A Long Strange Trip (75 page)

For the band, the spring of ’85 was dominated by a new experience. Phil DeGuere had come to the Dead’s attention with the failed 1972 film project called
Sunshine Daydream.
Since then, he’d moved up the Hollywood TV ladder with a writing stint on
Baretta
before becoming producer of
Simon and Simon.
Now he was the producer of a new version of Rod Serling’s classic
The Twilight Zone.
Few shows could possibly have been more appealing to the Dead and Garcia, who remarked, “Man, I
live
in the Twilight Zone.”They leaped at the chance to record their own version of the signature three-note motif,
“neenerneenerneener,”
that identified the show. They didn’t stop there. DeGuere and his music director, Merl Saunders, came to a board meeting to discuss the band’s doing all of the music for the show, the “stings” and “bumpers” that set the atmospheric soundscape. Garcia left the meeting early, announcing that he voted yes. Lesh was “adamantly opposed,” recalled DeGuere, and the decision was made to proceed without him.

They set to work, and while their music was appropriate and effective, the deal’s business aspects were badly handled, dooming the project to continuous friction among all parties involved. Hal Kant had delegated the negotiation of the arrangement with CBS to an associate, who didn’t know the Dead very well and produced a fairly standard contract. The head of the music department at CBS didn’t like the deal, since he now had no control, which put Merl in the middle of both an unhappy CBS and the Dead. Very quickly, Mickey Hart took the lead for the Dead in the studio, and proved to have a gift for sound design. Just as they began, he went into the hospital for back surgery, and ordered that all the necessary equipment be set up in his room. At first Ram Rod vetoed this seeming insanity, but Mickey pleaded, “When I wake up, I want to go to work.” The Demerol he’d gotten for his surgery proved to be aesthetically stimulating, and he produced music for the first four episodes from bed.

That spring, Hart set out on another sonic and social adventure. On a tour off-day, Mickey and Dan Healy journeyed to Amherst, Massachusetts, to record the Gyuto Monks of Tibet, who were staying with Amherst College professor of religion Robert Thurman, a Tibetan Buddhist monk (and father of the actress Uma). The Dead and its technology met one of the most esoteric of spiritual traditions, and the results were wonderful. Each monk could sing a three-note chord, and the assembled choir sounded like the edge of the universe. The Dalai Lama had explained that the long-term “benefit” of the Chinese occupation of Tibet was the spread of Tibetan Buddhism in the wider world, and he had encouraged the Gyuto Monks to visit America. But their efforts to raise money to build a monastery in India had gone poorly. On hearing that, Mickey volunteered to put on a Bay Area show, which turned out to be a resounding success. Over the next decade, Danny Rifkin and other members of the Dead family would take the reins so that Grateful Dead Productions became the monks’ de facto American promoters.

The otherworldly moan of the monks was not the only music in the Dead’s ears that late spring. Shortly after tickets for two early-June shows in Sacramento went on sale, the shows were canceled, because band members wanted to attend the San Francisco Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. “Jesus,” said Lesh, the band’s main but by no means only Wagnerian, “we couldn’t resist it. That’s some of the most transcendental music there is.” Most of them went. The sound of the “Ride of the Valkyries,” as played by Lesh, began to crop up in the rehearsals the band was conducting at the Marin Civic Center. Over three days in April they had shot video for
So Far,
a project that would not be released for two years. They were also lightly preparing for another challenge, their twentieth anniversary, which they would celebrate in mid-June at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. Aside from a superb Rick Griffin backdrop that transformed the Revolutionary War fife and drum bandsmen into a skeleton holding a guitar, they needed to do little except produce a musical surprise. “[Dead Heads] just want something old, right?” asked Garcia, turning to the publicist as the representative Dead Head in a meeting. “Yup.” And so they resurrected the long-unperformed “Cryptical Envelopment” segment of “The Other One.” Before they played the first of the three shows, they performed for the media, in their third press conference in twenty years.

The young men who’d gigged at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor certainly hadn’t imagined that they could continue for twenty years, but for all the ongoing madness, it was a tremendously vibrant musical ensemble onstage at the Greek, even though two months later they would play among the worst shows of their lives at a Northern California ski resort called Boreal Ridge. If they were no longer at the extreme edge of their talent, they were now sophisticated, subtle, and strong. What was even more remarkable was the growth of their audience, which had proceeded apace, slowly but oh so steadily, for twenty years. That summer they set yet another record at Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a pleasant amphitheater only four hours from Manhattan, selling more than forty thousand tickets, including seventeen thousand on the day of the show. That summer was also the last time they could play at Merriweather Post Pavilion, a relatively small facility on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

The future was visible. At an informal meeting in December in the lobby of Front Street, the band and crew talked about the increase in audience size and conceded, reluctantly, that they had outgrown arenas and amphitheaters and would need to perform in stadiums during the coming summer, when Dead Heads would be out of school. They were perhaps not quite large enough a draw to sell out a stadium on their own, but they were getting there. The talk turned to appropriate cohorts, and the first names were Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan. Planning began. The year ended with a New Year’s Eve show, of course, but even at home they had outgrown the 7,800-seat Oakland Auditorium, and moved to the largest possible local room, the Oakland Coliseum Arena. Their show was broadcast live on the USA cable network for visuals with a jury-rigged FM radio network for sound, earning a .8 Nielsen rating, meaning 250,000 homes and at least 500,000 viewers. The size of the show did not eliminate the Dead scene’s capacity for random numbskullery. At midnight Bill Walton and Tom Davis were supposed to act as hosts, but when Father Time, Bill Graham, approached the stage on a float, Ken Kesey stole the microphone and began to rave about Rasputin and FDR. His various “fucks” and “shits” had the director in a cold sweat, but the FCC didn’t seem to notice.

As 1986 passed, Garcia grew visibly healthier, Lesh quit using cocaine, Kreutzmann began to attend AA meetings, and one of the last seriously druggy employees, Bonnie Parker, was let go. Hard drugs were no longer chic around the Dead. Unfortunately, all Brent needed was booze. His erratic love life bottomed at a bizarre show on April 21, when he bypassed art and turned a solo performance of his song “Maybe You Know” into a shattering revelation of torment, screaming rather than singing. It was bleak reality without a shred of artifice, a frightening nakedness of soul, and so shocking that the band didn’t quite know what to do. Ordinarily, the slot would have been followed by drums and then space, but in an act of extraordinary compassion, Garcia came out, helped Brent finish his song, smiled tenderly at him, and launched into “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad.”

The summer of 1986 was meltingly hot, especially in Washington, D.C., where the tour, which included Bob Dylan backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, ended at RFK Stadium. It was a standard-issue D.C. summer day, with the temperature over one hundred and the humidity nearly that high. Garcia was only outside his air-conditioned dressing room for three hours, but he was intensely dehydrated when he left the stage. He flew home the next day, July 8, and once there complained of thirst.

He began to slip into a coma. “I started feeling like the vegetable kingdom was speaking to me. It was communicating in comic dialect in iambic pentameter. So there were these Italian accents and German accents and it got to be this vast gabbling. Potatoes and radishes and trees were all speaking to me,” he said, laughing. “It was really strange. It finally just reached hysteria and that’s when I passed out and woke up in the hospital.” On the tenth, his housekeeper, Nora, frantically called Weir to say, “Jerry’s in the bathroom, and he’s not making a lot of sense.” “Call 911,” said Weir. She did, and it saved his life. His blood was “thick as mud,” he’d later say, but there was worse to come. In a deep coma of initially unknown origin, he resisted the doctors’ efforts to give him a CAT scan, so they injected him with liquid Valium. Unfortunately, he was allergic to it, and his heart stopped. The doctors zapped him back to life in a Code Blue response, and placed him on a respirator for forty-eight hours before he was able to breathe on his own. Eventually, they concluded that the coma was the consequence of adult-onset diabetes, and his healing commenced.

“My main experience was one of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic, space-ship vehicle with insectoid presence. After I came out of my coma, I had this image of myself as these little hunks of protoplasm that were stuck together kind of like stamps with perforations that you could snap off. They were run through with neoprene tubing, and there were these insects that looked like cockroaches which were like message units that were kind of like my bloodstream.” As he came awake, one of his first visitors was M.G. First he wrote a note that read, “Be tactful.” She chuckled through her tears of anxiety and appreciated it. Then he muttered, “I’m not Beethoven.” This was charming, if mysterious. Was he saying he wasn’t dead? Or not deaf? When Hunter visited, Garcia began to describe his visions, demons and mechanical monsters that “taunted and derided” him with endless bad jokes and puns, and then asked his partner, “Have I gone insane?”

“No,” Hunter replied. “You’ve been very sick. You’ve been in a coma for days, right at death’s door. They’re only hallucinations, they’ll go away. You survived.”

“Thanks,” whispered Garcia. “I needed to hear that.”

48

A Suitable Touch of Grey (8/86–12/89)

The weeks following Garcia’s collapse were the true hiatus in Grateful Dead history. Trying to maintain that they were in charge of the situation, Lesh and Hart called in the newest em-ployee, Scrib, and laid him off until they might resume touring. The office was very quiet that day, as every other employee sat wondering. But Bonnie Parker’s odd notions of compartmentalization had resulted in the bookkeeping staff finding money they didn’t anticipate, and as the summer wore into the fall, no one else had to pay the price, although the company attorney, Hal Kant, ceased collecting his retainer for a year. Laird Grant went to Hepburn Heights and cleaned it of leftover stashes, M.G. moved in as nurse, and Garcia slowly began to recover. At first he was wobbly. That summer during a visit to Camp Winnarainbow, where his daughter Theresa was a camper, his halting shuffle was the gait of an elderly man.

As the fall passed, he regained his strength. Mickey stopped by to drag him out for walks, and once brought Carlos Santana by for some guitar talk and good company. Merl Saunders and John Kahn came to visit, running through changes on standards like “My Funny Valentine.” The coma had played havoc with Garcia’s neural pathways, and he had to start from scratch. “It took a while,” he said, “before I really had a sense of how music worked. I had to kind of reconstruct all that.” Merl was “kind of like a father figure to me,” Garcia told another interviewer. Saunders would sit at the piano and “bring along the chord changes or something to a tune and I’d slowly put it together a little and he’d play through the changes and then things started coming back together for me.” Music— and cards and prayers—healed him. His favorite card came from San Francisco’s juvenile hall: “Hey, Garcia, get well or we’ll mug ya!”

After a while, Merl and John Kahn began to alternate visits with David Nelson and Sandy Rothman, so that Garcia’s acoustic side got a workout. Aside from music, he spent considerable time on his art. He’d always sketched or doodled, and in the course of the eighties he’d taken up airbrush and then computer graphics. He didn’t take his art terribly seriously, saying that it “doesn’t live past the moment for me . . . I can’t take it seriously because there’s no serious side of me that’s a graphic artist. It has no value except for the execution . . . I have never had a graphic idea in my mind visually before the doing—my pen starts going, after a while I recognize it and finish it.” Alas, the opportunity to have a piece of Jerry Garcia’s mind was something many would be interested in. In years to come, his artwork would generate a great deal of money and lots of contention.

He returned to the stage with the Garcia Band at the Stone nightclub in San Francisco on October 4, then again at Halloween, and while his playing was subdued and his solos were limited in scope, his good health was evident. On October 14, he taped an interview for a San Francisco Dead Head gathering that made it clear he was still Garcia. When his interviewer remarked that both Lesh and Weir had talked about changes in the Dead concert format, he chortled, “Those lyin’ sons of bitches! . . . Saying anything about anything we’re gonna do, ever, is just bullshitting . . . Whole weeks have gone by when I didn’t know what the hell was going on. But you don’t have a choice. You can’t opt out, y’know . . . The thing to do is stay in there and slug it out . . . Sometimes it’s successful when we don’t agree.” Their conversation ranged over many topics, including the twentieth-anniversary video, now called
So Far,
which he optimistically said would be finished soon, but was in fact not released until a year later. By 1986, compact discs had replaced vinyl albums as the music format of choice, and he talked about releasing old Grateful Dead Records albums like
Wake of the Flood
on CD. This would be an in-house project, and it would grow.

As Thanksgiving approached, there was much to be thankful for, and Jon McIntire organized a family party. The next Dead concerts had been scheduled for mid-December, recording sessions for the first new studio album in seven years were set, and the traveling party, including Scrib, was once more intact. There was even new material. Late in November, Hunter had stopped by Front Street and given Garcia a stack of seventeen new lyrics. Two of them would end up going to Bob Dylan (“Silvio,” “The Ugliest Girl in the World”) and three to Hunter’s next album. Two went to the Dead—“When Push Comes to Shove” and another. Though he was working hard that day on
So Far,
Garcia came to the lyrics for a song called “Black Muddy River,” stopped what he was doing, and sat down at Keith Godchaux’s Steinway. A couple of hours later he had the music down. Strongly gospel-flavored, “River” touched on the Old Testament, Yeats, and Dante, and it was a major addition to the canon. Dark and majestic, narrated by a singer terribly conscious of being no longer young and of the wretched glory of freedom, the song came out of one of Hunter’s dreams, of burrowing to a place that was beyond the Styx, where, he said, it was “vast and it’s hopeless. It’s death . . . with the absence of the soul,” and the narrator is “whistling in the dark, saying there’s something warm on the other side.”

The family gathered for Thanksgiving at a little lodge in a park in Marin County. Entertainment was provided by an acoustic band that included Jerry, Sandy Rothman, David Nelson, and Robert Hunter. It was a genuine and heartfelt celebration, made even better a couple of weeks later when Phil and Jill Lesh celebrated the birth of their firstborn son, Grahame Hamilton.

The Dead resumed playing in mid-December at Oakland Coliseum to the joy of all concerned, beginning the first show with “Touch of Grey,” which would swiftly assume anthemic associations to Garcia’s resurrection, though it had been part of the repertoire for four years. A more subtle moment came on the third night, when Garcia sang “Black Peter.” Absorbing lyrics was for him a mnemonic rather than a conscious act, and when he heard himself singing the line “laying in my bed and dying,” he stumbled and almost lost his grip. The audience’s cheers helped him.

In January 1987, the band went into Marin Veterans’ Auditorium, the comfortable hall where they’d recorded
So Far,
to lay down a new album. They were in the best mood they’d shared in ages. Best of all, they had good material that was solidly road-tested. A new noise reduction system from Dolby allowed them to record the basic tracks live and still sound good, so they decided to set up onstage at Marin as though for a concert, with the Le Mobile recording truck parked outside; anything to avoid a conventional studio. Produced by Garcia and John Cutler, the new album resembled
Workingman’s Dead
in the speed with which it was completed, and work went so well they could even fool around a bit. One day Mickey suggested that they try playing in a completely darkened hall. They turned off the lights, and the song they were working on swiftly mutated into the realm of the bizarre, as drummers couldn’t find cymbals and guitarists lost control of their fretboards. It was a fascinating, if not practical, exercise, and gave them a name for the album
—In the Dark.
From that, Herb Greene suggested a cover depicting just their eyes. Coincidentally, Bill Graham had called Weir late one night to complain, “I just want to know one thing. Who the fuck’s in charge here?” “I can’t really tell you, Bill,” sighed Weir. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’ve been wondering this myself, lately.” Graham came by the studio the next day to discuss his gripes and ran into the cover photo shoot, so his eyes joined the band members’ on the cover.

As tickets for the spring tour went on sale in February, Cutler took to wearing a T-shirt that read, “Think Platinum.” The overdubs were relatively few and went well. Weir’s up-tempo celebration of mild misogyny and singleness in general, “Hell in a Bucket,” required a motorcycle blast and the sound of snarling dogs. Mickey supplied pit bulls, which when recorded and slowed down sounded positively satanic. As work tapes found their way to New York, the folks at Arista took notice. Roy Lott had been at Arista since 1979, first as an attorney and then as vice president for operations, but this was the first time he’d dealt with the Dead. One Saturday in late winter he got a tape at home, and when he put it on and heard “Touch of Grey,” he “jumped out of [his] skin,” yelling, “The Grateful Dead wrote a fuckin’ hit,” calling up a dozen people at the office to say, “You gotta come in early Monday morning. You’re not gonna believe this—the Dead have written a fuckin’ hit.” What really struck him, he realized later, was that they’d written a first-rate pop song that was nonetheless totally in character.

On February 20, seventeen hundred fans were in line by 6 A.M. to buy tickets in Hartford, and it took just two and a half hours to sell out two shows. Three concerts in Philadelphia sold out in three hours, with fans lining up fifteen hours early at a ticket outlet in distant Harrisburg just on a hope that Philly tickets might be available. The fuel for a cultural bonfire was stacked very high. McIntire had visited Warner Bros. the previous fall to discuss contracts, and found that the Dead’s catalog was outselling Jimi Hendrix. In the spring of 1987, the
Grateful Dead Hour
radio show, begun at San Francisco’s KFOG by Paul Grushkin and then produced by David Gans, went national, broadcasting selections from the Dead’s vault as well as news to Dead Heads across the country. The year saw the publication of DeadBase, the Dead taper’s guide to shows and song lists. The
Golden Road,
quite possibly the most intelligent and literate rock fan magazine ever—rare is such a publication that puts out serious musicological analyses of the history of cover songs along with interviews of band members—had been started by Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon in 1984, and sales were booming. Perhaps the single most emphatic pointer at the ubiquitousness of Garcia and the Dead was the extraordinarily successful release in February of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream.

Off the Dead went on the spring tour, to be greeted by headlines like “Another year, another classic concert,” “The Dead and Garcia alive and well.” Even that bastion of the au courant, the
Village Voice,
joined the chorus. “. . . radder, riskier, rootsier, and ruder than you-name-it’s; plus, they swing. Double-plus, the Dead do something no other musicians of their stature or influence can: they suggest the possibility of utopia in
everyday life . . .
indirectly nurture humanity, goodness, joy, truth, and solidarity among their devoted audience in a much less corny manner than you’d suspect . . . [they] do no less through their music than espouse the quaint notion that art can save your life.”

When the tour came to New York, Jon McIntire, Garcia, and Scrib sat down with Clive Davis, Roy Lott, Don Ienner, and Sean Coakley (Arista’s boss, two vice presidents, and head of FM radio promotion respectively) to get acquainted. After all, this was the first new album in seven years, and on the Arista side only Clive had been there for
Go to
Heaven.
They met in a conference room of the Parker Meridien late one morning, and there were the usual refreshments, including coffee and a giant jug of orange juice. Garcia broke the ice by speaking to Coakley, who’d been a Dead Head in high school and seen his first show in 1970. Pleasant as Jerry was, Coakley, the junior representative from Arista, felt real pressure. The company attitude at Arista was that they
had
to do well, not only because this was the last album on the contract but because the Dead were fully capable of never making another record. “Lemme ask you a question,” Garcia began. “Have you listened to our CDs since they’ve come out?” “You mean the ones on Arista?” said Sean. “Yeah, the ones on Arista.” Sean confessed, “I think the albums sound better than the CDs do.” Smiling like a teacher who gets the right answer from the student, Garcia bounced in his chair. “Yes, yes, that’s right. You know, we’ve got a real problem with the audio on these CDs. The mastering is terrible.” Don Ienner smiled. “You want to remaster them? Tell us who, no problem, done.”

The changeover to the CD format would bring vast profit to the record companies, and somewhat less money to the bands, but the lack of aesthetic control was the Dead’s real gripe. Arista’s positive message about that issue, and its overall message—“We’re new, give us a chance”—established the Dead’s first positive attitude toward a record company in far more than a decade. As they left the meeting, Don looked at Sean and said, “I wasn’t gonna drink out of that jug of orange juice, no way.” “Not me,” said Sean. Old reputations die hard.

By May the album was finished, and for the first time the band made a video to go with it. Not surprisingly, they chose an approach that would require the least possible commitment of their time. Gary Gutierrez, who had contributed the brilliant animation to
The Grateful Dead Movie,
and since then worked on
The Right Stu f
and other films, had conceived a clever idea that would transmute the band into life-size skeleton puppets for the bulk of the video. The puppeteers came to shows at Frost Amphitheatre in early May to study their subjects, and a week later at Laguna Seca, a racetrack and natural amphitheater near Monterey, they shot for reel. Because the facility permitted camping, many thousand Dead Heads were close at hand. After the day’s concert, the campers were welcomed back to watch first the band and then its stand-in puppets be filmed. The fog was a freebie, courtesy of the nearby Pacific Ocean.

Once done with the video, the band began to work on the summer tour. Early in January, Bob Dylan had come to Front Street to hang and play for two days, just to see how things went. Among other things, they played the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man” together and discovered a unique chemistry, neither Dylan nor Dead. A month later, he called and said he thought a dual tour might work. Early in March, the Dead played in Oakland for Mardi Gras, and Dylan came by for a photo session to promote the tour. Shortly thereafter, the Foxboro, Massachusetts, selectmen publicly approved a license for a concert, breaking the story of the tour. Dylan and the Dead spent three weeks in May at Front Street, rehearsing upwards of one hundred songs. “[Dylan] didn’t know what he wanted to do,” thought Weir, but were anyone less adept at simple, direct verbal communication than the Dead, it might well have been Dylan. When the Dead broke up short rehearsals for long sessions with the TV to watch Bill Walton’s Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs, Dylan would sit on a car hood in the parking lot, withdrawn, while the hookers across the street whispered among themselves about him.