Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 7, Episode 1
The Adventures of Pigpen, part 1
Archival interviews:
- Connie Bonner, Bob Matthews and Sue Swanson, by David Gans, 1992.
- Jerry Garcia, by Dennis McNally, Jerry On Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews.
- Jerry Garcia, by Peter Simon, WMVY, 1975.
- Phil Lesh, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 7/30/81.
- Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, by Hank Harrison & Bobby Petersen, 10/6/70.
- Ron “Pigpen” McKernan & Jerry Garcia, KFRC, 1966.
- Bob Weir, WMMR, 1976.
- Bob Weir, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1/4/83.
JESSE: Ron “Pigpen” McKernan died 50 years ago this month at the age of 27. He’s buried at the Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, the town where the Grateful Dead were born. An inscription reads, “Pigpen was and is now forever one of the Grateful Dead.” This is from Bear’s Choice, a live album released in 1973 that was in large part a tribute to Pigpen.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Bear’s Choice] (0:34-0:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Take Pigpen away from the electric Grateful Dead—take him away from being the frontman on “Turn On Your Lovelight” and “Good Lovin’” and things like that, bringing the house down with “Hard to Handle”—and he is one of the most soulful blues guys, when he’s got just [him] and a guitar.
AUDIO: “Katie Mae” [Bear’s Choice] (1:46-2:17) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was Pigpen’s idea to go electric as the Warlocks in 1965 and he wasn’t just the Dead’s first frontman but their first identifiable character, depicted on the first t-shirts and posters in 1967. But even 50 years after his death, Pigpen is still a bit of a mystery. He didn’t give many interviews, and died just as the Grateful Dead were transforming from an underground act into a mainstream band, and—more tragically—just as he was beginning to find his own voice as a songwriter.
AUDIO: “The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion)” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 22, 5/26/72] (1:18-1:44) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion),” recorded on the last night of the Europe ‘72 tour at the Lyceum in London, one of Pigpen’s final original compositions. And, as we’ll learn today, the intended title for the song is actually “Stranger Here.” It was never performed again. Pigpen appeared once more with the Dead after their return from Europe ‘72, but only played organ. He died nine months later. Today we remember—and meet—Pigpen. Here’s Bob Weir on WMMR in 1976.
BOB WEIR [1976]: He was really sweet… He was a madman. He was really wonderful... He was not at all like any Hells Angels, except that he kind of looked like a Hells Angel.
JESSE: And here’s how Weir remembered Pigpen when we spoke with him for our American Beauty season.
BOB WEIR: Pigpen was… gosh, what was he… sort of an Irish poet, or an Irish-Scottish… he had that going. He drank a bit, and he had that sensibility about him. As far as [being] a musician is concerned, he was a pretty damn competent musician, and then sort of a scholar of the blues.
AUDIO: “Turn On Your Lovelight” [Live/Dead] (0:31-0:50) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s probably what the phrase “Pigpen-era Dead” conjures for most people, Pig large and in charge and running down “Turn On Your Lovelight” on Live/Dead. It’s true, Pigpen was the least psychedelicized member of the original Grateful Dead, a fact that I think leads to a skewed perception of his role in the Dead and their history. It’s easy to think of two separate Grateful Deads — the psychedelic warriors acting as Pigpen’s backup group before switching back to their regularly scheduled rainbow-making. Here’s Jerry Garcia speaking with Peter Simon in 1975.
JERRY GARCIA [WMVY, 1975]: There were the tunes that he sang, and the rest of us got to just goof around. He had that thing of being able to really carry an audience, too — he was really more of a showman, and more out there, than the rest of us.
JESSE: That bit about “carrying an audience” was more than a little important during the lean years when the band didn’t quite have an audience of their own, let alone an original voice. During the band’s first five years of existence, its members developed into songwriters, most obviously Jerry Garcia with his partner Robert Hunter, but Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, too. In 1970, American Beauty featured Pigpen’s first fully original song on a Dead album.
AUDIO: “Operator” [American Beauty] (0:00-0:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It turned out that Pigpen’s songwriting voice meshed perfectly with the band he’d helped to found. Go figure. And that’s the story we’re going to focus on in these episodes — how completely Pigpen was—and is now forever—one of the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “Operator” [American Beauty] (1:41-1:56) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
School Days
JESSE: We talked a bunch about Pigpen in the “Operator” episode of our American Beauty season, delving a bit into his archives, and we’ll be pointing back in that direction occasionally so as not to repeat ourselves too much, but we’re going to go a bit further in a few ways. In 1970, the late Hank Harrison conducted one of the few interviews with Pigpen, and the recordings are now in the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz. It’s not the greatest recording, so you might have to squint your ears just slightly. A lot of the conversation involved trying to untangle the comings and goings of the early Palo Alto folk scene and how it led to Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and eventually the Dead.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: I mean, it's not no big important thing, that somebody's going here, somebody's going there —
JESSE: Well, to some of us…
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Then you gotta sort it out. And good luck.
JESSE: Thanks, Pig, and welcome to the Deadcast. The other way we went further is that Rich and I went on a research mission to California, where we visited our good Deadcast friend Jim Sullivan, known as Sully. He grew up in eastern Palo Alto nearby the McKernans, was best friends with Pig’s little brother, Kevin, has remained tight with the family, and became the keeper of the McKernan archives. One fascinating document we’re going to be hearing from today are some biographical notes written after Pigpen’s passing by his father, Phil. Sully’s going to be reading the part of Phil McKernan.
JIM “SULLY” SULLIVAN: “The entity that was to become Pigpen of the Grateful Dead, was welcomed into this world—born—on September 8th, 1945, in Mills Memorial Hospital, San Mateo, California. He was a quiet, sensitive and bright child. But it became apparent when he was about 12 that he had been born about 10 years before his time. At seven years, he took lessons on the steel guitar, but found it tedious. [He took] trumpet lessons when he was 10, and he really was a natural. But all the while, he played around on the piano, but was adamant about not taking lessons.”
JESSE: Ron Charles McKernan spent the first dozen years of his life in San Bruno, just south of San Francisco, adjacent to San Francisco International Airport. When he was around 13, his father Phil and mother Esther moved the family south to the Palo Alto area, around the time that Phil quit his job as a DJ and began to work as a lab technician at Stanford. By then, Ron had a younger sister, Carol, and a younger brother, Kevin. They first settled at 17 Buckthorn Way in Menlo Park, a location that would prove pivotal in young Ron’s life, though they only lived there briefly.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: I was living on a street that didn't have no sidewalks, and all that shit, funky houses and all that. And I had to actually walk across the tracks, down by the [hobos’ jungle], and then go through the rich neighborhood over to get to school.
SULLY: Atherton was the snooty community that, even back then, was large lots and fences, which wasn't really the norm. There weren’t a lot of fences back then.
JESSE: Atherton is where Bob Weir grew up, as well as a few other members of the Dead’s scene, so Pigpen might’ve been riding his bike right past young Bobby Weir on his way to middle school. Also attending middle school in another part of Menlo Park in that era was Jerry Garcia.
SULLY: And Buckthorn, you could get along the Caltrain tracks. And the Caltrain wasn't just for the commuter trains — there were a lot of freight trains that would come through, middle of the night. So you had that… we just called them hobos, but you had these folks that would ride the rails. And it was Ron [who] spoke [to them] at a few points.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Down at the end of my street, they had a hobo jungle scene. Yeah, hobos, they’d be down there, sittin’ around, drinking wine, waiting for the right train they want to get. During that time, they’d be coming up to the house. They’d say, “Ma’am, can I do some gardening work for you?” or something. We didn’t have much of a garden — we didn’t have no sidewalks on our street.
JESSE: This is from a track recorded by Pigpen in 1969 or 1970 about his experiences around Buckthorn Way when he was 12 or so years old.
PIGPEN [~1969-70]: I was just beginning to ask, I was just a little child, just a little child, asking to see what they was doing, find out — “How you do all this business? How do you get into it? How do you know where to go?” And one of them over there, tells me, “Hey, boy… boy, you just get on that train, and where you get, you get.” And that’s it.
SULLY: Pretty much everybody was sock hops and jock stuff. He definitely went a different way. And thank goodness for that.
JESSE: Even before he discovered the language of the blues, Pigpen’s first dose of underground culture came from migrants riding the rails, which is also likely where he got his first taste of alcohol.
SULLY: And Buckthorn’s still there. But again, the Caltrain tracks have got these 10-foot fences on each side. So you really… the only places you can access them is where streets cross, or at the station. So, again, a lost aspect of that area.
JESSE: Most of us know Ron McKernan as Pigpen, and before Pigpen he was known by some as Blue Ron. But in elementary school, he had a different nickname.
SULLY: He went to Encinal [Elementary School] and that's where, for whatever reason, his nickname there according to his yearbook was Rims. I'm not sure if it was car-related — he never wore glasses. About three-quarters of the signatures in his little grammar school book said, “Hey, Rims!”
JESSE: Now there’s a different reality — Rims McKernan. After only a year or so on Buckthorn Way, the McKernans moved a few miles to 2338 Santa Catalina Street, just over the southern border from east Palo Alto, a working class and Black neighborhood a few blocks from the mighty 101 expressway, and settled there.
SULLY: They were still developing the neighborhood. It was tract homes for all the… there was IBM, there were the airlines, which is where my father worked. And Phil McKernan worked up at Stanford. It was just cheap housing. My folks bought in the mid-’50s, ‘55, and the McKernans did too. They had just built those. Actually, they were budget — they weren’t even Eichlers, they were called Mackays. And they were the budget-conscious [model]. All the families, very rarely they’d have one or two kids — they’d have three, four or five or, as our family [did], six.
JESSE: Pigpen was working pretty early, and Phil McKernan sketched out a list of Pigpen’s early jobs.
SULLY: Phil was really trying to document his son's life. He talks about when he was a Cub Scout and then a newspaper delivery boy. He worked cleaning up in a butcher shop — boy, that must have been a heck of a job. He was doing lawns, pumped gas. First motorcycle when he was 15.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: I was about 15 or 16 years old, and I had me-self a motorcycle and I was working at a Texaco gas station. I’d get off early from school, I’d go and work through the afternoon until about 7 o’clock at night. The only thing is, I didn’t have any lights on my bike. When the winter started comin’ around, it began to get dark before I got off work. “Oops…” I would tape a flashlight to the handlebars, just so I wouldn’t get busted on the way home.
JESSE: Back in 1992, our good buddy David Gans interviewed a few members of the Dead’s early scene who were classmates with Pigpen. This is Connie Bonner, who would co-found the first Grateful Dead fan club, the Golden Road To Unlimited Devotion, in 1966, predating the song of the same name.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: I remember him in high school — the hallways would clear when Pigpen walked down the hallway. For what reasons, I wasn’t ever sure… with women on each arm, maybe. I just remember him in his last days of Palo Alto High School, before he was expelled. He was sort of an unforgettable character, and then running into him a few months later at the guitar store, much to my surprise.
JESSE: Here’s the description of Pigpen’s high school career from his father Phil’s notes on him.
SULLY: “Went to high school only when he had to. They were really glad when he quit. He set a bad example whenever he appeared on campus with boots, long hair and junky Levi's jacket that we're all familiar with. He made poetry, prose, and many a wall he painted.” [laughs] I guess that's graffiti.
JESSE: Pigpen’s first instrument was guitar.
SULLY: When he was 13, he got his first acoustic guitar — $12, Montgomery, a used one.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: John Ogilvie had this white electric guitar, with a little funky amplifier, and he loaned it to me. And so I went over and I started to play Duane Eddy songs, things like that. And my father bought me a $15 little funky guitar that was about 100 years old. A scroungy old funky little guitar. So that’s how I got started on the guitar trip.
SULLY: “Mostly, he taught himself the guitar and the harp. He sat in on hootenannies and other local musical gatherings.”
JESSE: If there were any parents ready to be supportive of a son who wanted to play guitar, it was Phil and Esther McKernan.
SULLY: I first became interested in R&B by listening to records and his father's R&B radio show, the first in the SF Bay Area.
JESSE: We’ll pause here and discuss Phil McKernan for a moment, because he does seem like a pretty profound influence on young Ron, even if the two didn’t always see eyeball to eyeball. Phil spent his 20s working in radio. In the McKernan collection, there’s a small black and white photo of a dirt road filled with puddles leading up to a tiny one-room building in the middle of nowhere situated next to a transmitter tower. KHSL it reads on the roof. On the back, the photo is captioned: “My home, my abode; the control room and transmitter; janitor, P.C. McKernan.” KHSL was in Chico, and Phil bopped between Bay Area stations, landing at KRE in Berkeley about a half-dozen years before Pigpen was born, where he became chief announcer. Often, it’s repeated that his radio name was Cool Breeze.
SULLY: I asked their daughter about this: was his nickname Cool Breeze? “No, it was not.” She goes, “That wasn’t his radio name — his radio name was Phil.” So, I don’t know. I’ve seen that bandied about. According to blood relatives, their only living daughter, that’s not his nickname. That’s not his stage name.
JESSE: Phil’s name appears in a few histories of radio. Supporting the family’s contention, John A. Jackson’s Big Beat Heat presents a list of “white radio disc jockeys of the early 1950s who played rhythm and blues music, each with a colorful nickname and personalized style.” There was Zena “Daddy” Sears in Atlanta, Clarence “Poppa Stoppa” Hayman in New Orleans, Danny “Cat Man” Stiles in Newark, Ken “Jack the Cat” Elliot also in New Orleans, George “Hound Dog” Lorenz in Buffalo, and Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue in San Francisco. Phil McKernan is actually the only DJ on the list without a nickname. He probably stopped DJing and took a straight job at Stanford right around the time Pigpen turned 10. A little bit of a piano player himself, he passed along one important musical skill to his son.
SULLY: “Learned boogie from Father also.” So, I’d assume that’d be boogie-woogie.
JESSE: Nearby was a neighborhood of East Palo Alto known as Whiskey Gulch.
SULLY: Whiskey Gulch was nearby. And that's… Ron, I think at some point, in some of his interviews, talked about going to Berrone’s. Whiskey Gulch now is completely gone — it’s really a place that doesn’t exist anymore, only in pictures. But it was kind of a seedy little section that was within a 10-minute walk of our neighborhood. But there’s also the Baylands — we all spent a lot of time out in the Baylands. I think Ron would go over to East Palo Alto to the blues clubs. There were quite a few: you had Mickey's Blue Room, and if you ever needed to have your head kicked in, there were plenty of places to go over there. It [was] real rough-edged. It was great. It was accessible. And there was no putting on airs when you went over there.
JESSE: Connie Bonner.
CONNIE BONNER [1992]: There was an instance, one time… I can't remember if my parents were supposed to be gone for the weekend, and they actually never went anywhere. And when they walked into their own home, Pigpen opened the door to greet them. I was always so proud of my mother — she's a very good sport.
JESSE: From Phil McKernan’s notes on Ron.
SULLY: “Blues were reflected in his writing and painting. But it took music to express it, to try and say what he had to say. Where did he meet Jerry? Bob, Phil, Bill?” And then, in parentheses: “(Must get info.)”
Palo Alto Scene
JESSE: Young Ron McKernan wasn’t long for high school. But dropping out of high school in Palo Alto was different than dropping out of high school in most places. For starters, there was Stanford University, and the bohemian world that flourished at its edges. The center of that scene was Kepler’s Books and Magazines.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: The whole early Kepler's scene. That's when I met Jerry. I was always bothering Jerry about playing some blues. And he had just gotten out of the Army at the time. He had a little brown Epiphone guitar.
JESSE: Jerry Garcia moved to the Palo Alto area in January 1961, fresh out of the Army, just after Ron McKernan’s 15th birthday. Garcia was 18.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: David X was living over on Ramona Street.
JESSE: David X was part of the Black bohemian scene in Palo Alto, who’d taken a liking to teenage Ron. When Garcia showed up, David was the first to notice his sweet voice for blues singing and introduced him to the scene at Kepler’s and to Ron McKernan. Garcia was soon a regular at the McKernan homestead, giving teenage Ron guitar pointers.
Garcia told Blair Jackson, “I sat in his room for countless hours listening to his old records. It was funky, man! Stuff thrown everywhere. Pigpen had this habit of wearing just a shirt and his underpants. You’d come into his house and he’d say, ‘Come on in, man,’ and he’d have a bottle of wine under the bed. His mom would come in about once every five hours to see if he was still alive.” Around then, Ron had a new nickname. This is from 1966, one of the first radio interviews with the Dead.
KFRC HOST [1966]: Around the table we’ll go. Meet, first, Pigpen. What a horrible name.
PIGPEN [1966]: Not my fault. Jerry gave it to me.
JERRY GARCIA [1966]: [chuckles]
KFRC HOST [1966]: What’s your real name?
PIGPEN [1966]: Ron.
KFRC HOST [1966]: Ron, Pigpen, who would influence you?
PIGPEN [1966]: Uggg. Mostly blues people: Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, and the more modern guys like Bobby Bland, Little Junior Parker and Little Walter and those kind of people.
JESSE: Well, that’s one version, and there’s another radio interview where Pigpen blames Garcia, too, but we’ll get to the other version of the Pigpen origin story momentarily. There are a number of incredible documents in the Pigpen collection, many from his teenage years.
SULLY: We get our hearts broken, and all of a sudden: how do I manifest? How do I deal with that? I could write about it. And he did. We're all tormented souls at that age, I'll tell you. Pretty much all of us.
JESSE: We’re going to hear Sully read a little bit of a story titled “San Bruno Blues,” written the year Pigpen turned 16. In it, he rides his motorcycle back to the town of his youth.
SULLY: “I rode through the narrow streets which were once wide. I felt all the emotions I felt years ago when I passed the long time known places, wandered so many years back in my lonely life. I passed a house on the corner where my childhood lover and I stayed up late at night, 1956. I was walkin’ in the windswept and foggy nights past her house, hoping she’d look out and see me. I walked once again in the hills west of skyline by the cold gray lake, where I would sit for hours and cry.”
JESSE: From a scholarly point of view, the story might be classified as juvenalia, but it also captures something of Pigpen’s teenage sadness. The story might be subtitled Portrait of Pigpen as a Young Beatnik Emo.
SULLY: “I hitchhiked under frigid trees, past the National Cemetery, wandered the Sunny Hill Park where my happiest days were spent. Then I climbed on that black machine and hit the road. All the memories of those wonderful times will forever live in my heart as real and tender as if they had just happened. As I left that foggy little windswept town, I cried on that hard highway. Had not the night grown longer, and the world grown colder. Is life so much harder to live? Ron McKernan, 1961.”
JESSE: Teenage angst or no, it was obvious that Pigpen loved the new generation of Beat writers. Here’s one particularly Ginsberg-like passage from another untitled piece: “who drank themselves into oblivion in San Francisco blue town solitude in spider foot fog, in 19th & Sloat but whining and crying to the solitary streetcars on rainy tracks.”
SULLY: Ferlinghetti ran that City Lights for a long time, and that was a favorite spot in North Beach. It was just where the beatniks hung out.
JESSE: Growing up just down the Peninsula, Pigpen was pretty close to ground zero as Beat literature and other radical books came flowing into Kepler’s.
SULLY: Yeah, we’d shoplift books from there — [Abbie Hoffman’s] Steal This Book, we took that to heart.
JESSE: The early ‘60s saw the formation of the social scene that was the Grateful Dead’s extended universe. One center of action was Kepler’s Books. The other was the Chateau, a group boarding house in Menlo Park.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: The old Chateau / Kepler days.
HANK HARRISON [10/6/70]: That'd be about ‘62.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: ‘round there, give or take a century.
HANK HARRISON [10/6/70]: Let’s see, you didn't live at the Chateau?
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: No, but I was hanging out there all the time. Hunter lived there, Jerry lived there, Danny lived there, Willy Legate lived there. Just a bunch of the people that we know used to live there.
JESSE: This next voice is Bobby Petersen, a poet and friend of Phil Lesh’s who would provide lyrics for “Unbroken Chain,” “New Potato Caboose,” and other Dead songs.
BOBBY PETERSEN [10/6/70]: That’s where Phil heard Jerry play for the first time, in the kitchen.
JESSE: At the Chateau, Phil Lesh joined the scene. Here’s him describing it to David Gans in 1981, in David’s fine book, Conversations with the Dead.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: By that time I’d met Jerry, and Pigpen, and Willy Legate, and other folks. That was the only place I could figure to go. I went back to Kepler’s bookstore, which at that time was a hangout. They had a little coffee shop there. That was where we did all our raving in my pre-Las Vegas period.
JESSE: With dozens of friends colliding, the future Grateful Dead fermented at the Chateau. One character of ill repute was Joe Novakovich, who gave Pigpen a new musical direction.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: I met Novakovich right around that time. I remember, one time, going up to the Chateau and Novakovich gave me a harmonica. I had heard some harmonica music and I dug it. So he gave me one and said, “Okay, see if you can do this.” So, I was honkin’ on it.
JESSE: At Sully’s place, atop the McKernan family piano, there’s a sketch of a teenage Pigpen by Joe Novakovich. With an instrument all his own, Pigpen contributed to the emerging music scene around the Chateau.
AUDIO: “In the Pines” [David X, Pigpen & Jerry Garcia, ~6/62] (1:42-2:12)
JESSE: That’s Pigpen playing harmonica with Jerry Garcia on guitar at the Top of the Tangent in Palo Alto, probably in June of 1962. Singing is David X, the man who introduced Pigpen and Jerry around a year earlier. Thanks enormously to Palo Alto folk scholar Brian Miksis for identifying this recording, which has circulated for years as filler on a Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers tape, alongside this snippet of Pigpen. We’ll let Hog Stompers banjo player Jerry Garcia introduce him.
JERRY GARCIA [~6/62]: I’m back again, but this time it’s purely secondary. Perhaps those of you that heard Ron play the harmonica were impressed by his playing. But there is another side of him that’s even more impressive I think. So even though he’ll be the last to admit it, I better shut up…
JESSE: One of the musicians that met Pigpen during this period is the guitarist Eric Thompson, who played guitar with Garcia and Hunter in the Black Mountain Boys. Welcome the Deadcast, Eric!
ERIC THOMPSON: Mostly we hung, because we were in the scene. But also, I had a car — I could use my folks’ car. He'd call me up and say, “Hey, man, come on…” Mostly, he’d want to go to East Palo Alto, where it was easier to buy Thunderbirds when you were underage. He had Black friends over there, we’d go and hang. Sometimes, he would just come along but sit in the car and drink. Partly, it was just to get out of the house. Ron did not get out of his persona. He was the Pigpen, the Ron persona, all the time. He didn’t just put it on for special occasions. His attitude, his way of talking, that's what it was. Some people, it’s like they have one act and another act. But that was not this. He was living in his persona. And he never mentioned his dad.
JESSE: Even though Pigpen wasn’t a bluegrass picker, nor even a folkie necessarily, he fit right into the scene alongside fellow serious music fans and musicians. Pig’s specialities were just different.
ERIC THOMPSON: He also came to our bluegrass band gigs. Some of us were more focused on bluegrass, and some of us were more focused on blues, but we were interested in all of it.
AUDIO: “99 Years” [Pigpen, 1962] (4:22-4:52)
ERIC THOMPSON: You’d listen to him play blues guitar and it's just so right on, the feel and everything in his guitar playing, and the singing. He didn't sound like he was trying to do it — he was doing it.
JESSE: Even by then, Pigpen was a pretty hardcore drinker.
ERIC THOMPSON: Ron was a juicer, already pretty alcoholic by the time I met him. [This] gang of girls that were part of the scene, I remember, one of them just said, “Yeah, Ron has a death wish.”
JESSE: In case that Skype buffering made it difficult to hear – one of the women who was part of the local folk scene told Eric, “Ron has a death wish.”
ERIC THOMPSON: I do feel that on some level Ron constructed this persona, but not having known him before that, then that’s just who he was. He didn't seem sad — it just seemed like this was what he was going to do.
JESSE: One of the many remarkable documents in the collection of Pigpen’s papers is a page of writing from October 1962, which we’re going to hear a bunch of — what Pigpen was doing on the day of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
SULLY: “Tentative description of October 22, 1962. 4pm: cynically evil Garcia, of guitar and banjo, chuckled across a black table at me. ‘Well, man, ol’ JFK is going to talk on us.’ St. Michael's Alley, – empty, spectacled, almost fat Verne, pothead waiter. Canned good salesmen, hip-talking cook….. all listening. The ominous message booming from high stucco ceilings, rough-cut timbers, round tables and screaming kitchen machines was like a sun and palm morning of December ‘41, the same totalit. We all searched other's faces. “What’d’ya think?” Tense, unbelieving – “seven point ultimatum. Oh shit!”
JESSE: In October of 1962, Garcia was 20, Pigpen had just turned 17.
SULLY: “4:20 to 4:30pm – assorted groans, goddammit, oh shits and oh God, what am I gonna do now? Jerry looks sickly at me. ‘Pigpen, they're gonna try and draft my ass. Shit, man. They’ll never get me, man.’ We left desolate St. Mike’s. … 4:30 to 11pm – Garcia and I roared around the Peninsula in a black rat hole-ish ‘41 Dodge, howling, screaming, ‘It’s later than you think!’ Picked up Dave, guitar-picker, bluegrass, went back to St. Mike's bustling with foxy young girls and collegiate uniformed appa-thetics, sat over coffee and cigarettes & huge plans for just the next ONE day.”
JESSE: The bluegrass guitar picker was almost certainly David Nelson. It’s funny to hear Garcia worry about being drafted, since he’d already been discharged from the Army the previous year, but war is hell. There were different sub-scenes at the folk clubs in the area. One of them was the Boar’s Head in San Carlos.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Jerry was in the Boar’s Head scene. I was there, and Pete Albin and Rod Albin.
JESSE: Rodney Albin would remain a staple of the local folk scene until his untimely passing in the mid-’80s. His brother Peter Albin would become the founding bassist in Big Brother and the Holding Company. Big Brother wasn’t the only future band whose members were hanging around the folk scene. In San Jose, future Merry Prankster Paul Foster ran a club called the Offstage.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Jorma would play there a lot, and Paul Kantner would show up, and [Jack] Casady would be around. That was before they ever met Gracie [Slick].
JESSE: Many of the members of the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother were friendly long before any of them went electric. A new singer showed up on the scene from Texas.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: In fact, remember every year, everybody would go down to the Pop Festival. So that’s the first time I met her. And then she showed up at the Tangent, and one night Jorma was backing her. She was singing and I met her.
AUDIO: “Trouble in Mind” [Janis Joplin & Jorma Kaukonen, The Legendary Typewriter Tape, 6/25/64] (0:06-0:29) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonen, from a new archival release from Omnivore titled The Legendary Typewriter Tape, recorded during their brief musical partnership. That year, members of the scene all met up at the Monterey Jazz Festival, with a typically amazing lineup featuring Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, the Shorter/Hancock/Williams/Carter version of the Miles Davis Quintet, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and—no small thing for the blues fans—Big Mama Thornton.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: And then with the Jazz Festival stuff, she was hanging around, I was talking to her, we were drinking wine together and all that jazz. She was on sort of the “folk circuit” at that time. And then she disappeared for a while, I didn't know where she went.
JESSE: They’d reconnect a few years later. There was a lot going on. Another part of Palo Alto that Pigpen ended up in was Perry Lane, where a group of Stanford graduate writing students lived. Like his future bandmates, Pigpen hung out among Ken Kesey’s scene.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Perry Lane was really fun. It was a good trip. And it was pretty weird — me and Novakovich used to go up there, bring a guitar, just sit around. We went to Kesey’s house a couple of times.
JESSE: There, Pigpen encountered the legendary Neal Cassady, template for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and soon the pilot of the Merry Pranksters’ bus Furthur.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: I thought he was kind of nuts: ilke, hey, wait a minute, what's this guy up to? Until I talked to him, and got to know him, got to love him.
The Zodiacs
JESSE: Of the future members of the Warlocks, Pigpen was the first to join an electric band.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: That's when I first started to hang around with Troy. It was when I was 16 or 17.
JESSE: Guitarist Troy Weidenheimer led the Zodiacs, a local R&B group, where Pigpen got his first experience fronting a band.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: In the Zodiacs, we were playing beer-drinking Stanford fraternity parties. And Troy played lead guitar. His old lady, Sherry [Huddleston], played rhythm guitar. Jerry would occasionally play bass.
HANK HARRISON [10/6/70]: Garcia?
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Yeah.
HANK HARRISON [10/6/70]: Really. Stringed bass, standup bass?
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Electric bass. And Ron Ogborn would play bass occasionally, Or either drums — he didn’t do bass and drums. And then I’d sing and play harmonica. Way before the Warlocks.
JESSE: Another version of history says that Ron McKernan’s tenure in the Zodiacs is where he earned the nickname Pigpen. Here’s Eric Thompson.
ERIC THOMPSON: David Nelson thinks he was there when he first got the nickname. Ron, Pigpen, was in the band the Zodiacs, it was Troy Weidenheimer’s band. Troy's girlfriend was Sherry Huddleston — this is the story that Nelson tells, and he’s pretty accurate. So, they were at some place and about to go to some other party and it's like: “Oh, Pigpen, come on!” It wasn’t like that was his nickname already. But it stuck.
JESSE: As other members of the scene remembered, he was just obviously Pigpen. Everybody around would’ve gotten the reference. The character Pigpen first appeared alongside Charlie Brown and the gang in Charles Schulz’s popular comic strip Peanuts, on July 8th, 1954, when Ron McKernan himself was 8 years old. If you believe in embodiment, it’s worth noting that the two Pigpens were around the same age.
No tapes of the Zodiacs with Pigpen and Garcia seem to have survived, but when we were assembling this episode, I was delighted to discover that in 2007 the wonderful label Norton Records put out a four-song Zodiacs 7-inch, recorded in 1960, about two years before Pig and Jerry started playing with them. It’s not too often that we at the Deadcast have reason to shout it out to Miriam Linna and the late great Billy Miller at Norton, but word up Miriam and Billy. Here’s the Zodiacs with Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” on the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast.
AUDIO: “Caravan” [The Zodiacs, The Primitive Instrumental Sounds of the Zodiacs] (0:02-0:34) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The Zodiacs apparently had a surf-rock bent before becoming more of an R&B band. They influenced the Dead in important ways. Here’s Jerry Garcia describing the experience to Dennis McNally. This is from the audiobook Jerry On Jerry, available from Hachette.
JERRY GARCIA [Jerry On Jerry]: Troy taught me the principle of: just stomp your foot and get on it. He was a great one for the instant arrangement. He was also fearless for that thing of — get your friends to do it. Fuck it if it ain’t slick, you know what I mean? Just get… it’s supposed to be fun. If it ain't fun, it ain’t worth it. He was good at that. And he was also a very good player, too. I admired him. I admired… he was facile.
JESSE: It’s pretty easy to imagine the Zodiacs version of “Caravan” stretching out heavily, and it’s totally fair to count this 1960 recording as an influence on the Grateful Dead, even if they never heard it.
AUDIO: “Caravan” [The Zodiacs, The Primitive Instrumental Sounds of the Zodiacs] (1:00-1:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Here’s a link to the single, courtesy of Norton Records (also on YouTube). They probably sounded a little more R&B oriented when Pigpen appeared with them.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: I sang and played harmonica — “Walking the Dog,” “Searchin’.”
JESSE: Both “Walking the Dog” and “Searchin’” would survive into the Grateful Dead repertoire, or at least their collective memory, turning up at jam sessions and soundchecks that have survived on tape.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Troy did a lot of instrumentals like “Sen-Sa-Shun,” “San-Ho-Zay,” Freddie King. Guitar instrumental stuff. Just all kinds of things. A few Jimmy Reed tunes. Just stuff. But nothing original.
JESSE: Au contraire mon Porc. Another quietly exciting thing we found in the Pigpen papers are a few sheets documenting a collaboration titled “Rainy Day Blues,” credited to Troy Weidenheimer and Ron McKernan, dated December 1963. We’re working on decoding it. It’s possible they didn’t play it on stage, but still cool to know about. Either way, the Zodiacs were Pigpen’s first real paying gig. One musician who filled in one night with the Zodiacs when Garcia was on bass was an underage drummer named Bill Kreutzmann. He’d connect with Garcia and Pigpen soon enough.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Troy was sort of the leader. And he was in with all the fraternities up at Stanford, and he was in with a few people. You'd make $20, if you were lucky.
JESSE: Some of the gigs got a little hairy.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: Pretty good for those days, except that if you have to contend with 100 football players… football players ain’t small. They’d get these big bowls of punch and they're running around and ripping off your t-shirts and jumping on the girls and all that. They’d rent a place like up at Searsville Lake — they’d rent the mens’ dressing room. It was just a big, huge stone room with benches on the side, showers.
JESSE: As happens, one gig led to another.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: We've got these guys, these three Black guys. This guy, Don Dee Great — that was his last name, Dee Great—we’d play for house parties and stuff, and they’d sing and do Coasters trips. He was the lead singer, and then decided to change the name to Dr. Don and the Interns.
JESSE: There’s sadly no historical trace of Dr. Don and the Interns.
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: We were working with him off and on for a while. We used to played a setup by Playland, played mostly house parties, college house parties. We had some weird times. We played in tents in the San Jose Fairgrounds, all kinds of weird little gigs.
JESSE: One fan of the Zodiacs was teenager Denise Kaufman, who would shortly join the Merry Pranksters as Mary Microgram and co-found the band Ace of Cups. Welcome back to the Deadcast, Denise.
DENISE KAUFMAN: My folks were trying to get me out of San Francisco, because I was hanging out in these folk clubs. I liked sneaking out and they caught me a couple of times. So I went to this school in Palo Alto, which was where Grace Slick graduated, as it turned out. I didn't know her; she was a little older. But it was right off of the Stanford campus.
JESSE: Denise’s parents dropped her directly into the maw of the Palo Alto folk scare.
DENISE KAUFMAN: Well, first of all, I used to go to Dana Morgan Music to get strings and things like that. I didn't know Jerry then; I didn't know any of them. I just knew Dana Jr., because he was working there. So there were these schools that would have school dances, so there were musicians playing those dances. The dances were more rock — most of them were more like Top 40. They certainly weren't folk music. But there was sort of nothing that really rocked my soul that I heard in that, until I heard the Zodiacs. I was already… I loved gospel music, I loved R&B. When I heard the Zodiacs, I was like — okay, this is great. I love them.
Our school would have the dance at one of the big hotels in San Francisco. I think it was the St. Francis. And it ended at midnight or 1, or whatever that was. That was kind of the early days of people not wanting the kids not just to go roaming around after their graduation party and, like, have them be somewhere. So, I got a few friends to pitch in, their families to pitch in, and we had this after party at Bimbo’s 365 Club in North Beach. And so it was from, I'm gonna say 1 to 6 in the morning. The one at the hotel was going to be somewhat straighter. This was like: change clothes, come out and rock. So, that was the afterparty at Bimbo’s. Bimbo’s was a really great place anyway. And that’s when we started putting together the arrangements, I was like — I know the band, I’ve got the band.
JESSE: With roots going back to a 1920s speakeasy, Bimbo’s 365 remains open at 1025 Columbus in San Francisco. It might have been Pigpen’s first big city gig.
DENISE KAUFMAN: It was a big deal for them. They weren't doing as many bigger [gigs], playing in places like that.
JESSE: It’s true that the Grateful Dead had their roots in the Bay Area folk scene, but they also had very real roots in the Bay Area R&B party band scene.
Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions
PIGPEN [10/6/70]: During that whole Offstage / Tangent period, it was sort of an amorphous trip because during the Chateau period, the Zodiacs, we were playing then. And then after that, after the Zodiacs, we started into the jug band.
PETE WANGER [7/64]: I’m Pete Wanger, I’m down here with Wayne Ott, bringing you some of the very best in live folk music from Palo Alto’s own folk coffee house, the Top of the Tangent. The next group is the Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Now, these guys are just a panic to watch: they fumble around on the stage and they bicker, and eventually, they come out with some pretty weird music. I think you’re in for a treat and a real thrill. So, let’s bring ‘em on — Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
JESSE: Yes, let’s. The first vocal is Jerry Garcia, the second is Bob Weir. Pigpen’s playing harmonica. This is almost exactly a month after the Zodiacs gig at Denise Kaufman’s high school graduation.
AUDIO: “Overseas Stomp” [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, s/t, 7/64] (0:37-0:52)
JESSE: By 1964, Pigpen had dropped out of high school. He wasn’t exactly trying to build a career in music, so much as hanging out a lot of places there happened to be music and musicians. Here’s how Bob Weir described the formation of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions to David Gans in 1983. This is in David’s killer book, Conversations with the Dead.
BOB WEIR [1/4/83]: Pigpen and I, we swept up in the music shop and I was lucky enough to get a job teaching beginning and intermediate students on guitar, and beginning in banjo. I was actually pretty good at it, I was good at working with kids.
JESSE: When a pair of DJs from Stanford’s KZSU came to interview the band, Pigpen avoided them, so Garcia acted as spokesman.
JERRY GARCIA [7/64]: Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, he plays harmonica and sings blues, quite well I might add.
BOB WEIR [1/4/83]: Pigpen was, he’d work at the music store because he could hang out with musicians. But basically he didn’t want to work any more than he absolutely had to. The playing and all that kind of stuff with different music, was different — that wasn’t like working for Pig.
JERRY GARCIA [7/64]: We have Mr. Pigpen McKernan here — known in the more esoteric circles. Mr. Pigpen McKernan would like to sing a Lightnin’ Hopkins song.
PIGPEN [7/64]: I wouldn’t like to, but I will anyway.
JERRY GARCIA [7/64]: He’s gonna sing a song called “The Rub”—
PIGPEN [7/64]: Hey, wait a minute…
JERRY GARCIA [7/64]: And we’re not gonna be responsible for its content. Or his.
PIGPEN [7/64]: Okay, I’m supposed to be over here, aren’t I?
JERRY GARCIA [7/64]: Yeah, in the middle.
AUDIO: “Ain’t It Crazy (The Rub)” [Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, s/t, 7/64] (0:00-0:19)
JESSE: That was “The Rub,” revived in 1970 by both the acoustic and electric Grateful Dead. And though there are no tapes of the Warlocks, it’s a decent bet that it was one of the first songs in their repertoire. Denise Kaufman was a Jug Band regular, too.
DENISE KAUFMAN: The Tangent was really my only local little place when I was down there. And also it was on the same street I lived on, so I could get there pretty easily. I know that somebody was playing like the washtub bass, and that was probably Bobby, but I didn't know Bobby then.
JESSE: Eric Thompson testifies to the power of young Pig.
ERIC THOMPSON: He was the best singer and best harp player. I played banjo in the Mother McCree’s right at the end, and the thing is that he was the one with the gravitas. He was the real force.
JESSE: Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions provide the logical segue to the next step of the story — the birth of the electrified Warlocks in early 1965. But we’re going to save that story for the next installment of the Adventures of Pigpen. To close us out today, we’re going to hear a few bits of virtually never heard music.
Pigpen In The Kitchen
JESSE: The first short bits we’re going to hear come from Eric Thompson’s tape collection, but the source itself is a little mysterious otherwise.
ERIC THOMPSON: We copied each other's tapes. That was just de rigeur. We copied each other’s bluegrass tapes, we copied each other's reel-to-reel tapes of old 78s. That was just what you did.
JESSE: Eric’s copy of this rare Pigpen reels from the early days isn’t the master.
ERIC THOMPSON: I'm not sure who recorded it. My inclination is that it was Garcia.
JESSE: By the end of the recording, though, Pig seems to have seized the controls from Garcia.
JERRY GARCIA [date unknown]: I’ll do a verse somewhere along, then you do the choruses there.
PIGPEN [date unknown]: Okay. I’ll do “O, what a beautiful city,” you do the rest of the verses.
JERRY GARCIA [date unknown]: Okay. Oh, are you doing it?
PIGPEN [date unknown]: It’s on.
JERRY GARCIA [date unknown]: Oh no!
JESSE: This is the old Black spiritual known alternatively as a “O What A Beautiful City” and “12 Gates To the City.”
AUDIO: “12 Gates To The City” [Pigpen & Jerry Garcia] (2:12-2:41)
JESSE: It’s been said by his bandmates that Pigpen’s natural musical habitat was at a kitchen table late at night with a small audience and a bottle of something tasty. And for our final course today, we are so pleased to present almost exactly that, some bits of Pigpen at a kitchen table sometime in the spring of 1964, when Pigpen was 18, courtesy of original recordist Ted Claire and archivist Brian Miksis. It’s not late at night, but it might as well be. If you’re capable, check out these bits on headphones with the volume turned up so you can hear the crickets, birds, and other ambient sounds.
AUDIO: “Blues #1” [Pigpen, spring 1964] (1:42-2:04)
JESSE: And please welcome to the Deadcast, taper Ted Claire.
TED CLAIRE: I was going to Stanford back in those days, and I had a radio show that played most of the country music and bluegrass and old-timey. There was a place called the Tangent where local folk players played. I would go over there and record the local people and play them on my radio show. And that's where I met Pigpen. I knew Garcia from sort of the scene in Palo Alto and Menlo Park because I was a player myself, but not a very good one at that point. So I recorded a ton of stuff and played it on my radio show.
JESSE: Ted’s radio show was the source of the 1962 recording of Jerry Garcia, David Nelson, and Robert Hunter playing with the Hart Valley Drifters, released as Folk Time and on the wonderful box set, Before the Dead. Here’s a rare cut of Garcia as a vocalist only, accompanied by Ken Frankel on dobro.
AUDIO: “Sitting On Top of the World” [Jerry Garcia with Hart Valley Drifters, Folk Time, 1962] (0:20-0:47) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
TED CLAIRE: And then one day, after I had met Pigpen — we weren't real close friends, but we were acquaintances who hung out a bunch together. And I decided that I wanted to record him. He had recorded at the Tangent, I think I had recorded him at the Tangent. But I had a friend over in Menlo Park that had a brand-new German Saba tape recorder. And so we invited ‘Pen over to his house — I remember it was 119 Hillside Drive in Menlo Park—and we sat him down one day in the kitchen, set up a microphone and provided him with a couple bottles of Peppermint Twist, which was his current favorite fortified wine. And he just played — and so, I recorded it.
AUDIO: “Rocks and Gravel” [Pigpen, spring 1964] (0:00-0:40)
TED CLAIRE: It was done in my friend's kitchen. It was done in the afternoon; it wasn’t a late-night tape. Pigpen got kind of wasted through the whole thing, but he did his best blues that way anyway. That Pigpen tape, on the box it says 1963. But I was talking with Kim, the lady at whose house the recording took place—she was there for the recording—and we determined that it was actually ‘64, spring of ‘64, is when the tape was made.
JESSE: Probably, Ted aired this recording on his KZSU sometime not long after he recorded it. Between Ted Claire’s show on KZSU and Garcia and Pigpen’s appearances on KPFA’s Midnight Special that don’t survive on tape, the future members of the Dead got a decent bit of local exposure.
TED CLAIRE: It would have been a departure from the format of the show, because the show was mostly bluegrass and old-timey and some more modern country styles. But I think because I had the tape I would have played that on the radio. But I can’t be sure about that. I never knew if anybody ever listened to my show. [chuckles] I mean, I was doing it for my own edification. I didn’t care whether anybody was listening. It was called The Flint Hill Special, from a Flatt and Scruggs album. It was once a week, and it would have been 8 o’clock, 7 o’clock, something like that.
JESSE: After dropping out of grad school a few years later, Ted Claire wound up in the Army, returning to the Bay Area music scene in 1967, and eventually playing with Robert Hunter’s band, Road Hog, who were in part an electrified version of the Liberty Hill Aristocrats, Rodney Albin’s bluegrass band that Pigpen occasionally blew harp with. We’ll talk again with Ted soon. Thanks again Ted for making this remarkable tape of Pig. There are some parts of this recording that are prophetic in different ways. We’ll start with the most literal and spooky.
AUDIO: “Blues #1” [Pigpen, Spring 1964] (2:53-3:36)
JESSE: But there are also some moments that wink at other parts of Pigpen’s future, like this tune from the 1920s.
AUDIO: “Keep On Truckin’” [Pigpen, Spring 1964] (0:21-0:55)
JESSE: And more subtly, the song “Bring Me My Shotgun.”
AUDIO: “Bring Me My Shotgun” [Pigpen, Spring 1964] (0:21-0:47)
JESSE: It’s the exchange afterwards that’s most revealing.
TED CLAIRE [11/63]: Where’d you hear that?
PIGPEN [11/63]: I just made it up right now.
TED CLAIRE [11/63]: Did you? Yeah, you had some pattern for it.
PIGPEN [11/63]: Well the first verse is ‘bring me shotgun’ and after that I go off.
JESSE: He ain’t lyin’. “Bring Me My Shotgun” seemed to be a staple for Pigpen. There are two other versions in circulation, both recorded in 1969 or 1970. When the later sessions get bootlegged, sometimes Bring Me My Shotgun was said to be the name of Pigpen’s lost album. As we’ll learn next time, it’s not. But it also might be a key to understanding Pigpen and how much he really did actually fit into the Grateful Dead. Taken with this from 1963, the three takes are almost completely different from one another. It was simply a springboard for Pigpen to improvise. Maybe he can find a band who can do that, too.
AUDIO: “Turn On Your Lovelight” [Live/Dead] (7:26-7:56) - [Spotify] [YouTube]