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Authors: Dennis Mcnally
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life.
Their real scene remained the back room at Kepler’s, but on May 5, 1961, Bob and Jerry made a foray into public performance, playing for the Peninsula School’s graduation. Willy’s girlfriend, Danya, got them the gig, for which they earned five dollars. Later in the month they got another job, this time lined up by some fans who asked them to come to their Stanford dormitory to play. Hunter would remember the sweet sound of the applause, and Garcia’s jocular introduction. “The next number is an old Indian work song, translated from the original Slavic by the head of the Hebrew department at Sacred Heart University.”
As it happened, Hunter was an extremely limited guitarist. In his own words, Garcia was already “getting serious. I was getting to be more and more impatient with Hunter’s guitar playing.” The turning point of his life that past February had begun to take solid hold of him. “I was just playing all the time,” Garcia recalled. “I just wanted to conquer that stuff. For me, it was little discoveries. I was just hungry to meet people to play. I was out on a limb like a motherfucker.” To another friend he remarked, “Man, all I wanna do is live my weird little life my weird little way—all I wanna do is play.” Hunter was a writer, already working on a novel about their lives, and wasn’t really interested in being a professional musician. Their sessions at Kepler’s and their friendship continued, but the duo billed as “Bob and Jerry” did not.
That June, Garcia met someone who could teach him. Marshall Leicester had just finished his sophomore year at Yale, where he’d been part of one of the first collegiate purist folk scenes, disciples of the New Lost City Ramblers (NLCR). Garcia was playing “Everybody Loves Saturday Night” as he strolled into Kepler’s, and though Leicester hated the song, he recalled Garcia from their seventh-grade class together at the Menlo Oaks school and borrowed his guitar to show him some real picking. They soon fell in together, with Garcia staying at Marshall’s home when Mrs. Leicester could be so persuaded. Like many moms, she thought Jerry was “shiftless.” Dazzled with Jerry’s verbal facility, Marshall enjoyed their relationship hugely. Together they followed Harry Smith and the NLCR’s lead and reveled in the manifold joys of the Carter Family songbook. Simple and expressive, A. P. Carter’s popular modulations of the mountain culture—since the material was recorded and then broadcast on radio, it was popular by definition—took folk music into the modern era with “Wabash Cannonball,” “Wildwood Flower,” and Mother Maybelle’s unique guitar technique (the “Carter Scratch”). Marshall also lent Jerry a copy of Flatt and Scruggs’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and he fell in love with it.
As summer came in, Garcia briefly followed Brigid to San Francisco, where she was living with her Aunt Muriel and modeling at I. Magnin’s department store while attending Jerry’s alma mater, the California School of Fine Arts, on weekends. He stayed for a while with John “the Cool” Winter at the Cadillac Hotel, in the seedy Tenderloin District, living largely on potatoes and carrots they stole from the produce market on the Embarcadero. Brigid fed him and gave him cigarette money, and occasionally Garcia gave lessons to an odd man named Bruce “the Nerd” Warendorf, who’d acquired an unusual semi-mandolin called a Waldzither and adopted Jerry as a mentor. Somehow Garcia had acquired a portable phonograph, and he spent the summer studying Elizabeth Cotten–style guitar, as well as Flatt and Scruggs.
Before going off to the Cadillac Hotel, Garcia had gotten an offer he couldn’t refuse. As usual, he was sitting in Kepler’s and playing—“Railroad Bill,” as it happened—when a young man named Rodney Albin approached him. As Rodney’s younger brother Peter and his friend David Nelson watched, peeking between
Their real scene remained the back room at Kepler’s, but on May 5, 1961, Bob and Jerry made a foray into public performance, playing for the Peninsula School’s graduation. Willy’s girlfriend, Danya, got them the gig, for which they earned five dollars. Later in the month they got another job, this time lined up by some fans who asked them to come to their Stanford dormitory to play. Hunter would remember the sweet sound of the applause, and Garcia’s jocular introduction. “The next number is an old Indian work song, translated from the original Slavic by the head of the Hebrew department at Sacred Heart University.”
As it happened, Hunter was an extremely limited guitarist. In his own words, Garcia was already “getting serious. I was getting to be more and more impatient with Hunter’s guitar playing.” The turning point of his life that past February had begun to take solid hold of him. “I was just playing all the time,” Garcia recalled. “I just wanted to conquer that stuff. For me, it was little discoveries. I was just hungry to meet people to play. I was out on a limb like a motherfucker.” To another friend he remarked, “Man, all I wanna do is live my weird little life my weird little way—all I wanna do is play.” Hunter was a writer, already working on a novel about their lives, and wasn’t really interested in being a professional musician. Their sessions at Kepler’s and their friendship continued, but the duo billed as “Bob and Jerry” did not.
That June, Garcia met someone who could teach him. Marshall Leicester had just finished his sophomore year at Yale, where he’d been part of one of the first collegiate purist folk scenes, disciples of the New Lost City Ramblers (NLCR). Garcia was playing “Everybody Loves Saturday Night” as he strolled into Kepler’s, and though Leicester hated the song, he recalled Garcia from their seventh-grade class together at the Menlo Oaks school and borrowed his guitar to show him some real picking. They soon fell in together, with Garcia staying at Marshall’s home when Mrs. Leicester could be so persuaded. Like many moms, she thought Jerry was “shiftless.” Dazzled with Jerry’s verbal facility, Marshall enjoyed their relationship hugely. Together they followed Harry Smith and the NLCR’s lead and reveled in the manifold joys of the Carter Family songbook. Simple and expressive, A. P. Carter’s popular modulations of the mountain culture—since the material was recorded and then broadcast on radio, it was popular by definition—took folk music into the modern era with “Wabash Cannonball,” “Wildwood Flower,” and Mother Maybelle’s unique guitar technique (the “Carter Scratch”). Marshall also lent Jerry a copy of Flatt and Scruggs’s “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” and he fell in love with it.
As summer came in, Garcia briefly followed Brigid to San Francisco, where she was living with her Aunt Muriel and modeling at I. Magnin’s department store while attending Jerry’s alma mater, the California School of Fine Arts, on weekends. He stayed for a while with John “the Cool” Winter at the Cadillac Hotel, in the seedy Tenderloin District, living largely on potatoes and carrots they stole from the produce market on the Embarcadero. Brigid fed him and gave him cigarette money, and occasionally Garcia gave lessons to an odd man named Bruce “the Nerd” Warendorf, who’d acquired an unusual semi-mandolin called a Waldzither and adopted Jerry as a mentor. Somehow Garcia had acquired a portable phonograph, and he spent the summer studying Elizabeth Cotten–style guitar, as well as Flatt and Scruggs.
Before going off to the Cadillac Hotel, Garcia had gotten an offer he couldn’t refuse. As usual, he was sitting in Kepler’s and playing—“Railroad Bill,” as it happened—when a young man named Rodney Albin approached him. As Rodney’s younger brother Peter and his friend David Nelson watched, peeking between
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