The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [130]
Your father, Joe Garcia, was a musician, wasn’t he?
Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t get a chance to know him very well. He died when I was five years old, but it’s in the genes, I guess, that thing of being attracted to music. When I was little, we used to go to the Santa Cruz Mountains in the summer, and one of my earliest memories is of having a record, an old 78, and I remember playing it over and over on this wind-up Victrola. This was before they had electricity up there, and I played this record over and over and over, until I think they took it from me and broke it or hid it or something like that. I finally drove everybody completely crazy.
What instrument did your father play?
He played woodwinds, clarinet mainly. He was a jazz musician. He had a big band—like a forty-piece orchestra—in the Thirties. The whole deal, with strings, harpist, vocalists. My father’s sister says he was in a movie, some early talkie. So I’ve been trying to track that down, but I don’t know the name of it. Maybe I’ll be able to actually see my father play. I never saw him play with his band, but I remember him playing me to sleep at night. I just barely remember the sound of it. But I’m named after Jerome Kern, that’s how seriously the bug bit my father.
How did he die?
He drowned. He was fishing in one of those rivers in California, like the American River. We were on vacation, and I was there on the shore. I actually watched him go under. It was horrible. I was just a little kid, and I didn’t really understand what was going on, but then, of course, my life changed. It was one of those things that afflicted my childhood. I had all my bad luck back then, when I was young and could deal with it.
Like when you lost your finger?
Yeah, that happened when I was about five, too. My brother Tiff and I were chopping wood. And I would pick up the pieces of wood, take my hand away, pick up another piece, and boom! It was an accident. My brother felt perfectly awful about it.
But we were up in the mountains at the time, and my father had to drive to Santa Cruz, maybe about thirty miles, and my mother had my hand all wrapped up in a towel. And I remember it didn’t hurt or anything. It was just a sort of buzzing sensation. I don’t associate any pain with it. For me, the traumatic part of it was after the doctor amputated it, I had this big cast and bandages on it. And they gradually got smaller and smaller, until I was down to like one little bandage. And I thought for sure my finger was under there. I just knew it was. And that was the worst part, when the bandage came off. “Oh, my God, my finger’s gone.” But after that, it was okay, because as a kid, if you have a few little things that make you different, it’s a good score. So I got a lot of mileage out of having a missing finger when I was a kid.
What did your mother do for a living?
She was a registered nurse, but after my father died, she took over his bar. He had this little bar right next door to the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, the merchant marines’ union, right at First and Harrison, in San Francisco. It was a daytime bar, a working guy’s bar, so I grew up with all these guys who were sailors. They went out and sailed to the Far East and the Persian Gulf, the Philippines and all that, and they would come and hang out in the bar all day long and talk to me when I was a kid. It was great fun for me.
I mean, that’s my background. I grew up in a bar. And that was back in the days when the Orient was still the Orient, and it hadn’t been completely Americanized yet. They’d bring back all these weird things. Like one guy had the world’s largest private collection of photographs of square-riggers. He was