Dana Morgan Jr.

THE WARLOCKS: AN ORAL HISTORY

PART ONE

“The Jug Champions couldn't get any gigs, and when a Palo Alto music store owner offered to front them with equipment to start a rock band, they said yes. Bill Kreutzmann, then Bill Sommers to fit his fake ID, became the drummer. A fan of R&B stylings, he was the only one with rock experience. At first the music store cat was the bass player, but concurrently Phil Lesh, an old friend of Jerry's, was coming to a similar dead end in formal electronic music, finding less and less to say and fewer people to say it to... He went to a Warlock gig on impulse and the group knocked him out. ‘Jerry came over to where I was sitting and said, “Guess what, you’re gonna be our bass player.” I had never played bass, but I learned sort of, and in [June] 1965, the five of us played our first gig...’” (Michael Lydon in Rolling Stone, 1969)

*

In the spring of 1965, in a music store in the town of Palo Alto, a young gang of misfits dazzled by the hubbub of the British Invasion formed a garage band that would storm the world – the Warlocks. Overlooked in the annals of rock music history, at last a band had arrived that would put the Bay Area on the map. Teen crowds at pizza parlors and cafeterias swooned over these young men: Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Bill Sommers, some scruffy fellow named Pigpen, and Dana Morgan Jr. The future beckoned – fame, fortune, the Ed Sullivan Show!

Yet it didn’t happen that way. After just a few shows, the bus took a different turn and Dana Morgan got off. The Warlocks proceeded to spend the next few months as an obscure bar band, playing short engagements at ever-sleazier dives before getting kicked out and wandering on. In later years, they would barely mention their first bass player: dismissed in a few words, generally forgotten, he became a trivia question. But there is an untold story here – Dana Morgan was a crucial founding member of the band, for he made it possible for the Warlocks to form in the first place.

So what happened?

*

DANA MORGAN'S

Dana Morgan Music Store - 534 Bryant St, Palo Alto

Norm van Maastricht: “Dana Morgan’s Music Shop was a small acoustic guitar retail and repair store with teaching rooms in the back… It turned out to be a laid-back place with very accessible instruments. As long as you limited your picking to used instruments, you were allowed to play them. You just had to learn what instruments not to play. Particularly when the owner, Dana Morgan Sr, was around.”

Dana Morgan Sr. taught trumpet, flute, and clarinet. Dana Jr. also played brass and taught trumpet, and the store would be filled with the sounds of students practicing. Almost nothing is known of Dana Jr's life - he was born Jan 4, 1941 in Palo Alto and had been a bugler in a Boy Scout troop. Evidently his father encouraged him to take up music and taught him to repair instruments and help run the music store, which had opened in 1940.

GARCIA

Jerry Garcia started teaching guitar and banjo at Dana Morgan’s Music Store around 1962-63. McNally’s book says that Garcia started teaching there in summer 1963 after marrying Sara Ruppenthal; but according to Blair Jackson it was by fall 1962, when he was still seeing Barbara Meier.

Dana Morgan Sr. remembered that Garcia “came in to see if I could use a guitar teacher, and it just so happened that I did need them. After all, teachers and salesmen like Garcia used to sell carloads of guitars in the early 1960s. Every damn fool had to have a guitar and walk around strumming it. But Garcia didn’t look like a fool. He was a very immaculate, tall, thin boy. He had coal-black hair and a little mustache. He looked like a Spanish gentleman.”

When Garcia came to see Dana Morgan, he’d been living on the streets and at friends’ houses for the previous couple years, refusing to get a job.

As he said in ‘74: “I’d scuffle, I’d hustle, I’d scam. I didn’t want to work, I didn’t want to have a job, didn’t want to live that life, and I didn’t care what I did in order to not have to do it… I never felt pressed by that. I’d sleep in the bus depot, theater lobbies behind the ticket booth. I didn’t give a fuck – I got into all those trips, because I didn’t want to make myself into somebody…”

Music was his passion. He said in ‘69 that playing the banjo was “what really turned me on, and that’s what I devoted all my time to… But at no time was it ever possible for me to…make a living playing music or anything. And I didn’t want to work either. So I just hung out and played.”

As he described his lifestyle in ’71, he and his friends were living “a sort of hand-to-mouth existence…living off people who were living off their parents… There would be various households that we could hang out at and get a little something to eat… Stanford was a rich place to hang out at, there was all this stuff going on there. You could always hustle the girls to get you something from the dining room… I was still in the same position of essentially being on the street, going around from place to place… I was either not making money and mostly living off my wits, which was pretty easy to do in Palo Alto – things are very well-fed – or else I was teaching guitar lessons in record stores.”

Barbara Meier remembered, “There was a short white-sleeved shirt that he wore when he went to Dana Morgan’s to teach, and he had [one] other shirt... And he did not care about anything, as long as he had that guitar, as long as he had cigarettes. There was always somewhere to stay, food was always manifested somehow. He lived on less than nothing for a long, long time.”

After marrying Sara, he became more settled and lived in Mountain View with her. The catch was, as Sara said, “We had no car. Jerry was teaching at Dana Morgan’s Music, but that depended on him getting from Mountain View to Palo Alto… Jerry would go off with his guitar in one hand, his banjo in the other, in his white shirt and black pants and vest, and hitchhike from Mountain View to Dana Morgan’s – if he could get a ride, because he looked a little disreputable. He missed many of his lessons just because he couldn’t get there.” (By mid-’64, though, Garcia got a Corvair and was able to drive around.)

Sara also pointed out: "He was a good teacher, but making very little money at it... We had so little money. If I didn't get over to Dana Morgan's on the day when he got his paycheck, he would go off and spend it on grass... If I would show up at Dana Morgan's on the last day of the week, then I could make sure the check got into the bank."

McNally writes, “His tiny, smoky room at Dana Morgan’s had two chairs and a music stand.” One of his students, Dexter Johnson remembered, “The teaching rooms were borderline tiny. A dumpy little place in the back with a phonograph. 'Jerry teaches on Monday nights at 7 or 7:30.'”

Various students remember him: "I took five-string banjo lessons from Jerry Garcia for $3.00 a half hour at Dana Morgan." "I saw Jerry every Tuesday night at 7:00pm for my guitar lessons at Dana Morgan Music."

John Dawson: “I would run into [Garcia] often when I went into Dana Morgan’s shop in Palo Alto. He rented a space there to give guitar lessons, and whenever he wasn’t teaching, he’d be in the front of the place, picking his guitar (or banjo or mandolin), and holding forth.”

One visitor to the store recalls: "Dana Morgan Sr. was my flute teacher from starting at age 12 or 13. His studio was upstairs in the back [of the] music instrument store, Dana Morgan & Son, on Bryant Street. A guitar teacher taught in the first-floor studio, near the white vinyl sofa where I would sit to wait for lessons. I remember once when the teacher came out, sat beside me, and began strumming on his guitar. He sounded very impressive. He was Jerry Garcia."

Another student: "I took banjo lessons there from Jerry, I was in fifth grade... I found the old Pete Seeger method book we used and some notes on how to read tab he gave me to work on. I remember Dana Jr. sat in on a lesson and they both were smoking Camel Straights [in the] little room!"

Garcia talked a bit in ‘71 about how he taught: “My whole trip with teaching kids was teaching them how to play by ear – how to learn stuff off of records, because kids were always coming in saying, ‘Here’s this record, I’d love to be able to learn to play this guitar part on it.’”

Dexter was one of those kids: “I went for my first lesson and…he said, ‘What do you want to learn? Bring me whatever you want to learn.’ He showed me a chord or two, and the next week I brought a Kingston Trio and a Highwaymen record… He actually threw aside the albums I brought… He told me to listen to Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and Lightnin’ Hopkins.”

Garcia said, “It was my whole trip to teach them something about music first.” He said he would “make a tape of a whole bunch of kinds of music that would include the guitar that would all be technically pretty easy but attractive to the ear, like the Carter Family.”

So Dexter was introduced to the Carters: “He started teaching me 'Wildwood Flower' and various forms of thumb-picking. For six months, that was all we did. Then he started me finger-picking: 'Freight Train,' [by] Elizabeth Cotton. He turned me on to Mike Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers.”

One enterprising student even taped Garcia demonstrating various banjo tunes in April 1964, a month before Garcia’s bluegrass trip east. The taper makes requests, and Garcia obliges: “What do you want me to put on there?” Though happy to play requested tunes, Garcia is not too happy with his playing, with numerous apologies: “I’m still working on that…I could never play it right…I can’t really play that…I’m not too happy with the way I play it. If you really want it that badly…You’re gonna have to figure it out yourself…It’s sort of a hard song.” At the end, Garcia has his own request for the taper: “Why don’t you play a lot of that stuff back. I wanna hear what it sounds like.”

(Trivia Note: This may be the very tape the band used for the banjo snippet at the end of the 'Dark Star' single. Garcia once said, “I found an old tape of me playing banjo for a lesson I was giving somebody, in ’62 or so. I threw it on the end of Dark Star just for the hell of it.”)

Garcia was frequently erratic, though, in meeting his schedule. Sara said that before he got the car, “He would hitchhike to Palo Alto. Oftentimes he didn’t make it in time for his lessons. His students would show up for lessons and he wasn’t there.”

Dexter Johnson: “I remember once coming to a lesson and he wasn’t there and on the music stand was a note: ‘Gone to New Lost City Ramblers concert in San Jose. See you next week.’ ...Weir came and subbed for Garcia during a lesson once...I was disappointed... Then I stopped taking lessons for a month until Jerry came back.”

McNally wrote, “His sense of time as it applied to lessons was unreliable. A student would knock, Garcia would call out, ‘I’ll be with you in a minute;’ and half an hour later the student’s mother would be there, and he’d still be enthusiastically describing something new to his first student.”

Jeff Weber: "I was a trumpet student of Dana Morgan Jr. at Dana Morgan's Music Store where Jerry Garcia would "teach" the banjo in the room next to mine. The student rarely played a note as Jerry would demonstrate how it was done in a half hour lesson. Jerry was often late for his teaching as he hitch hiked from Mountain View."

Ellen, a student: "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."

Phil Lesh heard that “Jerry became so discouraged by one student’s lack of progress that he excused himself to use the restroom, climbed out the window, and never returned.”

But not every lesson went badly. Monti Moore writes: "In 1965 I was all of 15, going to a very snooty girls' boarding school in Palo Alto. We were required to learn an instrument. The school preferred a classical instrument, but my mom marched me into Dana Morgan's guitar shop in Palo Alto and I picked out the most expensive guitar I could find, a beautiful cherrywood Epiphone solid-body guitar. Jerry was to be my teacher. I was embarrassed because I felt dumb in my little uniform... Jerry took me to the back, handed me the guitar, and asked me to play something so he could see where to start. Little did I know that the cherrywood Epiphone guitar was his favorite instrument in the shop. This little teenybopper had picked it out. I began with the only song I knew: 'Pipeline,' a sixties surf tune. My rendition was very bad. He could have laughed; he could have insulted me, a dumb kid who had picked out his favorite guitar and was butchering even 'Pipeline.' Instead, he began to play - incredible music of a kind that I had never been exposed to - real, heartfelt music... He took the time to be kind, and to play for me, and to encourage the artist in me."

Garcia's friends found it easy to meet Garcia at Dana Morgan's.

Dave Parker, living a few blocks away on Hamilton Street, would come hang out with Garcia: "He'd just be sitting around waiting for his next student to show up. Jerry always had some fascinating perspective on something. Then when his student would show up, I'd go out in front and look at the instruments or talk to Dana, who I went to high school with."

Norm van Maastricht: "I fell into a routine of...drifting down to Morgan’s and playing with Jerry if he wasn’t teaching. He demonstrated some pretty adept finger style playing of his own... We usually just played together for the pure joy of playing and swapping licks. Many times there would be other musicians there that would join in and we’d jam. When we wanted to take a break from playing, there was always the coffee shop just down the street from Dana's."

Garcia could be snarky with customers, though. Sandy Rothman recalled, “Jerry was in between students when this young kid picked a guitar up off the wall. Like people always do in music stores, he started playing fast and furiously. Quickly, he then put the guitar back up on the wall. Garcia said, ‘What’s the matter? Run out of talent?’”

Dana Morgan’s store became something of a new hangout spot for Garcia (along with the Tangent club), as it was a place where he could practice and meet other musicians; and he taught there for about two years or more.

One thing this means is that by mid-’65, Jerry must have known Dana Morgan Jr. for a couple years already, at least as a casual acquaintance. (I don’t know how early on Dana Jr started working there.) Garcia had also gained a level of trust with the store owner – after hanging out in the store for a year or two, Garcia could apparently come in the store afterhours, and he and his friends could freely borrow instruments (used ones, at least).

Weir liked to tell the story of how he wandered by one night in 1963 and heard Garcia playing banjo in the back of the store: “He said he was waiting for his students and my friend and I apprised him that no one was likely to show up as it was New Year’s Eve. He said he had the key to the instrument room and asked if we wanted to jam.” (Or in another telling, "We knew he had the key to the front of the shop, so we talked him into breaking in, and we grabbed a couple of the guitars we'd always wanted to play.")

Garcia was in a stable situation, doing what he wanted. “When I was teaching music, I was doing it because it was a way to exist without having to do a work thing – put on a collar and go do eight hours a day and all that stuff. I’m not interested in doing that.”

Barbara Meier said, “He was totally content… And he allowed himself to have…this time to devote to his craft. And he had no plan, either. This was just what he liked to do, and this is what he was interested in. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to do whatever he wanted.”

In a way, he had it made: “I was trying to be straight, kinda. I was working in the music store…but it wasn’t really working; I was really playing music. I was playing music during the day at the music store, practicing, and at nights I would go out and gig.”

THE FOLK SCENE

Kepler's Books was the main hangout where Garcia's community formed. Lesh recalled, "Kepler's bookstore had a coffeeshop and was the hangout. That's where we did all our raving."

Peter Albin: “Kepler’s had a back room… One half had books about halfway up the wall. Then it had this area that had tables, chairs, and a coffee machine. It wasn’t a coffeehouse, it was just a reading area, but some people like Garcia had taken it over and started bringing their instruments and playing.”

Alan Trist: "I went down to Kepler's, where I met Jerry. He was sitting on a coffee table playing the guitar and we struck up an instant relationship." “They would let us sit there all day and read the books off the shelves… So we had literature and we had a place to hang out, and there was coffee and they didn’t mind if Jerry played the guitar all day.”

Sara Garcia: "I first saw Jerry at Kepler's... He was there with Hunter and Nelson...they were playing music. There were some tables and a little coffee bar."

Marshall Leicester: "I walked into Kepler's and Jerry was sitting there playing a 12-string guitar and singing tunes like 'Everybody Loves Saturday Night'... I think I asked to borrow his guitar and play some of my kind of music on it...and we hit it off."

Peter Albin: "Rodney and I went down to Kepler's Bookstore to get Jerry. We had heard about the scene down there... I remember sitting around listening to Garcia play. He was playing Appalachian ballads and 'Sitting on Top of the World.' Not too many blues things, mostly old American folk songs."

Norm van Maastricht: "They knew all the coffee shops that would let us nurse cups of coffee for hours on end. You carefully rotated them so as not to wear out your welcome. It was a way of life."

Not everyone was happy to see Garcia's crowd hanging around all day.

Ira Sandperl, who ran Kepler's: “I had to kick [them] out of the store every night, before they were the Grateful Dead – Jerry Garcia and those guys. They would play the same song all night, and they never knew when to stop. I had to get them out of there. They were maddening.”

Vernon Gates, owner of St. Michael's Alley, felt the same way: “Jerry used to come in, nurse one cup of coffee all day, and pick up all the chicks... The only thing I credit myself with is kicking them out and telling them to go home and practice.”

(Garcia described St. Michael's Alley, their other main hangout, as "a local coffeehouse where you could sit over a cup of coffee all night." Gates would protest: "You all sit here and don't buy anything... You not only scare away potential customers, you drive away any that have been paying!" To which Garcia would reply, "Look at it this way: it's your business, but it's our home.")

Garcia had made himself a major figure in the (admittedly small) local folkie scene, with many other players being drawn to him.

David Nelson described his first encounter with Garcia: “The first time I saw him, sitting in [Kepler’s] bookstore…there’s this guy with an open shirt, and he was incredibly hairy, and he’s kind of dark and surly, and he’s strumming a [Stella] twelve-string, kind of quiet, with this really kind of intense stare. He had a little wreath of something in his hair, like some girl had woven some vines into a wreath. He was playing quietly – you could hardly hear it, but it was very intense, very captivating. He had some kind of aura. ‘Who’s that?’ I just couldn’t take my eyes off him.”

Nelson was struck: “He had some notoriety even then. There was something scary about him; something awesome, some invisible quality,” Nelson said. “He got accused of being arrogant a lot because of the awesome quality, that presence he had… He was very advanced at the time, compared to everybody else. People thought he was arrogant, but I never saw that.”

Alan Trist: "Jerry had this amazing way about him... He would just sit there and play and look at you and smile. His charisma was really attractive."

Hank Harrison wrote that at Kepler’s bookstore in ’62, “Garcia was already attracting a gathering of sorts. Garcia’s enthusiasm was genuine and, in spite of some seeming egomania, Garcia was a true charismatic… So people hung out with him.”

David Parker also noted Garcia’s charisma: “He was always an amazing guy… He just had a certain force to his personality and character. He was a very strong, magnetic person, and yet he was never looking to dominate anybody or any scene. He always had that thing of ‘I’m not the leader,’ yet ironically, he always was; he couldn’t help it.”

Sara said that in Garcia's groups, “He was clearly the leader.” Phil Lesh noticed, “Everyone seemed to defer subtly to him, and this made me a little nervous – nobody could be that cool.” Lesh was wary of Garcia at first: "People were just awed by him, sitting at his feet - and I'm the kind of guy who distrusts people like that."

Suzy Wood: “Even though Jerry was a dropout, because of the kind of intelligence and charm and insight that he had, he always seemed like more of a leader than a bad guy. My dad thought he was a wonderful person but he’d say, ‘Why doesn’t he do something with his life?’”

Sara Garcia: “He was very ambitious. He wanted to do something big. The Rooftop Singers came out with this old Gus Cannon song, 'Walk Right In,' and we thought, ‘Oh, we can do something better than that.’ That was our plan. The phrase we used then was 'destined for greatness.' Everybody recognized that he had some genius that he needed to do something with.”

Friends like Phoebe Graubard and David McQueen point out that “Garcia always had a guitar with him wherever he went.” When he got into the banjo he became even more maniacal. Lesh recalled, “He would walk around the Chateau in the afternoon playing the most astonishing shit.”

Bob Matthews: "In those days, he spent all his time playing. You could have a conversation with him, but it was always while he was playing."

Norm van Maastricht: "He was almost always playing on something if there was any kind of instrument around to be had. When he would get his hands on a banjo it made him hard to hear and understand over the music. A banjo is a noisome thing, particularly when you're sitting right in front of it. Once I asked him why he insisted on playing the thing during a conversation. 'I'm practicing so I can talk while I play,' he said."

Carolyn Adams first saw him at the Tangent: “There was Jerry sitting on a stool in the middle of this dusty dark place, practicing the shit out of the banjo… He would rip through these long complex runs and then hit a bad note and stop, go back to the beginning, and start over.”

Garcia: “I was just playing all the time. I just wanted to conquer that stuff. For me, it was little discoveries. I was just hungry to meet people to play.”

Garcia seems to have had the ambition to be the best player around, and with his constant practicing he was somewhat intimidating to other players.

Peter Albin said, “He was real good, and we got the definite impression that he knew he was real good… We were all local folkies, but he was a little bit higher on himself than the other people because he had more talent. He did and he knew it… [He’d play] something you could never play. He was excellent but he put it in your face.”

Suzy Wood: “He had an air of intensity and professionalism, dedication and concentration that was just more focused and intense than the other people who played there.”

Barbara Meier: “That’s all he did. He played music. He was totally dedicated. He would play all day long. If he was trying to learn something, he would practice it until he got it… It never occurred to him that he would have to earn a living.”

Sara Garcia: “He lived for music. He’d be in a bad mood if he couldn’t practice for several hours a day. At this point, he was very ambitious. He wanted to do something big. But there wasn’t any show-business niche for him.” So at that time, “what he really wanted was to play with Bill Monroe. That would be the pinnacle of success.”

Though fellow musicians perhaps took it for granted that Garcia would practice all day long, the women around him were quite struck by it.

For instance, Suzy Wood: “He would walk around the house with a guitar on. He would be so intent on what he was doing that he would come and stand in front of people…but he would be absolutely completely inside himself. He would make no response at all to the person he was standing in front of. He was inside himself playing… And he wouldn’t say a word. His fingers would never stop moving. He was really inside himself with stuff going on inside his head and coming out of his fingers.”

Sara Garcia said he would learn a banjo tune by “listening to it phrase by phrase and going over it and over it and over it again. [He had an] incredible single-minded drive… He would work on a single phrase for two days, three days, until he got it exactly right. I would love it when he got it right because he’d be pleased and happy for a moment, and then he would go into the next one. He set high standards for himself, and he would get into an absolute funk if he couldn’t get something just absolutely right, or if somebody else messed up.”

Garcia's main goal was to play with others, and from '62-'64 he was in one short-lived bluegrass group after another, with whatever local players he could round up.

Suzy Wood: “Jerry was the thing that groups formed around.”

John Dawson on the Tangent: “There was a back room there and people would get together and put a little bit of a trio or a duet together… There was a lot of that going on. Just instant groups coming together and falling back apart again.”

John Dawson said Garcia’s earlier bluegrass bands were “various aggregations of people who got together for one or two gigs and just decided to call themselves some weird name.”

Norm van Maastricht: "He just loved to play and it didn't take much encouragement or much of an occasion to get him to throw a 'band' together. For sidemen he would use whoever was handy to fill out his 'band,' oftentimes naming the band on the way to the gig."

Garcia put together various bands like the Hart Valley Drifters, the Badwater Valley Boys, the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers, the Asphalt Jungle Mountain Boys, the Godawful Palo Alto Bluegrass Ensemble, etc... (Peter Albin: "I can't remember all the names of the various bands they had.")

Jorma Kaukonen: “I remember Jerry being a consummate bandleader at an early stage when most of us [folkies] were really playing solo. His forte was always putting groups together. And really, whether it was an old-timey band, a bluegrass band or whatever, he put bands together and did a great job.”

Dave Parker: “When Jerry decided he wanted to do something, he always had a way of recruiting the people he needed to get it to happen.”

Marshall Leicester: Garcia was “a guy with a very strong drive to find what it was he wanted to do and do it, even if he didn’t know what it was. He would pick up stuff and drop it, and that often involved picking up people and dropping them on the way to finding what he wanted to do… He had an artist’s stubbornness about finding whatever that vision would turn out to be and sticking to it.”

Sara: “In music, Jerry could take people on and be very direct and actually quite cruel to bandmembers if they met with his displeasure. People were scared of him. He was a hard taskmaster.”

Garcia could be merciless in choosing people to play with. His first folk duo with Robert Hunter had soon split up: "I was getting to be more and more impatient with Hunter's guitar playing."

David Nelson: [in the Wildwood Boys] “Hunter wasn’t really as dedicated as we were… Garcia had a disagreement with Hunter about were we going to get serious with bluegrass… Garcia put it to him and said, ‘You’re really going to have to get serious or I’m going to have to get another mandolin player.’ Bluegrass is a staunch kind of music. It’s not easy and if you don’t really dedicate yourself to it, you’ll never make it. They had a sort of falling-out and Hunter just quit. So we went and found Sandy Rothman… Sandy said he’d like to play with us, but he played guitar…”

Sandy Rothman: “Garcia pointed his finger at me and said, ‘Are you Sandy Rothman? We want you to be our new guitar player.’ Really bold and confident and no question about it. Like it was going to happen.”

But they still needed a mandolin player. Nelson: “[So] Garcia just talked me into it. He got an F12 [mandolin] and said, ‘You can do it. You can do it.’ He put a mandolin in my hand, and the next thing I knew, we were doing gigs and I was playing mandolin. I had a few weeks to get it together, and then we were the Black Mountain Boys.”

Garcia had chosen a difficult discipline, causing him to complain about "the rookies in my band" and insist on more practicing.

Marshall Leicester: “It’s hard to learn how to play bluegrass. It’s got a lot of rules and it’s complicated music, and that creates a kind of natural elitism around it… It takes a lot of practice.”

Eric Thompson: “Bluegrass music, especially in the banjo playing, tends to be very perfection-oriented.” Garcia had what Rodney Dillard called "a real fancy bluegrass style, [but] not the greatest in the world," and Thompson admits, "He was pretty good and inventive, but he didn't have the sort of perfection that is the norm in that kind of music."

Meanwhile, Garcia was always on the hunt for places to play, but folk venues in the area were scarce, as well as an audience.

Phoebe Graubard [circa ‘61]: “Jerry was playing in dives in North Beach…but no one was going to them anymore. He would walk in at 7:30 or 8, and there might be nobody there, and sometimes nobody ever came, and he’d play his set and go. But he had an amazing perseverance.”

Eric Thompson says the local bluegrass bands rarely got to play real country-music dance halls: “It was a folk revival kind of thing, and I don’t think there were really the venues for it. There was no place like the Ash Grove [in Los Angeles] or the Club 47 [in Cambridge] in northern California, so we ended up doing things like playing on Gert Chiarito’s program on KPFA and things like that – that was about as public as you could get. And then we’d play at these little tourist places in North Beach.”

Norm van Maastricht: "We played a lot of little playing gigs, usually at no pay. Sometimes it would just be a house party. Sometimes a coffeehouse in San Francisco... We'd just pile in the car, get there, set up and play, get in the car and go home... Sometimes they even fed us. They seldom paid us."

There were also coffee galleries, occasional folk festivals, and places like the Boar's Head in San Carlos, which opened in '61. Peter Albin describes it: "The Boar's Head was no bigger than 15x20. People would gather on Friday and Saturday nights. We had a little stage... The place could hold no more than 25 people, but it was packed. It had chairs and tables and sometimes people would sit on the floor. It was an open-mike scene: two, three songs, pass the hat. Wasn't hardly any money... [Garcia] would come up every once in a while... When we asked him to come up to play the Boar's Head, it was like, 'Why should I?'... We said to him, 'You can have a lot of fun and there's lots of young girls there. It's a neat place. It's small but there's a dedicated audience.'" (In McNally's account, Garcia's response was more positive: "Sure, man!")

David Nelson: "The Boar's Head always seemed more like a party than a real gig. It became another place for friends to get together and play and sing."

Later on the Offstage opened, Paul Foster's club in San Jose. As McNally describes it, "There was, of course, no liquor, and even the coffee had to be consumed before the music began so there would be no clinking of cups. They sold pot under the counter to make the rent."

Some felt Garcia had a bad attitude, which caused some problems getting gigs. (Suzy Wood called it "that old fuck-you attitude....that was what Jerry had at the Boar's Head.") One visiting bluegrass musician saw him as "the surly guy drinking coffee who wouldn't talk to us."

David Nelson: "He got accused of being arrogant a lot... We were refused a gig because of Garcia's supposed arrogance."

Paul Foster (at the Offstage club): "I had a problem with him. I didn't book him very often because he was kind of snotty to the audience; he treated them terrible."

Garcia: "We always had a sort of abuse-the-audience attitude. Once they were in there, they were yours and you could do whatever you wanted to them! That was part of the fun of playing those little clubs."

Peter Albin: "God, he took so long to tune. It was like he went for some sort of philosophical tuning... My father who always came to these gigs said, 'When is that guy going to stop tuning?... He spent like a half hour on that goddamn banjo tuning that fucking thing.' The audience would be getting restless and Jerry would be going, 'Just a second, folks. You want me to play good here, I got to be in tune...'"

The place Garcia played most often was the Top of the Tangent, the local folk club in Palo Alto that opened in January '63 and had hoot nights every Wednesday. Garcia would be a regular there for the next two years, calling it "a little community...a sweet scene."

Norm van Maastricht: "The Tangent was a hofbrau with an upstairs loft... It seated about 75 souls at a few small tables but a lot of the patrons ended up sitting on the floor. It had a small two or three-microphone stage and a green room for tune-ups and run-throughs... The Tangent featured...an 'open mic' format. People would get up and do three songs or 15 minutes, then give way to the next performer. It was a dollar charge to non-performers to help with the rent. The performers were not paid."

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2015/07/jerry-garcia-top-of-tangent-117.html

http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/06/tangent-117-university-palo-alto-ca.html

But ultimately Garcia was feeling lonesome in the local bluegrass scene, such as it was, and he'd sigh that there were few good players in his area. "I got to be quite a good banjo player, but I was really operating in a vacuum, and what I wanted was to have a great bluegrass band, but I only got occasional chances to put a bluegrass band together that was by my standards even acceptable. Although I had fun, none of them was serious or a very good attempt."

“I got into old-time string-band music, and in order to play string-band music you have to have a band, you can’t play it by yourself. So I would be out recruiting musicians… Bluegrass bands are hard to put together because you have to have good bluegrass musicians to play, and in Palo Alto there wasn’t really very many of them – not enough to keep a band going all the time… Since I always liked playing whether it was bluegrass music or not, I decided to put together a jug band, because you could have a jug band with guys that could hardly play at all…”

“I was kind of froze up in bluegrass; there wasn’t enough good bluegrass in the area I lived in to let me play and feel good about playing it. I sort of copped out, and got involved in the jugband as a way of saying, ‘Let’s just have fun.’ It was one level of release, and going into electric music was another, a step into something that was about just having fun, playing with your friends, not worrying about it being absolutely perfect.”

MOTHER MCCREE’S

The jug band was formed in January 1964.

Bob Matthews: “Garcia was teaching banjo at Dana Morgan’s and I took banjo lessons from him… In high school, Weir and I would go to first period…[then] hitchhike to Dana Morgan’s and cut the rest of school hanging out with Jerry.” One day they hitch-hiked to Berkeley after school to see the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, and "Weir and I and [another student] decided we were going to start a jug band."

“Bob and I walked into Dana Morgan's music store, where Jerry was in his little tiny cubicle that he taught lessons in - if he wasn't working, he was always practicing. We said, 'We decided to start a jug band last night.' Without dropping a note, Jerry said, 'Oh, good - I'm in it.' And that's how Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions were born.”

Weir has told his story many times - here's an early version from a 1970 interview:

"It happened one fateful New Year’s Eve, when I was hanging around with nothing to do, so I thought I’d drift by the music store window and look in the window, with a friend of mine, and there was Garcia in the back of the shop...waiting for his banjo students...none of whom were showing up on New Year’s Eve... 'Can’t figure out why none of my banjo students are coming,' he was saying to the wall. And so, we went down and hung out and rapped with him, and we thought that we had enough halfway talent at hand to start a jug band, and so me and him and my friend and Pigpen and a couple others started the jug band."

(If Garcia had shown up for his regular Tuesday 7:00 appointment, it could indeed have been New Year's Eve in '63.)

Other accounts indicate that the jug band idea was already percolating.

Dave Parker: “Jerry was making a transition. He’d gone from the old-time music to bluegrass, and he wanted to try something different. I remember we saw the Jim Kweskin Band on the Steve Allen Show at somebody’s house in Berkeley, and we’d heard their record, and that sounded like a lot of fun, so Jerry decided we’d get together a jug band.”

David Nelson: “The jug band was formed in my room downstairs [on Hamilton Street]… We started playing jug band music, and these new kids Bob Weir & Bob Matthews and another guy came over. They were enthusiastic about playing in a jug band. And Dave Parker was playing washboard. Pigpen would come over sometimes...he'd talk and play.”

Bob Matthews: "I think Nelson is the one who came up with the name... A lot of different people eventually played with the jug band, but at the beginning there was Garcia, who played banjo, Nelson on guitar, Dave Parker and I played washboard, and Weir played washtub bass. Hunter was around, Pigpen was around and played occasionally. We played all the regular jug stuff that other groups were playing, some old-timey, some blues. Basically we stole from everybody's repertoire. But that's what everyone did."

Marshall Leicester: "The jug band didn't have the egregious discipline that bluegrass required. And there was no way to make a living playing bluegrass... Jerry was genuinely trying, working for Dana Morgan, and he was always trying to get together some kind of band that would keep him playing. And it was a real strain. Mother McCree's was fun for him and it allowed him to get in touch with musicians [like Pigpen] who had been on different paths."

David Nelson: "Hunter and I came up with the name for the jug band. We named it together - Hunter came up with 'Mother McCree's' and I added 'Uptown Jug Champions.' The jug band's first rehearsals were in my room at 431 Hamilton Street...Weir, Pigpen, Garcia, Bob Matthews, Dave Parker and I."

Nelson was only in the band for the first few gigs, then left for Los Angeles and joined the Pine Valley Boys. (After that, the jug band practiced in Garcia's garage.)

Garcia said, "Marmaduke even played with the jug band for a while." (However, John Dawson says ,"I remember going to a couple of rehearsals... Various publications have listed me as a member of the band but I never was.")

Hunter decided not to join the band since he was still upset over being dropped from the Wildwood Boys. ("I was offered the position of jug player, but...I dropped out.")

Hank Harrison: "Almost everybody that was in Palo Alto at the time sat in."

Bob Matthews: “I think the jug band was in existence for about a year and a half and probably went through about 20 different musicians at different times. I think I only lasted about six months. I went from washboard to first kazoo, to second kazoo, to being out of the band. I think I was out of the band the night we were playing and Jerry leaned over to me in the middle of a tune and said, ‘Why don’t you take a break,’ and I got off the stage.” (Dave Parker replaced him on washboard.)

David Nelson: "Bob Weir and a couple other young kids...showed up and started hanging around. I think we asked them, 'Hey, you want to play jug? Here, you.' Weir was the most unabashed to give it a try."

Weir had barely played in public before. "I really couldn't play guitar at all, so I got relegated to jug and washtub bass - which I also couldn't play at all, but they figured if anybody had to start from scratch it probably ought to be me. The next day I got a washtub and a broom handle and a piece of string and a bunch of different kinds of jugs and showed up at the next rehearsal. God knows how, but I figured out how to play them all. I could make notes happen with a washtub bass...and the jug, too."

Garcia: "Weir finally had his chance to play because Weir had this uncanny ability to really play the jug and play it really well, and he was the only guy around and so he of course was the natural candidate."

Weir: "I was only 16 at the time and I was kind of in awe of these guys I was playing with, because I was not any kind of journeyman musician at that point; I really had almost no experience."

Weir: "I think I first met Pigpen in Garcia's garage in Palo Alto at the first jug band rehearsal. Garcia had said he knew this guy Pigpen who played real good blues."

Hunter: "I had seen Pigpen play guitar and harmonica a bit at the Tangent and I was impressed with how good he was solo. Then he played with Mother McCree's, and he was seemingly the most professional of anybody in the group."

Nelson: "Because of Pigpen being in it, that changed everything. Pigpen was remarkable... We had something more than the Kweskin Jug Band. We were able to do those blues and Pigpen did those harmonica parts exactly perfect. He didn't copy it note for note, he had perfect feeling."

Dave Parker: “Jerry was definitely the leader. He pulled it together and made it the way it was. He went out and found the gigs. Jerry came up with most of the tunes, too; though Pig knew a lot of blues.”

Garcia: “Our jug band was complete and total anarchy. Just lots and lots of people in it, and Pigpen and Bob and I were more or less the ringleaders. We’d work out various kinds of musically funny material. It was like a musical vacation to get on stage and have a good time.”

Marshall Leicester: "The way he talked about Mother McCree's was that it was nice to play for people. It was nice to be listened to, and it was nice to be paid... That live energy was always important for him."

It took a while for the jug band to start playing in public, and it's not known just when their debut was. (Apparently later than January.) Dave Parker thinks they may have played 25-30 gigs in total.

Weir: “Somebody got us a gig at the Tangent, and we became fixtures there. We were putting on a party, and people would dance and stuff like that. We became popular, immensely popular. We owned the place, almost from the first night.”

Their known shows at the Tangent were in May & July '64. They also played the Off Stage in San Jose; Peter Albin says they played at the Gallery Lounge at SF State. McNally's research suggests they even played at Magoo's Pizza Parlor in August '64.

Nelson: "The jug band became a regular working band, a known band that would do parties. We got more gigs because people could dance to it."

Weir: "We played coffee galleries, parties. We might have gone home with 10 bucks a head on a good night."

The band was recorded once in July 1964 for the KZSU radio program "Live from the Top of the Tangent." (At the time, the lineup was Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, Dave Parker, Tom Stone, and Mike Garbett.)

https://deadsources.blogspot.com/2013/03/july-1964-mother-mccrees-interview.html

https://jerrybase.com/events/19640716-01

The last known performance by Mother McCree's was at a YMCA hootenanny in January 1965:

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/07/january-16-1965-hootenanny-peninsula.html

https://jerrybase.com/events/19650116-01

Weir: “We listened to a bunch of old jug band records that various guys had rounded up, and then we started working on the songs. We actually became a fairly good jug band. People dropped out as the rehearsal schedule got a bit more rigorous. Then we became really popular around the mid-Peninsula area – had work just about every weekend. We’d rehearse either in Garcia’s garage or in the music store...

“We were really happy playing jug band music, and we were getting real good at it. But we got to be real tight, and then started wondering what we were going to do. People started quitting the band, to go away to school or this or that. In the fall, we didn’t know what we were going to do.”

Garcia did not remember the jug band being so popular: “We played any place that would hire a jug band, which was almost no place, and that’s the whole reason we finally got into electric stuff.”

THE DECISION

Weir: “Toward the end of that year, [the jugband] started mutating into a rock & roll band… I was working in the store where Jerry worked, and we were thinking while we were working at the music store, all those shiny electric instruments are starting to give us the come-hither. And just around then, the son of the owner of the music store said, ‘Hey listen, you guys want to start a rock & roll band? I’ll loan you the instruments if I can play bass. The Beatles came out, and there was life to what they were playing. Rock & roll seemed viable – it seemed less like prepackaged, marketed pap and more like there was some expansiveness to the music. So we became a rock & roll band at that point.”

Dave Parker: “It was always my impression that it was Jerry’s decision to form the electric band; that he was not interested in playing the kinds of music he’d been doing before, and he’d done the jug band thing…and the excitement of electric rock & roll, what the Beatles & the Stones & Dylan were doing, was happening, and Jerry had this surge of energy to go and do that and make something happen. There was a feeling…that anything was possible, so just pick out what you want to do and do it.”

Bob Matthews: “British rock & roll – mainly the Beatles and the Stones – was happening, and the decision was made…that it was time to start an electric blues band, coincidental with the fact that Jerry was teaching at Dana Morgan’s and Bill Kreutzmann was teaching drums there.”

Lesh: “Pigpen was into the Chicago blues, and it was his idea: ‘Let’s get a drummer and make it an electric blues band.’ It was just such a natural thing to happen.”

Garcia: “It was Pigpen’s idea. He’d been pestering me for a while, he wanted me to start up an electric blues band… In the jug band scene we used to do blues numbers like Jimmy Reed tunes and even played a couple of rock & roll tunes, and it was just the next step… Theoretically it’s a blues band, but the minute we get electric instruments it’s a rock & roll band. Because, wow, playing rock & roll is fun.

“Pigpen, because he could play some blues piano and stuff like that, we put him on organ immediately and the harmonica was a natural, and he was doing most of the lead vocals at the time. We had a really rough sound, and the bass player was the [son of] the guy who owned this music store that I had been working in, which was convenient because he gave us all the equipment: we didn’t have to go out and hassle to raise money to buy equipment.”

Weir: “About that time the Beatles started to become popular. For what it’s worth, Garcia had been playing in rock & roll bands all along, pretty much to bolster his income – guitar and bass, whatever was required of him. We started kicking around the idea of maybe firing up [electric] guitars and playing some blues, Chicago style or Jimmy Reed style or whatever. We got Pigpen involved and finally, through the shop, we got Billy involved. The son of the owner of the shop wanted to be the bass player, and suddenly we had a band – especially since the son of the owner of the shop could supply the instruments. Along about New Year’s Eve of the next year, we had gone from being a jug band to a rock & roll band; called ourselves the Warlocks.”

Weir: “The Beatles had come out and made it real big, and then the Stones came out and they made it real big. The appeal of electric music just started creeping in, and by the end of the year [1964], I was working at Dana Morgan Music too – sort of taking some of Garcia’s excess students and picking up a few of my own. I was also working at another music store in Menlo Park, and we had access to electric instruments. So we gave in to the temptation to try a little rock & roll.

Garcia had done a few electric gigs with Pig in a band called the Zodiacs before I’d ever known them, and so they had a little experience with R&B and stuff like that. Pig knew it very well, because his father had been a DJ at a black R&B station, so we had a leg up there. We just sort of evolved into a rock & roll band. Dana Morgan Jr. played bass, which ensured that we got to use the instruments and amplifiers that we otherwise couldn’t have afforded. That’s when we became the Warlocks… Bill Kreutzmann had been a drum [teacher] at the music store, so that’s where he came from.”

David Nelson: "There was talk about going electric. Yeah! Jerry and me both recalled, remember those nights just a couple years ago, we'd get together and just do old rock and roll songs all night long? “Oh yeah, let's do 'Searchin',” you know. “Let's do all that kind of stuff.” And Jerry even had a couple of gigs through Stanford University where it was him and Troy Weidenheimer, who already played electric, because electric wasn't out of the question. Not at all...rock and roll is where I started in music actually. And Troy Weidenheimer was a working electric guitar player. We used to just admire him and sit there and watch him play. I later played a couple of gigs - I played bass with Troy Weidenheimer. So, there's all this thinking about yeah, go electric."

Garcia had played with Troy's band the Zodiacs back in '63, crossing paths with Pigpen & Bill Kreutzmann. "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing an electric bass. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even know it."

https://deadessays.blogspot.com/2010/11/zodiacs.html

Although the new band wasn't Dana's idea, he seems to have jumped in with enthusiasm. For years he apparently had no interest in Garcia's bluegrass or jug-band ventures, and he wasn't part of Garcia's social scene; but once Garcia & Pigpen started talking about a blues & rock band, he was in. While there's no indication that they "let" him be the bass player just to get the store equipment, it was certainly an opportunity for them. If anything, he made the formation of the band possible by loaning them guitars and amps; and for the moment, they had no need to look for a bass player or instruments or a rehearsal space - everything was right there in the store.

It's worth emphasizing that the Warlocks were formed entirely of guys who were working at Dana Morgan's store. (Even Pigpen was the "janitor" there.)

Weir: “At one point Garcia left on a tour of the south, more or less to study bluegrass music. [May ‘64] By that time I’d advanced on guitar to the point where he decided that I could probably take his beginning & intermediate students. So I started working at the music store...

“Pigpen and I swept up in the music shop, and I was lucky enough to get a job teaching beginning & intermediate students on the guitar, and beginning banjo. I was actually pretty good at it – I was good at working with kids... Pigpen would work at the music store because he could hang out with musicians, but basically he didn’t want to work any more than he absolutely had to.”

For Garcia, the Warlocks also served as his abrupt exit from playing banjo and trying to find a good bluegrass group: "For me, just going and playing the electric guitar represented freedom from the tremendous control trip that you have to have to be a banjo player. I'd put so much energy and brainwork into controlling the banjo...and playing the electric guitar freed me! ...And it was much easier putting together a rock 'n' roll band...than having a bluegrass band."

FINDING A DRUMMER

Bill Kreutzmann may not have been the band's first choice for a drummer. Per one commenter:

“Roger Moshell was a drummer for the Warlocks at the very beginning. He was going to go to Arizona State and chose school over the band... Roger ended up graduating from San Francisco State in 1967 (Business major). He continued to regularly play gigs throughout the mid-1960s as the drummer for The Metronomes--mostly at Longshoreman's Hall in the City on weekends.”

Moshell died in 1997. According to his obituary:

“Raised in Redwood City, he entered Woodside High School in 1958, the year it opened. He attended Arizona State University and San Francisco State University, from which he graduated with a degree in business in 1967. Before going to college, he was drummer for the Warlocks, the band that later became the Grateful Dead.”

No other details are known. No one in the Dead ever mentioned Moshell, so it's a mystery what his relationship with them was. But as we know, Mother McCree's had been an ever-shifting outfit with members going in & out; and possibly before the Magoo's shows, the first Warlocks rehearsals were the same way as they figured out who'd be in the band. (For that matter, in the Zodiacs earlier, Garcia & Kreutzmann were themselves "subs" for the regular members.)

Dave Parker: “I had good enough rhythm to play something like the washboard, but I hadn’t ever played drums, so when Jerry wanted to start an electric band, right at the first there was some thought maybe I could learn to play the drums – that’s how funky it was! But Bill Kreutzmann was already a skilled drummer who’d played around a bit and taught, so he was a much better choice.”

Hank Harrison: “He gave drum lessons at Dana Morgan’s in his spare time, and that’s how he met Garcia.”

Lesh: "He married his girlfriend Brenda and fathered a child, Stacey, while still in high school; he supported them by selling wigs by day and teaching drums at night at Dana Morgan's Music."

Weir: “Billy was working in various bands, as was everybody. I think he was working at a wig shop, or something like that, whatever genuine paying gig he could get. He was married at the time I met him.”

Lesh: “When I met Billy, he was just out of high school and already married with a child. He was under 21 at the time, because we had to get him a phony draft card… Both he and Bob were underage at that point, and Billy was Captain Straight, because he had a job and a wife and a kid. But it didn’t last very long.”

Garcia: “Bill Kreutzmann was working at the music store at the same time I was. My first encounter with Kreutzmann was when I bought a banjo from him way back in ’61 or ’62. He was just a kid then playing rock & roll; he was in high school. I may even have played a gig with him once when I was playing electric bass in a rock & roll band weekends.”

Garcia: “Kreutzmann was not a guy I knew socially. He was not a part of our scene. I got hold of him because I knew he was a player.”

Rock Scully: Kreutzmann “wasn’t somebody Jerry knew socially. They needed a drummer and Jerry found him through the music store. He’d been in a few rock & roll bands so he had more of a feel for it than the others.”

Garcia: Bill “played with a lot of big James Brown-style bands, that kind of R&B…and he was always the fastest, most heaviest rock & roll drummer in Palo Alto. And he worked in the same music store that I did. I was teaching guitar and he was teaching drums and we got together quite a bit.”

Garcia: “The only drummer I had really played around with around that area that I thought really had a nice feel was Bill. By now he's 18, so I talked to him and he was just as weird as ever, and I really really didn't understand anything he said. He was just like 'Rcty rcty shdd.' What? 'Rrrou.' Okay... I asked him if he wanted to play and he was delighted. He was all over the place, so we played and it was great – he worked out fine.”

Kreutzmann: “We were working separately at other jobs as musicians… We had a different bass player at one time, who brought us all together and knew all of us – we didn’t really know each other necessarily – and put us all together.” (This was from his perspective - actually everyone else did know each other.)

“We started practicing at Dana Morgan Music, in a small room crammed with equipment. Pigpen was the lead singer on all the songs. They didn’t know much about rock music, and it was pretty much the beginning for me, too, even though I’d been playing in rock bands for a little while.”

Kreutzmann has said that he'd seen McCree’s at the Tangent: “I got turned on that Jerry and Pigpen and sometimes Bobby were playing bluegrass at a place called the Tangent in Palo Alto, and I went down there faithfully and listened to them all the time. I really got off on those guys; I just liked them a lot.”

But elsewhere, Kreutzmann's story was different: “I wasn’t part of the jug band…never saw them play. I had played more rock than any of those guys.”

Justin Kreutzmann: “My dad told me he didn’t even see Mother McCree’s… He was just into rock & roll. He played in bands that wore red jackets and did 'At The Hop;' and the first time he ever played in public was at a party, and they did 'Johnny B Goode.' He realized that everybody at the party was dancing, and that was when he decided that this would probably be a good thing to do.”

Dexter Johnson: “Bill Kreutzmann was a drummer in a group called the Legends at Palo Alto High School, and they were the best band at the school… I hired them for the opening dance. They were great…they made the kids dance like they weren’t supposed to.”

Kreutzmann: “I played in a band called the Legends, and we’d play at YMCA dances, and there’d be fights and the usual stuff. The kids liked us for some reason, though I can’t imagine that we were really any good. We’d play Chuck Berry and whatever was popular. It wasn’t too soulful, though, and I think I was probably the most serious about music then. We were just teenagers… We got better, and eventually we got this black singer who came down from San Francisco, and he fronted the band real neatly.”

McNally: “Fronted by a black vocalist named Jay Price, the Legends were more an R&B than a rock band, covering James Brown, Junior Walker, Freddie King, the Isley Brothers’ ‘Shout,’ and Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say.’ They wore red coats, black pants, and black ties, and played YMCA dances, fraternity parties, and shows at Moffett Field, the local navy airstrip, which frequently ended in brawls.”

Kreutzmann had left the Legends a year or two earlier, and I don't know what bands (if any) he played with in 1965. He was still in his last year of high school and would graduate that year.

THE WARLOCKS

While Garcia's discovery of the name "Grateful Dead" has become band lore, there is no such story for how they were initially named the Warlocks. Many names were considered - "all sorts of names were giggled over, then rejected." One dreadful fate was narrowly averted: according to Hank Harrison, "Bob Weir suggested the Hobbits, which was what he was reading at the time." (David Grisman recalled, "They were all reading The Hobbit.”)

There are no warlocks in Tolkien - although, coincidentally, Tolkien did write the definitions for "warlock" in the 1928 Oxford English Dictionary. (Def. 4: "One in league with the devil and so possessing occult and evil powers; a sorcerer, wizard (sometimes partly imagined as inhuman or demonic); the male equivalent of witch." - vol.12, p.100.) They might have turned up in other fantasy novels Garcia read, but Garcia simply explained, “Warlocks is just a word that means male witches.”

One possibility is that the name came from the ABC sitcom "Bewitched," then in its first season and one of the most popular shows in the country, with its witches and warlocks secretly using magic in the everyday world. A wave of warlocks swept the country as bands everywhere started calling themselves Warlocks - including several high school bands in the Bay Area.

https://deadsources.blogspot.com/2018/03/1965-warlocks-massachusetts.html?showComment=1521183626662#c7360197738208749435

There's no definite date for when the Warlocks formed - some say fall '64, but this seems too early. But it was sometime around New Year's - Mother McCree's seems to have been disbanded in January '65. One bit of evidence comes from a list of songs Pigpen drew up, apparently for the Warlocks to rehearse sometime between December & February. (See the appendix here:

https://deadessays.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-songs-warlocks-played.html )

One music student writes: "When I turned 14 (old enough to get a work permit) in January 1965, Mr. Morgan hired me to work in the store's office on Saturdays. A band would rehearse there while I was filing papers. They were the Warlocks."

The Warlocks rehearsed for several months before making their public debut. Both Weir and Kreutzmann were still in high school, Morgan was running the store, and everyone (except Pigpen) was giving lessons at the store, so rehearsal time was probably limited during these months.

Blair Jackson writes that they could "take electric instruments off the walls and out of the store window in Dana Morgan's and play them after hours. There was one rule: no new instruments; only used ones."

Kreutzmann: "We used to rehearse at Dana Morgan's...and we practiced there mostly because we got the instruments for free, because the bass player's father owned the music store. So after hours [we] used to take instruments off the wall when the shop was closed and we'd start a jam session. Those were our first rehearsals, in this little music store. I had a little drum set out there and they'd take guitars off the wall to play."

Margaret Bell: "Jerry Garcia worked at Dana Morgan’s Music Store in the mid-60’s…I took lessons from him, at first…then baby-sat for his daughter, Heather, while the band (the Warlocks) practiced…then started hanging out on Sundays at Dana Morgan’s to watch the Warlocks practice…this was when Dana was the bass player. They’d send me for lemonade and donuts..."

Sue Swanson: “Dana Morgan was the bass player then and they used to practice at his father’s store. They did a lot of traditional stuff – I Know You Rider and things like that. They would listen to a lot of 45s to learn songs. My job was to change the 45s. ‘Play that part again!’ It was a crummy little phonograph that would sit on the counter at Dana Morgan’s. I’ll never forget the sound of them practicing in there, and all the cymbals and everything in the whole room would be making all this noise.”

David Nelson: “I remember the Warlocks rehearsing at Hamilton Street a little bit [where he lived in early '65]. I remember the first rehearsals at Dana Morgan’s: me and Eric Thompson went over and checked them out. Garcia was just railing on Weir: ‘No, no, goon child! No, no, I told you a thousand times!’ He’d be yelling about some passage in the song. ‘Let’s try it again.’ But it was all very good-humored; everybody was laughing.”

"Weir was just a green kid, unbelievably green... I've got to hand it to Weir, he hung in there and got better."

Nelson also described this incident to David Gans: "Eric [Thompson] comes by one [afternoon] to Gilman Street and says, “Hey, they're practicing down at Dana Morgan's Music Store right now...” I said, “Yeah? Let's go over.” So we walked over there, and there they are in the window and Garcia's going to Weir, “No, no, no, not like that you goony child!” I thought, oh man.

Gans: Jerry was being mean to Bob?


Nelson: We thought that's awful hard to take. I don't know if I could stand that, man.

Gans: Being yelled at by Jerry?


Nelson: Because we would be in the same position."

Dexter Johnson: “I remember seeing the Warlocks at some dive over by the railroad tracks playing rhythm & blues. I also remember coming to Dana Morgan’s one afternoon…to buy picks or strings, and they were practicing and they were doing 'Money.' I didn’t think it was as good as the hit on the radio. I still listened to teenage radio and I was thinking, ‘Why would he do this?’ ...I remember being really disappointed that [Garcia] had any interest at all in playing the electric guitar.”

BEATLES VS. STONES

Weir: “The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock & roll band. What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn’t think of anything else more worth doing.”

Garcia: The Warlocks "didn’t have any real background in playing loud rock & roll. But the Beatles were a big impetus."

“We had big ideas. I mean, as far as we were concerned, we were going to be the next Beatles… We had enough of that kind of crazy faith in ourselves.”

A Hard Day's Night came out in August 1964 and had quite an impact among Garcia's friends.

Lesh initially thought the Beatles were "too clean": “I hated the Beatles at first, and then I went to see A Hard Day’s Night. I was the only guy in a theater full of screaming chicks. I said, ‘There’s got to be something to this!’ Then I started to let my hair grow long.”

When David Nelson listened to Meet the Beatles with Garcia, at first he thought "this is going to make me puke," but by the end they decided “the verdict was iffy.” “Later the movie A Hard Day’s Night came out. A friend called me up and said, ‘You gotta see it, man. I think they smoke pot.’ So I went to see it and I went, ‘Oh my God! They’re smoking it!’”

Sara Garcia: “The Beatles’ first record in this country was in ’63. At that time, we were dismissing them as a pop phenomenon; lightweight… When A Hard Day’s Night came out, we started changing our minds about the Beatles. They were a trip and there was something inspiring about these smart adorable talented guys our own age getting to make a movie about themselves being very silly. We could identify with that kind of irreverent off-the-wall zaniness. By the end of 1964 or in early 1965, we got turned on to acid. That changed everything. By the time Help came out [in August 1965]…Sue Swanson and I saw Help about twelve times and memorized every line.”

Garcia: “All of a sudden there were the Beatles, and…Hard Day’s Night, the movie and everything. Hey great, that really looks like fun… They were real important to everybody. They were a little model of good times, especially the movies – the movies were a big turn-on… It was like saying, ‘You can be young, you can be far-out, and you can still make it.’ They were making people happy.”

Sara Garcia: “When we took acid, we started listening to the Beatles. Dylan’s first electric album came out right about then, too. We had been putting him down. But taking acid and listening to that album was incredible. So the resistance to amplified music waned.”

(Garcia was turned on to Dylan in early '65. "I dug his stuff really from Bringing It All Back Home. Back in the folk music days I couldn't really dig [Dylan's] stuff, but on Bringing It All Back Home he was really saying something that I could dig, that was relevant to what was going on in my life at the time."

The album was released in March 1965. "As a folkie, I found him reprehensible... The first time I heard Bringing It All Back Home, I went over to Eric Thompson's place...and on the record player [it] was playing... I had seen Bob Dylan on the Les Crane Show [on Feb 17], and he sang 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue' [with Bruce Langhorne]... I thought that was just gorgeous, I thought it was really a lovely-sounding song. I didn't really catch it on the TV, but then I recognized it [on] the record. And when I heard it, I played it over and over and over again since it sounded so great.")

Weir, the youngest of the Warlocks, was perhaps the biggest Beatles fan among them.

Sue Swanson: “I went to Menlo-Atherton High School and in my junior year, Bob Weir walked into my world history class... This was after the first Beatles summer [the Beatles had played at the Cow Palace on 8/19/64]…and he overheard me and my friend Sue Ashcroft talking about the Beatles concert and how my friend Connie and I had gotten into the garage of their hotel. Weir went, ‘Are you talking about the Beatles?’ That was the first thing he ever said to me.”

Sue would become close friends with Weir and his bandmates. "The first fans were Connie [Bonner] and me and Bob Matthews, Barney [Laird Grant] and Bobby Petersen. Connie and I were pretty wild. We used to do all kinds of crazy things, and we were up for it all. We were not exactly the kind of girls who stayed home and behaved. We were gone, we were history. One of the things we used to do was practice getting into hotel rooms - any band that came around we would break into their hotel rooms for practice so when the Beatles came to town we'd be ready! We always got in, too - Eric Burdon & the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, Chad & Jeremy, Sonny & Cher, the Rolling Stones. I asked Keith Richards, 'I know these guys who have a band - what can I tell them? What's your advice?' He said, 'Write your own songs.' So I passed along that information."

Skipping ahead a little bit to summer '65, the Beatles played the Cow Palace again on August 31. Beatles sites describe it as a typically frenzied show: “During the second show a group of fans broke through the barriers and rushed the stage. The Beatles were forced to wait backstage while order was restored.” “Partway through their set, an unruly crowd managed to push forward and rush the stage, causing the fainting of many fans while a fleeing Fab Four had to wait backstage until the frenzy diminished.” 

https://www.the-paulmccartney-project.com/concert/1965-08-31/ 

Sue and Connie were there, along with Weir and Lesh. Phil remembered going with Ken Kesey and the Pranksters: "Bobby and I had day-tripped on the bus to see the Beatles at the Cow Palace."

But per Carol Brightman's book "Sweet Chaos," Weir drove with Sue & Connie to the Cow Palace in Daly City. Swanson said she “wanted to support the new band and make it famous ‘so that then we might meet the Beatles’.” She chased the Beatles’ limo in her car up to the Cow Palace. “Weir, who was high on acid, sat between the two girls. ‘Don’t let them get away! Catch ‘em!’ they shouted, and he leapt out, scaled the chain-link fence, and sprinted down the concrete ramp after the disappearing car.”

The Pranksters' experience at the show was described by Tom Wolfe in the "Cloud" chapter of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. "Roaring hell...millions of screaming teeny freaks...gone raving mad...all transformed into one being...its scream does not subside for a moment...thousands of teeny bodies hurtling toward the stage...fainting and getting tromped on...a solid line of cops fighting to hurl the assault back..." 

Amidst the mob of screaming and fainting girls, the panicked Pranksters fled. "Kesey couldn't get over it. Kesey lost it," Garcia said. A disappointed Mountain Girl, who'd wanted to stay and see the rest of the show, grumbled, "Hell, I have to come here with a bunch of old men who never saw a rock 'n' roll show before."

Garcia, not as "rabid" as the others, didn't go. Weir would later see the Beatles again at their last show in Candlestick Park in 1966: “I caught both Beatle concerts when they played here. They were outasite.”

But while the Beatles served as a general inspiration for the Warlocks, their musical direction came from the Stones.

Justin Kreutzmann: “In the ’65 to ’66 period, they just basically wanted to be the Rolling Stones. That was what my dad said: they just wanted to make blues records like the Rolling Stones.”

Garcia: “Our earliest incarnation was kind of a blues band, in a way. We were kind of patterned along the same lines as the Rolling Stones. This was during the British Invasion. Everybody went and saw A Hard Day’s Night: ‘Yeah, that looks like fun. Let’s go play rock & roll!’ Me and Pigpen both had that background in the old Chess Records stuff – Chicago blues like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, and people like Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry. It was real natural for us, and we even did those kinds of tunes in the jug band. So it was an easy step to make into sort of a proto-blues band. The Stones were already doing all the old Muddy Waters stuff.”

“For me, the most resonant thing was hearing the Rolling Stones play music that I’d grown up with, the Chess stuff. That was surprising because it was music that had already happened in my life, and then hearing it again was like, ‘Right, that would be fun to play.’ In the Grateful Dead’s earliest version as a bar band, the option was to play Beatles stuff or Rolling Stones, and we always opted for whatever the Rolling Stones were doing – because we had a better understanding of where the music was coming from.”

"We got our first gigs because we were a blues-oriented Rolling Stones-style band."

Musician Mike Shapiro recalls: “Jerry Garcia saw something in the Rolling Stones. He really related to them. You might say he modeled his early style after them. I remember one day I was hanging out at Dana Morgan Music in the back. I knew Dana Morgan and the instrument repair guy Fred. I knew the whole family, really.

Jerry Garcia had a teaching alcove underneath the stairs leading up to a storage room. He was intently studying the guitar solo of “Heart Of Stone” when suddenly he shouted “I got it!” to no one in particular. He came running out of the alcove with his Guild guitar in one hand over his head. He had cracked the code of what Keith Richards was doing in his solo, which was a series of run together triplets. If you listen to Jerry’s early solos with the Grateful Dead you would hear that exact form where he runs together triplets forever!!”

The Stones were the perpetual soundtrack of the time. (Their latest album was The Rolling Stones, Now! released in February '65.) Lesh describes a typical house party, "dancers gyrating and swaying to the Rolling Stones." Hank Harrison remembers when "Garcia and Weir came over [to Phil's house] to listen to Stones' music." Lesh was not only a Stones listener (particularly taken by 'The Last Time'), he even went to see one of their shows before joining the Warlocks.

The Stones played at the Civic Auditorium on May 14, 1965. (The opening bands included the Byrds, the Beau Brummels, the Vejtables, and Paul Revere & the Raiders.)

Lesh: “The Stones made their first appearance in San Francisco in ’65. That was the one where the kids rushed the stage, the cops were trying to keep them off, and Jagger was doing his dance around the cops with his microphone cord and tripping them up. It was far out! [Danny] Rifkin led the entire Haight community dancing through the aisles.”

Hank Harrison: “It was a panic scene. The San Francisco Civic Auditorium was jammed with neo-dropouts of every style… San Francisco State scene goin' full blast, Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully flippin' out... The Civic Auditorium was packed to the rafters, people screamin' and stoned.”

Other accounts disagree about how full it was. Carl Scott (booking agent): “From a promotional standpoint it was a complete failure. Hardly anyone showed up. It was really too early for the Stones. Nobody knew who they were.”

George Hunter (later in the Charlatans): “There were maybe 500 people down there. It was pretty amazing. We had some idea of who the Stones were.”

Ron Nagle (member of the Mystery Trend): “The Stones concert was a big deal, probably one of the most moving experiences of my life. Right there in the Civic Auditorium people were rolling in the aisles, blacks and whites together – it was unbelievable. Charlie Watts got yanked off his stool. Real bedlam.”

Bill Wyman: “20 police onstage with us at the end of the show to protect us from the fans.”

Many of the musicians in the audience would soon be in their own bands. Even Chet Helms was so impressed he "briefly tried to put a band together."

Ralph Gleason: “When the Rolling Stones played the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, many people saw for the first time the gathering of the tribes that would be repeated again…from the Great Be-In through the free concerts in the parks.”

Tom Donahue: “At the Rolling Stones show, they were all there but they didn’t recognize each other.”

Dennis McNally: "When it was over, many of those hip young people left the show by snake-dancing down the aisle."

I don't think Garcia saw the Stones in '65, but a year later he made sure to. When they played the Cow Palace on 7/26/66, Jefferson Airplane (one of the openers) snuck Garcia backstage as a member of their crew so he could see the Stones.

PHIL

Lesh and Garcia had known each other since the Chateau days in 1961. They had a kind of mutual admiration society, each in different genres of music. As Garcia said, “We were in two totally different worlds, musically.”

Lesh had not been interested in folk music, but after hearing Garcia play at a party, "I just had this flash: 'God, this guy sounds really good, he makes the music live'... So that quickened my interest in that kind of music, and so I listened to it closer and found that there were things to enjoy in it." Later on, "Jerry was into the banjo. I was so astounded by Jerry's playing - I've never yet heard anyone play the banjo like that. It was the most inventive, most musical kind of banjo playing you could ever imagine."

Garcia: Phil "was studying music seriously - you'd go over to his house and find orchestra charting paper and incredible symphonies, man, all meticulously rapidographed... Phil has absolute pitch and this incredible vast store of musical knowledge, just the complete classical music education. And he'd been a trumpet player, that's what he played. So anytime I did anything musical, he was always turned on by the music..."

For more details on Phil's early career, check out the recent Deadcast: https://www.dead.net/deadcast/phil-85-part-1

Phil's goal in the early '60s was to become a composer, but by 1965 he found himself washed up. "I was trying to compose again and I couldn't. I'd composed myself into a corner. I couldn't get back to the state of mind I was in... I walked away from music as a participant, essentially...but I was listening to everything I could suck up."

Lesh: “The thing I had written in 1963 was a huge orchestral work called “Foci” for four orchestras. It required 125 players and four conductors. Needless to say, it will be difficult to perform it... I didn’t have anything more to say. That was in 1964. I wasn’t doing anything for a while. Except getting high a lot. I was trying to compose some stuff. But that was about the time I got dried out. I came to the end of the road, and the opportunities for having what I’d written performed were so limited, and the way I would have to channel my musical thinking was unpleasant to contemplate.”

After a while, he gave up his composing dreams. "I was at a musical dead end, so I just stopped being a musician and began driving a truck for the U.S. Postal Service."

He wrote: "My involvement with music had dwindled to almost nothing...oh, I would occasionally think about maybe composing something, or maybe going back to school to study conducting. That period wasn't a total loss, however, as I was introduced to the work of Bob Dylan."

Eventually he even had to quit the post office after they received a complaint that he looked like an "unkempt monkey." “The rest of that spring I spent sitting around letting my hair grow and taking acid, fucking off, having fun, and being supported by my girlfriend… Somebody came in with the news that Garcia had gotten himself a rock & roll band.”

Lesh: “Me and my old lady went to a party in Palo Alto; Garcia was there. I’d been listening to the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and stuff like that. Jerry and I were raving - you know, 'Where's the pot, man?' 'It's on its way - my rhythm guitar player's going to get it.' Bob [Weir] was at this party, and we sat in Garcia's car and smoked. At some point during this party, I mentioned to Garcia that I might like to get into playing some electric instrument...I said, maybe bass guitar… It was a stoned moment, and I didn't think anything more about it.”

Another account: "At some party...we'd just been to see the Rolling Stones, and the Byrds had been in town...and I just happened to mention in passing to Garcia...he was at the party too, we were both stoned out of our minds, he had the band even then, Weir came along with some grass and we went along to the car and got high...and I happened to mention sometime during that evening to Garcia, "I think I'll take up the electric bass and join a band." (In his book Lesh specifically mentions talking to Garcia about how he’d been struck by the Stones song 'The Last Time,' which came out in March ’65.)

Hank Harrison describes a (possibly imaginary) party he places on the night of May 14: "After the Stones' concert, Phil 'n Ruth sprung up to 1090 Page... Janis Joplin and some of the Charlatans jammin' in the basement ballroom, with Phil and Ruth standin' around and the Albin Brothers were there and David Freiberg and Gary Duncan were there...and Jerry Garcia was there and he sez to Phil, 'Come on down next week; we've got a gig at a pizza joint called Magoo's!' Phil was kind of tired...and said, 'Yeah, okay,' holding back his excitement."

MAGOO’S PIZZA

After a few months of rehearsing in the store, the Warlocks had found their first place to play: a Menlo Park pizza parlor on 639 Santa Cruz Ave. Magoo's called itself "the family spot" and featured weekly music, folksingers and such, though I don't know if many rock bands played there. Their ads in the Stanford Daily sometimes said, "Bring your guitars and other instruments." Generally Friday & Saturday were the live entertainment nights: "folk songs - ballads - humor - bluegrass." 

In the first week of May '65, they ran this mysterious ad:

https://jerrybase.com/venues/1

https://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/12/magoos-pizza-635-or-639-santa-cruz.html

Garcia said the Warlocks played three shows there on Wednesday nights - but despite the confidence of Dead setlist sites, the dates are not known for sure. (There's also a chance at least one show was on the weekend.) At any rate, the Magoo's shows are thought to have taken place between May 5 and May 26.

(David Browne's book So Many Roads has a good account of the last show at Magoo's, in chapter 2.)

Garcia talked about these shows a number of times, his initiation into playing rock & roll:

“We were playing at this pizza parlor: this is like our first gig, we were the Warlocks, with the music store owner playing bass and Bobby and me and Pigpen and Bill. And so we went and played three gigs at that pizza parlor… The first night at the pizza place nobody was there. The next week, when we played there again it was a Wednesday night, there was a lot of kids there; and then the third night there was three or four hundred people all up from the high schools, and in there was this rock & roll band. We were playing, people were freaking out.”

“When we were in the Warlocks, the first time we played in public, we had a huge crowd of people from the local high school, and they went fucking nuts! The next time we played it was packed to the rafters. It was a pizza place. We said, ‘Hey, can we play in here on Wednesday night? We won’t bother anybody. Just let us set up in the corner.’ It was pandemonium, immediately.”

"Our very first appearance was a total knock-out. Magoo's in Menlo Park. We talked the guy into letting us play, we set up and there was pandemonium. None of us expected that kind of reception. We caught fire right away. It really blew our minds... [An] overwhelming crowd of high-school kids came to see us."

The kids were local high-schoolers that Sue and Connie and Bob Matthews had roused up through enthusiastic word-of-mouth. (Matthews recalls, "A bunch of people from my high school would come down on Friday nights to hear this band, because they were a good dance band.")

But some in the crowd were just regular patrons who happened to be there. Donn Paulk, aged 10, writes: "Back in 1965 our family often went to McGoo's in Menlo Park, and Big Al's in Redwood City... I remember that there were not very many people there and it wasn't very crowded... There were kids there who came to hear the music, there were families there who came to eat pizza, and there were families like ours who came to eat pizza and hear the music. We liked to come hear all the bands play. I remember the Warlocks although I can't recall any of the specific songs they played. Several of the songs were instrumentals. Many were bluesy and R&B songs that were popular at the time. It was great fun!"

(Judging by the lack of a crowd, his family probably came the first night the Warlocks played.)

Needless to say, Sue & Connie wouldn't miss it:

"Of course we were there. Sounded wonderful!!!!!! Jerry, Bobby, Pig, Billy and Dana Morgan on bass. The boys just played through their own amps...they carried their own equipment and set it up and tore it down... Very small pizza parlor. BIG fun. We had the nerve to bitch at them for SITTING DOWN on stools and turning away from the audience! for a song or two. Can you believe it?... I think the stool and the laid back attitude towards the audience was from their folkie style."

Connie Bonner commented on the first Magoo's show in a recent Deadcast: "They had them up against the front window...I remember Jerry sitting on a stool and facing Weir and not looking at the audience...and after we said, 'You need to get rid of that stool and stand up, you need to play rock & roll!'...and so he got rid of the stool."

https://www.dead.net/deadcast/enjoying-ride-bay-area-part-1 (26m)

Philip Brown wrote a long account of seeing one show:

“A friend of mine heard that a really good band was going to be playing at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in nearby Menlo Park. It was May, 1965, and I was a junior in high school. This band, the Warlocks, had played one night already and word was spreading that this was some great music.

Although memory is a bit tricky, I seem to recall that they played two sets and that my friends and I arrived during their first set. I do know that they were already playing when we arrived. A girl I knew from my high school was there—much to my surprise because she was not part of my own hip little clique. She was dancing on the sidewalk, as were a number of other people… That was my first clue that something amazing was going on. Dancing on the sidewalk in Menlo Park? That was almost like a guy not getting a haircut. Or painting a school bus with psychedelic colors.

I was with a group of three or four friends. The atmosphere inside Magoo’s was strictly pizza parlor—bright overhead lights, long tables, ovens in the back. The band was set up by the front plate glass window, confined to a rather narrow area without a stage. Jerry Garcia was on the audience’s left, Pigpen on the far right. Those two, especially, looked somewhat menacing (at least to a suburban 15 year-old). They reminded me of outlaw bikers. Bob Weir, Dana Morgan, and Bill Kreutzmann were clean-shaven and looked more like guys you might see in a high school band.

The music was stunning. I have never forgotten it, although I cannot recall the specific set list. I think they did some Stones covers and I know that Pigpen sang “Little Red Rooster.” They were not the psychedelic Dead or the Americana Dead. The music I heard was raw rhythm and blues, propelled to a large extent by Pigpen’s animal magnetism.”

(He and Lesh both said the Warlocks played two "sets" at Magoo's.)

Of course, Garcia's friends came to see his new band too - everyone was invited. John Dawson said, "I was at the Warlocks' first gig at Magoo's." Robert Hunter said the second show was "wonderful;" Laird Grant was at Magoo's, Dave Parker (from McCree's) also came, and I believe Nelson did too. And at the last show, Phil Lesh arrived.

Hank Harrison brought a troupe of his friends after they all took LSD: “First time I got to know Garcia, he was playing in Pigpen’s band, called the Warlocks, in Menlo Park at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor… Paul Stubbins and me and Bobby Petersen and Phil Lesh all came down in my car… Marmaduke was at that Magoo’s gig – John Dawson...as was Dave Nelson, quiet in the corner waiting patiently to join Garcia… Dave Parker, the Dead’s eventual business manager, was at Magoo’s that night, too… It was really high that night – but it wasn’t folk music, nobody knew what it was – it was intense and alien. We boogied and got off on the Warlocks. Phil stood up on the redwood table and danced – the one and only time I ever saw him dance. Phil’s head was reeling; his mailman gig was over.”

(McNally: "Lesh began to dance, and was told by the pizza parlor management to stop. Kreutzmann would recall his long blond hair shaking away, and the ensuing argument.")

Garcia: “Phil came down from San Francisco with some friends because they heard we had a rock & roll band, and he wanted to hear what our rock & roll band was like; and it was a flash to see Phil because he had a Beatle haircut, and he’d been working for the post office and living in the Haight Ashbury. He wasn’t playing any music though, and he wasn’t writing or composing or anything, and I said, ‘Hey listen man, why don’t you play bass with us, because I know how musical you are, I know you’ve got absolute pitch and it wouldn’t take you too long, and I could show you some stuff to get started.’ He said, ‘Yeah well, that’d be far-out.’”

Lesh: “Somebody came in with the word that Garcia’s band was playing – at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor… We took acid and went down there: Harrison, myself, Petersen, [his girlfriend] Jane, and my girlfriend [Ruth]. We came bopping in there, and it was really happening. Pigpen ate my mind with the harp, singing the blues. They wouldn’t let you dance, but I did anyway – we were so fucking stoned!

During the set break, Jerry took me off to a table and said, ‘How’d you like to play bass in this band? Our bass player is not a musician, and we have to tell him what notes to play.’

I said, ‘By god, I’ll give it a try.’”

Another account from Lesh: "We go down to hear the band, and Garcia takes me aside and puts a beer in my hand and says, "Listen man, you're gonna play bass in my band." "But I...er...who me? Well Jesus, that might be possible." Actually, it excited the shit out of me because it was something to do. And the flash was, "Oh shit, you mean I can get paid for having fun!" Of course, it was so ironic because before I'd gotten to the point where I just wanted to quit music entirely, I hated rock'n'roll music, I didn't think it was anything, I hated it, I thought it was so lame. I said, "What can you do with three chords?"'

Hank Harrison: "After the gig, we all went over to Garcia’s house… Garcia pulled out a weird little book by Edward Gorey ["The Nursery Frieze," pub. 1964]... We all sat around the room on the floor and Garcia sat in his chair and held forth like a king with his court... Sara was changing the baby's diaper at the point where we had to split." Lesh has a very different version in his book (where he goes to Garcia's house after the gig for a quiet lesson in the living room while Sara sleeps), but it seems more likely that the whole gang went over.

Per McNally, Bobby Petersen told Garcia they'd all taken LSD. Garcia's reply: "Gee, if I'd known you were doing acid, I'd have taken you on a better trip...I could never play doing acid." Garcia had only taken it for the first time a few weeks earlier.

The Warlocks would not be able to play again at Magoo's. Not for the last time, their local audience had grown bigger than the venue. One Palo Altoan remembers "the Warlocks used to play at Magoo's Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park, until the crowds got so big that the police shut it down."

Connie Bonner thinks the last show may have been on a Saturday: "The sidewalk was packed with high school kids, teenagers... The neighboring shops shut it down, they called the cops and said, 'You can't have all these people crowding the sidewalks and blocking my business'... They were all peering in the window to watch the band, they couldn't fit any more people in the pizza parlor."

Lesh heard a different story: “Magoo’s, unfortunately, had discontinued live music because people just wouldn’t stop dancing!”

Menlo School

In the meantime, the Warlocks played one other show while Dana Morgan was in the band, in the student union at Menlo School.

https://jerrybase.com/events/19650521-01

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2011/09/september-1965-dining-hall-menlo.html

Earlier the show was thought to have taken place in April, or perhaps later in September, but the actual date seems to have been during finals week in May, in the midst of the Magoo's shows.

Per Ron Pietrowski in the 30 Trips book: "It was the spring of 1965 and I was a senior at Menlo School finishing term papers and getting ready for finals when a friend told me that Bob was in a band called The Warlocks and they were playing that night at the student union, which the school shared with Menlo College. (Bob had gone to Menlo School before transferring to Menlo Atherton.)... That night I walked over to the student union to see the band. There was no stage. They just set up right on the floor just inside and to the left of the doors. There were between 60 to 100 people there. I remember Big Boss Man and Midnight Hour and not much else."

One witness says, "I was a student at Menlo College when the Warlocks played there. The school put on what was called "Menlo mixers" which was basically a way for the guys to meet women from around the area. Since Menlo was an all-male school at the time it was a great way to meet women. The Warlocks were ok. Nothing great as I recall. Most of the bands that played at the Menlo mixers played the standards of the time, "Louie Louie" was a favorite."

Pietrowski also recalled the show in a Deadcast: "It wasn't real loud... They were good for what they were doing, which was R&B covers, radio hits" including 'Midnight Hour.' He was impressed by Pigpen: "He sang most of the songs - he had this presence... When he played harmonica he was kind of lurching around. He was like the lead man of the band." There were maybe 50 people max in the audience, but "there wasn't much dancing - people were mostly standing around watching them play."

Connie Bonner also went, and felt the show wasn't as good as Magoo's: it felt uptight and "wasn't any fun" (partly due to the lack of girls).

https://www.dead.net/deadcast/enjoying-ride-bay-area-part-1 (28m)

PHIL JOINS

Garcia: “I didn’t think bass guitar was important, but the first guy we had was pretty bad, so we brought in Phil Lesh. Lesh was this wonderful, serious, arrogant youth, a composer of modernist music. He only played the trumpet then, but he had perfect pitch.”

Weir: “We started to get a following pretty quickly around the mid-Peninsula and were getting a lot of gigs. Dana couldn’t keep up with the music store and the band, and so Phil (who was an old friend of Garcia’s) came down to listen one night, and we mutually decided that he could play bass with a little practice. He had never played bass, but he’d seriously studied classical music and got good enough to hold down the low end…”

John Dawson: “They had Dana Morgan on the bass because he was the guy that owned the music shop that was supplying all the instruments for them. He turned out not to be a very good bass player and they had to get rid of him. Jerry remembered he had this old friend, Phil Lesh, who was hanging out up in San Francisco and was an excellent musician, although he hadn’t played any bass. He called him up and said, ‘Hey, we need a bass player. Come on down.’ And so he came down and took up the job.”

Garcia: “It was obvious to me: ‘Right on. Phil would love this!’ It just seemed like that kind of thing. I knew he could do it – I didn’t even have to think about that. But he was a friend; I didn’t call him as a stranger, or even as a guy I knew that played.”

Weir: “We were talking about the problem of Dana Morgan not being able to make the rehearsals and gigs, and Garcia said he knew a guy who was a great musician, who wrote music and played trumpet and was particularly crazy and fun to be with. He said, ‘He doesn’t play the bass, but if we give him a couple of weeks I’m sure he could.’”

Garcia: “We got him an old guitar to practice on and borrowed a bass for him, and about two weeks later we rehearsed for a week, and we went out and started playing together.”

Lesh: "I was so excited that I didn't have to think about it."

Garcia: “We were all playing very different music to each other when the Warlocks started out. But it could work, and that was one of the things that turned me on about it, because I could include friends who weren’t specifically in the music I was involved with; but I would rather play with friends than people I didn’t know.”

Hank Harrison: “During the first proto-Dead gig at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park, Phil was completely blown away by Garcia’s offer to form a permanent band. He went home, borrowed a 6-string electric guitar from his upstairs neighbor Tom Purvis…and started to play bass lines on it. A few days later he bought his first Fender [sic – actually a Gibson] and within two weeks was up to speed on the [Warlocks] repertoire. When they first crammed into a four-by-four practice room behind Guitars Unlimited on El Camino in Menlo Park, it was awkward for Phil; the best he could do was stay in there and cook, which he did admirably.”

Lesh: “When I first played an electric instrument, I played it for seven hours straight, and I couldn’t sleep that night. It got me so high that I knew something had to be happening; something extremely different from acoustic. Then, of course, you start taking acid, and the phenomenon magnifies further, and you are hooked on electricity.”

Harrison: “Phil never thought he’d play the bass. In fact, he always felt a bit intimidated by the incredible genius of Lenny Lasher, a jazz & first-chair bassist with the San Francisco Symphony who jammed with Phil at the College of San Mateo in 1959 and ’60. They stayed friends, however, and when Phil joined the Warlocks he looked up Len Lasher who was living in Bernal Heights at the time, and asked his advice.”

Lesh's book mentions an initial brief lesson from Garcia: "The bottom four strings on a guitar are tuned the same as the four strings of a bass, so borrow a guitar from somebody and practice scales on it until you can get down here and we'll start rehearsing."

"As soon as I got back [home] I borrowed a guitar from my roommate Tom Purvis...and started with the scales."

Lesh wrote, "In June 1965 I'd moved down to Palo Alto...Jerry had already set up a rental room for me in a communal house." This was the house on Gilman Street where several of Garcia's friends like Nelson & Thompson lived; Lesh moved in on June 7. Since the house was full of guitar players, he got quite a bit of advice from everyone as he started learning bass. In fact everyone in the house seems to have given Phil tips on the bass - practically the same tips, too.

Eric Thompson: “I remember exactly when it was clear that Dana Jr was not exactly with the program on bass. Jerry said, ‘We’re gonna get Phil.’ Phil moved to the room across from me in this house, and he’d never touched an electric bass before. I remember him picking up the bass for the first time and saying, ‘Oh, how does this work?’ and he started figuring out how to play scales on it immediately, very methodically.”

(Michael K. writes, "Eric Thompson told me that he was the one who showed Lesh how to tune a bass guitar around this time.")

John Dawson: "Phil came down one day and I got to meet Phil. They were in the back room at Dana's and they said, 'Here Phil, here's a bass.' And Phil said, 'What do I do with it?' And I said, 'This is the A string, this is the E string, and you get to make the E string be the same as the A string by pushing on the fifth fret, and then the same tone. The basic beat is boom boom, boom boom, and then you need to go up to here, boom boom, boom boom.' I just showed him which string was which, and where an E was on the A string. He picked up on that right away."

David Nelson told Gans he was living on Gilman Street when "Jerry asked me to show Phil something about the bass – about a fretted stringed instrument.


Gans: Because he had never played one.

Nelson: “I'd be glad to.” I forget what it was, though. I think it was more than just telling him, but it might have been just that – it was Jerry's not going to be available that day and he wanted me to tell him because he's getting his bass. Because he got a room at Gilman Street...

Gans: He moved in and joined the band.

Nelson: He's got his room, and so maybe I gave him the first talk and I said, you know, “Tuning is this, and each fret's a half step, blah, blah, blah.” Phil goes, “Got it. That's all I need to know.” And I showed him bass positions because I had played bass before, and I said, “Here’s the basic thing they use. This finger's for the tonic and here's a boogie pattern...” I think I showed him that or something like that and he goes, “Okay, thanks Dave.” And then every day I’d hear the guy practicing on the electric instrument without an amp.

Gans: It's the clatter of the string on the frets.

Nelson: All day, every day."

Typically the story is told from Phil's side, but from the perspective of Garcia's friends, Lesh had been an elusive character who wasn't in Garcia's usual circles and certainly not a prospective musical partner. From Nelson's point of view, "Jerry found Phil, because Phil was always going to Las Vegas or he was studying classical music under Berio and stuff like that, or jazz trumpet, and the big news was, Wow, we found Phil! And he's coming, and he's going to play bass."

Sue Swanson remembers it a little differently than Lesh and thinks he needed more convincing: “I drove Jerry up to the city the day that he went to find Phil to get him to play in the band. We went up in my car. It just wasn’t working with Dana Morgan playing bass.”

Lesh was then living in Haight-Ashbury; he had drifted in & out of Palo Alto, there mainly on visits, hence more a person Garcia met at parties than someone to do musical projects with. But Garcia had admired Phil for a while, and he was glad to finally have an opportunity to work with him - even jumping at the chance. Indeed, for Garcia to invite Phil to be bass-player, he might have been thinking about it for quite some time before then.

It seems Garcia told Weir and others he was planning to ask Lesh to join (Thompson: "We're gonna get Phil;" Swanson: "He went to find Phil;" Nelson: "Wow, we found Phil!"). As far as we know, Garcia didn't invite anyone else (like, say, David Nelson) to be the new bass player - he had his mind set on Phil. And yet, once Lesh moved in with Garcia's friends, the Warlocks became a kind of communal project where everyone could help out.

DANA'S OUT

No one has ever told the story of how they told Dana he'd been replaced. In fact there's some disagreement about just why they kicked him out - was it because he couldn't play well? (Garcia: “The first guy we had was pretty bad.”) Or because he was too busy? (Weir: “Dana couldn’t keep up with the music store and the band.”)

Weir: “[The Warlocks] played for about six months that way, and then the son of the owner of the store couldn’t make our rehearsal schedule, not to mention our gig schedule, and had to drop out… By this time Garcia and I were both working in another music store anyway, part-time. We had large clienteles. We sort of hustled together – we already had a following at that point, so we just sort of added Phil and we were a working band.”

Weir (1972): “It got to the point where we became a serious hard-working young rock & roll band, and he couldn’t make it anymore. He was only in it for the flash anyway!”

Kreutzmann (1966): “He couldn’t play six nights a week at the club and things, so we found another bass player.”

Kreutzmann (2014): "Dana, God bless him, wasn't the best bass player."

Blair Jackson: “Dana Jr. was having trouble juggling his obligations to the store and being in a band at the same time, so it was no surprise that he quickly bowed out of the Warlocks.”

Dennis McNally: “The bass player, Dana Morgan, wasn’t really a musician, and he couldn’t make weekend gigs because of a National Guard obligation. Moreover, his wife didn’t particularly care for the other Warlocks.”

Lesh: "Jerry said, ‘Our bass player is not a musician, and we have to tell him what notes to play.’"

John Dawson: “I was at the Warlocks’ first gig at the pizza parlor at Magoo’s. This was when they finally got all their shit together. I think they rehearsed in Dana’s for the first one and then they got this gig at Magoo’s. The thing about Dana was that he had all the stuff to play on, so they let him be the bass player. He couldn’t play bass for shit, man. They gave him the best break possible and he just couldn’t do it.”

But Dana's cousin says "his bass playing wasn't bad at all," and even Hank Harrison called him "a fairly good bass player." There seem to have been multiple pressures pushing Dana out of the band. Garcia in particular was apparently the one most critical of Dana's playing. Whether or not Dana could have improved on bass, he was co-owner of the music store and did not have the kind of free time for rehearsals the others had. His father Dana Sr. hated the Warlocks and wanted them out of the store (more on that later). The Warlocks barely played any shows in May so it wasn't yet a question of his not making their "gig schedule;" but for a band looking for venues to play, a guy who couldn't play on weekends and might have trouble meeting nightly club dates was not an ideal member. (It's telling that he stayed in the band through months of informal rehearsals then dropped out once they started playing in public.) In short, Dana just wasn't as committed as the others to regular work in the Warlocks, nor was he (or his family) close friends with Garcia, so his days in the band were probably numbered from the start.

David Browne's book So Many Roads portrays Dana as someone who just didn't fit in the band: "too square, too straight, too disinterested in getting stoned...didn't seem all that interested in pot...preppy wardrobe," and in short, an unlikely Warlock. He wanted to be in a band and offered to play bass in exchange for loaning their instruments (although Garcia may have "put a good charm offensive on Dana" for the free gear). Apparently he was not happy about being fired, and the Warlocks were no longer welcome in the store.

Marshall Leicester had a different perspective:

“In terms of forming the Warlocks, I especially remember Lesh as being the decisive force in that. It was not so much Lesh himself…but the moves that got Dana Morgan out of the band. That was the moment at which something which was partly being done as a concession to grown-up bourgeois life and the need to make money and all the rest of it turned into the possibility of making something greater. Dana was their original bass player. And when Lesh came along, it was a great deal more than a question of just replacing one musician with a better musician. Because Jerry took a real leap there.

“I remember some of us chicken bourgeois types being afraid he’d lose his job at Morgan’s by firing his boss’s son. But Lesh was adamant about that. I think some of us went to Phil at one point and said, ‘Would you back off a little? We’re worried about whether Jerry’s going to be able to survive.’ And Lesh said, ‘No way. I’ve waited too long for this.’ Phil was really ambitious and could be really hard-nosed in a way that was always difficult for Jerry.

“Yet what often looked like a kind of narcissism on Jerry’s part was in fact him being more intense and in a certain way much more ruthless than others. I heard people say that you hadn’t been dropped until you’d been dropped by Garcia. When you became no longer of interest to him because he was moving in a different direction.”

TRANSITION

Sue Swanson: “When they fired Dana from the band, it was tough. Jerry’s guitar was from Dana Morgan’s Music. So all of a sudden, he didn’t have an axe. I remember him and his wife Sara sitting there trying to figure it out: ‘We’ve got 200 dollars in the bank. How much is this axe? Maybe I can borrow money from my mom…’ I’m not sure how, but Jerry got the guitar. It was a lousy place to rehearse anyway. The whole room was instruments. There were cymbals all over the place. When they played there, everything played right back at them.”

Hank Harrison: "Dana Morgan's father held an intense dislike for the Warlocks and discouraged them from hanging around the shop... Garcia taught at the shop but would never pay for guitar strings according to Morgan Sr... Garcia had to leave the [shop] as the action in Dana Morgan's car port was getting far too wild."

A store employee: "Mr. Morgan told me he was relieved that his son, Dana Morgan Jr., had left the band, because they were so messy."

Dana Morgan Sr. said in a 1988 interview (to the Palo Alto Weekly) that he ‘was getting tired of the Warlocks practicing in his store. Besides, he was worried they were starting to smoke marijuana.’ “I decided I just hated the noise they were making. I can’t understand why they’re famous today. I put them out in the carport [to practice], but they kept sneaking back in. Finally, I got so tired of them, I sold the instruments.”

After Dana Sr. took back the band's equipment, they had to scramble to get replacements on loan. (Kreutzmann has said that Dana "gave us all the instruments and never asked for them back," but this does not seem believable.)

The band borrowed instruments from Swain’s House of Music (on University Ave). Robert & Pauline Swain ‘lent instruments to the band “because we liked to help young musicians.” Sometimes the band would practice in the store.’

Lesh: "We were all playing on borrowed amps at the time, and it would be several months and a few gigs until we would score some of our own, thanks to the generosity of Jerry's mom."

Garcia: “She did support the band at the very beginning and loaned us enough money to seed the instruments.”

Sandy Troy: “Garcia’s mother, Ruth, came to their rescue, loaning the band the money to purchase the equipment they needed.”

Blair Jackson: “Garcia was forced to ask his mother, with whom he’d had very little contact during that period, to help him buy a guitar and amp, and…she agreed.”

(Bill Kreutzmann's parents seem to have helped out too.)

The band was also able to borrow instruments from Guitars Unlimited (on 1035 El Camino Real in Menlo Park). Garcia & Weir had been teaching there as well, so as with Dana Morgan's store, they had a connection with the owners and could use the store. Garcia apparently used the money from his mother to buy the red Guild Starfire he'd use for another two years. "I just liked the feel of it for some reason...I liked the thin-body sound."

Meanwhile Weir picked out a Gretsch - not coincidentally, a Beatle guitar. "I had no idea at that point what I was looking for... I was a complete novice at electric guitar. So I saw the Gretsch and I liked the way it felt. George Harrison played a Gretsch, and I thought that was pretty cool." (Blair Jackson's book Grateful Dead Gear has more details on how the Warlocks chose their first instruments, on pages 12-20.)

John Dawson: “So Phil came down and now the scene shifted to Guitars Unlimited in Menlo Park. Dana Morgan’s was no longer part of the scene. Now Jerry was teaching at Guitars Unlimited.”

Lesh: “After they split from Dana Morgan, who was the bass player and the son of the owner of the store where they had been rehearsing, they moved over to this place called Guitars Unlimited in Menlo Park. The guy there was real neat, and he just let me have a loaner to work with. Later my girlfriend bought me the bass. I hated the instrument - a single-pickup Gibson with a neck like a telephone pole - but it was the only one I could afford.”

(Lesh said of his first bass, "It was terrible," but he'd play it for another year until getting a Fender Jazz bass in summer '66.)

From his book: "Bob and Jerry were now teaching at Guitars Unlimited in Menlo Park, a large storefront full of guitars with a rehearsal room in the back. There, I found a Gibson [EB-0] electric bass that I (or rather Ruth, who was employed at the time and extraordinarily supportive) could afford. I always had a love-hate relationship with that bass; the neck was like a telephone pole, the strings weren't individually adjustable for height, and the one pickup seemed to be in the wrong place." But it was "easy to play."

Meanwhile, "We spent an awful lot of time practicing in the back of Guitar Unlimited in Menlo Park — about four hours a day."

Lesh evokes the rehearsal room: "Old equipment boxes were stacked along the walls, leaving just enough space for the drums, organ, and four amps." They started out with songs like 'I Know You Rider' and 'King Bee' - "everyone was very tolerant of my mistakes" since "everyone in the band was still learning his instrument."

Garcia also admitted, "I wasn't really too much of a guitar player when I started with the band." They both agreed, "We all learned how to play together." Lesh's misgivings about rock music were gone; excited about the new band, he looked forward to coming to rehearsals every day as they developed a daily routine. He practiced bass with the group more than on his own, feeling it would be better for him that way.

Lesh: “As soon as the first rehearsals started happening, I got over my nervousness over maybe not being able to play the bass with any degree of musicality – that got blown away in the first rehearsal… I went down there in June, and two weeks later we played a gig.”

REHEARSALS

Part of the timing at this point is uncertain. It's unlikely that the Warlocks played any rehearsals at Dana Morgan's after that last show at Magoo's, as it seems they were kicked out immediately. (Lesh says he never met Dana.) They may have moved over to Guitars Unlimited right away, but it also seems they weren't able to rehearse there for that long (or that regularly) since they had to spend the rest of the summer bouncing all over the place.

Blair Jackson: "Garcia drove the band hard, insisting they practice nearly every day, even though gigs were scarce for a while."

Sue Swanson: “After Dana was out of the band they rehearsed wherever they could. They rehearsed at Matthews’ house, they rehearsed at Connie’s house, they rehearsed in my back yard a few times, they rehearsed at Phil’s house a little bit – he and his girlfriend Ruth had a house on High Street that became a big hangout. In fact that’s where they found the [Grateful Dead] name later. They played anywhere they could find a place.”

Bob Matthews: “It seemed like they never had a place to practice. Sue’s parents would be out of town for a weekend and they’d practice over there. There was a night when my parents were out and they practiced in my living room. My parents found out, and to this day my mother still reminds me about the Thunderbird bottles in the garden.”

Connie Bonner told the Deadcast how they'd "give [the band] a place to rehearse - my parents' living room, Sue's back yard, any place they could rehearse. My parents were gone and weren't coming home til the next day, [but] then my mom walked in the front door. Actually, Pigpen saw her coming out from the car with luggage and opened the door for her, because he's the kindest heart you'd ever meet, and helped my mom, who was totally enraptured by his help...she loved him."

Sara Garcia: “I remember spending some time up at John Dawson’s parents’ house in the hills when they were just getting the band together, playing 'Gloria' and some Rolling Stones songs. It took some persuasion but Phil was definitely the bass player by then. They also practiced at Sue Swanson’s parents’ place.”

Hank Harrison: "The Warlocks used Sue Swanson's poolside back yard for practice sessions, but this drove the neighbors in Atherton mad."

Sue Swanson: “When Phil came on board he was just learning to play the bass and to sing. I used to hold his music. I think the first song he ever did with the Warlocks was 'Do You Believe In Magic,' and I’d sit there and hold his music and make faces at him and try to make him laugh… I could be quiet and cool and I had a car and a credit card for gas; that helped. So they let me hang around.”

Hank Harrison: “Sue Swanson came into the Dead family at the very beginning, somewhere near the age of 16. Sue was fair, cherubic, and pince-nez rich. She was also the first person to provide a practice area for the band. In the Warlocks days, we used to go over to Sue’s house and do the pool-side rehearsal routine. But things got fairly wild rather quickly and Sue’s mom was particularly upset at the uncouth manners… She was especially nonplussed by the cigarette butts, the beer bottles, and the grass smell… Mrs. Swanson found Pigpen especially disgusting. The rehearsals ended abruptly!”

Bill’s dad William Kreutzmann: “I remember they would occasionally bring their equipment over to our house and practice in our garage. They were real young then, especially Weir, who looked like he was 15.”

Hauling the band's equipment around also posed a dilemma. Connie points out that for the most part, "they didn't have cars...they didn't have a ride anywhere." Kreutzmann had a gray 1958 Dodge station wagon so he "always took his own drumkit." Garcia had a white 1961 Corvair (he drove across the country in it a year earlier). Since Lesh & Weir didn't have cars, Lesh recalled them using "Jerry's Corvair or Billy's station wagon." They also relied a lot on Sue & Connie's cars (for instance, to drive Weir to school). Their friend Bob Matthews also drove them around: "I had this old beat-up '55 Plymouth wagon, which I think was the original equipment car." Laird Grant, their first "equipment guy," gave them a boost sometime later in the year when he got an old, cheap Metro Mite delivery van (Connie called it "an old milk truck").

FRENCHY’S

https://jerrybase.com/events/19650618-01

https://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2012/11/frenchys-29097-mission-blvd-hayward-ca.html

One day in mid-June, the Warlocks piled their gear into Bill's station wagon and headed to Frenchy's, a club in Hayward where they'd managed to book some weekend gigs. The date is usually taken as June 18, but this is actually uncertain since there are two newspaper listings for Frenchy's from that date, and neither of them mention the Warlocks.

An ad in the Hayward Daily review:

And an entertainment article in the Oakland Tribune:

"Entertainment format at Frenchy's in Hayward has been changed once more. Owner Ralph Maillet has bowed to the Swim craze and is booking groups that feature this kind of music. Appearing there through tomorrow night is a group called the Lords of London, who will be followed on Tuesday by the Regimentals, a group of five musicians and two girl Swimmers."

http://lostlivedead.blogspot.com/2009/09/june-18-1965-frenchys-hayward-ca-lords.html

Corry Arnold & Jesse Jarnow have done some research into the Frenchy's listings for that month, and they reveal an interesting change: the club had just started featuring rock groups that week. Some listings for May through July (acts would stay in residence through the week):

May 2, 9, 16 - Pardon My Can Can revue, prod. by Ray Binney

May 23 - Carroll Wallace (female impersonator)

May 28 / June 5 - Floyd Drake, Jimmy Payne (“Mr. America”)

June 15 - Lords of London, Don Bexley (comedian)

June 18-19 - Lords of London

June 22 - The Swimmers [actually the Regimentals]

July 9 - The Night Caps

July 16 - The Mojo Men

July 30 - The Night Caps

One theory is that the Warlocks were an unlisted opening act for the headlining band that week, the Lords of London. (There were several Lords of London in the '60s, but this group may have been the Colorado group that released a couple of singles on Domain Records in LA in 1965.)

Another option is that the received date is off and the Warlocks actually appeared around June 11 (an apparently open date at Frenchy's); or possibly they were filling in some weekdays in between other acts. With Frenchy's seeking out local rock bands for their new format, it might make sense they'd try out the unknown Warlocks (the Mojo Men and Night Caps were regular bands on the dance circuit).

Alas, the Warlocks weren't part of "the Swim craze" - they brought no "Swim Dolls" with them and had no fans waiting in Hayward. On top of which, they were probably barely competent at that point.

Lesh: "We actually did play a gig two weeks after [I joined]... I didn't play too good man, it was a real wooden sound, real stiff."

Garcia: "Our most endearing quality was how rough and raunchy we were...noisy."

Lesh called the performance "stilted," writing: "There were about three people there...two of whom were Sue Swanson and Connie Bonner, our faithful friends and first fans... We probably played the same set twice, as our repertoire at the time was severely limited."

Sue Swanson didn't even get inside. As she recalls, "The first time I really spent any time talking to Pigpen was when they played at Frenchy's over in Hayward and he kept coming out to Billy's station wagon, where I was hanging out because I was too young to go in."

Pigpen was possibly not even performing. "[Pigpen] didn’t want to play, or he was too young and he’d forgotten his ID. Whatever the reason, we ended up out in the car, the two of us, while the band played. And he told me the whole story of The Hobbit! From beginning to end, while they played in Frenchy’s."

She thought, "It was really sweet."

But while Sue & Pigpen bonded, the Warlocks had a disastrous night.

Lesh: “My first gig was across the Bay in Hayward. We had an oral deal for two or three nights, and the first night was my first night in the band. There was nobody there – I guess the guy had expected us to draw automatically or something. We took all our equipment home with us that night because they wouldn’t guarantee any security for it, and when we came back the next night, there was a saxophone, accordion & guitar trio playing. Either we were so bad – which was possible – or the club owner was just desperate, but we’d been replaced. And I don’t think we ever got paid for the first night.”

And so the band loaded up their gear again and crawled off, never to return.

Frenchy's would thrive as a rock club over the next year:

https://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/2009/08/frenchys-hayward-ca-january-june-1966_18.html

The Warlocks had hit a dead end - kicked out of two venues, borrowing instruments to play with, trying to teach a new bass player who'd never touched a bass until that month. Their future was doubtful - most likely they would just be another of Garcia's short-lived fancies, lasting no longer than any of his previous bands as members came and went.

THE ELECTRIC COMPANY

Meanwhile, Dana Morgan later went on to play bass in another band called the Electric Company.

According to deaddisc.com:

"The Electric Company were formed at Menlo College in the Bay Area probably in early 1966. They released only one single which has subsequently been included on a number of compilations. Dana Morgan, who was the original bass player with the pre-Grateful Dead Warlocks, was the group's bass player. The other group members were: Dick Fletcher (guitar and vocals), John Glazier (guitar), Craig Parker (organ) and Dick Sidman (drums)."

Scarey Business / You Remind Me Of Her (Titan FF-1735, 1966)

"Formed at Menlo College in 1965 and originally known as Lothar & The Hand People, they split up in late 1966 before the 45 was released, The Electric Company moniker was devised by George Brown, head of Titan records, purely for the 'Scarey Business' release. Dana Morgan, who had previously played bass with The Warlocks. replaced Tom Harther in early 1966. (Dick Sidman, Craig Parker, and John Glazier were also in Generation with Lydia Pense.) Two previously unreleased tracks, 'You're Wrong' and 'See Me Sometime,' were issued on the Big Beat "Scarey Business" compilation in 2001."

[Other compilations that 'Scarey Business' has been released on include "Uptight Tonight" and the "Pebbles Box."]

http://deaddisc.com/GDFD_NorCal_E.htm

http://deaddisc.com/GDFD_Electric_Company.htm

Per one defunct website:

“The band members are: Dick Fletcher/vocals, John Glazier/guitar, Craig Parker/organist, Dick Sidman/drummer, and Dana Morgan Jr./bass -- The band from San Francisco performed at local frat houses and college parties under the name of Lothar & The Hand People, but when they recorded this straight ahead rocker, full of teenage angst concerning unplanned parenthood, Titan label owner George Brown renamed them the Electric Company--by the time they recorded this song the band had already gone their separate ways.”

The band had no relation to the Colorado group Lothar & the Hand People, which formed in Denver in 1965 and moved to NYC in '66. (Dana had a talent for being in bands that shared the names of more well-known bands!)

The 'Scarey Business' single came out in July 1966, just a month after the Dead’s first single. It's a mad Nuggets-style garage-punk rocker, and Dana's bass playing is simple but fine. Though the group didn't last long, he could easily have stayed in a rock band playing in dance clubs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ashyga7lhMs - Scarey Business (unfaded)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hrJCni79-0 - You Remind Me of Her

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA_ph2grmC4 - You're Wrong

EXIT DANA

Dana Morgan Jr. himself was never found or interviewed about his role in the Warlocks. Since the Dead have effectively written him out of the band's history as a nonentity who was barely there and had no creative involvement, many questions remain unanswered. Did he sing in the Warlocks? Did he suggest any songs that stayed in the band's repertoire? How did he react to being dropped from the band? Did he ever check out the Grateful Dead in later years?

Dana Morgan Sr. retired and closed the music store in the early 1980s. (Perhaps Dana Jr. was not willing or available to keep running the store.)

One employee: "After the store closed in the '70s, Dana Sr. still had his studio for awhile, accessible only from the alley, hence the sign [in the parking lot]."

Dana Sr. died around 1990. Dana Jr. apparently died in Oregon in the late '80s/early '90s.

Hank Harrison wrote in 1985: "Dana Morgan is the Pete Best of the Grateful Dead... Morgan's music repair shop dealt in top quality guitars and Dana could repair instruments. He was, unlike Pete Best, an excellent musician. He supplied Garcia with a place to play and numerous lines of credit on Martin guitars... Dana was drafted in 1965. Tragically he returned from Vietnam strung out and dropped out of sight. No one in his family has heard from him since 1983." (Knowing Harrison, this is likely invented.)

Dana's cousin writes: "As the nephew of Dana Morgan and cousin of Dana Morgan, Jr., I know a bit more about Dana Morgan Music, et al. Dana Morgan Jr. didn't die young but he was framed for a murder he didn't commit. He was a brass player also, but his bass playing wasn't bad at all. He dropped out of the band because of other interests, nothing to do with the lame excuse of mediocrity."

"I worked for Uncle Bob [Dana Sr.] repairing instruments and helping him in several other ways. He taught me how to repair instruments which comes in handy for repairing and maintaining my own instruments. Dana Morgan was a great musician and my first clarinet teacher... Dana Morgan didn't like or want the Dead and rock musicians to take over and destroy the true classical music tradition of high art music..."

"Unkle Buck" writes: “My first contact with Dana Morgan Jr. was in 1961, at his dad's cramped, over-packed music/instrument repair shop in downtown Palo Alto CA. That was where my father bought a trumpet for me from a rather 'greaser' looking dude. That store for sure triggered the aspirations of many local youths to peruse a life in 'music'. Over the next few years, Dana's image changed from that slick-back ducktail to longer and longer hair. In 1964, he sold me my first electric guitar and later 'loaned' me his Gibson Thunderbird Bass and Atlas amp for my first 'band gig'. I DO remember that a LOUD band rehearsed at the smallish shop all the time and 'after-hours' and that his Hawg was in the ally carport always....my friends and I were in and out of the shop all the time; drooling-over guitars, amps and such; watching odd-looking people flowing through the narrow hall leading back to the lesson rooms; always a constant din of wind and string instruments. As the '60's closed and as a few of us turned into some sort of 'hipsters', Dana was less and less a presence at the shop. Into the '70's, some of my friends now 'taught' new youths in the shop's lesson rooms....Dana would be seen now and again on this ever louder Hawg on the streets of Palo Alto, Redwood City, La Honda, and the roads up and over to the Coast....just one of the many folks who open many doors for many people...and just faded away....”