| The Palo Alto History Project |
| The Grateful Dead 117 University Avenue |
| The Grateful Dead: Making the Scene in Palo Alto “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 in which the American counterculture was slowly moving from Beatnik intellectualism towards psychedelic hippiedom, Palo Alto was a pretty happening place. This is rather surprising, because by most standards, the city in those years was far more conservative and less urban than it is today --- after all, Palo Alto was still basically dry until 1971. But as a quasi-university town not too far from San Francisco, a youth scene sprouted up on the city’s liberal fringes 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 future Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia arrived in Palo Alto. He 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 activity for the Palo Alto youth scene was Kepler’s Books on El Camino in Menlo Park. Still in operation today, Kepler’s was a kind of hyper-creative 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-worshipping, neo-Beatnik crowd hanging out in Kepler’s backroom. At night, the action tended to shift over to St. Michael’s Alley, a funky coffee shop that did business at ___ University and 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 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 a huge turn-of-the-century Victorian at 436 Hamilton Avenue Downtown. 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 Phil Weir’s apartment on High Street when he came up with the Grateful Dead name thumbing through a Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary. Garcia found out from his second Palo Alto girlfriend Sara Ruppenthal that she was pregnant while window shopping at Stanford Shopping Center. And their wedding took place on April 25th, 1963 at Palo Alto’s Unitarian Church, followed by a reception at Ricky’s Garden Hotel. Garcia met eventual Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and keyboardist “Pigpen” McKaren at Palo Alto parties and Garcia and long-time Dead lyricist Robert Hunter lived side-by- side in their cars for a while in a Palo Alto lot. The early version of the Dead even rented their instruments from Swain’s Music at 451 University and Garcia had a job as a guitar and banjo teacher a few years earlier at rival Dana Morgan’s Music Shop on Bryant street. But while Garcia may have been totally immersed in the Palo Alto scene, he was basically still free floating and free loading until his life was jolted by a terrific car crash on the night of February 20th, 1961. At around one in the morning that night after a party at The Chateau, Garcia went out for a drive with some 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 the car 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.” 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 met future Grateful Dead guitarist, 15 year old Bob Weir, 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 8 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 would become the harder-rocking Warlocks. The new lineup featured Garcia, Bob Weir, Dana Morgan, Jr., (who ran 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 in Palo Alto and other California cities dubbed Acid Tests. The Grateful Dead essentially became the “house band” of the Acid Tests, furthering their reputation and sphere. Soon they were off to Haight-Ashbury and eventual stardom as the Dead became the most iconic counterculture band of the 1960s. They wound end up the greatest and highest grossing live music band in history. Additionally, they would acquire an insanely devoted following of fans, nicknamed Deadheads, who worshipped the band for decades, following them from place to place on their “Endless Tour.” Even today, some 2,314 concerts later and long after Garcia’s fatal 1995 heart attack, Deadheads still scour the Internet looking for old mementos and keepsakes of the band --- including some from their earliest days back in Palo Alto. -Matt Bowling |
| Sources: Palo Alto Historical Association, Palo Alto Weekly, Palo Alto Times, Dark Star by Robert Greenfield, Garcia, An American Life by Blair Jackson, Sweet Chaos, The Grateful Dead's American Adventure by Carol Brightman |
| An early poster for a Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions show at the Tangent. Interestingly, the spelling of McRhea is different here from the usually seen McCree. |
| "Pigpen" McKernan, former Grateful Dead member died in 1973. He is buried in Palo Alto's Alta Mesa Memorial Park. |
| A map of Lower University Avenue where The Tangent coffeehouse was located --- where the Grateful Dead played in the mid-1960s. Zoom in and out with the + and - symbols in the top left corner of the map... |
| Palo Alto: Then & Now |
1960 |
| 2008 |
| Jerry Garcia with his beloved banjo during his Palo Alto days. |
| University Avenue at Kipling Street where Swain's House of Music once stood. Swain's once rented instruments to the Warlocks, the original Grateful Dead. Today the Swain's store has become Apple Computer Store. The Palo Alto Office Center at 525 University Avenue looms at the right of the photo. A left turn onto Kipling is no longer allowed. |
| The Warlocks playing in Palo Alto in 1965. |
| Bill Kreutzmann was the best drummer at Paly before joining the Warlocks. |
| The Warlocks played at Kreutzmann and McKernan's old school, Palo Alto High School in 1964. |
| Pauline Swain's ads for her store touted her renting instruments to the Warlocks in their earliest days. |
| The final days of Swain's Music, now the site of the Apple Computer store on University. |
| The inside of Kepler's Books today. |
| Kepler's Books & Magazines, still located on El Camino Real in Menlo Park. |
| Garcia and Weir at Palo Alto's El Camino Park. |
| Garcia with eventual wife Carolyn, AKA Mountain Girl. |
| Jerry Garcia performing with the Grateful Dead at Frost Amphitheatre at Stanford in 1989. |
| The former location of Dana Morgan's Music Shop, where Jerry Garcia taught guitar and banjo. |
| "When I was 12 years old I took guitar lessons from Jerry Garcia at Dana Morgan Music. I really wanted to learn the banjo but I had to settle for Jerry Garcia teaching guitar. My mother dropped me off every week in my pressed skirt and penny loafers, and every week Jerry would patiently listen to me struggle through scales and hits such as "Yankee Doodle Dandy." He would grunt every once in awhile and roll another cigarette. When my mother picked me up she complained about me smelling like smoke. After six months I changed instructors to learn flamenco guitar. I don't play guitar any more, but I treasure the memories and always have fun when I tell a Dead Head that I took lessons from the great Jerry Garcia." -Ellen |
| Memories added by our readers: |
| "I encountered Jerry at the Comedia Repertory Theatre in the early sixties when it was located at the corner of Emerson & Hamilton. I recall the accidental event as I was an acquaintance of Paul Speegle. I still have one of his paintings. I also have Perry Lane memories. I have been trying to locate a fiction book written by a woman in which the characters were based on Perry Lane/Homer Lane habitants of the era [late 50s/early 60s]. Unfortunately I do not recall the title. The only memory remnant is a ‘mailbox’ on the paperback cover and I’m not even sure of that." -Ester |
| "Good article. I was one of the founders of The Legends, along with Howie Schonberger (our best musician) and Bob Kelley (founder and artistic director of Theaterworks). Bill took over for Nick Hammer. We featured Bill on Bobby Blue Bland's "Turn On Your Love Light/Don't Cry No More," which became a Grateful Dead standard." -Byron |
| "In 1964, I was taking guitar lessons from a guy named Troy. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir also gaving guitar lessons at Guitars Unlimited on El Camino Real in Menlo Park. It was a block south of Santa Cruz Avenue. On a number of occasions Jerry would have me pick up my guitar and jam with him. At that time he was playing in the Warlocks and they used to play at Magoo's Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park, until the crowds got so big that the police shut it down. When Jerry and Bob left for Los Angeles, they took a lot of equipment that was owned by Guitars Unlimited. I they made it so that they would repay him for the equipment." -Alan |
| "As a 15 year old kid I was invited up to 'The Chateau' by my friend Roger "Cool Breeze" Williams. An a non-initiate I was beyond my realm when I passed a lanky beaded individual on the front porch who, with abandoned eyes like black saucers, was using a long folding pearl handle fruit knife to clean his fingernails. When we went inside Garcia was sitting at the dining room table in an agitated state and frustrated because he was having difficulty finding a certain cord on his guitar. A couple of people jumped on him as he fell back in his chair knocking over a gallon bottle of Red Mountain, pocket knife in hand, and professing he was going to cut off a finger to make his hand more adaptable to the guitar. This ruckus did not interrupt the semi-nude threesome in the sitting room who were swaying and in a state I only came to understand years later. 'Breeze' went on to notoriety in the opening chapter of Tom Wolf's Electric Kool-Aide Acid Test." -Patrick |