So Many Roads by David Browne

months later in August 1965, Weir, Bonner, and Swanson jumped in Swanson’s car and chased the Beatles from the airport to a local show. Encouraged by his friends, Weir tried to climb up the chain-link fence and crash the show, but he didn’t make it.)
    Just as jamming in Morgan’s store had helped initiate their jug band, so did the store lure them into rock. Morgan’s son, Dana Jr., who helped run the shop and harbored his own dreams of becoming a musician,made them an offer: if they wanted to start a rock ’n’ roll band, the store would loan them instruments, as long as Dana Jr. could play bass in the group. Morgan wasn’t intrinsically one of them: with his reddish-blond hair and preppy wardrobe, he looked more like a member of the neat and tidy Kingston Trio than a fledgling rocker. He didn’t seem all that interested in pot. But Garcia, according to Lesh (who wasn’t there at the time), saw the value in free gear and “put a good charm offensive on Dana.” They now had a rehearsal space and free instruments. “What more could a boy want?” Weir told Swanson as he stood in the driveway of his family home in Atheron, leaning his new electric guitar against his equally new Fender amp.
    Overnight the jug-band fever dream broke—Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions would give its last performances shortly into the new year, 1965—and the washboard, kazoos, and other eccentric instruments were dispatched. (Garcia would continue playing banjo, but its days too were numbered as far as playing an integral role in his music.) Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, and Morgan began congregating in the front part of the Dana Morgan Music Shop, now accompanied by yet another musical soul mate.
    Of them all, Bill Kreutzmann, born May 7, 1946, had the most experience playing something close to rock ’n’ roll. The son of a lawyer and a dance teacher, he had both financial and artistic impulses implanted into his brain from an early age. Like many kids, Kreutzmann began banging on whatever was around when he was a toddler, but in his case, he never stopped; by grade school he was obsessed with rhythm and drumming. When he was still in high school Kreutzmann’s parents divorced, and for a time he was sent off to school in Arizona. Kreutzmann’s parents hoped he would attend Stanford as they had, but the academic life wasn’t Kreutzmann’s destiny. “Bill was a stud,” recalls John McLaughlin. “He had girls falling all over him.” Kreutzmann soon had a family of his own to support: he and his equally younggirlfriend, Brenda, had a daughter in the middle of 1964 and were married. Increasingly drawn to music over school, Kreutzmann took the drum seat in a local R&B cover band, the Legends, who powered many a Palo Alto party with their covers of James Brown, the Isley Brothers, and others. Although not the frontman, Kreutzmann made his presence known: McLaughlin remembers that one of the highlights of a Legends show was the way it would wrap up with an extraordinary drum solo.
    Given how relatively small and insular the Palo Alto community was, it wasn’t surprising that by 1964 Kreutzmann had met or played with some of the future Warlocks. He’d not only seen Mother McCree’s at the Tangent but had been part of the Zodiacs with Pigpen and Garcia. (The guitarist who organized the band, Troy Weidenheimer, was partly responsible for the birth of the Dead in the way he brought those three young musicians together.) Most importantly, though, Kreutzmann could swing; having been exposed to jazz drummers, he was already remarkably accomplished for someone who was only eighteen when the new rock ’n’ roll band began congregating at the music store. In fact, his playing, influenced by drumming heroes like jazzman Elvin Jones and big-band walloper Buddy Rich, was so advanced that he was already teaching drums there, another bit of common