Free A Long Strange Trip by Dennis Mcnally Page A

distinguished associate of Karlheinz Stockhausen, was about to begin teaching a graduate-level course in composition at Mills College in Oakland, a small women’s school with a classy reputation in the arts. Too nervous even to apply, Lesh was ecstatic when T.C. got them both in the class, which included the cream of the Bay Area’s young composers, among them John Chowning and Steve Reich. It would be a formative experience.
    Berio was omnivorous about his sources, using jazz and Dante among many streams. His “Omaggio a Joyce” had established him as a leader in avant-garde composition, and Lesh was even more stunned when he came in with the actual “fuckin’ five-channel tape that Stockhausen made for performances” of “Gesang der Jüngliche,” a composition in which boys’ voices were electronically modified. There was a performance at Mills that also involved five channels. “We only had four in the room, so we put one in the hall. I got to run the knobs. The fifth speaker was supposed to be out there, somewhere . . . I got to control the positions of all the music in space, which meant trying to learn this piece, just from hearing it. No score, just the tape.” Lesh did so again at a performance of a Berio piece at the Ojai Festival. His own contribution to the class was a small piece that went over poorly in formal performance, but he’d heard it done beautifully in rehearsal, which was all that mattered to him. While taking Berio’s class, he also volunteered as an engineer at KPFA so that he could continue his involvement in music even without performing.
    One Saturday night in the spring of 1962, Lesh and Garcia connected. They’d seen each other around, but at a party at Pogo’s, Lesh remarked, “Jerry, you sing and play good, I work for KPFA, how’d you like to be on the radio?”
    “Why not? What do we have to do?”
    Lesh replied, “Well, first, my roommate has a tape recorder, and as long as you’re sittin’ here pickin’ and singin’, and the party is yet early, I’ll go up to Berkeley and get this tape recorder, and we’ll make what amounts to a demo, and I’ll play it for Gert [Chiarito, the producer of
The
Midnight Special
folk show].”
    Jerry agreed and added, “Well, shit, I’ll ride with you.”
    Out to T.C.’s Oldsmobile they went, and by the time they’d returned to Palo Alto they were lifelong partners. Lesh would remark that Garcia had a “raw,” really powerful personality, “and people were just awed by him, sitting at his feet—and I’m the kind of guy who distrusts people like that.” But they bridged their mutual barricades of personality, and something important happened between them, a lovely flowering of trust and connectedness that they would celebrate two months later on the ides of March on Lesh’s twenty-second birthday, sitting in Garcia’s room at the Chateau as they smoked the entire bag of weed Page Browning had brought to celebrate.
    On the night of Pogo’s party, they returned and recorded the demo. Gert Chiarito was so impressed that she had Garcia do an entire show solo, a virtually unprecedented event on
The Midnight Special.
She interviewed him about his music, and then he played. He was just nineteen, and yet somehow musically mature. His voice was not a great instrument, but it was evocative and right for his material. She remembered that he sang “Long Black Veil,” and the “sad, distant country” tone of it moved her. Normally she had a dozen people in the studio for the show, but she could concentrate at this solo session, so she was particularly startled toward the end of the hour to notice his missing finger. “He was playing as though he had everything and a few extras.”

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    A Fine High Lonesome Madness
    (3/62-12/63)
    Ken Frankel was a U.C. Berkeley physics student and guitar player who lived across the street from Lundberg’s Fretted Instru-ments, the Berkeley store that was a locus for acoustic music in the Bay Area.