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by John "Marmaduke" Dawson (McDuke)
Reprinted from Instant Armadillo News (IAN) #10 courtesy of Richard
Harvey
Jerry Garcia, LSD, Ken Kesey, Acapulco Gold, "Marmaduke",
Bob Weir, enlightenment, Dave Torbert, mescaline, the Golden Rule,
"Henry", pedal steel, David Nelson, the Underground
and on the road with the Grateful Dead...
Any story about the early days of the New Riders would also have
to be a story about my relationship with Garcia, since that's
how the whole thing got started. I first met Jerry Garcia at the
house of my guitar teacher, who was my best friend's mother. It
was during the folk music days in Palo Alto, sometime, I guess,
before I left for my first semester at Millbrook School in New
York, in September of 1959. Several of us students as well as
members of the local picking scene were invited. Jerry was too
but I didn't get to hear him play that night 'cause he had to
leave 'cause he and his then old lady, Sarah, were off somewhere
to do a gig with their little mandolin/guitar duet. Jerry was
the mandolin.
After that, I would run into him often when I went into Dana
Morgan's shop in Palo Alto. He rented a space there to give guitar
lessons and whenever he wasn't teaching, he'd be in the front
of the place, picking his guitar (or banjo or mandolin), and holding
forth. Actually, you usually had to interrupt him whenever he
was playing to get him to say anything, but when you did, it was
definitely interesting. In the early sixties in Palo Alto there
was a folk music thing happening, centered around a club called
the Tangent.
There was also a place where Garcia, Hunter, David Nelson and
several other area heads were hanging out, and I think it was
called the Chateau, but that was another scene that you'd have
to ask Hunter about, I only went to the Tangent for Hootenanny
Nights on Wednesday. There were lots of pickers and impromptu
groups would form in the back room, to take the mic several minutes
later with something that they'd just worked out. I think I first
met David Nelson on one of those evenings. He was a year older
than I was and he had a bushy moustache that made him look like
a guy from the Californian gold fields of 1849. He was also in
a little bluegrass band that Garcia had at the time, but they
never invited me to play in that club. I had to ask them to play
with me later on, but that was fine, 'cause I wasn't ready yet,
really.
LSD came in 1965. In retrospect, it seems now as though all
of the elements that made it possible for acid to do what it did
were assembled there in the Bay Area. Ken Kesey had recently brought
his well-we-started-in-Oregon-sort-of band of hippies, beatniks,
ne'er-do-wells, always-so-wells, insane people, sane people, a
few freaks and some hangers-on to La Honda, just over a few miles
from Palo Alto. Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions had started
evolving into the Warlocks, who would soon become the Grateful
Dead. There was an emerging political, intellectual, revolutionary,
coffee-shop type of scene, primarily in Berkeley. So it was like,
"Well, we got the wiring in and the lamps in, let's throw
this switch and see if the thing lights up". It did. I had
been smoking grass for two years, but acid was like that times
ten, with a bunch of interesting weirdness thrown in. Acid was
different, it was very special, and you probably didn't want to
do it every day. I was living at my parents' house that summer,
having just returned from three months in Europe. (I was supposed
to go to the University of Grenoble in France, but I and this
guy I met in Paris ended up in Copenhagen, trying to start a rock
and roll band.)
There was a house on Gilman Street, behind the post office in
Palo Alto, where David Nelson, Eric Thompson, Herb Pedersen, and
Rick Shubb lived. I would go there in the evenings to smoke pot.
One night Denny Smith brought the only kilo of Genuine Acapulco
Gold that I've ever seen. Delicious. The next morning when I walked
into the place, Rick Shubb decided that I looked more like a Marmaduke
than a John Collins Dawson. He took me around to everybody's room,
saying, "Doesn't this look more like a Marmaduke to you?"
I don't know from what reccesses of his cannabis-enhanced brain
he came up with Marmaduke, (I looked it up: it means Sea Leader!?!),
but the name has stuck, although Garcia later shortened it to
McDuke, because I can talk like Donald Duck. As I said, when the
LSD got there, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions started evolving
into the Grateful Dead. David Nelson might have been the rhythm
guitar player in the Dead if he had not been in L.A. at the time,
trying out Scientology. Bobby Weir had some catching up to do
on the guitar, but he was there, and he really wanted the gig.
I think Garcia might have said something like, "Okay, kid,
come on. Can you play this?" He eventually could.
The Grateful Dead got up and rolling that summer, but to all
of us who were there at the time it was just some friends who
had started this rock and roll band and they needed all the help
they could get and they weren't really tight yet and they seemed
to spend a lot of time just looking for a groove but when they
did find one it really sounded good so you wanted to be there
when that happened and you could just say, "I'm with the
band", at the door so you could go to all the gigs and well,
why not? But I wasn't actually in the band and I wasn't a secretary
or an accountant or an organizer or a quippie or any of that stuff,
so that fall I went back to Occidental College in Los Angeles
to try and finish my sophomore year. I made it to about December,
when I dropped out of school and continued hanging out with musicians
and weirdos in L.A.
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