A Long Strange Trip (73 page)

47

After Heaven (11/80–7/86)

On December 8, Garcia was at Front Street working on
Dead Set
when he got a call that told him of the assassination of John Lennon. Work was impossible. He sat down at Keith Godchaux’s old Steinway (more pain: Keith had died in a car accident that summer) and noodled for many hours, lost in thought. After all, he and Lennon had more than a little in common. Both had emerged from childhoods damaged by deeply flawed relationships with their mothers, and through their losses had found a stunning creativity that had put them in the prison of celebrity. Lennon, of course, had experienced Beatlemania, which made the enthusiasm of Dead Heads look quite demure. And in Marin County Garcia had a home where his celebritydom had a minimal impact; elsewhere, Dead Heads treated him as family, “Uncle Jerry,” and (usually) not as God. Still, Garcia felt it. A few years later, he made a very rare direct request of Scrib. “Hey, man, you gotta bail me out.” His wedding anniversary was only two days away, and he needed a restaurant reservation; only a terribly au courant place would do, and the date happened to be a prime holiday. Scrib replied, “Sure, but you know I’ll need to throw your name around to get it.” “That’s okay, man. It’s just that I could never do that.”

Early in 1981 the Dead went to Europe to play a few shows in London and then appear with the Who on the German TV show
Rockpalast,
and while in London Garcia gave one of his most extraordinary interviews. Few patently hostile interviewers get within yards of a star, and rarer still is the star who will tolerate hostility. Garcia found it stimulating. The interviewer, Paul Morley, was a cutting-edge young punk from
New
Musical Express,
and Garcia revolted him. “You’re just a part of a perpetuation of bland, blanketing myths,” said the punk. “Does that disappoint you?” Garcia chuckled. “Naah! I didn’t have any expectations . . . If you start out expecting to fail and expecting the worst then anything that happens is an improvement over that . . . we’re just starting.” Does it upset you that I don’t dig you? “No! I don’t give a damn. I would be afraid if everybody in the world liked us . . . I don’t want to be responsible for leading the march to wherever. Fuck that. It’s already been done and the world hates it . . . a combination of music and the psychedelic experience taught me to fear power. I mean fear it and hate it . . . First of all, I don’t think of myself as an adult.
An adult is someone who’s made up their mind
[italics Morley’s]. When I go through airports the people who have their thing together, who are clean, well-groomed, who have tailored clothes, who have their whole material thing together, these people are adults. They’ve made their decision to follow those routines . . . I would say that I was part of a prolonged adolescence. I think our whole scene is that . . . I feel like someone who is constantly on the verge of losing it, or blowing it. I feel tremendously insecure.” “My heated irrationality bumps into Garcia’s sheer reasonableness,” wrote Morley, and it was true. Garcia’s egoless interest in authentic communication, even when it involved mocking him, made for one of the more fascinating encounters in rock journalism.

On May 6, the Dead played at Nassau Coliseum. They began “He’s Gone,” which Weir dedicated to Bobby Sands, an IRA soldier who had just starved himself to death in prison. “I’m not a supporter of bombers,” Lesh would later muse, “but it meant something to me and I played it. Sands was never convicted of any real crime except carrying a weapon— and how the fuck will I know who he was, how he had the balls to go all the way. I don’t know what would make me grow the balls to go that far.” After the song came a ten-minute blur of improvisation that was as good as anything they’d played in years. Even though, as Garcia noted, the new guy needed to relax and to learn how to keep Bob Weir out of his hair, Brent Mydland had arrived, and the band had achieved a new quantum level.

It was an ironic coincidence that the future of rock and roll would find a new, and largely nonmusical, focus on Garcia’s birthday that year, his thirty-ninth. On August 1, 1981, MTV, a partnership of WEA (Warner Bros., Elektra, and Atlantic) and American Express, went on the air, or more precisely the cable system. With techniques taken from advertising, MTV linked music and visuals in a way that contributed to ever-dwindling spans of attention and ever-rising revenues. It took rock straight back to the showbiz values it had once rejected, producing visually conscious stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson who enshrined style as the apogee of the medium. The next year, Jackson would release
Thriller,
selling 40 million copies. MTV was slick, elegant, visual, and commercial, which is to say that it was everything the Grateful Dead was not. By contrast, the band’s best moment in 1981 came in a tiny, smoky club in Amsterdam, where they celebrated musical friendship with a spontaneous, financially meaningless gig dubbed the Oops Concert.

The band had gone to Europe for a second time, in September, and it was not a terrific business success. Kreutzmann had fired Richard Loren during the March tour of Europe. After the tour, Kreutzmann had apologized and Loren had been rehired, but with Garcia adrift, the job wasn’t much fun anymore, and in September Loren had quit. As a result, the fall tour was run by Rock, and his instincts for drugs and entertaining lunacy were still intact. When a gig in France was canceled, he arranged for Jerry and Bobby to play an acoustic show at the Melk Weg club in Amsterdam, a four-hundred-seat room that had among its features the Markt, which sold comic books, candy, and various kinds of hashish. The police station was directly across the street. The duo so enjoyed themselves that they inveigled the entire band into a little Amsterdamian adventure, and they had a ball. Lesh was already walking on air, because he’d just seen Leonard Bernstein conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in a program of Brahms and Mozart, one of the cherished experiences of his lifetime.

The spontaneity of their jump to Amsterdam had cost them their normal equipment—Lesh somehow managed to finagle his regular bass, but Garcia and Weir played on loaners—so they couldn’t rely on their usual bells and whistles, and they reveled in this freedom. In a hot room, so crowded that people were sitting under Brent’s piano, they returned to their garage band roots, pulling out “Gloria” and “Hully Gully,” as well as Pigpen’s “Lovelight,” which simply fell out of Lesh’s fingers, and which Weir ran away with. It all worked. Clowning around between swigs on a vodka bottle, Lesh realized that he hadn’t sweat so hard in ages, and it was a healthy sweat. Somehow, in the middle of their usual sea of troubles, they’d returned to what they were about. The catharsis would mean a great deal down the line. Three days later in Barcelona, after the last show of the tour, Lesh wrote out a note for Garcia and made the rest of the band sign it. Though arch in tone, it was a deadly serious attempt to confront Garcia, their emotional anchor. “Dear sir and brother: You have been accused of certain high crimes and misdemeanors against the art of music. To wit: Playing in your own band; Never playing with any dynamics; Never listening to what anybody else plays . . .”The long party was taking its toll on all of them, but especially on the leader who wouldn’t lead.

The year 1981 ended with the usual Grateful Dead mixture of the conventional and the utterly bizarre. Mickey Hart and Joan Baez had taken up romantically. Mickey thought Joan wanted to “get wild.” He’d fallen for her voice at first, sound above all, and then he’d fallen fully in love. Although the relationship would come apart when he found himself unable to cope with her bouts of depression, it resulted in the Grateful Dead backing Baez at a mid-December benefit called Dance for Disarmament. The show was an underrehearsed and only partially successful event. Two weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, Jerry and M.G. were married by Peter “Monk” Zimmels in Jerry’s dressing room, partly for tax reasons and partly out of a fond flickering of a once-bright romance. The new year began with a ferocious, weeklong storm, which brought January to Marin County with such force that few could leave their homes for the duration. Jerry’s place at Hepburn Heights was too small for a second person, and he and M.G. soon decided that they could not live together.

Phil Lesh spent early January stuck in the Berkeley Marriott Hotel bar, for his home was inaccessible. Being in limbo further encouraged his ongoing life changes. He’d recently moved to San Rafael to escape his old patterns, which for years had centered on Nave’s Bar in Fairfax. For some time he’d breakfasted every day at the Station Cafe in San Rafael, just a few blocks from 5th and Lincoln. In February 1982, he invited Jill Johnson, a Station Cafe waitress, to a Dead show, and the romance of his life began. For the first time since 1965, he would have something essential in his life other than the Dead.

The Dead’s “new”
Go to Heaven
material was now three years old, and though the fall of 1982 saw the end of their collective writer’s block, it would take a violation of the rules. “No politics” and “no lectures” were the implicit and fundamental rules of the Dead’s lyricists as far as Barlow was concerned (Hunter had written political material, but Garcia had tossed it), and with the possible exception of “New Speedway Boogie,” those limits had always been observed. But however entertainingly surreal, the era of Ronald Reagan, a figurehead president who was most distinctive in what historian Frances FitzGerald called his “limitless capacity for denial,” demanded stern choices, and Weir broke the code. “I didn’t like his movies,” said Garcia, “and I don’t like his politics. I like things wide open, with question marks hanging over it, everything changing—nothing settled.”

Weir and Barlow would raise their voices. John Barlow had been active in the movement that fought the installation of “Star Wars” MRVs in Wyoming. One day he pointed out to a judge that there had been no environmental impact report, and the judge replied that since using the missiles was unthinkable, there could therefore be no consequences. Faced with this conundrum, Barlow’s mind flashed back to his high school years at Fountain Valley School in the shadow of the Strategic Air Command’s headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain, where he heard sirens wailing because of the Cuban missile crisis. He and Weir went to work, beginning with the English nursery rhyme “Ring around the rosey . . . Ashes, ashes, all fall down,” a ditty that derived from the plague years. The ring referred to a sore, the ashes to cremated corpses. The result was “Throwing Stones,” which Weir called an “anarchistic diatribe” against all manner of evil, and was by far the most overtly political song in the Dead catalog. He wasn’t finished. A few days after debuting “Throwing Stones,” he began to sing “My Brother Essau,” a take on Cain and Abel and the Vietnam War, a superior song marred only by the ungainly refrain “shadowboxing the apocalypse, and wandering the land.”

Along with these songs, Garcia and Hunter introduced “West L.A. Fadeaway,” a musically simplistic take on the traditional San Francisco disdain for Los Angeles; “Keep Your Day Job,” a musically lightweight shuffle with a cautionary message that Dead Heads would dislike; and “A Touch of Grey.” “Touch” was interesting on a number of levels. Musically, it was an up-tempo variant of “Bertha.” Lyrically, it was a superb rendering of the morning after a cocaine binge—“Must be getting early / Clocks are running late / Paint by number morning sky / Looks so phony,” complete with a catalog of middle-age grumbles, from the high cost of rent to a recalcitrant child, but Hunter included an uplifting closing that turned the song into an anthem:

Oh well a Touch Of Grey
Kind of suits you anyway.
That was all I had to say
It’s all right.

I will get by / I will get by
I will get by / I will survive
We will get by / We will get by
We will get by / We will survive

As with most Dead tunes, it would take a while for the song to find its soul. It would marinate well over the next few years.

Meantime, as always, there were gigs, some memorable, most not. In March the Garcia Band enjoyed its strangest show ever, at a country-western bar in San Jose called the Saddlerack. Rock Scully had outdone himself with this booking. Complete with a mechanical bucking bull and punching bag, the club was an enormous cavern half filled with wide-eyed Dead Heads. The front row was occupied exclusively by the off-duty waitresses in beehive hairdos and the security force, each man no less than 220 pounds, all dressed in red T-shirts. Clearly amused, Garcia chuckled and smiled throughout the show. For his main band, September 1982 brought them their first gig actually scheduled for 9 A.M., Breakfast in Bed with the Grateful Dead. At the last second, Bill Graham had taken over the booking for the US Festival, a giant outdoor festival sponsored by the computer tycoon Stephen Wozniak. With a respectable chunk of Wozniak’s fortune at his discretion, Graham convinced the band to open the second day. As is so often the case with jobs taken exclusively for financial reasons, it was not an aesthetically rewarding morning for the band.

Their other weird morning gig that year was in November at the World Music Festival in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Due to the vagaries of festival scheduling, they hit the stage at about 4:30 A.M., and though they played into a beautiful dawn, various distractions created by armed guards, too much dust, and a strange sound system made for a terribly difficult gig.

The year ended with a New Year’s Eve concert that was one of the few in that era not afflicted with burnout, largely because for the final set the Dead became Etta James’s backup band on tunes like “Lovelight,” “Tell Mama,” and “Midnight Hour.” At one point, the zaftig James leaned on the rotund Garcia, mugging in a bit of standard R&B showbiz shtick that was utterly unlike Garcia’s usual stage demeanor, and he simply beamed. A few days later, Scrib would remark to Garcia that he seemed just as happy as a sideman as he did as a leader. “Y’know,” Garcia replied, “I coulda spent my life playin’ blues in a Mission Street dump and been just as happy. All my life, man, all my life.”