Read Online Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson - Free Book Online
Authors: Blair Jackson
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Lord Buckley, Ken Nordine and the incomparable Neal Cassady.
Wally Hedrick, Jerry’s mentor at CSFA, had been in the thick of the city’s bohemian renaissance since he arrived at the school as a promising painter at the dawn of the ’50s. As early as 1953 he experimented with a sort of proto–light show machine that projected splashes of color while he played music on a keyboard. The following year, he and Deborah Remington turned a former auto repair shop on Fillmore Street into a combination gallery/ performance space called the Six Gallery. It was there on October 13, 1955, before an audience of about a hundred cognoscenti and illuminati, including Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat paterfamilias Kenneth Rexroth and scores of others, that Allen Ginsberg gave his first public reading of “Howl.”
By the time Jerry arrived at CSFA in 1958 some of the early Beat energy had dissipated or moved elsewhere, but there was still very much a scene in North Beach. Laird Grant remembers, “We’d hang out in front of the Anxious Asp, the Green Street Saloon, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, Coffee & Confusion, and we’d go to parties here and there—there was a lot of action around; this is still before they drove the beatniks out.” Jerry, Laird and their friends also devoured the latest books by Beat writers—a dog-eared copy of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
was eagerly passed around as if it were some secret mystic text.
* * *
In the winter of 1958 Jerry’s mother had bought a vacation home for the family up on Austin Creek near the Russian River town of Cazadero, about sixty miles north of the city. Tiff Garcia, who visited the house only a few times while he was on leave from the marines, says the house was “rustic but modern. It had a nice big living room, a lot of windows; it was in a really pretty area.”
Daniel Garcia recalls, “We used to go up to Cazadero and sit in the family room and smoke Bull Durham cigarettes and play our guitars for hours. Hours and hours until my fingers literally bled. We’d play Chuck Berry, Bill Haley,
everything.
”
The family still went down to Lompico for part of each summer, too, though for shorter periods, and Tiff remembers a time at the Lodge there in the late ’50s when “Jerry and my cousin Danny and I played some Wilbur Harrison tunes up on the dance floor. They were playing guitars and I think Iwas beating on a cymbal and a box. It used to be the place for the kids to hang out, and for adults there was a bar, so they would go in there and get blasted. It was really quite a busy place;
crowded.
”
Daniel says that he and Tiff and Jerry practiced and played together on a number of different occasions: “I seem to remember we called ourselves the Garcia Brothers among the bunch of us. Jerry and I played lead guitar and we’d argue about who was going to play what. Jerry used to kid me—‘Hell, I play better with four fingers than you guys do with five.’ Tiff would play bass sometimes. Mostly we played by ear and copied records.” Daniel also says that in Lompico he and Jerry would practice their guitars at a nearby dam “and a couple of times we’d even get a little group around us and people would actually clap when we were done, which surprised us.
“When we were first learning, we used to go up to Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park and practice out there. We also practiced a lot at my mom and dad’s house, because they’d put up with it.”
Jerry’s younger cousin Dennis Clifford recalls a big Garcia-Clifford Thanksgiving bash in ’58 or ’59 where Jerry entertained the families with his guitar playing. “I know he was self-taught,” he says, “but he was really pretty good.” Daniel Garcia also remembers a “family reunion at [Aunt] Lena’s house in San Francisco where Jerry and I played. Boy, we knocked ’em dead! They hadn’t heard us before and we played ‘Donna’ by
Wally Hedrick, Jerry’s mentor at CSFA, had been in the thick of the city’s bohemian renaissance since he arrived at the school as a promising painter at the dawn of the ’50s. As early as 1953 he experimented with a sort of proto–light show machine that projected splashes of color while he played music on a keyboard. The following year, he and Deborah Remington turned a former auto repair shop on Fillmore Street into a combination gallery/ performance space called the Six Gallery. It was there on October 13, 1955, before an audience of about a hundred cognoscenti and illuminati, including Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Beat paterfamilias Kenneth Rexroth and scores of others, that Allen Ginsberg gave his first public reading of “Howl.”
By the time Jerry arrived at CSFA in 1958 some of the early Beat energy had dissipated or moved elsewhere, but there was still very much a scene in North Beach. Laird Grant remembers, “We’d hang out in front of the Anxious Asp, the Green Street Saloon, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, Coffee & Confusion, and we’d go to parties here and there—there was a lot of action around; this is still before they drove the beatniks out.” Jerry, Laird and their friends also devoured the latest books by Beat writers—a dog-eared copy of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
was eagerly passed around as if it were some secret mystic text.
* * *
In the winter of 1958 Jerry’s mother had bought a vacation home for the family up on Austin Creek near the Russian River town of Cazadero, about sixty miles north of the city. Tiff Garcia, who visited the house only a few times while he was on leave from the marines, says the house was “rustic but modern. It had a nice big living room, a lot of windows; it was in a really pretty area.”
Daniel Garcia recalls, “We used to go up to Cazadero and sit in the family room and smoke Bull Durham cigarettes and play our guitars for hours. Hours and hours until my fingers literally bled. We’d play Chuck Berry, Bill Haley,
everything.
”
The family still went down to Lompico for part of each summer, too, though for shorter periods, and Tiff remembers a time at the Lodge there in the late ’50s when “Jerry and my cousin Danny and I played some Wilbur Harrison tunes up on the dance floor. They were playing guitars and I think Iwas beating on a cymbal and a box. It used to be the place for the kids to hang out, and for adults there was a bar, so they would go in there and get blasted. It was really quite a busy place;
crowded.
”
Daniel says that he and Tiff and Jerry practiced and played together on a number of different occasions: “I seem to remember we called ourselves the Garcia Brothers among the bunch of us. Jerry and I played lead guitar and we’d argue about who was going to play what. Jerry used to kid me—‘Hell, I play better with four fingers than you guys do with five.’ Tiff would play bass sometimes. Mostly we played by ear and copied records.” Daniel also says that in Lompico he and Jerry would practice their guitars at a nearby dam “and a couple of times we’d even get a little group around us and people would actually clap when we were done, which surprised us.
“When we were first learning, we used to go up to Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park and practice out there. We also practiced a lot at my mom and dad’s house, because they’d put up with it.”
Jerry’s younger cousin Dennis Clifford recalls a big Garcia-Clifford Thanksgiving bash in ’58 or ’59 where Jerry entertained the families with his guitar playing. “I know he was self-taught,” he says, “but he was really pretty good.” Daniel Garcia also remembers a “family reunion at [Aunt] Lena’s house in San Francisco where Jerry and I played. Boy, we knocked ’em dead! They hadn’t heard us before and we played ‘Donna’ by
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