Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

be rock ’n’ roll musicians. I remember him telling me, ‘We can do that; we can play like that.’ I remember that very clearly.”
    Jerry was already falling in love with rock ’n’ roll by the time that Bill Haley and the Comets movie came out. Again, Tiff was his main influence—Tiff began listening to local R&B radio stations in the early ’50s, so by the time the first true rock ’n’ roll records came out, the Garcia brothers were primed. “I remember going out with a friend to this record store on Mission near Geneva called the Record Changer, and buying this record, ‘Crazy, Man, Crazy,’ which was Bill Haley’s first release out here—before ‘Rock Around the Clock,’” Tiff says. “I bought it on 78 and Jerry bought it on 45. He got a pretty good 45 collection, because my mom, being in the bar business, used to get all these 45s from the jukebox. We had tons. Most of those weren’t rock ’n’ roll, but there was some good stuff in there.”
    Besides Tiff and Daniel, Jerry’s other early rock ’n’ roll buddy was a kid named Laird Grant, who lived a few blocks away from Jerry in Menlo Park. Like Jerry, Laird had moved to the suburbs from San Francisco—he’d lived in the outer Mission district, not far from Harrington Street. The two, who became lifelong friends, met when Jerry was in seventh grade at Menlo-Oaks.
    “I met him because he hazed me,” Laird says. “That’s something that went around a lot back then, though it was usually a college thing; occasionally it trickled down. The bully kids—and I wouldn’t say Jerry was a bully, but he hung out with some kids who were, and he was rougher than your normal, average kid—would haze other kids. So there they were, smearing me with lipstick and shaving cream, and there may have even been some perfume involved, and one of the guys was trying to pants me. They’d do that and then throw your pants up in a tree. Jerry was one of the guys and I thought, ‘There’s gotta be more to this guy than this.’ After that we started hanging out together and we found out we actually had a lot in common. We hung out together because we realized that all the rest of the kids weren’t the same as we were.”
    Tiff didn’t feel like he was fitting in very well either in school or at home, so after he graduated from Sequoia High in 1956, “I was really anxious to get out of the house because I felt like there was some kind of tension there,” he says. “My mom and Wally would argue—nothing too heavy, but I didn’t like it. It hadn’t felt right to me since we moved out of the city, so as soon as I waseighteen I was ready to get the hell out of the suburbs. I wanted to go back to the city. Instead I went into the marines. The Korean War was over by then, but you still had the drill instructors who were Korea veterans; a tough bunch, boy.
Mean.
But I thought if I was going to be in the service I was going to be in the tough one. I wasn’t going to be in the army or navy.”
    Laird spent a fair amount of time at the Matusiewicz house (and later, at the bar) and he remembers Wally this way: “He was kind of like Popeye. He had a set of forearms on him—man, the last thing you wanted to do was piss this guy off because he’d reach out and grab you with a couple of canned-ham hands. He could get pissed off and rant and rave, but I never saw him raise a hand on anybody. He could go off—
BAM!
—like a firecracker, and then two minutes later he was cool.”
    “Wally was a no-nonsense, hard-nosed guy,” adds Daniel Garcia. “He had a temper but he also had a great sense of humor. He used to get pissed off all the time because Jerry and Tiff wouldn’t do enough work around the house.”
    And with Laird Grant in the picture, Jerry spent even less time at home than before. The Peninsula was their playground, and they darted around constantly—on bike, on foot and in buses, day and night. One of the duo’s favorite late-night activities