A Long Strange Trip Read Online Free Page A

custom by mixing the song at high volume. The audience grasped that decision perfectly. The resistance to adult authority depicted in the film and in the contemporary career of James Dean attracted Jerry, though not the song itself. Most of the early rock tunes were the product of small regional labels, like Little Richard Penniman’s bizarre, manic “Tutti Frutti” on Specialty. Inevitably, the larger companies moved to co-opt the rock and roll fad, releasing Pat Boone’s acceptably bland cover version of “Tutti Frutti” among many other covers to even greater commercial success. It was a critical moment for Jerry, who swiftly came to understand that there was frequently an authentic black version, and then “there’s the lame white version.” Two unquestionably genuine tunes from Chicago’s small Chess Records caught his ear. Bo Diddley’s self-named tune established the fundamental shave-and-a-haircut beat, and Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” melded country guitar riffs with the backbeat and melody of rhythm and blues and defined rock’s fundamental structure and attitude. To Jerry it seemed like a cowboy song, “only nastier,” and to a thirteen-year-old with surging hormones, nasty was very, very good. For the first time in history, large masses of young white Americans were listening and dancing to black musicians.
    Another aspect of black American life stirred at this time, the precise connections to the music uncertain but impossible to dismiss. In December 1955, a young Birmingham, Alabama, minister named Martin Luther King Jr. united his passionate nonviolent moral leadership with the organizational genius of the city’s local civil rights leader and the communications system of television to sustain an antisegregation bus boycott. It would trigger the greatest American social movement since the organization of labor. Not least of the civil rights movement’s effects would be to give the future politics of American protest a spiritual rather than an ideological base. And the spirit was in the songs.
    Jerry had been a bright but fairly indifferent student to this point, excelling in art and the occasional subject that took his interest, but an underachieving “wise guy” the rest of the time. He seemed to his friend Mary Brydges to be pretty much “in his own world,” doodling skulls and crossbones and monsters, always funny and fun, sarcastic but not cruel, somehow “more worldly, faster” than the rest of the kids, but also a little lonelier. Then in the fall of 1955 he entered the Fast Learner Program in the eighth grade at Menlo Oaks school. His new teacher, Dwight Johnson, an iconoclastic bohemian who was regularly in trouble with the school administration, was the perfect inspiration for students like Jerry. When Mr. Johnson roared up to school on his Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle or MG TC, he instantly drew his students’ attention, and when he threw open the class to discussion and introduced them to D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell, Jerry delightedly followed him into the intellectual world. Johnson noticed Jerry’s facility as an artist, and soon the boy was absorbed in murals, the sets for school plays, and the school newspaper. He did not exactly become a well-behaved Good Student, however, and continued with one of his favorite games, mock switchblade duels in the school corridor with his buddy Laird Grant. When he dug in his heels over retaking certain tests toward the end of the year, he was required to repeat the eighth grade. Finally, in June 1957 he graduated from Menlo Oaks and moved back to San Francisco, where he lived some of the time with Nan and Pop and some of the time with his mother and stepfather at their new apartment above the new bar at 1st and Harrison.
    Bobbie’s fifteenth-birthday present to him that summer would turn out to be quite special, although at first it was a giant disappointment. She’d purchased a lovely Neapolitan accordion for him from one