Dark Star (8 page)

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.