Loading summary
Transcript60 lines
- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma. For a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official Podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast where you really don't know what you're gonna get until you climb inside. If you haven't already, please subscribe, give us a like and leave a rating. It helps spread the word to fellow and future heads. So thank you for your help. This here episode is the second of our bonus episodes outside of the scope of our deep dive into the songs on Working Man's Dead. It is after all the days between and we agreed it would be fun and apropos to put together an episode that focused on Jerry. One period we don't hear enough about is this time before the Dead and even before the Warlocks. We'll find out. Jerry was always very serious about music and already had that drive to practice all the time. Jesse and I took a trip up to the San Francisco Bay area a little over a year and a half ago, and a few of the interviews we conducted took us well down the path of Jerry's musical upbringing to find out what he was digging as a developing young. Music.
- [01:56]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
Was in the spring One summer's day My baby left me she went.
- [02:04]
Jerry Garcia (speaking)
Away.
- [02:07]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
Now she's gone But I don't worry no I'm sittin on top of.
- [02:15]
Narrator/Host
The world it's pretty universally agreed that January 1961 was an important month in the history of music when teenage Bobby Zimmerman arrived in New York from Minnesota to turn himself into Bob Dylan. But a perhaps less recognized but maybe equally important arrival that month was when 18 year old Jerry Garcia showed up in Palo Alto, California. Over the next four years, Jerry Garcia had a miniature career in acoustic music with several distinct periods. That version of Garcia singing Sitting On Top of the world from 1962 is on an incredible box set of music that came out in 2018 called before the Dead. It's a compilation of Garcia's music during these years from 1961 to 1964, before he went electric with the Warlocks and eventually the Grateful Dead. Besides being enjoyable as music, the box set made me realize how similar Jerry Garcia's acoustic trajectory was to his career with the Dead, especially in the early part of their career. The band kept changing every year, going from the psychedelia of Live Dead to the rootsiness of working man's dead in under 12 months. But Jerry Garcia was already doing that in these Palo Alto years, progressing from the folk revival songbook to deep blues, old timey music and eventually serious contemporary bluegrass. In the history of psychedelic rock, the Haight Ashbury scene gets all the press, but in a lot of ways the previous half decade was just as exciting. Here's a little bit of Cannonball Blues from before the Dead, recorded on June 11, 1962. Eighteen year old Jerry Garcia was discharged from the army on December 14, 1960. His military records turned up online recently. His commanding officer wrote, I have found Garcia to be unreliable, irresponsible, immature, unwilling to accept authority, and completely lacking in soldierly qualities. Sounds like our boy. You can find a link to Jerry's whole military record over@dead.net deadcast with his last army paycheck, Garcia bought a used Cadillac and drifted down the San Francisco peninsula, staying with friends and eventually making it to Palo Alto, where he parked the soon deceased car outside the house of his junior high school buddy, Laird Grant, who would later become the first member of the Grateful Dead's equipment crew. Jerry Garcia wasn't quite ready to rock, but he was definitely ready to pick. He'd played electric guitar in high school and found an affinity for the acoustic while in the Army. After hearing Garcia play a blues song, Grant's neighbor, a black man named Dave McQueen, sometimes known as David X, introduced Garcia to local musicians. Jerry Garcia jumped right into the deep end of the scene, which stretched far beyond music and centered in part around Kepler's Books, the beloved progressive bookstore in Menlo Park. He instantly started meeting people who would remain part of both his personal and professional lives in decades to come. One of the first was a young British man named Alan Trist, who would go on to run the Grateful Dead's ICE9 publishing company. There were eccentrics like Willie Legate, who the Dead later employed at their Front street rehearsal hall, and painters like Paul Spiegel. In the spring, Robert Hunter showed up. Through sheer fate, Garcia had picked an absurdly fertile place to hang out. Nicholas Meriwether, who is the archivist at the Grateful Ed Archive at UC Santa Cruz and is now the director of the center for Counterculture Studies, has spent as much time pondering the question of why Palo Alto as anybody.
- [06:04]
Nicholas Meriwether
One of the interesting things about the Dead is even though in the public's mind, they are most strongly associated with the hit Ashbury, which is considered sort of ground zero of the counterculture in their minds, I think they believe they are part of an outgrowth of that early Palo Alto bohemian community, and would say that and have said that that early Palo Alto peninsula bohemian community really was the birthing ground, in some ways, the spawning ground for what became the Haight. And a good way of looking at both Palo Alto and the Haight. Ashbury is, as part of a long tradition in American history of little bohemias. And they are bohemian enclaves, bohemian groups, and they define a very powerful theme in American literature, culture, history. One thing about bohemias is that they tend to be serendipitous. They are the confluence. They're the result of a confluence of forces. You know, accidental, deliberate, all kinds of things from economics on. But in early Palo Alto, people could afford to live. It's close to Stanford, which had a pretty long tradition of supporting bohemian thinkers and intellectuals, going all the way back to Thorsten Veblen, who lived on Perry Lane, which is where Ken Kesey lived when he was attending Stanford on a Stegner fellowship. And it was a perfect place to be young and artistic. You could survive on not much money. Garcia and his friends were part of what he called the great folk scare, which was something that essentially begins in America. You can say it's got its roots going all the way back to the twenties, but most historians would date it to the 1940s and, in particular, the 1950s. And Garcia and his friends were. Were part of Apple folk scene, which had music as one of its bases, but not its only basis. So one of the people that really influenced, you know, that was a huge leading light in that scene was a young, gifted painter named Paul Spiegel, who was part of an old Bay Area family. Spiegel was a very gifted painter, and he was tragically killed in a car accident. And Jerry Garcia and a couple of other members of the later and broader Dead scene were in that. Jerry went through the windshield, and that's where Robert Hunter got the line. Lost my boots in transit is a veiled reference to the fact that Garcia was thrown through the windshield. His shoes were left in the car.
- [08:44]
Narrator/Host
In the 80s, Jerry Garcia spoke with Grateful Dead publicist and biographer Dennis McNally about the accident. It's one of the many topics covered on the great Jerry on Jerry audiobook, which edits together five and a half hours worth of Dennis interviews with Jerry over the years. Thanks to Hachette and Dennis for permission to use this. You can check out the rest wherever you get your audiobooks.
- [09:06]
Jerry Garcia (speaking)
I went through the windshield. It was so violent, so furious, but I don't even know. I have no, nothing, you know, for me it was. There was an unbroken moment between being in the car and being in a field. And that's it, you know, there's nothing in between. I don't know what happened really. I mean, at 90 miles an hour, things happen to fly. My shoes were in the car, you know, under the seat, literally thrown out of my shoes. I mean, that was what the force of it was like. It was a sobering sensation. And when I saw that, what that car looked like, believe me, I mean, I was so. I was so amazed I was alive, I couldn't believe it. That thing was. It was a total loss. It was just. It looked like a smashed beer can or anything, you know what I mean? It was junk. The violence must have been incredible. My life started there. I was fucking around in there. Really, I was just a dumb kid. I mean, I had a few half formed ideas, but my life, that is the slingshot boom. That's what got me going. That's what made life, gave life that urgency. That was hard. That stuff is hard when you're young. The grief, you know, when you lose a brother, you know, when you lose a pal. The thing of losing a comrade in it, he was like a new friend too. It was like we were just getting chummy, you know, we were just getting really fond of each other, you know. And you know how it is when you're young and there's that excitement, you know.
- [10:40]
Narrator/Host
And Garcia absolutely got serious. By the spring, he'd begun to absorb folk music by the ton, starting with the Songbook of the Weavers, the blacklisted folk singers, in part led by Pete Seeger. He also acquired his first nice guitar from his girlfriend, Brigid Meyer. The earliest recording of Garcia is of him performing alongside Robert hunter at Brigid's 16th birthday. Captured in part on the before the Dead box set. Jerry was mostly just strumming. But already he and Hunter were diving into folk scholarship. And Garcia's vocabulary began to expand really quickly. This is Trouble in mind, recorded May 26, 1961. Available on the before the Dead box set from Round Records.
- [11:27]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
I'm trouble in mind I'm blue.
- [11:35]
Narrator/Host
But.
- [11:36]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
I won't be blue always.
- [11:39]
David Nelson
You know.
- [11:40]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
The sun gonna shine.
- [11:51]
Narrator/Host
Though Garcia started playing gigs almost immediately, it wasn't that he jumped into music to the exclusivity of everything else. There was all kinds of other information to learn. Another regular at Kepler's books was Willie Legate. Many years later in the 80s, Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally encountered Willie after the band gave him a job at their Front street rehearsal hall.
- [12:13]
Dennis McNally
He sent off for LSD at Sandoz, like in 58 or 59. And that was before any anybody even knew about it, long before Leary had ever heard of lsd. He read about it in some fashion and, and managed to, you know, use college letterhead to, you know, get a free sample from Sandoz. He taught people how to think funny, that's what Jerry said, to use a current cliche, to think outside the box. He was, you know, the archivist, the superintendent of Front Street. He kept the archives, the tape archives. Before Dick got the job, he studied the Bible. But I think it was almost like a sort of numero, from a numerological point of view, almost. Whatever it was, his mind saw puzzles.
- [13:09]
Narrator/Host
As Nick Merriweather pointed out, the San Francisco peninsula was a breeding ground for folk music in Bohemia. Just north of Palo Alto in San Mateo, a teenager named Rodney Albin had begun to operate a small folk club called the Boar's Head out of the balcony of a local bookstore, using a turned over bookcase as a stage. Two regulars were his younger brother Peter Albin, later of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and David Nelson, later of the New Riders of the Purple Sage. We'll let David Nelson pick up the story from here.
- [13:40]
David Nelson
So Rodney says one day where they're fooling around, I don't know. But what I remember is Rodney grabbed me and Pete by the shoulders like this and said, come on, we're going down to Kepler's. Kepler's bookstore was the big hangout in Palo Alto, the hub of the bohemian scene. Basically, you know, totally non conformists and beatniks and stuff and artists and everything. And I just went and it had a little cabaret, it had a little coffee place. You could get coffee in the bookstore and sit at a table and read your book. And so we go in and he says, there's some people I want you to meet, or we're going to look for people to advertise, I mean, to come up to our club, you know. And so, okay, we sat down and I remember Pete, Alvin and me looking through books and we see this guy sitting in a Chair in that little coffee area. And it's summer, so he's got this shirt open and his hair from here to here just like a rug, you know. Just like what, you know. And he's playing a 12 string guitar. This real surly look on his face. Bing, blah, blah, bling. He's looking and me and Peter looking at Pete, says, that's Jerry Garcia. And I remember never having heard, to my knowledge, the name Jerry Garcia. But as soon as he said, that's Jerry Garcia, it went. Something happened. I can't explain it. It's like this thing. Deja vu experience, you know, Deja vu. So Rodney brings us both up to Garcia. I'm going, no, no, no. Hey, you know. And Rod is introducing himself and saying, I wonder if you could just round up some people. And we want you to come up and play. It's called the Boar's Head. And this David here, he did the poster. I remember doing a drawing of a boar's head and, you know, this fig. And did lettering, the Boar's Head. So he said, okay, I'll see what I can do. Yeah, okay. You know, talking like this. And we wait for the next Tuesday night or whatever, and we go there. We're so excited, you know, me and Pete and Rodney and. Anything yet? You know, I'm looking up. No, nothing yet. And all of a sudden, I hear a Harley Davidson come up.
- [16:10]
Bob Matthews
Vroom, vroom, vroom.
- [16:12]
David Nelson
And I went, they're here because there's always a lead guy who goes, I'll get there before you guys. Where is it? What's the address? Anyway, so here he comes, parks his bike, comes in. Next thing you know, there's a station wagon full of people and coming out, and they're all coming up the steps. And here comes Garcia with a Martin 018. You know what that is? That's the dark top one. It's mahogany top, back and sides. The cheapest Martin you can get. And he's holding it like that now. Wow. I'm going, awesome. Anyway, he plays first. Johnny Sims played David X. The black guy. We called him David X. His nickname was David X. You know, all these people came and they sang a few songs, and it was just awesome. Fantastic. First time I'd ever seen this kind of thing, you know. And we made it happen, you know. And so Garcia gets on the thing with this guitar, the bookcase stage, you know, and starts finger picking. And I believe the first song he did was When First Unto this country a Stranger I came, I Courted a fair maid And Nancy was her name, you know, that song. And I'm just spellbound. Then he gets his finger picks out and starts finger picking and does. As we rode out to Finerio, I just hit the bricks almost. I just like, oh, my God. I mean, Peter, go, what song is this? Where did he get that song? And you know, because Fenerio. What's the name? Pagio Finerio. I went and looked for it. You know, we didn't have Internet then, but I had ways of looking up stuff. And nothing, nothing. There's no reference to that. And then years later, Dylan comes out with an album with that song on it. But still, we would have get togethers after the Boris Head and at Susie woods house in Belmont. And because that had a time limit on it since we'd go late and so everybody would come over to her house, we were welcome there. And so I remember one of those times I said, jerry, Jerry, can I talk to you in this other room? You know, And I said, what's the song, Finerio? I mean, what is that? Where's that from? And where could I find that song? He goes, putnam's Golden Songster. And I went, oh, thanks. You know, and he had other people talking to him too. So I said, putnam's Golden Songster. Looked it up for something or found it in a bookstore. And it was like so many hundreds of songs. I had no idea. You know, I'm not about to pick a note out and read for music. That's not a good way to learn a song. So I passed on it, but there it was. And I forget whether they called it Fenerio or Pagio. That's always a dispute. Now, what's the name, the real name of the song? Right? Yeah. But there's one step right there, and that just started me off.
- [19:19]
Narrator/Host
It's amazing how quickly Garcia picked up skills once he set his mind to them.
- [19:23]
David Nelson
Once Garcia started seriously studying banjo, bluegrass banjo, it was in his hands all the time, constantly. You'd almost wanna say 24 7, but he'd have to sleep sometimes. But seriously. And everybody started noticing, anytime you want to talk to Garcia, he goes, yeah, what? You know. But he comes over with his banjo and he's listening to you, but he's going. And you're trying to talk to him, he's going, yeah, I hear you. But still, you had to hear. He just never stopped. Never stopped playing.
- [20:02]
Narrator/Host
It reminds me of the legendary Neil Cassidy, the Merry Prankster, also known as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's on the Road. Who would sometimes hold several conversations at once. One local teenager was Bob Matthews, who became one of the dead's in house engineers and co produced Working man's Dead, among other albums. He wouldn't enter the picture for a few more years, but he remembers exactly the same thing. When he encountered Garcia in his natural habitat at Dana Morgan's music store, where Garcia was a music teacher and Jerry.
- [20:34]
Bob Matthews
Was there in his classic situation of playing. Always, you know, he'd carry on in conversation. Mostly he'd be playing, he'd just look at you. He was always just looking for reaction.
- [20:47]
Narrator/Host
Not only was Garcia a serious player, but he was a serious listener. He and his friends trekked all across California and eventually beyond in search of live bluegrass. In fact, like many deadheads to follow, Garcia plugged himself into the national live tape trading network in order to further his knowledge. David Nelson remembered one particularly transformative road trip.
- [21:09]
David Nelson
Bill Monroe was playing at the Ash grove in Los Angeles. And me and Garcia and Adam Zodis drove down to Los Angeles because Adams was ready to drive. You know, he was willing to drive the thing. And so we go there and I actually gonna see Bill Monroe in his bluegrass voice. It's fucking incredible, man. It was like that was our thing, you know. Doc Watson was the only guy you'd hear that's by the way, the only guy you'd ever hear playing single notes fiddle tunes, you know. So I'm just like, wow, Doc Watson and Vil Monroe. And then they came on together and did songs. Ah, you know. So at one of the breaks I went out, I was still, I was just learning mandolin, right. And I thought, wow, I'll ask the master himself for some pointers on mandolin. So I went up, excuse me, Bill. He was heading onto the stage, but not yet. And he said, yeah, so it is. I said, I'm just starting to learn to play mandolin and I was wondering if you could give me a few pointers. I said, I already play guitar for years, but I'm just starting on mandolin. And he goes, yeah, yeah. Just always remember to keep a loose wrist and don't hold the pick too tight. He turns and walks on. Thanks. But I was wondering, what's that mean to me? Because when you're asking the question, you're expecting some dissertation on what not to do and what to do and stuff. But he said, keep a loose wrist and don't hold the pick too tight. And I've used those words. I found out that it's easier said than done, actually. Relax when you get to Something you don't. Yeah, kind of grip the pick. That's why it gets harder all of a sudden. Slower, Slower. And so I realized that, you know, it's really true, but Doc Watson was just, just a cataclysmic. I mean, it just. To me, it was a huge revelation. And we knew about him. And I don't know where we heard him or anything because he didn't have a record out yet. But we knew about him playing with somebody else, maybe the Carter Family or something. But anyway, when his first record came out, I wasn't aware of it. Once again, I'm at home and the phone rings, David, it's for you. And I go, hello? And Garcia goes, listen to this. And he plays. Not from the record player, he plays Black Mountain Rag, which he had learned from the record. The first Doc Watson record has Black Mountain Rag on it. Anyway, he plays it. I'm going, holy shit, what is that? What is that? He says, it's Black Mountain Rag by Doc Watson, you know, So I was just nuts. And then I was just searching all the record stores. And that's why that was such a huge trip to be able to want to go down and see Bill Munro and Doc Watson. Yeah, it was like amazing, man. Once again, I'm lucky, I can't help it. You know, it's just like the Dylan song says, I can't help it if I'm lucky.
- [24:12]
Rich Mahan
So was Doc the first guitar player that you guys really latched onto that was playing single note lines.
- [24:19]
David Nelson
There really wasn't much of anything else. Except for that Stanley Brothers record, which I believe it was dad Napier. Bill Napier, who would be on some Stanley Brothers records. They were on a budget too, I imagine. But Mountain Dew by the Stanley Brothers, that's the guitar. And so it was just a treasure to me. Anytime you could find a guitar solo on a traditional music record or a bluegrass record, you were really lucky because it just didn't happen that much. Besides the whole thing of bluegrasses, I learned this after many being in many bluegrass bands. The solo, if you're gonna solo, you'd better have another guitar there. Because as soon as the guitar goes away from chords and pick the bass notes, you know, the bottom falls out. What do you got? A five string banjo and a mandolin and a bass which you can't hear anyway. It's below audibility, right? I mean, so it gig after gig, as soon as I take a little solo ups, the group is not there anymore. It's like part of it drops out. So yeah, and so that was one of the things that I learned and that's how I value. That's another thing that told me that's why they don't have guitar solos a lot, because you'd have to have another guitar. You have to have two guitars. If you're at a gig where people paid money, you know, you don't want that. You don't want everything falling apart with.
- [26:00]
Narrator/Host
In fact, Garcia's first improvisational hero wasn't a guitarist or even a banjo player, but a fiddler named Scotty Stoneman of the legendary Stoneman family, playing in the early 60s with the Kentucky Colonels, a group Garcia more or less followed on tour and eventually befriended. Scotty Stoneman made an especially deep impression at the Ash Grove and elsewhere. Here's Garcia talking about it again from Dennis McNally's Jerry on Jerry, available from Hachette as a 5 1/2 hour audiobook of great Jerry interviews.
- [26:31]
Jerry Garcia (speaking)
Well, Scotty Stoneman is one of those guys that opened up music, you know, because he'd start off with a tune, a fiddle tune like BlackBerry Blossom or some fiddle tune, and. And he'd take that sucker out, I mean, and it'd be like 20 minutes would go by and he was playing ideas that went across four choruses. You know, instead of playing the tune, it would be some crazed idea that stretched all the way across that. I mean, he, he is like the Coltrane of country fiddle.
- [27:00]
Rich Mahan
Really.
- [27:00]
Jerry Garcia (speaking)
I mean, have you ever heard him play? Not. I'll have to find you some tapes of him playing really outside. I mean, he played so soulfully. His playing had so much pain and, and beautiful, you know, and. Plus incredible sensibilities, man. I mean, the incredible freshness and neatness of his ideas are just. Oh, I mean, he's played some of the coolest solos in bluegrass music from bar none, you know, I mean, some of them are so fresh and so exciting.
- [27:33]
Narrator/Host
Here's a little bit of Scotty Stoneman with the Kentucky Colonels playing 8th of January from the album 1965 Live in LA, which gives a little sense of how Stoneman extended his wild fiddle breaks at the Grateful Dead scholars caucus in 2008. Rev Carr did a fantastic presentation connecting Scotty Stoneman's playing to Jerry Garcia's solos on the Dead's version of Viola Lee Blues. You can find a link to Rev's full presentation@dead.net deadcast. The peak of Jerry's bluegrass period was probably the summer of 1964, when he and his friend Sandy Rothman drove cross country in Jerry's White Corvair, first following the Kentucky Colonels to LA and then heading east with a destination of Bill Monroe's Bean Blossom Music Venue and Rolling Summer Bluegrass Festival in Indiana. En route, they saw shows by the Osbourne Brothers, jammed with their friends in the Colonels, and traded bluegrass reel to reels with Neil Rosenberg, who himself was en route to becoming perhaps the preeminent scholar of bluegrass in the acoustic music world. Jerry Garcia rolled deep. Michael Kramer of the Berklee Folk Music Festival Project has been going through their archives and recently came across photos of Garcia in the front row of performances by the Georgia Sea Island Singers and others absorbing the music with rapt attention. Here's what a Jerry Garcia banjo solo sounded like in March 1964 from the before the Dead box set here playing with the Black Mountain Boys, featuring Sandy Rothman on guitar and David Nelson on.
- [29:33]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
Mandolin, My Darling Ella Lee.
- [29:51]
Narrator/Host
But as Garcia discovered, not only did bluegrass require a lot of discipline to play, it required a lot of other equally disciplined people to play it with. And he found it harder and harder to hold steady ensembles together. Which is why it's fortunate that two teenagers from nearby Atherton began to frequent Dana Morgan music. One of them was a high school student named Bob Matthews, who'd already taken some banjo lessons from Garcia. So of course I asked him a natural question. How was he as a teacher?
- [30:21]
Bob Matthews
I never learned how to play the banjo. I did learn how to play music, and I did learn how to enjoy music and understand it through my many years of association with him. It was also during that time, I think, that I was in high school. Bob Weir showed up in my sophomore year. I had a habit of not particularly participating, and he was known as an incorrigible in all the private schools in the west, west of the Rockies. Sorry, Bobby. So we started cutting class a lot. He didn't have a first period class. I had typing, so I had to go learn how to type. And then I'd meet him out on we'd leave campus, which we weren't supposed to do, and we'd hitchhike into Palo Alto to Dana Morgan to hang out. And at one point we were into the jug band phase of folk music and Questin's Jug Band was coming in and playing at the I think it was a freight and salvage in Berkeley. And it was a 21 only thing Bob Weir managed to sneak in. Actually, I was with him when Kluskin came out and this Daisy Mae of a, Maria del Moto came out and sang I'm A woman. Both of us right then and there, decided to start a jug band. And the next day, or the next school day, when we went and hitchhiked into Dana Morgan and Jerry was there, we came in and said, we're starting a jug band. He looks up and says, good, I'm in it. And that's my story of the beginning of the musical performing entities that started as Mother McCree's Uptown Jug champions.
- [32:07]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
Smile louder. Long distance information Give me Memphis, Tennessee. Trying to find the. Please try to get in touch with me. You do not have to tell me who it was and made you call. Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall.
- [32:34]
Narrator/Host
That was Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions from the sole surviving tape of that ensemble, released as a self titled CD by Grateful Dead Records in 1998. In retrospect, Jerry Garcia adapting Chuck Berry's Memphis for a jug band was maybe a sign of things to come. Mother McCree's provided an outlet for almost pure fun without the need for virtuoso musicians. As always, Garcia was game. It wasn't fully rock and roll just yet, but it was a different energy than bluegrass and less somber. For sure. David Nelson, too, played a role in the jug band.
- [33:08]
David Nelson
Oh, the jug band. Next thing was the jug band. And I swear I named the band. I think Hunter. We were all trying to name the band. There's these name band sessions, which are just maddening because immediately after the first two or three ideas, then you start dwindling into puns and jokes and stuff that occurs to you, hey, how about the conservative Cocks? You know, something like that. You know, everybody thinks that causes other people to think of a funnier name and stuff like, so it's really maddening to get down. Seriously, come on, what's the name gonna be? And we were thinking for the jug band, and I think it was Hunter who said, how about Mother McCree's? And I said, no, that's not good enough for a jug band. We gotta extend it to Mother McCree's Uptown Jug champions. Champions. I thought, brilliant. Yeah, don't call it band or people or anything like that, boys, you know. No. Champions. Jug champions. I said, okay, make it so. Next thing you know, posters.
- [34:14]
Narrator/Host
One of Nelson's memories of his time in the jug band was the can do enthusiasm of Bob Weir.
- [34:20]
David Nelson
And here's Weir, he's willing to play jug. Cause that's one of the things you gotta find a jug player and nobody wants to do that. It's like you get tired of it in about five notes, you know, and there's no impetus to do that, but Weir was like, yep, I'll do it, I'll do it. You know. And so we're playing and. And Weir was just like, he brought like a box of jugs. Listen to this one. You know, Garcia, look at goes, yeah, yeah, it's very nice. What about that one? You know, like that. And he just. And then pretty soon got tired of it and he's going, no, no, no, you got to hear this one. We're going, enough, enough, man. No, no, listen to this one. What do you think? So which one should I use? The beginning. Okay, you're hired. The beginning.
- [35:11]
Narrator/Host
Weir's endless quest for tone.
- [35:13]
David Nelson
That's right. Endless quest for tone.
- [35:16]
Bob Matthews
Right, that's good.
- [35:18]
David Nelson
That is absolutely true. That was the beginning of the endless quest for tone. But anyway, so. And Bob Matthews agreed to play. No, no, Dave Parker agreed to play washboard, rub board. And bygot we had the Questkin Band records, which was their player was the guy, man. And we watched him. We'd go to questin gigs, watched him. And he'd have free sewing thibbles, three on each hand. And then the washboard goes parallel out to you like this. I mean perpendicular. It's not like this. Some people probably play it like that, but this is the way to play it because you got one hand, which is the beat. It's like boom cha cha boom.
- [36:06]
Narrator/Host
The band plugged in by early 1965, debuting as the Warlocks in later spring. Acoustic music would continue to play a part in the Dead in Garcia's worlds, of course, but never with such single minded attention. Garcia's progress was just remarkable, moving through five distinct phases in those few years, starting with Weavers like folk before Moving to virtuosic 12 string guitar work, old timey string band music, hardcore bluegrass, and finally the jug band. With the exception of the jug band, which you can hear on the CD mentioned before, all of these phases have been captured beautifully on the before the Dead box set that came out in 2018, produced by Dennis McNally and Brian Mixis and released by Round Records. Dennis, the Grateful Dead's biographer and longtime publicist, spoke to us about the project.
- [36:54]
Dennis McNally
You get to listen to Jerry go up musically. The first recording is in May of 61 and he's been playing acoustic guitar because remember he played electric in, in high school. He'd been out of the army for four months. He'd been maybe playing acoustic for eight or nine. He's still fairly primitive the next tape, which is only three months later, he's way better. And, you know, you just watch him grow up in front of your eyes. It's remarkable. And then he gets to be a really, seriously good bluegrass banjo player.
- [37:26]
Narrator/Host
I can't recommend the set highly enough. Some of these recordings have circulated among traders for a while, in part because of recordings that Dennis himself found while researching his essential biography of the band Long Strange trip in the 1980s. But it wasn't until more recently that the recordings were finally collected and properly mixed, in part thanks to the persistence of co producer Brian Mixis.
- [37:48]
Dennis McNally
Brian Mixis is this sound professional. He records the sound for TV shows and films in New York. And he's a Deadhead and a Taper, which all. All of which, to those familiar with the phenomenon mean he's a little obsessive. And he got, oh, I don't know, eight, 10 years ago. He wrote to me. He was one of those people that, you know, came out of the blue and wrote to me that he was interested in Jerry's bluegrass period. He had questions, you know, based on the book. I answered them as best I could, frequently interrupting myself with Brian, that was 30 years ago. I don't remember, because literally, the research I done. This is about 10 years ago. And the research had been done in the early 80s. You know, it was already. It's already 30 years. Where does the time go? Sorry, write that down. It's a good lyric.
- [38:43]
Jerry Garcia (speaking)
And.
- [38:44]
Dennis McNally
And so he went away and eventually he approached the estate and he wanted to do a box set of Jerry before the Dead and the State called me up and said, what do you think of this project? Because if you like the idea, we'd like you to be the producer. Because of name recognition and just sort of general, the folks that are involved with all this know you. And I went, yeah, actually, that sounds like fun. So, I mean, Brian had been working for 10 years, and he had. Not only did he have all the tapes, some of which, of course, I had been the person to locate, as an example, there was a tape from the Boar's Head, which was Rodney Albin's. His brother Peter is in Big Brother to this day, Rodney's Club in San Carlos. And so I interviewed Rodney, I don't know, 81, 82. And he let me copy his master tape. And in the interval, he's, alas, passed, and nobody can find that master tape. So my cassette copy is the oldest known version. And then there were other things where he found some, you know, truly amazing stuff. He found the guy who. That. That one off that came before. Before the Dead, which was a show recorded in a studio. It wasn't a show.
- [40:04]
Narrator/Host
Oh, the Hard Valley Drifters. Right.
- [40:05]
Dennis McNally
The Hard Valley Drifters in the studio. And although it was one mic, I mean, it was bluegrass after all. It was certainly a better sounding than the average show. Remember, some of these early. The early parts of this were done in very small rooms with noisy people. The first one is done at a birthday party, and that's Brigid Meyer's 16th birthday party. So anyway, he had these tapes, except for the Bridget one, which, I mean, I've known Brigid for 25 years, and I never. I never said to her. It never occurred to me to say, got any tapes? Or, you know, other, you know, fragments of your life with Jerry back when you were 16. So we got that, and it's marvelous. There's a tape of Bob and Jerry. It was the first time I'd ever heard it. And it's. It's remarkable.
- [40:52]
David Nelson
It's so cool.
- [40:53]
Dennis McNally
It is wonderful to listen to these guys. They're so young, and yet already they're so Themselves, especially Jerry. And the relationship to the audience is just hysterical. So, yeah, so we. He had the. In effect, he had the. Pretty much had the tapes. So I, you know, started listening to them and doping out in terms of time and space and how much can we fit and all that. And in some ways, it was really quite simple.
- [41:22]
Narrator/Host
The last music on before the Dead was recorded in the summer of 1964. The Jug Band was already in existence, and they were a few months from grabbing some instruments off the wall at Dana Morgan Music and renaming themselves the Warlocks. But that's a topic for another day. We'll leave you with Garcia, Nelson and Rothman taking a chorus of the bluegrass classic Drink up and Go Home. The Black Mountain Boys, recorded in the spring of 1964.
- [41:48]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
Don't tell me your troubles.
- [41:53]
David Nelson
I got.
- [41:53]
Jerry Garcia (singing)
Enough of my own Be thankful you're living Drink up and go home.
- [42:13]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to this special bonus episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast. Please stop by our website, dead.netdeadcast and check out what we have for you there. You never know what you might find attached to each episode. And while you're there, don't forget to submit your story for the Dead Cast. You can record up to two minutes of audio, and we'll take the ones that make us sit up straight and craft them into a future episode. Before you log off, please be kind. Hit that, like, button and subscribe. Thank you very much. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doron Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.