Dark Star by Robert Greenfield Page B

heavy-duty bluegrass. Bob Hunter played well but he wasn’t your real ethnic type like you find at the music colleges. He wasn’t going to delve into exactly how those bass lines were played. He was a trumpet player. So he played simply.
    David Nelson: We were the Wildwood Boys and that lasted about only a year at the most. Garcia had a disagreement with Hunter about were we going to get serious about bluegrass. I remember one practice when they were going back and forth and I was just stepping out of it. I think Garcia put it to him and said, “You’re really going to have to get serious or I’m going to have to get another mandolin player.” Bluegrass is a staunch kind of music. It’s not easy and if you don’t really dedicate yourself to it, you’ll never make it. They had sort of a falling out and Hunter just quit. So we went and found Sandy Rothman. There were these Berkeley people who played bluegrass. We went over to Sandy’s house one night and Sandy said he’d like to play with us but he played guitar and he didn’t want to make me not play guitar or anything. Garcia just talked me into it. He got an F12 and said, “You can do it. You can do it.” He put a mandolin in my hand and the next thing I knew, we were doing gigs and I was playing mandolin. I had a few weeks to get it together and then we were the Black Mountain Boys.
    Sandy Rothman: These two guys came to Campbell Coe’s Campus Music Shop just off Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I seem to recall that Garcia pointed his finger at me and said, “Are you Sandy Rothman? We want you to be our new guitar player.” Really bold and confident and no question about it. Like it was going to happen. I started going down to Palo Alto by Greyhound bus with my guitar every weekend.
    Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: The next time I saw Jerry was actually just before he got married. A couple of months before the wedding, he came up to the city with Sara. She was pregnant. So it was like, “We’re going to get married. We have to get married quick. Because it’ll start to show and people will talk and blah blah blah.”
    Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: It was Jerry’s idea that we get married. When I found out I was pregnant, he said, “I always wanted to be married!” Poor guy. We had no idea. No idea. We were babies.
    Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: He went to my grandmother Tillie first. Because there was always somebody there at Tillie’s house. My grandmother called my mom. My mom went over and then I went over and we all met Sara at the same time.
    Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: When we decided to get married, he told me his mother and his grandmother both lived in the city and I said, “We’ve got to go meet them. We’ve got to bring them to the wedding. We have to do that.” He had run away from home when he was sixteen or seventeen. Before that, he’d been pretty much raised by his grandmother, Tillie. Tillie was something else.
    By the time I met her in the spring of ’63, she was starting to get senile and it really really upset him. But we went and found her and she was so happy to see him. And so thankful to me for bringing him. Coming out of there, he was shaking his head, saying, “Oh, she’s losing it.” It was so sad for him because he’d had a tough childhood. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to watch your father drown? Think about yourself at five. Your father is out fishing in his wading boots in the ocean and he gets swept away? You’re really conscious at five and full of fears. What a terrible loss.
    Jerry talked to me about losing his finger. He talked about losing his father. Later on, when his mother and stepfather moved to Menlo Park, Jerry was miserable in suburbia. He didn’t fit in there. I think these were formative events. We don’t have a lot of memories from our childhood. The things that we