A Long Strange Trip (80 page)

GARCIA:
[laughs] “The guy who was respectable enough to talk to the rest of the world while we were out on the fringe.” . . .

WEIR:
“But we’re not going to have to play ‘Sugar Magnolia’ every New Year’s now.”

Instead, they opened their show that night with it, and then on November 3 joined Carlos Santana, CSN&Y, John Fogerty, Neil Young, Aaron Neville, prima ballerina Evelyn Cisneros, and 300,000 San Franciscans at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park to say good-bye. It had been twenty-four years since the Be-In.

November had become personal tour month, but this year the Jerry Garcia Band went out to work arenas, not bars. The coolest tour of the fall by far was Planet Drum’s. The album would sell stunningly well and win the first World Music Grammy, and the tour would crest at Carnegie Hall on the night before Thanksgiving, with a full house and all umpteen backlit tiers of applauding fans calling for encores. Mickey Hart was a long, long way from Flatbush.

Absorbing the new keyboard players had made working up new material even more difficult than usual. Finally, in the first shows of the new year 1992, in February, each vocalist brought out a new song. Throughout the spring tour, each singer would perform with a music stand in front of him as they continued to learn the material. Three of the songs were less than enthusiastically received: Vince’s “Long Way to Go,” Lesh’s “Wave to the Wind,” and “Corinna,” written by Hart, Hunter, and Weir, although the last would improve with age. Garcia’s “So Many Roads” hinted at his exhaustion, and his emotional stance in singing it gave it great authority. Ten years before, Hunter had listened to Garcia playing changes on the piano and recorded them. On listening to the tape once more, he’d set them to words. At first, Garcia said he liked the words but demurred at his music. Hunter told him to run through it anyway, and they both liked the results.

Wind inside & the wind outside
Tangled in the window blind
Tell me why you treat me so unkind
Down where the sun don’t shine
Lonely and I call your name
No place left to go, ain’t that a shame?

So many roads I tell you
New York to San Francisco
All I want is one
to take me home

Two changes marked the early part of the year. Bruce and Kathy Hornsby’s twin sons, Keith and Russell, had been born in January, and when Hornsby visited home in the middle of the spring tour, they didn’t seem to know him. By that time, he felt “Vinny had really figured it out,” and that his job as a bridge from Brent to Vince was complete. The fact that, primarily due to Garcia’s playing, the music remained less than fabulous was also a factor. In March he stopped performing regularly with the band. The other important change of the summer was technical, and, from the audience point of view, not entirely positive.

Twenty-seven years of amplified music had noticeably damaged the band members’ hearing, ranging from major damage (Mickey and Jerry most, but Phil and Bobby close behind) to only somewhat damaged (Billy; the relatively young keyboard players weren’t so badly affected). At first for health reasons, the band switched to ear monitors that summer. This meant that each musician had a custom-molded earpiece in each ear, looking something like hearing aids and virtually invisible, in which he could hear what he wanted. Lesh, in fact, would step over to the monitor mixing board and mix to suit himself. A side effect of ear monitors was that with them, the sound crew could mike all the instruments directly into the system, giving Healy a much purer palette to work with, with no sounds bleeding through other sounds onstage. But the real reason for the ear monitors was that the members of the Dead didn’t really want to listen to each other anymore. After three decades of trying to mix so that everyone could hear everything, the technicians found out that most of the band members mostly wanted to hear themselves; only Mickey actually listened to the entire band.

They returned home from the summer tour to new worries about Garcia. On his return to Marin from the summer tour, he and Manasha had moved into a grand new house, this time a ten-acre, 7,500-square-foot mansion near George Lucas’s Skywalker ranch, with marble fireplaces, a media room, and a pool. Late in July Garcia had gone to Southern California for a quick run of Garcia Band shows, and on his birthday, August 1, he remarked that he felt weird, as though he’d been dosed. He returned home that day, and the next day he lay comatose, his lips blue and his legs swollen. His heart was enlarged, his lungs were diseased, and he had borderline diabetes. Compounding everyone’s distress, Manasha initially refused to let anyone from the band—or any conventional doctor—near him, preferring her acupuncturist Yen Wei and a Santa Cruz hippie, Dr. Randy Davis, whose general air of Dead Head deference to Garcia inspired no faith in the Dead office scene. Garcia’s collapse had been easy to anticipate. His weight had ballooned, and he had no energy; on tour he would ask people to carry his rather light briefcase up the stage stairs for him.

It was a querulous August for the Dead family. Manasha’s devotion to Garcia was unquestioned, but her manner was dazed and frequently oblivious, and she was generally thought to be a “space case.” Her hotel room was always stuffed with icons and candles, and her beliefs were unclear but undoubtedly esoteric. Her habit of having a limousine waiting in front of the hotel for an entire day, just in case she wanted it, was not well thought of. Any date with her was subject to a thousand changes of plans, and more than once her lateness caused herself, Garcia, Keelin, and her nanny to miss a plane bound for Hawaii because she’d changed her mind. Her whims controlled their lives to a remarkable and maddening degree. But she responded to this crisis with a new focus and coherence, and it was certainly true that Garcia would rather have died than go to a hospital. As August passed, he went on a strict vegetarian diet and declared to Parish and other visitors his awareness that unless he changed his ways, his ways would end. At least for a while, he seemed to understand.

51

Interlude: “Can’t Stop for Nothin’” (ENCORE/NEW YEAR’S EVE)

New Year’s Eve, Oakland Coliseum

There was no subject on which Dead Heads and the Dead so diverged as that of New Year’s Eve. For the Heads it was heaven. For the band and most of the staff it was hell, the night the most distant cousins came out of the closet demanding tickets, a night invariably played by six exhausted guys with colds or worse, so put off by the borderline hysteria of the audience that it was impossible to work up any genuine enthusiasm. It was like the Super Bowl, so often a mediocre game because of the excessive preceding tension. Factor in that the Dead Heads in this case were represented by Bill “This Is My Goddamn Best Moment of the Year and You Can’t Stop Me” Graham, and the atmosphere was even more complicated.

As usual, it is misty gray in the parking lot as Clyde “Willie” Williams, BGP’s ageless security guard, lines the audience up to enter the building. Once the doors open, half of the “handicapped” people in line, who enter first, will miraculously heal. The band and staff’s closest friends use their all-access laminated passes, but one way or the other, everyone’s gotta get in early to save seats. Scrib and BGP’s Bob Barsotti bark futilely at the more obvious abusers to try to keep things fair, but they might as well spoon back the tide. Backstage is a little more crowded than usual, because space has been taken to build a studio for the radio broadcast. Radio is where Healy began, and this show and broadcast is one of Healy’s favorite things. Over the eighties and early nineties he builds an amazing once-a-year network.

Midnight. Bill Graham has been producing New Year’s Eve moments for many years, but 1979’s was best. The lights dropped, the crowd noise built, and then the spotlights picked out a shrouded object on the arena floor. The coverings flew off to reveal a wood and fabric “truck,” marked “Dead Head Trucking,” complete with a happy hippie driver. Then the top of the truck blew off, and into the air ascended Bill Graham, Father Time dressed as a butterfly. He rose all the way to very near the ceiling, flew the length of the hall, and landed onstage. This from a man who hated heights. All the while, Garcia was playing, solo, Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

On another year, or yet another year, or any year, the ritual is generally the same. The seconds count down, 3, 2, 1, and Father Time lands on the stage, the balloons drop—God, how the musicians hate them, the visual distraction as they come down, and the aural distractions when they’re popped—and the band slams into “Sugar Magnolia.” It’s an ideal song to close a show. Played right, it sounds like the Rolling Stones, sweeping guitars crashing up to a rock and roll Valhalla. It even has a traditional rock subject matter, since it is a tribute to love and the ladies. The coda “Sunshine Daydream” gives the band a chance to build the tension.

This being New Year’s Eve—any New Year’s—they satisfy Bill Graham’s plea; “Sugar Magnolia” is his favorite Dead song, so instead of ending the show with it, they begin with it, and go into a truncated third set. Tonight they cruise out of “Sugar Magnolia” and into “Terrapin.” It is an odd song. It is one of their greatest, the product of incredible simultaneous inspiration, and also one of their most formal, the song least subject to variation. It is a modest symphony, really, and it builds a rolling power that can be stunning. The story plays out, the cautious soldier and the impetuous sailor compete for the favors of the lady with the fan; the sailor wins, or does he? Ultimately, our concern is for the narrator, for he has become us.

Inspiration move me brightly
light the song with sense and color,
hold away despair
More than this I will not ask

faced with mysteries dark and vast
statements just seem vain at last
some rise, some fall, some climb
to get to Terrapin

Terrapin, of course, is the goal that we all define for ourselves, possibly a poetic tribute to Gary Snyder’s
Turtle Island,
but otherwise the promised land of hearts’ dreams. And a hard, bloody hard place to get to. The music is ecstatic, thunderous, overwhelming. Garcia reaches for the final notes, and the audience joins him, all caught up in the moment so deeply that only a scream is possible:

Terrapin—I can’t figure out
Terrapin—if it’s an end or the beginning
Terrapin—but the train’s got its brakes on
Terrapin—and the whistle is screaming: TERRAPIN

Beyond words and into a maelstrom, six men make a symphony and it works beautifully. The song climaxes, ends, and trails away. Time to go. Lesh steps to his rack, takes a sip of water, hits a switch, and leads a deft segue into “Touch of Grey” to end the show. It was the hit that almost killed the band, but a damn good rock song nonetheless, although Garcia never felt terribly comfortable with his performance of it. He wanted a rock and roll snap to it, like the opening of the Stones tune “Shattered,” but that is not what the band would play, and he always thought the song was too melodic, lacking in bite. The anthemic chorus took it in another direction. Yet what it also contains is the faith that saves us from ourselves, from despair and age and tragedy.

Scrib’s in the photographer’s pit in front of the stage, happy the night’s over, relaxing now. Next to him is the photographer Susana Millman, his love, and Garcia sings “Oh well a touch of grey / kind of suits you anyway, / that is all I meant to say / it’s all right.” Scrib carefully pushes a particularly long lens out of the way, and they embrace, and smile, and with sixteen thousand hearts furious with joy, they know that life is very weird and very beautiful and sometimes, as Weir used to say about the equipment, just exactly perfect.

52

Interlude: Packed and Gone (LOAD-OUT)

Some month, Somewhere in America

The last notes of the encore are still bouncing around the ceiling as Phil Lesh, always first, clatters down the stage stairs to take his accustomed shotgun seat in the first of the two vans parked in the tunnel behind the stage. Sears and his assistant Jan Simmons stand by, making sure that every band member is accounted for before they hop in. Next to the two of them is a member of the catering crew, handing each band member a postshow made-to-order shopping-bag-size lunch/snack, which might include a good bottle of wine, a salad, a full meal, or Lesh’s regular peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Garcia clomps stolidly along, then jumps in the front bench behind Lesh. Weir brings up the rear. By the time the house lights are fully up and the security guards have started the old chant, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” the vans are halfway to the airport. They’ll run out on the tarmac, the band will get on the plane, and at the other end the process will reverse. Less than two hours after the show, the band will be in the next gig’s hotel. Security will still be emptying the parking lot. Ecstatic Dead Heads dreamily find cars, grab each other for last hugs, and go off to their chosen rest.

That is the universal; one particular is worth retelling. In 1987 the band played an afternoon show in Telluride, Colorado, leaving around 6 P.M. for the next show, in Phoenix. Because of the altitude at the Telluride airfield, they were not in their usual luxurious G-3 charter airplane, where the arrangements had them sitting on couches that faced in. Instead, they were in something that resembled a plane from the 1930s, with one seat on each side of the aisle, which meant that each seat had a window. After boarding, the pilot inquired as to whether anyone wanted to be a tourist. The beers were out, and fat joints had been sucked down on the ride to the airfield, so the answer was a resounding yes. “The Black Canyon of the Gunnison or Monument Valley?” “Monument Valley!” everyone chorused. The famous buttes of the valley rise approximately two thousand feet above the valley floor, and the plane went in at one thousand feet. It was near sunset, and the sandstone of the buttes was bleeding color. Garcia sat happily giving a film history lecture on John Ford and his Monument Valley efforts. Mickey Hart’s brand-new acquisition, a Burmese python named Charley, went up and down the plane depositing various horrible residues on people’s shoes—or at the very least scaring the residue out of them. Mickey’s son Taro sat in the pilot’s lap. The passengers together were a speck in the Creator’s infinite universe, enjoying a view of Her handiwork so fantastic, so beyond words, that Scrib later realized it was undoubtedly the most remarkable offstage experience he would ever share with the band.

Onstage, “load-out” resembles the end of
Alice in Wonderland,
a film run in reverse, almost as though the pieces of equipment are leaping back into their cases on their own. As the band’s crew packs the instruments, the sound crew gathers the microphones and mike cables, carefully coiling them with a practiced twist of the wrist so they’ll be easy to use the next day. The heaviest things begin to leave the stage for the truck, Parish directing traffic at the top of the ramp, Mike Fischer inside the truck.

Parish wants to be on his way, and growls at the truck, “Come on, or I’m gonna come in there and get crazy,” and Ram Rod snickers, “You don’t have to go in there to get crazy.”

As the stage gear clears, Parish grabs a box to make sure it’s stable, then asks the monitor man, “Harry, where do you want it?” Word comes up the ramp: “All the lights just blew out in the fuckin’ truck.” After a few minutes the lights come back on, and the flow of equipment resumes. Forty minutes after the show, the stage is clear of band gear. The hoists have brought the speakers down to the stage, and local guys under Ultra Sound’s direction are sending them to the relevant truck. The lighting guys are pulling their storage cases out from under the stage. Parish has moved nearer to the truck and calls to a union stagehand, “Try a new section with the K20A on top of the organ—line it up, now. Push it low, it’ll go in smooth.”

Ten minutes later, the Dead’s crew members have their coats on. Parish, fatherly, passes out T-shirts and hats to the local loaders, and they are delighted.

Taylor and Ram Rod gather next to the truck to watch the final stacking. “Rodriguez,” Taylor asks, “did you make the walk?”

“I wouldn’t be out here if I hadn’t,” says Rod, because for nearly thirty years, he won’t leave until he’s watched the last piece of equipment, the drum risers, enter the truck. The crew exits, bound for their jet to the next town. Taylor remains, supervising the load-out of the sound and lights, setting schedules, worrying over the details.

Day off tomorrow, then another load-in.