My earliest recollections of playing with Jerry Garcia are the informal Bluegrass pickin’ sessions in John and Deirdre Lundburg’s guitar shop on Dwight Way, just off campus, in Berkeley. This would have been around 1962 or 1963. He and I’d been introduced by a mutual friend, Lonnie Feiner, a singer-guitarist from Los Angeles, who seemed to know everyone and was a walking clearing house for people from many different sub-groups in the folk music cosmos of the ‘Sixties.

Most professional musicians from a certain era (mine) have all kinds of stories about what happened “when the bus broke down,” i.e., when some of the band didn’t show up for the gig. Playing a set with Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, is one of mine.

The first time I remember meeting Janis Joplin was in the winter of 1963 during a dope break on the sidewalk outside The Cabale, a Berkeley coffee house where my bluegrass band, The Ridgerunners, was playing. This was before she was known to more than a tiny handful of people who themselves had just met her.