Dark Star (5 page)

Barbara Meier:
My parents were alcoholics. I had a lot of trouble with them. I was really bummed about this and Jerry once went and got one of those little books of Buddhist sayings and came back and read it aloud to me and I got it. I'd previously read in Kerouac about Buddhism but Jerry brought it home to me and made it more alive for me. Even now I have the sense of him as being an incorrigible Buddha. Because I was having a difficult time living with my parents, I moved to San Francisco at the age of sixteen to live with my aunt for the summer. I went to the Art Institute and that was also Jerry's trip. He was the one who said, “You have to go there. This is what you need to do. Go there.” He pointed me in that direction. Jerry used to say that he and I invented each other. In the sense that I gave him his first acoustic guitar and he steered me toward Buddhism and painting, it's true.

Laird Grant:
Me and this kid got drunk and decided to take a car from Monterey to the highway so that we could hitchhike to Mexico, but we never managed to get out of town. They'd busted me before I was eighteen so I went into Juvie. When I was in Juvie, Jerry got into that horrible automobile accident. I was in the Salinas Boys Home when that happened. Some people at Juvie got in touch with me because Paul Speegle was a friend of mine. He'd been in school with me and Jerry both at Menlo Oaks.

Alan Trist:
There was Jerry and I and Paul Speegle and Lee, the driver, in the car. Paul was somebody that I had just met and he was tremendously important in our scene. Talk about living theater or street theater. This was a guy with long hair who wore amazing clothes. He made jewelry and incredible paintings, one of which, “The Blind Prophet,” used to hang in the Dead's studio in the eighties. He was our age and he did all this stuff and he was a theatrical person and he was really living out what we were raving about verbally. He was more extreme than us.

Laird Grant:
They were coming back from a party and Lee, who was driving, was saying, “Oh well, we got to get to such and such at a certain time.” More than likely, it was to another bottle shop.

Alan Trist:
That evening, we'd played a game of charades at the Chateau. I remember Jerry opposed Paul and me. Paul was dressed up in a big cloak and so was I. We were putting on costumes now. We had never done this sort of stuff until Paul turned up. Paul and I and Jerry were playing a game of death. And then we took off to take Paul home. It was Paul and me in the back and Jerry was in the front seat. Lee, as always, had drunk a little too much, as we all had, and the car went off the road. It was a Studebaker Hawk, a car way ahead of its time with two doors, but it didn't have seat belts in there.

Laird Grant:
Lee had this Studebaker Golden Hawk and he brought it on up to—They were doing well over a hundred. The last words that anybody can remember was Paul saying, “Wow, this is really beautiful,” and over she went.

Alan Trist:
Before it happened, we were going a hundred. Easy. I felt the car fishtail. Then we rolled and cartwheeled into a field. All four of us were thrown out of the car. Those in the back seats went through the front doors. Paul was unlucky. Unfortunately, the car got Paul and not the rest of us. Jerry broke his collarbone. All his life he had problems with it. It was interesting how he held that guitar. I had a compressed fracture of the back, which has always troubled me but not too extremely. The way we talked about it wasn't so much like “I got away with it” or “I was spared.” It was more, “Look what happened to Paul.” This gem of a person. Why was he gone from our lives? That was the significance of this. Hunter was right in on this, too. He'd left the party about the same time in his old car, the ambulance passed him on the road, and he sensed it was to do with us. There was a psychic concentration that evening. This was when we were all coming into adult life. It had a profound effect on Jerry. It made him aware of life's fragility. Of how things could be taken away.

Laird Grant:
Paul was the only one killed. But they all got thrown out. Alan got his back crunched. Jerry broke his shoulder, I think. Lee got his gut sliced open on the door when he went out of it. The car landed on top of Paul. Broke every bone in his body except his hands. Prophetic stuff here, you know?

 

Barbara Meier:
That summer, John the Cool and Jerry and someone else lived in a hotel room on McAllister Street in San Francisco. I was working as a model for Joseph Magnin so I used to go hang out with them and give them money. Rent money, food money, cigarette money. That was a crazy scene. A lot of raving around San Francisco. I moved back to Menlo Park to do my junior year in high school and they moved back too. Sometime in October of that year, I was at a party at the Chateau and there were these girls in the kitchen where Jerry was playing and they were dancing around and saying, “We love Jerry Garcia!” I went up to Hunter and just burst into tears. I said, “I can't stand that. I'm in love with him.” He said, “You are? He's in love with you and he's been afraid to tell you all this time because he didn't want to spoil everything.” He went up and he said, “Jerry, come here. I've got to talk to you.” Jerry said, “Are you kidding me? Are you telling me the truth?” Jerry came up to me and said, “I've been in love with you from the minute I met you.” That was it. That was it.
That was it!
I can't remember anything after that. That was the end of my virginity.

Peter Albin:
My older brother Rodney and I went down to Kepler's Bookstore in Palo Alto to get Jerry. We had heard about the scene down there. Kepler's was a much larger, college-oriented bookstore. It had a lot of textbooks, but it also had all sorts of Marxist magazines. It was definitely a leftist bookstore. There were a lot of radicals like Ira Sandperl in Palo Alto. There weren't any radicals in Belmont and San Carlos, where we had gone to Carlmont High School with David Nelson. Kepler's had a back room. If I remember correctly, the room was divided. One half had books about halfway up the wall. Then it had this area that had tables, chairs, and a coffee machine. It wasn't a coffeehouse. It was just a reading area but some people like Garcia had taken it over and started bringing their instruments and playing.

David Nelson:
There he was. This hairy guy in the summer playing a Stella twelve-string.

Peter Albin:
I remember sitting around listening to Garcia play. He was playing Appalachian ballads and “Sitting on Top of the World.” Not too many blues things. Mostly old American folk songs. He was real good and we got the definite impression that he knew that he was real good. When we asked him to come up to play the Boar's Head in San Carlos, it was like, “Why should I?” I don't know if he said those exact words but the attitude was like, “What's in it for me?”

Tom Constanten:
He looked like Cesar Romero and he sounded like the Limelighters. It was before the Prince Valiant look. And he sang songs like “Long Black Veil” and “Fennario.” At one of those wild party scenes, he did a version of “Mattie Groves” that silenced the party in awestruck wonder. He played songs like you would have found on the first couple of Joan Baez albums.

Marshall Leicester:
In the summer of 1960, I came back from college and I walked into Kepler's and saw this guy playing a twelve-string guitar. What I remember hearing is that song “Everybody Loves Saturday Night.” In general, the picking in those days was sort of somewhere between Pete Seeger and the Kingston Trio. I asked to see his guitar and struck up a conversation and we discovered that we remembered each other from grade school in Menlo Park. I knew how to do a kind of Elizabeth Cotton pick that was a technical challenge to him. Once I showed him how to do it, he picked it up in nothing flat. We weren't much in touch when we were three thousand miles apart but each summer, we'd immediately sort of take up where we'd left off.

Peter Albin:
The Boar's Head was no bigger than fifteen by twenty. People would gather on Friday and Saturday nights. We had a little stage with maybe a foot-high riser tucked in the corner. The place could hold no more than twenty-five people, but it was packed. It had chairs and tables and sometimes people would sit on the floor. It was an open-mike scene: two, three songs, pass the hat. Wasn't hardly any money. I don't think that Garcia was making any money at Kepler's Bookstore either. We said to him, “You can have a lot of fun and there's lots of young girls there. It's a neat place. It's small but there's a dedicated audience.”

Suzy Wood:
It seems to me there were a lot of women who would have liked very much to sleep with Jerry. I remember him looking into their eyes and saying, “Ho ho, I have a feeling I'll see you again sometime.” Of course, people were having sex before marriage back then. It was just that nobody ever admitted it. That was the whole point. One of Jerry's earlier girlfriends had this straight merchant father. Her parents were terribly respectable and she had to be terribly respectable and it would have been horrible bringing Jerry over to meet her mother because her mother would have just died.

Peter Albin:
If I remember correctly, there weren't a lot of people sitting around watching Garcia at Kepler's. So he came up. He would come up every once in a while. It wasn't like he was up there every weekend.

Suzy Wood:
I remember the first time I played in public. I got through doing this sappy little set and Jerry said, “You're going to be great. You've got that old fuck-you attitude.” When I play that one back, that was what Jerry had at the Boar's Head. It wasn't quite fuck-you. It was really being scared inside but also real confident at the same time. He had an air of intensity and professionalism, dedication, and concentration that was just more focused and intense than the other people who played there.

Marshall Leicester:
He lived at my house for two or three weeks and we spent all our time together until my mother got upset. “Who is this freeloader?” she asked and I had to pass this on to Garcia. He was no problem at all but it was just too unconventional for them.

Barbara Meier:
We had this exquisite time together until my father found out that I had in fact lost my virginity. I was living at home and things were just crazy. You couldn't run off with the Grateful Dead in those years. Girls who got pregnant in the early sixties ended up in homes for unwed mothers. My father wore me down with his disapproval and made it absolutely impossible for me. For over a year, I had to have goofy guys from high school pick me up on “dates” and drop me off to see Jerry. We'd go to bed and then I'd have to go home at midnight. Ultimately, everything got way too crazy and Jerry and I broke up.

We had planned to get married when I turned eighteen and he turned twenty-one. All I ever wanted in my life was to paint and be a happy beatnik with Jerry Garcia. I would have been ecstatic if he had been playing in bars in San Jose and we had been living in a trailer court. It was about the fabulous way our minds interacted. I finally left him and he drank himself silly for three months. I guess I totally broke his heart. I was just a kid. It wasn't as if he'd said, “Come live with me, baby. I'll take care of you.” I was taking care of him financially.

It was horrible. By the time I realized, “Fuck it. Fuck my father. Fuck all of it. Fuck college. I want to be with this man,” it was too late. He'd already gotten Sara pregnant. So that was the end of that. I left town and went to the Art Institute, got my degree, and became a student of Suzuki Roshi's at the Zen Center in San Francisco.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
It was funny. He was there all the time and I was there all the time but we didn't meet for a long time. Our paths were crossing. Ira Sandperl was my mentor. I was a pacifist and a folk singer and a student at Stanford, hanging around with Ira a lot. I first saw Jerry at Kepler's. I remember it very well. It was evening. He was there with Hunter and Nelson. I met the three of them all together. They were playing music. There were some tables and a little coffee bar. I would help Ira run the coffee bar sometimes and sit around with Joan Baez when she was in town—a lot of sitting around and drawing on napkins with our Rapidographs, a drawing pen you had to hold absolutely straight up to get the ink to come out. One night, these guys were there. After they played, Jer came to the coffee bar for coffee. I was eating a tangerine and I gave him some. We looked into each other's eyes and smiled and I picked him. He was clearly the leader.

They were hanging out there and we all started hanging out together. They cracked me up. They were just so terribly clever. Witty, zany, and smart. A lot of the people I knew in college didn't seem nearly so smart. I had also never known people my own age who were disconnected from their families. But Hunter and Jer lived up at the Chateau with this strange crew of what seemed to me like the Lost Boys. I'd heard about them before. When I was in high school, I'd heard there was something going on up in La Honda and something going on at this place called the Chateau. Whatever it was, my mother wouldn't let me go. Instead, I would go up to San Francisco on the bus or on a train and hang out in North Beach, looking for the beatnik scene. We were all looking for it, wanting to be part of that.

Laird Grant:
He was doing stuff with Sara and Hunter and Nelson at the Boar's Head but also at the Palo Alto Peace Center. That was when we all got our names on the attorney general's list for belonging to a subversive organization. The Peace Center. Obviously, if you were for peace, you were a Red in those days. I could never understand that. I still chuckle at it.