Dark Star (4 page)

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
While he was in the Army, I'd see him now and then when he'd come by and ask for some money or when he came by my grandmother's house. He wasn't really AWOL for long. He was just AWOL so frequently that they said to him, “Enough.” He told me he apologized. Every time he'd screw up in the Army, he'd say, “Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that.” And he just kept screwing up. I don't think his record was all that severe. Not enough for us to know about it. It was like a hardship discharge. I was surprised he stayed in as long as he did. I really was.

Alan Trist:
What he told me in '61 was that he was down in Monterey at Fort Ord and that his job was driving the missile trucks. There he was, driving around the means of destruction on his back. It wasn't so much that which upset him about the Army. It was the authoritarianism of it all. He said, “I couldn't handle that for very long.” It was typical Jerry that he was able to get himself out of the Army by just being really smart. He'd go AWOL and come up to San Francisco and hang out with Laird. When I first met Jerry in '60, he may have still been on the tail end of that. I saw him for so many days in a row sometimes that his AWOLs must have been quite extensive.

Suzy Wood:
Jerry told us stories about being in the Army. He said, “I didn't do anything in the Army. I didn't do anything at all. But I was very nice about it.” He told us about leaving his tank out in the middle of a field. They'd say, “You left this tank out in the middle of a field.” And he'd say, “Oh, did I? Oh, I'm sorry.” He'd be off on leave for the weekend and wouldn't come back and he'd say, “Oh, I'm sorry.” Finally they said, “Maybe you'd like to leave?” And he said, “Oh, okay.”

Alan Trist:
That sounds about right. He always did everything with a big grin and he always put people off the defensive by being that way. It was, “What are we gonna do with this guy?” and they realized he was not the type to be in the Army and that was what Jerry's strategy was. He knew that he and the Army were not suited to each other. From his perspective, it was just a question of making a cool exit.

Laird Grant:
He got busted out of the Army because they could not deal with him. He was like the prodigal son gone awry. It was just one thing going on after another.

 

Laird Grant:
The whole thing in Palo Alto was happening. He was out of the Army, he was hanging out at Kepler's Bookstore, and he was staying with me in this apartment over in East Palo Alto while I was trying to go to Ravenswood High School which no longer exists because they burned it down. And there were all these parties going on up on Perry Lane and Homer Lane and at the Chateau. This was all before our eighteenth birthday. He was eighteen by now but I wasn't yet.

Alan Trist:
Roy Kepler had created one of the first paperback bookstores. They would let us sit there all day and read the books off the shelves and even take them home and bring them back. So we had literature and we had a place to hang out and there was coffee and they didn't mind if Jerry played the guitar all day. Which was what he did. We were Bohemians.

David Nelson:
The atmosphere was beatnik. It was a literary crowd based on books and writers. Music was just starting to happen. It was a coffeehouse scene. You sat around and discussed things.

Barbara Meier:
I was a sophomore in high school in Menlo Park and my friend Sue Wade and I were going for a hike after school and she said, “Oh, I just met this guy and I want to stop and pick him up. Is that okay with you?” I said, “Sure.” We went to the Skylight Art Supply store and he was waiting on the porch and she went up and said, “I brought a friend with me. Is that okay with you?” He looked in the car and said, “Oh yes. Tell her I love her.” Those were his first words to me. I was fifteen at the time and he was three years older.

So he got in the car and we drove up to the Mill Pond in Los Trancos Woods, a very beautiful, magical place. We walked around and on the way back, he sat in the backseat and sang Joan Baez songs to me and it was the most exotic, seductive, dangerous—I mean he was the archetypal beatnik with his goatee and black hair—singing these songs and looking up from under those eyebrows. When I was fourteen, right before I went to high school, I had read
On the Road
. I'd read it and fallen in love with that world and somehow connected on a very deep level with the whole Kerouac/Buddhist vision and beat poetry. I got it and then when I met Jerry, he embodied and manifested that world for me and apparently I did the same for him.

That was the spring of 1960. We met in April or May so it was really just a question of weeks since he had gotten out of the Army. He was living in his car in East Palo Alto and Robert Hunter was living in his car. What then ensued was this whole long period where we all sort of functioned as a tribe. There were all these different people with different roles but we were this wonderful collection of poets, musicians, painters, writers, socialists, and pacifists, with a smattering of out-and-out lunatics.

Alan Trist:
It was art that interested us. A large part of our conversation was based upon what we had been reading. Or it was Jerry learning those folk songs. Or it was Hunter writing in this journal. Or it was John the Poet who had an incredible collection of classical music. We would go over and spend whole evenings listening to Bach. Endless Bach. In early 1961, the then organist at the Vatican came to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco for a series of fourteen concerts where he played the complete organ works of Bach. I remember going with Jerry to three or four of those. It was incredible. It was in the middle of a period when we were doing that young person's thing of seeing how many nights we could stay awake for and I remember having a very psychedelic experience. Grace Cathedral is made of concrete. Looking up at the vaulted roof, I saw all the different patches of dark and light concrete turn into faces. The faces were very clear. D. H. Lawrence was the one that stays in my mind. In the middle of Bach, I was having this conversation with D. H. Lawrence.

Barbara Meier:
I spent a lot of time hanging out with Bob Hunter, Jerry, and Alan Trist. I was going to this affluent suburban high school and they would pick me up after school and we'd just go rave, the four of us. We'd drive up into the mountains or go over to the beach or go to St. Michael's Alley or to Kepler's Bookstore and hang out or go to somebody's house or over to East Palo Alto where there was a big jazz scene with black jazz musicians. We were all smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and Hunter was into Dylan Thomas. The scene was always extremely literary. Jerry was already an incredible intellect, very well read, and he had lots of literary references. He'd tuned in to James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
at a very early age and that was a powerful reference point for him. The book is fundamentally a psychedelic vision of reality and he got it. He got that long before he took psychedelics. We'd all just scratched the surface with that book but he and Hunter would riff on it and there were always running gags about it between them. Very early on, Jerry got the essential random nature of the art that James Joyce and John Cage represented. Before I met him, he had connected with the scene at the San Francisco Art Institute. He had connected with action painting, abstract expressionism, and the jazz underpinnings of it all. The whole mix of Kerouac, Joyce, painting, poetry, and jazz. That vision was really surfacing strongly in the late fifties and the early sixties and was a formative and perennial reference point for him.

Jerry could have easily passed himself off as an intellectual but because he was a high school dropout, he had no self-esteem. He didn't have what he considered to be the required academic foundation, but he always got the essential meaning of whatever he encountered and he could hold his own. The thing I loved about being with him was being considered an equal on that level and being able to riff back and forth with the puns and literary references. I loved to play in that world. It was very heady and it was also fucking hilarious. I have never laughed so hard in my life.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
All his friends were now in Palo Alto. That was his group. I tried to find him a couple of times. Finally, a friend of mine who owned a gas station down there said that he'd seen him. So I went and I found his old car. While he was in the service, he had to go buy this car and I had to sign for it. So I went down and that was the last time I actually saw him for about a year and a half.

Barbara Meier:
Because I was much younger, the three of them treated me with kid gloves and protected me. I was their darling on some level. I was their muse on some other level. They put me in a role which was incomprehensible sometimes. I was like their kid. At the age of fifteen, I wrote my first poem and it was about the three of them. The first part is about Jerry and then Alan Trist and then Bob Hunter. The blind man is Bob because he wore glasses.

“He speaks of angels and snowy hillsides”; that's the poet, Kenneth Patchen. We were reading Patchen. Patchen was there in Menlo Park and we would go and visit him. We were such a motley group of people, but we were all there for each other in a way that now feels like the seed of what eventually became the Dead scene. It was a beautiful little green shoot coming up through the concrete of fifties consciousness and we were taking our cues from the beat culture and from the pacifist culture.

Laird Grant:
These people were the upper crust Bohemians of Stanford University. Their parents were professors or something like that. Frank Seratone was a San Francisco artist who'd happened to make it fairly good and moved to Palo Alto and he had the Chateau. He rented out some rooms and we soon took it over. It was groovy and he didn't mind the parties. It was a rambling house with a porch. Built probably turn of the century. Maybe in the twenties. And it had all kinds of weird little alcoves and stairs that went upstairs and downstairs and gardening rooms and a pump house. Because there was no water in those days except what you got from your own well. Jerry moved into the pump house.

Tom Constanten:
There was one rather large party type of house called the Chateau at 838 Santa Cruz Avenue. Jerry's place there was a pleasant one-room shack with a big thick Persian carpet on the floor and hippie-type lighting. I remember one party when I was out there with him and about twelve other friends and I counted eleven joints in a row that were trotted out by one person or another. It was just mind surfing.

Laird Grant:
Alan Trist was living right around the corner. He was halfway between the Chateau and Kesey's. Right on the corner in this Spanish-style house that his dad had gotten when they came from England.

Alan Trist:
Kesey may have finished the writing program at Stanford, but he was still hanging out in that area and he had a lot of parties in his little cabin back there on Perry Lane, which backed on to my house. We knew this was going on but we hadn't met any of these people. One night, Jerry and Hunter and maybe Laird and I decided to crash one of these parties and I remember we were thrown out on our ear. It was so funny, man. Because we were kids. The real connection didn't happen until many years later in La Honda. Still, we managed to make some sort of rebellious reputation for ourselves at an early age. Sometimes, we were walking around stoned. I remember at one point, we managed to buy a lid of grass for five or ten bucks which actually came in a matchbox in those days. Because my parents were away, we all went out to my house to smoke this lid. Jerry, Bobby Petersen, Laird, Hunter, Phil Lesh, Willie Legate. I forget who else but we smoked up this lid and we got very stoned because we were young people whose systems were quite open. And we designed this fantasy of how we would like to be, where we would like to take all this beat stuff and the art, and where we would like to go with it. We designed an ideal habitation which was very influenced by the Chateau. We took the Chateau as a model and expanded it. We said, “What we need is a large central house with a kitchen with a refrigerator full of beer.” Which is what old Frank had there. It was his beer. We weren't allowed to touch it, actually. We all would have our individual cabins spread around these large grounds. We imagined acreage. Then we would have the ability to get on with our own things because we were aware that this one was a musician and he was a writer and someone else was a painter. We wanted to come together but we wanted to have our privacy, too. I've never forgotten that particular session because it was a model. The dream of the hippie commune. But right then we had already taken care of the problems which communes would have. Which was the lack of ability to get away from it. We designed it right from the beginning so that wouldn't happen.