A Long Strange Trip Read Online Free Page B

of the sailors at the bar, but after plenty of adolescent moans and whines, she agreed to swap it for the Danelectro guitar he’d spotted in a pawnshop window at the corner of 3rd and Folsom, a few blocks from the bar. He’d had years of piano lessons before the move to Menlo Park, but his personality resisted formal teaching, and he’d lost interest. Now music consumed him. Whatever his other deficiencies were, Jerry’s stepfather happened to have mandolins and other stringed instruments around the house, even electrical instruments, amplifiers, and a rare (for that time) tape recorder. Mr. Matusiewicz tuned the Danelectro to some odd open tuning, or perhaps it merely became that in Jerry’s hands. Working only with his ear and the Chuck Berry tunes on the bar jukebox, Garcia began the practice that would turn out to be the focus of his life.
    His cousin Danny saw him with the guitar and followed suit, going to the same pawnshop for his own. Though Danny, Joe’s brother Manuel’s son, had been part of Jerry and Tiff’s life from their earliest days, music proved an especially unifying common bond in their mid-teens. Jerry’s father had not been the only musical Garcia. Their grandfather “Papuella” ( Joe’s father) had insisted that his sons and grandsons learn to play an instrument and sing, and though, as Danny recalled it, “it wasn’t an option,” the boys liked music anyway. Jerry, Tiff, and Danny would spend a good part of their teens singing on street corners, learning how to harmonize. Now Danny, who knew some music theory, taught Jerry the conventional tunings for rock, and he found them “a revelation . . . the key to heaven.” He began to gobble up the styles of Eddie Cochran, Jimmy Reed, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, and, as always, Chuck Berry.
    The summer of 1957 was a memorable one. In addition to the guitar, Jerry discovered cigarettes, a lifelong habit, and marijuana, two joints shared with a friend that sent them laughing and skipping down the street. Tiff had graduated from high school in 1956 and enlisted in the Marine Corps, so Jerry was more on his own now, and his world began to expand. He and Danny would take the 14 Mission bus downtown to see movies, go shopping at the Emporium, sometimes with a “five-finger discount” (shoplifting), or out to the Cliff House, a restaurant and sight-seeing complex that overlooked the ocean, and the Playland amusement park down the hill. Jerry spent the ninth grade at Denman Junior High School in the outer Mission, and then in the fall of 1958 began tenth grade across the street at Balboa High School. Balboa was frequently a rough place, filled with Barts (“Black Bart” Italians with “greaser” hair-cuts) and Shoes (Pat Boone white-shoe-wearing prep types). Later, Garcia would tell more than a few tall tales about his career as a street fighter, but his family and friends of the era didn’t recall it that way.
    His more natural environment was at Joe Garcia’s, where he worked “pearl diving” (washing) dishes and “decorating” (stocking) the joint with beer. Music remained his passion, and he often worked with a transistor radio earplug wedged firmly in his ear. Just as often he’d take a break and play along to the jukebox with his guitar. Although the old-fashioned original Joe Garcia’s had been replaced by a modern fifties circular bar with mirrored columns for glasses, slick Naugahyde booths, and chrome fixtures, it remained a lively place, its clientele a mixture of longshoremen and sailors from the Sailors Union of the Pacific on one corner, and Union Oil executives from the other corner. It was a verbal ambience, one that welcomed Joe Garcia’s son as an equal. He was gregarious by nature, but this aspect of his personality was greatly encouraged by example. “I’ve always wanted to be able to turn on people,” he said later, “and also I’ve always taken it for granted that if I like something, that other people will like