You don’t always get to meet your idol in person, let alone privately in an an impromptu manner. But it happened to me on July 5, 1976.
I wrote about it in Chapter 23 of my memoir, “Thumb Out” -
One afternoon I was alone in the movie room when Jerry Garcia walked in. I’d met him briefly three years earlier in San Rafael when he played my 1943 Harmony Cremona and told me to let it guide me. He bought a Super 8 projector, and we got to talking about film. He was genuinely enthusiastic — he wanted to make films, loved the medium, and we stood there in that cramped back room going back and forth about cameras and what film could do. A few days later his publicist called and arranged for me to shoot on stage with my Super 8 during a show. Standing on stage filming the Grateful Dead — that was probably the high point of my entire time in the Bay Area.
“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now
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