Dark Star (10 page)

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
Neal Cassady was a figure who'd sort of appear now and then, take whatever he could find in the medicine cabinet, bend everybody's minds, and disappear. The Martian policeman.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
I loved Neal, man. He was fabulous. He was always willing to have a toke. He'd say, “I been smoking this shit for fifty years. Still gets me high.”

Jerry Garcia (1988):
We loved Cassady. He was the guy, you know? The real thing. The Pranksters were learning from him and we were also learning from him. We were just that much younger. Neal was great. He was just unbelievable. There really has never been anything like him since. He was a true inspiration
.

Laird Grant:
Kesey moved to La Honda. At that point, everything really kicked into gear. When I look back now at the chronology and the time space that it happened in, there was so much stuff going on at some points, it seems like it had to have taken five years. But it was only a matter of eight to twelve months. Because of the madness. All of a sudden it just exploded. I still say it was the Stanford Research Institute's fault. They let something out the smokestack. All of us in Palo Alto got contaminated. You look at all the weird and talented people who came out of Palo Alto in comparison to any other town in the U.S., you go, “Wait a second. This is rather strange.”

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
I wasn't involved in the early Kesey stuff. Jerry went up to La Honda and from what I could tell, there was this kind of uneasy alliance. What we'd been doing before was very organic and elemental. Although we might not have spoken of it that way, there was this deeply spiritual aspect to it for us. When we took acid, we started listening to the Beatles. Dylan's first electric album came out right about then, too. We had been putting him down. But taking acid and listening to that album was incredible. So the resistance to amplified music waned. And there wasn't a huge market for jug bands.

By this time, we had a little house of our own on Bryant Court in downtown Palo Alto with a white picket fence and a garage out back. Jerry and I had a family scene with him going off to work at Dana Morgan's and practicing at home. Heather was walking and as she got older, she and Jerry enjoyed playing together, singing, and talking. I was a film major at Stanford by then and I had a social life of my own. I was hanging out with other filmmakers, making little movies. The jug band practiced out in the garage, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions.

When did we start going our separate ways? There was a theme running through our relationship from the start. Early on, I got preoccupied with pregnancy, motherhood, the family, making ends meet, that sense of responsibility. We didn't talk about what was bothering us. His real relationships were in the music, not his family. He had this drive to succeed.

Sue Swanson:
I went to Menlo-Atherton High School and in my junior year, Bob Weir walked into my world history class. I knew Wendy, his sister, forever and I'd always heard about her weird brother, Bob. But I'd never met him and then this guy walked into the classroom. This was after the first Beatles' summer and so I was totally into anybody who was into music or long hair and of course Bob was so cute. He overheard me and my friend Sue Ashcroft talking about the Beatles' concert and how my friend Connie and I had gotten in the garage of their hotel. Weir went, “Are you talking about the Beatles?” That was the first thing he ever said to me. We started talking and he told me that he had this band he was in. At that point, it was Mother McCree's.

Justin Kreutzmann:
My dad told me he didn't even see the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Band. He was just into rock 'n' roll. He played in bands that wore red jackets and did “At the Hop” and the first time he ever played in public was at a party and they did “Johnny B. Goode.” He realized that everybody at the party was dancing and that was when he decided that this would probably be a good thing to do. He was the rock 'n' roll element and Jerry had the bluegrass and Phil had the orchestrated stuff and Weir had probably a little of everything strange mixed into it. I think Weir's probably a folkie more than anything else.

Dexter Johnson:
Weir came and subbed for Jerry during a lesson once. He didn't seem like a man to me. He didn't have a beard, he was clean cut, and he was younger than Jerry. I was probably fifteen and he was seventeen. He wanted to show me some electric stuff. That was not what I wanted to learn. I said, “Well, that's not what we were working on, you know.” He said, “Well, what are you doing?” If I'm not mistaken, I played “Spike Driver Blues” by Mississippi John Hurt. He just flipped. It was like, “Wow, man. How do you do that?” He wanted me to show it to him. He said, “So what else is Jerry showing you?” Of course I was disappointed. I'd come to learn, not to show. But I showed him how to play it. Then I stopped taking lessons for a month until Jerry came back.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
I'd be out for a couple of months in the Merchant Marine. I'd come back and I'd hear, “Jerry's doing this. They're playing this place with these guys.” Sometimes I'd go down and help him
schlep
their equipment around. They would go try these different coffeehouses in the city. They'd go around and audition and I'd end up talking to the manager or the bartender and they'd be saying, “These guys dress any better?” And I'd say, “Shit, I don't know. Maybe they have sweatshirts that match. They don't have any money. They're all real poor.” Starving artists, you know? They were slovenly. That was the trend at the time. This was pre-Warlocks. After the Warlocks, I seen them once or twice. Then I didn't see them again for a long time.

David Grisman:
I got them their first piece of national press in
Sing Out
magazine. I was living in Greenwich Village and going to NYU and I worked part-time for a guy named Israel G. Young who had a place called the Folklore Center. Izzy wrote a column called, I believe, “Frets and Frails” for
Sing Out
magazine, which was sort of a newsy, chatty thing. I came back from California and I told him about this band. I think I even mentioned Jerry. I was taken with the fact that it was like a rock band. It was becoming cool for folk people to get into rock 'n' roll because of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. We all dug on that and Bob Dylan.

Tom Constanten:
I saw one of the Warlocks' shows at the Inn Room in Redwood City. I think it was a bar in a hotel and I was one of about twelve people in the audience. Let me say charitably that the room could have held more. Jerry was no longer Cesar Romero but Prince Valiant doing “Roly-Poly,” “Do You Believe in Magic?,” and other songs like that. Did people listen? When there are twelve people, you can't tell. It seemed everybody was listening. It was like one of those Danish film festival theaters. When you're there and there are six or seven other people in the whole theater, you don't want to profess too much curiosity about everybody else.

David Grisman:
Jerry and those guys were beyond the music even then. They were a bunch of very hip guys. They were all reading
The Hobbit
and they were doing this communal living that opened my eyes. I dug the music because they were doing bluegrass songs. They were doing Bob Dylan. They were putting this roots music in the context of rock 'n' roll.

Dexter Johnson:
Now the Warlocks were happening. I remember seeing them at some dive over by the railroad tracks playing rhythm and blues. I also remember coming to Dana Morgan's one afternoon, not for a lesson, but to buy picks or strings and they were practicing and they were doing “Money.” “The best things in life are free....” I didn't think it was as good as the hit on the radio. I still listened to teenage radio and I was thinking, “Why would he do this?” Jerry could play that banjo so good and he played in those bluegrass bands and I'd gotten to love that. It just seemed bizarre to me that anybody would want to play that electric music if he could play the banjo and guitar and mandolin. I remember being really disappointed that he had any interest at all in playing the electric guitar.

David Nelson:
We all knew that he'd played electric guitar on Bobby Freeman's “Do You Wanna Dance?” Before any of this. Before the folk thing. Before anything. When he was in high school. In a real funky studio. If you listen to that recording, there are no drums. There are cardboard boxes. He was a kid from Balboa High. It was what he used to refer to as his “teenage hoodlum period.” When he got that first electric guitar from his mom in exchange for the accordion. He got that guitar and he was really happy with it and he told me that he just tuned it to one tuning. The solo actually sounds like it could be in that tuning because he said it wasn't until a couple months later when he found out how to really tune it. It's very primitive and it's very much that style of plunging out and jumping in with both feet first. The solo itself is basically two licks used very modestly. Very modestly.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
I first met Phil Lesh back at the Chateau when he was a music student. He was this madman coming in with these musical scores where there were great slashes of music going down the paper and all over. He was just so wildly excited about avant garde music, which didn't seem to have anything to do with what Jerry was doing. Jerry could share his enthusiasm for some of it but it wasn't his thing.

Peter Albin:
Lesh lived down the street with a friend of my brother. I'd go over there and I'd see these charts that Lesh had written. I couldn't believe this weird shit. Like a symphony for fifty guitars. They were all circular. It was a circular chart. A bizarre-looking thing. How do you read this?

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
I remember going to a couple rehearsals of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Various publications have listed me as a member of that band but I never was. I was at the Warlocks' first gig at the pizza parlor at Magoo's. This was when they finally got all their shit together. I think they rehearsed in Dana's for the first one and then they got this gig at Magoo's. The thing about Dana was that he had all the stuff to play on so they let him be the bass player. He couldn't play bass for shit, man. They gave him the best break possible and he just couldn't do it.

Sue Swanson:
I drove Jerry up to the city the day that he went to find Phil to get him to play in the band. We went up in my car. It just wasn't working with Dana Morgan playing bass. When they fired Dana from the band, it was tough. Jerry's guitar was from Dana Morgan's Music. So all of a sudden, he didn't have an ax. I remember him and his wife Sara sitting there trying to figure it out. “We've got two hundred dollars in the bank. How much is this ax? Maybe I can borrow money from my mom....” I'm not sure how but Jerry got the guitar. It was a lousy place to rehearse anyway. The whole room was instruments. There were cymbals all over the place. When they played there, everything played right back at them.

Marshall Leicester:
In terms of forming the Warlocks, I especially remember Lesh as being the decisive force in that. It was not so much Lesh himself, although Phil was obviously extremely important, but the moves that got Dana Morgan out of the band. That was the moment at which something which was partly being done as a concession to grownup bourgeois life and the need to make money and all the rest of it turned into the possibility of making something greater. Dana was their original bass player. And when Lesh came along, it was a great deal more than a question of just replacing one musician with a better musician. Because Jerry took a real leap there. I remember some of us chicken bourgeois types being afraid he'd lose his job at Morgan's by firing his boss's son. But Lesh was adamant about that. I think some of us went to Phil at one point and said, “Would you back off a little? We're worried about whether Jerry's going to be able to survive.” And Lesh said, “No way. I've waited too long for this.” Phil was really ambitious and could be really hard-nosed in a way that was always difficult for Jerry. Yet what often looked like a kind of narcissism on Jerry's part was in fact him being more intense and in a certain way much more ruthless than others. I heard people say that you hadn't been dropped until you'd been dropped by Garcia. When you became no longer of interest to him because he was moving in a different direction.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
So Phil came down and now the scene shifted to Guitars Unlimited in Menlo Park. Dana Morgan's was no longer part of the scene. Now Jerry was teaching at Guitars Unlimited. Phil came down one day and I got to meet Phil. They were in the back room at Dana's and they said, “Here, Phil, here's a bass.” And Phil said, “What do I do with it?” And I said, “This is the A string, this is the E string and you get to make the E string be the same as the A string by pushing on the fifth fret and then the same tone. The basic beat is boom boom, boom boom and then you need to go up to here, boom boom, boom boom.” I just showed him which string was which and where an E was on the A string. He picked up on that right away.

Jerry Garcia (1988):
We were stoned on acid the first time we walked into one of the Family Dog's first shows at Longshoreman's Hall when they had the Lovin' Spoonful. We went in there and looked around and Phil went up to Luria Castel and said, “Lady, what this little séance needs is us.” We thought, “Yeah. We should be here. Hell, yeah. You kiddin'?” It was obvious
.

Sue Swanson:
The first time I ever got high was when the Lovin' Spoonful played Longshoreman's Hall. Garcia put the sugar cube under my tongue and said, “In half an hour, you won't believe your eyes.” We went somewhere in Larkspur, a place I'll never find again, and then we ended up going back to Longshoreman's Hall to see the Lovin' Spoonful.