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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, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season seven of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. It's great to be back and thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode, the first in a two part series on Ron Pigpen McKernan, we commemorate the life of the original Grateful Dead frontman on the 50th anniversary of his passing. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons one through six and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platforms so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help us by subscribing. Hit that like button and leave us a review. Thank you very much. Have you checked out the transcripts we now have available for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes? Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and click the transcript link on the episode you want to explore, including the recently uploaded Season 6 transcripts. Well, timing is everything and as we salute Pigpen, it's only appropriate that there be some music to come along with us on this trip. Announcing History of The Grateful Dead Volume 1 Bears Choice 50th Anniversary Remaster this is the original album, newly remastered by Grammy Award winning engineer David Glasser using Plan Gent processes from the original analog to track tapes. These were recorded live by Owsley Bear Stanley at the famed Fillmore east on February 13th and 14th, 1970. There are two versions, a black 180 gram vinyl edition and a limited edition custom vinyl version available exclusively@dead.net you can pre order any and all of The Bear's Choice 50th Anniversary Remaster releases and merch over at Dead.net thanks to everyone who has left their stories at stories.Dead.net we are now asking you to share your stories of serendipity miracles and the most unbelievable, craziest stories ever told. Share those stories@stories.dead.net and you just may hear yourself on the Deadcast. Jesse and I took a trip to interview Jim Sullivan, who is the keeper of the Pigpen Archives, a unique collection of Grateful Dead memorabilia and and a treasure trove of McKernan family keepsakes. Sully graciously invited us into his home and shared a multitude of stories, documents, photographs and museum worthy items that blew our minds multiple times. Welcome back to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Here's Jesse Jarno.
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I said goodbye, Goodbye poor Katie here's the last words I'm got to say Last words I've got to say.
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C
Ron Pigpen McKernan died 50 years ago this month at the age of 27. He's buried at the Alta Mesa Memorial park in Palo Alto, the town where the Grateful Dead were born. An inscription reads, pigpen was and is now forever one of the Grateful Dead. This is from Bear's Choice, a live album released in 1973 that was in large part a tribute to Pigpen. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David.
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Lemieux Take Pigpen away from the Electric Grateful Dead.
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Take him away from being the frontman.
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On Turn on your Love Light and.
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Good Lovin and things like that and.
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Bringing the house down with Hard to.
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Handle and things like that.
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And he is one of the most.
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Soulful blues guys when he's got just.
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B
He and a guitar. You know, some folks say she must be a Cadillac I say she got to be a team model fool yeah so she got the shape all right but you can't carry no heavy load.
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C
It was Pigpen's idea to go electric as the Warlocks in 1965, and he wasn't just the Dead's first frontman, but their first identifiable character, depicted on the first T shirts and posters in 1967. But even 50 years after his death, Pigpen is still a bit of a mystery. He didn't give mini interviews and died just as the Grateful Dead were transforming from an underground act into a mainstream band. And more tragically, just as he was beginning to find his own voice as a songwriter.
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Did I take a wrong turn on life's winding road? Won't somebody help me find the right way to go?
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That was the Two Souls in Communion, recorded on the last night of the Europe 72 tour at the Lyceum in London, one of Pigpen's final original compositions. And as we'll learn today, the intended title for the song is actually Stranger Here. It was never performed again. Pigpen appeared once more with the Dead after their return from Europe. 72, but only played organ. He died nine months later. Today we remember and meet Pigpen. Here's Bob Weir on WMMR in 1976.
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B
He was really sweet. He was a madman. He was really wonderful. He was not at all like any Hell's Angels, except that he kind of looked like a Hell's Angel.
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C
And here's how we remembered Pigpen when we spoke with him for our American Beauty season.
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B
Pigpen was Christ. What was he? Sort of an Irish poet or, you know, Irish Scottish, that he had that going. You know, he drank a bit and he had that sensibility about him. As far as as a musician is concerned, he was a pretty damn competent musician and then sort of a scholar of the blues.
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C
That's probably what the phrase Pigpen era Dead conjures for most people. Pig large and in charge and running down. Turn on your love light on live Dead. It's true, Pigpen was the least psychedelicized member of the original Grateful Dead, a fact that I think leads to a skewed perception of his role in the Dead in their history. It's easy to think of two separate Grateful the Psychedelic warriors acting as Pigpen's backup group. But before switching back to their regularly scheduled rainbow making, here's Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in 1975.
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There were the tunes that he sang, and the rest of us got to just goof around. He had that thing of being able to really carry an audience, too. He was, like, really more of a showman and more out there than the rest of us.
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C
That bit about carrying an audience was more than a little important during the lean years, when the band didn't quite have an audience of their own, let alone an original voice. During the band's first five years of existence, its members developed into songwriters, most obviously Jerry Garcia with his partner Robert Hunter, but Phil Lesh and Bob weir, too. In 1970, American Beauty featured Pigpen's first fully original song on a Dead album.
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Operator can you help me, Help me if you please Give me the right area code and the number that I need My rider left up on the midnight flyer Singing like a summer breeze.
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It turned out that Pigpen's songwriting voice meshed perfectly with the band he'd helped to found. Go figure. And that's the story we're gonna focus on in these episodes. How completely Pigpen was, and is now forever one of the Grateful Dead.
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B
I don't know where she's gone I don't care where she's been Long as she's been doing it. Right.
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C
We talked a bunch about Pigpen in the Operator episode of our American Beauty season, delving a bit into his archives. And we'll be pointing back in that direction occasionally, so as not to repeat ourselves too much. But we're going to go a bit further today in a few ways. In 1970, the late Hank Harrison conducted one of the few interviews with Pigpen, and the recordings are now in the Grateful Ed Archive at UC Santa Cruz. It's not the greatest recording, so you might have to squint your ears just slightly. A lot of the conversation involved trying to untangle the comings and goings of the early Palo Alto folk scenes and how it led to Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and eventually the Dead.
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I mean, it's not no big important thing that if somebody's going over here, somebody's going there.
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Well, to some of us, then you.
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Gotta sort it out. Good luck.
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C
Thanks, Pagan. Welcome to the Deadcast. The other way we went further is that Rich and I went on a research mission to California, where we visited our good Deadcast friend, Jim Sullivan, known as Sully. He grew up in eastern Palo Alto, nearby the McKernans, and was best friends with Pig's little brother. Kevin has remained tight with the family and become the keeper of the McKernan Archives. One fascinating document we're going to be hearing from today are some biographical notes written after Pigpen's passing by his father, Phil. Sully's going to be reading the part of Phil McKernan.
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The entity that was to become Pigpen of the Grateful Dead was welcomed into this world. Born on September 8, 1945, in Mills Memorial Hospital, San Mateo, California, he was a quiet, sensitive and bright child. But it became apparent when he was about 12 that he had been born about 10 years before his time. At seven years, he took lessons on the steel guitar, but found it tedious. Trumpet lessons when he was 10, and he really was a natural. But all the while he played around on the piano but was adamant about not taking lessons.
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Ron Charles McKernan spent the first dozen years of his life in San Bruno, just south of San Francisco, adjacent to San Francisco International Airport. When he was around 13, his father, Phil, and mother, Esther, moved the family south to the Palo Alto area around the time that Phil quit his job as a DJ and began to work as a lab technician at Stanford. By then, Ron had a younger sister, Carol, and a younger brother, Kevin. They first settled at 17 Buckthorn Way in Menlo Park, a location that would prove pivotal in young Ron's life, though they only lived there briefly.
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I was living on a street that didn't have no sidewalks, you know, and all that stuff and bunking houses and all that. I had to actually walk across the tracks down by the hobo jungle and then go through the rich neighborhood over to get to school.
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D
Atherton was the snooty community that even back then was large lots and fences, which wasn't really the norm. There weren't a lot of fences back then.
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C
Atherton is where Bob Weir grew up, as well as a few other members of the Dead scene. So Pigpen might have been riding his bike right past young Bobby Weir on his way to middle school. Also attending middle school in another part of Menlo park in that era was Jerry Garcia and Buckthorn.
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D
You could get along the Caltrain tracks. And the Caltrain wasn't just for the commuter trains. There was a lot of freight trains that would come through middle of the night. So you had that. I mean, we just called them hobos, but you just had these folks that would ride the rails. And it was Ron, you know, spoke at a few points down into my street.
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B
They had hoobos on me and standing, you know, the bows. He'd be down there sitting around drinking wine, waiting for the right train to want to get. But, you know, during that time, they'd be coming up to the house and say, you know, you know, ma', am, you know, can I do some gardening work for you or something? We didn't have much of garden. We didn't have no sidewalks from the street.
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C
This is from a track recorded by Pigpen in 1969 or 1970 about his experiences around Buckthorn Way when he was 12 or so years old.
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B
I began to ask him, I was just a little child, like, just a little child asking to see what they was doing and find out, you know, how you do all this business and how you get into it, how you know where to go. And one old guy, you know, he tell me, hey, boy. He said, boy, you just get on that train and what you get, you get, and that's it.
- [14:31]
D
Pretty much everybody was sock hops and jock stuff. And he definitely went a different way. And thank goodness for that.
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C
Even before he discovered the language of the blues. Pigpen's first dose of underground culture came from migrants riding the rails, which is also likely where he got his first taste of alcohol.
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D
Buckthorn still there, but again, the Caltrain tracks have got these 10 foot fences on each side. So you really. The only places you can access them is at where streets cross or at the stations. So again, a lost aspect of that area.
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C
Most of us know Ron McKernan as Pig Pen. And before Pig Pen he was known by some as Blue Ron.
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E
But.
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C
But in elementary school he had a different nickname.
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D
He went to Encinal and that's where for whatever reason he. His nickname there, according to his yearbook, was Rims. And I'm not sure if it was car related or he never wore glasses. So I mean about three quarters of the signatures in his little grammar school book said hey, Rims.
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C
Now there's a different reality. Rims McKernan. After only a year or so on buckthorn Way, the McKernans moved a few miles to 2338 Santa Catalina street just over the southern border from East Palo Alto, a working class and black neighborhood a few blocks from the mighty 101 Expressway and settled there.
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D
They were still developing the neighborhood. It was tracked homes for all the, you know, IBM, there was the airlines where my father worked. And then Phil McKerna worked up at Stanford. It was just cheap housing my folks bought in the mid-50s, 55 and the McKernans did too. And they had just built those. And actually they were budget. They weren't even iclers, they were called Macays. And they were the budget conscious all the families had. You know, very rarely they'd have one or two kids that have three, four, five. As our family was six.
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C
Pigpen was working pretty early and Phil McKernan sketched out a list of Pigpen's early jobs.
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D
Phil was really trying to document his son's life and it talks about when he was a Cub Scout and then newspaper delivery boy, you know, worked cleaning up in a butcher shop. Boy, that must have been a heck of a job. Yeah, he was doing lawns, pump gas, first motorcycle when he was 15 and.
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B
I was about 15 or 16 years old when I met him. I had myself a motorcycle and I was working at a Texac gas station. I'd get off early from school. I'd go and work through the afternoon up until about 7 o' clock in the morning. Only thing is, I didn't have any lights on my bike. And when the winter started coming around, it began to get dark before I got off work. Oops. So I'd take a flashlight to the handlebars just so I wouldn't get busted.
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C
Back in 1992, our good buddy David Ganz interviewed a few members of the Dead's early scene who were classmates with Pigpen. This is Connie Bonner, who would co found the first Grateful Dead fan club the Golden Road to unlimited devotion in 1966, predating the song of the same name.
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B
I remember him in high school. The hallways would clear when Pigpen walked down the hallway forever. Reasons I wasn't ever showing with women on each arm. Maybe I just remember him in his last days at Palo Alto High School before he was expelled with a sort of unforgettable character. And then running into him a few months later at the guitarist store, much to my surprise.
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C
Here's the description of Pigpen's high school career from his father. Phil's notes on him went to high.
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D
School only when he had to. They were really glad when he quit. He set a bad example whenever he appeared on campus with boots, long hair and a junky Levi jacket that we're all familiar with. He made poetry, prose and many a wall he painted. So I guess that's graffiti.
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C
Pigpen's first instrument was guitar.
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D
When he was 13, he got his first acoustic guitar, $12. Montgomery used one.
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B
John Oglety had this white electric guitar with a little funky amplifier and he loaned it to me. And so I went over and I started to play Dwayne Hindy songs. Yeah, right, things like that. And my father bought me a $15 unsung guitar. It was about 100 years old, you know, scroungy old clunky little guitar. So that's how I got decided on the guitar.
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D
Mostly taught himself the guitar and the harp. He sat in on hootenannies and other local musical gatherings.
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C
If there were any parents ready to be supportive of a son who wanted to play guitar, it was Phil and Esther McKernan.
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D
I first became interested in R and B by listening to records and his father's R and B radio show. The first R and B radio show in the SF Bay Area.
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C
We'll pause here and discuss Phil McKernan for a moment because he does seem like a pretty profound influence on young Ron, even if the two didn't always see eyeball to eyeball. Phil spent his 20s working in radio. In the McKernan collection, there's a small black and white photo of a dirt road filled with puddles leading up to a tiny one room building in the middle of nowhere, situated next to a transmitter tower. Khsl, it reads on the roof. On the back, the photo is captioned. My home, My abode. The control room and transmitter. Janitor PC McKernan. KHSL was in Chico and Phil bought between Bay Area stations, landing at KRE in Berkeley about a half dozen years before Pigpen was born, where he became chief announcer. Often it's repeated that his radio name was Cool Breeze.
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D
I asked their daughter about this was his nickname Cool Breeze and no, it was not. She goes, he had, he was, that wasn't his, his radio name. His radio name was Phil, so I don't know. I've seen that bandied about. And according to blood relative, they're only living daughter. That's not his nickname, that's not his stage name.
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C
Phil's name appears in a few histories of radio. Supporting the family's contention, John A. Jackson's Big Beat Heat presents a list of white radio disc jockeys of the early 1950s who played rhythm and blues music, each with a colorful nickname and personalized style. There was Xena Daddy Sears in Atlanta, Clarence Papa Stoppa Heyman in New Orleans, Danny Catman Stiles in Newark, Ken Jack the Cat Elliot, also in New Orleans, George Hound Dog Lorenz in Buffalo, and Tom Big Daddy Donahue in San Francisco. Phil McKernan is actually the only DJ on the list without a nickname. He probably stopped DJing and took a straight job at Stanford right around the time pigpen turned 10. A little bit of a piano player himself, he, he passed along one important musical skill to his son.
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D
I learned boogie from father also, so I'd assume that'd be Boogie Woogie.
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C
Nearby was a neighborhood of East Palo Alto known as Whiskey Gulch.
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D
Whiskey Gulch was nearby and that's Ron, I think at some point in some of his interviews talked about going to Baronies and then, you know, Whiskey Gulch now is completely gone. You know, it's really a place that doesn't exist anymore, only in pictures. But it was kind of a sea little section that was within, you know, a 10 minute walk from our neighborhood. But there's also the Baylands. You know, we all spent a lot of time out in the Baylands and I think Ron would go over to East Palo Alto to the blues clubs. There was quite a few. He had Mickey's Blue Room and you know, if you ever needed to hear your head kicked in, there's plenty of places to go over there. It was real rough edge. It was great. It was accessible and there was no putting on airs when you went over there.
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C
Connie Bonner.
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B
There was an instance one time, I can't remember if my parents were supposed to be gone for the weekend and they actually never went anywhere and they walked into their own home and Pigpen opened The door to greet them. And I was always been so proud of my mother. She's a very good Sport.
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C
From Phil McKernan's notes on Ron Blues.
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D
Were reflected in his writing and painting. But it took music to express it to try and say what he had to say. Where did he meet Jerry, Bob, Phil, Bill and then in parentheses Must get more info.
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C
Young Ron wasn't long for high school, but dropping out of high school in Palo Alto was different than dropping out of high school in most places. For starters, there was Stanford University and the bohemian world that flourished at its edges. The center of that scene was Kepler's books and magazines and the whole early Kepler scene.
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B
And that's when I met Jerry and Elliot who was bothering Jerry about place of Luther. And he had just gotten out of the army at the time and he had a little brown epiplon guitar.
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C
Jerry Garcia moved to the Palo alto area in January 1961, fresh out of the army, just after Ron McKernan's 15th birthday. Garcia was 18.
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B
David X was living over on Ramona street.
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C
David X was part of the black bohemian scene in Palo Alto who'd taken a liking to teenage Ron. When Garcia showed up, David was the first to notice his sweet voice for blues singing and introduced him to the scene at Kepler's and to Ron McKernan. Garcia was soon a regular at the McKernan homestead, giving teenage Ron guitar pointers. Garcia told Blair Jackson, I sat in his room for countless hours listening to his old records. It was funky, man. Stuff thrown everywhere. Pigpen had this habit of wearing just a shirt and his underpants. You'd come into his house and he'd say, come on in, man. And he'd have a bottle of wine under the bed. His mom would come in about once every five hours to see if he was still alive. Around then, Ron got a new nickname. This is from 1966, one of the first radio interviews with the dead.
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B
Around the table will go meet first. Pigpen. What a horrible name.
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C
Not my fault.
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B
Jerry gave it to me. What's your real name? Ron.
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E
Ron Big pin.
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B
Who would influence you? Oog, mostly blues people. Lynan Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and the more modern bags like Bobby Bland and little junior Parker and little Walter and those kind of people.
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C
Well, that's one version. And there's another radio interview where Pigpen blames Garcia too. But we'll get to the other version of the Pigpen origin story momentarily. There are a number of incredible documents in the Pigpen collection, many from his teenage years.
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D
We get our hearts broken, you know, and all of a sudden, how do I manifest? How do I deal with that? I could write about it, you know, and he did. I mean, we're all tormented souls at that age, I'll tell you. Pretty much all of us.
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C
We're going to hear Sully read a little bit of a story titled San Bruno Blues, written the year pigpen turned 16. In it, he rides his motorcycle back to the town of his youth.
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D
I rode through the narrow streets which were once wide. I felt all the emotions I felt years ago when I passed long time known places. I wandered so many years back in my lonely life. I passed a house on the corner where my childhood lover and I stayed up late at night. 1956 I was walking in the wind swept and foggy nights past her house Hoping she'd look out and see me. I walked once again in the hills west skyline by the cold gray lake where I would sit for hours and cry.
- [26:45]
C
From a scholarly point of view, the story might be classified as Juvenalia, but it also captures something of Pigpen's teenage sadness. The story might be subtitled Portrait of Pigpen as a young beatnik Emo.
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D
I hitchhiked under frigid trees past the national cemetery, wandered the sunny hill park where my happiest day days were spent. Then I climbed on that black machine and hit the road. All the memories of those wonderful times will forever live in my heart as real and tender as if they had just happened. As I left that foggy little windswept town I cried on that hard highway. Had not the night grown longer and.
- [27:29]
B
The world grown colder?
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D
Is life so much harder to live? Ron McKernan 1961.
- [27:40]
C
Teenaged angst or no, it was obvious that Pigpen loved the new generation of beat writers. Here's one particularly Ginsburg like passage from another untitled piece. Who drank themselves into oblivion in San Francisco Bluetown Solitude in spiderfoot fog at 19th and Sloat, but whining and crying to the solitary streetcars on rainy tracks.
- [28:01]
D
Ferlinghetti ran that city lights for a long time. And that was a favorite spot in north beach. And it was just where the beatniks hung out.
- [28:10]
C
Growing up just down the peninsula, Pigpen was pretty close to ground zero as beat literature and other radical books came flowing into Kepler's.
- [28:18]
D
Yeah, we'd shoplift books from there, you know, steal this book. We took that to heart.
- [28:23]
C
The early 60s saw the formation of the social scene that was the Grateful Dead's extended universe. One center of action was Kepler's books. The other was the Chateau, a group boarding house in nearby Menlo Park.
- [28:36]
B
The old chateau a Kepler days that'd be about 62 around there, you know, give or take a century. See, you didn't live in the Chateau. No, but I was hanging out there all the time. Hunter lived there, Jerry lived there, Danny lived there. Willie Le Gate lived there. Just a bunch of the people that we know. You know, I used to live there.
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C
This next voice is Bobby Peterson, a poet and friend of Phil Lesh's who would provide lyrics for Unbroken Chain, New Potato Caboose and other Dead songs.
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B
That's where Phil heard Jerry played for.
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C
The first time in the home kitchen at the Chateau. Phil Lesh joined the scene. Here's him describing it to David Ganz in 1981 from David's Fine book Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [29:26]
B
By that time I met Jerry and Pigpen and Lily. We gave other folks. And so that was the only place I could figure to go. And went back to Kepler's Bookstore, which at that time was a hangout. They had a little coffee shop there. That was where we did all our.
- [29:41]
D
Raving in my pre Las Vegas period.
- [29:43]
C
With dozens of friends colliding, the future Grateful Dead fermented at the Chateau. One character of Ill Reputed was Joe Novakovich, who gave Pigpen a new musical direction.
- [29:54]
B
I met Novakovich right around that time. I remember one time going up to the Chateau, Novakovich gave me a harmonica. I had heard some harmonic music and I dug it. So he gave me one and said, okay, see, you can do it. So I was honking on it.
- [30:06]
C
At Sully's place, atop the McKernan family piano, there's a sketch of Teenage Pigpen by Joe Novakovich, with an instrument all his own. Pigpen contributed to the emerging music scene around the Chateau.
- [30:19]
B
Black girl, black girl, don't you lie to me Anywhere we stay.
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E
Where the.
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B
Sun never shines and I shiver the whole.
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C
That's Pigpen playing harmonica with Jerry Garcia at the top of the tangent in Palo Alto, probably in June of 1962. Singing is David X, the man who introduced Pigpen and Jerry around a year earlier. Thanks enormously to Palo Alto folk scholar Brian Mixis for identifying this recording, which has circulated for years as filler on a Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers tape. Alongside this snippet of Pigpen, we'll let Hogstnompers banjo player Jerry Garcia introduce him.
- [31:18]
B
I'm back again, but this time it's purely secondary.
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E
A lot of.
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B
Perhaps those of you that heard Ron play the harmonica were impressed by his playing, but there is another side of him that's even more impressive. I think so. Even though he'll be the last to admit it. I better shut up.
- [31:44]
C
One of the musicians that met Pig Pen during this period was Eric Thompson, who played guitar with Garcia and Hunter in the Black Mountain Boys. Welcome to the Deadcast, Eric.
- [31:53]
E
Mostly we hung because we were in the scene, but also I had a car. I could use my folks car. So he'd call me up and hey, man, come on, let's. Mostly like, he'd want to go to East Palo Alto, where it was easier to buy Thunderbirds when you were underage. He had black friends over there where we'd, you know, go and hang. And sometimes he would just come along, but sit in the car and drink. Harley was just to get out of the house. Ron did not get out of his Persona. He was the Pigpen, the Ron Persona all the time. He didn't just put it on for special occasions. His attitude, his way of talking, that's what it was. Some people, it's like they have one act and another act, but that was not this. He was living in his Persona, and he never mentioned his dad.
- [32:51]
C
Even though Pigpen wasn't a bluegrass picker nor even a folkie necessarily, he fit right into the scene alongside fellow Series music fans and musicians. Pig's specialties were just different.
- [33:02]
E
He also came to our bluegrass band gigs. Some of us were more focused on bluegrass and some of us were more focused on blues, but we were interested in all of it.
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B
Look at me now. Done. You got 99y. I said, I'm about to stay behind these concrete wall. You know, man, you know, the rest.
- [33:38]
D
Of my life.
- [33:44]
E
You listen to play blues guitar, and it's just so right on it. Just, you know, the feel and everything. And his part playing and his singing. He didn't sound like he was trying to do it. He was doing it even by then.
- [33:55]
C
Pigpen was a pretty hardcore drinker.
- [33:57]
E
Ron was a juicer, you know, already pretty alcoholic by the time I met him. You know, gang of girls that were part of the city alone. I just remember one of them just saying, yeah, you know.
- [34:15]
C
In case that Skype buffering made it difficult to hear. One of the women who is part of the local folk scene told Eric, ron has a death wish.
- [34:22]
E
I do feel that on some level, Ron constructed this Persona, but not having known him before that, then, you know, that's just who he was. He didn't seem sad. Just seemed like this was what he was going to do.
- [34:41]
C
One of the many remarkable documents in the collection of Pigpen's papers is a page of writing from October 1962, which we're going to hear a bunch of. What Pigpen was doing on the day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
- [34:53]
D
Tentative description of October 22, 1962. 4:00pm Cynically Evil Garcia of guitar and banjo chuckled across a black table at me. Well man, old JFK is gonna talk on us. St. Michael's Alley. Empty, spectacled, almost fat Vern Pothead, waiter, canned goods salesman. Hip talk and cool all listening the ominous message booming from high stucco ceilings, rough cut timbers, round tables and screaming kitchen machines. It was like a sun and palm morning in December 41. The same totality we all searched others faces.
- [35:41]
B
What do you.
- [35:42]
D
What do you think? Tense, unbelieving. Seven point ultimatum.
- [35:46]
C
Oh. In October of 1962, Garcia was 20. Pigpen had just turned 17.
- [35:53]
D
4:20 to 4:30pm assorted groans. God damn it.
- [35:58]
B
Oh.
- [35:59]
D
And oh God, what I gotta do now. Jerry looks sickly at me. Pigpen, they're gonna try and draft my ass, man. They'll never get me, man. We left desolate St. Michael's 4:30 to 11pm Garcia and I roared around the peninsula in a Black rat hole.
- [36:21]
B
Ish.
- [36:22]
D
41 Dodge. Howling, screaming. It's later than you think. Picked up Dave. Guitar picker bluegrass. Went back to St. Mike's bustling with Foxy young girls and collegiate uniformed athletic types. Sat over coffee and cigarettes. Made plans for just the next one day.
- [36:45]
C
The bluegrass guitar picker was almost certainly David Nelson. It's funny to hear Garcia worry about being drafted since he'd already been discharged from the army the previous year. But war is hell. There were different sub scenes at the folk clubs in the area. One of them was the Boar's Head in San Carlos.
- [37:02]
B
Jerry was in the Boar's Head scene and I was there. And Pete Albin and Rod Albin.
- [37:07]
C
Rodney Albin would remain a staple of the local folk scene until his untimely passing in the mid-80s. His brother Peter Albin would become the founding bassist in Big Brother and the Holding Company. Big Brother wasn't the only future band whose members were hanging around the folk scene in San Jose. Future merry prankster Paul Foster ran a club called the Offstage.
- [37:29]
B
Yoro would play there a lot and Col Cantner would show up and Cassidy would be around and shit like that. That was before they ever met Gracie.
- [37:37]
C
Many of the members of the Dead Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother were friendly long before any of them went electric. A new singer showed up on the scene from Texas.
- [37:46]
B
In fact, remember, like, every year, everybody go down to the pop festival. That's the first time I met her. And then she showed up at the Tangent and Jorma one night. Jorma was backing around and she was singing, and I met her. I walk be blue always sun gonna shine in my Lord Shining my light Girl, someday.
- [38:25]
C
That was Janis Joplin and Yor McCochonen from a new archival release from Omnivore titled the Legendary Typewriter Tape, recorded during their brief musical partnership that year, members of the scene all met up at the Monterey Jazz Festival with a typically amazing lineup featuring Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, the shorter Hancock, Williams, Carter version of the Miles Davis Quintet, Felonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and no small thing for the blues fans, Big Mama Thornton.
- [38:53]
B
And the jazz stuff was stuff. And she was hanging around and I was talking to. We were drinking wine together and all that bit. And she was like, on sort of like the quote folk circuit at that time. And then she disappeared for a while. I didn't know where she went.
- [39:08]
C
They'd reconnect a few years later. There was a lot going on. Another part of Palo Alto that Pigpen ended up in was Perry Lane, where a group of Stanford graduate writing students lived. Like his future bandmates, Pig Pen hung out among Ken Kesey's scene.
- [39:23]
B
Yeah, Perry Lane was really fun. It was a good trip, and it was pretty weird. Me and the locker would just go up there, bring a guitar, just sit around. We went over Kenzie's house a couple times.
- [39:35]
C
There, Pigpen encountered the legendary Neil Cassidy template for Dean Moriarty and Jack Kerouac's on the Road, and soon the pilot of the Merry Pranksters bus further.
- [39:45]
B
I thought he was kind of nuts. Hey, wait a minute. What's this guy up to? And so I talked to him and got to know him and got to love him.
- [39:51]
C
Of the future members of the Warlocks, Pigpen was the first to join an electric band.
- [39:56]
B
Yeah, and that's when I first started to hang around with Troy, too. When I got into the band, it was when I was like, 17, you know, 16. 17.
- [40:05]
C
Guitarist Troy Weidenheimer led the Zodiacs, a local R and D group where Pigpen got his first experience fronting a band.
- [40:12]
B
And the Zodiacs, we were playing beer drinking Stanford fraternity parties, and Troy played lead guitar. His old lady Sherry played rhythm guitar. Jerry would occasionally play bass. Garcia? Yeah, really string bass. Stand up bass, Electric bass. Electric Bass. Is that right? And Ron Ogborn would play bass occasionally or either drums. He doubled in bass and drums and I'd sing and play harmonica.
- [40:43]
C
Way before the war was another version of history says that Ron McKernan's tenure in the Zodiacs is where he earned the nickname Pigpen. Here's Eric Thompson.
- [40:53]
E
David Nelson thinks he was there when he was first got the nickname. Ron Pigt was in the band the Zodiacs. He was Troy Weidenheimer's band. Troy's girlfriend was Sherry Huddleston. And this is the story that Nelson tells and he's pretty accurate. So they were at some place and about to go some other party. It's like, oh, Pigpen, come on. And you know. But it wasn't like that was his nickname already.
- [41:25]
C
But it stuck as other members of the scene remembered. He was just obviously Pigpen. Everybody around would have gotten the reference. The character Pigpen first appeared alongside Charlie Brown and the gang in Charles Schulz's popular comic strip peanuts on July 8, 1954, when Ron McKernan himself was 8 years old. If you believe in embodiment, it's worth noting that the two Pigpens were around the same age. No tapes of the Zodiacs with Pigpen and Garcia seem to have survived. But when we were assembling this episode, I was delighted to discover that in 2007 the wonderful label Norton Records put out a four song Zodiac 7 inch recorded in 1960, about two years before Pig and Jerry started playing with them. It's not too often that we at the Dead cast have reason to shout it out to Miriam, Linna and the late great Billy Miller at Norton. But word up, Miriam and Billy, here's the Zodiacs with Duke Ellington's Caravan on the good old Grateful Dead cast. The Zodiacs apparently had a surf rock bent before becoming more of an R and B band. They influenced the Dead in important ways. Here's Jerry Garcia describing the experience to Dennis McNally. This is from the audiobook Jerry on Jerry, available from Hachette.
- [43:06]
B
Troy taught me the principle of just stomp your foot and get on it. He was a great one for the instant arrangement and he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it, fuck it if it ain't slick, you know what I mean? Just get supposed to be fun. If it ain't fun, it ain't worth it. He was good at that. And he was also a very good player too. And I admired him. I admired. He was facile.
- [43:32]
C
It's pretty easy to imagine The Zodiac's version of Caravan stretching out heavily. And it's totally fair to count this 1960 recording as an influence on the Grateful Dead, even if they never heard it. We've posted a link to the single@dead.net deadcast the Zodiacs probably sounded a little more R and B oriented when Pigpen appeared with them the same place.
- [44:19]
B
I like Walking the Dog, you know, like Searchin'.
- [44:23]
C
Both Walking the Dog and Searchin would survive into the Grateful Dead repertoire, or at least their collective memory, turning up at jam sessions and sound checks that have survived on tape.
- [44:32]
B
Troy did a lot of instrumental, like sensation sounds, a Freddie King guitar instrumental. Stuff, just all kind of things. A few Jimmy Reed tunes and. Just stuff, but nothing original.
- [44:47]
C
Au contraire, Mon Pork. Another quietly exciting thing we found in the Pigpen papers are a few sheets documenting a collaboration titled Rainy Day Blues, credited to Troy Weidenheimer and Ron McKernan, dated December 1963. We're working on decoding it. It's possible they didn't play it on stage, but still cool to know about. Either way, the Zodiacs were Pigpen's first real paying gig. One musician who filled in one night with the Zodiacs when Garcia was on bass was an underage drummer named Bill Kreutzman. He'd connect with Garcia and Pigpen soon enough.
- [45:22]
B
Troy was like, sort of the leader. And he was in with all the fraternities up at Stanford, and he was in with a few people. You'd make $20 if you were lucky.
- [45:33]
C
Some of the gigs got a little hairy.
- [45:35]
B
Pretty good for those days. Except that if you have to contend with a hundred drunken football players. Football players ain't small. They get these. These big bowls of punch. And they were running around and ripping off their T shirts and jumping on the girls and all that. They ran a place like up at Searsville Lake. They rent the men's dressing room. It was just a big, huge stone room with benches on the sides and.
- [46:06]
C
They'Ll showers, as happens. One gig led to another.
- [46:10]
B
We got these guys, these three black guys, this guy Don D Grate. That was his last name, D Grate. We'd play for house parties and stuff, and they'd sing and do like, coaster kind of trips. He was a lead singer and then decided to change the name to Dr. Don and the Interns.
- [46:33]
C
There's sadly no historical trace of Dr. Don and the Interns.
- [46:36]
B
We were working with them off and on for a while. We used to play a couple. We played a setup club by Playland and played Mostly house parties, you know, college house parties. And we had some weird times. We played in tents in San Jose fairgrounds, you know, like, all kind of weird, weird little games.
- [46:57]
C
One fan of the Zodiacs was teenager Denise Kaufman, who had shortly joined the Merry Pranksters as Merry Microgram & Co found the band Ace of Cups. Welcome back to the Dead cast, Denise.
- [47:07]
F
My folks trying to get me out of San Francisco because I was hanging out in these folk clubs, and I like sneaking out. And they caught me a couple of times. So I went to this school in Palo Alto, which was where Grace Slick graduated, as it turned out. I didn't know her. She was a little older, but it was right off of the Stanford campus.
- [47:28]
C
Denise's parents dropped her directly into the maw of the Palo Alto folk scare.
- [47:32]
F
Well, first of all, I used to go to Dana Morgan music to get strings and things like that. I didn't know Jerry then. I didn't know any of. I just knew Dana Jr. Because he was, you know, working there. So there were these schools that would have school dances. So there were musicians playing those dances. And the dances were more rock. Most of them were more like top 40. And they certainly weren't folk music. But there was sort of nothing that really rocked my soul that I heard in. In that. Until I heard the Zodiacs. And I was already, you know, I love gospel music. I loved R and B. And when I heard the Zodiacs, I was like, okay, this is great. I love them. Our school had their, like, the dance at one of the big hotels in San Francisco. I think it was like the St. Francis, and it ended at midnight or one or whatever that was. And that was kind of the early days of people not wanting the kids just to go roaming around after their graduation party and have them be somewhere. So I got a few friends to pitch in, their families to pitch in, and we had this after party at Bimbo's 365 Club in North Beach. And it was like, from, I want to say, one or two, one to six in the morning. The one at the hotel was going to be somewhat straighter. This is like, change clothes, come out, you know, and rock. And so that was the after party at Bimbos. Mimbo's was a really great place anyway. And that's when we started putting together the arrangements to have that party. It was like, I know the band. I've got the band.
- [49:12]
C
With roots going Back to a 1920s speakeasy, Bimbo's365 remains open at 1025 Columbus in San Francisco. It might have been Pigpen's first big city gig.
- [49:22]
F
It was a big deal for them. You know, I think they weren't doing as many. As many bigger, you know, playing in places like that.
- [49:32]
C
It's true that the Grateful Dead had their roots in the Bay Area folk scene, but they also had very real roots in the Bay Area RB party.
- [49:39]
B
Band scene during that whole offstage Tangent period. It was sort of an amorphous trip because during the Chateau period and the Zodiacs, you know, we were playing then. And then after that, after the Zodiacs, we started into the Jug Band. I'm Pete Wanger. I'm down here with Wayne Ott, bringing you some of the very best in live folk music from Palo Alto's own folk coffee house, the top of the Tangent. The next group is the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug champions. These guys are just a panic to watch. They fumble around on the stage and they bicker and eventually they come out with some pretty weird music. I think you're in for it, treat.
- [50:23]
E
And a real thrill.
- [50:24]
B
So let's bring him on. Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions.
- [50:28]
C
Yes, let's. The first vocal is Jerry Garcia. The second is Bob Weir. Pigpens playing harmonica. This is almost exactly a month after the Zodiacs gig at Denise Kaufman's high school graduation.
- [50:41]
B
I know they're gonna run to me when they get across the sea Every chance to win in Washington lays in France all safer now, Sugar Baby.
- [51:01]
C
By 1964, Pigpen had dropped out of high school. He wasn't exactly trying to build a career in music so much as hanging out a lot of places that happened to be music and musicians. Here's how Bob Weir described the formation of Mother McCree's Uptown Jug champions to David Ganz in 1983. This is in David's killer book, Conversations with the Dead.
- [51:21]
B
Pigpen and I were. I mean, we swept up in the music shop, and I was lucky enough to get a job teaching beginning intermediate students on guitar and beginning banjo. I was actually pretty good at it. I was good at working with kids.
- [51:42]
C
When a pair of DJs from Stanford's KZSU came to interview the band, Pigpen avoided them. So Garcia acted as spokesman.
- [51:48]
B
Ron Pigpen McKernan. He plays harmonica and sings blues quite well, I might add. Pigpen was. He'd work at the music store because he could hang out with musicians, but basically he didn't want to work any more than he absolutely had to, though playing and all that kind of stuff was different music. Was different. That wasn't like working for Pigpen. McKernin here known. And in the more esoteric circles, Mr. Pickpan McKernan would like to sing a Lightning Hopkins song.
- [52:17]
C
I wouldn't like to, but I will.
- [52:18]
B
Anyway. He's. He's gonna sing a song called A Rub. And we're not gonna be responsible for his contents or his. Hey, I'm supposed to be over here, aren't I, man? Yeah, in the middle. Yeah, there you go. Mama got a rub bald and sister got a tub Going around Doing a rub de rub Ain't it crazy?
- [52:44]
D
Ain't it crazy?
- [52:47]
B
Ain't it crazy one day to keep on rubbing that thing?
- [52:51]
C
That was the rub. Revived in 1970 by both the acoustic and electric Grateful Dead. And though there are no tapes of the Warlocks, it's a decent bet that it was one of the first songs in their repertoire. Denise was a jug band regular, too.
- [53:04]
F
The tangent was really my only local little place when I was down there. And also it was on the same street I lived on, so I could get there pretty easily. I know that somebody was playing like the washtub bass, and that was probably Bobby, but I didn't know Bobby then.
- [53:20]
C
Eric Thompson testifies to the power of young Pig.
- [53:24]
E
He was the best singer and the best harp player. I played banjo in the mother McCree's right at the end. And the thing is, is that he was the one with the Grammatus. He was the real force.
- [53:37]
C
Mother McCree's Uptown Jug champions provide the logical segue to the next step in the story. The birth of the electrified warlocks in early 1965. We're going to save that story for the next installment of the Adventures of Pigpen. To close us out today, we're going to hear a few bits of virtually never heard music. The first short bits we're going to hear come from Eric Thompson's tape collection. But the source itself is a little mysterious otherwise.
- [54:03]
E
We copied each other's tapes. That was just de rigor. We copied each other's bluegrass tapes. We copied each other's reel to reel tapes of old 78. That was just what you did.
- [54:18]
C
Eric's copy of this rare pig pen reel from the early days isn't the master.
- [54:22]
E
I'm not sure who recorded it. My inclination is it is Garcia.
- [54:27]
C
By the end of the recording, though, Pig seems to have seized the controls from Garcia.
- [54:32]
B
I'll do a verse somewhere along, but you do the chorus instead the boss. Okay. I'll do oh, in a beautiful City. You do the Rest of the verses. Okay. Oh, are you doing it? It's on. Oh, no.
- [54:45]
C
This is the old black spiritual known alternatively as oh, what a beautiful city and 12 gates to the City.
- [54:54]
B
There's Twink Gates.
- [55:20]
C
It's been said by his bandmates that Pigpen's natural musical habitat was at a kitchen table late at night with a small audience and a bottle of something tasty. And for our final course today, we are so pleased to present almost exactly that, some bits of Pigpen at a kitchen table sometime in the spring of 1964, when Pigpen was 18. Courtesy of Original recordist Ted Claire and archivist Brian Mixis. It's not late at night, but it might as well be if you're capable. Check out these bits on headphones with the volume turned up so you can hear the crickets, birds and other ambient sounds. And please welcome to the Deadcast Taper, Ted Claire.
- [56:19]
E
I was going to Stanford back in those days, and I had a radio show that played mostly country music and bluegrass and old timey. There was a place called the Tangent where local folk players and stuff played. And I would go over there and record the local people and play them on my radio show. And that's where I met Big Pen. And I knew Garcia from sort of the scene in Palo Alto and Menlo park because I was a player myself, but not a very good one at that point. So I recorded a ton of stuff and played it on my radio show.
- [57:00]
C
Ted's radio show was the Source of the 1962 recording of Jerry Garcia, David Nelson and Robert Hunter playing with the Heart Valley Drifters released as Folktime, and on the wonderful box set before the Dead. Here's a rare cut of Garcia as a vocalist, only accompanied by Ken Frankel on Dobro.
- [57:21]
B
Was in the spring, one summer's day My baby left me she went away now she's gone But I don't worry no, I'm sitting on top of the world.
- [57:42]
E
And then one day after I had met Pigpen, and we weren't real close friends, but, you know, we were acquaintances who hung out a bunch together, and I decided that I wanted to record him. He had recorded at the Tangent. I think I'd recorded him at the Tangent, but I had a friend over in Menlo park that had a brand new German Saba tape recorder. And so we invited Penn over to his house. I remember it was a 119 hillside drive in Menlo Park. And we sat him down one day in the kitchen, set up a microphone and provided him with a couple of bottles of peppermint twist, which was his current favorite, fortified wine. And he. He just played, you know, and so I recorded it. Let's just let the thing.
- [59:05]
B
Rocks and gravel take a solid road. Rocks and gravel make a solid road.
- [59:21]
E
Possible. It was done in my friend's kitchen, you know, it was done in the afternoon. It wasn't a. A late night tape. But Pigpen got kind of. Kind of wasted through the whole thing. But he did his best blues that way. Anyway, the Pig Pen tape on the box, it says 1963. But I was talking with Kim, the lady who. Whose house the recording took place, and she was there for the recording. And we determined that it was actually 64. The spring of 64, I think, was when the tape was made, probably.
- [59:56]
C
Ted aired this recording on his KZSU show sometime, not long after he recorded it. Between Ted Claire's show on KZSU and Garcia and Pigpen's appearances on KPFA's Midnight Special that don't survive on tape, the future members of the Dead got a decent bit of local exposure.
- [60:12]
E
It would have been a departure from the format of the show because the show was mostly bluegrass and old timey in some more modern country styles. But I think because I had the tape, I would have played that on the radio, But I can't be sure about that. I never knew whether anybody ever listened to my show. I mean, you know, it just. I was doing it for my own edification. I didn't care whether anybody was listening. Was called Flint Hill Special from a flat and Scruggs album. It was once a week and it would have been 8 o', clock, 7 o', clock, something like that.
- [60:49]
C
After dropping out of grad school a few years later, Ted Clare wound up in the army, returning to the Bay Area music scene in 1967 and eventually playing with Robert Hunter's band, Roadhog, who were in part an electrified version of the Liberty Hill Aristocrats, Rodney Albin's bluegrass band that Pigpen occasionally blew harp with. We'll talk again with Ted soon. Thanks again for making this remarkable tape of Pig. There are some parts of this recording that are prophetic in different ways. We'll start with the most literal and spooky.
- [61:30]
B
That Tokyo. Oh, yes. Doctor told me got to be dealing you well. I said, well, that's all right now me, well, I'm gonna do just what the hell I wanna do.
- [61:59]
C
But there are also some moments that wink at other parts of Pig Pen's future, Like this tune from the 1920s.
- [62:13]
B
Keep on trucking mama trucking mom blew the wind Keep on trucking, mama Trucking now till the break okay, well, you can do what you do when you can say what you say Tonight Come to it your way. You have to keep on Truck driver.
- [62:35]
C
And more subtly, the song Bring Me My Shotgun.
- [62:49]
B
Yeah, you know, if I don't get some competition, you know, there's got to be some trouble here.
- [63:00]
C
It's the exchange afterwards that's most revealing.
- [63:03]
B
Where'd you get that? I just made it up right now. Yeah, and you had some pattern.
- [63:16]
C
He ain't lying. Bring Me My Shotgun seemed to be a staple for pigpen. There are two other versions in circulation, both recorded in 1969 or 1970, when the later sessions got bootlegged. Sometimes, Bring Me My Shotgun was said to be the name of Pigpen's lost album. As we'll learn next time, it's not. But it also might be a key to understanding Pigpen and how much he really did actually fit into the Grateful Dead. Taken with this from 1963, the three takes are almost completely different from one another. It was simply a springboard for Pigpen to improvise. Maybe he can find a band who can do that, too.
- [64:17]
B
Oh.
- [64:20]
A
We'D like to thank our guests in this episode. David Lemieux, Bobby Weir, Jim Sullivan, Connie Bonner, Eric Thompson, Denise Kaufman and Ted Claire. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Gans, for contributing audio from his interview archive. Thank you very much for tuning in. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And keep your tour stories coming by recording yours over@stories.dead.net See you at the next show. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.