The Grateful Dead

“Palo Alto was the magic carpet.  It was where everything happened.  That’s where the music was…Jerry [Garcia] was there and [Bob] Hunter was there…all the characters were there.  Palo Alto was the beautiful golden basket that this all came out of...Palo Alto was INCREDIBLE in those days.” –Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, those years when the American counterculture was slowly moving from Beatnik intellectualism towards psychedelic hippiedom, Palo Alto was a pretty happening place.  This is rather surprising, because in those years the city was far more conservative and less urban than it is today.  But in this quasi-university town not too far from San Francisco, a youth scene sprouted up on the city’s liberal fringe that would end up producing some big-time artists, including the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, and the very symbol of American counterculture — the Grateful Dead.

In 1960, 18-year-old  Jerry Garcia arrived in Palo Alto.  The future Grateful Dead leader had just been discharged from an unlikely Army stint where he had accrued two courts-martial and eight AWOLs.  At the time, the daytime center of literary and intellectual activity for Palo Alto youth was actually in Menlo Park at Kepler’s Books on El Camino. Still in operation today, Kepler’s was a kind of hypercreative living room for what Garcia’s then-girlfriend Barbara Meier would later say was a full-time “collection of poets, musicians, painters, writers, socialists, and pacifists, with a smattering of out and out lunatics.”  Garcia took up nearly daily residence as part of the Kerouac-inspired, neo-Beatnik crowd hanging out in Kepler’s backroom.

At night, the action tended to shift over to St. Michael’s Alley, a funky Palo Alto coffee shop at 436 University which had launched Joan Baez a couple years earlier.  There were other places as well — the Top of the Tangent, a small folk club upstairs from a pizza parlor at 117 University Avenue, and The Chateau, a three-story, old Victorian house on Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park that approached the atmosphere of a hippie commune.  Later the scene would shift to author Ken Kesey’s house on Perry Lane, near Stanford Golf Course, and to a huge turn-of-the-century Victorian at 436 Hamilton Avenue in downtown Palo Alto.

Indeed, reading accounts of the Dead’s formative years is like a walk through Palo Alto in the early 1960s.  For example, Garcia was in bandmate Bob Weir's apartment on High Street, thumbing through a Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary, when he came up with the Grateful Dead name.  Garcia found out from his second Palo Alto girlfriend, Sara Ruppenthal, that she was pregnant while window shopping at Stanford Shopping Center. And Garcia's wedding to Ruppenthal took place on April 25, 1963 at the Unitarian Church, followed by a reception at Ricky’s Garden Hotel.

Garcia met eventual Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and keyboardist “Pigpen” McKernan at Palo Alto parties, and for a while Garcia and longtime Dead lyricist Robert Hunter lived side by side in their cars in a nearby lot.  The early version of the Dead, the Warlocks, even rented their instruments from Swain’s House of Music at 451 University. When he encountered Bob Weir, Garcia had a job as a guitar and banjo teacher at Dana Morgan Music on Bryant Street.  

But while Garcia may have been totally immersed in the Palo Alto scene, he was basically free floating and free-loading until his life was jolted by a terrific car crash on the night of February 20, 1961.  At around one in the morning, after a party at The Chateau, Garcia went out for a drive with three friends- — Alan Trist, Paul Speegle and Lee Adams, who was behind the wheel of a 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawk.  The car was up near 90 mph on Junipero Serra Boulevard when it jumped the guardrail, flipped over several times, and landed on top of Speegle, killing him instantly.  All the passengers were thrown from the car, including Garcia, who literally came out of his shoes. The three survivors ended up at Stanford Hospital with Garcia sporting a broken collarbone.  Later he would say that the crash was “Where my life began.  Before then I was always living at less than capacity.  I was idling.  That was the slingshot for the rest of my life.” 

By early 1964, after a rather unsuccessful attempt at married life and a cross-country trip to find the roots of his beloved bluegrass music, Garcia began his move toward forming the Grateful Dead.  On New Year’s Eve 1963, Garcia had met 15-year-old Bob Weir, future Grateful Dead guitarist, who later described the fortuitous encounter: “I was wandering the back streets of Palo Alto with a friend when we heard banjo music coming from the back of a music store….It was Garcia waiting for his pupils, unmindful it was New Year’s Eve.  We sat down and started jamming and had a great old rave.  I had my guitar with me and we played a little and decided to start a jug band.” 

The jug band was Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, Garcia’s nod to the particular niche of folk music that took off as a minor craze in the early 1960s.  But despite his love of banjos, jugs and bluegrass, Garcia found that playing “old-timey” folk in Palo Alto was not so easy.  As Garcia would explain in 1981, “in the area there were virtually no bluegrass musicians…I was operating in a vacuum.”  After 25 or 30 gigs over the course of eight months, Jerry began to move away from the nostalgic style of Mother McCree’s and toward cutting edge rock ‘n’ roll.  And there was something that was pulling him hard in that direction — the soaring phenomenon of the Beatles.

In 1964, the American musical world was turned upside down by the British invasion of the Beatles.  As Garcia’s biographer Blair Jackson put it, “Like half of America under the age of 25, Jerry had been seduced by the Beatles, especially their film A Hard Day’s Night which depicted life as a rock ‘n roll band as just about as much fun as you could have on Planet Earth.”  Bob Weir agreed, “The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock ‘n’ roll band.  What we saw them do was impossibly attractive.”  Plus by early 1965, Garcia had forever fallen in love with the electric guitar. 

As Garcia and Weir turned toward rock ‘n’ roll, Mother McCree’s evolved into the harder-rocking Warlocks.  The new lineup featured Garcia, Bob Weir, Dana Morgan, Jr. (from the Bryant Street music store) on bass, Bill Kreutzmann (from Paly’s best band, The Legends) on drums, and Paly dropout Ron “Pigpen” McKernan on keyboards and harmonica.

Over the next few years, as the Warlocks officially became the Grateful Dead, the band rose to ever greater heights.  As LSD and hallucinatory drugs infused the Palo Alto scene, author Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters began to stage elaborate drug parties dubbed Acid Tests in Palo Alto and other California cities.  The Grateful Dead essentially became the house band of the Acid Tests, furthering their reputation and reach.  Soon they were off to the Haight-Ashbury and eventual stardom as the Grateful Dead became the most iconic counterculture band of the 1960s.  They would end up the greatest and highest-grossing live music band in history. 

Along the way, the Dead acquired an insanely devoted following of fans — nicknamed Deadheads— who worshipped the band for decades and followed them from place to place on their “endless tour.”  Even today, some 2,314 concerts later and long after Garcia’s fatal heart attack in 1995, Deadheads still scour the internet looking for old mementos of the band.  It seems sure that some still hope to find a piece of that magic carpet from the Grateful Dead's earliest days, back when “Palo Alto...was where everything happened."