Dark Star (7 page)

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.