The Adventures of Pigpen, Part 1
The Deadcast marks 50 years since the passing of original Grateful Dead frontman Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, part 1 uncovering his mysterious pre-Dead years in the Palo Alto folk scene, featuring a visit to the McKernan archives, never-heard performances, & archival interviews.
The Adventures of Pigpen, Part 1, supplementary text
by Jesse Jarnow
Ron Charles McKernan was born September 8th, 1945 in San Mateo and died March 8th, 1973 in Corte Madera. We dug into the McKernan archives for the first time in our “Operator” episode during the American Beauty season and throughout our trip across Europe ‘72
The extended Pigpen tribute in the final issue of Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon’s The Golden Road in 1993 provided a tremendous starting point for research, and the Grateful Dead Guide also assembled a great dossier. Light Into Ashes has also transcribed some of the 1970 Hank Harrison interview tapes with Pigpen, which we’ve also delved into in this episode.
When researching this episode, I discovered that the great label Norton Records released a 4-song 1960 session by Troy Weidenheimer and the Zodiacs (also on YouTube), the Palo Alto party band that Pigpen, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Kreutmann would all play with a few years later.
Thanks immensely to Eric Thompson, gigging at a folk club near you. And, of course, where would we be without David Gans, once again lending us some crucial audio from interviews with Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, and members of the early Palo Alto scene. David’s book Conversations With the Dead and many other projects are available via David’s web store.
Comment
Great show, but...
Listen back to the episode. There are times where talk should have been muted and there are multiple speakers at once.
Listen back to the episode. There are times where talk should have been muted and there are multiple speakers at once.
Because of the "crosstalk." Please clean up the episode and re-release. Thanks!