Read Online Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson - Free Book Online Page A

Ritchie Valens.”
    During this period Daniel and Jerry also wrote a few simple songs together. “I still have a book where we wrote down the fingering and lyrics,” he says. “They were typical love songs. One was called ‘Fly Trap’—‘words by J. Garcia and D. Garcia.’ But mostly we played standard stuff—‘Church Bells May Ring,’ ‘Whispering Bells,’ Everly Brothers songs.”
    Sometime in the middle of 1959 Ruth decided that it would be in Jerry’s best interest to get out of the city, so they moved up to the house in Cazadero full-time and that fall Jerry was enrolled at Analy High School in Sebastopol, a thirty-minute bus ride away. Jerry was
not
pleased about this turn of events, though he acknowledged once that “things were just getting too intense for me in San Francisco. Then I started cutting school up there at Analy, and I’d steal my mother’s car and I’d go down to the Peninsula—I had a girlfriend down there [in Redwood City].”
    When the fall semester ended at Analy in late January 1960, Jerry decided he’d had enough. He was unhappy in school, unhappy at home and had no notions of getting a job, either. After bumming around for two months, splitting his time between his girlfriend’s house and various friends’ pads in San Francisco, he made a decision that obviously came more out of desperation than rational analysis: he joined the army, enlisting at a recruiting office in Oakland on April 12. Since he was still only seventeen at the time, his mother had to sign the papers; now both of her sons were in the military. At least it was peacetime.
    To say that Jerry Garcia wasn’t exactly “army material” would be puttingit mildly. He related more to the rebellious Brando in
The Wild One
than to John Wayne in
Sands of Iwo Jima,
and he wasn’t about to leave Kerouac and Chuck Berry behind just because his hair was short and he wore a khaki uniform. By his own admission, he was lazy and “pathologically anti-authoritarian,” but no doubt the military has made “men” out of tougher cases than his, and he was always such a genial and enthusiastic fellow that he probably convinced the recruiters, and maybe even himself, that this was the best move for him. Tiff says he tried to talk Jerry out of enlisting—after all, he knew both the military and his brother—but, as Jerry put it, “I wanted so badly to see the world; it was the only hope I had. The only reason I wanted to go into the army was to go someplace—Germany, Korea, Japan,
anyplace.
”
    From mid-April to July of 1960, Jerry did his basic combat training at Fort Ord, a scenic if slightly desolate base near Monterey, on the Pacific Coast 125 miles south of San Francisco. He wasn’t a total washout as an army man: at Fort Ord he earned decorations for carbine sharpshooting and for “Basic Missileman (Surface to Air Missile)” training. Clearly, though, he had things other than soldiering on his mind. There was his girlfriend, whom he visited in Redwood City whenever he could, and Laird Grant helped make sure that Jerry’s time at Fort Ord wasn’t
too
dull:
    “I’d go on base and we’d go to the PX and get a bunch of beer and put it in my ’47 Cadillac convertible and drive around and throw beer cans at the sentries,” Laird says. “I had a whole bunch of crazy people that were dressed in weird costumes, people from Redwood City, like his girlfriend. I drove around with a leopardskin vest and cutoff patent leather shorts and a top hat with a dead mole on top of it.”
    In July and August of 1960 Jerry was in an advanced individual training program at Fort Ord learning how to be an auto maintenance helper. He had always been interested in cars, but Laird Grant says, “The army said, ‘What do you want to do?’ and he said, ‘I want to do electronics,’ but instead they gave him motor pool! He told me, ‘If I’d asked for motor pool they would have given me electronics!’ That’s the way the army was in