A Long Strange Trip (74 page)

Danny Rifkin had replaced Richard Loren as the band’s manager late in 1981, and it denoted a significant return to their roots. A thoroughgoing small-c communist, Rifkin had been nicknamed Danny the Dime by the crew for his parsimonious ways. Loren had received a percentage of the band’s guarantees in a deal that gave the band a percentage of the gross, which meant that promoters had little incentive to control expenses. Now, with Rifkin on his relatively modest salary, and with deals based on the band getting a percentage of the net rather than gross, there was a surplus, which led to raises. Early in 1983 Danny took another step, one with enormous ramifications. Buying tickets to Dead concerts had long meant getting in line on a frozen sidewalk in the middle of the night, and although no one on the planet can make waiting in line a more pleasant occupation than a Dead Head, by the eighties there were committed Dead Heads with jobs who could not spare the time. First with movie producer Eddie Washington, and then with Steve Marcus and Frankie Accardi in charge, Rifkin established a Dead mail-order ticket office. Effectively run by four strong women in middle management—Calico, Joanne Wishnoff, Carol Latvala, and Mary Knudsen—it proved to be a marvelous idea, not only because it employed dozens of family members but also because it opened up the demographics of the audience to include people with more or less conventional lives. The hardest core would always find a way, but now the respectable could, too. The first tickets sold were for benefit concerts in March 1983 at the Warfield. Over the next decade in-house ticket sales grew from 24,500 the first year to 115,000 the next to 500,000 annually in the early nineties.

Across the country, the band’s venues usually had exclusive contracts with Ticketmaster, a national ticket sales company. Eventually, push came to shove. Fred Rosen, boss of Ticketmaster, and John Pritzker, part of the family that owned the Hyatt chain of hotels as well as Ticketmaster, met with Hal Kant, Danny Rifkin, and others from the Dead. At some point, Hal offhandedly began to ask Fred Rosen, a tough and aggressive businessman, various biographical questions. After the umpteenth question, Fred said, “Why are you asking me these questions?” “Because I want to see what kind of witness you’re going to be.” “Witness? What?” said Fred, who then sputtered to Hal, “You’re claiming [that Ticketmaster violates antitrust laws], but you’re interfering with my contractual relations.” “That’s interesting,” replied Hal, “because we just hired a law firm to handle this litigation, and I told them, ‘Forget about antitrust, they’re interfering with
our
contractual relations.’ When did you go into business, Fred? How long have our contractual relations existed with these venues before you ever came along? Who interfered with whom?” “[Rosen] sort of turned white,” recalled Hal, “and then he
really
turned white when he heard the name of the law firm, because it happened to be his law firm. He had the West Coast office, and we had the East Coast office. At that point everything changed, and he agreed to everything we wanted . . . I think at some point I did say, ‘I don’t think you want five thousand crazed Dead Heads staying at Hyatt Hotels unhappy with you.’ ” It helps to have a good lawyer.

After the ticket office, the hippest and most consequential of Rifkin’s moves came in 1984, when the band founded the Rex Foundation, named after Rex Jackson. Just as every greedhead in America was making buckets of money, the Dead figured out how to give it away more effectively. Too many benefits had proved to be inefficient, requiring huge amounts of energy but yielding small amounts of money for the cause. The 1982 Vietnam Veterans benefit at Moscone Center in San Francisco was a case in point. An enormous trade-show and convention center, the site was a terrible place for music and was selected only as a favor to the mayor. The recipient organization splintered into dueling factions, wasting much of the money raised. With the Rex Foundation the Dead would take over the benefit process entirely, setting up a board that included some band members and friends like Bill Graham, John Scher, Bill Walton, M.G., and an Alabama dentist named Bernie Bildman. Benefits became simple. The band performed, and the profits went into a “pot,” which would be emptied in increments of $5,000 and $10,000. Over the next few years the Rex Foundation would give away more than $6 million to organizations for the environment, human services, and arts, groups like Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow and the San Francisco Mayor’s Fund for the Homeless, and direct grants to obscure English avant-garde composers. It was remarkably efficient and direct, because the board did not accept applications—it learned of good causes and gave money away.

Shortly before the first official Rex shows, in February 1984, the band made noises about recording a new album and went into Fantasy Records’ Studio D in Berkeley. The sessions were a farcical waste of time. The musicians didn’t particularly want to be there, and their ever-increasing popularity as performers—that year at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center they would sell twelve thousand tickets on the day of the show in a pouring rainstorm—removed any economic incentive to record. One night Scrib attended a session. They began with a tentative take of “My Brother Essau,” Weir fiddling with his guitar, Garcia off by a full beat at the end. The second version was much better, and a happy Weir called out,
“Uno más.”
Mickey chimed in, “Let’s do another,” then got up from his chair. Garcia stood up, observed, “Well, it’s not getting worse,” and wandered off to the next-door lounge.

When they resumed, they began working on “Keep Your Day Job.” Garcia was playing an odd twangy pattern that made no musical sense. Lesh lost the song again, and Garcia remarked, “None of you seem to remember it tonight.” Weir said, “I’m searching for a part.” Garcia snapped, “Play a rhythm fuckin’ part.” At the end of the session, Kreutzmann emerged from the studio furious with Weir, swinging at the air, yelling, and telling himself to calm down. In great good humor, Garcia came out and talked with Billy. “Hey, man, ‘Day Job’s’ a boogie-woogie tune,” and began drumming on a tabletop with him. Their talk shifted to Art Tatum, and Jerry gleefully told stories of pianists contemplating suicide after listening to the master. Finally, Kreutzmann grabbed Weir and they went back into the studio to work things out, while Parish took Garcia home.

They no longer had the stomach for life in the studio, and it was no surprise that nothing came of the sessions. On the other hand, their concert sound had gone to levels most bands didn’t know existed. That summer a veteran CBS-TV soundman stood in front of the speakers, listening first to the mix in his headphones as beamed from the soundboard, and then to the sound system. He was astounded when he could not distinguish between them. A few years later the snootiest of all sound magazines,
Absolute Sound,
published the following: “The other night I experienced the finest large-scale High End audio system I have ever heard. It shattered my preconceived notions of what the state-of-the-art in High End sound reproduction is capable of . . . Never at any time did I hear distortion . . . stereo imaging was pinpoint and extremely accurate . . . [The] emotional connection between the listener and the music . . . was absolute, total, complete.”

Healy was the consummate live engineer, with an ability to identify what was most positive in the music on a given night—or who—and mix to it (him). He had his failures, such as allowing the band to perform in the HHH Metrodome in Minneapolis, very probably the worst-sounding venue in Dead history, as well as an inability—Weir felt it was an unwillingness—to present Weir fully. But his commitment to the band, the music, Dead Heads, and the quest for Better were unparalleled. One of his major goals was to plug the system’s “ears,” the B&K wave analyzer which was created to evaluate the harmonic strength of metals, directly into a computer so that the system could balance itself. When asked if he was trying to do himself out of a job, he replied, “No, just make it a better job.”

Change accelerated through the organization in 1984. The previous fall, Alan Trist had been fired and departed for Oregon to work on his drug problems, leaving Rock without an ally. It was ironic, because it had been Alan’s attempt to act as a staff lieutenant and keep Rock functioning during the post-Loren, pre-Rifkin period in 1981 that had sucked Trist’s life into the drug haze Rock loved so much. The band’s action was in part an attempt to save Trist’s health and in part an attempt to isolate Garcia from his most egregious codependents. It proved more useful to Alan, who would, some years later, return to work. Rock’s continued employment in the Dead scene was by now a mystery. He was undoubtedly the latest man in the world, and his excuses for his tardiness grew ever more imaginative; apparently, every woman going into labor in Marin County tended to be in a car in front of Rock at just the right time, and he’d assisted with all their deliveries.

In March 1984, Garcia’s loyal assistant and bookkeeper, Sue Stephens, had had enough. “I finally threw my hands up and said, ‘it’s Rock or me.’ ” Given Rock’s inability to cope with schedules, the Garcia band would tend to miss flights, so that Rock would have to buy a new set of tickets. But, Sue pointed out to Jerry, at the end of the tour the unused tickets would have been cashed in. In addition, Rock would “duck out on paying the hotel bill, for God’s sakes,” said Sue, “which he would have been allowed cash for from the settlement [the night’s pay] . . . So at the end of the tour I’d end up with all these airfares I still had to pay, all these hotel bills I still had to pay—that the money had been allotted for and doled out to Rock out on the road . . . And it was blatant, too. He’d apologize and be laughing, too. So we went and told Jerry we couldn’t deal with [Rock]. And he just said okay,” and agreed to fire Rock. “He was almost gleeful,” recalled Sue. “And he thanked us. ‘I depend on you guys to deal with this shit because I can’t deal with too much of it.’ ”

One of Danny Rifkin’s many virtues was that he was not addicted to the Grateful Dead. In the summer of 1984 he decided to leave the road, and once again the band reached out to its past, asking Jon McIntire to return. After his 1974 departure he’d worked as Weir’s personal manager, then returned to St. Louis during his father’s terminal illness, where he worked as a domestic violence and substance abuse counselor. He was also, he said, “teaching occasionally in a Methodist church in southern Illinois, giving talks on things like Joseph Campbell’s cosmology of myth, the Book of Job, the sermons of Paul Tillich.” He studied religion because he was interested in “the essence of individual transformation . . . we need to be better than we are in order to exist.” Phenomenally bright, he was engaging, even to the man who’d fired him, Bill Kreutzmann. Shortly after going on the road with the band, he and Bill found themselves together. “Wanna hear a story?” asked Jon. “I’d love to,” said Kreutzmann. Jon proceeded to tell of staying at the edge of the Grand Canyon at a time of great personal confusion. Trying to grasp the meaning of the canyon, he threw the I Ching and realized that he had to surrender, stop trying to grasp. “The word ‘can’t’ doesn’t exist, the word ‘why’ doesn’t exist,” said Kreutzmann, himself a spiritual seeker who could spin mysto word games with any guru. Conversations like that were the reason McIntire was part of the Dead, and though he was not entirely convinced at the wisdom of his return, he found the scene still remarkably collective, although the band was in greater control than before. Thanks to Rifkin’s honesty, the Dead’s business was healthy. But the audiences were much, much larger, and there was that much more adrenaline around every night.

A second bit of fallout from Rock’s firing took place in June at an all-employee meeting. Mary Jo Meinolf, then the band’s receptionist, complained of getting repeated calls from members of the media because Rifkin did not return them, being both too busy and not overfond of journalists in any case. “Get [Scrib] to do it,” said Garcia. “He knows that shit.” After a fifteen-minute training session in which he was instructed to avoid currying favor with the media, Scrib took over as the new publicist.

As 1984 wore on, Garcia set to work with his old friend Tom Davis on creating a script for a film of Kurt Vonnegut’s
The Sirens of Titan.
Davis had come to Hepburn Heights to begin, and was greeted with, “Come in, sit down, and get high, we’ll talk about it tomorrow.” Both of them were fans of Bob and Ray, and many of their earliest sessions had more to do with laughter and television than work. Jerry and Tom eventually produced a script, based on their mutual understanding of the book as a definition of love, said Davis, “in Kurt Vonnegut’s stark, minimalist way—romance with no romance, just kernels of love.” Davis managed to arrange a meeting that included the Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz and
SNL
star Bill Murray, but nothing came of it, and the script languished.

The year ended in awful tragedy. Late on the twenty-eighth of December, Steve Parish’s wife, Lorraine, and their young daughter Jennifer died in a car accident. His closest brothers—Angelo and Robert from the Hell’s Angels, John Cutler, Kidd Candelario, John Hagen, and Mickey— wrapped themselves around Parish in a hard protective knot, and he survived, as those left behind must. As the band played New Year’s Eve, he sat helpless onstage and grieved, and when Garcia ended the year with Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,”
everyone
cried.

A large part of the reason McIntire had returned as manager was to catalyze the band’s concern for Garcia’s drug use, and in mid-January he arranged a confrontation. This was neither the first nor the last intervention for Garcia, and as usual, he promised to seek help. He almost made it. He planned to enter a facility in Oakland, and on January 18, 1985, he set out for it. Halfway there he stopped in Golden Gate Park, where he sat in his car meditating on his life, and, not coincidentally, finishing off his drug supply. Unfortunately, his BMW, a gift from a disreputable source, was not registered. A passing police officer took notice of the car and ran the plates. When he approached the car, he saw Garcia trying futilely to conceal things. The legal results of the bust were minimal, and a good attorney named Chris Andrian quite properly got Garcia into a diversion program, where he attended counseling meetings with Grace Slick, among others. The sessions had no significant impact on his habit, but something else did. Early in the summer the consequences of almost total physical passivity caught up with him, and he began to experience massive edema, a swelling in his ankles and lower legs that was so bad his trousers needed to be cut. The appearance of his legs was so shocking that Garcia finally had undeniable proof of the damage. Bit by bit, as the year 1985 passed, he began to clean up and exercise at least a little.