In July 1964, Peter Wanger and Wayne Ott were taking summer classes at Stanford and listening to local bands at a coffeehouse called The Top of the Tangent, located on University Avenue above what is now Rudy's Pub. Sometimes they'd record the bands and broadcast them on campus radio station KZSU. One of those groups, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, was an energetic sixsome whose members played, among other instruments, guitar, banjo, kazoo, washtub bass and tin cup.
The lead singer was a guy named Jerry Garcia, who was in Palo Alto that summer giving banjo lessons at Dana Morgan's Music Shop. He was joined at the Tangent by Bob Weir and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan. "Little did we know that this group of crazy singers would become the Grateful Dead," says Wanger, '65.
Which may explain why the recordings made by Wanger and Ott, '63, MA '66, PhD '72, were lost for more than three decades. In 1997, Wanger and his brother Michael, '69, stumbled on the reel-to-reel tape in their mother's attic. It was a piece of music history. Michael contacted Grateful Dead Productions, which earlier this year released an 18-track CD version of their fortunate find. The CD is the first known recording of the group that, a year later, became the Dead -- and went on to do 2,200 concerts over 30 years. It includes a brief interview with Garcia (who died in 1995) in which he explains how the group plays purely for the love of the music: "We don't expect to make a fortune at it or ever be popular or famous or worshipped." Just one more reason the band is so beloved by Deadheads worldwide.
