So Many Roads (7 page)

Around 5 p.m. Garcia and Meier arrived at their possibly final destination. The field before them was one of gently waving golden grass, black oak trees, and nothing in sight: not the Chateau, not the roads, not the thriving Stanford campus sprawled out below them. There was no sign of Menlo Park, a town only thirty-five years old, nor of Palo Alto, which had arisen even earlier as a village for Stanford faculty. Before World War II Palo Alto had been home to only about seventeen thousand people; that number had now more than tripled, to fifty-five thousand, and the area had made way for a shopping center, an industrial park, and two thousand mass-produced homes. Subdivisions began taking over empty fields, and roughly seventy thousand cars entered and left the town every day. Yet Palo Alto also retained its only-in-California lure. When Garcia's future partner Mountain Girl arrived the following summer, her earliest memories would be riding her bike and seeing oranges, apples, walnuts, and peaches lying on the sidewalks after falling off trees. Palm trees loomed over other houses. It felt like paradise, especially because it barely seemed to rain.

Settling onto the grass, Garcia and Meier talked and cried a bit, then began singing. The song was “Go Down, Old Hannah,” an African American prison work song recorded by Lead Belly, among others. (During this time Garcia had discovered the Folkways label, and one of its collections included a version of the song sung by actual Texas inmates.) In its original form the song was the inmates' way of ending the day; “Hannah” was the sun. But tonight, on this hill and in this situation, the lyric—“if you rise in the morning, well, well, well / Bring
judgment for sure”—took on a far more fraught context. “We were trying to hasten the sun setting so the day would come to an end,” Meier says. “We thought that if we got through the day, things would be okay—it wouldn't be the end of the world. If we got through this particular twenty-four hours of saber rattling with the Soviet Union, we would all survive.” So they sang to Hannah, over and over.

Garcia had arrived in the Peninsula early the previous year after tackling the unlikeliest of jobs. After dropping out of high school, he told Tiff he was planning to follow him into the service. Tiff tried to talk his brother out of it, feeling it wouldn't be a good match, but it didn't work: “He wanted to get away from his mom and stepfather, I think,” Tiff says. (According to Blair Jackson's
Garcia
:
An American Life
, Jerry also stole his mother's car, paving the way for his stint in the army.) Other friends think it may have been a way for Garcia to drum up some money, and Garcia himself later said it was simply an alternative to college or staying with his family. Whatever the motivation, Garcia found himself at Fort Ord in Monterey in the spring of 1960. “If you were rich, you went to West Point,” says Grant. “If you were poor, you went to Monterey.” Visiting him at Fort Ord, Grant was struck by Garcia's shaved head and khakis, but the sight didn't last long. Garcia's stint, which also included an assignment at a fort in the Presidio area, lasted all of eight months. After spending too much time with a friend who was considering suicide in San Francisco, Garcia was declared AWOL (one of several times this occurred) and was drummed out of the service at year's end.

As 1961 began, Garcia had no job, no prospects, and few instruments, but at least he found a thriving community to welcome him when he followed friends down to the Peninsula. Stanford, which had opened in the late 1800s, had established itself as a leading hub for scientific research and intellectual thought; just as Garcia arrived, the school built a $1.2 million medical lab. The area was crammed with students,
academics, and the children of professors along with the attendant bohemians, artists, and liberal thinkers. With its coffeehouses and book stores, Palo Alto held an ambrosial lure to those who felt they didn't fit in with the rest of the country or their own households. Garcia began spending time at Kepler's (in its original location in Menlo Park—a second Kepler's opened in Palo Alto in 1962) or St. Michael's Alley, the high-ceilinged coffeehouse known for its Danish open-faced sandwiches, wine, and beer. That space also became known for Joan Baez, the unswervingly pure-voiced teenager who played there when she was a high school student in Palo Alto before her family moved east in 1958.

From almost the moment he arrived in the area Garcia befriended similarly offbeat characters, sometimes at Kepler's. One was Trist, and another was Paul Speegle, a high school friend of Barbara Meier's who would prance around school in a cape just, in her words, to “outrage the straights.” The three men, along with Lee Adams, an African American who worked at the Chateau, were driving in the area on the night of February 1961 when the car, going far over the speed limit, hit a tricky curve and crashed. Speegle was instantly killed; the other three sustained a range of injuries, with Garcia, violently ejected from the car, winding up with a broken collar bone and other wounds. Although Garcia wasn't as close to Speegle as he was to his own father, it was yet another example of the way lives could change, dramatically, on a dime. “It set Jerry back on his heels,” says Grant. “It brought the reality of, ‘Oh, shit, you can die.' Until it happens to someone close to you, it's just something that happens to others. That's a hell of a reality sandwich, a big bite.”

At the same time, a replacement of sorts for Speegle appeared in their lives. At a local production of
Damn Yankees
Garcia's girlfriend of the moment was working the lights and introduced him to one of her exes, Robert Hunter, a nineteen-year-old with horn-rimmed glasses and a clenched grin. A few nights later Hunter wandered into St. Michael's,
looking for someone to hang with, and ran into Garcia again. Hunter, who'd lived everywhere from the West Coast to Connecticut, had in a way lost his own father too. Born Robert Burns in June 1941, Hunter had suffered through the breakup of his parents when he was young, which resulted in him spending time (being “boarded out,” as the phrase went at the time) with families between the ages of nine and eleven. His mother eventually remarried, and his new stepfather was a national sales manager for the college division of McGraw-Hill as well as an editor at Harcourt. Growing up in different locales—from Palo Alto to Connecticut—made him feel like “always the new kid in school.”

Despite their differences in family backgrounds and schooling (Hunter had logged some time at college at the University of Connecticut), Hunter and Garcia were natural allies. At Kepler's, the Chateau, or other local digs, they could be seen playing guitars together, singing Weavers' songs, riffing on
Finnegans Wake
, and chewing over whatever else they were reading and devouring at the time. “Hunter was often bummed,” Meier says. “He had some sense of things being tragic. He never seemed all that happy except when he was singing—then out came this rousing, exuberant voice.” He and Garcia's respective cars were parked next to each other at one point, and each slept in his own vehicle and lived off whatever food they could scrounge up (sometimes from female students at Stanford, whom Garcia would charm into nabbing grub from the cafeteria). Before long they'd even formed a loose duo, Bob and Jerry, and performed at Stanford and Meier's sixteenth birthday party, right after she'd met Garcia. As her parents cooked a barbeque, Garcia and Hunter, along with a slew of friends who all seemed to have beards, strummed and sang “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and other summer-camp favorites.

The move to folk music was a natural one; even though groups like the Kingston Trio were amassing hit singles and earning a small fortune on tour, the music represented everything seemingly authentic at
the moment, the antidote to the commercial culture. The year 1962 was far from barren for earthy early rock 'n' roll; Dion's “The Wanderer,” Little Eva's “The Loco-Motion,” and Booker T. and the MG's “Green Onions” shook up the radio, but the music felt at an impasse, and schlock like Bobby Vinton's “Roses Are Red (My Love)” continued to dominate the airwaves. The high school days when Garcia would play intermittently with a band called the Chords must have felt even farther away in light of how rock 'n' roll had faltered. It wasn't uncommon to see Garcia walking around with a banjo or with one of the two guitars Meier had bought for him. A few months before the Cuban Missile Crisis he'd been introduced to the banjo by another member of the scene, Marshall Leicester, a sophomore at Yale who'd known Garcia at school in Menlo Park and reconnected with him in the Palo Alto area in the summer of 1961.

Folk music also led Garcia to the next, even purer form of acoustic music, bluegrass and string bands. Thanks to Leicester, Garcia had become fascinated with the banjo, playing on it for hours at a time at the Chateau, Kepler's, or anywhere that would have him. “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly,” Meier says. “He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” It would be the first indication that making music could take priority over attending to his personal life.

Garcia's musical partners in crime—Hunter, Leicester, Nelson, and another bluegrass-obsessed local picker, Sandy Rothman—shared his passion for acoustic genres. What followed, with varying lineups, was a succession of unplugged bands with ever-changing names: the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers, the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, the Hart Valley Drifters. Hunter logged time in some of them, but Garcia
didn't consider his friend a serious enough musician and didn't think he practiced mandolin nearly enough. Before long the two had had their first major falling out. Hunter had already begun writing his first novel and was seeking his own adventures at the time. To earn extra cash he volunteered for a psychology experiment at the local veterans hospital in 1962. One week he was given LSD, followed by psilocybin the next, mescaline the third week, and all four together the last week. The military wanted to know whether people who took those drugs could be easily hypnotized—the drugs were seen as potential weapons—and Hunter only told a few people about it, including Garcia and Meier. None of them could believe he'd done such a thing: it sounded so mysterious and enticing that everyone wanted in.

The string band names may have been gags—white kids gently mocking the real string bands of the South—but the fledgling musicians took to the music with an unabashed earnestness. “It was some kind of search for authenticity, for real American music,” Meier says. “That's what was at the heart of it, finding something unsullied.” As one newcomer to the scene noticed, the boys looked straight and dressed the same way. The previous fall a Washington, DC–based guitarist named Jorma Kaukonen (who went by Jerry for a while) had arrived in California to attend Santa Clara College. His first night on the campus he wandered into a folk club and met Garcia and a young, throat-shredding Texas transplant named Janis Joplin, and eventually he would share the bill with one of Garcia's acoustic bands in Palo Alto. “The bluegrass guys at the time dressed nicely,” Kaukonen says. “We hadn't cultivated the jeans-and-T-shirt look yet. Jerry had that bluegrass ambience of the period.”

Norm van Maastricht had also arrived in the Bay Area shortly before, following his parents, who'd moved from Michigan. Considering himself a serious country-style guitar player in the vein of Chet Atkins, he wanted to meet other musicians and take lessons, and he kept hearing about a teacher who worked out of a music store in Palo Alto. The
business, the Dana Morgan Music Shop, was known for its impressive, jammed-to-the-ceiling collection of acoustic instruments for sale. In one of the practice rooms in the back of the store van Maastricht finally caught up with Garcia, the first bearded person he'd ever met. Given Garcia's missing digit, van Maastricht felt a strange sensation when he shook Garcia's hand, and he also noticed Garcia liked to talk while playing his banjo, making it hard to hear him over the clatter of the instrument.

Van Maastricht became part of Garcia's inner circle of bluegrass musician friends. Every so often he'd get a call asking whether he wanted to play and would soon after find himself in a car with Garcia and whoever else constituted the band, all of them making their way to a club, house party, or anyplace that would have them. “We felt almost driven to play anytime, anywhere, with anyone,” he says. “The hunger was never satisfied.” By the fall of 1962 the latest lineup had dubbed itself the Hart Valley Drifters and featured Garcia, Hunter, Nelson, and van Maastricht. Practice would sometimes take place at the Chateau. Every so often the same dedication and drive Meier saw in Garcia would also arise in the band too. One day the other Drifters were yapping away about this and that, all talking at once. Garcia was increasingly irked. “Guys . . . guys . . . fellas . . .
boys
,” he said, his voice growing ever so slightly more assertive each time.