Dark Star (6 page)

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
I think Jerry and I started singing together right away. We knew a couple of songs in common. They were playing bluegrass in Kepler's and they were so good. They were so incredibly good. Then I learned from him about old-timey music. I'd been studying the Childe Ballads and the Folkways collections and wishing I had gone to a different school and studied folk art. I was living on campus and hating it. So this was exactly what I was looking for. I think I went home with them that first night. I had my roommate's car, her little Mercury convertible, so I drove them home. Which was pretty classy. None of them had cars. In those days, it was dormitory sign-outs and strict rules as to when you had to be back in at night. One of those early nights together, I called my roommate on the hall phone and got her to sign me in. But somebody overheard it happening and the school sent out an all-points bulletin. The California Highway Patrol found me by morning. They actually came to the Chateau to get me and escorted me home. They said, “We know you haven't done anything wrong but your parents are worried.”

As a pacifist and a folk singer, I guess I had been a little weird at Palo Alto High School. Joan Baez had gone there but she had graduated the year before I started. I hadn't known her there but some of my friends knew her and her family from the Peninsula School. Jerry didn't like her. He was jealous of her because her record had just come out. She was about to go on her first European tour and had asked me to come with her and be her companion because I'd been to Europe a lot and I knew how to travel there. She didn't know her way around. This was right when I met Jerry. So I had to make a choice between them. He didn't like her because she wasn't a musical purist and he didn't think she played very well. It just didn't seem right that she should be on the cover of
Time
magazine and getting all this publicity. She had a record that was becoming successful and it just didn't seem right. He said, “Ah, she picks her nose.” Like you had to be perfect in order to be successful?

Suzy Wood:
No matter who was there in the daytime or the nighttime when Jerry was living in the Chateau, he would walk around the house with a guitar on. He would be so intent on what he was doing that he would come and stand in front of people the way you stand in front of somebody you're going to have a conversation with. But he would be absolutely completely inside himself. He would make no response at all to the person he was standing in front of. He was inside himself playing. That used to be frustrating and odd for me. He would be standing this close to me. This person I knew. “How are you doing today?” And he wouldn't say a word. His fingers would never stop moving. He was really inside himself with stuff going on inside his head and coming out of his fingers. My very clearest picture of Jerry is standing in front of him sitting in a chair at the Chateau playing guitar. Completely encased in himself.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
The scene at the Chateau was totally male. It was definitely a guys' scene. Guys and music. That was why it felt like the Lost Boys. It never got cleaned. Maybe somebody like Hunter would take care of things now and then and do the dishes. Once a week.

Suzy Wood:
Bob Hunter was such a crack-up. He was so anal that it just cracked me up. He and I were boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever the hell that was for a little while. His parents were going to come out from Connecticut. His father was a publisher. Bob was going to be a writer and Jerry just used to rag on Bob all the time saying, “We're going to have this big pile of joints right here in the middle of the table and when your dad comes out, we're going to offer him one.” He was waving his arms around and pointing at this imaginary pile of joints that was going to be on the table. Bob would be seething and all ticked off.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
In honor of our relationship, Jerry bought himself new underwear which was kind of thoughtful, I thought. Because these boys didn't do much laundry either. He made the mistake of leaving this package of underwear in the living room. Of course, it disappeared. One of his buddies helped himself to it. Jerry was a lot bigger than any of them but that didn't matter. New underwear was new underwear. He was very forgiving and tolerant of such behavior. He would have done the same thing.

Suzy Wood:
I had a paper to write for San Francisco State and it was late. My school career was rapidly crumbling around me. I went down to the Chateau. Bob Hunter wanted to be a writer, so who better to go to when I was trying to figure out how to write a term paper? He said, “Here, take these,” and he gave me some Dexedrine. So I stayed up for three days and three nights on a couple of Dexedrines. Meanwhile, Jerry and I don't know who else were in the kitchen divvying up some Romilar cough drops. I remember people calling drugstores and having these terribly ill grandparents and could they please deliver these Romilar cough tablets? I don't know what it did for them because I didn't take it. They also ate the little folded-up papers in the Vicks inhalers. I don't know what that did for them, either. I was professional. I would only take Dexedrine for a purpose. I was writing a paper and those people were just getting fucked up. I remember them trying to figure out how to make a peanut butter sandwich. They had a loaf of French bread and a brand new jar of peanut butter. Figuring out how to cut the bread, figuring out where to insert the knife in a brand new jar of peanut butter, and how to get it on the bread in order to get it in their mouths must have taken forty-five minutes. I don't know if they even ever got to that part. They were pretty loaded.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
We had kind of a whirlwind courtship. I was still at the dorm but I got kicked out of the college really quickly because of the all-points bulletin. I was a restless, rebellious kid. I remember that night I met Jerry, I had this sense of putting on some new piece of clothing and it just felt really—what would be the word? I was feeling wild and ready for action. And I got it.

 

David Nelson:
Jerry said that he'd gotten a gig offer if we could get a band together. Pete Albin was getting together this College of San Mateo Folk Music Festival. So we put together the band for that. Me, Bob Hunter, and Jerry. Hunter was playing mandolin or bass. Doubling. At first, we didn't even have a mandolin. The very first gig, it was bass, guitar, and banjo. We had all taught ourselves how to play. We used to slow records down or play with the same track on a record over and over again to learn things. We drilled a lot because we were paralyzed with stage fright. The first few times he played, Jerry had to have it on automatic.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
He lived for music. He'd be in a bad mood if he couldn't practice for several hours a day. At this point, he was very ambitious. He wanted to do something big. But there wasn't any show business niche for him.

Peter Albin:
Jerry was always witty. Wry humor. “Hey man, hey, hey. What're you doing, eh, eh, eh.” But I didn't find him to be one of the friendlier guys in the world. He wasn't, “Hey, Pete. How are you doing?” He was always, “Hey, hey man, hey.” He was cool. He was watching everybody but he was not quiet. He was very vocal. Jerry talks on that series done by the BBC and PBS,
History of Rock 'n' Roll
. That was the way he talked then, too. Pretty much the same. I don't think he really changed.

Suzy Wood:
Jerry did seem older. He was separate to himself. You know how a lot of times people are kind of formless but what makes them who they are is the group they're a part of? You pull any little piece out of it and they're essentially a representative of the group. Jerry wasn't like that. Jerry was the thing that groups formed around and a certain group formed around him when he and Marshall Leicester were together. Marsh was very very bright, and Jerry was very very bright and they had incredible amounts of fun aside from music.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
Those guys had such keenly wry senses of humor. Those three. David Nelson, Hunter, and Jerry. The sidekicks. They loved each other a lot and played wonderful music together and shared a kind of an off-the-wall, quirky sensibility. I wasn't good enough to play with the three of them. But we started doing old-timey music. I met Marshall and Suzy [Wood] Leicester. The four of us did some performances in places in the city like the Coffee Gallery or Coffee Cantata and we were quite well received. I threw myself into the study of these old tunes and just loved it. Jerry and I played at the Tangent in Palo Alto. We had a little duo.

Suzy Wood:
Jerry took up with Sara. She was straight and darling and impressive as hell. She was a Stanford student and her dad was a pilot and my sense was that they were a cut or two above the general riffraff.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
We sang together and I played a little autoharp and my little rosewood Martin guitar. He played most of the instruments. We sang well together. We took turns. One of us would sing the verses and we'd join each other on the chorus. The surviving tape is really awful. It sounds like the Chipmunks. But we liked singing together, we were good at it, and people seemed to enjoy it. Remember that song, “Walk Right In” by the Rooftop Singers? That was popular then. We figured we could do something better than that. So that was our plan.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
I was just another folk guitar player when they had the hootenannies at the Tangent on Wednesday evenings. There was a back room there and people would get together and put a little bit of a trio or a duet together. “Hey, you want to play some stuff with me tonight?” “Sure. What are we going to play?” “Okay, let's do this one.” “You want me to capo up and play it in a different key so we get two different guitar sounds?” “Yeah, okay, let's go.” There was a lot of that going on. Just instant groups coming together and falling back apart again. At that point, Jerry was the best picker in town. Along with Jorma and a guy named Eric Thompson. Jerry was one of the hot pickers and David Nelson was one of the hot pickers.

Jorma Kaukonen:
I think we all taught each other a lot. One of the really neat things about that period and I don't know if this was a function of the period or just that we were younger and more open-minded but there was a lot of jamming and that doesn't happen that much anymore. In those days, it happened almost all the time. In terms of who was the best player, keep in mind that as youngsters, we were all bad boys. I'm sure all of us thought we were the coolest thing in our external persona. Internally of course, it was, “God. I don't know what I'm doing here.”

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
Even then, I think Jerry had that beatnik cutting edge. Because of his history. He never did like cops and he never did like the Army even though he was in it for a while. He was a good maze rat. It only took him one try to find that out. He learned that course real quickly. It didn't take two tries for him.

David Nelson:
At the College of San Mateo Folk Music Festival, Jerry did a three-part thing where he started out doing solo stuff from the old ballads. Then he got into the twenties and thirties with string band music. We'd be an old-time string band and play old stuff. Then, modern age. We played bluegrass in the third section. That was really a nice little display.

Peter Albin:
We were all local folkies but he was a little bit higher on himself than the other people because he had more talent. He did and he knew it. When he first started playing banjo, he'd come up to you and say, “Hey, dig this,” and he'd play “Nola” on the five-string banjo. And he'd go faster like Roger Sprung. It was something you could never play. He was excellent but he put it in your face. He knew who did everything. He did his research. He did his homework. I don't want to make him sound as if he was unfriendly and not willing to share things because he was. As a matter of fact, when I put on a folk music festival during this time at the College of San Mateo through the auspices of the Art Club, Jerry and his group played there. We also did a guitar workshop where he did finger picking and I did flat picking.

David Nelson:
The thing about Jerry was that you could come up to him and ask him how to do something and he would show you, which was an incredible thing when you think back about those times. There wasn't this free atmosphere of exchange. I remember asking him a few questions and he came and showed me in detail how to do certain finger-style things.

Peter Albin:
The musicians respected him and the audience at the College of San Mateo show thought he was good. But God, he took so long to tune. It was like he went for like some sort of philosophical tuning. I remember my father who always came to these gigs said, “When is that guy going to stop tuning?” That was his major complaint after the gig. He said, “God, that guy Garcia. When is he going to learn how to tune that damn thing? He spent about like a half hour on that goddamn banjo tuning that fucking thing.” The audience would be getting restless and Jerry would be going, “Just a second, folks. You want me to play good here, I got to be in tune, blah, blah, blah.” He'd make some more clever remarks. “And now a Chinese song. ‘Too-Ning.'” That was the classic line during the sixties. Named after a city in China.

 

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia:
There was a folk music festival in Monterey in the summer of '63. Chris Strachwitz, who still owns Arhoolie Records, brought in old-timey people, the original guys who were still alive. I don't know if Doc Watson was there but I think he brought Clarence Ashley. Clarence White may have come. I don't know how we afforded the gas to get down there. I know that we didn't have any food. We didn't have any place to stay. We slept in the car. I was pregnant. It was just peanut butter and bread if we were lucky. Bob Dylan played there. Lots of things had been going on. Small performances and workshops. Connecting with some of the real seminal American folk music. Dylan did more of a performance in a big space. He came out by himself on stage and brought a little amplifier and plugged in his guitar. We were so outraged by the amp that we got up, walked down the center aisle to the stage, and marched off. It was like, “We are not going to be a part of this.” Amplified guitar? This wasn't pure. For money, Jerry had played in a rock 'n' roll band with Troy Weidenheimer. They played fraternity parties. What they had to put up with was awful. And in high school, Jerry had played on Bobby Freeman's “Do You Wanna Dance?” But he didn't consider that exactly worthy. What he really wanted was to play with Bill Monroe. That would be the pinnacle of success.