Night Beat (57 page)

no simple highway: the story of jerry garcia & the grateful dead

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone
FROM “RIPPLE,”
ROBERT HUNTER AND JERRY GARCIA

H
e was the unlikeliest of pop stars, and the most reticent of cultural icons.

Onstage, he wore plain clothes—usually a sacklike T-shirt and loose jeans, to fit his heavy frame—and he rarely spoke to the audience that watched his every move. Even his guitar lines—complex, lovely, rhapsodic, but never flashy—as well as his strained, weatherworn vocal style had a subdued, colloquial quality about them. Offstage, he kept to family and friends, and when he sat to talk with interviewers about his remarkable music, he often did so in sly-witted, self-deprecating ways. “I feel like I’m stumbling along,” he said once, “and a lot of people are watching me or stumbling along with me or allowing me to stumble for them.” It was as if Jerry Garcia—who, as the lead guitarist and singer of the Grateful Dead, lived at the center of one of popular culture’s most extraordinary epic adventures—was bemused by the circumstances of his own re-nown.

And yet, when he died on August 9, 1995, a week after his fifty-third birthday, at a rehabilitation clinic in Forest Knolls, California, the news of his death set off immense waves of emotional reaction. Politicians, newscasters, poets, and artists eulogized the late guitarist throughout the day and night; fans of all ages gathered spontaneously in parks around the nation; and in the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury—the neighborhood where the Grateful Dead lived at the height of the hippie epoch—mourners assembled by the thousands, singing songs, building makeshift altars, consoling one another, and jamming the streets for blocks around. Across town, at San Francisco City Hall, a tie-dyed flag was flown on the middle flagpole, and the surrounding flags were lowered to half mast. It was a fitting gesture from a civic government that had once feared the movement that the Grateful Dead represented, and that now acknowledged the band’s pilgrimage across the last thirty years to be one of the most notable chapters in the city’s modern history.

Chances are Garcia himself would have been embarrassed, maybe even repelled, by all the commotion. He wasn’t much given to mythologizing his own reputation. In some of his closing words in his last interview in
Rolling Stone,
in 1993, he said: “I’m hoping to leave a clean field—nothing, not a thing. I’m hoping they burn it all with me. . . . I’d rather have my immortality here while I’m alive. I don’t care if it lasts beyond me at all. I’d just as soon it didn’t.”

Garcia’s fans and friends, of course, feel differently. “I think that Garcia was a real avatar,” says John Perry Barlow, who knew the late guitarist since 1967, and has co-written many of the Grateful Dead’s songs with Bob Weir. “Jerry was one of those manifestations of the energy of his times, one of those people who ends up making the history books. He wrapped up in himself a whole set of characteristics and qualities that was very appropriate to a certain cultural vector in the latter part of the twentieth century: freedom from judgment, playfulness of intellect, complete improvisation, anti-authoritarianism, self-indulgence, and aesthetic development. I mean, he was truly extraordinary. And he never really saw it himself, or could feel it himself. He could only see its effect on other people, which baffled and dismayed him.

“It made me sad to see that, because I wanted him to be able to appreciate, in some detached way, his own marvel. There was nothing that Garcia liked better than something that was really diverting, and interesting, and lively and fascinating. You know, anything that he would refer to as a ’fat trip,’ which was his term for that sort of thing. And he wasn’t really able to appreciate himself, which was a pity, because, believe me, Jerry was the fattest trip of all. About the most he would say for himself was that he was a competent musician. But he would say
that.
I remember one time he started experimenting with MIDI—he was using all these MIDI sampled trumpet sounds. And he started playing that on his guitar, and he sounded like Miles Davis, only better. I went up to him, the first time I ever heard him do it, and I said: ’You could have been a great fucking trumpet player.’ And he looked at me and said: “I
am
a great fucking trumpet player.’ So, he knew.”

JEROME JOHN GARCIA was born in 1942, in San Francisco’s Mission District. His father, a Spanish immigrant named Jose “Joe” Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland band leader in the 1930s, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while on a fishing trip, Jerry saw his father swept to his death in a California river. “I never saw him play with his band,” Garcia told
Rolling Stone
in 1991, “but I remember him playing me to sleep at night. I just barely remember the sound of it.”

After his father’s death, Garcia spent a few years living with his mother’s parents, in one of San Francisco’s working-class districts. His grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts on Saturday nights, and it was in those hours, Garcia would later say, that he developed his fondness for country music forms—particularly the deft, blues-inflected mandolin playing and mournful, high-lonesome vocal style of bluegrass’s principal founder, Bill Monroe. When Garcia was ten, his mother, Ruth, brought him to live with her at a sailor’s hotel and bar that she ran near the city’s waterfront. He spent much of his childhood there, listening to the boozy, fanciful stories that the hotel’s old tenants told, or sitting alone, reading Disney and horror comics, and poring through science-fiction novels.

When Garcia was fifteen, his older brother, Tiff—the same brother who, a few years earlier, had accidentally lopped off Jerry’s right-hand middle finger while the two were chopping wood—introduced him to early rock & roll and rhythm & blues music. Garcia was quickly drawn to the music’s funky rhythms and roughhewed textures, but what captivated him most was the lead-guitar sounds—especially the bluesy mellifluence of players like T-Bone Walker and Chuck Berry. It was otherworldly-sounding music, he later said, unlike anything he had heard before. Garcia decided he wanted to learn how to make those same sounds. He went to his mother and proclaimed that he wanted an electric guitar for his upcoming birthday. “Actually,” he later said, “she got me an
accordion,
and I went nuts.
Aggghhh, no, no, no!
I railed and raved, and she finally turned it in, and I got a pawn-shop electric guitar and an amplifier. I was just beside myself with joy.”

During this same period, the Beat scene was in full swing in the Bay Area, and it held great sway at the North Beach arts school where Garcia took some courses, and at the city’s coffeehouses, where he heard poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth read their venturesome works. “I was a high-school kid and a wanna-be beatnik!” he said in 1993. “Rock & roll at that time was
not
respectable. I mean, beatniks didn’t like rock & roll. . . . Rock & roll wasn’t cool, but I
loved
rock & roll. I used to have these fantasies about ’I want rock & roll to be like
respectable
music.’ I wanted it to be like
art. . . .
I used to try to think of ways to make that work. I wanted to do something that fit in with the art institute, that kind of self-conscious art—’art’ as opposed to ’popular culture.’ Back then, they didn’t even talk about popular culture—I mean, rock & roll was so
not legit,
you know? It was completely out of the picture. I don’t know what they thought it was, like white-trash music or kids’ music.”

By the early 1960s, Garcia was living in Palo Alto, hanging out and playing in the folk music clubs around Stanford University. He was also working part time at Dana Morgan’s Music Store, where he met several of the musicians that would eventually dominate the San Francisco music scene. In 1963, Garcia formed a jug band, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Its line-up included a young folk guitarist named Bob Weir and a blues aficionado, Ron McKernan, known to his friends as “Pigpen” for his often unkempt appearance. The group played a mix of blues, country, and folk, and Pigpen became the front man, singing Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins tunes.

Then, in February 1964, the Beatles made their historic appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show,” and virtually overnight youth culture was imbued with a new spirit and sense of identity. Garcia understood the group’s promise after seeing their first film,
A Hard Day’s Night!
For the first time since Elvis Presley—and the first time for an audience that had largely rejected contemporary rock & roll as seeming too trivial and inconsequential—pop music could be seen to hold bold, significant, and thoroughly exhilarating possibilities that even the ultra-serious, socially aware folk scene could not offer. This became even more apparent a year later, when Bob Dylan—who had been the folk scene’s reigning hero—played an assailing set of his defiant new electric music at the Newport Folk Festival. As a result, the folky purism of Mother McCree’s all-acoustic format began to seem rather limited and uninteresting to Garcia and many of the other band members, and before long, the ensemble was transformed into an electric unit, the Warlocks. A couple of the jug band members dropped out, and two new musicians joined: Bill Kreutzmann, who worked at Dana Morgan’s Music Store, on drums, and on bass, a classically trained musician named Phil Lesh, who, like Garcia, had been radicalized by the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. “We had big ideas,” Garcia told
Rolling Stone
in 1993. “I mean, as far as we were concerned, we were going to be the next Beatles or something—we were on a trip, definitely. We had enough of that kind of crazy faith in ourselves. . . . The first time we played in public, we had a huge crowd of people from the local high school, and they went fuckin’
nuts!
The next time we played, it was packed to the rafters. It was a pizza place. We said, ’Hey, can we play in here on Wednesday night? We won’t bother anybody. Just let us set up in the corner.’ It was
pandemonium,
immediately.”

It was around this time that Garcia and some of the group’s other members also began an experimentation with drugs that would forever transform the nature of the band’s story. Certainly, this wasn’t the first time drugs had been used in music for artistic inspiration, or had found their way into an American cultural movement. Many jazz and blues artists (not to mention several country-western players) had been using marijuana and various narcotics to intensify their music-making for several decades, and in the ’50s the Beats had extolled marijuana as an assertion of their nonconformism. But the drugs that began cropping up in the youth and music scenes in the mid-1960s were of a much different, more exotic, sort. Veterans Hospital near Stanford University had been the site of government-sanctioned experiments with LSD—a drug that induced hallucinations in those who ingested it, and that, for many, also inspired something remarkably close to the patterns of religious experience. Among those who had taken the drug at Veterans Hospital were Robert Hunter, a folk singer and poet who would later become Garcia’s songwriting partner, and Ken Kesey, author of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and
Sometimes a Great Notion.
Kesey had been working on an idea about group LSD experiments, and had started a makeshift gang of artists and rogues, called the Merry Pranksters, dedicated to this adventure. Kesey’s crew included a large number of intellectual dropouts like himself and eccentric rebels like Neal Cassady (the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
) and Carolyn Adams (later known as Mountain Girl, who eventually married Garcia and had two children with him).

The Pranksters had been holding parties at a house in the nearby town of La Honda, to see what would happen when people took LSD in a situation where there were no regulations or predetermined situations. At Kesey’s invitation, the Grateful Dead—as the Warlocks were now called—became the house band for these collective drug experiments, known as the Acid Tests. The Dead would play for hours as the Pranksters filmed the goings-on—everything from freak-outs to religious revelations to group sex. The Acid Tests were meant to be acts of cultural, spiritual, and psychic revolt, and their importance to the development of the Grateful Dead cannot be overestimated. The Dead’s music, Garcia later said, “had a real sense of proportion to the event”—which is to say that sometimes the group’s playing would seem to overshadow the event, and at other times, it would function as commentary or backdrop to the action of the event itself. Either way, the band did not see itself as the star of the party; if there were stars, they were formed from the union of the music and musicians with the audience and the spirit and shape of what was happening, from moment to moment—which meant that there was a blur between the performers, the event, and the audience.