I drove out to California in late December and stayed there through January, and that was when I really got to know Jon McIntire. By then, Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia had already written “Uncle John’s Band” about him, and he was about to become the manager of the Grateful Dead.
Physically, he was a classically beautiful man in the post-Raphaelite style. He had long flowing blond hair, aristocratic features, and the bearing of one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. It was bumpkin nobility, the kind that only comes from truly being from the provinces. I always felt like a complete barbarian around him because Jon was such a ridiculously elegant person in the way he carried himself.
Jon was from Belleville, Illinois. He had gone to Washington University in St. Louis and so was well educated and extremely literate but also an astonishingly adept autodidact. He then went to San Francisco State, where he met Rock Scully and studied German phenomenology. That was where he also met Rock’s friend Danny Rifkin, who introduced Jon to the Dead.
Part of what brought us together was that I was studying German phenomenology myself and had just been reading Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and that whole sick crew. It kind of blew Jon away that there was anyone else who actually knew anything about any of this, especially someone wearing a cowboy hat.
Within the Grateful Dead scene itself, very few people knew Jon was gay. Garcia must have known, but he couldn’t have cared less. The real dominant strain in the culture of the band, which few people recognize, came straight out of Pendleton, Oregon, through roadies like Rex Jackson and the Hagen brothers, who were real cowboys and as macho as they came.
Jon himself was not a lookist. It was always the other party’s mind that interested him. For him, it was always about love rather than cruising. Jon also never wanted to have a relationship with anybody but a straight guy that he had somehow managed to turn.
I went to see the Dead on New Year’s Eve at Winterland and was living at Weir’s until Jon lured me over to his place. I was staying there with him when he and Weir and I cooked up a plot to go to Mexico together in a three-cylinder, two-stroke Saab that broke down during our trip every day at the exact same time, about four-thirty or five in the afternoon.
I would be standing by the side of the road with the hood up alongside all these solemn Mexicans in straw hats and white shirts who had just seemed to suddenly precipitate out of thin air so they could look at this engine that was not at all familiar to them. At one point, I had to sew the fan belt together so we could keep on driving. We stayed in pretty cheap hotels and were muy borracho a good deal of the time, because we were on an expedition. We were not smoking too much weed, but we were snorting a little blow.
One night, we were all trying to get into a very fancy nightclub in Mexico City. We told them we were Los Grateful Dios, but they didn’t know anything about that. Then we told them that we were Los Rolling Stones. They knew about them but were not particularly impressed. So then we told them we were with Los Creedence Clearwater Revival and they went nuts. They loved them. Everywhere we went in Mexico, we heard Creedence.
I was sitting in the Saab in a mercado in Guadalajara one day when I heard Kris Kristofferson singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on the radio. The song totally blew me away because I could relate to the story of it so completely. I had never written any lyrics before, but that song inspired me to think that maybe I could.
Weir had a gig back in the United States and so we reluctantly sent him off. Jon really wanted something to happen with me, and I was thinking, “Better to be bisexual, surely.” I figured this would more than double my opportunities because I could always get laid with a guy.
We eventually ended up in this completely isolated village called Puerto Angel on the Gulf of Tehuantepec, about 150 hard miles of dirt from Oaxaca. The only electricity in the town was devoted to running the beer coolers and the jukebox at the cantina, which blared out wall-to-wall Los Creedence at maximum volume.
I decided this was the time for me to find out about this whole bisexuality thing. Jon and I gave it a shot, but it was absolutely not working for me. We got into bed together and did a lot of naked thrashing about but not much more because it all felt too weird. Jon had stubble on his face and it didn’t smell right because he was a guy. We kissed each other because we could do that, but I didn’t get the feeling that it was ever going to be anything but strange.
Jon was a dramatic fellow and after it didn’t happen between us, he pouted for a while. Then we got drunk together and had a conversation about it and the cloud lifted and we became even deeper friends than we had been before.
We returned to San Francisco, and I drove back to Wyoming in my El Camino. I stayed with my folks for a little while and then flew back to Connecticut, where I was still living in that nondescript apartment with the girlfriend with whom I was not having sex. And that was where I eventually sat down and wrote the lyrics to “Mexicali Blues.”