The first time I saw Jerry Garcia after our Bluegrass days in Berkeley was one nite in his sound truck, parked somewhere in LA, I cannot remember where. My friend, Lonnie Feiner, who had introduced us a couple yrs before that, thinks it was in a scary part of town, which would mean either East LA or Watts (now called South Central). For some reason I think it was in Hollywood. Which, now that I think about, was a scary part of town in ways of its own.

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.

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.