A Long Strange Trip by Dennis Mcnally

insane.” On his second test, he went beyond the “Lord I’m high” rhapsodies and straight into linguistics, Joycean word sounds, the play of vowel and syllable. His ability to articulate hallucinations would serve him well in the future.
    His friends passed around his notes and then took him for coffee, pumping him for details. Garcia’s reaction was simple: “God, I’ve
got
to have some of that.” Hunter was not the only person they knew who had access to this experience. Palo Alto had its very own bohemian neighborhood, eight shacks on Perry Avenue, and one of its residents, Vic Lovell, was a psychology graduate student who kept his friends well supplied with this interesting new stuff, especially his pal Ken Kesey, a graduate student in writing who happened to work as a janitor at the V.A. Hospital. Older and more sophisticated than the Chateau gang, “Kesey and the wine drinkers,” as Garcia would call them, were not impressed with the youngsters who tried to crash their parties, the annual Luwow and the Perry Lane Olympics (“Lane” sounded sooo much more aesthetic than “Avenue” to them), and gave them the boot.
    Lesh, who’d been brought over to Lovell’s by his friend Mike Lamb, had at first thought of Kesey as a “blustering asshole,” until Lamb snuck in and read what was on Ken’s typewriter, afterward telling them all to look out for his book. Kesey’s seminar with Malcolm Cowley, the distinguished editor of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Kerouac, and a remarkable group of young writers which later included Robert Stone, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, and Larry McMurtry, combined with psychedelics to produce something extraordinary. His fable of liberation from an authority-bound society,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
had been published to glorious reviews that February 1962. It was a masterpiece.
    June meant Marshall Leicester’s annual return from Yale. This year they would call themselves the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, a tribute to the 1920s group Fisher Henley and His Aristocratic Pigs, which had been sponsored by Armour Ham. Suze Wood made them some snappy red-trimmed black vests, and they were ready to play. But there was a major difference this summer. Marshall had returned from school with one suitcase and six instrument cases, and the upshot was that Garcia began to play the devil’s own fiendish twanger, the banjo. In all of acoustic music there is nothing quite like it. There is fire in a banjo, an intrinsic speed and intensity. He was drawn to what he described as “that incredible clarity . . . the brilliance” of the instrument. It consumed him, and as with nothing in his life to that point, he enslaved himself to his practice. His model was Earl Scruggs, and Garcia treated Scruggs’s fingering as though it was the master lock, studying it by playing back his records at slow speeds, trying to crack the combination. His devotion to music would be central to his life, and it came at a price. Brigid Meier was talented, beautiful, and interested in literature and jazz, but now Garcia’s idea of a great time was to find someone who could teach him a new song, and their romance sputtered. As 1962 passed, he continued to meet her every day for lunch across the street from school, and they even discussed marriage, when she was eighteen and he twenty-one, but the bloom was off.
    The Hog Stompers were followers of the New Lost City Ramblers, and Garcia’s banjo playing was at first in the old-timey tradition. The Boar’s Head had found new quarters at the Peninsula Jewish Community Center in Belmont, and they played there regularly. But the banjo and Scruggs led Jerry inexorably from old-time music to bluegrass, a very different thing. Bluegrass was not folk music. It had been created in the 1940s by superbly gifted professionals, starting with Bill Monroe, and it required considerable skill to play. Bluegrass had a limited but important history in the Bay Area, beginning with