Long before his rise to becoming the dynamic lead guitar player for the Grateful Dead and an icon of the counter culture movement of the 1970’s, Jerry Garcia had his own run in with fate in the heart of the Santa Cruz Mountains. While staying at his families vacation home nestled in the redwoods, Jerry was involved in a freak accident cutting firewood with his brother. The middle finger on his right hand was severed and had to be amputated. While the dismembered finger didn’t stop Jerry’s musical genius, its said that his finger still resides, buried deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains, radiating musical energy through the trees and flippin an eternal bird to the man.

Located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, off Old Santa Cruz Highway, the Chateau Liberte was a former resort hotel turned hip music enclave in the early 70s. Calling the Chateau Liberte "notorious" doesn't tell the half of it… In the early 70s, the Santa Cruz Mountains had plenty of cheap, inaccessible housing, so those hills were full of bikers, pot growers, entrepreneurs and layabouts. Many Mountain residents fit more than one of these categories, and all of them hung out at Chateau Liberte on weekends.

"The Chateau" had originally been a Wells Fargo stagecoach stop. From 1920 to 1945, it was a resort called Chateau Boussy, a French restaurant and resort, noted as a hideaway for important political figures to stash their mistresses. When it got taken over by hippies in the early 70s, it became infamous for its swimming pool, which had a tiled "Zig Zag Man" adorning the swimming pool. The Chateau had a deserved reputation for being a hangout for the Hell's Angels, but many people who went there claim that it was mostly a mellow scene.

In 1970, when The Chateau first got rolling, one of the regular bands was Mountain Current, led by Matthew Kelly and John Tomasi (John Tomasi was the former lead singer of The New Delhi River Band). Mountain Current often shared the stage with either The Doobie Brothers or Hot Tuna, who tended to alternate weekends. Often the nights ended up in a big jam. The cover of the first Doobie Brothers album was taken at the Chateau Liberte bar, and the second Hot Tuna album (First Pull Up, Then Pull Down) was recorded there in 1971, with an inner sleeve photo of Tuna on stage at the Chateau.

W.J. McKay, who first frequented the joint as a teenager, recalled how everyone seemed to get along: "You had people that were totally politically opposite, socially opposite," he told me. "Bikers and hippies were about as different as people could be, and yet they totally co-existed up there. They even had their own underground economy going on. Dope had an established exchange rate. Pot was worth so much in weight, for so many hits of acid. The hippies and the bikers totally worked together. They exchanged food, they worked on each other's vehicles, they did chores for each other."

"It wasn't just a legendary rock & roll bar," McKay said. "It was an example of music and people breaking barriers, for better or worse, in one of the most beautiful natural coastal rain forests in the world. It was a scene that will never be re-created, and hopefully never forgotten."

The Doobies got their start in San Jose, where co-founder Patrick Simmons Sr. was born. He was introduced to Tom Johnston and John Hartman in 1970 by Skip Spence of Moby Grape, and the band began playing the local scene. In the early days, they found a devoted following among bikers and hippies, playing regularly at the Santa Cruz Mountain biker bar Chateau Liberté. John McFee, who joined the Doobie Brothers in 1979, grew up in Santa Cruz.

Attracted by Santa Cruz’s “magical sun” and what he describes as its progressive/libertarian tolerance, Simmons bought “a funky old farm house” off Vine Hill Road near the Santa Cruz Mountains summit around 1976. He lived there until the end of the 1980s.

The influence that the Santa Cruz Mountains had on the Doobie’s early career can be seen in songs like Neil’s Fandango where they sing:

“Loma Prieta my mountain home, on the hills above Santa Cruz, in the place where I spent my youth”