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Authors: Dennis Mcnally
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shelves of books, Rodney asked Jerry if he’d care to perform at his new folk music club, the Boar’s Head. They were pleasantly surprised when Garcia, already possessed of an imposing local reputation, said, “Sure, man.” “Great,” said Rodney. “Can you bring anybody else? Tell everybody.” It was characteristic of Rodney Albin that the first Peninsula folk club would be his idea. An eccentric intellectual who carried a briefcase at the age of nineteen and was notorious for the dried bat hanging off his bedroom lamp at home, Rodney was definitely a leader.
The Boar’s Head was a tiny loft seating perhaps thirty or forty people above the San Carlos Book Stall, a metaphysical bookstore in a town halfway up the Peninsula between Palo Alto and San Francisco. There was a miniature triangular stage, with lighting provided by bulbs masked by cut-up coffee cans. Donations covered the cost of the coffee, and the musicians were unpaid, mostly performing hootenanny style—that is, one song per person or group at a time, with few long sets. A surviving tape captures what people recalled as a fairly typical night. Garcia, with Leicester on autoharp, played “Wildwood Flower,” and with both men on guitar and Hunter on mandolin, they covered “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” and so forth. They were more than competent, though not yet any threat to the Carter Family.
The Boar’s Head was small but popular, and Garcia adopted it as his home, bringing along Hunter, Leicester, David McQueen, and Truck Driving Cherie Huddleston to play. A local electric guitarist, Troy Weidenheimer, might play some Ventures or Jimmy Reed. A few nonlocals performed, including a calypso singer named Walt Brown, and the East Bay blues singer Jesse “the Lone Cat” Fuller. It was a highly sociable environment, not least because it had an “annex,” the Belmont home of Suze Wood, Leicester’s girlfriend. Their enormous house, built at the turn of the century by the magnate William Ralston for his daughter, sheltered a rowdy, individualistic household, and they welcomed the Boar’s Head gang to spread blankets in the backyard, drink wine, talk, and play. The Boar’s Head would also be significant as the place where Garcia’s East Palo Alto friend and future musical partner Blue Ron McKernan first performed in public, as a member of the Second Story Men, a one-night group with Rodney and Peter Albin and their friend Ellen Cavanaugh.
Ron McKernan always had depths. He was a serious child, and his mother, Esther, would recall that when she took him on carnival rides, he would sit stone-faced. She could never tell if he was truly enjoying himself or just pleasing her, because he was always sweet and considerate. “He’d throw me.” His father, Phil, played boogie-woogie piano until Ron was born in 1945, and then was a rhythm and blues disc jockey at KRE under the name “Cool Breeze” until the mid-fifties, when he went to work at Stanford as an electronics engineer. After an early fondness for Elvis Presley, Ron followed his father’s tastes into Presley’s black roots, and the early exposure to African American music became central to his life. He was a serious student of blues lore, well up on the musicians and the labels long before there were any reference books available. But his interest went far deeper than a taste for music. By the time he showed up at the Boar’s Head at the age of sixteen, he had left white middle-class life entirely behind. His first nickname was “Rimms,” as in the rim of a wheel, like steel. He had a motorcycle chain permanently bolted to his wrist and wore oily jeans, Brandoesque T-shirts, and greasy hair. He was never violent or mean, but the ugly boil on his cheek seemed to at least one friend to have made him a sensitive disfigured artist figure, like the Phantom of the Opera. He was certainly set apart in his bodily funkiness, so extreme that the officials of the local pool would not let him swim there.
The Boar’s Head was a tiny loft seating perhaps thirty or forty people above the San Carlos Book Stall, a metaphysical bookstore in a town halfway up the Peninsula between Palo Alto and San Francisco. There was a miniature triangular stage, with lighting provided by bulbs masked by cut-up coffee cans. Donations covered the cost of the coffee, and the musicians were unpaid, mostly performing hootenanny style—that is, one song per person or group at a time, with few long sets. A surviving tape captures what people recalled as a fairly typical night. Garcia, with Leicester on autoharp, played “Wildwood Flower,” and with both men on guitar and Hunter on mandolin, they covered “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” and so forth. They were more than competent, though not yet any threat to the Carter Family.
The Boar’s Head was small but popular, and Garcia adopted it as his home, bringing along Hunter, Leicester, David McQueen, and Truck Driving Cherie Huddleston to play. A local electric guitarist, Troy Weidenheimer, might play some Ventures or Jimmy Reed. A few nonlocals performed, including a calypso singer named Walt Brown, and the East Bay blues singer Jesse “the Lone Cat” Fuller. It was a highly sociable environment, not least because it had an “annex,” the Belmont home of Suze Wood, Leicester’s girlfriend. Their enormous house, built at the turn of the century by the magnate William Ralston for his daughter, sheltered a rowdy, individualistic household, and they welcomed the Boar’s Head gang to spread blankets in the backyard, drink wine, talk, and play. The Boar’s Head would also be significant as the place where Garcia’s East Palo Alto friend and future musical partner Blue Ron McKernan first performed in public, as a member of the Second Story Men, a one-night group with Rodney and Peter Albin and their friend Ellen Cavanaugh.
Ron McKernan always had depths. He was a serious child, and his mother, Esther, would recall that when she took him on carnival rides, he would sit stone-faced. She could never tell if he was truly enjoying himself or just pleasing her, because he was always sweet and considerate. “He’d throw me.” His father, Phil, played boogie-woogie piano until Ron was born in 1945, and then was a rhythm and blues disc jockey at KRE under the name “Cool Breeze” until the mid-fifties, when he went to work at Stanford as an electronics engineer. After an early fondness for Elvis Presley, Ron followed his father’s tastes into Presley’s black roots, and the early exposure to African American music became central to his life. He was a serious student of blues lore, well up on the musicians and the labels long before there were any reference books available. But his interest went far deeper than a taste for music. By the time he showed up at the Boar’s Head at the age of sixteen, he had left white middle-class life entirely behind. His first nickname was “Rimms,” as in the rim of a wheel, like steel. He had a motorcycle chain permanently bolted to his wrist and wore oily jeans, Brandoesque T-shirts, and greasy hair. He was never violent or mean, but the ugly boil on his cheek seemed to at least one friend to have made him a sensitive disfigured artist figure, like the Phantom of the Opera. He was certainly set apart in his bodily funkiness, so extreme that the officials of the local pool would not let him swim there.
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