Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 1, Bonus Episode 2
JERRY GARCIA: AMERICAN FOLKIE
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Dennis McNally, Jerry On Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews.
AUDIO: “Sittin’ On Top of the World” [Jerry Garcia with Hart Valley Drifters, Before the Dead, 1962] - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 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 “Sittin’ 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 Workingman’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-time 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.
AUDIO: “Cannonball Blues” [Jerry Garcia with Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, Before the Dead, 6/11/62] (0:10-0:32) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 18-year-old Jerry Garcia was discharged from the Army on December 14th, 1960. His military records turned up online recently. His commanding captain wrote, “I have found Garcia to be unreliable, irresponsible, immature, unwilling to accept authority, and completely lacking in soldierly qualities.” Sounds like our boy.
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.
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’d go on to run the Grateful Dead’s Ice-9 publishing company. There were eccentrics like Willy Legate, who the Dead later employed at their Front Street rehearsal hall, and painters like Paul Speegle. In the spring, Robert Hunter showed up.
Through sheer fate, Garcia had picked an absurdly fertile place to hang out. Nicholas Meriwether, who was the archivist at the Grateful Dead 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.
NICHOLAS MERIWETHER: One of the interesting things about the Dead is even though in the in the public's mind they're most strongly associated with the Haight-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, and have said, that that early Palo Alto Peninsula bohemian community really was the spawning ground for what became the Haight. A good way of looking at both Palo Alto and the Haight-Ashbury is as part of a long tradition in American history of local bohemians and their bohemian enclaves. 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 result of a confluence of forces — accidental, deliberate, all kinds of things, from economics onward.
But in early Palo Alto, people could afford to live there; 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. 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 with roots all the way back to the ‘20s, but most historians would date it to the 1940s and, in particular, the 1950s. Garcia and his friends were part of that whole folk scene, which had music as one of its bases, but not its only basis. So, one of the people that was a huge leading light in that scene was a young gifted painter named Paul Speegle, who was part of an old Bay Area family. Speegle was a very gifted painter, and he was tragically killed in a car accident. Jerry Garcia and a couple of other members of the later and broader Dead scene were in that car as well. Jerry went through the windshield, and that’s where Robert Hunter got the line “lost my boots in transit,” as a veiled reference to the fact that Garcia was thrown through the windshield, his shoes left in the car.
JESSE: In the ‘80s, Jerry Garcia spoke with Grateful Dead publicist biographer Dennis McNally about the accident. It’s one of the many topics covered on the great Jerry On Jerry audiobook, which edits together 5-and-a-half hours worth of Dennis’s 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.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry on Jerry]: I went through the windshield. It was so violent, so furious, I don't even know… I have no, nothing. For me, there was an unbroken moment between being in the car and being in a field, and that’s it. There’s nothing in between. I don’t know what happened, really. At 90 miles an hour, things happen fast. My shoes were in the car, under the seat — I was literally thrown out of my shoes. That was what the force of it was like. It was a sobering sensation. When I saw what that car looked like, believe me… I was so amazed I was alive, I couldn’t believe it. That thing was a total loss — it looked like a smashed beer can. You know what I mean? It was junk. The violence must have been incredible.
My life started there. I was fucking around until there, really… I was just a dumb kid. I mean, I had a few half-horned ideas, but my life… that is the slingshot, boom, you know? That’s what got me going — that’s what gave life urgency. That was hard. That stuff is hard when you’re young — the grief when you feel you lose a brother, when you lose a pal. Losing a comrade. He was like a new friend, too… we were just getting chummy. We were just getting really fond of each other. You know how it is, when you’re young and there’s that excitement.
JESSE: 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 folksingers in part led by Pete Seeger. He also acquired his first nice guitar from his girlfriend, Brigid Meier. 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 26th, 1961, available on the Before the Dead box set from Round Records.
AUDIO: “Trouble in Mind” [Jerry Garcia with Robert Hunter, Before the Dead, 5/26/61] (0:40-1:09) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 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 Willy Legate. Many years later, in the ‘80s, Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally encountered Willy after the band gave him a job at their Front Street rehearsal hall.
DENNIS McNALLY: He sent off for LSD at Sandoz in ‘58 or ‘59. That was before anybody, anybody, even knew about it. Long before anybody had ever heard about LSD. He read about it in some fashion and managed to use college letterhead to get us 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 the archivist, the superintendent of Front Street. He kept the tape archives before Dick [Latvala] got the job. He studied the Bible; I think it was almost from a numerological point of view. Whatever it was, his mind saw puzzles.
JESSE: As Nick Meriwether pointed out, the San Francisco Peninsula was a breeding ground for folk music and 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.
DAVID NELSON: So, Rodney says, one day when they’re fooling around… I remember Rodney grabbed me and Pete by the shoulders and says, “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. Totally nonconformist and beatniks and stuff, artists and everything. It had a little coffee place, you could get coffee in the bookstore and sit at a table and read your book. 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 and come up to our club.” So, okay. We sit there, and I remember Pete Albin and me looking through books, and we see this guy sitting in a chair in that little coffee area — it’s summer, so he’s got his shirt open, and his hair, from here to here… just, like, a rug. What? And he’s playing a 12-string guitar, just a real surly look on his face. [makes vocalizing strumming noises] Me and Peter are looking at each other, and he says, “It’s Jerry Garcia!”
I remember never having heard, to my knowledge, the name Jerry Garcia. But as soon as he said “That’s Jerry Garcia,” something happened. I can’t explain it — it’s like this deja vu experience. So, Rodney brings us both up to Garcia. We’re going, “Oh, hey,” and Rodney’s introducing himself and saying, “I’m wondering if you could just round up some people — we want you to come up and play. It’s called the Boar’s Head. This is David here, he did the poster.” I remember doing a drawing of a boar’s head, lettering “The Boar’s Head.” So he said, “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
We wait for the next Tuesday night; we go there, we’re so excited, me and Pete and Rodney. “Anything yet?” I look around — “No, nothing yet.” And all of a sudden, I hear a Harley-Davidson come up, and I went: “They’re here…” Because there’s always a lead guy who goes, “I’ll get there before you guys. What’s the address?” So here he comes, comes in — next thing you know, there’s a station wagon full of people coming out, and they’re all coming up the steps. And here comes Garcia with a Martin 0-18, a dark top one, mahogany top, back and sides. It’s the cheapest Martin you can get. He’s holding it like that… wow, awesome. [chuckles] Anyway, he plays first; Joni Sims played; David X, a Black guy who we called David X, his nickname. All these people came and they sang a few songs. It was just fantastic — the first time I’d ever seen this kind of thing. And we made it happen. Garcia gets his guitar, [goes on] the bookcase stage, and starts fingerpicking. 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? I’m just spellbound. Then he gets his finger picks out and starts fingerpicking and does “As we rode out to Fennario.” I just hit the bricks almost — oh my god. I went to Peter, “What song is this? Where did he get that song?” Fennario… what’s the name, Peggy-O? I went and looked for it — we didn’t have internet then, but I had ways of looking up stuff. Nothin’ — nothin’. There’s no reference to that. Years later, Dylan comes out with an album with that song on it. But still.
We would have get-togethers after the Boar’s Head at Suzie Wood’s house in Belmont. That had a time limit on it, since we’d go late. Everybody would come over to her house — she said we were welcome there. I remember one of those times, I said, “Jerry, Jerry, can I talk to you in this other room?” I asked him, “What’s the song with Fennario? What is that, where’s that from? And where can I find that song?” He goes, “Putnam’s Golden Songster.” I went, “Oh, thanks.” Other people talked to him, too, and he said, “Putnam’s Golden Songster.” I looked it up and found it in a bookstore. So many hundreds of songs, I had no idea. I’m not about to pick a note out and read from music — that’s not a good way to learn a song. So, I passed on it. But there it was. I forget whether they called it Fennario or Peggy-O, what’s the real name of the song. But there’s one step right there, and that just started me off.
JESSE: It’s amazing how quickly Garcia picked up skills once he set his mind to them.
DAVID NELSON: Once Garcia started seriously studying bluegrass banjo, it was in his hands all the time, constantly. You’d almost want to say 24/7, but he'd have to sleep sometime. But seriously. And everybody started noticing, anytime you want to talk to Garcia, he’d go, “Yeah, what?” And he’d come over with his banjo — he’s listening to you, but he’s going [vocalizes banjo picking noises]... you’re trying to talk to him, and he’s saying, “Yeah, I hear ya.” And still he’s going [vocalizes more banjo picking noises]... he just never stopped, never stopped playing.
JESSE: It reminds me of the legendary Neal Cassady, the Merry Prankster also known as Dean Moriarty in Jack Keroauc’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 Workingman’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 became a music teacher.
BOB MATTHEWS: Jerry was there in this classic situation of playing, always. He’d be carrying on a conversation — honestly, he’d be playing and just look at you. He was always just lookin’ for a reaction.
JESSE: 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 Dead Heads 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.
DAVID NELSON: Bill Monroe, at one point, was playing at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, and me and Garcia and Adams Otis drove down to Los Angeles. Adams is ready to drive, he was willing to make the drive. So we go there, and we’re actually going to see Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys. Fucking incredible, man. That was our thing. Doc Watson was the only guy you’d hear playing single-notes, fiddle tunes. I’m just like, “Wow, Doc Watson and Bill Monroe!” And then they came on together and did songs.
At one of the breaks, I went out… I was just learning mandolin, and I thought, “Well, I’ll ask the master himself for some pointers on mandolin.” So I went up: “Excuse me”—he was heading onto the stage, but not yet. He said, “Yes, what is it?” I said, “I’m just starting to learn to play the mandolin, and I was wondering if you could give me a few pointers. I’ve already played guitar for years, and I’m just starting.” He goes, “Yeah: always remember to keep a loose wrist, and don’t hold the pick too tight.” And he turns and walks on. “Thanks!” I was wondering — what does that mean to me? When you ask the question, you’re expecting some dissertation on what not to do and what to do and stuff. He just said keep a loose wrist, and don’t hold the pick too tight. I’ve used those words and found out it’s easier said than done, actually, to relax. When you get to something you don’t [know well]—[makes groaning noise]—you grip the pick, and that’s why it gets harder. So I realized that it’s really true.
But Doc Watson was just a cataclysmic… to me, it was just a huge revelation. We knew about him, and I don’t know where we heard him because he didn’t have a record out yet. But we knew about him playing with somebody else, the Carter Family or something. 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.” I go, “Hello?” And Garcia goes, “Listen to this.” And he plays, not from the record, “Black Mountain Rag,” which he had learned from the record. The first Doc Watson record has “Black Mountain Rag” on it—[vocalizes melody]—and he plays it. I’m going, “Shit, what is that?” He says, “It’s ‘Black Mountain Rag,’ by Doc Watson.” So I was just nuts, and I was searching all the record stores. That’s why that was such a huge trip, to go down and see Bill Monroe and Doc Watson. It was amazing, man. Once again, I’m lucky — I can’t help it. Like the Dylan song says, “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”
RICH MAHAN: So was Doc the first guitar player that you guys really latched onto that was playing single-note lines?
DAVID NELSON: Mmmhm. There wasn’t really much of anything else except for that Stanley Brothers record, which I believe it was Pap Napier — Bill Napier, who would be on some Stanley Brothers records. They were on a budget, too, I’d imagine. “Mountain Dew” by the Stanley Brothers—[vocalizes instrumental melody]—that’s the guitar. So it was just a treasure, to me, anybody we could find the guitar solo on a traditional music record or a bluegrass record, you were really lucky because it just didn’t happen that much. The whole thing of bluegrass is—I learned this after being in many bluegrass bands—if you’ve got a solo, you’d better have another guitar there, because as soon as the guitar goes away from chords and the picked bass notes and the bottom falls out, what do you have? A 5-string banjo, a mandolin and a bass, which you can’t hear anyway. It’s below audibility. So, gig after gig, I’d take a little solo: “Oops, the groove is not there anymore.”
RICH MAHAN: Yeah, part of it drops out.
DAVID NELSON: Yeah. So that was one of the things that I learned. Another thing he told me that’s why they don’t have guitar solos a lot because you’d have to have another guitar, two guitars. If you’re at a gig where people paid money, you don’t want that; you don’t want everything falling apart with one solo.
JESSE: 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-and-a-half hour audiobook of great Jerry interviews.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry]: Scotty Stoneman is one of those guys that opened up music, because he’d start off with a tune, a fiddle tune like “Blackberry Blossom,” and he’d take that sucker out and it’d be like 20 minutes would go by. He was playing ideas that went across four choruses. Instead of playing a tune, it would be some crazed idea that stretched all the way across. He was like the Coltrane of country fiddle. Have you ever heard him play?
DENNIS MCNALLY [Jerry On Jerry]: Nah, I haven’t.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry]: I’ll have to find you some tapes of him playing really outside. He played so soulfully; his playing had so much pain, and [beauty]... plus incredible sensibilities, man. An incredible freshness and neatness to his ideas. He’s played some of the coolest solos in bluegrass music, bar none. Some of them are so fresh and so exciting.
JESSE: Here’s a little bit of Scotty Stoneman with the Kentucky Colonels playing “Eighth of January,” from the album 1965 Live In L.A., which gives a little sense of how Stoneman extended his wild fiddle breaks.
AUDIO: “Eighth of January” [Scotty Stoneman with the Kentucky Colonels, 1965 Live in L.A.] (2:21-3:13) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 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.”
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 the destination of Bill Monroe’s Bean Blossom music venue and rolling summer bluegrass festival in Indiana. En route they saw shows by the Osborne 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 Berkeley 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, playing with the Black Mountain Boys, featuring Sandy Rothman on guitar and David Nelson on mandolin.
AUDIO: “Darlin' Allalee” [Jerry Garcia with the Black Mountain Boys, Before the Dead, 3/1964] (1:20-1:34) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 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 was 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.
JESSE: [to Bob] How was he as a teacher?
BOB MATTHEWS: I never learned how to play the banjo. [laughs] 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 I was in high school, that Bob Weir showed up — my sophomore year. I had a habit of not particularly participating, and he was known as incorrigible in all of the private schools 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 learn how to type, but we’d leave campus—which we weren’t supposed to do—and we’d hitchhike into Palo Alto to Dana Morgan, to hang out. At one point, we were into the jug band phase of folk music, and [Jim] Kweskin’s jug band was coming in and playing at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. I think it was 21-and-up only. Bob Weir managed to sneak in, and actually, I was with him. When Kweskin came out and did “Daisy Mae” and Maria D’Amato 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.” [laughs] And that’s my story of the beginning of the musical performing entities that started as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
AUDIO: “Memphis” [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, s/t] (0:07-0:37)
JESSE: 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.
DAVID NELSON: Oh the jug band — the next thing was the jug band. I swear, I named the band I think… We were all trying to name the band. There were these “name the 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 Cucks?” [chuckles] Stuff like that. Everybody goes and thinks of a funnier name. So it’s really maddening: “Seriously, come on, what’s the name gonna be?” We were thinking for the jug band, I think it was Hunter that said, “How about Mother McCree’s?” I said, “No, that’s not good enough for a jug band. We’ve got to extend it to Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.” Champions, I thought — brilliant. Nothing with “Boys”— Champions, Jug Champions. “Okay, make it so.” Next thing you know: posters.
JESSE: One of Nelson’s memories of his time in the jug band was the can-do enthusiasm of Bob Weir.
DAVID NELSON: Here’s where he’s willing to play jug, because that’s one of the things — you’ve got to find a jug player, and nobody wants to do that. You get tired of it in about five notes; there’s no impetus to do that. But Weir was like, “Yep, I’ll do it, I’ll do it.” So, we’re playing, and Weir just brought a box of jugs: “Listen to this one!” Garcia would go, “Yeah, yeah, that’s very nice. What about that one?” [makes jug-blowing sounds] Pretty soon, he got tired of it, and Weir goes, “No, no, you’ve got to hear this one!” We’re going, “Enough, enough, man.” “No, no, listen to this one! What do you think? Which one should I use?” Okay, you’re hired.
JESSE: The beginning of Weir’s endless quest for tone.
DAVID NELSON: That's right! An endless quest for tone! That’s good. That is absolutely true — that was the beginning of the endless quest for tone. Anyway, Bob Matthews agreed to play… no, no, Dave Parker agreed to play washboard. And by god, we had the Kweskin Band records, which was—[makes washboard scraping sounds]... and their player was the guy. We watched him, we’d go to Kweskin gigs and he’d have three sewing thimbles on each hand, and then the washboard goes parallel out to you, perpendicular. Some people probably play it like that, but this is the way to play it, because you’ve got one hand that’s like — [makes rhythmic noises].
JESSE: The band plugged in by early 1965, debuting as The Warlocks in the later spring. Acoustic music would continue to play a part in the Dead and 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-time 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 Miksis and released by Round Records. Dennis, the Grateful Dead’s biographer and longtime publicist, spoke to us about the project.
DENNIS McNALLY: You get to listen to Jerry grow up musically. The first recording is in May of ‘61, and he has been playing acoustic guitar — remember, he played electric in high school. He’d been out of the Army for four months; he’d been playing acoustic for maybe eight or nine. He’s still fairly primitive. The next date, three months later, he’s way better. You just watch him grow up in front of your eyes — it’s really remarkable. And then he gets to be a really seriously good bluegrass banjo player.
JESSE: 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 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, in part thanks to the persistence of co-producer Brian Miksis.
DENNIS McNALLY: Brian Miksis is this sound professional. He records the sound for TV shows and films in New York, and is a Dead Head and a taper — all of which, to those familiar with the phenomenon, means he’s a little obsessive. 8 or 10 years ago, he wrote to me. He was one of those people that came out of the blue and wrote to me that he was interested in Jerry's bluegrass period; he had questions 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 had done was about 10 years ago, and the research had been done in the early ‘80s. Eesh, where does the time go? Sorry, write that down, it’s a good lyric…
So, he went away, and eventually, he approached the estate, and he wanted to do a box set of Jerry before the Dead. The estate called me up and said, “What do you think of this project? If you like the idea, we’d like you to be the producer because of name recognition and because the folks involved with all this know you.” And I went, “Yeah, actually, that sounds like fun.” Brian had been working for 10 years, and he had all the tapes — some of which, of course, I had been the person to locate. There was a tape from the Boar’s Head, which was Rodney Albin’s—his brother, Peter, is in Big Brother [and the Holding Company], to this day—club in San Carlos. So I interviewed Rodney in ‘81, ‘82, and he let me copy his master tape. In the interval he has, alas, passed, and nobody can find that master tape. So my cassette copy is the oldest known version. There were other things where he found some truly amazing stuff. He found this one-off that came before Before the Dead, which was a show recorded in a studio. It wasn’t a show, it was —
JESSE: Oh, the Hart Valley Drifters —
DENNIS McNALLY: The Hart Valley Drifters, in the studio. And although it was one mic—it was bluegrass, after all—it was certainly better-sounding than the average show. Remember, some of 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 Meier’s 16th birthday party. Anyway, he had these tapes, except for the Brigid one — I’ve known Brigid for 25 years, and it never occurred to me to say, “Got any tapes? Or other fragments of your life with Jerry, back when you were 16?” So, we got that and it’s marvelous. A tape of Bob and Jerry? It’s the first time I’d ever heard it, and it’s remarkable.
JESSE: So good.
DENNIS McNALLY: It is wonderful to listen to. These guys are so young, and yet, already, they are so themselves — especially Jerry. And the relationship to the audience is just hysterical. So yeah, in effect, he pretty much had the tapes. So I started listening to them and doping out in terms of time and space, how much can we fit and all that. In some ways, it was really quite simple.
JESSE: 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.
AUDIO: “Drink Up and Go Home” [Jerry Garcia with the Black Mountain Boys, Before the Dead, 1964] (2:35-2:58) - [Spotify]