A Long Strange Trip by Dennis Mcnally Page B

Garcia played two solo banjo tunes, “Little Birdie” and “Walking Boss,” extremely obscure material for this audience. “We make music in the tradition,” said Garcia as he then introduced the Hart Valley Drifters’ first set. “It says so right here in the program.” But he didn’t merely jest, going on to inform his audience of the historical roots and record-label contexts of the tunes they were playing.
    After some comments on the Carter Family and the song, he and Nelson, “who more than anything else wants to be a real boy,” played “Deep Ellum Blues.” With Hunter, they played “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (“The first code of the banjo is to get it into the proper tune . . . since our band is a strict adherent to this rule, we can take hours to tune,” Garcia explained), and then Garcia gave them “Man of Constant Sorrow,” solo and
a cappella
. They closed with two bluegrass tunes, “Pig in a Pen” and “Salty Dog.” It was authentic and skilled and more than the audience could appreciate, although the Drifters’ performance was very good indeed. Dean Hammer and His Nails closed the show with a few snide remarks about being made to wait, then sang “Scotch and Soda,” and the audience went home happy.
    So did the band. In the middle of the show, Nelson noticed something fall from Hunter’s pocket, an object he thought was a white-wrapped Stickney’s toothpick. Hunter assumed David knew that it was, in fact, a joint. At the postshow party at Suze Wood’s, Nelson and his friend Rick Melrose said to Hunter, “Let’s get loaded,” as in “Have a drink.” Since they were underage, Hunter’s reluctance didn’t surprise Nelson, but eventually Hunter talked to Garcia, and the four of them went to the car. A joint appeared, and Melrose asked, “What’s that?” Nelson muttered to himself, “Shit, we’ll blow our chance to smoke pot.”
    Hunter began to grumble about underage kids who weren’t cool, but Garcia reassured and disarmed him, then gave lessons in smoking to the rookies, and before long they’d gone back to the Chateau and buzzed their way through Hunter’s entire stash. At which point the rookies asked, “When does this stuff take effect?” Hunter resumed fuming, mostly silently, about the waste of scarce pot, and Garcia interceded again. “Here’s what we do. Let’s just talk about what a great guy Hunter is for getting us all stoned. What a great, great guy, he really put himself out for us, and isn’t it just the nicest world . . .” And Hunter came out of his snit. “Aww, you guys, it was worth it, okay, okay.” And Nelson began to think that they were talking a little funny. Garcia was beginning to giggle like crazy. Nelson turned to Melrose and said, “Too bad it didn’t work, but we’ll have a good time.”
    By now they were back at Suze’s, and as they crossed her front lawn, they began to notice the dewdrops in the grass, and the moon, and the beauty of the night, and Rick turned to Nelson and whispered, “David, have you noticed this lawn? David, you know what I think? I think this stuff works.”
    The Tangent started as an amusement for two bored young doctors, but it became, for two years, the home of folk music on the Peninsula. Stu Goldstein and David Schoenstadt were Stanford Hospital residents who knew nothing about folk music, but Max and Bertha Feldman’s Palo Alto deli had a room upstairs, and it occurred to Stu and David to open a club there, using Pete Seeger’s songbook,
How to Make a Hootenanny,
as their blueprint. They opened in January 1963, with open hoots on Wednesdays and the winners playing weekends. The charge was a dollar fifty, and the performers got five or ten dollars. It quickly became Garcia’s new musical home, “a little community . . . a sweet scene.” It also produced some remarkable music. One night in a moment of boredom, Rodney Albin and Garcia gathered up four other guitarists, broke out some sheet music,