The first time I ever met him was backstage at the Tangent, a coffeehouse in Palo Alto, in October, 1963. It was hoot night and he was somewhat of a local banjo hero, so I didn’t have that much interaction with him because he was warming up with his outfit, The Black Mountain Boys. At that point, he had bigger fish to fry.
The second time I met him was New Year’s Eve of 1964, and that was a whole different story. I was walking the back alleys of Palo Alto with a couple of friends, and we heard banjo music coming from the back room of Dana Morgan’s music store. We just knocked on the door and he invited us in. It was seven-thirty at night and I asked him, “What’s up?” and he said, “Well, I’m waiting for my students.”
I looked at my friend’s watch (I don’t think I had one at the time) and I said, “Well, Jerry, it’s seven-thirty on New Year’s Eve so I don’t know if any of them are going to be here.” That raised his eyebrows.
He asked us if we played instruments and we said yeah and he said, “Well, I got the keys to the front of the shop. You guys wanna kick some stuff around?” He clearly felt like playing so I said, “Hell, yeah.” There were three of us, all young folkies, and we went and got some instruments and had all kinds of fun for a few hours. As we broke it up, maybe because somebody had to get to a New Year’s Eve party, Jerry, who knew how to get gigs, said, “That was a lot of fun. Maybe we ought to get together and start a jug band, make a little money on the weekends.”
With Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, Dave Van Ronk, and what became The Lovin’ Spoonful, jug bands were the fad in the folk craze and real popular back then. Jug band music was early blues. These musicians were the same guys who played minstrel music on the riverboats and the blues in the night spots and street corners all along the chitlin’ circuit. I was sixteen, still a kid, and needless to say, the idea was impossibly attractive to me. I hitchhiked to rehearsals for what immediately became Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, though The Black Mountain Boys also continued to exist for a while.
In Mother McCree’s I played the jug, the washtub bass, and maybe a little guitar. Does it get any lower than that? Well, when I was working on a ranch, I shoveled a lot of stalls, and playing music was better than that. These are the jobs a kid gets.
Eventually, that band coalesced into The Warlocks. We went for about a year as Mother McCree’s and got popular enough that the gig money was better than what Jerry had been getting with The Black Mountain Boys. We became sort of the toast of the town on the folk circuit.
That summer, 1964, Jerry wanted to take a sabbatical and go catch some fiddler conventions. At this point, he was with Sara and they had a newborn kid, but he traveled all over the South and saw Bill Monroe and a bunch of those guys. While he was gone, he had me teach his beginning and intermediate guitar and banjo students. Did I know enough to teach? I knew enough to bullshit. By then I was making headway playing guitar, and I spent a lot of time dodging school so I could play, which got me kicked out of the California public school system. Because I am dyslexic in the extreme, I couldn’t read music, but since Jerry wasn’t teaching his students how to read either, I was okay as his replacement. What we were teaching was folk music, and we were bringing our students into the folk process. They learned it eagerly.
In early 1965, The Warlocks got started. With Mother McCree’s, it had been just the music. With The Warlocks, Pigpen was kind of the showman. He was singing half the leads, and Jerry and I took the other ones. I was the kid in the band—and I still am—and there were often times when Jerry had to come to my defense. He was protective of me because I was basically his little brother. As in any family, a raft of horseshit gets dished out to the younger brother. I was used to this. My musical skills were not as advanced as the older guys’, but I knew I had some sort of talent, and Jerry gently horsewhipped me with that. That said, the band was my mentor, as it was to the other guys.
Then came Mickey. One of the pleasing things about Mick back then was that he was so not California. As Mickey today is so not this planet. He managed much better than most New Yorkers to assimilate to the California lifestyle. California chews up and spits out New Yorkers just like New York does Californians. Jerry himself was way more California than you would think. He did have that cynical beatnik thing in the beginning, but that was California. He was certainly not Mr. Mellow.
Was Jerry the sun around which we all revolved in the Dead? No. Not to any of our minds. He wasn’t regarded that way by the other band members. We were all brothers and he was the biggest brother. We all listened to him when he had something to say, but if we disagreed, we disagreed. It was a free-for-all. When he did have something to say, it was not that he was persuasive, it was his clarity that was persuasive. Everybody saw the picture. And sometimes we didn’t. And sometimes he was wrong. We were all wrong about a lot of stuff. He was outspoken about pretty much everything, even the stuff he wasn’t clear on, but he was always the first to admit, “You know, we can’t make this decision now.” Or at least that he couldn’t.
Jerry was only fifty-three when he died. I am older than that now, but he looked a lot older then. Was it the drugs that killed him? I think it was the burgers and pizza. The drugs enabled him, but it was the whole lifestyle. The drugs didn’t stop his heart. It was the fat. And the sleep apnea. I’m quite certain he died of sleep apnea. If you’d ever been around him when he was sleeping, you’d see him snore and wake up suddenly. Flying out on a tour, we would have most of the first-class section, Jerry would be sawing away, I’d be sitting next to him, and the stewardess would come up in a panic because the people around us were freaking and she would say, “You’ve got to get your friend to shut down that goddamn chainsaw.” I would gently twist his head the other way, and usually he would keep sleeping. In his case, the sleep apnea was a component of being overweight. And with apnea, your heart stops when you’re asleep.
I heard he was dead while I was on tour with the early version of Rat-Dog. I’d woken up early that morning from a dream that I still remember quite clearly. In the dream, I was backstage at some club, and on a shelf I had discovered a can of invisible paint. Dressed in Castilian splendor, Jerry came in through the back door. His hair was black again and he was wearing a blue-black velvet cape. I couldn’t get him interested in the inviso-paint, something he would normally have reveled in. He seemed completely preoccupied. He just looked me deeply in the eye, and then he was gone. I think he was already dead. He had just checked out. I went back to sleep, and then a couple of hours later, my sound man knocked on my door, came in, and said, “I want you to sit down. I’ve got some bad news for you.” And I went blank. My reaction was nothing. I went home for the funeral proceedings and then hit the road and stayed out there for as long as I could.
Jerry died in August, and I went to India with his widow in April to scatter his ashes. When I was over there, I became enthralled by one of the Hindu deities, Lord Ganesh. I had a couple of letters from people who had traveled in India, and one of them said Jerry was a manifestation of Lord Ganesh, whose major attribute is intelligence. Piercing intelligence. He has all these arms and one holds a little axe, which symbolizes intelligence and enables him to cleave to the truth. The gods all live within us. Jerry just had a heaping helping of that one.
The story about scattering the ashes was that Jerry had this river that he would talk about whenever he was waxing whimsical. It was a mythical place for him. And one morning between dreams and waking, I saw the river. And I knew it was the river he had always been talking about. I don’t know where it came from. But when we went to India to scatter his ashes, that was the river. The Ganges.
Is he gone from our culture? He’s not gone! Because when I’m onstage, I can hear him. I can hear his guitar. I can hear the overtone series. I can feel him saying, “Nah, don’t go there. Yeah, go there.” It’s the same thing that always used to go on telepathically between us when we were on stage. Or, it could be abnormal psychology. But after spending thirty years living in each other’s hearts and souls, not to mention brains and minds, he is immortal to me.
Was he an American original? He was a world original. One of a kind. Although I distrust pride and take a dim view of it, America can be proud of him. He had such an American childhood. And he was self-created. He created the culture as he was a part of it. Because the man was an artist, and nothing but. Jerry was my dearest friend. He was also my big brother.
Bob Weir
July, 2008