Famous People I Never Knew #3: Jerry Garcia (Part 1)

Today Nathan Zakheim is an art conservator in LA, world renowned, and bald. But in 1963 Nathan was the biggest leftie folksinger (maybe second biggest) at San Francisco State, bold and brave, with mounds of curly black hair and red cheeks of kibbutz health and a curly black beard. Nathan dressed the part too – like he'd just stepped out of a 1930s WPA work camp and was about to grab a freight across America to go to the big Wobbly meeting in Tacoma. Not that it was an affectation, you understand. I dressed exactly the same way.

So did everybody in the Underground (except for a local named Ale Ekstrom, who dressed like a nineteenth century tar and played sea shanties on his concertina). Nathan was the face of folk music to me – a guy in a red check shirt and an acoustic guitar and a bold attitude singing out signals of destruction from the Underground.

At this late date, I don't have Nathan's set list in front of me, but I'm pretty sure he sang Old Left songs about the galvanic labor struggles of fifty, sixty years before. Stuff like I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night (Joe Hill was a labor organizer who got shot for his trouble) and You Can't Fool Me, I'm Stickin' to the Union and Solidarity Forever, the Union Makes Us Strong. He might have also sung the beautiful Russian folk anthem Meadowlands.

“Meadowlands, Meadowlands, meadows green and fields in blossom,
Merrily greet the plucky heroes, heroes of the Soviet Republic”...or something like that for fourteen verses.

Hey, I'm not talking politics. Who knew about politics? My politics began in rage because someone was about to drop an H-Bomb on my head and ended with carrying Ban The Bomb! (you bastards) on a placard at demonstrations. I know when I sang Meadowlands every verse was meant to be a comic dada snowball thrown to knock off the proper pillbox hat of uptight materialist sleeping SQUARE America and its weird right-wing defenders - the Christian Ant-Communist Crusade, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and, of course, George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party mates.

Nathan lived in a the dust and cold squalor of a big Victorian flat on Divisadero Street with a dangerous pyrotechnical wizard named Edmund, a kid from LA named Al and my friend Rodney Albin, luthier, harpsichord builder, folk musician and greathearted brother of my heart forever, though he would laugh to hear it.

On a day in early Spring, 1963, Linda Lovely and I picked up Rodney and Nathan in our little liver-colored Studebaker Lark – we were driving up to Rodney's big house party at his uncle's summer place on the Russian River north of San Francisco. Apple blossoms brushed across the windshield as we turned down the little dirt road to the Sebastapol farmhouse where Nathan's father, the great Thirties muralist Bernard Zakheim, lived and worked. His murals illuminated many of San Francisco's civic buildings of the Thirties, most notably Coit Tower, and we were a little in awe of meeting him. Grey-bearded and smiling, Bernard came out into the orchard to greet us. He served us tea and we smiled gratefully. He paid the most attention to Linda.

As we drove on raindrops glistered in the sky like in a Thirties children's picture book or a Grant Wood painting or a Bernard Zakheim mural of a little brown car in purple light painted from high above the two lane highway ribbon and workbooted children inside the car actually listening to rock and roll on the radio in spite of their folk genuinity. We turned right at Occidental and crossed the dripping spring valley and tawny hills into the redwood forest that edged out from the river where the light dims and the air smells damp, musty and poignant.

The light fades fast in the redwoods. I switched on the headlights as we looked for the private road up through the redwoods to the big dank and mildewed summer vacation house, except it's now early spring. Inside the house, ghostly in the ascending mist, lights are welcoming and someone is tuning a banjo, someone else has got the wood stove going and someone else has set four big jugs of Val-Vin Burgundy, $1.99 a gallon, on the trestle table, and yet someone else is working on the spaghetti and French bread and salad, and everything's happening in the kitchen, the only warm room.

The proto-hippies are starting to arriving now in force -- San Francisco State folkniks and Palo Alto folkies and a few hangers on like me, unsure of who I am, because I love this scene but I hate this music!

Continued tomorrow. (I know - where's Jerry? Hold on a bit - he's coming. One day at a time)