January 13, 1969, Rehearsal Space, Novato, CA: Grateful Dead and Fleetwood Mac

The 1969 album Fleetwood Mac in Chicago, recorded a few weeks before the band visited San Francisco

San Francisco was one of the centers of the rock music universe in the late 1960s. One of the rituals for many visiting English bands was meeting the hitherto legendary San Francsico bands. There was considerably more press about groups like the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead than there were records, and the English groups were equally exotic to their San Francisco counterparts. There were two primary factors that the San Francisco bands considered: were the visiting Englishmen "kindred spirits" (which meant "did they take LSD?") and were they willing to jam? The requisite jam was a similar to visiting jazzmen, or gunfighters--good musicians could bring it when asked, and anyone who backed down just might not be worthy. Sadly, none of these historic jams were recorded, to my knowledge, but I was recently reminded of an eyewitness account of the first jam between Fleetwood Mac and the Grateful Dead, in the Grateful Dead's rehearsal hall on January 13, 1969.

Dinky Dawson and Fleetwood Mac
Stuart "Dinky" Dawson, a former DJ, was hired as Fleetwood Mac's road manager and soundman in July, 1968, soon after the Mac returned from their first American tour. Unlike many road managers, Dawson was also a sophisticated, self-taught sound technician, but he was as rough and ready as any 60s rock and roll adventurer. Also unlike many of the rest of these unsung heroes, Dawson wrote a fascinating memoir of his touring days in the late 60s and 70s, Life On The Road (with Carter Alan, Billboard Books 1998, 345 pp). It's a must-read for anyone interested in the music of the time. Dawson road managed Fleetwood Mac though mid-1970, and then signed on for long tours of duty with The Byrds, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Steely Dan and Warren Zevon. He also ran an important sound company in the Northeast.

Fleetwood Mac was formed by the great guitarist Peter Green, but the self-effacing Green named it after his rhythm section, bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood. The initial iteration of the band was a quartet, with slide guitarist Jeremy Spencer, and early albums featured tough, expressive Chicago-style blues, with vocals by Green and Spencer. By the time Dawson arrived in Summer 1968, the Mac had added guitarist Danny Kirwan. Fleetwood Mac thus had three singing guitarists, giving them a wide range of stylistic diversity for the time. After some recording and touring in England and Europe, Fleetwood Mac was set to begin their second American tour in late 1968. They were supporting their second American album, English Rose. Fleetwood Mac had done some recording in New York City in December, and then played Texas and then played various cities in the East. They spent New Year's in Chicago, performing and recording, but by the second weekend in January, Fleetwood Mac were heading West. After a weekend in Portland and Seattle (January 10-11), the band was looking forward to a week in San Francisco.

Visiting San Francisco
The San Francisco ritual of jamming with visiting bands seems to have begun with the Jefferson Airplane. Since the Airplane were effectively managed by Bill Graham, he had arranged for them to rehearse in a building he owned two doors from the Fillmore, the former Masonic Temple at 1859 Geary (in between these buildings was the former Temple Beth Israel synagogue, later known as Theatre 1839). Thus it was easy for bands who were playing the Fillmore to drop by and hang out and jam with the Airplane, assuming they were in town. Among other things, this was how Jimi Hendrix first met and played with Jack Casady. Less directly, it was how Paul McCartney got to meet and play with the Airplane, even though he was not playing the Fillmore.

Meanwhile, the Grateful Dead had made friends with Eric Burdon, and thus Eric Burdon and The Animals were invited on stage with the band at the Avalon (on March 26, 1967). Steve Winwood and Traffic were met at the airport by Dead representatives (and dosed immediately, apparently), and Jerry Garcia ended up sitting in with Traffic (on March 18, 1968). Of course, both the Dead and the Airplane were on the road a lot, so many opportunities for jams with visitors never occurred. Nonetheless, Garcia, at least appears to have been unforgiving when Jimi Hendrix did not show up for a planned jam with the Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, so there was plenty of significance attached to these meetings, even if it was not spoken about much at the time.

Fleetwood Mac had debuted in America in late June of 1968. They were originally booked to play the Carousel Ballroom with the Grateful Dead on June 7-9, but they were delayed by visa issues. In fact, the band's debut appears to have been at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on June 28, 1968, opening for The Who and Crazy World Of Arthur Brown (see Christopher Hjort's exceptional 2007 book Strange Brew for a detailed chronology of this period). Fleetwood Mac were then scheduled to play Thee Image in Florida, but their booking was canceled. As a result, the Mac spent the week of July 2-7 hanging out in San Francisco. They played a guest set at Fillmore West, and met members of the Grateful Dead, but never actually got to play with them. As a result, when the Mac returned in January 1969, they were looking forward to furthering their friendships with the Grateful Dead and others.

Stuart 'Dinky' Dawson in the 90s. Note the fisherman's hat.

Fleetwood Mac, January 1969
One of the many pleasures of Dinky Dawson's book for a rock prosopographer like me is that he clearly wrote it with access to a log book or tour itinerary, since while he doesn't always identify dates, he is very precise about the sequence of events. Thus Dawson's narrative makes it plain that the day of the jam between the Grateful Dead and Fleetwood Mac is Monday, January 13, 1969. Dawson:

Later that same day [Monday], we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito [sic], where we had been invited to hang out at the Grateful Dead's rehearsal space. I finally met Owsley and bonded with the group's sound engineer, Dan Healy, and Ramrod, the stage manager. They had set up all the Dead's equipment and soon the informal session got into full swing.

It's clear to me that Fleetwood Mac went to Novato, where the Dead rehearsed, not Sausalito. Dawson was an Englishman on his first trip to America, so it's no surprise that he wasn't clear about Marin suburbs--I wouldn't know the difference between, say, Staines and Woking, were I south of London, particularly a few decades after the fact. Dawson's most interesting comment follows:

Watching Jerry Garcia and Peter [Green] get off on each other and trade bluesy licks amazed me. Ron McKernan, aka Pigpen, the Dead's fearsome looking but lovable keyboard player, held things together with his fantastic rhythmic piano playing [p.74]

Members and friends of the Grateful Dead have always alluded to Pigpen's seemingly vast talents that were rarely ever seen on stage, and here is an indication of another one. Pigpen's piano playing has rarely been heard, much less as the anchor to a blues band, much less as the rhythm man for a guitar duel between Peter Green and Jerry Garcia.

We have a pretty good idea of Fleetwood Mac's sound during this period, not least because they recorded in Chicago and Los Angeles. Fleetwood Mac had just recorded the great album Bluesjam In Chicago at Chess Studios over New Year's. However, instead of Buddy Guy and Otis Spann joining in, it was Garcia and Pigpen. Fleetwood, McVie, Garcia, Green and Pigpen--there's a blues band for you. I wonder if Pigpen wanted to sing anything? Boy, I sure wish Owsley or Healy or someone had a tape deck running, but it's wishful thinking. Yet, here was a side of Pigpen that was totally dormant. He could apparently play like Otis Spann when he wanted to, but the Dead's music never called for it, so he rarely bothered. Remarkable.

Of course, we don't know exactly who sat in with who--I'm sure the different members of the Grateful Dead and Fleetwood Mac all got their licks in. The jam had many ramifications, however. At the time of the jam, Fleetwood Mac's instrumental single "Albatross" was starting to become a hit, and Mac would break out of the simple blues band mold, following a path trod by the Dead a little bit earlier. The ever-inventive Green was very impressed by Garcia's commitment to playing new, imaginative music every night, and he frustrated the other members of the band by trying to play music that was farther and farther out. The rest of 1969 and early 1970 featured some fantastic music by Fleetwood Mac, including the great album Then Play On, and then some legendary gigs with the Dead in New Orleans, and the even more epic jam at Fillmore East on February 11, 1970.

After the jam n Novato, Fleetwood Mac went on to open for Creedence Clearwater at Fillmore West (January 16-19) and on across America. The band's performance at the Shrine in Los Angeles (January 24-25, 1969) was ultimately released, as soundman Dawson had the foresight to make a great tape. Dawson and Fleetwood Mac went on to have numerous adventures, and Dawson's book provides a remarkable perspective on the relatively early days of national rock and roll tours. The January 1969 jam clearly loomed largely in the minds of Fleetwood Mac, however, and not just for Garcia's inspiration for Green. Dawson recalls

[I became] fascinated with [Pigpen's] leather Greek Fisherman's cap, which I thought was the most. Next day I went out and bought a light cotton replica with a plastic visor, later purchasing an authentic and sturdier wool one, which has been with me ever since. Even though Pigpen left us four years later for that great jam session in the sky, I still think of him every time I put on that Greek cap [p.74].

Warlocks Resumes, 1965 (pre Grateful Dead Employment)

The back alley behind 536 Bryant Street in Palo Alto in June 2009. On New Year's Eve 1963, Bob Weir heard banjo music coming from Dana Morgan Music at 536 Ramona, and found music teacher Jerry Garcia waiting for his banjo students. They agreed to form a jug band, and the Grateful Dead saga began.

It is an apocryphal rock-and-roll trope that real rockers don't want jobs. Keith Richard, the legend goes, only had non-musical employment once, as a Postal assistant at Christmas one year, and he was fired after three days for keeping a mouse in his pocket. Bruce Springsteen never had a job at all, as far as I know. Sometime in the late 80s, Jerry Garcia was asked in an interview if he was satisfied with his musical career, and whether he had achieved his professional goals, and Jerry said that his goal had been not to have a real job. From that point of view, his membership in the Grateful Dead had made his career a success "so far."

The Grateful Dead were a bunch of misfits, would be outlaws who did not feel comfortable in the paths that the "straight" world would have mapped out for them. The band members were an early wave of post-Beatniks who wanted something different from their life than the proverbial white picket fence and 2.2 children, commuting to the plant or the office 5 days a week. Indeed, with one exception the band members non-musical history only prepared them for being bohemians, so it is fortunate that the 60s came along when they did. This post will consider the educational and professional activities of the original members of the Grateful Dead prior to the formation of the Warlocks in May, 1965. It will not be a long post.

Jerry Garcia: Garcia had attended Balboa High School in San Francisco, but he dropped out around the 11th grade. After getting into some kind of scrape in 1959, a judge offered him the opportunity to join the Army instead of jail--a common enough choice at the time--and the 17-year old Jerry took the Army. Ironically, he was assigned to a base in San Francisco (at The Presidio), so opportunities to go AWOL were many and tempting. Garcia did discover country music in the Army. If he had been sent to a base in the South, he might have been a better soldier and learned about bluegrass more quickly, but it was not to be. Garcia was given a less-than-honorable discharge, but not a dishorable one (I think it was a General Discharge) in 1960. Not having an Honorable Discharge was a barrier to success in the early 1960s, when many males had served in the Armed Forces.

After his debut with Army buddy Robert Hunter as "Bob and Jerry" at Peninsula School, for which they were paid 5 dollars, Garcia played around folk clubs in various combinations. He did not earn a living from playing live music, or even much money, but he was actually paid. He also occasionally played electric bass with a band called The Zodiacs, who played Stanford Frat parties and the like. Bill Kreutzmann and Pigpen were occasional members of The Zodiacs as well.

Garcia also had a job of sorts doing the lighting at a Palo Alto theater group called Commedia Del Arte, around 1962. I think they were on Emerson Street (possibly on the site of the Aquarius Theater). I'm not sure Garcia actually got paid to do the lights, but he could have put it on his resume.

Garcia's principal source of income was as a music teacher at Dana Morgan Music on 536 Ramona Street in Palo Alto. Garcia gave guitar and banjo lessons to aspiring musicians, mostly teenagers, and probably taught mandolin and fiddle as well. Many people in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area proudly recall that Garcia taught them guitar. The whole Grateful Dead saga began on New Years Eve 1963, when Bob Weir heard banjo music coming from the back of Dana Morgan's. Garcia was practicing, wondering why none of his students were showing up. Garcia told young Bobby that he was planning to form a jug band, and Weir said "I'm in," and so the story began.

In mid-1965, Garcia and Weir had borrowed equipment from Dana Morgan Music to start the Warlocks. When they pushed aside Dana Morgan Jr, the owner's son, as bassist, in favor of Phil Lesh, Morgan Sr demanded his instruments back and effectively fired Garcia and Weir (who by this time was a music teacher as well). Garcia and Weir moved their students over to Guitars Unlimited on El Camino Real in Menlo Park, and borrowed more equipment. When Garcia and Weir actually gave their final guitar lessons at Guitars Unlimited is unclear--probably late 1965.

Bob Weir: Bob Weir attended various High Schools, but did not graduate from any. I think he briefly attended Menlo-Atherton High School, and some private schools, but I'm not sure where. He seems to have met John Barlow in Prep School in the East. I have been told that his mother asked the future founder of Pacific Free High School (too long a story to go into) to "get him to stop playing that guitar and get him into something that will make him some money," but that did not happen.

When Jerry Garcia made his famous trip across country with Sandy Rothman in 1964, Weir apparently took over his students for a few months. Weir remained at Dana Morgan's, and moved on to Guitars Unlimited. Music Teaching music was (and is) a sort of freelance occupation, and fewer people claim Weir as a teacher than Garcia in the Bay Area.

Weir's only professional pre-Warlocks performances were with Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Band Champions, and it is debatable whether they actually got paid.

An ad for Swain's House Of Music at 451 University in downtown Palo Alto. The ad is from the March 7, 1967 issue of the Cubberley High School paper, The Catamount.

Bill Kreutzmann: Bill Kreutzmann actually graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1965. By that time, he was married and had a child, so while he was able to avoid the draft (as sole support of his family), college was seemingly out of the question. During High School, Kreutzmann had played drums with a pretty successful Palo Alto band called The Legends. The Legends played "R&B," which at the time meant mixing James Brown songs with rock songs, and sometimes played for racially mixed audiences in East Palo Alto as well as the Stanford fraternity circuit. Kreutzmann occasionally filled in as drummer for The Zodiacs.

Kreutzmann also gave drum lessons at Swain's House Of Music, a competitor of Dana Morgan's. Swain's was at 451 University (near Waverley) just a few blocks over from Dana Morgan's.

Ron "Pigpen" McKernan: Pigpen had been expelled from Palo Alto High School in 1964 or '65, for some transgression or series of transgressions. Pigpen apparently had a job as a janitor at Swain's, but he did not give music lessons.

Phil Lesh: Unlike the other Warlocks, Phil Lesh bordered on the respectable. He had graduated from Berkeley High School in 1958, and attended the College Of San Mateo. CSM was a junior college with an excellent music program that included an excellent big band. Lesh played trumpet in the CSM band (Santana's Mike Shrieve was the CSM big band drummer some years later). Ultimately Lesh transferred to UC Berkeley in about 1961. Although University of California admissions were structured to favor California residents and junior college transfers, the fact that Lesh got into UC Berkeley means he had to have been a diligent and successful student. Lesh met Tom Constanten at Berkeley, and the two of them also studied with Luciano Berio at Mills College in Oakland The connection to Mills was probably through the UC music program (although Mills is a Woman's College, male students are admitted to its graduate programs, and there has always been reciprocity between UC and Mills classes). Phil also did some work at KPFA in Berkeley, which (similar to Jerry's stint as a lighting director) would not have been paid, but would have counted as work experience.

Phil dropped out of UC Berkeley about 1962. Unlike the other Warlocks, he had a variety of actual jobs. He worked at a Casino in Las Vegas with Constanten, and he drove a Post Office truck as well. Lesh has recalled hearing "Subterranean Homesick Blues" while driving the truck. Although the USPS was a "straight" job that required a uniform, many beatnik-types liked the work since it often involved being on your own most of the day, and Phil seems to have been no exception. Lesh, to my knowledge, never received a dime for a musical performance prior to performing with the Warlocks at Magoo's Pizza in Menlo Park. He had performed with school jazz ensembles, but those were not (by definition) paying gigs.

The Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building at 300 Pine St in San Francisco. Phil Lesh worked there briefly in the early 1960s as a board marker for Dean Witter.

While dropping out of UC Berkeley made Lesh a "dropout" along with the rest of the Warlocks, he was the only band member to have had to consciously avoid the middle class. Phil has occasionally alluded to various jobs he held between 1958 and 1965 in one interview or another. For a variety of reasons, Phil's most interesting brush with another path was alluded to in an extensive interview with Blair Jackson in The Golden Road. Phil said that through his father he got a job as a "board marker" for Dean Witter at the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange.

A board marker put up qoutes for the stock trading on the floor of the old P-Coast (board markers were the equities equivalents of MQTOs, for those readers for whom that has meaning). Working on the trading floor, Phil would have had to have worn a tie, thus being the only member of the Dead to have had to worn a tie for employment. Phil's presence on the P-Coast was fascinating to me personally, because at the time I read the interview, I too was working on the Pacific Stock Exchange, albeit on the infinitely more exciting Options Floor around the block.

The P-Coast Equities Floor in the early 1960s had a reputation as a stifling place. When I told my options compatriots that Phil Lesh had apparently worked on the Equities Floor twenty-odd years earlier, their attitude was that it was no surprise that he left, the implication being that if Phil had worked on the Options Floor (which opened only in 1976) he might have stayed. While that is unlikely on the face of it, the Equities Floor had its roots in the 19th Century and showed it, so it's no surprise that Phil found it unrewarding. If he had discovered all the risk and reward of options trading, maybe David Freiberg would have ended up as the Warlocks bass player. To answer the question no doubt foremost in everybody's mind, I think Phil would have been a frontspreader rather than a backspreader.

Even in the mid 1980s, I knew some old Equities brokers who had come over to the brave new world of Options. Of course none of them would have remembered the name of any board marker, ever, much less one who only worked there briefly, so it was futile to ask. There were probably a bunch of skinny kids in ties and ill-fitting jackets, many with glasses, and to think that just a few years later one of them would be headlining major performances under strange psychedelic conditions was too much to comprehend. Of course, the old Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building is now an Equinox Fitness Club, and that too was impossible to imagine at the time. Sic Transit Gloria Psychedelia.