A Long Strange Trip Read Online Free PDF

downtown at the movie theaters on Market Street, where he stoked his lifelong fascination with film. Formal education became increasingly irrelevant, and his rare appearances at Balboa were chiefly punctuated by getting caught— for smoking in the boys’ room, minor fights, or cutting classes, all the usual dreary detritus of high school life. In the summer of 1959, Bobbie Garcia made a last-ditch effort to restore her son to conventional behavior and moved the family to Cazadero, a tiny town in the redwoods eighty miles north of San Francisco. It was futile, of course. Garcia’s problems were centered on his boredom with regimented life, and adding a lengthy commute to his day at Sebastopol’s Analy High School did not help.
    However, Analy did have a band called the Chords, and Jerry soon joined it. Their business card read “featuring the Golden Saxes,” and their material was largely 1940s big-band tunes, including “Misty” and songs by Billy Vaughn. It was, Garcia would say, “kind of easy-listening stuff. Businessman’s bounce, high school version.” They played at youth canteens, high school dances, and once at a Sea Scouts graduation ceremony. With only limited experience at playing with others, Garcia was an extremely primitive musician, so crude that his bandleader had to shift the capo on his guitar so that he could transpose keys. Jerry’s attitude didn’t always help, either. He played a great deal with his cousin Danny at this time, and Danny was a sober, steadying influence who wanted to rehearse regularly and learn chords and structure. But Jerry’s invariable response was “Let’s just play, man.” Years later Garcia would, inevitably, regret his lack of formal knowledge and discipline. But even in 1959 he showed an ability to play convincing rock and roll on the Chords’ occasional contemporary tunes. The band even won a contest and got to record a song, Bill Doggett’s “Raunchy.”
    Garcia’s facility with rock was ironic, because the form was at a low ebb, with each of its creators distracted by circumstances: Elvis Presley was in the army, Chuck Berry was on his way to jail for a Mann Act violation, and Little Richard had entered the ministry. The predominant institution in pop music at the time was Don Kirshner and Al Nevins’s Aldon Music, which focused on the songwriting of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Highly professional New York City production-oriented pop had replaced the original performer-created rock.
    Early in 1960, Jerry got into his final bit of trouble, as he would recall it, by stealing his mother’s car. In the tradition of the era, his options were simple—jail or the army. Though Tiff begged Jerry to delay his enlistment until he could get home from the marines and talk his younger brother out of it, Jerry was in no mood to wait; he decided to join the army and see the world. He got about 150 miles away from San Francisco, to Fort Ord, near Monterey, where he endured basic training. Somehow, it was not terribly surprising that his squad leader turned out to be a jail veteran who happened to be able to fingerpick acoustic guitar. Jerry had first heard acoustic music from Jimmy Reed on the radio, and then again when Wally Hedrick played Big Bill Broonzy during class, and now he started to listen to Joan Baez’s incredibly beautiful voice, which sent him into old-time southern white music. It was a move in line with hip taste.
    Folk music had entered the American mainstream a year before in San Francisco, at a club called the Purple Onion, with a group of good-looking college boys in striped shirts called the Kingston Trio. With five no. 1 albums and hits like “Tom Dooley” and “Scotch and Soda,” they knocked off traditional tunes with smooth harmonies and good humor, and started a rage. Rock had been professionalized and made boring, whereas folk was direct and authentic, seemingly the genuine product of a community rather