So Many Roads (8 page)

“You could tell he was irritated and wanted them to shut up and get on with it, but he didn't want to say, ‘Shut up and get on with it!'” van Maastricht says. “He had that low tone.” Garcia's insistence helped. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis the Hart Valley Drifters were scheduled to play an art gallery at San Francisco State and also headline a folk festival at the College of San Mateo.

A month before Garcia and Meier made their way up through the fields near Sand Hill Road, John Perry Barlow sat in his first day of English
class at the Fountain Valley High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Hearing a leg thrumming behind him, he turned around and saw a classmate with nerdy black glasses, short hair, a thin face, a monobrow, and a look that was slightly cross-eyed. He seemed like a bit of an oddball, but equally strange was Barlow's initial feeling that they were kindred spirits and had known each other already.

One thing was certain: both were troublemakers who'd been shipped off to their all-boys boarding school for a reason. Barlow had been raised in Wyoming, where he was part of a Boy Scout troop whose members turned borderline delinquent when they began riding motorcycles. Because Barlow's father was a Republican state legislator who didn't want to attract that sort of attention, Barlow, an only child, was sent to Fountain Valley. There he learned that many of his fellow students, including this strange-looking one behind him, had also been kicked out of one school or another. The kid's name turned out to be Bob Weir, and as Barlow learned that same day, Weir was living right across the hall from him in one of the Fountain Valley dorms.

Weir, Barlow soon discovered, had grown up in a lovely house with a long driveway and a swimming pool in Atherton, an affluent suburb west of Palo Alto. All that were missing were his birth parents. Weir's father, a military man named John Parber who years later would wind up an Air Force colonel, had been involved with a woman in his native Tucson, Arizona; when she became pregnant she went to San Francisco and had the baby on October 16, 1947, without telling Parber. The baby would later be adopted by another military man, Frederick Weir, and his wife, Eleanor, and named Robert Hall Weir. “It was an idyllic place,” recalls Matthew Kelly, an Atherton buddy who met Weir during a Halloween trick-or-treat playtime one year. “No crime. A great place to grow up.” According to Bob, Frederick Weir was amiable, a “consummate gentleman” who was more than capable of holding his liquor; his son never saw his father drunk, just with “a twinkle in his eye.”

Bob would be similarly civil, but something inside him was incorrigible and offbeat, perhaps the result of a spinal meningitis illness during his childhood or simply the way his brain was wired. In the fall of 1960 Weir began attending the Menlo School for Boys, a quasi-military academy where students wore gray flannel pants, blue blazers, and ties. Even in that setting Weir's head seemed to operate at a different speed from his fellow students'. In class he'd deconstruct sentences and reconstruct them backward. “He'd sit there and look off into space for a second,” recalls Vance Frost, a classmate, “and you knew he was working on something. Then it would come out where the object would come first and the subject would come later. It was very unusual. I'd go, ‘Wow, his mind is different.'”

Weir was also a jock, a member of the football team, as he would be at Fountain Valley. (When the football coach at the Menlo School ordered everyone to go home that night and tape their name to the backs of their helmets, Weir, in a subtly rebellious gesture, returned the next time with his name in old English calligraphy; he did the same with Frost's helmet too.) But participating in team sports was one of the few ways he would conform. If students heard about a firecracker being set off outside a classroom or a prank pulled on a teacher, they naturally assumed Weir had something to do with it, even if he only flashed a sly smile and never admitted to anything. In eighth grade a group of Menlo School boys were asked to be escorts at a debutante ball. Weir and Frost tolerated it as best they could, but during a break they skipped out a back door. Weir had girls on his mind, but in other ways: another classmate, Michael Wanger, recalls that Weir could sketch a naked woman in seconds.

Weir had started playing guitar at thirteen, and by the time he'd enrolled in Fountain Valley he, like Barlow, had immersed himself in vernacular music. The two would trade records by the Greenbriar Boys, Cisco Houston, and other authentic or semi-authentic vernacular types. Neither kid was much interested in what amounted to modern
rock 'n' roll, which seemed a spent force by 1962, what with Buddy Holly dead and Elvis still getting his career back on track after serving in the army. “I was fifteen, sixteen years old at the time and very much attuned to the trends,” Weir said to David Hajdu. “[Folk music] was in vogue among the artsy-fartsy kids set. There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.”

Even though they were holed up in the middle of the country, far from their homes, Weir and Barlow had no interest in leaving their wild streaks behind. “It was a Godless subdivision where everyone went to sleep at ten,” Barlow recalls. “There wasn't too much trouble to get into, but we managed anyway.” One night the two jumped a fence, wandered out into the prairie that surrounded the school, and dug a lavish tunnel complete with underground lairs. The boys were proud of their feat, but when they found the spot, school officials were less than impressed. A biology class semi–food fight—where dead frogs, not luncheon meat, were hurled—would become legendary. Both kids were now under scrutiny. Weir was clearly a misfit, albeit a mild-mannered one. As 1962 drew to a close he just needed a better, more welcoming outlet for that sensibility.

It wasn't until he made one of his trips to Kepler's in early 1962 that Phil Lesh made the connection. Among the rows of paperbacks he'd spotted a biography of French composer Claude Debussy. With his goatee and short hair parted to the right, the man on the cover looked very much like that guy Lesh had met at the Chateau the previous fall. Lesh was neither folkie nor rocker—he'd been raised on classical music, hence
his interest in the likes of Debussy—but the book jacket and the physical resemblance made Garcia seem somehow more accessible and intriguing. “It made me want to listen more closely to what Jerry was doing musically,” Lesh says. “How curious is
that?
Sometimes things work that way, those kinds of associations.”

Born Philip Chapman Lesh on March 15, 1940, he, like Garcia, was the child of an industrious father—in his case, Frank, who was so adept at repairing office equipment that he opened his own shop in the Bay Area. Like Garcia, young Lesh was the offspring of two working parents and spent quality time during his childhood with his grandmother. But the outward comparisons ended there. Lesh's grandmother had helped raise him on a regular diet of classical music, and before long Lesh was learning to play violin in grade school. The blond crew cut he sported during this time made him look like the band geek he inherently was, and sure enough, he landed a seat in the kids' orchestra at age ten. Compared to classical music, rock 'n' roll seemed crude and unappealing. “I detested it,” Lesh says. “I thought it was totally infantile. Three chords over and over and over again. I'm coming from Beethoven and Mahler.” (Talking about his early antirock prejudices in a radio interview in 1990, Lesh added, with a laugh, “I'm happy to eat those words now and forever.”)

Whether it was a result of his brain, his personality, or his dismissive attitude toward rock 'n' roll, Lesh not surprisingly became a loner during his teen years. “I didn't have many friends in the fifties,” he says. “I wasn't very popular at all.” In a sense his best friend was music, so much so that his parents moved to Berkeley so he could attend that city's high school, which had a far better music program. By then he was specializing in trumpet. After graduating high school he enrolled in San Francisco State but left halfway through his freshman year and soon returned home. Finally, in the fall of 1958—the same time Garcia began his difficult year of tenth grade at the rough Balboa High School in San
Francisco—Lesh began classes at the College of San Mateo, which introduced him to experimental modern music, Beat writing (by way of a classmate and new friend, Bobby Peterson), and pot. Taking entrance exams for UC Berkeley in 1961, Lesh met Tom Constanten, a fellow classical music fanatic and outlier. Born in New Jersey in 1944, Constanten had relocated with his family to Las Vegas ten years later. He recalls Lesh as “strikingly blond” and similarly inclined to avoid pop music. “The music we were into was off the beaten path,” Constanten says. “It was rare to find someone else who was into that. It was almost like a secret society, and we didn't know we were members until we met.”

During his time at the College of San Mateo Lesh began making pilgrimages to the Palo Alto area, and like so many others, he was bewitched by Kepler's, St. Michael's Alley, and the grimier, R&B-inclined hangouts in East Palo Alto. “It was the only game in town,” he said years later to writer Hajdu. “There were just all these neat people who seemed to be congregated in one place. You could go to St. Michael's Alley and play music all night long, and you only had to buy one cup of coffee. Every once in a while one of the girls would get up and dance flamenco on top of a table, and that was okay.” He'd also finally developed a taste for folk music, if not outright rock 'n' roll.

By way of John “the Cool” Winter, another member of Garcia's crowd, Lesh had finally met Garcia, most likely at the Chateau. At a party at the house around the time of Lesh's twenty-second birthday someone brought along a sizable bag of weed to help him celebrate, and Lesh, Garcia, and anyone else around got blissfully stoned. “It seemed like enough to last a year at the time,” Lesh recalls. “I don't think we went through all of it, but we tried.” Soon after, at a party in East Palo Alto, Lesh became entranced as he watched Garcia sing and play “Matty Groves,” the old English folk ballad about an affair between a lady of the manor and a servant that ends in death when the woman's husband, a lord, learns about it. “It was absolutely operatic,” Lesh says. “It was a deadpan delivery and minimal guitar picking, but
the whole thing was mesmerizing.” Afterward, in what Lesh calls “that adolescent hyperbolic way,” he told Garcia he was in the presence of greatness, and Garcia just snickered and said, “Yeah, right, man.”

Given his love of classical and experimental music, not to mention his barbershop-short haircut and height (he stood over six feet tall), Lesh distinguished himself in the scene in more ways than one. He seemed to talk at a quicker pace than everyone around him. For Meier's sixteenth birthday Lesh wrote her a piece of music, a score, and told her it should be “played as fast as possible.” He seemed like the last person who would connect with Garcia, but for reasons both musical and personal, Lesh felt a bond from the start. “I have to confess, I always told my parents ‘Gee, I'd really love to have a brother,'” he says. “I guess I saw other families where there were two brothers. He was one of those guys you realize would be a friend for life.” To Constanten, the two were “complimentary and sympathetic, like strings on a guitar. Phil and I were into avant-garde, and Jerry was into the Carter Family. We hadn't had enough of a map exposed to see where the roads would lead. But we knew there was a connection somehow.”

That connection grew sturdier when, after hearing Garcia perform “Matty Groves” that night, Lesh offered to make a tape of his new friend singing that and other traditional songs. By then Lesh was volunteering as a recording engineer at KPFA, a noncommercial talk and music station funded by listeners, and he sensed Garcia would be an ideal addition to the station's folk show. After grabbing Constanten's tape deck out of the apartment they were sharing, Lesh and Garcia raced back to the party, recorded Garcia, and soon played it for Gertrude (“Gert”) Chiarito, the host of KPFA's folk show,
Midnight Special.
The friendship was mutually beneficial: thanks to Lesh, Garcia had the potential to be heard by more people than ever before, even if his own career plans were still uncertain.