So Many Roads (11 page)

Pigpen and Garcia had crossed paths already; they'd both logged time in a local ad hoc rock band, the Zodiacs, in which Garcia did his best to play bass guitar. Pigpen had also taken guitar lessons with Garcia at Morgan's store, and he appreciated Garcia's knowledge of the blues. With his affinity for roots music, Pigpen was a natural for the band that began crystallizing around Garcia, Weir, Matthews, and seemingly anyone in their vicinity during the early months of 1964. For
young guys who wanted to form a band whether or not they knew how to play an instrument, one option cried out: jug-band music, which was enjoying the briefest of vogues. To play this ribald younger sibling of folk music one needn't know how to play an instrument (kazoos and washboards were easy enough to master) or even the history of the music (how it originated in the South in the twenties). Here was party music: bawdy songs bashed out on everything from banjos and guitars to actual jugs. “It wasn't electric urban blues, but it was old-style urban blues,” Weir recalled. “Some of the jug bands were real good. Noah Lewis, the harmonica player, was phenomenal. There hasn't been another harmonica player who could do what he could do.”

After they'd bonded with Garcia at Morgan's on New Year's Eve, Weir and Matthews caught a Berkeley show by the leading jug ensemble of the moment, Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band. Both kids were so inspired that they decided they wanted to form their own combo, and the first person they told was Garcia. Now that they'd jammed with him, the two students would hitchhike over to the store on school mornings if they didn't have a first-period class. When they mentioned the jug idea Garcia, noodling as always on a banjo, looked up: “Without missing a beat, he said, ‘Good—I'm in!'” Matthews recalls. Given his connections and contacts with musicians in the Palo Alto area, it was only natural for Garcia to take charge of the nascent project. Garcia would play guitar and banjo, of course, and Pigpen would handle harmonica. Parker scoured junkyards and thrift stores, eventually finding a used washboard and strapping a kazoo atop it; for a while Matthews also handled washboard and kazoo duties.

Weir, the youngest and most eager of the lot, was especially intent on having a role in the band. “He was very persistent,” David Nelson, Garcia's bluegrass-band guitarist, later said to Hajdu. “He kind of barged his way into the jug band by saying, ‘C'mon, I want to play in this band.' We'd say, ‘Get out of here, kid.'” Almost as a way to
drive him away for good, someone suggested Weir play jug. (Garcia had asked Hunter to hold down that role, but Hunter couldn't attain the right tone and opted out.) The next day Weir appeared, bringing with him a wide array of jugs, clay and plastic, and asking everyone which one had the best tone. Weir settled on an empty plastic Clorox container, an improvement over an actual clay jug. “He just kept at it and kept at it when he didn't seem to have a chance,” said Nelson. “From the start it didn't seem like he knew how to do anything, but he just kept doing it. The kid had pluck.” The new band began practicing in a wooden garage behind Garcia's cottage on Hober Lane, where Weir showed up one day with a pile of old jazz and ragtime records—“Look at these!” he exclaimed. Pigpen also brought along a slew of records nabbed from his father's extensive collection, including jug-band recordings from decades before.

Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions—the name was courtesy of Nelson, although it would change from time to time—played the first of many shows at the Tangent about three weeks after Weir and Garcia had reconnected at Dana Morgan's. “We were putting on a party, and people would dance and stuff,” Weir recalled to Hajdu. “We owned the place, almost from the first night.” Over the next few months and a few dozen performances the band began attracting a loyal following; a local drummer, Bill Kreutzmann, saw them at the Tangent, sitting right up against the stage and mesmerized by Garcia—“I want to follow
that
guy, forever,” he said to himself. No one in the band considered jug music his first love, but it was a hoot to play, and a market existed, even in their part of the country. “As long as there was a living to be made or a buck to be made for us fledgling musicians,” Weir recalled, “we were more than happy to go into it and research it and come up with the stuff.”

In the spring of 1964 Mother McCree's temporarily shut down as Garcia made one last shot at fulfilling his dream of becoming a member
of a renowned bluegrass band, that of mandolin legend Bill Monroe. By then the Wildwood Boys had morphed into the Black Mountain Boys, and as summer approached, Garcia and the Boys' latest guitarist, Sandy Rothman, embarked on a road trip that took them as far south as Florida and north to Massachusetts. (In the interest of avoiding any harassment in the South, a part of the country far more suspicious of beards than Palo Alto, Garcia shaved off his facial hair before he left.) He and Rothman checked out bluegrass bands at clubs and festivals and hooked up with numerous musician friends, making the trip culturally rewarding. In the end Garcia wound up driving back home to California without a job; he didn't have the confidence to apply for the gig in Monroe's group, even if it were available. But by then it almost didn't matter. Another reinvention cried out to him, one that promised far more imaginative journeys than those in bluegrass or jug bands. And perhaps it even offered the chance to make something close to a livable wage.

The song list for the May 26 show at Magoo's would be lost to history, although it most likely included a Chuck Berry cover and songs any well-meaning garage band of 1965 had to learn, like Sam the Sham and the Pharaoh's deliriously silly “Wooly Bully.” The song embedded most in the minds of those who were there was Slim Harpo's deep, slow, sexual blues “I'm a King Bee.” In another variation on the folk boom, white kids around the country were digging into the blues, forming bands and playing their own versions of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf songs. Some of those covers could be embarrassingly callow, but the Warlocks' rendition at Magoo's was on a different level, largely thanks to Pigpen, who growled it with a menacing seductiveness. “The vocal sound of that band was Pig—that's what I remember,” recalls Jorma Kaukonen, who popped into Magoo's on one of those May nights
and was thrilled to see his friends plugging in. “He sounded so authentic. He was an old soul. It was like, ‘Man, what am I going to have to do to sound like that?'”

Having grown up listening to electric blues, Pigpen became the first member of Mother McCree's to encourage his friends to amplify. But they all felt the tug of rock 'n' roll. When Garcia went on his southern expedition, Weir filled in for his friend at the Dana Morgan Music Shop, giving guitar lessons. Spending hours in the store, amid both acoustic and amplified fretted instruments, filled the teenager's head with new, different musical visions. “All those shiny electric instruments were starting to give us the come hither,” he has said. The British Invasion had arrived on American shores that year, and the Beatles were far from the only overseas band on the charts; by the fall of 1964 the Dave Clark Five's “Glad All Over” and “Catch Us If You Can,” the Kinks' “You Really Got Me” and “Set Me Free,” and many other punchy, charged-voltage singles had taken over American radio. “Rock 'n' roll seemed viable—it seemed less like prepackaged, marketed pap and more like there was some expansiveness to the music,” Weir recalled to Hajdu. “None of us had stopped long enough to think about taking rock 'n' roll seriously until the Beatles came out, and they were downright musical.” The fact that the music made girls scream wasn't lost on anyone, and neither were the rent-paying possibilities: at the Top of the Tangent, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions would play three sets a night and end up with $15 dollars in each of their pockets. (A few months later in August 1965, Weir, Bonner, and Swanson jumped in Swanson's car and chased the Beatles from the airport to a local show. Encouraged by his friends, Weir tried to climb up the chain-link fence and crash the show, but he didn't make it.)

Just as jamming in Morgan's store had helped initiate their jug band, so did the store lure them into rock. Morgan's son, Dana Jr., who helped run the shop and harbored his own dreams of becoming a musician,
made them an offer: if they wanted to start a rock 'n' roll band, the store would loan them instruments, as long as Dana Jr. could play bass in the group. Morgan wasn't intrinsically one of them: with his reddish-blond hair and preppy wardrobe, he looked more like a member of the neat and tidy Kingston Trio than a fledgling rocker. He didn't seem all that interested in pot. But Garcia, according to Lesh (who wasn't there at the time), saw the value in free gear and “put a good charm offensive on Dana.” They now had a rehearsal space and free instruments. “What more could a boy want?” Weir told Swanson as he stood in the driveway of his family home in Atheron, leaning his new electric guitar against his equally new Fender amp.

Overnight the jug-band fever dream broke—Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions would give its last performances shortly into the new year, 1965—and the washboard, kazoos, and other eccentric instruments were dispatched. (Garcia would continue playing banjo, but its days too were numbered as far as playing an integral role in his music.) Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, and Morgan began congregating in the front part of the Dana Morgan Music Shop, now accompanied by yet another musical soul mate.

Of them all, Bill Kreutzmann, born May 7, 1946, had the most experience playing something close to rock 'n' roll. The son of a lawyer and a dance teacher, he had both financial and artistic impulses implanted into his brain from an early age. Like many kids, Kreutzmann began banging on whatever was around when he was a toddler, but in his case, he never stopped; by grade school he was obsessed with rhythm and drumming. When he was still in high school Kreutzmann's parents divorced, and for a time he was sent off to school in Arizona. Kreutzmann's parents hoped he would attend Stanford as they had, but the academic life wasn't Kreutzmann's destiny. “Bill was a stud,” recalls John McLaughlin. “He had girls falling all over him.” Kreutzmann soon had a family of his own to support: he and his equally young
girlfriend, Brenda, had a daughter in the middle of 1964 and were married. Increasingly drawn to music over school, Kreutzmann took the drum seat in a local R&B cover band, the Legends, who powered many a Palo Alto party with their covers of James Brown, the Isley Brothers, and others. Although not the frontman, Kreutzmann made his presence known: McLaughlin remembers that one of the highlights of a Legends show was the way it would wrap up with an extraordinary drum solo.

Given how relatively small and insular the Palo Alto community was, it wasn't surprising that by 1964 Kreutzmann had met or played with some of the future Warlocks. He'd not only seen Mother McCree's at the Tangent but had been part of the Zodiacs with Pigpen and Garcia. (The guitarist who organized the band, Troy Weidenheimer, was partly responsible for the birth of the Dead in the way he brought those three young musicians together.) Most importantly, though, Kreutzmann could swing; having been exposed to jazz drummers, he was already remarkably accomplished for someone who was only eighteen when the new rock 'n' roll band began congregating at the music store. In fact, his playing, influenced by drumming heroes like jazzman Elvin Jones and big-band walloper Buddy Rich, was so advanced that he was already teaching drums there, another bit of common ground with Garcia.

The nascent rock 'n' roll band had equipment and a lineup of two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboard; Pigpen, who could play first-rate blues piano and gave an occasional lesson to local kids, switched to the more garage band–fashionable organ. Now they also had a space to boot: the front of the Dana Morgan Music Shop. The room was cluttered as it was; anyone walking into the store had to duck under a hanging cymbal or two and navigate around a few amplifiers. With the band set up, the room felt even smaller, and on the second day of rehearsal the musicians also had to make room for Bonner and Swanson, who immediately became the group's first cheerleaders—bringing along donuts or playing records for the band to learn and copy. They tried some of Pigpen's favorite blues songs or Rolling Stones or Everly
Brothers covers—almost everything except the Beatles. (“They were untouchable,” said Weir.) The music was so loud that the instruments dangling on the walls swayed and made their own clamor.

If the nascent band had a front man, it was Pigpen; his voice was the most distinctive and guttural, and he commanded the material in ways the others couldn't yet. Without meaning to, he had antistar charisma. But Garcia remained the most assertive and was clearly in charge of the proceedings. “There's a difference between being the star of the band and being the leader,” Swanson recalls. Before long they had a name, the Warlocks, probably an homage to fantasy books in vogue at the time. Soon after came their first booking, at a pizza parlor in Menlo Park. As Weir said, “And bang, we're on.”