PART 1

ECSTASY



In the spring of 1965, they got their chance.

Jerry Garcia and his wife, Sara Ruppenthal, were eager to try psychedelic drugs. As teenagers in the suburbs south of San Francisco, each had smoked marijuana; in fact, one of Garcia's friends, Robert Hunter, had given Ruppenthal her first "funny cigarette." She thought marijuana brought out her husband's irresponsible side, but she was curious about LSD. "I had always wanted to do psychedelics," she recalled later. "I'd read Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception when I was a teenager and really wanted to expand my consciousness."

If hers was an unusually literary introduction to psychedelics, The Doors of Perception was an unusual book. Published in 1954, it recounted a single day in the life of the English intellectual tripping on mescaline in and around his Hollywood home. The book's title echoed a passage from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite," Blake wrote. "For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." Ingesting mescaline, which was legal, would put Huxley in direct contact with that insight. Intrigued by the links between drugs, consciousness, and art, Huxley knew that mescaline had been isolated from peyote in the late 1890s, that British physician Havelock Ellis had experimented with it in the 1920s, and that Ellis had supplied poet William Butler Yeats with peyote. Yeats reported that he had seen "the most delightful dragons, puffing out their breath straight in front of them, like rigid lines of steam."

At age fifty-nine, Huxley had already led a remarkable life. Born into a family of prominent writers, scientists, and physicians, he studied literature at Oxford and established himself as a successful novelist, poet, and journalist. His fifth novel, the dystopian Brave New World, appeared in 1932. It was both a jab at the earlier utopian works of H. G. Wells and a complex response to the fast-paced, unreflective, and technology-obsessed mass society that Huxley saw around him, especially in America. In that novel, an overweening state encourages its citizens to drink soma, a hallucinogen that pacifies its users and provides a measure of temporary transcendence and communion.Brave New World brought Huxley even more notoriety, but his outspoken pacifism in the 1930s alienated him from his British peers, and he decided to move to the United States.

In 1937, Huxley arrived in Hollywood and soon began mixing screenwriting assignments with fiction and nonfiction. After the Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives in 1946, the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed the Hollywood Ten, the so-called unfriendly witnesses who declined to answer questions about their alleged membership in the Communist Party. Four years later, Congress launched a second investigation of leftists in the film industry, and this time, Huxley was identified as a Communist fellow traveler. His film career collapsed after a cover story in Counterattack, a right-wing magazine, described him as a Communist dupe.

In 1953, Huxley persuaded Humphry Osmond, the British psychiatrist who invented the term psychedelic, to dose him with mescaline. On the morning of May 4, Osmond mixed less than half a gram of white crystals into a glass of water, which Huxley drank. After thirty minutes, Huxley noticed that the flowers in his study melted into wavy patterns. Osmond began to quiz him about spatial relationships. They were altered, but Huxley found that he could move around the room normally. The more interesting change, he thought, was that his books were glowing with living light. When the psychiatrist asked about time, Huxley replied, "There seems to be plenty of it." After ninety minutes, Huxley was asked if his experience was agreeable. "It just is," he said, laughing. As his daily concerns evaporated, Huxley looked around his home, and he noticed that "a sense of special significance began to invest everything in the room.... A plain wooden chair was invested with a 'chairliness' which no chair ever had for me before."

In the afternoon, Huxley wandered down to the local drugstore seven blocks from his Hollywood home. There he made his way through the aisles of toys, greeting cards, comic books, and cooking utensils. Nearly blind since his teenage years, Huxley was transfixed by the art books he discovered there. "This is how one ought to see," he told his companions repeatedly, but he also felt panic. "Suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad," he recalled. That sensation gave way to a more peaceful one that he called "contemplation at its height." Reflecting on his experience, Huxley didn't equate it with authentic enlightenment, but he stressed its intellectual benefits.

All I am suggesting is that the mescalin [sic] experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the rut of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world ... this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

Reviewers panned The Doors of Perception and castigated Huxley, but he was unfazed. He continued to trip several times a year for the rest of his life, and his book spread the word about the virtues of psychedelic drugs.

Garcia's interest in psychedelics was less bookish than Ruppenthal's-not surprising, perhaps, given that she attended Stanford University, where her father taught, and he dropped out of high school. But Garcia and his friends were no dullards. Ruppenthal met them at Kepler's Books, the Menlo Park store where local intellectuals and activists gathered. Garcia, Hunter, and David Nelson spent their days playing music in the back room, and they impressed Ruppenthal with their energetic banter. At the time, Garcia and Hunter were living at a boardinghouse called the Chateau near the Stanford campus. Inhabited by bohemians and eccentrics, the Chateau was a step up from the East Palo Alto vacant lot where Garcia and Hunter had previously lived in their automobiles. But Garcia's room at the Chateau was primitive. "I think it had a dirt floor," Ruppenthal said. "He'd stuck a bed in there, and there was a box with a candle on it, and that was it. There was no electricity. There were spiders. It was really funky."

A few weeks after Ruppenthal and Garcia began dating, she was pregnant. They married, moved into a small apartment, and tried to manage on his meager earnings from the local music store, where he taught guitar and banjo. Their prospects weren't bright, but at twenty-three, Jerome John Garcia was just getting started.

* * *

Like many residents in and around Palo Alto, Jerry Garcia was a newcomer. He grew up thirty miles north in the famously freewheeling city of San Francisco. His father, Jose, emigrated from Spain with his family at sixteen. A clarinetist, Joe formed a small band that played on cruise ships shuttling between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Joe later joined the Orpheum Circuit, a chain of vaudeville theaters based in San Francisco, and toured for several years before settling in Hollywood and playing clubs and occasionally for the movies. Returning to San Francisco to be near his family, he married Ruth Clifford, a registered nurse. They had two sons, Clifford (known as Tiff) and Jerry, who grew up to the sound of woodwinds. "The clarinet had that lovely wood quality, especially in the middle register. And that sound is very present in my ear," Jerry recalled. "Some people can recall smells. I can recall specific sounds-I can hear a sound and all of a sudden it will transport me to places."

Four years after the repeal of Prohibition, Joe and Ruth opened a bar called Garcia's at the corner of First Street and Harrison Street on Rincon Hill. It was close to the city's docks, skid row, and the recently completed Bay Bridge, which connected San Francisco to Oakland. Business was good, but family life soon took a turn for the worse. When Jerry was four, he lost half of his right middle finger while Tiff was chopping wood. The next year, his father drowned while fishing on the rugged Northern California coast. Ruth took over the bar, remarried, and eventually moved the family to the peninsula suburbs. By that time, the bar had exposed Jerry to professional music and life on the city's bustling waterfront. At Garcia's, Jerry found a community receptive to his outgoing nature and enthusiasms. "I've always wanted to be able to turn on people, and also I've taken it for granted that if I like something, that other people will like it, too," he said. "The bar world established that kind of feeling; it engulfed me like a little community."

The docks near Garcia's were also a key part of San Francisco's identity. Ever since the city's furious growth during the Gold Rush, the waterfront had been a busy node in the global economy. By the time Garcia's opened, San Francisco supported the nation's largest population of sailors, and 5 percent of the city's employed males worked as seafarers, longshoremen, or warehousemen. More than two-thirds of the district's population was male, half of them were foreign-born, and many lived in hotels. The neighborhood around Garcia's was known for its bars, gambling dens, and bordellos, and such vice districts had been integral parts of San Francisco's social fabric for generations. The same year Garcia's opened, an FBI agent told a San Francisco grand jury that the city's police force received at least $1 million in graft each year to keep the party going. Despite periodic calls for reform, especially from clergy, crackdowns were a low priority, as even the FBI agent acknowledged: "We were aware that the bulk of the people wanted a so-called open town, and that the history of San Francisco reflected a public attitude of broad-mindedness, liberality, and tolerance comparable to only two other American cities, namely New York and New Orleans."

The docks also shaped San Francisco's political culture. For decades, organized labor had been a key component in local politics. Garcia's maternal grandmother, who helped raise him after his father's death, organized the laundry workers' union in San Francisco and served as its secretary-treasurer. But the city's pro-labor disposition was tested in a series of dramatic showdowns less than a decade before Garcia's birth. In 1934, militant longshoremen led a general strike that shut down San Francisco for months. That lethal conflict, which played out around the site of Garcia's, transformed labor relations in and around the ports and established the longshoremen's union as a potent political force on the West Coast. Its leader, however, became a target of federal probes that dragged on for decades. The government claimed that Harry Bridges, a native of Australia, had lied about his Communist Party membership in his immigration documents. But prosecutors couldn't prove that claim, and Bridges's feisty lawyer, Vincent Hallinan, helped fend off the attacks. While doing so, Hallinan was convicted of contempt and spent six months in prison. Eventually federal prosecutors dropped the Bridges case, and though local authorities continued to pressure and prosecute dissidents of all stripes, San Francisco became known as a haven for radicals and free spirits.

* * *

The Second World War, which the United States entered shortly before Garcia was born, changed the Bay Area profoundly. Some 240,000 workers built and repaired ships at various Bay Area locations, and defense-related activities drew the first sizable black population to the region from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Another 1.6 million soldiers and sailors traveled through San Francisco on their way to and from the Pacific theater, and after the war, many settled in the Bay Area. Some veterans used their GI Bill benefits to earn college degrees and swelled the region's professional ranks. Others took a different path. A small but highly visible faction of veterans formed motorcycle gangs that maintained large chapters in and around San Francisco. Rogue bikers were at the center of a 1947 incident in Hollister, where four thousand motorcyclists attended a rally and overwhelmed the small town south of San Jose. Their brawling led to dozens of injuries and arrests, and the spectacle served as the basis for the 1953 film The Wild One with Marlon Brando.

In the 1960s, Hunter S. Thompson's bestselling book Hell's Angels focused national attention on the region's most notorious motorcycle gang, which derived its name and insignia from military units in previous wars. "Like the drifters who rode west after Appomattox," Thompson noted, "there were thousands of veterans in 1945 who flatly rejected the idea of going back to their prewar pattern." But well before Thompson's book appeared, the Hells Angels were famous in the Bay Area. According to Laird Grant, Garcia's boyhood friend, the motorcycle gang fired their young imaginations. "We knew about the beatniks, and we knew about Hells Angels and were fascinated by both of these cultures," Grant said. "We'd see the bikers, the Hells Angels, coming up from San Jose or read about the runs that would happen in Monterey. The movie The Wild One with Brando came out in '53, I think, and that was incredible. At that point, all of us wanted to wear leather jackets and ride Harleys." Law enforcement cast the motorcycle gang as a threat to public safety and order, but the Hells Angels saw themselves as pursuing the good life: a combustible admixture of heavy drinking, road trips, and a powerful if frequently extralegal form of fellowship.

As Grant's comment about beatniks suggests, the war also changed the local arts community. Although San Francisco was beautifully situated and commercially connected, it was culturally isolated. Perhaps for this reason, the avant-garde played a different role in the city than it did elsewhere. Poet Kenneth Rexroth, the éminence grise of midcentury San Francisco letters, described the city's underground arts scene as "dominant, almost all there is." This postwar scene was by no means the first bohemia. The French, who coined that term in the nineteenth century, based it on the Central European region through which the Romany people, or Gypsies, entered Western Europe. Greenwich Village had served as New York City's bohemia for generations, and in California, Bret Harte wrote as "The Bohemian" as early as the 1860s. When other local journalists, including Mark Twain, began to identify themselves that way, they founded the Bohemian Club in 1872. Its members had a clubhouse in downtown San Francisco and eventually acquired a camp in the redwood forests of Sonoma County for their summer revelries, which featured music, plays, and heavy drinking.

Living on the nation's geographical and artistic margin, 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. Though small, that party was lively. The earlier San Francisco literature created by Jack London and others was populist, bohemian, and rowdier than its Eastern counterparts. After the war, San Francisco artists built on that legacy in new and interesting ways. Politically radical, attracted to the Romantic and prophetic traditions, and drawing on esoteric spirituality, writers of the so-called San Francisco Renaissance dreamed of more connected and fulfilling communities.

After settling in San Francisco in 1953, Lawrence Ferlinghetti began attending the Friday-night soirées at Rexroth's apartment over Jack's Record Cellar in the predominantly black Fillmore district. "Local and itinerant poets and other flickering literary lights would show up," Ferlinghetti recalled, "usually loaded in more ways than one but mainly with the latest poetry." The poets were "passionate, erudite, disputative conversationalists," Ferlinghetti recalled, and he thought it best to keep his mouth shut, drink the dago red, and let the brilliant raps wash over him. When he opened City Lights Bookstore that year with Peter D. Martin, Ferlinghetti helped make the North Beach neighborhood the center of San Francisco's literary activity.

The underlying impulses of many San Francisco writers-elegiac, nostalgic, and utopian-responded to the violence and dislocation of the war, but much of their work also arose from a profound sense of insularity. "In the spiritual and political loneliness of America in the fifties, you'd hitch a thousand miles to meet a friend," poet Gary Snyder recalled. "West Coast of those days, San Francisco was the only city; and of San Francisco, North Beach." The coteries formed by local poets reflected the need for community that was otherwise lacking-not only among artists, but also in postwar American society generally. Stan Brakhage, whose experimental films would later influence Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone, remembered the city's arts community as a welcoming place. "You sensed that everybody was very active and very creative and needed the support of others," Brakhage said.

Several San Francisco poets hosted programs on KPFA, the nation's first listener-supported radio station across the bay in Berkeley, but most had little or no financial support for their 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. Those encounters, which could include up to one hundred persons, were intellectually acute but also fully embodied. Sensuality and excess, as represented by the Greek god Dionysus, were regarded as artistically useful. "My view of the Dionysian," San Francisco poet William Everson wrote, "is that you gain more through a certain quality of imprecision ... a certain openness or vulnerability to sensation."

In that spirit, Robert Duncan occasionally disrobed during readings. Fellow poet Michael McClure recalled one such instance at a 1955 comic masque. "When it ended, Duncan, trembling and cock-eyed with pleasure, stood up, took off his pants, and showed the nakedness of the poet," McClure said. "All of us knew we'd done something outrageous, something that took a little courage in the silent, cold gray ... chill fifties of suburban tract homes, crew cuts, war machines, and censorship." Allen Ginsberg noted Duncan's exhibitionism in his journal and reenacted it the following year at a reading in Los Angeles. Responding to a heckler, Ginsberg shed his clothing and shouted, "A poet always stands naked before the world!"

Duncan's audacity reflected another aspect of San Francisco's historical roots. A century earlier, the Gold Rush had drawn a population that not only tolerated risk, but also actively sought it out. Like their Gold Rush precursors, 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. If she applied hundreds of pounds of paint so that the piece resembled a sculpture, even better. And if the paint inside 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. "Only by chancing the ridiculous," DeFeo said, "can I hope for the sublime."

* * *

In the mid-1950s, the Beats arrived in San Francisco and energized the local arts scene. "We had been trying for a whole decade to get something like the Beat Generation going," William Everson recalled. "As it turned out, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provided the ingredients. They came to San Francisco and found themselves, and it was their finding that sparked us. Without them, it never would have happened." Ferlinghetti described the encounter more pointedly. The Beat poets were "wild-ass carpetbaggers from Back East like Allen Ginsberg who proceeded to take over the scene."

For a young Jerry Garcia, the most influential Beat figure was Kerouac, a Columbia University dropout whose westward drift informed his picaresque fiction. Kerouac's most acclaimed novel, On the Road, was set in the late 1940s and featured cross-country car trips and spirited adventures, some of them in and around San Francisco. His fictional odyssey through the nation's social margins glorified spontaneous and intense experience often fueled by alcohol, Benzedrine, marijuana, and morphine. Bebop jazz, with its soaring improvisations, provided the sound track, and Kerouac consciously adapted its methods to his own writing. For many readers, his America was an exotic continent waiting to be explored. It was right now, just over the horizon, and Kerouac populated it with his thinly disguised friends. Even the narrator's name, Sal Paradise, signaled the novel's utopian theme. "I was a young writer and I wanted to take off," Paradise says. "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."

On the Road's hero, Dean Moriarty, was based on Neal Cassady, a charismatic hustler and erstwhile car thief from Denver. To Kerouac, Cassady's combination of energy, raw appetite, and thirst for experience represented a romantic frontier ideal. Moriarty was "a sideburned hero of the snowy West," and his energy was "a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming." In real life, the cross-country car trips bonded Kerouac and Cassady, and their frantic jags with a speedy Cassady at the wheel 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 Benzedrine-powered raptures.

On the Road challenged mainstream American values in several ways. Its key relationships aren't found in nuclear families but in male friendships forged by shared adventures. In their bohemian exuberance, Sal and his friends ignore or flout almost everything Main Street might recognize as worthy, including sobriety, common sense, hard work, monogamy, conventional forms of spirituality, and patriotism. Their goal is rapture, not respectability, and they pursue it ardently. But for all their high spirits, Sal realizes that his paradise lacks something: "'I want to marry a girl,' I told them, 'so I can rest my soul with her till we get old. This can't go on all the time-this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something.'" Later Sal admits, "I had nothing to offer anybody but my own confusion." Even after witnessing an ecstatic jazz performance, he and his friends feel empty. "This madness would lead nowhere. I didn't know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea [marijuana] we were smoking." But Sal sets his misgivings aside when the next adventure beckons. "We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move."

Published in 1957, On the Road failed to please many critics, but it found a large and appreciative audience, especially among young people bored by the mainstream American culture of the 1950s. Garcia fit that profile perfectly. His family's move down the peninsula was part of a larger pattern of suburbanization and white flight enabled by the national expansion of the freeway system under President Eisenhower. "My mother remarried when I was about ten or eleven or so," Garcia recalled, "and she decided to get the kids out of the city, that thing, go down to the Peninsula, and we moved down to Menlo Park for about three years, and I went to school down there." The nearby community of Palo Alto, which had been known for fruit orchards and Stanford University, became a suburban showcase. Another local institution, Sunset magazine, blossomed in the postwar period by offering advice on homes, gardens, food, travel, and tasteful Western living. Nothing could be less interesting to Garcia. For him, On the Road and its promise of adventure was the antidote to suburban life.

Kerouac's fiction also connected Garcia to the more intriguing world he experienced in San Francisco, not only on the embarcadero, but also in nearby North Beach, the Beat epicenter and home of City Lights. Adjacent to the Barbary Coast, another vice district with a colorful history, North Beach was teeming with bars and strips joints catering to GIs and tourists. Its residents were primarily working-class Italians, who populated its cafés, restaurants, delicatessens, and Catholic churches. Raised on circuses, small theater groups, and anarchist politics in the old country, many North Beach residents were remarkably open to their new bohemian neighbors. The same cannot be said of the mainstream media, which quickly stereotyped and lambasted the Beats. Even progressive magazines got their shots in, casting Kerouac as a mindless, apolitical primitive. But critics couldn't blunt the novel's appeal to Garcia and others who longed for something more exciting than the Great American Barbecue of the Eisenhower era. Garcia was soon attending poetry readings in and around North Beach and generally absorbing the neighborhood's bohemian atmosphere. "We'd hang out in front of the Anxious Asp," Laird Grant said, "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."

Although the Beats brought national attention to North Beach, they weren't permanent fixtures. In 1958, Kerouac bought a home on Long Island and returned to San Francisco occasionally. That same year, Cassady was arrested for selling two marijuana cigarettes to an undercover police officer in San Francisco. Cassady's sentence was five years to life in San Quentin, the notorious state prison a few miles north in Marin County. He was released in 1960, but the Beat frenzy had already peaked, and he began searching for a new scene.

* * *

On the Road changed Jerry Garcia's life, but he discovered it only by pursuing another interest. A capable illustrator, he enrolled in a summer and weekend program at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) when he was fifteen years old, the same year he received his first guitar and smoked his first joint. Garcia's studies at CSFA, whose campus was perched on a hill just above North Beach, immersed him more deeply in the Beat milieu. His teachers included Elmer Bischoff, whose figurative work bore some of the immediacy and exuberance of the abstract expressionists. Rexroth and another poet, Jack Spicer, also taught there. Spicer, whose college friends from Berkeley included Robert Duncan and science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, accepted the CSFA teaching position only after refusing to sign the University of California's anticommunist loyalty oath and thwarting his mainstream academic career.

Garcia's main mentor at CSFA was Wally Hedrick, whose example appealed directly to a teenager looking for more. Growing up in Southern California, Hedrick had been interested in hot rods, bridge, and the beach, but after learning that he could avoid gym class by helping an art teacher, he received solid training at Pasadena Junior College. As the Cold War began in earnest, Hedrick and his friends called their group the Progressive Art Workers, thereby connecting themselves to the area's small but vocal radical tradition once embodied by resident muckraker and two-time gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair. Hedrick recalled the political climate after the war. "This was when they were coming down hard on Communists and all that stuff, but we didn't know that from a hole in the ground," he said. "I mean, the closest I got to it was maybe singing folk songs. We'd sit around and sing 'Freiheit' or something and really feel like we were on the verge of something." On the advice of a local artist, Hedrick and his friends headed north to investigate CSFA. By the time they arrived, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange had already come and gone, but the San Francisco Renaissance was only beginning to attract national attention.

The Korean War protracted Hedrick's studies; he had joined the National Guard to avoid the draft, but his unit was called up. Despite his decorations and the GI Bill benefits that supported his studies, Hedrick detested his military experience. He returned to civilian life painting American flags before Jasper Johns did so; during the Vietnam War, Hedrick painted them black in protest. After completing his studies at CSFA, he signed on as an instructor and began to produce assemblage and funk art that grew out of the futurist, surrealist, and Dada traditions. Reviewing his work of that period, author Rebecca Solnit noted that it managed to be "lurid, mystical, and sarcastic all at once."

For Hedrick, making art was primarily an act of pleasure. "There is, no doubt, an element of hedonistic selfishness in the act of my painting, for I enjoy it," he wrote in a 1956 brochure about his work. "I like to paint. Much of the time there is a complete freedom from harassment, from even awareness of the world. There is no time, no place. It is in the act of painting that I find my keenest sense of self and of 'being.'" His work routinely lampooned conceit, self-deception, and authority, including in the art world. Garcia took to heart Hedrick's final comment in that early brochure: "In painting, it is not what you paint that is important, it is what you paint out that counts." Years later, Garcia gave the same advice almost verbatim to Jorma Kaukonen about playing the guitar.

Garcia learned from Hedrick that art is not only something you do, but something you are as well. Garcia's bohemian models at CSFA opened up a world of new possibility-not only in his thinking about art, but also in how to live like an artist. Hedrick and his wife, Jay DeFeo, had a flat at 2322 Fillmore Street in a four-unit building known as Painterland. Their neighbors included poets Michael and Joanna McClure, painter Joan Brown, and Dave Getz, who studied painting at CSFA and later played drums for both Big Brother & the Holding Company and Country Joe & the Fish. Hedrick and DeFeo's flat served as a touchstone for their colleagues and visiting artists. "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," recalled CSFA faculty member Carlos Villa. In that maze of studios and apartments, DeFeo worked steadily on The Rose, which took up an entire wall of the apartment.

The CSFA scene also included the Studio 13 Jass Band, with Hedrick on banjo and Bischoff on trumpet. Hedrick's banjo was the first one Garcia had ever seen. Later, Garcia noted that the banjo informed his taste in music. "I like to hear every note," he said. "I like the clarity and separation of notes." The Studio 13 Jass Band played at CSFA parties, which were known for their bohemian excess. Laird Grant recalled one such Halloween party when he and Garcia were sixteen years old: "This 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."

In addition to drinking heavily, many CSFA artists smoked marijuana and hashish and ate peyote to heighten their perceptions. One issue of Semina, an underground journal connected to CSFA, was originally titled Cannabis Sativa. While visiting Michael McClure in 1958, Wallace Berman described the Native American uses of peyote and left behind some buttons in the apartment. McClure ingested them and wrote a poem about the experience for the journal. A few artists were also using heroin. A 1957 issue of Semina included two photographs of poet Philip Lamantia injecting it and an excerpt from Alexander Trocchi's novel about his experiences as an addict. Hedrick and his colleagues also explored esoteric traditions, including tarot, theosophy, the Kama Sutra, and the kabbalah. Never expecting to make money from their art, Garcia's teachers worked without concern for posterity or publicity. Influenced by their example, Jack Spicer later refused to seek copyrights for his poetry and invented new ways to narrow its distribution.

With Spicer and four others, Hedrick founded the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street in 1954. That decision solved the basic problem of where to show their work. "There was no market for art," Bruce Conner said later. "The Six Gallery would have an opening and everybody would have a lot of beer and wine and get drunk and maybe Wally Hedrick and Dixieland friends would play music.... Why have a show? Just have a party." At one such party in 1955, Allen Ginsberg read "Howl" for the first time in public. It was a raucous scene and signal event in Beat history. Kerouac, who wore a gas mask for the occasion, drank from a bottle of burgundy and scatted during Ginsberg's performance. Kerouac also offered a fictionalized version in The Dharma Bums, which was published in 1958. By that time, Lawrence Ferlinghetti had been cleared of obscenity charges arising from his publication of Ginsberg's "Howl." (The poem's most legally troubling line mentions those "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.") There would be more San Francisco obscenity trials, most notably that of comedian Lenny Bruce, who cast himself as a stand-up version of a jazz soloist, free-associating on sex, politics, race, and religion. But Ferlinghetti's legal victory in 1957 was regarded as another advance for liberty, San Francisco style.

The same year, the second issue of Evergreen Review ran a cover story called "The San Francisco Scene." Kenneth Rexroth wrote the introductory essay, and Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Henry Miller contributed poems and articles. In her piece, art critic Dore Ashton claimed that San Francisco was second only to New York City as a source of avant-garde painting. Two years later, Hedrick and DeFeo were included in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit called Sixteen Americans, which also served as the museum debut of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Hedrick and DeFeo didn't attend what turned out to be the pinnacle of his artistic career. In 1962, Hedrick contributed an assemblage piece called Xmas Tree to a group show at the San Francisco Museum of Art.Xmas Tree was composed of bed rails, record players, radios, and lights as well as a blasting cap, bullhorn, siren, and fan, all wired to washing-machine timers. When activated, one of the phonographs spun Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," while the other played a blues song about a poor man pawning possessions to buy holiday gifts. Before the exhibition, Hedrick set the timers, alerted the museum to his plan, and left town. When the appliances kicked in during a private showing, the fan snagged a startled trustee's fur. She screamed, the piece's lights and sirens added to the commotion, and a museum employee finally severed the electrical cord with an ax.

It was Hedrick who introduced Garcia to Kerouac and On the Road. For Garcia, much of the novel's appeal lay in its musicality and 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 so transformative that Garcia later had difficulty distinguishing his identity from Kerouac's. "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," he said. "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."

If Kerouac's fiction was a key influence, Garcia's contact with San Francisco bohemians during this period also shaped his broader understanding of art and the people who made it. Their emphasis on ecstasy, spontaneity, and community offered him a conceptual platform that was enticing and flexible, and their example encouraged him to experiment with new forms of expression, high and low, without weakening his core convictions about what was worth doing. His eclectic interests-which included painting, film, comic books, and science fiction-reflected Lawrence Ferlinghetti's advice to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. Garcia's emerging artistic sensibility also mirrored a cardboard sign that painter and collagist Jess Collins, who was Robert Duncan's partner, posted in his San Francisco studio.

THE SEVEN DEADLY VIRTUES OF CONTEMPORARY ART

ORIGINALITY

SPONTANEITY

SIMPLICITY

INTENSITY

IMMEDIACY

IMPENETRABILITY

SHOCK

Garcia's chance encounter with the midcentury art scene furnished him with the core principles for his lifelong project. "I wanted to do something that fit in with the art institute, that kind of self-conscious art-'art' as opposed to 'popular culture.'" That aspiration can be traced to the interval between his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. He would later acknowledge the significance of this annus mirabilis, when he received his first guitar, smoked his first joint, signed up for art classes, and discovered Kerouac.

Inspired by San Francisco's bohemian scene, Garcia still wasn't sure how to find his way. After dropping out of high school, he enlisted in the army. "I wanted so badly to see the world," he said. "It was the only hope I had." But the world would have to wait; Garcia was assigned to the Presidio in San Francisco. He frequently missed roll call, was court-martialed for going AWOL, and was discharged in December 1960.

Two months later, Garcia and his friends were bombing around the peninsula in a Studebaker after a party. The car hit a guardrail, fishtailed, and rolled into a field. Garcia, who was hurled through the windshield with such force that he lost both of his shoes, broke his collarbone. His good friend Alan Trist suffered a compressed fracture of the back. The driver received a gash on his abdomen, and the car landed on Paul Speegle, a fellow Chateau resident and talented artist, crushing almost every bone in his body and killing him. Garcia recalled the accident as a turning point for him. "That's where my life began," he said. "Before then, I was always living at less than capacity. I was idling. That was the slingshot for the rest of my life. It was like a second chance." Later, he kept a reminder of that opportunity close at hand by hanging one of Speegle's paintings in the Grateful Dead rehearsal studio.



Copyright © 2014 by Peter Richardson