Famous People I Never Knew #3: Jerry Garcia (part 2)

Back in the redwood forest, people have settled in, dinner is over, and guys start tuning up their instruments. Nice, beautiful Martins and Gibsons and the occasional Stella. OK, I'm a little jealous. I have an old Mexican nylon string and, as a full-time student with a baby on the way, the chances of saving up for one of those charmers is nil. Still, I've never seen so many really nice instruments before.

Now a big smiley Palo Alto kid with short hair and square clothes starts the night off by accompanying himself with very good Skruggs style banjo while singing “The Hit Parade of Love”. The what?

On the Hit Parade of Love I know I'll never stop,
I've got a long long ways to go before I reach the top
But if I ever get there, I'll really have it made,
Cause then I will be number one on the Lover's Hit Parade

Should I laugh? This isn't Masters of War! This isn't I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night. This isn't even By the Banks of the Oh-hi-o. This is just silly!

But I can't laugh. I wouldn't be laughing with this guy, who's grinning and clearly knows how silly the song is and doesn't care a bit, I'd be laughing at him.

I couldn't grok it – my soul was formed for tragedy. I'm a meloncholiac. I love the blues, I love John Coltrane. La Boheme knocks me out. I love pathos and warfare in music – but this was goofy! The songs were like that a lot that night...

There's a beautiful, beautiful field
Far away in a land that is fair
Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart
Farewell, first lady of the air

And

Don't send my boy to prison
For that would drive me mad
Remember I'm a widow
And I'm pleading for my lad

All sung with perfect irony I think, but I wasn't sure – I just couldn't grok it.

For me folk music was a way to be popular at parties and meet girls, just like Richie Valens songs had been a few years earlier. I was a strong singer, but my guitar skills in those days were rudimentary. These guys from Palo Alto were serious – they were mastering their instruments. They practiced by copying 1920s Charlie Poole 78s note for note. And the concept of guys playing popular music together on stringed instruments was actually going to be quite useful later on.

David Nelson was there that night – the perfect example (not Ozzie and Harriet! The David Nelson of New Riders of the Purple Sage and a long, distinguished music career). He was already a legend , the best flat picker in Palo Alto. Clean as Doc Watson they said. Plus he had a quiet introverted mysterious hipness that I admired.

But, truth be told – I thought bluegrass was ugly. All those broken glass harmonies and a thin tenor singing reedy through his nose. Why were cool people listening to this bright tinkly, very white music?


This was a minority opinion of course, and I had to hop on the bus or stay on the curb. And I wanted to be on the bus. So I got Rodney to teach me Elizabeth Cotton style finger picking and I would sit in our apartment afternoons trying to get my thumb to rock back and forth like Rodney's did. I kept wanting to swing it, and you had to have a steady metronome thumbbeat to make the syncopation sound right.

Soon I was sitting in with his band, the Liberty Hill Aristocrats, playing rhythm on the mandolin. I only knew three mandolin chords, but Rodney let me play anyway. He was a born encourager, may I be as good as Rodney that way someday. Like I said, my strong point was singing, I had a soulful tenor full of heart and soul emerging from my own suffering and madness. Girls listened, at least the soulful ones. I sang the Greenbriar Boys song Little Birdie with a lot of power and emotion – but it wasn't exactly what was wanted down at the Top of the Tangent, the Palo Alto club where folk music went down. I just wasn't quite in sync. I wonder how Pigpen (Jerry Garcia's Grateful Dead mate) felt during those years.

I met Ron McKernan (Pigpen) once during those years. Linda Lovely and our new baby Jennifer and I were camping with a bunch of freaks on a hill above the 1963 Monterey Folk Festival. Ron was playing blues harp at the campfire, and I joined right in – I knew all those Jimmy Reed songs he was playing because we'd listened to the same radio station. We had instant musical communication and a great red wine drunken evening. I had no problem at all groking his music.

Like Ron, I spent my high school years listening to KWBR, the rhythm and blues station beaming across the San Francisco Bay to Eisenhower Republican San Mateo from the city of Oakland, where, as I was reminded after nearly every song, you could buy a complete furniture room group for $99 at Furniture Discount Warehouse for no money down and ten dollars a month – and when in 1958 Bobbie Blue Bland first shouted

“She used to call me Bobby, Little Boy Blue, B-O-B-B-Y!, BAH BEE!!”

the hairs on the back on neck stood up and screeched. Same thing when James Brown and the Famous Flames came on singing

"Please Please Pleeze Darlin' PLEEZE Don't Go!!!"

Lying in my San Mateo suburban bedroom at midnight I groked somebody expressing in his terrified lostness spirit what I felt in my own terrified lost heart – heartbreak – heartbreak and rage, but about what? I didn't know about what.

The other greatness in 1950s R&B was what they call today doo-wop. It had no special name then. In between commercials for the the Furniture Discount Warehouse we could hear the latest sides from the smooth Spaniels or The Turbans so beautiful and rich and hovering in the air. It made driving around stupid ugly San Mateo with its class divisions and crickity post-WWII Shoreview stucco emptiness after school worth it-- those smooth sorrowful major and minor sevenths harmony.

I used to fantasize about learning how to play electric guitar like BB King or Elmore James, that sound, that sound that spoke my ache, what it was, what life really was – I felt like if I could do that I could get some peace, but unlike Mike Bloomfield, for me it seemed just impossible, a life lived in bars in West Oakland – me, a little wimpy kid with thick glasses and a heart murmur and a brother killed in a car crash. Unconceivable, I couldn't grok that either.

But back in the 1963 future it was a great party anyway. The rain poured and we stayed warm around the stove and played lots of music and I joined in on the high harmonies. Linda disappeared as chicks were supposed to do, I guess it was boring to listen to a bunch of semi-good bluegrass musicians if you weren't making the music yourself.

There was one Palo Alto guy at the house party besides David Nelson who was more than semi-good. His name was Jerry Garcia. Slender, goateed, with a cowboy hat and a five-string banjo, I could tell he was seriously good although I knew nothing about banjo music and wanted to know less. He played with complete technical confidence, then he put his banjo down and picked up his guitar and did the same thing, and then he put the guitar down and picked up the fiddle and did the same thing. He was so far out of my league, I couldn't grok it. And that was okay.


The next morning Linda and I struggled out of our sleeping bags and went to find warmth and coffee. By the stove, I listened to a couple of Palo Alto folkies feeling so sorry for Jerry and his practicing obsession. It went something like this:

“Poor Jerry, when we get out of college we'll get good jobs and move on to the serious world of law and order while poor Jerry – what does he have to look forward to? – traveling from Bakersfield to Fresno playing in country and western bars the rest of his life. What a dead end. Poor Jerry”.

Maybe that's what I didn't like about bluegrass-style folk music. Guys like that.