A Long Strange Trip Read Online Free PDF Page B

than a manufactured commodity. It was part of a continuum that included the New Deal, Woody Guthrie, and the ongoing civil rights movement, and it swept the country.
    It was easy for Garcia to observe the San Francisco folk scene, since it had moved to North Beach’s hungry i, the hippest club in America, and after basic training at Fort Ord he’d landed in the choicest duty in the entire United States Army, the Presidio of San Francisco. He might just as well have been back hustling on Mission Street, because the army was just a party. In between working at menial tasks, he would sit up all night with the armorer filing the serial numbers off .45 automatics in order to sell them. Surrounded by old army characters now safely ensconced in the heavenly confines of the Presidio, he correctly saw his military career as a joke best expressed by the old saw “the incompetent leading the unwilling to do the unnecessary in an unbelievable amount of time.” His inglorious military career revealed an utter lack of talent for either mindless obedience or artful dodging, and it was bound not to last. His friend the squad leader had taken up with the sister of one of Garcia’s former girlfriends, and late in 1960 he was holed up in a Palo Alto hotel threatening suicide as well as trying to sell Garcia a Fender Jazzmaster guitar he’d stolen somewhere. Garcia spent more time sitting up with his friend than making it back to the Presidio in time for roll call, and he began to collect multiple counts of AWOL (absent without official leave).
    As his life slid further and further out of control, music became the only stabilizing force available to him. The one thing that he could hold on to was the guitar, which he played constantly. But his music was handicapped, and not by the missing portion of the middle finger on his right hand; almost from the first, he’d chosen to use a pick (although he did acknowledge later that with a full hand he’d have played piano or classical guitar). No, his limit as a musician at that time was his lack of a partner. Very early on, he intuitively realized that he needed someone else to play with, a companion, a musical cohort. Over the years he would have many collaborators, but in terms of playing music, as apart from composing it, there would be one supreme pal, and he hadn’t met him just yet.
    Phil Lesh found his future one Sunday in 1944 at the age of four, when his grandmother discovered him intently listening from the next room to the New York Philharmonic’s broadcast. Having already taught him to read, she was happy to expose her grandson to more. The next week she inquired, “Philip, would you like to come and listen to the nice music on the radio?” Bruno Walter conducted Brahms’s First Symphony, and from then on, Lesh’s life had focus. His father, Frank, was an office equipment repairman, and their lives were generally comfortably middle-class, except for a rather rarefied taste in music. From the third grade on, Phil took violin lessons, and when his braces were removed at fourteen, he took up the trumpet. Except for a fascination with racing cars, music occupied most of his life. He was not athletic, and his intelligence had set him apart from his peers. In the second grade, word had gotten out at a PTA meeting that Phil Lesh had the highest I.Q. in school, and more than a few of his classmates were asked why they couldn’t be as smart as he was. He would never hear the end of it, and it made for an extremely difficult adolescence. The incident turned him inward, and the combination of brilliance and isolation made him focus powerfully on his own values, in the tradition of an elite artist.
    His parents, Frank and Barbara, supported the musical ambitions of their only child, and in the middle of his junior year in high school the family moved so that he could transfer from El Cerrito High School to Berkeley High School, where the music program was infinitely better. He seized the