Well, the first days are the hardest days don’t you worry anymore When life looks like Easy Street There’s danger at your door....
—Robert Hunter, “Uncle John’s Band”
I personally feel my heart is in San Francisco. I left my heart in San Francisco. I’m from there. I still feel like a city person.... I don’t really relate to Marin County consciousness. I’m locked in my old world.
—Jerry Garcia, interview with author, 1988
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: Our mom was a registered nurse. She wasn’t a practicing nurse. Maybe she practiced for one year and then she got married. In the thirties, she was a housewife. Her family was working-class Irish. Her mother, Tillie Clifford, organized the laundry workers union. She was elected secretary-treasurer and she kept the post for like twenty-five years. I was named after her. Which I guess was traditional. It might have been at my father’s insistence. I don’t know. My father used to play in speakeasies. He also had big bands that used to play out in the park and various places. A big orchestra. Twenty-piece, at least. I’ve seen pictures of them in their formal stuff. He had these pictures taken for promotion and in one of them, he was all spruced up. Really looking sharp. Tux, tie, everything. He had kind of fair skin and he worked under his own name. Jose Garcia. Or Joe Garcia. Depending on the particular gathering he was with.
When they got married, he went into the bar business because he got blackballed from the union and his band had a breakup. It was a job he had to take to survive. Back then, you had to take any damn thing. You couldn’t be really picky. So he got into the bar business with a partner. He took a day job because he couldn’t make money being a musician. He was lucky to even have a job back then. This was right after the Depression. Things were pretty slim. Usually, he was at home at night because he worked in the daytime. He was perfect for the bar scene. Maybe a little bit too suave. Shirt open. Sleeves rolled up. Apron. It was his place but he served.
The first of his bars was located on First Street and Harrison in San Francisco right where the Sailors Union of the Pacific is now. It’s an industrial neighborhood about two blocks from the waterfront with a lot of seamen. In fact, a seamen’s hotel was on top of the corner businesses. There was a bar on one corner, a Curtis Baby Ruth candy factory on the other corner, and right behind that was Union Oil. Running bars, my mom went from one corner to the next. She was on three or four corners.
Two blocks away was the poorest area in town. Third and Howard. Down there was really scumbag city. Skid row, totally. Jerry and I used to go down there. We’d take the bus from my grandmother’s house or the streetcar down to First Street and then all the way to Mission from the Excelsior District where we lived. Then we’d wait for the bus at First where the terminal is and then ride it up. We could see the transients and sailors. A lot of drunken sailors and it was rowdy. That was the worst part of town we could go to. We were street kids but in our neighborhood. We knew when we got in another neighborhood, we didn’t know who anybody was. We were living on the other side of town in the Excelsior or the Crocker-Amazon District. My grandmother lived three blocks away. Within a five-mile radius lived all the family members that I was aware of. All in different neighborhoods but we’d see each other weekly.
The Cliffords and the Garcias bought a summer house in Santa Cruz. In Lompico near Felton. In the wintertime, you could never get out of there. In the summertime, they had a nice dam, a lodge, a bar, and a little grocery store. Sometimes we’d go there all summer. We’d ride down there with my grandfather and my grandmother would stop at the store and load up on groceries and we’d go into the canyon. The first stuff they brought down there was tools. Between the half-dozen adults down there at the time, my father and my uncle and my grandfather Clifford put all the kids to work, raking leaves or unloading the car so they could fix up this cabin. The different family members would go down there and have a picnic and they started gradually staying longer because the place was fixed up. But there was no electricity or nothing.
A year before my father died, I chopped off Jerry’s finger. That was where it happened. I’m not sure how long we’d had the place by then but we’d been there for a while. Long enough to put what I thought was my name across the driveway. CLIFFORD GARCIA. Actually, we’d been given a chore to do but we were fucking around. Jerry had the ax for a while, too. I wasn’t the only one that had the ax. We both had axes. He would hold the wood and I’d chop it and we were chopping these branches. My dad was constantly cutting parts of this redwood tree down and Jerry just kept fucking around. He was putting his finger there and pulling it away.
He was fucking around and I was just constantly chopping. I was going to tease him. But I would stop the hatchet before getting to the wood. He’d put the wood there and I’d go “SWEEEEE” and stop. And he’d pull it away thinking it was chopped. I’d say, “Hey, I forgot to chop,” and I’d pick it up again and I’d do that. We were playing little games like that and then I nailed him. He screamed. I screamed. We both screamed. It was an accident. I didn’t do it maliciously. I was a kid. I was eight and Jerry was four. We were little guys.
They took him to the hospital in Santa Cruz. Back then it could have taken two hours. I remember I was in the car. It was traumatizing. Jerry was home that night but they couldn’t get him to the right surgeon to save the finger. They could have saved it. I didn’t cut it off. It was just a wound.
All of a sudden, my aunt came down from the city and I ended up going up there. They took me away. I was always the first one to get moved away because I was more portable. I was older and I could walk on my own and I knew directions.
No one hard-timed me about it. I think they all realized it was an accident. But there are these things you feel. I felt guilty. I can still feel it. My mom would bring it up now and then. When she was on my case for something else. She would bring up the incident. Like, “Remember what you did.”
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: I was not there when my dad drowned. I was in Santa Cruz, near Lompico. The drowning was in Arcata. They were up there fishing. My dad didn’t want to take me along because he knew he’d have to take me out there with him and that was probably why I didn’t go. That was the only reason. I was ten but I had fished with my dad before. Whereas Jerry was too small to go out there with him. Not that I could have saved him. We probably both would have gone.
Jerry and my mom were sitting on the beach and my dad was out in waders in the ocean. He was a good to very good swimmer. I guess he got pulled down by an undertow and cracked his head. The body was lost for like six hours. Jerry didn’t witness his father’s death. When it happened, he was five years old. All he knew was what the adults were telling him. It was not as though he sat and watched. That would have been a horrible thing to watch. But that was not what happened.
For the whole family, this was the first death in this particular generation. So there was a lot of grief and I felt that hard. I got dragged to the funeral parlor and it was my first real encounter with death. It was very intense. All of a sudden, as a little kid, I saw all these adults I’d never seen before. Besides all the aunts and uncles who were in one place at one time. Everybody was there. It was traumatizing. I remember that. The thing that I think had the biggest effect on me and that probably got me into nine-to-five-type jobs for the rest of my life was that all of a sudden my mom said, “You’re the man in the family.” I hated that. Soon as she said that, I said, “Why me? What am I supposed to do? Can I drive a car? Can I have a job?” I was ten years old. And I’d had absolutely no responsibilities up until that point. I didn’t even know how to comb my own hair till I was eleven. My childhood ended right there. Definitely. But not Jerry. Jerry was coddled totally and he got everything he wanted from my mom until he left home and went into the Army.
After my dad drowned, my mom started trying to be mom and dad. That was laid on her. She wasn’t trying to do it but it was automatically laid on her. But I had an aunt and uncle that lived up the street. I had two aunts and uncles who lived within half a mile of our house. My grandmother was half a mile away in the other direction. So we went from one aunt and uncle to the other. Then we went back to my grandmother’s house to live while my mother maintained the bar business. After my dad died, things all happened.
Laird Grant: Where Grandma lived was Eighty-seven Harrington Street. Where Jerry had lived was First and Harrison. It was not the same neighborhood. One of them was way down on the docks and the other one was in the middle of the Mission District. In the Excelsior District was where his grandmother was. Between Mission and Alemany. Jerry lived with his grandmom for a lot of the time. Later on, I actually ended up moving into the house and I lived there for a while as well. A bunch of us did. Tillie was great. Tillie really liked Jerry a whole bunch. She was a typical grandmother. A very stern kind of a lady but with a twinkle in her eye. God, she must have been a mischievous woman when she was younger. She was really a character. She helped organize the laundry workers union and she was kind of a radical for her time. For a woman back then, this was not a heard-of thing. Harrington Street was kind of Jerry’s psychic home and his stomping grounds, too. Balboa High was just across the way and all of his old running partners were over in that area.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: My mom wanted to move a lot so we moved a lot. Four or five times in three or four years. One of the reasons was the bar business. She kept wanting to get another house in the country. She wanted to go to the Russian River. Most of the time, she would get home in time to make us dinner. When we were living with my grandmother, my mom didn’t cook at all. My mom went down and she worked from six in the morning to one at night. Late, long hours. At night when we were staying at my grandmother’s before we got the TV, we’d sit around the kitchen table and listen to the radio. My grandfather would sit there with the paper and listen to fights with his beer and we’d draw on these laundry sheets that had all this stuff written on them. On the other side, there was nothing and they were pretty thick. We’d both draw. Sometimes, Jerry would take mine and start drawing on it and I’d take his and start drawing on it. He had more of a knack for it than I did or he was at least as good as me even though he was four years younger. He did come out with some good stuff. He was creative. He always had that creative passion.
He was pretty social. If there were kids to play with, he’d be out playing rather than sit at home. If there was activity in the street, he was in it. He wouldn’t sit around or get into his own stuff. He wasn’t like that. He never got into fights. He had a pretty normal childhood. Definitely middle-class. Definitely normal. The Little Rascals were no different than us except they looked a little more tattered than we did. Any of those pictures I have of us from the fifties compare with the Little Rascals.
When we moved down to Menlo Park, my mom had to work until six P.M. At first she stayed home to be a housewife and didn’t work at all. My stepfather, Wally Matusiewicz, took care of the bar business, and my mom did nothing but be a homemaker. She even made her own clothes. Everything new. She went down to Montgomery Ward and bought everything new for the brand new house and brand new neighborhood. Everything brand new. We almost went down there naked. We didn’t bring anything from my grandmother’s house. She just wanted to start over. A new life. Her dream then was the housewife dream. And she did it.
Marshall Leicester: Jerry and I first met and discovered that we liked each other in grade school in Menlo Park. We were kids and I can remember us riding bikes together. I remember him as being a distinctive and sort of shaped individual from when we were nine and ten. There weren’t many kids around like that. I was a young intellectual and uncomfortable with it. I was going to Catholic school at the time and there was definitely no room for that kind of thing. Garcia was a guy who liked to talk that way too even then. He’d picked it up. I don’t know where.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: When I was sixteen, I was dragged out of the city to go to Menlo Park. I had nobody down there. I knew nobody except for my next-door neighbor. In the city, I was going to go to Balboa High. Now I had to start high school down there. Then it got to the point where my mom was working again. They needed the money. They had to drive Cadillacs and all this shit. Plus, Wally was a merchant marine. He’d be gone for two months at a time.
I finally got a driver’s license so Jerry and I would hop in the car and go to the city and see our friends. My stepfather was working in the bar, my mom was working with him, and Jerry and I would take whatever car was there. We’d hot wire a car and I’d take him to the city and drop him off at his friend’s house and I’d run around and show off whatever car I was driving to my friends and party for a while and then I’d haul him back down there. Then I went into the Marines. I enlisted because I had to get out of the house. I was seventeen and my stepfather and my mom used to argue a lot.
Laird Grant: Jerry’s dad had died. His mother was with a man by the name of Wally Matusiewicz. Wally was kind of a stevedore. A seaman. He was a real rough-and-tumble guy but she really loved him. Because even though she was a nurse, she was kind of rough-and-tumble herself. That was why she liked running that bar for seamen down at First and Harrison. She was always very nice to me. She and I got along wonderful. I was one of the kids that she really liked having around because if there was a leaky faucet or something that needed to be done, I could do that stuff. In that way, I took up Jerry’s slack. It never seemed like there was a closeness there like I had with my mom. But I saw a bond. It wasn’t like she was abusing him or beating him or anything like that. It was almost kind of a loving indifference. It was like, “Go ahead and do your thing. Just don’t get into trouble and don’t bother me.” I guess there was some conflict with the new husband. I was a kid so I didn’t really look at that aspect, although I saw a certain amount of tension between Wally and Jer. But I had the same things with my stepdad so I figured that was just family stuff. The old man saying, “Oh you lazy bum, why don’t you do something?” “I’m busy doing nothing right now. Thank you very much. I don’t want to be busy doing something else that you want me to do.”
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: Jerry was fourteen, fifteen. He could do what he wanted in the city with all people he knew before we moved. I think the kids I associated with were more on the hoodlum level. Partying dudes in Hagars, peg pants, and one-button rolls. At that time, Jerry was like a Richie and I was a Fonzie. Everyone I knew was a Fonzie. Everyone he knew was a Richie. Once he got to know Laird? Fonzie.
Laird Grant: When I was in the seventh grade, he was in the eighth. He stayed back a whole year. This was at Menlo Oaks School in Menlo Park, California. It was a semi-middle-class neighborhood. He’d moved down from San Francisco. His mom had decided to get him out of the city and they found this place. He’d already been in the seventh grade and to the eighth and he had failed to do anything for a whole year. In a way, I guess he just shut down. It was so different from the city. Jerry was a very intelligent and precocious kind of a person even at that age and the teachers knew it and he could get their goat. Because they knew that he was so damned intelligent yet he refused to do anything. So they had to fail him.
I also came from San Francisco. I grew up in the Mission District. I left when I was ten. The change from the city, the difference in the interaction … after coming from the streets of San Francisco, Menlo Park was like country bumpkins. Basically, Jerry ignored them and in doing so of course isolated himself. I met him during hazing. All of a sudden, a couple of other guys and Jerry grabbed me. I wasn’t that big a kid. He was bigger than I was and here was Jerry sitting on my chest smearing me with lipstick and shaving cream while another guy was trying to get my pants off. That was how I first met Jerry. Looking up at this fat kid. He was always chubby. He had his hair in a burr cut so he was kind of pinheaded.
He and I just started hanging out together. As kids, we were always throwing spiders, frogs, and worms on each other. We’d get into a little mischief because I was kind of an outsider too. I didn’t go along with the straight crowd. We knew about the beatniks and we knew about the Hell’s Angels and were fascinated by both of these cultures. We’d see the bikers around, the Hell’s Angels coming up from San Jose, or read about the runs that would happen in Monterey. The movie The Wild One with Brando came out in ’53, I think, and that was incredible. At that point, all of us wanted to wear leather jackets and ride Harleys.
Even though we were in the seventh grade, Jerry and I realized that we were surrounded by straight geeks. We knew we were different. Jerry was a prankster and so was I. We both saw that sparkle in each other’s eyes and said, “Ah! Kindred souls.” If we were back-to-back, better not try and fuck with us. We were bad boys. We were. We wouldn’t look for trouble. But when we walked down the street a lot of times, people would just move.
At the time, he was playing saxophone. Nine-and-a-half-fingered saxophone. He was also playing piano and he was taking guitar lessons. I remember going by his place sometimes on this cul-de-sac where he lived maybe half a mile from my place. I’d go, “Hey man, let’s go out and screw around,” and he’d go, “I can’t. I’m taking guitar lessons, man.” I told him back then. I said, “Hey man, you know what? You’re going to be a fucking rich famous rock ’n’ roll star someday.” And he was going, “No, man. You’re the guy who’s going to be rich and famous. You’re always working, you always have money. You always got these little hustles going.” When I was in high school, I had three different gigs.
I didn’t see Tiff very often. I think he was in the service at the time. Tiff would show up occasionally. He had a bedroom there at the place.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: I went to San Diego for boot camp and at that time it was brutal because all the drill instructors, the DIs, were Korean War vets. Bitter. Cream of the crop bitter. And they ran us through all kinds of shit. But their job was to do that. I never wore my uniform at home except once when my mom had to take some damn pictures.
Laird Grant: I got Jerry a job one time. We worked picking apricots in the fields down in Santa Clara. We didn’t do too good at that so the guy put us on the cutting trays and of course we sliced ourselves up pretty good trying to cut apricots and put them on the trays. We also picked beans. We worked for about a week in the fields there. I liked it because I had learned a little bit of Spanish and I was somewhat interested in the Spanish culture. After a week of doing that, Jerry went back and said, “Bullshit. Enough of this stuff, man. This is too weird.”
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: When I was in the service, I’d been smoking some pot down in San Diego. I’d gone into Mexico and I had pot. I came home and Jerry was wondering if I’d ever smoked any pot. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the last time I was up there, I was in jail because I had brought some pot in my car. I’d gotten in an accident and they towed away my car and I was afraid to go into it because I had this stash under the seat. They found it and they called up the bar where Wally was working at the time and they said, “We’ve got your son’s car. You want to come down to the station and talk about this?” He paid a thousand dollars and they let it go. It was funny because he said, “Yeah, I used to smoke pot years ago and it’s better than alcohol any day.” Wally was an ex-alcoholic. “But they’ll never legalize it.” He was afraid I’d get court-martialed. And he was sheltering it from my mom. If my mom found out, she would have been in total hysterics. Definitely. She would have fucking blown it. But he was real cool. If something like this happened now, I’d be in jail for like ten, fifteen years. For just possessing that big an amount.
When Jerry asked me if I’d smoked pot, I told him I did. And he said, “That’s cool. Let’s have some.” I remember my grandmother had this matchbook collection. She’d travel around and every time she was at a conference or something, she’d bring home these matchbooks as souvenirs. She kept them in a little place and they were steadily going down. Jerry was using the matches. I knew he’d been smoking pot all along because all these matches had gone. He was also smoking cigarettes. But you don’t use too many matches with cigarettes.
Laird Grant: Jerry and I started smoking pot in ninth grade. It was really hard to get a hold of. It was rolled in two Zig-Zag brown wheatstraw papers with a very thin liner. In those days, we bought joints. That was all we could get. We couldn’t even get a matchbox. Nobody would trust us enough to sell us a matchbox. A matchbox was a lot of dope back then. If you cleaned it up, you’d probably get fifteen joints out of a matchbox. Skinny pinners. We’d pay fifty cents apiece for them. Three for a dollar.
Then Jerry went back to San Francisco. He started going to Balboa High and I continued on in Menlo Park at Menlo-Atherton High School. He and I were always going to the Russian River together up to some place his mom had. Later on when I had wheels, we’d take off for the weekend and go up there and bring girls up there to the cabin. Actually, moving back to San Francisco was a great change for him because he was able to get back into the city beat. He spent a lot more time at the California School of Fine Arts with Wally Hedrick doing his art stuff and music stuff. We’d see each other maybe a couple of times a month. He wasn’t into any kind of criminal activities other than just being a general rowdy to a certain degree but not a violent guy. He and I would practice with our switchblades and our choke chains up on the roof.
We would also get pills from various street gangs and people that Jerry knew in the city. I’d show up for a weekend trip and he’d open a bag and go, “Well, man, we’ve got a bunch of candy.” And he’d have about fifteen different kinds of colored pills. If there were two of each kind, we’d separate them out. We didn’t even know what they were. We’d just separate them out to get equal piles and then we’d drop five or six pills each. These were unknown substances. Ups and downs and sideways and tranks. We’d drop all of that and then go out and go tripping around San Francisco. We’d go out and get silly and do weird little pranks.
I remember one great Halloween Night at the California School of Fine Arts. I’d made this weird costume out of bedsheets that had been cut into strips and sewn on to a shirt collar. It went all the way to my feet. I had a weird rag thing over my head and full eyes like a bug. Jerry dressed up as Dracula in a completely immaculate suit with the black and red cape. He had on facial paint and the spike teeth. We dropped a whole bunch of different kinds of pills we’d been saving.
Jerry used to clean the bar for his mom. That was one of his gigs. He’d bus up the bar on Harrison Street during the morning before she opened. So we’d managed to save like half a bottle of vodka but there were all these other drainage things in it. Whenever there was a little bit left in the bottom of a bottle, we’d just drain it all into one bottle. There was rye and whiskey and vodka and rum and God knows what else. I was drinking on that and Jerry took a few swigs but he didn’t really ever like to drink.
In those days, they still had the streetcars. We walked down to Market Street and took the streetcar and went up to Powell and then got on the cable car and rode over into North Beach to go to this party and we were goofing on people the whole time. Freaking out, jumping off the cable car, running around, acting silly. Doing kid stuff on Halloween. We were sixteen. Then this big limo pulled up in front of the California School of Fine Arts. This chick got out in this fur coat and left it there. She was totally stark naked with a raisin in her navel. She came as a cookie. She was one of the art student models who modeled in the nude all the time. To her, it was nothing at all. But in ’56 or ’57, it was quite unusual.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: When I came out of the Marines, I remember I spent a month trying to talk Jerry out of going into the Army. I was home to visit him and he was staying at my grandmother’s, getting high with his buddies and going to Balboa High. Next time I went home, I was out of the service. All of a sudden, he was living up in Cazadero and going to another school. He was in his last year of high school. He would have graduated. He was only seventeen. I said, “Jerry, think about it. You shouldn’t do it. Finish school.” I told him, “Shit, you don’t have too much more school. Finish it. Just get it out of the fuckin’ way.” I hated to see him that close to being out of school and not finishing. He listened to some things I said. With my mom, he wasn’t totally disobedient or anything like that. But after my dad died, she was the authority figure. Definitely. She cracked down. She was heavy.
Laird Grant: A bunch of weird stuff went down between Jerry and his family. He was seventeen going on eighteen but not really all that interested in going to school. So he moved to Redwood City to live with his girlfriend and her parents. That worked for a while. At that point, he decided to join the Army. He was down at Fort Ord so I was going down on the weekends and picking him up. I thought his joining the Army was pretty radical. He said, “Hey man, it got me out to where I could legally be away from home.” In those days, you couldn’t just leave. I’d also left home when I was seventeen. I had my own apartment and was working and going to high school. I’d pick him up at the Army base and we’d cruise around. I had a ’47 Cadillac convertible we partied in. In terms of playing music, he was just kind of plinking around. When he was in the Army, he met the Kingston Trio. They were in the Army at the same time and they were playing at the Officers Club so he hung out with them a little bit and got into playing with them. A little taste, I guess. This was probably before they were the Kingston Trio. They were all just in the service together.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: While he was in the Army, I’d see him now and then when he’d come by and ask for some money or when he came by my grandmother’s house. He wasn’t really AWOL for long. He was just AWOL so frequently that they said to him, “Enough.” He told me he apologized. Every time he’d screw up in the Army, he’d say, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” And he just kept screwing up. I don’t think his record was all that severe. Not enough for us to know about it. It was like a hardship discharge. I was surprised he stayed in as long as he did. I really was.
Alan Trist: What he told me in ’61 was that he was down in Monterey at Fort Ord and that his job was driving the missile trucks. There he was, driving around the means of destruction on his back. It wasn’t so much that which upset him about the Army. It was the authoritarianism of it all. He said, “I couldn’t handle that for very long.” It was typical Jerry that he was able to get himself out of the Army by just being really smart. He’d go AWOL and come up to San Francisco and hang out with Laird. When I first met Jerry in ’60, he may have still been on the tail end of that. I saw him for so many days in a row sometimes that his AWOLs must have been quite extensive.
Suzy Wood: Jerry told us stories about being in the Army. He said, “I didn’t do anything in the Army. I didn’t do anything at all. But I was very nice about it.” He told us about leaving his tank out in the middle of a field. They’d say, “You left this tank out in the middle of a field.” And he’d say, “Oh, did I? Oh, I’m sorry.” He’d be off on leave for the weekend and wouldn’t come back and he’d say, “Oh, I’m sorry.” Finally they said, “Maybe you’d like to leave?” And he said, “Oh, okay.”
Alan Trist: That sounds about right. He always did everything with a big grin and he always put people off the defensive by being that way. It was, “What are we gonna do with this guy?” and they realized he was not the type to be in the Army and that was what Jerry’s strategy was. He knew that he and the Army were not suited to each other. From his perspective, it was just a question of making a cool exit.
Laird Grant: He got busted out of the Army because they could not deal with him. He was like the prodigal son gone awry. It was just one thing going on after another.
Laird Grant: The whole thing in Palo Alto was happening. He was out of the Army, he was hanging out at Kepler’s Bookstore, and he was staying with me in this apartment over in East Palo Alto while I was trying to go to Ravenswood High School which no longer exists because they burned it down. And there were all these parties going on up on Perry Lane and Homer Lane and at the Chateau. This was all before our eighteenth birthday. He was eighteen by now but I wasn’t yet.
Alan Trist: Roy Kepler had created one of the first paperback bookstores. They would let us sit there all day and read the books off the shelves and even take them home and bring them back. So we had literature and we had a place to hang out and there was coffee and they didn’t mind if Jerry played the guitar all day. Which was what he did. We were Bohemians.
David Nelson: The atmosphere was beatnik. It was a literary crowd based on books and writers. Music was just starting to happen. It was a coffeehouse scene. You sat around and discussed things.
Barbara Meier: I was a sophomore in high school in Menlo Park and my friend Sue Wade and I were going for a hike after school and she said, “Oh, I just met this guy and I want to stop and pick him up. Is that okay with you?” I said, “Sure.” We went to the Skylight Art Supply store and he was waiting on the porch and she went up and said, “I brought a friend with me. Is that okay with you?” He looked in the car and said, “Oh yes. Tell her I love her.” Those were his first words to me. I was fifteen at the time and he was three years older.
So he got in the car and we drove up to the Mill Pond in Los Trancos Woods, a very beautiful, magical place. We walked around and on the way back, he sat in the backseat and sang Joan Baez songs to me and it was the most exotic, seductive, dangerous—I mean he was the archetypal beatnik with his goatee and black hair—singing these songs and looking up from under those eyebrows. When I was fourteen, right before I went to high school, I had read On the Road. I’d read it and fallen in love with that world and somehow connected on a very deep level with the whole Kerouac/Buddhist vision and beat poetry. I got it and then when I met Jerry, he embodied and manifested that world for me and apparently I did the same for him.
That was the spring of 1960. We met in April or May so it was really just a question of weeks since he had gotten out of the Army. He was living in his car in East Palo Alto and Robert Hunter was living in his car. What then ensued was this whole long period where we all sort of functioned as a tribe. There were all these different people with different roles but we were this wonderful collection of poets, musicians, painters, writers, socialists, and pacifists, with a smattering of out-and-out lunatics.
Alan Trist: It was art that interested us. A large part of our conversation was based upon what we had been reading. Or it was Jerry learning those folk songs. Or it was Hunter writing in this journal. Or it was John the Poet who had an incredible collection of classical music. We would go over and spend whole evenings listening to Bach. Endless Bach. In early 1961, the then organist at the Vatican came to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco for a series of fourteen concerts where he played the complete organ works of Bach. I remember going with Jerry to three or four of those. It was incredible. It was in the middle of a period when we were doing that young person’s thing of seeing how many nights we could stay awake for and I remember having a very psychedelic experience. Grace Cathedral is made of concrete. Looking up at the vaulted roof, I saw all the different patches of dark and light concrete turn into faces. The faces were very clear. D. H. Lawrence was the one that stays in my mind. In the middle of Bach, I was having this conversation with D. H. Lawrence.
Barbara Meier: I spent a lot of time hanging out with Bob Hunter, Jerry, and Alan Trist. I was going to this affluent suburban high school and they would pick me up after school and we’d just go rave, the four of us. We’d drive up into the mountains or go over to the beach or go to St. Michael’s Alley or to Kepler’s Bookstore and hang out or go to somebody’s house or over to East Palo Alto where there was a big jazz scene with black jazz musicians. We were all smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and Hunter was into Dylan Thomas. The scene was always extremely literary. Jerry was already an incredible intellect, very well read, and he had lots of literary references. He’d tuned in to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake at a very early age and that was a powerful reference point for him. The book is fundamentally a psychedelic vision of reality and he got it. He got that long before he took psychedelics. We’d all just scratched the surface with that book but he and Hunter would riff on it and there were always running gags about it between them. Very early on, Jerry got the essential random nature of the art that James Joyce and John Cage represented. Before I met him, he had connected with the scene at the San Francisco Art Institute. He had connected with action painting, abstract expressionism, and the jazz underpinnings of it all. The whole mix of Kerouac, Joyce, painting, poetry, and jazz. That vision was really surfacing strongly in the late fifties and the early sixties and was a formative and perennial reference point for him.
Jerry could have easily passed himself off as an intellectual but because he was a high school dropout, he had no self-esteem. He didn’t have what he considered to be the required academic foundation, but he always got the essential meaning of whatever he encountered and he could hold his own. The thing I loved about being with him was being considered an equal on that level and being able to riff back and forth with the puns and literary references. I loved to play in that world. It was very heady and it was also fucking hilarious. I have never laughed so hard in my life.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: All his friends were now in Palo Alto. That was his group. I tried to find him a couple of times. Finally, a friend of mine who owned a gas station down there said that he’d seen him. So I went and I found his old car. While he was in the service, he had to go buy this car and I had to sign for it. So I went down and that was the last time I actually saw him for about a year and a half.
Barbara Meier: Because I was much younger, the three of them treated me with kid gloves and protected me. I was their darling on some level. I was their muse on some other level. They put me in a role which was incomprehensible sometimes. I was like their kid. At the age of fifteen, I wrote my first poem and it was about the three of them. The first part is about Jerry and then Alan Trist and then Bob Hunter. The blind man is Bob because he wore glasses.
He speaks of angels and snowy hillsides
But I am in rapture of the thing
where we are all in love
with life and each other
Never before and perhaps again
will it be so
with such youthful vigor
and wild eyes
He who creates such magical music
radiates it upon us
The one of poetic words
encourages
and overwhelms us with faith
The blind man in the corner sees all
even though he believes not in himself today
and I, follower of each,
cry beautiful tears of joy
“He speaks of angels and snowy hillsides”; that’s the poet, Kenneth Patchen. We were reading Patchen. Patchen was there in Menlo Park and we would go and visit him. We were such a motley group of people, but we were all there for each other in a way that now feels like the seed of what eventually became the Dead scene. It was a beautiful little green shoot coming up through the concrete of fifties consciousness and we were taking our cues from the beat culture and from the pacifist culture.
Laird Grant: These people were the upper crust Bohemians of Stanford University. Their parents were professors or something like that. Frank Seratone was a San Francisco artist who’d happened to make it fairly good and moved to Palo Alto and he had the Chateau. He rented out some rooms and we soon took it over. It was groovy and he didn’t mind the parties. It was a rambling house with a porch. Built probably turn of the century. Maybe in the twenties. And it had all kinds of weird little alcoves and stairs that went upstairs and downstairs and gardening rooms and a pump house. Because there was no water in those days except what you got from your own well. Jerry moved into the pump house.
Tom Constanten: There was one rather large party type of house called the Chateau at 838 Santa Cruz Avenue. Jerry’s place there was a pleasant one-room shack with a big thick Persian carpet on the floor and hippie-type lighting. I remember one party when I was out there with him and about twelve other friends and I counted eleven joints in a row that were trotted out by one person or another. It was just mind surfing.
Laird Grant: Alan Trist was living right around the corner. He was halfway between the Chateau and Kesey’s. Right on the corner in this Spanish-style house that his dad had gotten when they came from England.
Alan Trist: Kesey may have finished the writing program at Stanford, but he was still hanging out in that area and he had a lot of parties in his little cabin back there on Perry Lane, which backed on to my house. We knew this was going on but we hadn’t met any of these people. One night, Jerry and Hunter and maybe Laird and I decided to crash one of these parties and I remember we were thrown out on our ear. It was so funny, man. Because we were kids. The real connection didn’t happen until many years later in La Honda. Still, we managed to make some sort of rebellious reputation for ourselves at an early age. Sometimes, we were walking around stoned. I remember at one point, we managed to buy a lid of grass for five or ten bucks which actually came in a matchbox in those days. Because my parents were away, we all went out to my house to smoke this lid. Jerry, Bobby Petersen, Laird, Hunter, Phil Lesh, Willie Legate. I forget who else but we smoked up this lid and we got very stoned because we were young people whose systems were quite open. And we designed this fantasy of how we would like to be, where we would like to take all this beat stuff and the art, and where we would like to go with it. We designed an ideal habitation which was very influenced by the Chateau. We took the Chateau as a model and expanded it. We said, “What we need is a large central house with a kitchen with a refrigerator full of beer.” Which is what old Frank had there. It was his beer. We weren’t allowed to touch it, actually. We all would have our individual cabins spread around these large grounds. We imagined acreage. Then we would have the ability to get on with our own things because we were aware that this one was a musician and he was a writer and someone else was a painter. We wanted to come together but we wanted to have our privacy, too. I’ve never forgotten that particular session because it was a model. The dream of the hippie commune. But right then we had already taken care of the problems which communes would have. Which was the lack of ability to get away from it. We designed it right from the beginning so that wouldn’t happen.
Barbara Meier: My parents were alcoholics. I had a lot of trouble with them. I was really bummed about this and Jerry once went and got one of those little books of Buddhist sayings and came back and read it aloud to me and I got it. I’d previously read in Kerouac about Buddhism but Jerry brought it home to me and made it more alive for me. Even now I have the sense of him as being an incorrigible Buddha. Because I was having a difficult time living with my parents, I moved to San Francisco at the age of sixteen to live with my aunt for the summer. I went to the Art Institute and that was also Jerry’s trip. He was the one who said, “You have to go there. This is what you need to do. Go there.” He pointed me in that direction. Jerry used to say that he and I invented each other. In the sense that I gave him his first acoustic guitar and he steered me toward Buddhism and painting, it’s true.
Laird Grant: Me and this kid got drunk and decided to take a car from Monterey to the highway so that we could hitchhike to Mexico, but we never managed to get out of town. They’d busted me before I was eighteen so I went into Juvie. When I was in Juvie, Jerry got into that horrible automobile accident. I was in the Salinas Boys Home when that happened. Some people at Juvie got in touch with me because Paul Speegle was a friend of mine. He’d been in school with me and Jerry both at Menlo Oaks.
Alan Trist: There was Jerry and I and Paul Speegle and Lee, the driver, in the car. Paul was somebody that I had just met and he was tremendously important in our scene. Talk about living theater or street theater. This was a guy with long hair who wore amazing clothes. He made jewelry and incredible paintings, one of which, “The Blind Prophet,” used to hang in the Dead’s studio in the eighties. He was our age and he did all this stuff and he was a theatrical person and he was really living out what we were raving about verbally. He was more extreme than us.
Laird Grant: They were coming back from a party and Lee, who was driving, was saying, “Oh well, we got to get to such and such at a certain time.” More than likely, it was to another bottle shop.
Alan Trist: That evening, we’d played a game of charades at the Chateau. I remember Jerry opposed Paul and me. Paul was dressed up in a big cloak and so was I. We were putting on costumes now. We had never done this sort of stuff until Paul turned up. Paul and I and Jerry were playing a game of death. And then we took off to take Paul home. It was Paul and me in the back and Jerry was in the front seat. Lee, as always, had drunk a little too much, as we all had, and the car went off the road. It was a Studebaker Hawk, a car way ahead of its time with two doors, but it didn’t have seat belts in there.
Laird Grant: Lee had this Studebaker Golden Hawk and he brought it on up to—They were doing well over a hundred. The last words that anybody can remember was Paul saying, “Wow, this is really beautiful,” and over she went.
Alan Trist: Before it happened, we were going a hundred. Easy. I felt the car fishtail. Then we rolled and cartwheeled into a field. All four of us were thrown out of the car. Those in the back seats went through the front doors. Paul was unlucky. Unfortunately, the car got Paul and not the rest of us. Jerry broke his collarbone. All his life he had problems with it. It was interesting how he held that guitar. I had a compressed fracture of the back, which has always troubled me but not too extremely. The way we talked about it wasn’t so much like “I got away with it” or “I was spared.” It was more, “Look what happened to Paul.” This gem of a person. Why was he gone from our lives? That was the significance of this. Hunter was right in on this, too. He’d left the party about the same time in his old car, the ambulance passed him on the road, and he sensed it was to do with us. There was a psychic concentration that evening. This was when we were all coming into adult life. It had a profound effect on Jerry. It made him aware of life’s fragility. Of how things could be taken away.
Laird Grant: Paul was the only one killed. But they all got thrown out. Alan got his back crunched. Jerry broke his shoulder, I think. Lee got his gut sliced open on the door when he went out of it. The car landed on top of Paul. Broke every bone in his body except his hands. Prophetic stuff here, you know?
Barbara Meier: That summer, John the Cool and Jerry and someone else lived in a hotel room on McAllister Street in San Francisco. I was working as a model for Joseph Magnin so I used to go hang out with them and give them money. Rent money, food money, cigarette money. That was a crazy scene. A lot of raving around San Francisco. I moved back to Menlo Park to do my junior year in high school and they moved back too. Sometime in October of that year, I was at a party at the Chateau and there were these girls in the kitchen where Jerry was playing and they were dancing around and saying, “We love Jerry Garcia!” I went up to Hunter and just burst into tears. I said, “I can’t stand that. I’m in love with him.” He said, “You are? He’s in love with you and he’s been afraid to tell you all this time because he didn’t want to spoil everything.” He went up and he said, “Jerry, come here. I’ve got to talk to you.” Jerry said, “Are you kidding me? Are you telling me the truth?” Jerry came up to me and said, “I’ve been in love with you from the minute I met you.” That was it. That was it. That was it! I can’t remember anything after that. That was the end of my virginity.
Peter Albin: My older brother Rodney and I went down to Kepler’s Bookstore in Palo Alto to get Jerry. We had heard about the scene down there. Kepler’s was a much larger, college-oriented bookstore. It had a lot of textbooks, but it also had all sorts of Marxist magazines. It was definitely a leftist bookstore. There were a lot of radicals like Ira Sandperl in Palo Alto. There weren’t any radicals in Belmont and San Carlos, where we had gone to Carlmont High School with David Nelson. Kepler’s had a back room. If I remember correctly, the room was divided. One half had books about halfway up the wall. Then it had this area that had tables, chairs, and a coffee machine. It wasn’t a coffeehouse. It was just a reading area but some people like Garcia had taken it over and started bringing their instruments and playing.
David Nelson: There he was. This hairy guy in the summer playing a Stella twelve-string.
Peter Albin: I remember sitting around listening to Garcia play. He was playing Appalachian ballads and “Sitting on Top of the World.” Not too many blues things. Mostly old American folk songs. He was real good and we got the definite impression that he knew that he was real good. When we asked him to come up to play the Boar’s Head in San Carlos, it was like, “Why should I?” I don’t know if he said those exact words but the attitude was like, “What’s in it for me?”
Tom Constanten: He looked like Cesar Romero and he sounded like the Limelighters. It was before the Prince Valiant look. And he sang songs like “Long Black Veil” and “Fennario.” At one of those wild party scenes, he did a version of “Mattie Groves” that silenced the party in awestruck wonder. He played songs like you would have found on the first couple of Joan Baez albums.
Marshall Leicester: In the summer of 1960, I came back from college and I walked into Kepler’s and saw this guy playing a twelve-string guitar. What I remember hearing is that song “Everybody Loves Saturday Night.” In general, the picking in those days was sort of somewhere between Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio. I asked to see his guitar and struck up a conversation and we discovered that we remembered each other from grade school in Menlo Park. I knew how to do a kind of Elizabeth Cotton pick that was a technical challenge to him. Once I showed him how to do it, he picked it up in nothing flat. We weren’t much in touch when we were three thousand miles apart but each summer, we’d immediately sort of take up where we’d left off.
Peter Albin: The Boar’s Head was no bigger than fifteen by twenty. People would gather on Friday and Saturday nights. We had a little stage with maybe a foot-high riser tucked in the corner. The place could hold no more than twenty-five people, but it was packed. It had chairs and tables and sometimes people would sit on the floor. It was an open-mike scene: two, three songs, pass the hat. Wasn’t hardly any money. I don’t think that Garcia was making any money at Kepler’s Bookstore either. We said to him, “You can have a lot of fun and there’s lots of young girls there. It’s a neat place. It’s small but there’s a dedicated audience.”
Suzy Wood: It seems to me there were a lot of women who would have liked very much to sleep with Jerry. I remember him looking into their eyes and saying, “Ho ho, I have a feeling I’ll see you again sometime.” Of course, people were having sex before marriage back then. It was just that nobody ever admitted it. That was the whole point. One of Jerry’s earlier girlfriends had this straight merchant father. Her parents were terribly respectable and she had to be terribly respectable and it would have been horrible bringing Jerry over to meet her mother because her mother would have just died.
Peter Albin: If I remember correctly, there weren’t a lot of people sitting around watching Garcia at Kepler’s. So he came up. He would come up every once in a while. It wasn’t like he was up there every weekend.
Suzy Wood: I remember the first time I played in public. I got through doing this sappy little set and Jerry said, “You’re going to be great. You’ve got that old fuck-you attitude.” When I play that one back, that was what Jerry had at the Boar’s Head. It wasn’t quite fuck-you. It was really being scared inside but also real confident at the same time. He had an air of intensity and professionalism, dedication, and concentration that was just more focused and intense than the other people who played there.
Marshall Leicester: He lived at my house for two or three weeks and we spent all our time together until my mother got upset. “Who is this freeloader?” she asked and I had to pass this on to Garcia. He was no problem at all but it was just too unconventional for them.
Barbara Meier: We had this exquisite time together until my father found out that I had in fact lost my virginity. I was living at home and things were just crazy. You couldn’t run off with the Grateful Dead in those years. Girls who got pregnant in the early sixties ended up in homes for unwed mothers. My father wore me down with his disapproval and made it absolutely impossible for me. For over a year, I had to have goofy guys from high school pick me up on “dates” and drop me off to see Jerry. We’d go to bed and then I’d have to go home at midnight. Ultimately, everything got way too crazy and Jerry and I broke up.
We had planned to get married when I turned eighteen and he turned twenty-one. All I ever wanted in my life was to paint and be a happy beatnik with Jerry Garcia. I would have been ecstatic if he had been playing in bars in San Jose and we had been living in a trailer court. It was about the fabulous way our minds interacted. I finally left him and he drank himself silly for three months. I guess I totally broke his heart. I was just a kid. It wasn’t as if he’d said, “Come live with me, baby. I’ll take care of you.” I was taking care of him financially.
It was horrible. By the time I realized, “Fuck it. Fuck my father. Fuck all of it. Fuck college. I want to be with this man,” it was too late. He’d already gotten Sara pregnant. So that was the end of that. I left town and went to the Art Institute, got my degree, and became a student of Suzuki Roshi’s at the Zen Center in San Francisco.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: It was funny. He was there all the time and I was there all the time but we didn’t meet for a long time. Our paths were crossing. Ira Sandperl was my mentor. I was a pacifist and a folk singer and a student at Stanford, hanging around with Ira a lot. I first saw Jerry at Kepler’s. I remember it very well. It was evening. He was there with Hunter and Nelson. I met the three of them all together. They were playing music. There were some tables and a little coffee bar. I would help Ira run the coffee bar sometimes and sit around with Joan Baez when she was in town—a lot of sitting around and drawing on napkins with our Rapidographs, a drawing pen you had to hold absolutely straight up to get the ink to come out. One night, these guys were there. After they played, Jer came to the coffee bar for coffee. I was eating a tangerine and I gave him some. We looked into each other’s eyes and smiled and I picked him. He was clearly the leader.
They were hanging out there and we all started hanging out together. They cracked me up. They were just so terribly clever. Witty, zany, and smart. A lot of the people I knew in college didn’t seem nearly so smart. I had also never known people my own age who were disconnected from their families. But Hunter and Jer lived up at the Chateau with this strange crew of what seemed to me like the Lost Boys. I’d heard about them before. When I was in high school, I’d heard there was something going on up in La Honda and something going on at this place called the Chateau. Whatever it was, my mother wouldn’t let me go. Instead, I would go up to San Francisco on the bus or on a train and hang out in North Beach, looking for the beatnik scene. We were all looking for it, wanting to be part of that.
Laird Grant: He was doing stuff with Sara and Hunter and Nelson at the Boar’s Head but also at the Palo Alto Peace Center. That was when we all got our names on the attorney general’s list for belonging to a subversive organization. The Peace Center. Obviously, if you were for peace, you were a Red in those days. I could never understand that. I still chuckle at it.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I think Jerry and I started singing together right away. We knew a couple of songs in common. They were playing bluegrass in Kepler’s and they were so good. They were so incredibly good. Then I learned from him about old-timey music. I’d been studying the Childe Ballads and the Folkways collections and wishing I had gone to a different school and studied folk art. I was living on campus and hating it. So this was exactly what I was looking for. I think I went home with them that first night. I had my roommate’s car, her little Mercury convertible, so I drove them home. Which was pretty classy. None of them had cars. In those days, it was dormitory sign-outs and strict rules as to when you had to be back in at night. One of those early nights together, I called my roommate on the hall phone and got her to sign me in. But somebody overheard it happening and the school sent out an all-points bulletin. The California Highway Patrol found me by morning. They actually came to the Chateau to get me and escorted me home. They said, “We know you haven’t done anything wrong but your parents are worried.”
As a pacifist and a folk singer, I guess I had been a little weird at Palo Alto High School. Joan Baez had gone there but she had graduated the year before I started. I hadn’t known her there but some of my friends knew her and her family from the Peninsula School. Jerry didn’t like her. He was jealous of her because her record had just come out. She was about to go on her first European tour and had asked me to come with her and be her companion because I’d been to Europe a lot and I knew how to travel there. She didn’t know her way around. This was right when I met Jerry. So I had to make a choice between them. He didn’t like her because she wasn’t a musical purist and he didn’t think she played very well. It just didn’t seem right that she should be on the cover of Time magazine and getting all this publicity. She had a record that was becoming successful and it just didn’t seem right. He said, “Ah, she picks her nose.” Like you had to be perfect in order to be successful?
Suzy Wood: No matter who was there in the daytime or the nighttime when Jerry was living in the Chateau, he would walk around the house with a guitar on. He would be so intent on what he was doing that he would come and stand in front of people the way you stand in front of somebody you’re going to have a conversation with. But he would be absolutely completely inside himself. He would make no response at all to the person he was standing in front of. He was inside himself playing. That used to be frustrating and odd for me. He would be standing this close to me. This person I knew. “How are you doing today?” And he wouldn’t say a word. His fingers would never stop moving. He was really inside himself with stuff going on inside his head and coming out of his fingers. My very clearest picture of Jerry is standing in front of him sitting in a chair at the Chateau playing guitar. Completely encased in himself.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: The scene at the Chateau was totally male. It was definitely a guys’ scene. Guys and music. That was why it felt like the Lost Boys. It never got cleaned. Maybe somebody like Hunter would take care of things now and then and do the dishes. Once a week.
Suzy Wood: Bob Hunter was such a crack-up. He was so anal that it just cracked me up. He and I were boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever the hell that was for a little while. His parents were going to come out from Connecticut. His father was a publisher. Bob was going to be a writer and Jerry just used to rag on Bob all the time saying, “We’re going to have this big pile of joints right here in the middle of the table and when your dad comes out, we’re going to offer him one.” He was waving his arms around and pointing at this imaginary pile of joints that was going to be on the table. Bob would be seething and all ticked off.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: In honor of our relationship, Jerry bought himself new underwear which was kind of thoughtful, I thought. Because these boys didn’t do much laundry either. He made the mistake of leaving this package of underwear in the living room. Of course, it disappeared. One of his buddies helped himself to it. Jerry was a lot bigger than any of them but that didn’t matter. New underwear was new underwear. He was very forgiving and tolerant of such behavior. He would have done the same thing.
Suzy Wood: I had a paper to write for San Francisco State and it was late. My school career was rapidly crumbling around me. I went down to the Chateau. Bob Hunter wanted to be a writer, so who better to go to when I was trying to figure out how to write a term paper? He said, “Here, take these,” and he gave me some Dexedrine. So I stayed up for three days and three nights on a couple of Dexedrines. Meanwhile, Jerry and I don’t know who else were in the kitchen divvying up some Romilar cough drops. I remember people calling drugstores and having these terribly ill grandparents and could they please deliver these Romilar cough tablets? I don’t know what it did for them because I didn’t take it. They also ate the little folded-up papers in the Vicks inhalers. I don’t know what that did for them, either. I was professional. I would only take Dexedrine for a purpose. I was writing a paper and those people were just getting fucked up. I remember them trying to figure out how to make a peanut butter sandwich. They had a loaf of French bread and a brand new jar of peanut butter. Figuring out how to cut the bread, figuring out where to insert the knife in a brand new jar of peanut butter, and how to get it on the bread in order to get it in their mouths must have taken forty-five minutes. I don’t know if they even ever got to that part. They were pretty loaded.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: We had kind of a whirlwind courtship. I was still at the dorm but I got kicked out of the college really quickly because of the all-points bulletin. I was a restless, rebellious kid. I remember that night I met Jerry, I had this sense of putting on some new piece of clothing and it just felt really—what would be the word? I was feeling wild and ready for action. And I got it.
David Nelson: Jerry said that he’d gotten a gig offer if we could get a band together. Pete Albin was getting together this College of San Mateo Folk Music Festival. So we put together the band for that. Me, Bob Hunter, and Jerry. Hunter was playing mandolin or bass. Doubling. At first, we didn’t even have a mandolin. The very first gig, it was bass, guitar, and banjo. We had all taught ourselves how to play. We used to slow records down or play with the same track on a record over and over again to learn things. We drilled a lot because we were paralyzed with stage fright. The first few times he played, Jerry had to have it on automatic.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: He lived for music. He’d be in a bad mood if he couldn’t practice for several hours a day. At this point, he was very ambitious. He wanted to do something big. But there wasn’t any show business niche for him.
Peter Albin: Jerry was always witty. Wry humor. “Hey man, hey, hey. What’re you doing, eh, eh, eh.” But I didn’t find him to be one of the friendlier guys in the world. He wasn’t, “Hey, Pete. How are you doing?” He was always, “Hey, hey man, hey.” He was cool. He was watching everybody but he was not quiet. He was very vocal. Jerry talks on that series done by the BBC and PBS, History of Rock ’n’ Roll. That was the way he talked then, too. Pretty much the same. I don’t think he really changed.
Suzy Wood: Jerry did seem older. He was separate to himself. You know how a lot of times people are kind of formless but what makes them who they are is the group they’re a part of? You pull any little piece out of it and they’re essentially a representative of the group. Jerry wasn’t like that. Jerry was the thing that groups formed around and a certain group formed around him when he and Marshall Leicester were together. Marsh was very very bright, and Jerry was very very bright and they had incredible amounts of fun aside from music.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Those guys had such keenly wry senses of humor. Those three. David Nelson, Hunter, and Jerry. The sidekicks. They loved each other a lot and played wonderful music together and shared a kind of an off-the-wall, quirky sensibility. I wasn’t good enough to play with the three of them. But we started doing old-timey music. I met Marshall and Suzy [Wood] Leicester. The four of us did some performances in places in the city like the Coffee Gallery or Coffee Cantata and we were quite well received. I threw myself into the study of these old tunes and just loved it. Jerry and I played at the Tangent in Palo Alto. We had a little duo.
Suzy Wood: Jerry took up with Sara. She was straight and darling and impressive as hell. She was a Stanford student and her dad was a pilot and my sense was that they were a cut or two above the general riffraff.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: We sang together and I played a little autoharp and my little rosewood Martin guitar. He played most of the instruments. We sang well together. We took turns. One of us would sing the verses and we’d join each other on the chorus. The surviving tape is really awful. It sounds like the Chipmunks. But we liked singing together, we were good at it, and people seemed to enjoy it. Remember that song, “Walk Right In” by the Rooftop Singers? That was popular then. We figured we could do something better than that. So that was our plan.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: I was just another folk guitar player when they had the hootenannies at the Tangent on Wednesday evenings. There was a back room there and people would get together and put a little bit of a trio or a duet together. “Hey, you want to play some stuff with me tonight?” “Sure. What are we going to play?” “Okay, let’s do this one.” “You want me to capo up and play it in a different key so we get two different guitar sounds?” “Yeah, okay, let’s go.” There was a lot of that going on. Just instant groups coming together and falling back apart again. At that point, Jerry was the best picker in town. Along with Jorma and a guy named Eric Thompson. Jerry was one of the hot pickers and David Nelson was one of the hot pickers.
Jorma Kaukonen: I think we all taught each other a lot. One of the really neat things about that period and I don’t know if this was a function of the period or just that we were younger and more open-minded but there was a lot of jamming and that doesn’t happen that much anymore. In those days, it happened almost all the time. In terms of who was the best player, keep in mind that as youngsters, we were all bad boys. I’m sure all of us thought we were the coolest thing in our external persona. Internally of course, it was, “God. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Even then, I think Jerry had that beatnik cutting edge. Because of his history. He never did like cops and he never did like the Army even though he was in it for a while. He was a good maze rat. It only took him one try to find that out. He learned that course real quickly. It didn’t take two tries for him.
David Nelson: At the College of San Mateo Folk Music Festival, Jerry did a three-part thing where he started out doing solo stuff from the old ballads. Then he got into the twenties and thirties with string band music. We’d be an old-time string band and play old stuff. Then, modern age. We played bluegrass in the third section. That was really a nice little display.
Peter Albin: We were all local folkies but he was a little bit higher on himself than the other people because he had more talent. He did and he knew it. When he first started playing banjo, he’d come up to you and say, “Hey, dig this,” and he’d play “Nola” on the five-string banjo. And he’d go faster like Roger Sprung. It was something you could never play. He was excellent but he put it in your face. He knew who did everything. He did his research. He did his homework. I don’t want to make him sound as if he was unfriendly and not willing to share things because he was. As a matter of fact, when I put on a folk music festival during this time at the College of San Mateo through the auspices of the Art Club, Jerry and his group played there. We also did a guitar workshop where he did finger picking and I did flat picking.
David Nelson: The thing about Jerry was that you could come up to him and ask him how to do something and he would show you, which was an incredible thing when you think back about those times. There wasn’t this free atmosphere of exchange. I remember asking him a few questions and he came and showed me in detail how to do certain finger-style things.
Peter Albin: The musicians respected him and the audience at the College of San Mateo show thought he was good. But God, he took so long to tune. It was like he went for like some sort of philosophical tuning. I remember my father who always came to these gigs said, “When is that guy going to stop tuning?” That was his major complaint after the gig. He said, “God, that guy Garcia. When is he going to learn how to tune that damn thing? He spent about like a half hour on that goddamn banjo tuning that fucking thing.” The audience would be getting restless and Jerry would be going, “Just a second, folks. You want me to play good here, I got to be in tune, blah, blah, blah.” He’d make some more clever remarks. “And now a Chinese song. ‘Too-Ning.’” That was the classic line during the sixties. Named after a city in China.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: There was a folk music festival in Monterey in the summer of ’63. Chris Strachwitz, who still owns Arhoolie Records, brought in old-timey people, the original guys who were still alive. I don’t know if Doc Watson was there but I think he brought Clarence Ashley. Clarence White may have come. I don’t know how we afforded the gas to get down there. I know that we didn’t have any food. We didn’t have any place to stay. We slept in the car. I was pregnant. It was just peanut butter and bread if we were lucky. Bob Dylan played there. Lots of things had been going on. Small performances and workshops. Connecting with some of the real seminal American folk music. Dylan did more of a performance in a big space. He came out by himself on stage and brought a little amplifier and plugged in his guitar. We were so outraged by the amp that we got up, walked down the center aisle to the stage, and marched off. It was like, “We are not going to be a part of this.” Amplified guitar? This wasn’t pure. For money, Jerry had played in a rock ’n’ roll band with Troy Weidenheimer. They played fraternity parties. What they had to put up with was awful. And in high school, Jerry had played on Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance?” But he didn’t consider that exactly worthy. What he really wanted was to play with Bill Monroe. That would be the pinnacle of success.
David Nelson: Hunter wasn’t really as dedicated as we were. He wasn’t ready to die for it like we were. We were insane. We were nuts for bluegrass. Back then, you couldn’t get this music in record stores. You had to know some real big-time collector. One lived up at Stanford. I think his father was a professor. We would go over there and pester him to play tapes for us because he had a collection like the Dead tape system now. People would give us copies and we’d trade tapes of different blue-grass gigs. So we’d actually get to hear the real thing. Not a studio slicked-up version. I remember going over there lots of times, sitting on that couch and listening to stuff. I would just never get tired of it. All these other guys were older than me. So when they decided that was enough, we had to go. I’d always be saying, “Oh, can we hear some more?” Jerry would say, “No. Don’t make him mad. Don’t piss him off, Nelson. Don’t wear out our welcome.” Because we wanted to be able to do that most any time. That was where I first heard the Stanley Brothers live and Flatt and Scruggs live and Clarence White, the guitar player. It was amazing.
Peter Albin: Garcia and Nelson and Hunter concentrated on heavy-duty bluegrass. Bob Hunter played well but he wasn’t your real ethnic type like you find at the music colleges. He wasn’t going to delve into exactly how those bass lines were played. He was a trumpet player. So he played simply.
David Nelson: We were the Wildwood Boys and that lasted about only a year at the most. Garcia had a disagreement with Hunter about were we going to get serious about bluegrass. I remember one practice when they were going back and forth and I was just stepping out of it. I think Garcia put it to him and said, “You’re really going to have to get serious or I’m going to have to get another mandolin player.” Bluegrass is a staunch kind of music. It’s not easy and if you don’t really dedicate yourself to it, you’ll never make it. They had sort of a falling out and Hunter just quit. So we went and found Sandy Rothman. There were these Berkeley people who played bluegrass. We went over to Sandy’s house one night and Sandy said he’d like to play with us but he played guitar and he didn’t want to make me not play guitar or anything. Garcia just talked me into it. He got an F12 and said, “You can do it. You can do it.” He put a mandolin in my hand and the next thing I knew, we were doing gigs and I was playing mandolin. I had a few weeks to get it together and then we were the Black Mountain Boys.
Sandy Rothman: These two guys came to Campbell Coe’s Campus Music Shop just off Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I seem to recall that Garcia pointed his finger at me and said, “Are you Sandy Rothman? We want you to be our new guitar player.” Really bold and confident and no question about it. Like it was going to happen. I started going down to Palo Alto by Greyhound bus with my guitar every weekend.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: The next time I saw Jerry was actually just before he got married. A couple of months before the wedding, he came up to the city with Sara. She was pregnant. So it was like, “We’re going to get married. We have to get married quick. Because it’ll start to show and people will talk and blah blah blah.”
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: It was Jerry’s idea that we get married. When I found out I was pregnant, he said, “I always wanted to be married!” Poor guy. We had no idea. No idea. We were babies.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: He went to my grandmother Tillie first. Because there was always somebody there at Tillie’s house. My grandmother called my mom. My mom went over and then I went over and we all met Sara at the same time.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: When we decided to get married, he told me his mother and his grandmother both lived in the city and I said, “We’ve got to go meet them. We’ve got to bring them to the wedding. We have to do that.” He had run away from home when he was sixteen or seventeen. Before that, he’d been pretty much raised by his grandmother, Tillie. Tillie was something else.
By the time I met her in the spring of ’63, she was starting to get senile and it really really upset him. But we went and found her and she was so happy to see him. And so thankful to me for bringing him. Coming out of there, he was shaking his head, saying, “Oh, she’s losing it.” It was so sad for him because he’d had a tough childhood. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to watch your father drown? Think about yourself at five. Your father is out fishing in his wading boots in the ocean and he gets swept away? You’re really conscious at five and full of fears. What a terrible loss.
Jerry talked to me about losing his finger. He talked about losing his father. Later on, when his mother and stepfather moved to Menlo Park, Jerry was miserable in suburbia. He didn’t fit in there. I think these were formative events. We don’t have a lot of memories from our childhood. The things that we remember, we do for a reason. They’re so full of meaning. The accident in which Paul Speegle was killed was another absolutely formative event. All these formative events in his life were difficult, tragic. Loss. Utter loss.
Jerry’s mother, Ruth, had really wanted Jerry to be a girl. She’d had a boy and she doted on him. Tiff was the favorite kid. Tiff was the star. When Jerry took me that same night to meet her in her little place in Diamond Heights, there was a photo on top of the TV. Tiff in his Marine suit with the gun. On top of the TV. She watched TV all the time. I loved that woman a lot but she and Jerry didn’t have a very good relationship.
His whole family came to the wedding. I was making an honest man out of him. We got married real quick. At the Unitarian Church in Palo Alto. By the Reverend Danforth K. Lyon. Or maybe it was K. Danforth Lyon. Jerry’s friends came to the party at Rickey’s on El Camino. He and Hunter and Nelson played bluegrass. They called it a shivaree.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: Jerry had a goatee. In fact, Jerry had a goatee in the ninth or tenth grade for Halloween. He had his goatee, he was all dapper, he played banjo, and he had his little band and they played for the wedding. He hadn’t come to my wedding. But I had a totally different kind of wedding. Quick, low-key, fffshp. He didn’t know. I’d already been married a year or two before I went to his. I knew a few people there. I knew Laird and Hunter. I was the working-class blue-collar guy. Sara was kind of the elite of the upper middle class. But I understood the scene. Because the same kind of scene was happening around some of the people I knew in the city. It was just in a different area and I didn’t know all the faces.
Suzy Wood: My father gave them an electric frying pan for a wedding present. And I remember thinking, “Oh God, this is too weird.”
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: We found this little hovel in Mountain View. A one-room cottage in back of a house. We had no car. Jerry was teaching at Dana Morgan’s Music but that depended on him getting from Mountain View to Palo Alto. We weren’t that far out of the fifties. He had this little goatee and greasy black hair. Carrying his guitars or with a guitar in one hand and a banjo in the other, he would hitchhike to Palo Alto. Oftentimes, he didn’t make it in time for his lessons. His students would show up for lessons and he wasn’t there.
Dexter Johnson: Jerry was my first guitar teacher. My mom got him for me by going to Dana Morgan’s, which was just blocks away. The teaching rooms were borderline tiny. A dumpy little place in the back with a phonograph and it was like, “Hey, Jerry teaches on Monday nights at seven or seven-thirty.” I went for my first lesson and I didn’t know what to expect. He said, “What do you want to learn? Bring whatever you want to learn.” He showed me a chord or two and the next week I brought a Kingston Trio and a Highwaymen record. That strumming thing. “Tom Dooley.” I was into that. His music at that time was more Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe. He actually threw aside the albums I brought. I was a little shocked when he did that. He didn’t do it in a way that made me feel bad. It was a little bit confusing but then again from my straight world, he was a confusing guy. I was in junior high school trying to be cool and he looked like a beatnik. His socks might not have matched or he might have been wearing high-top black tennis shoes which were completely uncool with no socks. I noticed his finger missing. This guy was definitely not trying to be in with the in-crowd. And that was interesting to me. He told me to listen to Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, and in blues, Lightnin’ Hopkins. So I went to this record store at Town & Country Shopping Center and they had booths where I could listen to these records. As soon as I heard that stuff, that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to make the guitar sound like that.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: He was a good teacher. A very good teacher. But making very little money at it. The person who’d lived in our room before us was one of those people who would take the change from their pocket and throw it on the floor. That was pretty much what we counted on for bridge money and cigarette money. Until it ran out, we were scrounging around under the furniture for pennies.
Dexter Johnson: He started teaching me “Wildwood Flower” and various forms of thumb picking. For six months, that was all we did. Then he started me finger picking. “Freight Train,” Elizabeth Cotton. He turned me on to Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers. I remember once coming to a lesson and he wasn’t there and on the music stand was a note: “Gone to New Lost City Ramblers concert in San Jose. See you next week.” Psychologically, he was interesting to me. Like, “God, I could just do what he’s doing.” It had never occurred to me that I didn’t have to grow up and get a job somewhere. He didn’t seem to have a job. He taught but he certainly didn’t go to the office. This was a novel plan for me. Maybe you could grow up and not go to the office. He never said, “Gee, I’m a Bohemian.” There was nothing but the music. But it was still in my kid’s mind. “How does this guy get away with not going to the office and looking the way he does?”
Sandy Rothman: Someone who grew up in Palo Alto told me about walking into Dana Morgan’s when Garcia was teaching there. Jerry was in between students when this young kid picked a guitar up off the wall. Like people always do in music stores, he started playing fast and furiously. Quickly, he then put the guitar back up on the wall. Garcia said, “What’s the matter? Run out of talent?”
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: We married in April and our daughter Heather was born in December. By then we lived in Palo Alto. We’d found a nice little studio apartment behind another house. We went to Stanford Hospital for the birth. Jerry came with me and was with me during the labor. They would make him leave for the procedures but he was there all day. I remember it was a Sunday. We read the Sunday paper. It was a long labor and when Heather was finally born, Jer was so cute. I remember they wheeled us out into the hall where he was waiting anxiously. He’d been pacing and smoking cigarettes and doing all the things he thought he needed to do as the expectant father. Either the nurse or I told him, “It’s a girl.” He jumped for joy. It was so sweet. He went leaping down the hall to his friends in the waiting room, saying, “It’s a broad! It’s a broad!” And then he went off to hear and play with Clarence White in L.A. The next week.
Suzy Wood: They had wedding present-y things around and it was attractive and nice. That was all Sara’s stuff and Jerry looked lost. He was teaching at Dana Morgan’s to make money. He was being the supportive husband and father and Sara was a Stanford student and being a mother and it was just all impressive as hell. Sara was impressive to me because she was holding all that together. And they were going to marriage counseling. He was trying real hard to do whatever it was that he was supposed to be doing.
David Nelson: As far as doing things, the marriage didn’t really change him because he went on that trip with Sandy. At the time, he was married. That just occurred to me now. I didn’t even think of it then or haven’t thought of it since. How did he get the wife to let him do that? The reason it didn’t occur to me was because I’d never been married. I didn’t know what it was like when the wife put the chain on you.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Heather was about four months old when Jerry left with Sandy on their trip. They were gone for a couple of months. It was a musician’s life. They were up late at night and out a lot and I’d lost interest in going to the gigs because of Heather. Jerry wouldn’t hold her when she was little. He was afraid he would drop her or hurt her. I have a photo of him taking off on the trip to go with Sandy. I forced him to hold her so I could take a picture and he has this scowl on his face. He never did handle emotional difficulties well. Me neither. But Heather heard music nonstop in those years. The first time she ever stood was by pulling herself up on a guitar case. That kind of says it all. Valiantly, Jer also tried to learn the fiddle when she was a baby. That was painful to be around. But she’s a violinist now.
Peter Rowan: A lot of cats from the West would go on this pilgrimage east. They’d drive for three days. We were all influenced by On the Road by Kerouac. It was like, “That’s what you do.” You get in the car and you drive and you go to Pennsylvania and then you have a meeting there of Jerry Garcia from California and David Grisman from New York who’d come to hear bluegrass in the only place where you could hear it.
David Grisman: This was before bluegrass festivals. There were what you would call country music parks. Little outdoor deals with a stage and some wooden plank bench seats and every Sunday, they would have shows there. Sometimes it would be Kitty Wells and Johnny and Jack and many Sundays, it would be bluegrass. Usually a double bill with somebody like Bill Monroe or Jim and Jesse or the Stanley Brothers. There were two such places near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. One was Sunset Park, which is in West Grove, Pennsylvania, and the other was New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, and they were probably less than thirty miles from each other. There were a lot of Amish people there in black vests and regular people from that area and then there’d be us. These people from the cities who had discovered this music. The parking lot was where the pickers hung out.
Sandy Rothman: How did it escape my attention that Jerry was leaving his wife with a four-month-old daughter without any notion of how long he was going to be gone? We went in Jerry’s white ’61 Corvair. The magic Corvair. What I called “the intrepid little beast.” I remember leaving from Sara and Jerry’s apartment in the afternoon. We went to this Payless store and bought boxes of seven-inch reel tapes to take with us and Jerry had his little Wollensak with him. We had our instruments and the car was full. I don’t think we had any clothes or food or anything like that but we had lots of tapes. Gas was cheap, like twenty-three cents a gallon. It was really a pilgrimage for the music because we went around and heard a lot of music and we filled up all those tapes with live shows that we collected from people taping back there and we taped a bunch ourselves. Later, Jerry said many times, “We were just like Deadheads are today.”
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: They’d gone off with the great hope of playing with Bill Monroe and it didn’t work out. I don’t know what we were going to do if he got a gig in Nashville. We didn’t do much anticipating. I was twenty and he was twenty-one. We were babies. Our plan was I would come out and meet him. Actually, we had planned on my going with him but that became unrealistic, partly because it would have meant leaving the house. We couldn’t pay the rent and leave. My dad was financing us. If I went to school, he would give us a hundred dollars a month. Jerry needed me to go to school because we needed the money. We thought maybe I should go out to Bloomington, Indiana, and transfer into ethnomusicology. That was another plan.
Sandy Rothman: We had this dream that was never verbalized: We could get a job playing with Bill Monroe. We went out to the Brown County Jamboree at Bean Blossom, just outside Bloomington, Indiana, on the first weekend of the season to watch Bill Monroe play. Before the show, Monroe was signing autographs and talking to people out in front of this barn door. We positioned ourselves right in his line of vision, about eight or ten feet away. We had our instrument cases standing upright and we were sort of leaning on them. We were too scared to say anything. We thought he was going to just take pity on us and come over and talk to us. But he never did.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: They came back. Around that time, jug band music started coming in. The Lovin’ Spoonful became a national phenomenon. We went to see them. Some of those people knew some of our people. They’d heard of each other and they were like rival gangs checking each other out. Zal Yanovksy looking Jerry over, Jerry acting cool.
Sandy Rothman: Jerry decided he wanted to get back to Sara. Recently, I asked Sara whether he ever called her in that approximately two-month period. She said, “Are you kidding?” But when he got ready to go back, I remember him talking about Sara all the time. “I gotta get back. I want to see Sara.” He told me later that he drove back without stopping except for gas. He didn’t sleep at all.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: They started getting interested in jug band music. Jug band music was wonderful. A major step towards rock ’n’ roll. Bluegrass is very heady. It’s very mathematical in its virtuosity. Jug band music is gutsy. Earthy. Jerry started playing it with David Nelson and Pigpen.
Sandy Rothman: After Jerry went back, I was at Bean Blossom again and Bill Monroe did come over and talk to me. He asked me what I was doing around there and he said he remembered me from California. A couple of weeks later, I ended up playing with him for the rest of that summer. Jerry and I never really talked about it. By the time I got back to the West Coast and checked in with Jerry, the jug band was reactivated.
Peter Albin: I can’t remember all the names of the various bands they had. In ’63 or ’64, there was some change when he went into the jug band music. I know that they played in what they called the Gallery Lounge at S.F. State as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Band.
David Nelson: We went over and saw the Jim Kweskin Jug Band live and then Dave Parker learned the real pattern stroke on the washboard. It was like the first time you learn three-finger picking. Where you’re picking up the beat with your thumb and you play the syncopated notes with your fingers. It’s something you have to walk through the first few times. You can’t know and understand it and just do it. He learned that and that turned the trick. We sounded like a jug band then.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Jerry loved to get up there on stage and play but it was a challenge. Can you pull this one off? He’d get an idea and pick up something. He’d want to give it a try. Would they be able to follow? But it was really a shared virtuosity. He was the king in some way. He couldn’t help it. He was a triple Leo. But really modest and self-effacing. Willing to share always but getting so pissed if he couldn’t get something right. That winter, he got hold of a record of Scott Joplin rags, which weren’t known in those days. They’d been lost but they were found and he listened to one. I think it was “Maple Leaf Rag.” He picked it out on the banjo. Can you imagine? Listening to it phrase by phrase and going over it and over it and over it again. What I’m aware of now is his incredible single-minded drive. My goal then was to just make him his coffee and see that he had his cigarettes and not bother him because he had this work he had to do. He would work on a single phrase for two days. Three days. Until he got it exactly right. I would love it when he got it right because he’d be pleased and happy for a moment and then he would go into the next one. He set high standards for himself and he would get in an absolute funk if he couldn’t get something just absolutely right. Or if somebody else messed up.
Marshall Leicester: The way he talked about Mother McCree was that it was nice to play for people. It was nice to be listened to and it was nice to be paid. Of course, that was not all that was going on. I’d say it was a coalition out of all the kinds of musicians that were available. Integrating all the various worlds that had built up around the Chateau and around the Peninsula in the course of those four or five years was also part of it. Even though the band wasn’t together very long, Mother McCree was really an important intermediary step and sort of a bridge between that old-time music and blues. Because it was so much looser than the rest of it. And I think that live energy was always important to him.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I talked about the Lost Boys. My fantasy was that my role was Wendy. Sewing on the buttons. It was an auxiliary role. Being a mom. I got into “the domestic arts” and tried to make a home. I learned how to cook cheaply and hand-sewed a quilt for the baby. Ever since he’d been a child, Jerry’d had asthma pretty bad. He told me once about his mom coming to visit him when he was sick. He must have been living at Tillie’s and he didn’t get to see his mom very often. And when she left, he remembered looking out the window and seeing her leave and then having this really scary asthma attack. He thought he was going to die. To me, there was a real connection in that. But he got over his asthma when we got together. In those early years, I always felt I was good for him, that he was destined for greatness, and that I had a role to play. To help him. I often got really anxious and really bitchy about him smoking grass because I did not want him spending our money on it. We had so little money. If I didn’t get over to Dana Morgan’s on the day when he got his paycheck, he would go off and spend it on grass. No doubt. And I didn’t like him getting silly. I was really a bitch about it until I took acid. I was the mother and I was the guardian of the family and anything that threatened that, which was most everything, I was against. I really went from being one of the guys and having fun with them to this other role a lot of the time. Being the cop and the caretaker. Kind of tapping my finger and waiting and telling him he was supposed to be home and that kind of stuff. Which fit his expectations of “the old lady.”
David Nelson: Bob Weir and a couple other young kids came over to Hamilton Street where I was living. They knew Pigpen because Pigpen was younger too. They showed up and started hanging around. I think we asked them, “Hey, you want to play jug? Here, you.” Weir was the most unabashed to give it a try. He was up there making fart noises. To play jug? What an offer. In a band? To go, “Uhh phoooo. Booooo.” And that was your instrument? Next thing you know, we had gigs and everything. Because of Pigpen being in it, that changed everything. Pigpen was remarkable. Jerry had introduced Pigpen to us about a year or two earlier at one of those Boar’s Head’s things at the Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. Pigpen was still Ron McKernan then and we were coming out of there and everybody was milling around. The usual thing was to decide where we’d go to party. Suzy Wood’s house was not available that night and people were arguing about where they were going to go. Ron McKernan made some remark and Sherry Huddleston turned around and said, “Oh, Pigpen!” It just clicked. Everybody howled and turned around and went, “Pigpen!” Referring to Pigpen in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts cartoon strip, which was a very very popular thing in the early sixties. Pigpen the comic strip character had long hair and he was a mess. It was just a momentary gag. But I remember Pete Albin saying to me, “That’d be a great name for a performer, man. Pigpen, man. Like Blind Lemon Jefferson. Pigpen, you know?” And we all went, “Yes!” Him being in the jug band made it really legitimate beyond belief. In that respect, we had something more than the Kweskin Jug Band. We were able to do those blues and Pigpen did those harmonica parts exactly perfect. He didn’t copy it note for note. He had perfect feeling. We were playing jug band music and doing those rags and I thought of the name. Me and Hunter came up with Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: In Palo Alto, there was a club; actually it was a pizza parlor, called the Tangent. I had just moved to Palo Alto from upstate New York where I grew up. I was probably seventeen and a half, driving around Palo Alto on my bicycle when I heard this banjo music coming out of the top floor of the Tangent. I slammed on the brakes, pulled over, parked the bike, went inside, and there was this old bald guy making pizzas there. It was a scary kind of place, really funky, the windows had never been washed. It was hot in there and they had a little stage on the upstairs floor and I was listening to this banjo music floating down the stairs. This was the best banjo music I had ever heard. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. My ear was just going right up the stairs. I asked the guy behind the counter, “Who the heck is playing the banjo up there?” And he said, “Oh, that’s Garcia. He plays over here. He plays with the jug band and they’re going to be playing here in a couple of days and he’s just using the room to rehearse in.” I said, “Do you think he’d mind if I went up and had a look around?” And he said, “No, go ahead.” So I trotted up the really crusty old stairs and there was Jerry sitting on a stool in the middle of this dusty dark place, practicing the shit out of the banjo and just tearing through these unbelievable long runs, and what he was practicing was a song called “Nola.” He would rip through these long complex runs and then hit a bad note and stop, go back to the beginning, and start over. Then he looked up. He looked at me and I looked at him and I said, “Oh, just looking around.” There was no contact because he was rehearsing. I thought, “Pretty cute. Not bad.” I went back downstairs and the guy behind the counter leaned over and said, “What’d you think?” I said, “Gee, really interesting. When are they going to play here?” And he said, “Now, listen, honey. He’s married.” He could read the interest. I went back out and got on my bicycle and went away. I did come back for a show a few days later and absolutely loved it. That was Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions or one of the pretty early versions of it and it was my first look at the people who were to become my friends. But it was several years before I met any of them.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Jerry had very few role models for what it was to be a father or a husband. His grandmother Tillie had a husband at home. But she also had her boyfriends coming in and out and he thought that was normal. Tillie was the matriarch. She was the strong adult in his life. I didn’t find out until months after we split up that he had been running around. Had I known then, I would have killed him. I would have killed him! I still could kill him! We had no skills. No way to handle relational difficulties. There was no arguing. Jerry did not do emotional honesty or confrontation. I could make him mad and he’d be pissed but there wasn’t any exchange then.
David Nelson: The jug band became a regular working band. A known band that would do parties. We got more gigs because people could dance to it. If you were playing bluegrass, it was this scholarly atmosphere where people were studying it. You were in a vacuum because you were a city person playing another kind of music. That was not your ethnic background. Even though jug band wasn’t either, it was related more to rock ’n’ roll. There’d been a conversation in Hamilton Street years before about, “Let’s do rock ’n’ roll. That would be a goof.” And everybody was like, “Yeah.” At a lot of parties, especially Pete Albin-related things, there’d be these howling doo-wop groups, impromptu stuff. But that idea got into our heads then and it came back out a couple years later with the jug band. The idea of, “Let’s just flat out go electric. Do rock ’n’ roll. Do the thing, you know?”
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I loved the jug band music. I really did. It was such fun. The Beatles’ first record in this country was in ’63. Or their first hit. At that time, we were dismissing them as a pop phenomenon. Lightweight.
David Nelson: Garcia was working at Dana Morgan’s and he called me up and said, “We’ve got to go down to St. Mike’s Alley now. They’re playing this group, the Beatles. They’ve got the album and I want you to check it out.” So we went and got coffee and sat there looking at each other listening on the sound system to the Beatles’ first album. The “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” album. After every song, we’d look at each other. I was going, “This is going to make me puke, man.” He said, “Oh no, give it a chance. Let’s listen with an open mind.” I said, “Okay, okay. I like rock ’n’ roll but I don’t think those British punks can play it, man. Do they know who Jimmy Reed is? Come on, man.” Garcia would say, “Calm down, man. They probably do, you know.” I’d say, “You can’t put it past me, man. I don’t hear no Jimmy Reed in that. I don’t hear no Hank Ballard and the Midnighters or Fats Domino.” Because I loved those people so much. I was angry that these British guys had come and now people were going to think that was it. Now people were going to think that that was where rhythm and blues was at. This pissed me off. He wanted a good perspective on it because I think he could sense that it was going to be big. The British invasion was coming.
After each song, it was like, “Pretty good. Good harmony. Like in the bluegrass band. Yeah, they do sing good harmony.” We finished the album and we both looked at each other and said, “Okay, what’s the verdict? What do you think?” And we both gave it the iffy sign. Not the okay sign. It was iffy. And we got up and left. I was thinking, “So that’s the story on the Beatles.”
A year later, the movie A Hard Day’s Night came out. A friend called me up and said, “You gotta see it, man. I think they smoke pot.” So I went to see it and I went, “Oh, my God! I think they do. They’re smoking it.” It hadn’t come above ground then and so anything about pot was like the cat that ate the canary. Any time you laughed, you’d cover your mouth because nobody knew what you were laughing about. Only we knew.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: When A Hard Day’s Night came out, we started changing our mind about the Beatles. They were a trip and there was something inspiring about these smart adorable talented guys our own age getting to make a movie about themselves being very silly. We could identify with that kind of irreverent off-the-wall zaniness. By the end of 1964 or in early 1965, we got turned on to acid. That changed everything. By the time Help came out, the Beatles and their music were part of big changes going up for a whole group of us. Sue Swanson and I saw Help about twelve times and memorized every line. Things were still very innocent in Palo Alto then. Taking acid and tripping out, we felt like we owned the sidewalks downtown. It was a sweet time.