One of guitarist Bob Weir’s slogans for the band was ‘Misfit Power’. “It got sterile and inhuman, so I murdered it and went electric and we got a reaction.” “But that was too much frozen technique,” he said. They still didn’t have much style, since Garcia was holding on to his folk roots. “It was fairly rigid, with lots of practice.” “We learnt precision and technique,” according to Weir. The new band house in Haight-Ashbury became the crucible. “It was creepy, and only me and Phil liked it, but it was a striking combination of words,” Garcia said. However, Garcia held one last band meeting in Palo Alto where they thumbed through a dictionary until the guitarist saw ‘The Grateful Dead’, a folklore reference to a dude who pays for the burial of an unknown corpse. The Warlocks were okay, though very rough round the edges, and when they discovered that the prototype Velvet Underground on the East Coast also had that name, they might have called it a day.
#Last dead show mod#
The drummer was a natty-looking mod called Bill Kreutzmann who, like Weir, was underage and couldn’t legally play in bars. Avant-garde composer Phil Lesh was brought in and told he was the bass player, although he’d never touched the instrument. A long-haired teenager called Bob Weir had gravitated west from Colorado and, hooking up with Hunter, McKernan and Garcia, they became The Warlocks. Since Ron was an R&B fanatic he became the frontman. He met Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, whose father sold Garcia a banjo. Fuelled by the left-wing politics and Cold War paranoia of the early 1960s, Garcia hung out in bookstores like Kepler’s in Menlo Park, discovered cannabis and lost faith with reality. Garcia created his own monster when he gave up wanting to be a bluegrass star like his hero Earl Scruggs, or a beatnik jug-band novelty act with his oldest friend Robert Hunter, instead hitting the electric switch.
Frankenstein’s monster is, after all, a drive to reanimate, or to produce life, and it hit me in that archetypal centre.” At that point, he decided, “I want to be concerned with weird.” Garcia said: “It might have been the dead thing brought to life.
First steps on a long strange trip: pre-Dead band The Warlocks circa 1965 (Image credit: Getty)
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