So Many Roads by David Browne Page A

ground with Garcia.
    The nascent rock ’n’ roll band had equipment and a lineup of two guitars, bass, drums, and keyboard; Pigpen, who could play first-rate blues piano and gave an occasional lesson to local kids, switched to the more garage band–fashionable organ. Now they also had a space to boot: the front of the Dana Morgan Music Shop. The room was cluttered as it was; anyone walking into the store had to duck under a hanging cymbal or two and navigate around a few amplifiers. With the band set up, the room felt even smaller, and on the second day of rehearsal the musicians also had to make room for Bonner and Swanson, who immediately became the group’s first cheerleaders—bringing along donuts or playing records for the band to learn and copy. They tried some of Pigpen’s favorite blues songs or Rolling Stones or EverlyBrothers covers—almost everything except the Beatles. (“They were untouchable,” said Weir.) The music was so loud that the instruments dangling on the walls swayed and made their own clamor.
    If the nascent band had a front man, it was Pigpen; his voice was the most distinctive and guttural, and he commanded the material in ways the others couldn’t yet. Without meaning to, he had antistar charisma. But Garcia remained the most assertive and was clearly in charge of the proceedings. “There’s a difference between being the star of the band and being the leader,” Swanson recalls. Before long they had a name, the Warlocks, probably an homage to fantasy books in vogue at the time. Soon after came their first booking, at a pizza parlor in Menlo Park. As Weir said, “And bang, we’re on.”

    Garcia wasn’t alone in taking note of the gangly blond guy with the Beatle haircut who sauntered into Magoo’s, buzzing off some acid he’d taken beforehand. Anyone who’d met Phil Lesh knew he was tall, but they also noticed he’d let his freak flag fly high since his days kicking around Palo Alto and the Chateau two or three years before. “That blond page-boy look was his signature—it definitely stood out,” recalls Jim Cushing, a friend of Bonner’s who attended two of the Magoo’s shows. “If there was a crowd of people, you’d spot Phil in a heartbeat.”
    By his own admission, Lesh’s life over the previous two and a half years had been aimless and frustrating. By the spring of 1963 he’d fled Las Vegas and his post office job. (He’d also left Constanten’s family’s house and was crashing with a nearby friend.) Hopping aboard a Greyhound bus, Lesh returned to Palo Alto and was able to score a room at the Chateau. Once more he was immersed in the outlier scene he’d come to love, which included attending Garcia and Sara Ruppenthal’s wedding—where Lesh would see Garcia’s “scuzzy beatnik friends,” as he put it, wolfing down as much of the free food as possible.
    But the good times, which included Lesh’s stab at writing an ambitious orchestral work, ended when the owner of the Chateau announced he was selling the house. After bouncing around a few places, Lesh rented an apartment in San Francisco with Constanten, who had himself returned to the area. Lesh resumed work on his classical piece, but the fall of 1963 and most of 1964 became a lost, open-ended period for him. To support themselves, both he and Constanten took jobs with the post office, Lesh driving a delivery truck. “Those jobs weren’t that hard to get,” Constanten says. “We worked 6 to 10 p.m., four hours. And it paid quite well.”
    Another rising composer, Steve Reich, whom he’d met at Mills College, introduced Lesh to the world of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a three-year-old hotbed of political theater and activism. Again, Lesh’s world seemed to be on the verge of blossoming: he wrote a piece to be performed at a Troupe-led concert and met his