hugh to speechify and handshake. It was a hilarious, goofy day, and when they couldn’t even find Bagley’s name in the election results, it mattered not at all.

Just at this time Hunter underwent a most extraordinary experience. He’d been making some money by taking psychological tests at Stanford, and somehow that gave him the opportunity to earn $140 for four sessions, one per week, taking psychedelic drugs at the V.A. Hospital under the auspices of what would prove to be the CIA. He received LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly called acid) the first week, psilocybin the second, mescaline the third, and a mixture of all three on the fourth. Danny Barnett told him he was crazy, but he ignored the doubts. Instead, he told Ken Frankel, “It’ll be fun! I’ll take my typewriter and no telling what’ll come out.”

Indeed. He’d read a bit of Huxley and tried the notorious cough syrup Romilar, but otherwise this was the first expedition into the world of the psychedelic by any of them, and what he brought back transfixed them all. His first session generated six single-spaced pages of notes, a remarkable document of a mind trying to remember paradise. “Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly-mist . . . and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resoundingbells.” Other people were enmeshed in “the most GODAWFUL prison of concrete and veins and consciousness,” while he could feel “PURE WHITE SPIRIT” pouring from each vein. It was not all ooh and ahh. He saw that “from this peak of Darien” he could unravel any riddle, but if it was brought to him and stripped down, “it would reveal itself to be simply its own answer . . . By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.” On his second test, he went beyond the “Lord I’m high” rhapsodies and straight into linguistics, Joycean word sounds, the play of vowel and syllable. His ability to articulate hallucinations would serve him well in the future.

His friends passed around his notes and then took him for coffee, pumping him for details. Garcia’s reaction was simple: “God, I’ve
got
to have some of that.” Hunter was not the only person they knew who had access to this experience. Palo Alto had its very own bohemian neighborhood, eight shacks on Perry Avenue, and one of its residents, Vic Lovell, was a psychology graduate student who kept his friends well supplied with this interesting new stuff, especially his pal Ken Kesey, a graduate student in writing who happened to work as a janitor at the V.A. Hospital. Older and more sophisticated than the Chateau gang, “Kesey and the wine drinkers,” as Garcia would call them, were not impressed with the youngsters who tried to crash their parties, the annual Luwow and the Perry Lane Olympics (“Lane” sounded sooo much more aesthetic than “Avenue” to them), and gave them the boot.

Lesh, who’d been brought over to Lovell’s by his friend Mike Lamb, had at first thought of Kesey as a “blustering asshole,” until Lamb snuck in and read what was on Ken’s typewriter, afterward telling them all to look out for his book. Kesey’s seminar with Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished editor of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Kerouac, and a remarkable group of young writers which later included Robert Stone, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, and Larry McMurtry, combined with psychedelics to produce something extraordinary. His fable of liberation from an authority-bound society,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
had been published to glorious reviews that February 1962. It was a masterpiece.

June meant Marshall Leicester’s annual return from Yale. This year they would call themselves the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, a tribute to the 1920s group Fisher Henley and His Aristocratic Pigs, which had been sponsored by Armour Ham. Suze Wood made them some snappy red-trimmed black vests, and they were ready to play. But there was a major difference this summer. Marshall had returned from school with one suitcase and six instrument cases, and the upshot was that Garcia began to play the devil’s own fiendish twanger, the banjo. In all of acoustic music there is nothing quite like it. There is fire in a banjo, an intrinsic speed and intensity. He was drawn to what he described as “that incredible clarity . . . the brilliance” of the instrument. It consumed him, and as with nothing in his life to that point, he enslaved himself to his practice. His model was Earl Scruggs, and Garcia treated Scruggs’s fingering as though it was the master lock, studying it by playing back his records at slow speeds, trying to crack the combination. His devotion to music would be central to his life, and it came at a price. Brigid Meier was talented, beautiful, and interested in literature and jazz, but now Garcia’s idea of a great time was to find someone who could teach him a new song, and their romance sputtered. As 1962 passed, he continued to meet her every day for lunch across the street from school, and they even discussed marriage, when she was eighteen and he twenty-one, but the bloom was off.

The Hog Stompers were followers of the New Lost City Ramblers, and Garcia’s banjo playing was at first in the old-timey tradition. The Boar’s Head had found new quarters at the Peninsula Jewish Community Center in Belmont, and they played there regularly. But the banjo and Scruggs led Jerry inexorably from old-time music to bluegrass, a very different thing. Bluegrass was not folk music. It had been created in the 1940s by superbly gifted professionals, starting with Bill Monroe, and it required considerable skill to play. Bluegrass had a limited but important history in the Bay Area, beginning with Garcia’s heroes, the Redwood Canyon Ramblers. Neil Rosenberg, Mayne Smith, and Scott Hambly were all classmates of Phil Lesh’s at Berkeley High School and veterans of
The Midnight Special.
Neil and Mayne had come upon authentic bluegrass while attending Oberlin College, and their Bay Area shows in 1959 and 1960 brought the form to the region and inspired a second generation of East Bay players who would come to be Garcia’s friends, including Butch Waller, Sandy Rothman, and Rick Shubb. Most Berkeley folkies had little use for bluegrass players, dismissing them as technicians concerned with speed rather than taste, and rejected bluegrass itself as “social tyranny,” due to its difficulty. There was even a Berkeley band called the Crabgrassers; the name served as a pointed joke.

The atmosphere of the fall of 1962 was dominated by the tensions of the Cuban missile crisis. Hunter was taking classes at the College of San Mateo in philosophy and astronomy, which was certainly appropriate: John Glenn had orbited the earth that February, the Telstar communications satellite had been launched in July, and the best-selling book in America,
Silent Spring,
was concerned with pesticides and damage to the environment. For Hunter, this single vivid memory of the missile crisis involved going outdoors to scan the horizon for mushroom clouds at the time when Russian ships were required to turn back from the blockade. The crisis, thought one historian, “imbued the sixties generation with an apocalyptic cast of mind, a sense of the absurdity of politics, and a suspicion of politicians.” True.

With Marshall back in New Haven, Garcia organized a new band. This version of the Hart Valley Drifters included Hunter on mandolin, Rodney and Peter Albin’s young friend David Nelson on guitar, Jerry on banjo, and a new guy, Norm Van Maastricht, on bass. Nelson, who had graduated from high school in 1961, owned a motorcycle and a twentyfive-dollar ’48 Plymouth, which immediately became band transportation. The Drifters practiced Tuesdays and Thursdays, and their big day came on November 10, when they debuted in the afternoon at an art gallery opening at San Francisco State and then headlined that night at the College of San Mateo Folk Festival. It was Nelson’s first paid gig, and he would remember every detail. At their dress rehearsal the night before, they’d worked into the night and all night. As the show approached, David and Norm began to tire. Grumbling genially about “the rookies in my band,” Garcia produced some Dexamyl, and their energy returned. They arrived at the art gallery, but no one met them. Seeing some microphones, they set up, and after stalling, finally had to play. Nelson suddenly wondered, “Good God, what’s the tune?” Knowing that it would be a banjo instrumental, he looked at Garcia, who had his own nerves to deal with. Digging into the strings too hard with his picks, Garcia suddenly felt a string slide underneath the flap of the pick and send it twirling around. “Heh, heh,” he snickered embarrassedly, and began again. By then, Nelson was “fucking terrified, paralyzed.” But they kicked off without further interruption, and the music settled them. The audience liked what it heard, and filtered in. There were intentional laughs for their between-songs patter, some applause, and before they knew it, they were on break in a closet-size dressing room.

The CSM Folk Festival was actually a device for the Art Students Guild to raise money for beer, and with one giant poster at the cafeteria, they managed to sell out. It was partly luck: that very week, the cover of
Time
acclaimed Joan Baez a “Sibyl with Guitar.” The audience expected something on the order of the Kingston Trio’s “Scotch and Soda,” but they got a lot more first. One student contributed a protest tune called “The Atom Song.” An Indian student, Ramesh Chan, played Indian folk songs. Rodney Albin played “The IRT.” Then Garcia played two solo banjo tunes, “Little Birdie” and “Walking Boss,” extremely obscure material for this audience. “We make music in the tradition,” said Garcia as he then introduced the Hart Valley Drifters’ first set. “It says so right here in the program.” But he didn’t merely jest, going on to inform his audience of the historical roots and record-label contexts of the tunes they were playing.

After some comments on the Carter Family and the song, he and Nelson, “who more than anything else wants to be a real boy,” played “Deep Ellum Blues.” With Hunter, they played “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (“The first code of the banjo is to get it into the proper tune . . . since our band is a strict adherent to this rule, we can take hours to tune,” Garcia explained), and then Garcia gave them “Man of Constant Sorrow,” solo and
a cappella
. They closed with two bluegrass tunes, “Pig in a Pen” and “Salty Dog.” It was authentic and skilled and more than the audience could appreciate, although the Drifters’ performance was very good indeed. Dean Hammer and His Nails closed the show with a few snide remarks about being made to wait, then sang “Scotch and Soda,” and the audience went home happy.

So did the band. In the middle of the show, Nelson noticed something fall from Hunter’s pocket, an object he thought was a white-wrapped Stickney’s toothpick. Hunter assumed David knew that it was, in fact, a joint. At the postshow party at Suze Wood’s, Nelson and his friend Rick Melrose said to Hunter, “Let’s get loaded,” as in “Have a drink.” Since they were underage, Hunter’s reluctance didn’t surprise Nelson, but eventually Hunter talked to Garcia, and the four of them went to the car. A joint appeared, and Melrose asked, “What’s that?” Nelson muttered to himself, “Shit, we’ll blow our chance to smoke pot.”

Hunter began to grumble about underage kids who weren’t cool, but Garcia reassured and disarmed him, then gave lessons in smoking to the rookies, and before long they’d gone back to the Chateau and buzzed their way through Hunter’s entire stash. At which point the rookies asked, “When does this stuff take effect?” Hunter resumed fuming, mostly silently, about the waste of scarce pot, and Garcia interceded again. “Here’s what we do. Let’s just talk about what a great guy Hunter is for getting us all stoned. What a great, great guy, he really put himself out for us, and isn’t it just the nicest world . . .” And Hunter came out of his snit. “Aww, you guys, it was worth it, okay, okay.” And Nelson began to think that they were talking a little funny. Garcia was beginning to giggle like crazy. Nelson turned to Melrose and said, “Too bad it didn’t work, but we’ll have a good time.”