A Long Strange Trip Read Online Free

variety of deeply emotional reasons. In a confused, never-understood way, Jerry had never entirely forgiven his mother for the death of his father, nor for remarrying. Now hormones swept over him in the usual tidal wave, crashing into the retaining wall of his Roman Catholicism and creating a jumbled mess. As an adult he would concede that sex and women were never his primary concern, “except for when it really runs you around crazy, when you’re around fourteen or so.” Add to puberty his alienation from his mother and you had a recipe for torment. Twenty years later he would read an underground comic book called
Binky Brown Meets the
Holy Virgin Mary
and grasp profoundly that it described exactly the hell of his early teens, as captured in the rays of light, lust, guilt, that emanated from Binky’s crotch, up toward the Virgin, down to hell, and out toward the entire world. Coping with sexuality is tough; dealing with the guilt of the Roman Catholic Church regarding sex is tougher; doing both when confused by an absent father and a mother perceived as disloyal—this for Jerry was impossible. He would love and be loved, but he would stay painfully confused about himself and women for all his days.
    That year Union Oil bought the property on which Joe Garcia’s was located, and while Bobbie waited for the company to build her a new bar on the opposite corner, she decided to move her family twenty-five miles south of the city to Menlo Park. The Garcias were part of a social tidal wave. In the aftermath of World War II, millions of veterans had used the G.I. Bill to move from working-class to middle-class lives, and from renting city apartments to owning suburban homes. Their prosperity was one consequence of the permanent war economy that the Cold War demanded. Another result was suburban conformity. Jerry would first become conscious of racism and anti-Semitism in Menlo Park, and he didn’t like them. His new friends were determinedly diverse, ranging from a classmate and early sweetheart, Mary Brydges, to Will Oda, the son of a Nisei gardener at Stanford, to his best friend, Laird Grant, a working-class borderline hoodlum. One of the other ways that he countered the suburban blahs was with music. As the predominant culture of the fifties grew ever more bland, the discerning ear could find escape in the riches of African American music.
    In the Bay Area, that meant the rhythm and blues station KWBR, to which Tiff introduced him. An obscure street-corner tune by the Crows called “Gee” set him to listening to the cream of American popular music, and Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, and Muddy Waters kept him company all day and half the night long. Initially a solo acoustic form from the Mississippi Delta, the blues evolved through boogie-woogie piano and Kansas City big-band vocal shouting to Chicago, where Muddy Waters found acoustic guitar inaudible in forties clubs. His transition to electric guitar defined a new urban blues, which evolved yet again into the R&B of the late forties and the fifties. Each mode contained a high realism that knew life as a solitary confinement sometimes comforted by sexuality or even love but inevitably succeeded by a death sentence. In all of American popular music, only the blues spoke truthfully of love and death. Enthralled, Jerry absorbed not only chords and rhythms but a certain vision. It was not the psychopathology of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” that he acquired, but hipness, the authentic wisdom eternally found at the edges and bottom of the social pyramid.
    In 1955, rock and roll—rhythm and blues with a backbeat—emerged to enliven a torpid America. First came Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” a no. 1 hit a year after its release when it served as the theme song of a classic film of youthful rebellion,
Blackboard Jungle.
The producers of the film displayed their understanding of the music’s importance and violated film