Garcia: An American Life

Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson

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Authors: Blair Jackson
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all wanted to be Mike Seeger, so we were all trying to learn to play five or six instruments,” says Marshall Leicester. “I played guitar, banjo, autoharp and a little mouth harp. I didn’t become a fiddler, which is mostly what I am these days, until a couple of years later. Jerry was just playing the guitar at first, but then of course he took up the banjo and got really good at that, too.” By 1963 Jerry was trying his hand at mandolin, dobro, fiddle and autoharp as well.
    Another huge influence on nearly everyone playing folk music at this time was Harry Smith’s multivolume
Anthology of American Folk Music
, which brought dozens of folk tunes that had been originally cut as 78s between the ’20s and the ’50s to a new audience. “Back in 1961 there was only one copy around our scene, belonging to Grace Marie Haddie,” Robert Hunter said. “The six-disc boxed collection was too expensive for guitar-playing hobos like me and Garcia, even if we had a record player, or a place to keep a record player. Grace Marie had a job and an apartment and a record player. We would visit her apartment constantly with hungry ears. When she was at work, we’d jimmy the lock to her apartment door or crawl through the window if the latch was open. Had to hear those records.”
    Early in the summer of 1961 a pair of folk music enthusiasts, Rodney Albin and George Howell, launched a small coffeehouse called the Boar’s Head in a loft above a bookstore called the Carlos Bookstall in San Carlos (north of Menlo Park). “George was a renegade high school student and a wanna-be beatnik,” said Peter Albin, Rodney’s younger brother, later a founding member of Big Brother and the Holding Company. “My brother played banjo and fiddle and guitar; I played a little guitar, and a lot of our friends played various instruments. So we opened the Boar’s Head and we had little get-togethers there on Friday and Saturday nights.”
    Besides the Albin brothers and George Howell, one of the other key members of the Boar’s Head scene was David Nelson, who in June of 1961 had graduated from Carlmont High School in Belmont. Nelson was another bright, well-read kid with music in his soul. He began taking guitar lessons when he was in second grade and even studied steel guitar when he was in grade school.
    It was through the Albin brothers that Nelson met Garcia: “I still remember that moment at Kepler’s when Pete and I were peeking through some books, and we saw this hairy, swarthy guy with an open Levi’s shirt and a real brooding look and an olive wreath in his hair, playing a Stella twelve-string. It was Garcia, and he had some notoriety even then. There was something scary about him; something awesome, some invisible quality. We talked tohim and Rodney put a banjo in my hand and I thought, ‘Oh no!’ I had learned a little bit of banjo from a Pete Seeger book Rodney had given me, but here I was playing with Garcia the first minute that I met him!
    “So we asked him to come play at the Boar’s Head. That night at the Boar’s Head it was Garcia, who played some songs on guitar, and then Bob Hunter came on wearing his army boots, as he always did in those days, and he sang a couple of songs. And there was also David X [David McQueen, a black man in his forties who was part of the Chateau scene] and Sherry Huddleston, who’s the one who gave Pigpen his name [the next year]. It was very low-key. The Boar’s Head always seemed more like a party than a real gig. It became another place for friends to get together and play and sing.”
    After Boar’s Head gatherings, Suzy Wood, Carlmont High class of 1960, often hosted parties at her parents’ large, lovely home on Debbie Lane, on a hill above the College of Notre Dame in nearby Belmont. “The way the house was set up, there was an extra lot behind the house, sort of secluded by fences and bushes, and we’d go hang out back there and pass hats and collect change and somebody would go

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