A Long Strange Trip (78 page)

Built to Last
was released on October 31, along with another Gutierrez video, this one based on the work of Georges Méliès, a French turn-of-the-century filmmaker, for the song “Foolish Heart.” The album deserved, and got, a middling reception. Everything that had put energy into
In the Dark—
mature songs recorded nearly live with consummate enthusiasm—was absent, and the versions of Garcia’s and Weir’s songs lacked fire. Since he had contributed four of the nine songs, Brent was more visible, and thus more vulnerable, and many reviews singled out the emotionalism and literalness of his works. Ironically, what may have been the best song recorded for the album was not included. “Believe It or Not” was a first-rate Hunter-Garcia country-western song that came, as Hunter remarked, out of hearing a tavern jukebox about 1947; Garcia chose to leave it off. Overall,
Built to Last
was not one of Garcia’s triumphs as a producer. The band was fortunate, really. Another hit and they’d never have been able to tour again.

Adam Katz’s death was a mystery; the death of another Dead Head, Patrick Shanahan, was not. Shortly after the third show of a December run at the Forum in Los Angeles, Shanahan found himself uncomfortable with his LSD trip and went looking for medical aid outside the building. Instead, he was surrounded by five or six police officers. He grew agitated, and they found it necessary to subdue him with their nightsticks, leaving bruises virtually everywhere on his body “as much as an inch deep,” said the coroner. The district attorney ruled it a justifiable killing. The band quickly decided to stop patronizing the Forum, but their feelings of responsibility, no matter how hard they tried to deny them, lingered.

Three days later, Scrib and road manager Cameron Sears were at 5th and Lincoln when word came that Brent Mydland had overdosed on some drug—morphine, it was speculated. His wife called 911. The arriving EMTs reported his drug possession, and he was arrested. Scrib and Sears bailed him out and then took him home to an empty house, sitting up with him for much of the night and listening to him deny, deny, deny his profound personal anguish. A day or two later he would go to Gary Gutierrez’s Colossal Films to shoot the band’s second video for
Built
to Last,
his own “Just a Little Light.” The decade was ending in dark confusion.

49

Interlude: “Noble but Lame”

(THE GRATEFUL DEAD ON THE G.D.)

Lesh, 1981: “The Dead is, of course, noble but lame.” Lesh, 1967: “If you want coherence, gentle men, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

Garcia, 1970: “I just see us as a lot of good-time pirates. I’d like to apologize in advance to anybody who believes we’re something really serious.”

(Do you see yourself as some kind of guiding light?)

Garcia, 1970: “Fuck, no. We’re just musicians. On a good night our music will be clear and won’t scare anybody and won’t hurt anybody.”

Weir, date unknown: “We’re a band. We felt free. We still do . . . We’re a lot like the circus . . . we won’t give up until we feel we’ve achieved something.”

Garcia, 1972: “. . . anybody in the Grateful Dead could draw you a picture of the Grateful Dead, man. It’s got like six or seven weird legs, mismatched pairs, and one moth-eaten eagle wing and one bat wing, you know, and it snorts fire and it’s cross-eyed . . . And it jumps up and kicks around and laughs real loud.”

John Barlow, 1988: “They do something that nobody else does: they create mass hysteria of a very benign sort which makes people hear and see things that cannot be heard and should not be seen.” Lesh, 1981: “We became the Grateful Dead when we started playing for the acid tests. That’s it, man. It’s like Galileo: recant or be punished. They can burn me, man. They won’t burn nothing but the body.”

Kreutzmann, 1982: “Bobby would like it to be a Bob Weir band . . . that’s the only lapse that I can see in his commitment . . . With the Grateful Dead, there’s more possible than you could ever dream of—even I could ever dream of. That’s what’s frustrating.”

Lesh, 1981: “But I don’t get bored with being in the Grateful Dead. To me, the Grateful Dead is life—the life of the spirit . . . [and] the mind, as opposed to standing in line and marking time in the twentieth century.”

Lesh, date unknown: “I’ve always called what we play electric chamber music. It’s closely interlocked. Chamber music has been called the music of friends . . . Those hookups are like living things . . . like cells in the body of this organism. That seems to be the transformation taking place in human beings. To learn to be cells as well as individuals. Not just cells in society but cells in a living organism.”

Dan Healy, 1982: “For me it’s a vehicle that enables an aggregate of people to experiment with musical and technical ideas; it’s a workshop and a breadboard as well as a dream and a treat . . . I don’t hassle destiny—there’s some reason why I’m here.”

Garcia, 1974: “It’s embarrassing to be considered part of the entertainment scene. And weird to be so popular. That’s a mystery. Maybe it’s because we stuck at it for so long. When the dust clears, there’s still the Grateful Dead . . . we don’t consciously play what they want to hear. Or what they need. Just what we can remember.”

Garcia, 1972: “I think basically the Grateful Dead is not for cranking out rock and roll, it’s not for going out and doing concerts or any of that stuff, I think it’s to get high . . . To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe . . . [not] unconscious or zonked out, I’m talking about being fully conscious . . . the Grateful Dead should be sponsored by the government or something. It should be a public service, you know, and they should set us up to play at places that need to get high.”

Garcia, date unknown: “Coming to see the Grateful Dead is like getting a kit from Radio Shack—” Weir: “Yeah. The audience gets to help put it together.” Garcia: “And it might not work.”

Garcia, 1971: “Ugly but honest, that’s us. Hey, there’s a good title for you, ‘Ugly But Honest.’ A’course, we ain’t all that honest, either. Maybe just ‘Ugly’ is good enough.”

50

A Deadicated Life (1/90–9/92)

A combination of sheer profitability and the Dead’s honest efforts to hold the parking lot scene down to a dull roar kept most facilities interested in booking the band. In 1990, to paraphrase a remark once made about Frank Sinatra, it seemed at tour time that it was the Dead’s world and everyone else just lived in it. By and large, the media and local decision-makers had enough respect for the band’s venerability and the uniqueness of its imprint to shrug at the audience’s excesses. The fact that the parking lot and interior of every Dead concert were a no-holds-barred orgy of pot, LSD, nitrous oxide, and other substances seemed to worry only curmudgeonly columnists and the occasional small-town-minded police department (Louisville, Kentucky, comes to mind). Even the Nassau Coliseum, where the police had long ago alienated Dead Heads with an aggressive attitude, had by now acquired a new manager, Neil Sulkes, who wanted the Dead, and worked very hard to make the relationship succeed. Every show got its local reporter, who consistently fell in love with the decency and pleasantness of most Dead Heads, while marveling at the flagrant drug consumption. Most cops shrugged. “It’s silly for us to be out here,” said a female undercover officer in North Carolina. “We may try to look like them, but they know we’re not like them. I’d have to wear no bra and no underwear.”

The tours had achieved the inexorable reliability of the seasons, and from within the efficient cocoon of Deadworld, the only differences were the weather and the occasional special blips in the passing parade, as when Dead Heads mingled with the nabobs of the TV industry, the National Association of Broadcasters, on an Atlanta plaza—both Heads and executives seemed amused by each other—or when the Dead Heads shared a (very large) parking lot in Louisville with a Jehovah’s Witness encampment. Nineteen ninety brought two final horror stories. One involved a young woman who bought some LSD in the parking lot of an L.A. show and then drove off hallucinating fire, causing a fatal auto accident. The other incident, in Denver, ended in the death of a homeless person with a concert ticket in his pocket after he so terrified a family that a man felt obliged to kill him.

Yet the soft colossus rolled on, with the crazies who were the Dead being treated as serious people. After nearly twenty years of trying to save his home, John Perry Barlow had finally been forced off the Bar Cross Ranch by foreclosure, and had become, as he put it, the Cicero of Cyberspace, establishing the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Lotus software developer Mitch Kapor. Weir was involved in a variety of social concerns, from a celebrity roast of 49er star Ronnie Lott on behalf of the Special Olympics to his more serious environmental lobbying efforts, which included writing a fine
New York Times
op-ed piece on the sale of a Montana forest that spring. When the newly freed South African anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela came to the Bay Area in June, Mickey Hart was invited to put on a musical welcome that would include Garcia and Weir and (of course!) many, many drummers.

Early in the year the Rex Foundation made a grant to David “Dawg” Grisman. When David discovered that Garcia was responsible, he called him to say thanks. Because of Grisman’s legitimate anger at his treatment by Grateful Dead Records and Garcia’s inability to deal with his own embarrassment, they had not spoken for many years after Old and in the Way had ceased playing. Now Grisman invited him to come by and play. Garcia showed up, sat down, and said, “What we should do is make a record, ’cause that’ll give us something to focus on.” They had their first tune, “Louis Collins,” in the can before Dawg’s recording engineer, Decibel Dave Dennison, could arrive. Over the next few years, Garcia would visit Grisman’s tiny basement studio dozens of times and make a tremendous amount of wonderful music. The material Garcia laid down with David in the nineties was the best acoustic playing of his life, with Grisman’s gifted and creative discipline influencing Garcia for the best. There was a tremendous purity to their music making. Garcia would arrive at one, they’d smoke a fat joint, and sit in a tiny basement room playing. It was a quiet, almost meditative approach.

Many members of the Dead scene viewed this with dark suspicion, not only because Grisman was amassing hours of valuable tape, but also because—well, just because. There had always been a generalized suspicion of people with access to Garcia, and by now these misgivings were accentuated by the ongoing anguish occasioned by his resumption of opiate use. His drug habits were like the weather; everyone talked about them, but no one felt the slightest ability to do anything about it. “[Garcia] just goes over there because he can do what he wants and nobody busts him,” grumbled John Cutler. Of course, nobody really busted Garcia at Front Street, either. Periodically, Cutler would tearfully harangue Garcia—it was a measure of Jerry’s love for John that he tolerated even that much intrusion on his life—and every once in a while the band would stage an intervention, but Garcia mixed a large ego and grand intelligence with his weakness. Challenging him on a personal matter was, as he put it, a “generally futile pursuit.”

Garcia sampled a number of projects at this time. Bob Weir’s duo partner, bassist Rob Wasserman, was making an album of trios. Together with singer Edie Brickell, he and Garcia improvised a tune called “Zillionaire.” Garcia was deeply ambivalent when Wasserman used a take that had Jerry playing piano, but Edie Brickell’s ability to improvise vocally thrilled him, and he looked forward to working with her again. At the other end of the sociomusical spectrum, Garcia recorded the title track for Warren Zevon’s
Transverse City,
a song cycle about a grim and ugly technofuture. Zevon was bemused by him, telling the
Boston Globe,
“[Garcia’s] a virtuoso, and he played nonstop for about five hours. He said, ‘I’ll play it as much as you want, and you stop me when you have to go’—the most generous musician I’ve ever met . . . [He] baffles me. Why did this guy go to all this trouble for me?”

The finest musician to fall into the Dead’s orbit at this time did so at a Dead concert. Late in the spring 1990 tour, Phil Lesh was sitting with a friend of a friend who happened to know the great jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and asked if Phil had a message for Branford. “Yeah, tell him to sit in with us at Nassau.” At first, the band was cautious, and “auditioned” Marsalis by asking him to sit in on “Bird Song,” late in the first set. Never did a musician prove his brilliance faster, and about one verse in, Garcia and Marsalis were trading licks as though they were old friends. “You
will
stick around for the second set, won’t you, Branford?” “Love to.”

They flew off the planet to a “Dark Star,” skated along the heavens with “Eyes of the World,” and generally played one of the finest shows with a visiting musician the Dead had ever managed. Since the Dead actually listened and reacted to their guests, an outsider almost always held them back. But Branford was exactly
there
with them and pushed them straight to their strength—highly innovative improvisation. He had played with Sting and knew rock musicians, but this was something new for him. “Those guys can play
music.
They’re much better than most people give them credit for. They have big ears and real chops, and they’ve got 18,000 tie-dyes dancing along. I’d never seen anything like it. Most rock shows are just like versions of MTV, but not the Dead—they’re into jazz, they know Coltrane, they’re American musical icons . . . They’re
fantastic.”
In a note to the band, he wrote, “On Thursday night I had the best time I’ve had in my entire life. I now know that playing rock and roll can be all that I have envisioned it would be.” The admiration was entirely mutual, and Marsalis would be a welcome guest a number of times over the next years. In addition to his towering gifts as a player, he brought to the shows a sweetness of disposition that made even the grumpiest drummer smile when told that Branford was coming.

It was a soggy summer, with the band generally playing very well to reward audiences dancing in the pouring rain. The surreal march through straight America acquired a new twist in Boston, where the local police called in the National Guard to assist them in their pursuit of dope dealers. In a gross violation of the U.S. Constitution, Operation Yankee Scout used forty-five Guardsmen, some in uniform, a guard helicopter, night-vision goggles, super binoculars, and military communications gear to arrest thirty people in a crowd that was estimated at around 100,000.

Three days after the tour ended, Scrib went to work at 5th and Lincoln and was greeted by bookkeeper Mary Jo Meinolf, who sobbed, “They just called. Brent’s dead.” After various DUI arrests, he was facing time in jail and then a spell of chemical monitoring, and had been chasing one last binge; it was his sheer inexperience that caused him to overdose on a mixture of morphine and cocaine. “He was willing to die just to avoid” the jail time, Garcia believed. “Brent was not a real happy person.” It wasn’t, Garcia said, that he’d been treated as the new guy all that much. “It’s something he did to himself. But it’s true that the Grateful Dead is tough to . . . I mean, we’ve been together so long.” After twenty-five years of being “the Kid,” Weir had finally found someone who’d have to listen to him. He often scrapped with Brent, and they’d had more than one dressing room wrestling match. But the real problem was always a certain hollowness in Brent, a lack of faith in his music and self, in the value of his own life. “And he could have gotten better,” Garcia once said, “but he just didn’t see it. He couldn’t see what was good about what he was doing.” He had no intellectual resources and lacked any intellectual perspective. Growing up in Concord had left him with nothing at the center. Once, he and Hart had bickered, and Mickey was aghast when he looked out the window of their New York hotel and watched Brent walk out into Manhattan traffic, his eyes closed, crossing and recrossing the street until finally Mickey went down and gently asked him to come back inside. No one in the Dead touring party would ever be able to enter the elevator at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C., without thinking of Brent. Drunk, he had reached up and slugged the hanging crystal light fixture there, laying his hand wide open. Heavily bandaged, he managed to play the next show.

His death devastated the band. That afternoon Scrib met alone with them—the manager, Cameron Sears, was in New York on business—to draft a statement. Weir’s profound frustration was revealed in a powerful anger, an anger that would torment him for some time. He was so distraught that it was an effort for him to agree to allow the conciliatory line, “We have lost a brother in music and we grieve for him and his family.” Not that he had any alternative, in any case. The Grateful Dead monster had claimed another victim, and Garcia could feel it. In a side room at the funeral home, John Barlow watched the band metaphorically whistle past the graveyard, engaging in “juvenile grab-ass” joking, stuck in their roles, unwilling to confront the Reaper. Alone with Garcia in the limousine to the cemetery, Barlow remarked that he’d come to prefer the Dead Head side of the proscenium arch, because “they play a straighter game.” Garcia answered, “Man, I would [go there]. If I could do that, I’d go out there right away.”

Though he clearly had greater personal resources than Brent, Garcia could neither join the audience nor confront what was happening to all of them. Authentic communication had shut down, leached by time, by the encompassing pressure of audience demand, by the responsibilities of too many people’s livelihoods. There was still a phenomenal joy in the playing, but only in the playing. Later, Candace Brightman wondered aloud why she had put up with the frustrations of working for the Dead, from the sometimes uncooperative crew to the endless depression of watching Garcia slowly crumble. She certainly had other options. So why? “ ’Cause I loved the Grateful Dead, Jerry’s guitar . . .” During the hiatus she’d worked in film and with other bands, but nothing was as good as the Dead. And she, along with almost all of the people who worked for the band, tried to give the trip 100 percent every night. The love for Garcia endured the horror. David Kemper was the Garcia Band’s drummer for ten years, and one day without warning, and for no particular reason other than a desire for change, he was dismissed. Yet he bore no grudge. He said the audience “didn’t care if they were hearing fast music or slow . . . it didn’t matter if it was good or bad or who he had onstage with him . . . And I don’t blame them. Being in the same room with Jerry was a pretty damn wonderful place to be.”

The Dead reacted to Brent’s death by dealing with it as little as humanly possible. They didn’t talk about it, didn’t try to use it emotionally. They were stuck in their roles as members of the Dead. Drugs and fame had lured them into forgetting that the Grateful Dead, which had a mission from God to perform, was something to be serious about. But each individual was, of course, just another bozo, and nothing to be too pompous about. Alas, over time, that distinction between the serious whole and the less-than-serious parts proved desperately difficult to maintain. “Why,” asked Candace Brightman later, “did they take themselves soooo seriously? One of the reasons I got shit from the crew was that I lacked the proper reverence for the band.”

As far back as the previous Christmas, when Brent had overdosed, Garcia had put in a call to his friend, the pianist, singer, and composer Bruce Hornsby, thinking of him as a possible replacement. Hornsby and his band the Range had opened for the Dead in 1987 and several times after, and Garcia had recorded tracks on Hornsby’s
Night on the Town
and
Harbor Lights
albums since then. It was convenient that Bruce had played in a Dead cover band as a youth, but far more important, he was a gifted pianist who could make a solid contribution. In December, Garcia only reached Bruce’s answering machine, and they never spoke. In the wake of Brent’s death, Garcia and Lesh went to see Bruce at a Bay Area concert and eventually invited him to join the band. But Hornsby had a booming solo career, and while happy to fill in, was reluctant to commit completely. In Dead fashion the band decided to include Bruce where and when available, but also search for a permanent new keyboard player.