Chateau’s wastrels or some of the people from Norman “Pogo” Fontaine’s house in East Palo Alto. Pogo was an artist and a conga player, a bit older than they, and a fine party-giver. They’d load a pickup truck with people and go off to the beach at Half Moon Bay on the other side of the coastal range, or to San Francisco, to the Beat scene in North Beach, or to see the Vatican organist play Bach on the Grace Cathedral organ, or to feed Garcia’s cinephilia with strange art-house movies, especially Jan Potocki’s
Saragossa Manuscript.
Both Jerry and Robert read the book it was based on before going up to the Cento Cedar cinema to see the film, in which story after story unfolded in a perfectly mythic world. There were potent forerunners of their lives in the film; characters drink magic potions from a skull, as door after door opens to an ever more surreal world.
Their cultural tastes fed a continuous stream of conversation, for all of them had something to say and an exquisite joy in listening. Many years later a friend of Garcia’s would call him quite possibly the world’s greatest conversationalist, and he surely took immense delight in the art, recognizing, as the friend put it, that “thought is the most ductile source of pleasure, because you can construct all pleasures from it.” Hunter and Trist would sit with their notebooks open, each capturing the moment in some prose or poetic fashion, while Garcia sat with a guitar, always a guitar.
There were lots of young women in their scene, including Alan’s friend Karen “K.K.” Kaplan, an ardent Zionist, and Hunter’s love, Christie Bourne, a flamenco dancer with an exotic Brigitte Bardot aura. But soon there would be a woman who, though quite young, would be a peer. Barbara “Brigid” Meier was an extraordinarily beautiful fifteen-year-old high school student when she met Garcia in March on her way to a hike in the Los Trancos Woods with Jerry’s friend Sue. When Sue invited him along, Garcia was quick to join them, and on the way home, he sat in the backseat playing a song to Brigid from Joan Baez’s first album, “Don’t Sing Love Songs, You’ll Wake My Mother.” Brigid had read Kerouac the year before, and this daughter of left-wing bohemians whose lives closely resembled Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s was totally ready for the Garcia-Hunter-Trist scene. It did not represent “coupling,” as she later put it, but “mayhem. Where’s the scene tonight?” After school she’d go to Kepler’s, and then to who-knows-where. She met one of Garcia’s other friends, an older woman named Grace Marie Haddy, who seemed like someone from a Doris Lessing novel. Grace Marie lived alone and was, Brigid recalled, “arch, erudite, practiced free love, smoked pot, drank wine, and had something to say about everything.” It was at this point a very literary group, and Garcia was reading all the time:
Finnegans Wake,
poetry from the Beats and Kenneth Patchen, science fiction, and lots of other things that fell off Kepler’s shelves. Naturally, Brigid expressed it in a poem.
He [Patchen] speaks of angels and snowy hillsides
But I am in rapture of the thing
where we are all in love
with life and each other
Never before and perhaps again
will it be so
with such youthful vigor
and wild eyes
He who creates such magical music [Garcia]
radiates it upon us
The one of poetic words [Trist]
encourages
and overwhelms us with faith
The blind man in the corner [Hunter, in his glasses] sees all
even though he believes not in himself today
and I, follower of each
cry beautiful tears of joy.
Something was happening, and they knew it. It would be presumptuous, thought Brigid later, to even call it avant-garde. But there was a wave, and they were riding it. It was May 1961, and the image of the moment was “Camelot.” Representing youth, style, and virile Hemingwayesque manhood, John Kennedy and his beautiful, elegant wife defined a current that
Saragossa Manuscript.
Both Jerry and Robert read the book it was based on before going up to the Cento Cedar cinema to see the film, in which story after story unfolded in a perfectly mythic world. There were potent forerunners of their lives in the film; characters drink magic potions from a skull, as door after door opens to an ever more surreal world.
Their cultural tastes fed a continuous stream of conversation, for all of them had something to say and an exquisite joy in listening. Many years later a friend of Garcia’s would call him quite possibly the world’s greatest conversationalist, and he surely took immense delight in the art, recognizing, as the friend put it, that “thought is the most ductile source of pleasure, because you can construct all pleasures from it.” Hunter and Trist would sit with their notebooks open, each capturing the moment in some prose or poetic fashion, while Garcia sat with a guitar, always a guitar.
There were lots of young women in their scene, including Alan’s friend Karen “K.K.” Kaplan, an ardent Zionist, and Hunter’s love, Christie Bourne, a flamenco dancer with an exotic Brigitte Bardot aura. But soon there would be a woman who, though quite young, would be a peer. Barbara “Brigid” Meier was an extraordinarily beautiful fifteen-year-old high school student when she met Garcia in March on her way to a hike in the Los Trancos Woods with Jerry’s friend Sue. When Sue invited him along, Garcia was quick to join them, and on the way home, he sat in the backseat playing a song to Brigid from Joan Baez’s first album, “Don’t Sing Love Songs, You’ll Wake My Mother.” Brigid had read Kerouac the year before, and this daughter of left-wing bohemians whose lives closely resembled Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s was totally ready for the Garcia-Hunter-Trist scene. It did not represent “coupling,” as she later put it, but “mayhem. Where’s the scene tonight?” After school she’d go to Kepler’s, and then to who-knows-where. She met one of Garcia’s other friends, an older woman named Grace Marie Haddy, who seemed like someone from a Doris Lessing novel. Grace Marie lived alone and was, Brigid recalled, “arch, erudite, practiced free love, smoked pot, drank wine, and had something to say about everything.” It was at this point a very literary group, and Garcia was reading all the time:
Finnegans Wake,
poetry from the Beats and Kenneth Patchen, science fiction, and lots of other things that fell off Kepler’s shelves. Naturally, Brigid expressed it in a poem.
He [Patchen] speaks of angels and snowy hillsides
But I am in rapture of the thing
where we are all in love
with life and each other
Never before and perhaps again
will it be so
with such youthful vigor
and wild eyes
He who creates such magical music [Garcia]
radiates it upon us
The one of poetic words [Trist]
encourages
and overwhelms us with faith
The blind man in the corner [Hunter, in his glasses] sees all
even though he believes not in himself today
and I, follower of each
cry beautiful tears of joy.
Something was happening, and they knew it. It would be presumptuous, thought Brigid later, to even call it avant-garde. But there was a wave, and they were riding it. It was May 1961, and the image of the moment was “Camelot.” Representing youth, style, and virile Hemingwayesque manhood, John Kennedy and his beautiful, elegant wife defined a current that
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