Free So Many Roads by David Browne

Garcia sing and play “Matty Groves,” the old English folk ballad about an affair between a lady of the manor and a servant that ends in death when the woman’s husband, a lord, learns about it. “It was absolutely operatic,” Lesh says. “It was a deadpan delivery and minimal guitar picking, butthe whole thing was mesmerizing.” Afterward, in what Lesh calls “that adolescent hyperbolic way,” he told Garcia he was in the presence of greatness, and Garcia just snickered and said, “Yeah, right, man.”
    Given his love of classical and experimental music, not to mention his barbershop-short haircut and height (he stood over six feet tall), Lesh distinguished himself in the scene in more ways than one. He seemed to talk at a quicker pace than everyone around him. For Meier’s sixteenth birthday Lesh wrote her a piece of music, a score, and told her it should be “played as fast as possible.” He seemed like the last person who would connect with Garcia, but for reasons both musical and personal, Lesh felt a bond from the start. “I have to confess, I always told my parents ‘Gee, I’d really love to have a brother,’” he says. “I guess I saw other families where there were two brothers. He was one of those guys you realize would be a friend for life.” To Constanten, the two were “complimentary and sympathetic, like strings on a guitar. Phil and I were into avant-garde, and Jerry was into the Carter Family. We hadn’t had enough of a map exposed to see where the roads would lead. But we knew there was a connection somehow.”
    That connection grew sturdier when, after hearing Garcia perform “Matty Groves” that night, Lesh offered to make a tape of his new friend singing that and other traditional songs. By then Lesh was volunteering as a recording engineer at KPFA, a noncommercial talk and music station funded by listeners, and he sensed Garcia would be an ideal addition to the station’s folk show. After grabbing Constanten’s tape deck out of the apartment they were sharing, Lesh and Garcia raced back to the party, recorded Garcia, and soon played it for Gertrude (“Gert”) Chiarito, the host of KPFA’s folk show, Midnight Special. The friendship was mutually beneficial: thanks to Lesh, Garcia had the potential to be heard by more people than ever before, even if his own career plans were still uncertain.
    Lesh was soon gone from the scene; dropping out of the University of California at Berkeley, he wound up living with Constanten and hisfamily in Las Vegas during the summer of 1962. (In between, he and Constanten signed up for composer Luciano Berio’s composition class at Mills College in Oakland, which also fostered their mutual love of adventurous music.) Constanten’s parents took issue with Lesh—who, by then, was letting his hair grow out—and asked him to leave, although Constanten says he never understood what happened: “They would yell at me, and I never knew what I did,” he says. “It was a very old-world sort of thing.” Either way, Lesh wound up taking a job at the post office in Vegas, hoping to work his way back to Palo Alto when he could.
    But that night on the Midnight Special show Lesh didn’t simply have another chance to observe Garcia’s musical prowess; he also noticed the way Garcia effortlessly bantered with Chiarito, whom everyone knew was no pushover. “She had a lot of local folkies kissing her ass, and Jerry didn’t do that,” Lesh says. “He was just himself. I was watching him win her over instantaneously.” Few others in their world, Lesh included, had those types of people skills at that point in their lives, yet Garcia already seemed to have mastered it. As Leicester would later tell Hajdu, Garcia was “a kind of natural bohemian, but he was a bohemian who knew how to find his way through the