44 b o o m c a l i f o r n i a . c o m

Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, Number 4, pps 44–59. ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X.

© 2013 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for

permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and

Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2012.2.4.44.

A lmost five decades after their inception, the Grateful Dead are alive and

well.1 True, the legendary Bay Area band hasn’t performed since the death

of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995. Yet the Dead community and its

various enterprises are thriving. Last year, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame unveiled

a special exhibit on the Dead; the entire run of a $450 boxed set of CDs sold out in

four days; UC Santa Cruz opened a Grateful Dead Archive to national media fanfare;

and the National Recording Registry included a 1977 concert along with twenty-

four other “sounds of cultural significance” from that year. To top it off, the band’s

Facebook page—perhaps the truest measure of cultural significance—drew more

than 1.4 million friends.

All of which raises a simple question: of the countless bands that flashed across

the American scene in the second half of the twentieth century, why did the Grateful

Dead become a premier rock institution?

The best answer probably won’t be found in the Dead’s substantial songbook.

Although its many gems reflect a rich array of American idioms, the Dead themselves

acknowledged that their recordings were neither consis tently excellent nor broadly

Coming of age in San Francisco

peter richardson

Jerry Garcia’s Annus Mirabilis

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“The Attics of Our Lives,” by Stanley Mouse. © 2011, all rights reserved. Used with permission.

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46 b o o m c a l i f o r n i a . c o m

popular. The albums sold well over time, but the Dead

never had a number-one song, and they cracked the top ten

only once—and that was more than two decades after their

formation.

Nor was the Dead’s success due to their showmanship.

Their live performances were their calling card, they cared

about the audience’s experience, and their sound system

was legendary, but they put almost no energy into the usual

rock theatrics. They skipped the stagy strutting, flashy

costumes, and special effects. In fact, they usually skipped

the set list. Their presentation was so stripped down that a

single smile from Garcia could delight the audience.

Their image was certainly a factor. Like many San

Francisco bands, they were hip, funny, and smart.

Creating effortlessly and without artifice, the Dead also

satisfied a countercultural ideal. Even more than Jefferson

Airplane, who attracted more attention and sold more

records during the 1960s, the Grateful Dead were cool

because they gave mainstream American culture a wide

berth, still managed to flourish, and were living proof

that San Francisco hippies could make it on their own

preferred terms. Wherever the Grateful Dead played, the

Summer of Love lived on, long after many of the original

hippies headed for the hills and their Haight-Ashbury

neighborhood descended into squalor.

The Grateful Dead’s status as counterculture heroes

masks an even more important source of their popularity.

Although the Dead offered a fully formed alternative to

America’s sober, God-fearing, and profit-maximizing

ways, a large part of their appeal arose not from their

resistance to American mainstream culture, but rather

from their uncanny ability to tap its inexhaustible utopian

energies. A Grateful Dead tour was always more than

a series of shows; it was a mobile social laboratory—a

chance to experiment and innovate, not only musically

but also personally and even spiritually. Living on the

edge of novelty, inventing their own ways and means, the

Dead pursued a singular, consistent, and deeply utopian

vision, even when it began to pose serious personal and

creative challenges.

Certainly one of their utopian impulses was for

ecstasy—not the drug, but the feeling, the urge to

transcend. Though often misunderstood, this part of the

band’s project was inseparable from their public image.

As Garcia explained in 1972, the band “is not for cranking

out rock and roll, it’s not for going out and doing concerts

or any of that stuff, I think it’s to get high . . . I’m not

talking about unconscious or zonked out, I’m talking

about being fully conscious.”2 The Dead certainly weren’t

the first artists to explore ecstasy, but their fortunes were

linked to a historical moment that placed enormous value

on intense experience. The band’s penchant for rapture

also had a corollary: a commitment to improvisation,

which reflected a particular understanding of what it was

to be an artist. Transcending stasis, the Greek word for

standstill, wouldn’t be accomplished by recital. Getting off

dead center (ekstasis) would require artistic spontaneity

and discovery.

As its etymology suggests, ecstasy is a kind of journey, a

refusal to stand still, so it’s no surprise that the Dead were

also devoted to mobility. Making a virtue of necessity, they

put touring ahead of recording, and their lyrics elevated

geographical and psychic journeys to mythic importance.

“Truckin’” became a signature song, and adaptations of

“Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” and “I Know You Rider”

were concert staples. Having chosen to become a touring

band, they undertook a series of annual migrations that

both enacted the American fascination with mobility and

modeled it for two generations of Deadheads. The band

members understood the importance of these journeys

both for themselves and for the fans that accompanied

them. Garcia called the Dead’s traveling culture his

generation’s “archetypal American adventure,” the modern

equivalent of joining the circus or riding freight trains.3

Drummer Mickey Hart claimed that the Grateful Dead

were not even entertainers: “We’re in the transportation

business. We moved minds.”4 Hart’s comment was meant

figuratively—the Dead specialized in ecstasy—but to the

extent that it also works at the literal level, it underscores

the association between ecstasy and mobility.

The band members understood the importance

of these journeys.

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Finally, the Dead were dedicated to community. From the

outset, their project was tribal as well as utopian. Many of

their precursors and peers also emphasized community, but

the Dead were uniquely successful at fostering it. Their inner

circle consisted of the musicians, managers, lyricists, and

roadies who lived together in various configurations, shared

their earnings more or less equally, and made decisions

more or less democratically. As the touring operation grew,

so did the core group of employees, friends, and family.

(Their corporation, which eventually grossed more than

$50 million annually in merchandise alone, was headed

by a crew member.) Connected by the Dead’s annual

migrations, newsletter, and later its website, a growing cohort

of Deadheads swelled the progress. This larger community

would famously come to include one vice president (Al Gore),

two US senators (Al Franken and Patrick Leahy), an NBA

all-star (Bill Walton), a famous scholar (Joseph Campbell),

and other notables. Paradoxically, the band’s mobility didn’t

impede their efforts to create community, which was never

tied to a specific location. To the contrary, mobility powered

the community’s growth. “We went on a headhunting

mission for twenty-five years,” Mickey Hart told one writer.

“We went out there and got this army in tow.”5

If these three ideals help explain the band’s success,

where did they originate? Here the conventional wisdom

refers us to that grand abstraction—the sixties. Once upon

a time, teenagers had sex, used drugs, and listened to loud

music. True as far as it goes, this observation fails both to

distinguish that decade from others and to account for the

Dead’s remarkable staying power. Yes, the Dead were the

quintessential sixties phenomenon, the shaggy part that

stood for the unruly whole, but they were also America’s

most popular touring band well into the nineties.

Focusing on the sixties also obscures important aspects

of the band’s prehistory. In fact, the main features of the

Dead’s long-term project were formed, in utero as it were,

by 1958. This was Jerry Garcia’s annus mirabilis, the twelve

months between his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays,

when he received his first guitar, smoked his first joint,

studied at the California School of Fine Arts, and read

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. By themselves, none of these

events counts for much. Many baby boomers had similar

experiences, and most of us haven’t been inducted into

the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But when we set these

experiences against the larger cultural forces that were

sweeping through San Francisco at the time, and when we

consider their profound effect on Jerome John Garcia, they

help us understand not only the Dead’s interest in ecstasy,

mobility, and community, but also the source of the band’s

sustained appeal.

Roots

Born during the Second World War, Garcia was named

after composer Jerome Kern.6 His father was a former big-

band clarinetist who opened a seamen’s bar not far from

the San Francisco’s docks and skid row. Joe Garcia drowned

in a fishing accident when Jerry was five years old; Jerry’s

mother Ruth took over the bar, remarried, and eventually

moved the family down the peninsula, but only after Jerry

had been exposed to professional music and life on the

city’s bustling waterfront. Although the embarcadero was

a hotbed of urban vice going back to the Gold Rush days,

Garcia remembered the bar fondly. “I’ve always wanted

to be able to turn on people, and I’ve always taken it for

granted that if I like something, that other people will like

it, too . . . [T]he bar world established that kind of feeling;

it engulfed me like a little community.”7

Marlon Brando in the Wild Ones.

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48 b o o m c a l i f o r n i a . c o m

or read about the runs that would happen in Monterey.

The movie The Wild One . . . came out in ’53, I think, and that

was incredible. At that point, all of us wanted to wear leather

jackets and ride Harleys.8

The Hell’s Angels would become fixtures in the Grateful

Dead scene, but as Grant’s mention of the beatniks suggests,

the local arts scene was also changing during this period.

San Francisco was beautifully situated and commercially

connected, but it was culturally isolated. Perhaps for this

reason, the avant-garde played a different role in the city

than it did elsewhere. According to Kenneth Rexroth, the

eminence grise of mid-century San Francisco letters, the

city’s underground arts scene was “dominant, almost all

there is.”9 Living on the nation’s geographical and artistic

margin, lacking established outlets for their work, and with

no culturally important cities for thousands of miles in

any direction, San Francisco artists were constantly in the

position of making their own party.

After the war, Bay Area artists did so in increasingly

novel ways. Politically radical, attracted to the Romantic

and prophetic traditions, and drawing on various forms of

Motorcycle club in the 1950s. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JASON C. TAYLOR.

The war changed the Bay Area profoundly. Defense-

related industries drew the first sizable black population

from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Many veterans who

traveled through the Bay Area to the Pacific theater settled

there, attended college on GI Bill benefits, and swelled the

region’s professional ranks. Less upwardly mobile veterans

formed motorcycle gangs with headquarters or large

chapters in San Francisco and Oakland. Rogue bikers were

at the center of a 1947 incident in the Central California

town of Hollister that served as the basis for the 1953 film

The Wild One with Marlon Brando. Even then, members of

the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang were pursuing their own

vision of the good life: a combustible admixture of heavy

drinking, road trips, and a powerful if frequently extralegal

form of fellowship—which is to say, ecstasy, mobility, and

community.

According to Laird Grant, Garcia’s boyhood friend, the

Hell’s Angels fired their young imaginations.

We knew about the beatniks, and we knew about Hell’s

Angels and were fascinated by both of these cultures. We’d

see the bikers, the Hells Angels coming up from San Jose,

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esoteric spirituality, writers of the so-called San Francisco

Renaissance (including Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan,

Jack Spicer, and William Everson) offered different

versions of an alternative, more connected and more

fulfilling community. Their underlying impulses—elegaic,

nostalgic, and utopian—were a response to the violence

and dislocation of the war, but much of it also arose from

a profound sense of insularity. As poet Gary Snyder put it

later, “In the spiritual and political loneliness of America of

the fifties, you’d hitch a thousand miles to meet a friend . . .

West coast of those days, San Francisco was the only city;

and of San Francisco, North Beach.”10

Several San Francisco poets hosted radio programs on

KPFA, the nation’s first listener-sponsored station, where

Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh later volunteered. But most

of these poets had little or no financial support for their

KPFA album cover, “Is Freedom Academic?”

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50 b o o m c a l i f o r n i a . c o m

work. Meeting in bars or at informal dinner parties to talk

politics, religion, and art, they presented their work not as

literary artifacts but as dramatic performances intended

for (and sometimes aimed at) close friends. The San

Francisco poets were intellectually acute, but their poetics

was fully embodied. William Everson, for example, argued

that sensuality and excess, as represented by the Greek

god Dionysus, were artistically useful. “My view of the

Dionysian is that you gain more through a certain quality

of imprecision . . . a certain openness or vulnerability to

sensation.”11 The interpersonal nature of their work also

helped create a sense of community that was otherwise

lacking—not only in San Francisco, but in American mass

society as well.12

The art community reflected another aspect of the city’s

historical roots. Just as the Gold Rush drew a population

with a high tolerance for risk, twentieth-century San

Francisco artists felt no need to play it safe. If a painter

decided to work on a single piece for six years, as Jay DeFeo

did with “The Rose,” so be it. And if she applied hundreds

of pounds of paint over the years so that the work resembled

a sculpture, even better. And if the paint underneath the

new layers never quite dried, or if the piece fell apart when

moved, or if the whole thing turned to goo when stored,

those risks were worth taking. Fear of failure mattered less

than the artist’s commitment to her evolving vision.

In the 1950s, the Beats arrived in San Francisco and

added a new layer to the scene. Jack Kerouac’s On the

Road (1957) featured cross-country car trips and spirited

adventures, some of them set in San Francisco. His

fictional odyssey glorified spontaneous, intense experience,

often fueled by alcohol, Benzedrine, marijuana, and

morphine. Bebop jazz, with its soaring improvisations,

provided the Beat soundtrack, and Kerouac consciously

adapted its methods to his own writing. The narrator’s

name, Sal Paradise, signals the novel’s utopian theme, and

he reinforces it early on: “I was a young writer and I wanted

to take off. Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be

girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the

pearl would be handed to me”13 The novel’s hero was based

on Neal Cassady, whose energy and thirst for experience

represented a romantic frontier ideal. In real life, the

cross-country road trips bonded Kerouac and Cassady and

prompted a compositional style that captured the spirit

of their journeys. After extensive planning and outlining,

Kerouac banged out the manuscript for On the Road in a

series of epic, Benzedrine-fueled raptures.

On the Road challenged mainstream American

values in several ways. As with the Hell’s Angels, its key

relationships aren’t found in nuclear families but rather

in male friendships forged by shared adventures. In their

bohemian exuberance, the characters decline almost

everything Main Street might recognize as worthy: sobriety,

common sense, hard work, monogamy, Christianity, or

patriotism. Although Sal realizes that his paradise lacks

something, that their frantic questing masks a conceptual

emptiness, he sets aside his misgivings when the next

adventure beckons. “We were all delighted,” Sal says,

“we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense

behind and performing our one and noble function of the

time, move.”14

Community

On the Road failed to please many critics, but it created a

media swirl and found a large and appreciative audience,

especially among young people bored by that decade’s

Wonder Bread culture. Garcia fit that profile perfectly.

His family’s move to Menlo Park was part of a larger

pattern of white flight from San Francisco, an exodus

that was enabled by the expansion of the highway system Jack Kerouac, circa 1956. PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM PALUMBO.

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and the suburbanization that accompanied it. Palo

Alto, which had been known for its fruit orchards and

university, became a suburban showcase. One of its local

institutions, Sunset magazine, blossomed in the postwar

period by offering western readers advice on homes,

gardens, food, and travel.

Nothing could be less interesting to Garcia; but in 1957,

the family moved back to San Francisco. Unmotivated at

school and still unaware of Kerouac, Garcia focused on

the guitar he received for his fifteenth birthday—actually

an accordion that he promptly returned for a Danelectro.

“I was beside myself,” he told one interviewer. “I was so

happy to get it. I wanted to be an artist but I fell in love with

rock ‘n’ roll.”15 He never took lessons but instead imitated

the hot guitarists of the day however he could: “I used to do

things like look at the pictures of guitar players and look

at their hands and try to make the chords they were doing:

anything, any little thing.”16

During this time, Garcia also discovered marijuana, an

event he recounted in a 1972 interview.

I was fifteen when I got turned on to marijuana. Finally, there

was marijuana: Wow! Marijuana. Me and a friend of mine went

up into the hills with two joints, the San Francisco foothills,

and smoked these joints and just got so high and laughed

and roared and went skipping down the streets doing funny

things and just having a helluva time. It was great, it was just

what I wanted, it was the perfect, it was—and that wine thing

was so awful and this marijuana was so perfect.17

In the same interview, Garcia was matter-of-fact about his

heavy marijuana consumption as well as misinformation

about its effects: “I don’t have that many illusions about it

because I was never around in that world where you had

to read about it. For me, it came in the form of dope. You

got a joint, you didn’t get a lecture; and you got a cap, you

didn’t get a treatise or any of that shit. You just got high, you

took the thing and found out what happened to you; that’s

the only evidence there is.”18 Eventually, Garcia’s heroin

use would create serious health problems and hamper the

band, but he typically portrayed his first encounters with

marijuana as a positive development.

A capable illustrator, the young Garcia also decided to

enroll in a weekend program at the California School of

Fine Arts (CSFA) in the spring of 1958. His teachers there

included Elmer Bischoff, whose figurative work bore

some of the immediacy and exuberance of the abstract

expressionists. CSFA had strong links to the local literary

scene; both Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Spicer taught there,

and the latter’s college friends from Berkeley included poet

Robert Duncan and science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.

Garcia’s mentor at CSFA was Wally Hedrick, whose

example appealed directly to a teenager looking for more.

The son of a used-car dealer, Hedrick grew up in Pasadena,

where his main interests were hot rods, bridge, and the

beach. Having received solid art training at Pasadena City

College, Hedrick headed north to investigate CSFA. By

the time he enrolled, after serving in Korea, Mark Rothko,

Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, and Ansel Adams had

already come and gone, but the San Francisco Renaissance

1956 Danelectro guitar. PHOTOGRAPH BY JAzzYPANTS123.

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52 b o o m c a l i f o r n i a . c o m

was beginning to attract national attention. Hedrick finished

his art studies with the aid of GI Bill benefits, signed on

as an instructor, and began to produce assemblage and

funk art that grew out of the futurist, surrealist, and Dada

traditions. His art routinely lampooned conceit, self-

deception, and authority. Reviewing his work of that period,

Rebecca Solnit notes that it managed to be “lurid, mystical,

and sarcastic all at once.”19

Hedrick recalled his first encounter with Garcia at CSFA.

He and a friend of his named Mike Kennedy came over

to the Art Institute [California School of Fine Arts] as part

of a program that the Institute had to provide summer

instruction for high school students who had been referred

from their own school because they had some real aptitude

in that area. I remember these two guys walking in one

morning and they became part of the class and immediately

both of them began to paint up a storm. They were really

quite good for their age.20

Garcia later said that Hedrick taught him that “art is not

only something you do, but something you are as well.”21

That lesson opened up a world of new possibility—not only

in terms of making art, but also in how to live like an artist.

Hedrick and his wife, Jay DeFeo, lived at 2322 Fillmore

Street, a four-unit building in Pacific Heights. Their

neighbors included poets Michael and Joanna McClure,

painters Joan and Bill Brown, and Dave Getz, who studied

painting at CSFA, and eventually played drums for both

Big Brother and the Holding Company and Country Joe

and the Fish. CSFA faculty member Carlos Villa also

stressed the importance of 2322 Fillmore: “Wally and Jay’s

house on Fillmore was the unofficial first stop on any art

itinerary—anyone important in the art world—national

or international—theirs was the first stop,” he recalled.

Jay DeFeo working on “The Rose,” 1960.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BURT GLIN. © 2012 BURT GLIN/MAGNUM PHOTOS.

“The Rose,” Jay DeFeo, 1958–1966, oil with wood and mica on canvas;

128 7/8 × 92 1/4 × 11 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New

York; gift of The Jay DeFeo Trust, Berkeley, CA, and purchased with

funds from the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Committee and

the Judith Rothschild Foundation 95.170; © The Jay DeFeo Trust/

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN BLACKWELL.

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“There was this maze of studios and apartments with great

works in all of the studios.”22 It was there that Jay DeFeo

worked steadily on “The Rose,” which took up an entire

wall of the flat.

Hedrick’s mentorship was social as well as artistic. “Jerry

never became a full-time student,” he recalled, “but he did

become a personal friend and we’d invite him over to our

parties and various social activities.”23 In her study of Joan

Brown, author Karen Tsujimoto recalls the festive spirit of

that place and time.

The parties they threw with homemade beer brewed in the

bathtub and music of Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley

blaring through the apartments became well known in San

Francisco’s underground community and are now the grist of

legend . . . Symbolic of this rambunctious and unrestrained

time was the hole that was knocked into the wall adjoining the

flats of the Browns and Hedrick and DeFeo, in order to allow a

freer flow of the beer, music, energy, and high jinks.24

Some CSFA parties included the Studio 13 Jass Band,

with Hedrick on banjo and Elmer Bischoff on trumpet.

Hedrick later recalled that “drinking, openings, food, and

music were all of the by-products of when a person had a

show. And then dancing, too, come to think of it . . . And

so openings of any sort were much more attended during

that period. In fact, part of the thing was to get loaded and

act outrageous.”25

Laird Grant described one CSFA Halloween party he

and Garcia attended as teenagers.

[T]his big limo pulled up in front of the California School of

Fine Arts. This chick got out in this fur coat and left it there.

She was totally stark naked with a raisin in her navel. She

came as a cookie. She was one of the art student models who

modeled in the nude all the time. To her, it was nothing at all.

But in ’56 or ’57, it was quite unusual.26

Garcia also absorbed the bohemian atmosphere at other

North Beach venues. According to Grant, “We’d hang out

in front of the Anxious Asp, the Green Street Saloon, the

Co-Existence Bagel Shop, Coffee & Confusion, and we’d go

to parties here and there—there was a lot of action around;

this is still way before they drove the beatniks out.”27

Many CSFA artists were smoking marijuana and taking

peyote to heighten their perceptions, though heroin,

too, was a drug of choice. A 1957 issue of Semina, an

underground journal connected to CSFA and published by

artist Wallace Berman, included two photographs of poet

Philip Lamantia injecting heroin, as well as an excerpt

from Alexander Trocchi’s novel about his experiences as

an addict. Another issue of Semina was originally titled

“The Eyes,” Jay DeFeo, 1958, graphite on paper 42 x 84 3/4 inches; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Lannan Foundation 96.242.3;

© The Jay DeFeo Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL ORCUTT.

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54 b o o m c a l i f o r n i a . c o m

Cannabis Sativa. While visiting Michael McClure in 1958,

Berman described the Native American uses of peyote and

left behind some buttons in McClure’s apartment. McClure

ingested them and wrote a poem about the experience for

the journal.28

Hedrick and his colleagues also explored esoteric

traditions, including Tarot, theosophy, alchemy, the Kama

Sutra, and the Kabbalah. Never expecting to make money

from their art, they worked without concern for posterity

or publicity. Influenced by their example, Jack Spicer

later refused to seek copyright for his poetry and invented

new ways to narrow its distribution.29 With Spicer and

four others, Hedrick organized the Six Gallery at 3119

Fillmore Street in 1954. “[W]e knew that we weren’t

going to be able to show our own work,” Hedrick said in

1974, “and so the answer was to start our own gallery.”30

Casually administered and chronicled, the gallery hosted

the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in

1955. It was a signal event in Beat history. Kerouac, who

drank from a bottle of Burgundy and scatted during

Ginsberg’s performance, offered a fictionalized version

of the evening in The Dharma Bums. By the time that

novel appeared in 1958, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti

had been cleared of obscenity charges arising from the

publication of “Howl.” His legal victory in 1957 was widely

seen as another advance for liberty, San Francisco style.

The same year, Evergreen Review ran a cover story called

“The San Francisco Scene.” Kenneth Rexroth wrote the

introductory article, and Gary Snyder, Michael McClure,

and Henry Miller contributed poems and articles. In

her piece, art critic Dore Ashton maintained that San

Francisco was second only to New York as a major source

of avant-garde painting.

It was Hedrick who introduced Garcia to On the Road,

Kerouac, and Beat culture more generally in 1958. In a

1989 piece devoted to Kerouac, Garcia cited the novel’s

importance.

A germinal moment for me was back when I was in high

school going to the San Francisco Art Institute on weekends,

just when the words “beat generation” began hitting the

papers. We asked my teacher, Wally Hedrick, about the

phrase, and he said, “Well, there’s this book, On the Road,

and it’s all in there.” I was an impressionable San Franciscan,

really taken with the North Beach scene, and this stuff began

to surface.

For Garcia, much of the novel’s appeal lay in its

musicality and in its romantic depiction of travel.

Then in the next couple of years I read Kerouac, and I recall in

’59 hanging out with a friend who had a Kerouac record, and

I remember being impressed—I’d read this stuff, but I hadn’t

heard it, the cadences, the flow, the kind of endlessness of the

prose, the way it just poured off. It was really stunning to me.

His way of perceiving music—the way he wrote about music

and America—and the road, the romance of the American

highway, it struck me. It struck a primal chord. It felt familiar,

something I wanted to join in. It wasn’t like a club; it was a way

of seeing.

On the Road was literally transformative.

It became so much a part of me that it’s hard to measure;

I can’t separate who I am now from what I got from Kerouac.

I don’t know if I would ever have had the courage or the vision

to do something outside with my life—or even suspected the

possibilities existed—if it weren’t for Kerouac opening those

doors.31

I can’t separate who I am now from what I got from

Kerouac.

The cover of one of Kerouac’s several spoken work albums.

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American weird

Soon after this formative year, Garcia and future Grateful

Dead lyricist Robert Hunter would absorb another huge

influence hatched in the Bay Area, Harry Smith’s Anthology

of American Folk Music. Like many poets of the San Francisco

Renaissance, Garcia and Hunter looked back to prewar

America with a strong sense of elegy and nostalgia, and

they were riveted by Smith’s six-album collection of folk,

Cajun, gospel, hillbilly, blues, and fiddle music released by

Folkways Records in 1952.

A classic west-coast oddball, Harry Smith was raised in

the Pacific Northwest in a family steeped in theosophy and

freemasonry. His college studies included anthropological

fieldwork with Native American tribes, but his life took

a different turn in the 1940s, when a trip to Berkeley

introduced him to Woody Guthrie and marijuana. He

downplayed the significance of the Guthrie performance

he witnessed, however. “It could have been at some

longshoremen’s hall,” he recalled vaguely. “I’m sure it was

like Communists. But I didn’t like his singing. It was too

sophisticated and too involved in social problems, I felt. It

wasn’t the sort of stuff I was interested in.”32

Soon Smith was living in a small Berkeley apartment

attached to the home of Professor Bertrand Bronson, an

expert on Francis James Child, the nineteenth-century

Harvard folklorist who exhaustively catalogued Scottish

and English ballads. Scouring the East Bay for vintage

records with Jack Spicer and others, Smith also explored

avant-garde film, which introduced him to Robert Duncan,

painter Jess Collins’s partner. From 1950 to 1952, Smith

lived in San Francisco’s Fillmore District over Jimbo’s Bop

City, and his paintings of that time reflect his deep interest

in jazz.33 Smith also became an enthusiastic drug user.

He drank heavily, used amphetamines and barbiturates,

smoked weed incessantly, and took peyote, which he

acquired from the Sears Roebuck catalog. “Anything that

changes the consciousness to a degree I think is useful,” he

told Sing Out! interviewer John Cohen in 1968.34

In 1952, Smith moved to New York City, took up

residence in the Chelsea Hotel, and approached Moe Asch,

who had recorded Woody Guthrie for Folkways. Smith’s

original idea was to sell Asch his record collection, but

Asch persuaded him to fashion an anthology from it. Smith

ignored field recordings and focused instead on commercial

songs released in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He added

a twenty-eight-page booklet of idiosyncratic liner notes

decorated with woodcuts, record-sleeve art, and faded

photographs of the artists, most of them deceased. The

anthology’s cover illustration showed what Smith called

the “celestial monochord,” a single-stringed instrument of

ancient origin, being tuned by the hand of God.

The recordings suggest live performances rather

than finished studio products. The singers, for example,

frequently shout out instructions to invisible dancers.

Despite that immediacy, the social world that gave rise

to these performances remained strangely inaccessible.

Smith’s records were only two decades old when his

anthology appeared, but both the music and the world they

evoked already felt ancient and remote. The nineteenth-

century source material was even more peculiar. In his

Sing Out! interview with John Cohen, Smith noted its

“amazing subject matter, all connected with children

freezing to death.”35

Illustration of the celestial monochord used on

Harry Smith’s album cover.

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56 b o o m c a l i f o r n i a . c o m

The entire package—recordings, liner notes, and

cover art—became a kind of talisman for Hunter and

Garcia.36 It connected them to what Greil Marcus would

one day call the Old, Weird America—a shadow world

of obscure heroes, rogues, doomed love affairs, suicides,

murderous exploits, and half-forgotten legends. Marcus

distinguished Smith’s “invisible republic” from what

Kenneth Rexroth had called the “old, free America”

because that phrase, Marcus thought, located America’s

best self in the past and thereby “cut Americans off from

any need to measure themselves against the idealism . . .

[they] have inherited.”37 For a young Bob Dylan, another

Smith enthusiast, the Old, Weird America’s elusiveness

practically defined folk music, which Dylan described as

“roses growing right up out of people’s hearts . . . seven

years of this and eight years of that, and it’s all really

something that nobody can touch.”38

Eventually, Smith befriended Allen Ginsberg and Patti

Smith, donated his enormous paper airplane collection

to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space

Museum, served as shaman-in-residence at the Naropa

Insitute, earned a Grammy for lifetime achievement, and

received $10,000 per year for living expenses from the

Grateful Dead’s charitable foundation. But for Garcia

and Hunter in the late 1950s, Smith’s weirdness was all.

They were astonished that such music had been made

in America within living memory, and they explored it

ardently. When Hunter eventually turned to songwriting,

Smith’s invisible republic became a touchstone.

Ecstasy

But well before Garcia encountered this Old, Weird

America—in fact, even before he qualified for a California

driver’s license—he was absorbing a rich and historically

specific set of ideas about what it was to be an artist.

The 1960s in general, and LSD in particular, fueled that

conception, and Garcia would remain open to a wide

variety of artistic influences and developments throughout

his life. But this very receptivity was another legacy of

the San Francisco Renaissance; Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s

standard advice was to keep an open mind, but not so open

that your brains fall out. Garcia also seemed to follow a

more specific version of the local ethos, which artist Jess

Collins posted in his San Francisco studio.

THE SEVEN DEADLY VIRTUES OF

CONTEMPORARY ART:

ORIGINALITY

SPONTANEITY

SIMPLICITY

INTENSITY

IMMEDIACY

IMPENETRABILITY

SHOCK

The Grateful Dead absorbed these deadly virtues and

reflected them in their music. By the mid-nineties, the

Dead were a long way away from the insular, bohemian

arts community that Garcia stumbled upon in 1958, but

the band’s core values are evident over the long arc of

their history.

Garcia frequently acknowledged his annus mirabilis,

leading one of his interviewers, Yale law professor and

bestselling author Charles Reich, to reflect on its effects.

Jerry left the straight world at fifteen. Can any straight person

comprehend the incredible meaning of that fact? From then

on, he no longer cared about getting good grades in school,

or getting approval from authority figures, or entering college,

or having a “career.” He got off the escalator … Jerry makes it

sound easy but it isn’t. Leaving the straight world is frightening

and lonely.39

Garcia made it sound very easy indeed. “When I left

the straight world at fifteen, when I got my first guitar

These teachers offered Garcia an artistic

framework that was enticing, flexible,

and durable.

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boom | w i n t e r 2 012 57

and left everything I was doing, I was taking a vacation.

I was going out to play, and I’m still playing.”40 This

is vintage Garcia, but it’s also a hippy version of the

studied nonchalance embodied by many mid-century

Californians—think Chet Baker and Joe DiMaggio—who

made their difficult art look easy.

To argue that Garcia’s miraculous year was the Dead’s

point of origin risks a serious misunderstanding of their

project. The Grateful Dead were nothing if not collaborative,

and their achievement far outstripped the contribution of

any individual member. Indeed, they frequently compared

their experience to Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than

Human, the 1953 science fiction novel with a protagonist

comprised of several beings who act as a single organism

and thereby overcome their individual deficiencies.41 But

it’s also true that the band looked to Garcia for direction,

Jerry Garcia in 1966. PHOTOGRAPHY BY HERB GREENE. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD ARCHIVE, UC SANTA CRUz.

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58 b o o m c a l i f o r n i a . c o m

and Hunter described their organization as a reflection of

Garcia’s mind.42

What, then, preoccupied that mind? First and foremost,

a vision of what it was to be an artist, a vision shaped by

his early contact with the painters and writers of the San

Francisco Renaissance. Garcia saw his teachers—broadly

defined to include Kerouac and Smith—making art,

improvising, taking risks, getting high, defying the square

world, exploring weirdness, downplaying commerce, and

radiating irreverence. By emphasizing the utopian ideals

of ecstasy, mobility, and community, these teachers offered

Garcia an artistic framework that was enticing, flexible,

and durable—so durable, in fact, that Garcia and the Dead

never deviated significantly from it. b

Notes

1 This article stems from papers presented to the Grateful Dead

Scholars Caucus at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and

American Culture Association Conference in San Antonio

(2011) and Albuquerque (2012). The 2011 presentation, “’Let

Fate Decide the Rest’: The Grateful Dead, Quietism, and the

Politics of Utopia,” appeared in Nicholas Meriwether (ed.),

Dead Studies, vol. 2 (Santa Cruz, CA: Grateful Dead Archive,

University of California, Santa Cruz, 2012), 81–94.

2 Jerry Garcia, Charles Reich, and Jann Wenner, Garcia: A

Signpost to New Space (San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow

Books, 1972; rpt. Da Capo, 2003), 100.

3 Anthony DeCurtis, “The Music Never Stops: The Rolling Stone

Interview with Jerry Garcia,” Rolling Stone 664 (2 Sept. 1993),

42–46, 76.

4 Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the

Grateful Dead (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 538.

5 Carol Brightman, Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American

Adventure (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1998), 3.

6 Blair Jackson, Garcia: An American Life (New York: Viking

Penguin, 1999), 7.

7 Dennis McNally, A Long, Strange Trip: The Inside History of the

Grateful Dead (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 14.

8 Robert Greenfield, Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry

Garcia (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1996; rpt.

HarperCollins, 2009), 10–11.

9 Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics

and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 1991), 11.

10 Davidson, 29.

11 Davidson, 49.

12 Davidson, 22–23.

13 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Viking Press, 1957; rpt.

Penguin Books, 1976), 8.

14 Jack Kerouac, 134.

15 Alice Kahn, “Jerry Garcia and the Call of the Weird,” San

Jose Mercury’s West Magazine, 30 December 1984. Reprinted

in David G. Dodd and Diana Spaulding (eds.), The Grateful

Dead Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),

201.

16 Blair Jackson, 21.

17 Jerry Garcia, Charles Reich, and Jann Wenner, 3.

18 Jerry Garcia, Charles Reich, and Jann Wenner, 97.

19 Rebecca Solnit, “Inventing San Francisco’s Art Scene,” San

Francisco Chronicle, 25 January 2005. http://www.sfgate.

com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/01/25/LVG344BTP61.

DTL&ao=all).

20 Blair Jackson, Garcia: An American Life (New York: Viking

Penguin, 1999), 22.

21 Dennis McNally, 24.

22 Carlos Villa, “Remembering Wally Hedrick,” Stretcher: Visual

Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area and Beyond, http://www.

stretcher.org/features/remembering_wally_hedrick/

23 Blair Jackson, 22.

24 Karen Tsujimoto and Jacquelynn Bass, The Art of Joan Brown

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 21.

25 Oral history with Wally Hedrick, 10–24 June 1974, Archives

of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, http://www.aaa

.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-

wally-hedrick-12869.

26 Robert Greenfield, 13–14.

27 Blair Jackson, 23.

28 Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and

Politics in California (Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press, 1996), 247.

29 Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer

and the San Francisco Renaissance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan

University Press, 1998), 50.

30 Oral history interview with Wally Hedrick, Archives of

American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1974.

31 The Jack Kerouac Collection audiotape booklet (Rhino Records,

1990).

32 Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh, eds., Harry Smith: The Avant-

Garde in the American Vernacular (Los Angeles: Getty Research

Institute, 2010), 12.

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boom | w i n t e r 2 012 59

33 Paola Igiori, ed., American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern

Alchemist (New York: Inanout Press, 1996), 25–26.

34 The Cohen interview appears in Paola Igliori, insert.

35 Cohen interview in Paola Igliori, insert.

36 See Dennis McNally, 33.

37 Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement

Tapes (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997; rpt. The Old,

Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes), 89.

38 Greil Marcus, 30.

39 Jerry Garcia et al., xii.

40 Jerry Garcia et al., xiv.

41 David Gans, Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual

Portrait of the Grateful Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press,

1985), 18.

42 Dennis McNally, 55.

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