On The Road<\/em>, a book that \u201cchanged his life forever.\u201d<\/p>\nJack Kerouac\u2019s hymn to the world as an explorational odyssey, an adventure outside conventional boundaries, would serve as a blueprint for the rest of Garcia\u2019s life. (The impact of Kerouac\u2019s book on many of the players in this saga should not be underestimated. I note with some interest that Jimmy Page recently visited Kerouac\u2019s grave in Lowell, MA.)<\/p>\n
Outside of art and music \u2013 he played guitar in his high school band \u2013 Jerry was an indifferent student, with no real direction despite his (now more involved) mother\u2019s best efforts. He did a stint in the Army, most of it spent at the Presidio, a former military fort in San Francisco.<\/p>\n
Folk music was incredibly popular during this time. and Jerry \u2013 likely recalling his grandparents\u2019 records \u2013 got into it. He took up the banjo and worked at it relentlessly, night and day. He heard the Flatt and Scruggs classic, \u201cFoggy Mountain Breakdown,\u201d and added bluegrass, a more technically demanding genre, to his repertoire.<\/p>\n
In 1961, Garcia was involved in a near-fatal car accident that served as an awakening. He started to get serious about his life. Two months after his accident, at a theater production, Jerry met a would-be novelist named Robert Hunter.<\/p>\n
Robert Hunter was born Robert Burns and is reportedly a great-great-grandson of the same-named Scottish Romantic poet. He was a volunteer \u2013 along with writer Ken Kesey \u2013 \u00a0at Stanford University in a program run by the CIA to test the effects of LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. \u00a0(Psychedelics were legal in the US until 1966.) \u201cHe received LSD the first week, psilocybin the second, mescaline the third, and a mixture of all three on the fourth (!)\u201d<\/p>\n
Hunter was musically inclined,\u00a0playing various instruments including cello and trumpet. In fact, like Garcia, he played in his high school band.<\/p>\n
Garcia and Hunter hung out together, talking philosophy, enjoying being outsiders, misfits. Bohemians. At this point in time, musically they were far more impacted by folk than rock. The two actually performed together doing folk songs. But it was clear early on that Garcia was and would be the more accomplished guitarist, Hunter the better lyricist.<\/p>\n
Garcia started playing at a San Carlos loft called the Boar\u2019s Head. He played acoustic folk, country and even some blues like \u201cBrown\u2019s Ferry Blues.\u201d Hunter would often join on mandolin.<\/p>\n
It was at the Boar\u2019s Head that Garcia met singer\/harmonica player\/keyboardist Ron McKernan. McKernan\u2019s father was an R&B and blues disk jockey. Ron taught himself to play harmonica and piano and if there was any really strong blues influence in the Dead. \u201cPigpen\u201d was it.\u00a0He didn\u2019t look like a hippie and in fact, he had a \u201cmotorcycle chain permanently bolted to his wrist and wore oily jeans, Brandoesque T-shirts, and greasy hair.\u201d\u00a0(\u201cPigpen,\u201d for his supposed resemblance to the Peanuts<\/em> character\u2019s somewhat unkempt look.)<\/p>\nInto this motley crew of Beats, bohemians and free thinkers entered Phil Lesh. Whereas the other guys were largely self-taught, picking up what they knew from records and the odd lesson, Lesh was the real deal. A trained musician \u2013 starting out on violin and switching to trumpet \u2013 he studied composition under experimental Italian composer Luciano Berio. He eventually enrolled at the College of San Mateo where he rose to first trumpet chair of their big band.<\/p>\n
Lesh had been volunteering for progressive radio station KPFA as a recording engineer. He and Garcia recorded a demo of Jerry playing which got him a successful solo radio gig. But while they were kindred spirits, there doesn\u2019t appear to have been any serious talk at this point about the two of them collaborating musically.<\/p>\n
For a period of time, Garcia \u2013 now married and a father \u2013 became a guitar teacher at a music store in Palo Alto called Dana Morgan\u2019s. Morgan\u2019s was at that time a hotbed of talented musicians.<\/p>\n
Garcia met a guy there named Troy Weidenheimer who had a band called the Zodiacs. They were basically a blues band that played frat parties. Since Weidenheimer played guitar, Jerry joined and played bass. The band also had a couple of other players, namely the aforementioned Ron McKernan and a drummer named Bill Kreutzmann.<\/p>\n
The Wikipedia entry for Kreutzmann contains some surreal information:\u00a0\u201cKreutzmann started playing drums at the age of 13. \u00a0As a teenager, practicing drums alone in a large building at his high school, Aldous Huxley (!) and another man walked in.<\/p>\n
Huxley told Bill he\u2019d never heard anything like it, and encouraged him in his drumming \u2013 despite the fact Bill had been told by his sixth-grade music teacher that he could not keep a beat. Kreutzmann continued to practice a great deal. His earliest enthusiasm was for the music of Ray Charles and other R&B musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite Garcia\u2019s flirtation with rock, acoustic music was where he wanted to be. He played with bands such as Black Mountain Boys and eventually, Mother McCree\u2019s Uptown Jug Champions.<\/p>\n
This is a performance from the Black Mountain Boys. I think one of the things that made the Dead distinctive early on is that they were one of the first rock bands with a pronounced folk\/bluegrass background:<\/p>\n