Dark Star by Robert Greenfield

Cantata and we were quite well received. I threw myself into the study of these old tunes and just loved it. Jerry and I played at the Tangent in Palo Alto. We had a little duo.
    Suzy Wood: Jerry took up with Sara. She was straight and darling and impressive as hell. She was a Stanford student and her dad was a pilot and my sense was that they were a cut or two above the general riffraff.
    Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: We sang together and I played a little autoharp and my little rosewood Martin guitar. He played most of the instruments. We sang well together. We took turns. One of us would sing the verses and we’d join each other on the chorus. The surviving tape is really awful. It sounds like the Chipmunks. But we liked singing together, we were good at it, and people seemed to enjoy it. Remember that song, “Walk Right In” by the Rooftop Singers? That was popular then. We figured we could do something better than that. So that was our plan.
    John “Marmaduke” Dawson: I was just another folk guitar player when they had the hootenannies at the Tangent on Wednesday evenings. There was a back room there and people would get together and put a little bit of a trio or a duet together. “Hey, you want to play some stuff with me tonight?” “Sure. What are we going to play?” “Okay, let’s do this one.” “You want me to capo up and play it in a different key so we get two different guitar sounds?” “Yeah, okay, let’s go.” There was a lot of that going on. Just instant groups coming together and falling back apart again. At that point, Jerry was the best picker in town. Along with Jorma and a guy named Eric Thompson. Jerry was one of the hot pickers and David Nelson was one of the hot pickers.
    Jorma Kaukonen: I think we all taught each other a lot. One of the really neat things about that period and I don’t know if this was a function of the period or just that we were younger and more open-minded but there was a lot of jamming and that doesn’t happen that much anymore. In those days, it happened almost all the time. In terms of who was the best player, keep in mind that as youngsters, we were all bad boys. I’m sure all of us thought we were the coolest thing in our external persona. Internally of course, it was, “God. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
    John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Even then, I think Jerry had that beatnik cutting edge. Because of his history. He never did like cops and he never did like the Army even though he was in it for a while. He was a good maze rat. It only took him one try to find that out. He learned that course real quickly. It didn’t take two tries for him.
    David Nelson: At the College of San Mateo Folk Music Festival, Jerry did a three-part thing where he started out doing solo stuff from the old ballads. Then he got into the twenties and thirties with string band music. We’d be an old-time string band and play old stuff. Then, modern age. We played bluegrass in the third section. That was really a nice little display.
    Peter Albin: We were all local folkies but he was a little bit higher on himself than the other people because he had more talent. He did and he knew it. When he first started playing banjo, he’d come up to you and say, “Hey, dig this,” and he’d play “Nola” on the five-string banjo. And he’d go faster like Roger Sprung. It was something you could never play. He was excellent but he put it in your face. He knew who did everything. He did his research. He did his homework. I don’t want to make him sound as if he was unfriendly and not willing to share things because he was. As a matter of fact, when I put on a folk music festival during this time at the College of San Mateo through the auspices of the Art Club, Jerry and his group played there. We also did a guitar workshop where he did finger picking and I did flat