Free So Many Roads by David Browne Page B

Magoo’s—long and narrow, picnic-style benches lined along the wall up front, a counter and oven to the right, florescent lighting overhead. But in a town teeming with college and high school students yearning for places to bond, Magoo’s was a gathering place for the emerging tribe.
    On this Wednesday night the young band making a clanging racket inside was as idiosyncratic as the setting. The lead guitarist now had a helmet head of thick, curly hair; his goatee had been banished for thetime being to his bluegrass days. Hunched over a portable Vox organ was a stocky kid with an equally unkempt mop, a spotty complexion, and a truculent gaze that dared anyone to mess with him. (The hair on both looked like it had been smushed down on their heads.) The other three—the drummer, the bass player, and especially the rhythm guitarist, so young looking he could easily have been on a middle school night out—appeared straighter and not quite as grubby. The sound they were making, bouncing off Magoo’s brick walls, was a clattering, exuberant, but not fully shaped mash-up of blues, jug band, rock ’n’ roll, and R&B. “They were still searching for their own sound,” recalls John McLaughlin, who’d taken percussion lessons from the Warlocks’ drummer, Bill Kreutzmann. “I thought, ‘This is weird stuff.’ Most of the local bands sounded like the Beatles or the Stones. The Warlocks sounded like music from the first Star Wars , when Luke Skywalker walks into the bar and they’re playing reverse jazz. It sounded really strange.”
    The first time the Warlocks had set up musical shop at Magoo’s, three weeks earlier, a small group of friends had shown up along with a smattering of high school kids they’d enticed. “It wasn’t too hard to get the student population to come hear music,” says one of those friends, Palo Alto High School student Connie Bonner (later Bonner Mosley). “It was perfect timing: ‘Come over after school to Magoo’s—have a pizza!’ They all came.” It almost didn’t matter how the band sounded; with rock ’n’ roll experiencing a heady, joyful rebirth, the idea of the Warlocks would be enticing enough.
    That first night at Magoo’s, May 5, the Warlocks’ lack of experience—the second guitarist, Bob Weir, had barely even held an electric guitar before—became amusingly apparent when they started playing. Some of them sat on stools, staring at each other instead of at the small crowd gathered in front of them. Bonner and her friend Sue Swanson, who’d become the band’s first two loyal fans, the original Deadheads, called upon their extensive knowledge of the Beatles’ stage craft andwent over and offered the Warlocks advice: leave the stools, stand up, turn around, make eye contact. They were playing rock ’n’ roll now, not bluegrass or jug-band music, and the songs required more visceral skills. The musicians, especially the lead guitarist, Weir’s older buddy Garcia, seemed thankful for the suggestions. After all, what did they know about doing this? Tonight’s show had at least one slightly wholesome touch: because it was Swanson’s seventeenth birthday, her mother, much to her daughter’s embarrassment, showed up with a cake.
    With each of the Warlocks’ weekly Wednesday shows that followed, Magoo’s grew a bit more congested, the crowd eventually spilling out onto the sidewalk on Santa Cruz Avenue. (Granted, it took only a few dozen people to do that, but it certainly looked impressive to anyone passing by.) Sometimes the Warlocks played in a corner in the back; other nights, like tonight, they were jammed into a space near the front window. Earlier, the local fire marshal had dropped by and been concerned about the overflow crowd. (Although May 27 has often been cited as the day of the Warlocks’ third Magoo’s show,