A Long Strange Trip (81 page)

53

“I Guess It Doesn’t Matter, Anyway” (10/92–4/96)

By the time Garcia returned to the stage with the Garcia Band on Halloween, 1992, he had undergone a considerable metamor-phosis, losing seventy pounds, although as always he was shy about the attention the transformation earned him. At the beginning of December he and the Dead went to Denver, and the pace of change in his private life accelerated dramatically. Early in the year Barbara “Brigid” Meier, his girlfriend from 1961, had sent Robert Hunter a copy of her first published book of poetry,
The Life You Ordered Has Arrived,
and he and Garcia had sat in the kitchen at 5th and Lincoln, sharing poems and fond memories. They were both sure that one poem, “El Gran Coyote,” referred to Garcia, although it didn’t.

Brigid had settled in Boulder, Colorado, and in the mid-eighties she’d been contacted by Scrib, acting as the band’s biographer. She’d come to a Red Rocks concert and naturally wanted to say hello to Garcia afterward, but riven with guilt over his drugged state, he’d begged off. In mid-1992 Garcia had met with her to do an interview for the Buddhist magazine
Tricycle,
and the old attraction was clearly there. Still an extraordinarily beautiful woman, she looked not terribly different from the nineteen-year-old model of thirty years before. In December their conversation resumed.

Over the years of their relationship, Manasha had grown increasingly possessive, deeply suspicious of Garcia’s behavior. Came six o’clock at a Grisman session, and she’d be on the phone wanting to know where he was. By Denver, there were actual reasons for her doubts about his fidelity. In the time since Jerry and Brigid had first reconnected in the summer, they’d maintained an increasingly close relationship by telephone. Now, in a carefully concealed backstage room, Brigid challenged Garcia’s personal passivity with an ultimatum: she was ready to make a life change, and she would either go off with Garcia or travel outside the country. They threw the I Ching and found the “Joyous” hexagram, with no changes. Garcia agreed, but said that he could not make the break with Manasha until after Christmas.

On December 30 Brigid flew to San Francisco. Because Bill Graham was no longer able to insist upon it, the Dead were not playing a New Year’s show, so Garcia was miraculously unoccupied. He told Manasha he was going out for cigarettes and went to Robert Hunter’s home, where he’d been spending time songwriting of late, to meet Brigid. Coincidentally, the Leshes were there for dinner. Garcia got cold feet, and revealed his doubts to his friends; their response seemed to him somewhat in the nature of a drug intervention, as they made clear their concerns over the suffocating nature of his relationship with Manasha. He came to agree. His emotional cowardice surfaced when he decided to have Vince Di Biase tell Manasha that the relationship was over. The women there convinced him to at least write a personal note. Jerry and Brigid went off to Hawaii, and on their return in January, moved to a condo in Marin.

Late in the month he was interviewed there by a
New Yorker
writer, Bill Barich. Over a supper of low-fat Chinese food and a laserdisc of
Naked
Lunch,
Jerry was his usual charming self, a “wonderful talker, in fact, and converses in much the same way that he plays, constantly improvising and letting his thoughts lead where they may.” Barich described him as the “most improbable pop-culture idol, somebody in whom the playing matters more than the posing,” for whom “the absence of style is a style itself and suggests an inability to abide by anybody else’s rules. He’s the rebellious child grown up, not so much above his youthful audience as insistently a part of it. In refusing to be adulated, he inspires a kind of love.”

The tour year 1993 began as usual with a February run, but this year was made special by the presence of Ornette Coleman. He and his band Prime Time opened the Mardi Gras show, and he sat in with the Dead for a good part of the second set. Their reverence for him showed. Even more significant, the run saw the debut of a number of new songs. Lesh sang Robbie Robertson’s “Broken Arrow” to good effect, and Weir brought out “Eternity,” a darkly brilliant number he’d written with Rob Wasserman and the legendary Willie Dixon. Hunter and Garcia produced three songs. “Liberty” was a traditional Dead anarchist plaint. “Lazy River Road” was a classic Dead shuffle with a southern, Hoagy Carmichael flavor.

Moonlight wails as hound dogs bay
but never quite catch the tune
Stars fall down in buckets like rain
till there ain’t no standin’ room
Bright blue boxcars train by train
clatter while dreams unfold
Way down
down along
Lazy River Road

Both songs were solid contributions, and if that had been all, it would have been a good week. But Hunter had been deeply inspired by seeing his old friend Brigid again, and the seeming breakthrough in Garcia’s life had given him hope. He poured it all into the third song, “Days Between.” Garcia’s music for it was anything but standard, a sort of drone that put the focus purely on Hunter’s splendid lyrics, which were the sort of work T. S. Eliot might have done if he’d heard rock and roll. It premiered on a night the band was playing badly. The sound was crap. But in the middle of the rubble was a masterpiece.

There were days
and there were days
and there were days between
Summer flies and August dies
the world grows dark and mean
Comes the shimmer of the moon
on black infested trees
the singing man is at his song
the holy on their knees
the reckless are out wrecking
the timid plead their pleas
No one knows much more of this
than anyone can see / anyone can see . . .

There were days
and there were days
and there were days between
polished like a golden bowl
the finest ever seen
Hearts of Summer held in trust
still tender, young and green
left on shelves collecting dust
not knowing what they mean
valentines of flesh and blood
as soft as velveteen
hoping love would not forsake
the days that lie between / lie between

Garcia’s romance with Brigid was not meant to be. Early in March he ran into Deborah Koons, his lover from the seventies, at a health food store in Mill Valley, and was summarily enchanted. Brigid was a sensitive soul, and knew immediately that something was not altogether kosher. The band left for Chicago to begin the spring tour, and on the last night there she confronted Garcia, who came clean and conceded that their relationship was at an end. The next day was to be an off-day in Chicago, but an incoming blizzard made it necessary to gather up everyone early. On the plane Garcia was relieved, listening to the old rock tune “I Fought the Law” on his Discman and chortling about how good a song it was. Though he spent much time on the phone with Deborah for the rest of the tour, he was presumably alone for the first time in years. That didn’t last, either. For much of the tour he would involve himself in a seemingly archetypal May–December romance with a young woman named Shannon Jeske. He would also spend an hour or two after every show of that tour in the hotel bar, which produced the predictable crush of Dead Heads.

The blizzard hit and the tour party got a day off due to a canceled show in Cleveland, most of which was spent in the movie theater next door. The only people who really cared about the blizzard were Scrib and Mickey Hart, because the next town was Washington, and they had an event planned for D.C. Mickey had initiated a relationship with the Library of Congress, one of the world’s great repositories of music as well as printed material, and was about to release
The Spirit Cries,
the first item from the library’s Endangered Music Project. Since the release consisted of chants and percussion in a language understood by few living persons, Scrib had suggested that the only way to sell it would be to let the Dead and its friends in Congress shill for it, and all had agreed. It was a new era in Washington. For the first time in many years, a Democrat, Bill Clinton, was in the White House. More important, Clinton was the same age as the band members. In December Garry Trudeau’s
Doonesbury
comic strip had celebrated the ascendance of a new political generation by having the character Joanie Caucus apply for a job with the administration. She was required to take a “Clinton Aptitude Test” (“CAT Scan”), and her question was “Who’s the Bass Player for the Grateful Dead?”

Washington was not used to deep snow, and it was truly remarkable that the gathering came off. Aided mightily by Dead Heads with Capitol Hill clout, including Diane Blagman, a congressional chief of staff, and a lobbyist, Tim Scully, Mickey and Scrib gathered up various politicians, including Senator Patrick Leahy, and a goodly collection of media, and then mixed in the band. The bonds among the band members might have tarnished since 1965, but they weren’t gone. Every band member gladly showed up at the library and helped make it a special event for Mickey, the library, and the band itself.

A few days after the Library of Congress event, a group that included Garcia, Mountain Girl (in town traveling), the Leshes, the Harts, and others visited the White House and met Vice President Al Gore. Impeccable in his elegant suit, he walked everyone through the Oval Office— the president was absent that day—and showed off John Kennedy’s desk, chatting animatedly with Garcia, who wore sweatpants and looked even worse than the proverbial unmade bed. Neither man seemed to pay much attention to the other’s appearance. Though the Clinton administration was to prove far more centrist than was expected in March 1993, the generational bond between it and the Dead was profound. Garcia had been pleased by Clinton’s election, remarking that he wouldn’t mind paying his taxes if he thought they’d be used for something other than weapons. Clinton’s enemy Newt Gingrich had declared 1967 the year “America fell apart,” and despite Clinton’s pathetic “I didn’t inhale” rationale, it was clear that by age alone, he represented a connection to the sixties. After all, Tipper Gore, once the maven of the effort to label music via the Parents Media Resource Council, was also proud of her background as a drummer in a rock band, the Wildcats. After their visit at the White House, the group went over to Tipper’s office at the Old Executive Office Building to talk for quite a bit longer.

Deborah Koons was a filmmaker, then finishing a fine romantic film,
Poco
Loco,
and she wanted to research a new movie that would be set in Ireland. That summer, after an excellent stadium tour that included Sting as the opening act, Garcia set off for Ireland with Deborah, her cinematographer, and her costumier. Wanting balance, Garcia called his old friend Chesley Millikin and invited him along. They had a wonderful time, with the women going one way and the men another. The contrasts made for great fun. In Dublin they stayed across the street from St. Stephen’s Green at the elegant Shelbourne Hotel, where the clerk was so appalled by Garcia’s grubby appearance that he balked at checking them in until he discovered that Garcia could afford to reserve the hotel’s finest space, the Grace Kelly Suite. At one site the women got out to look at some ruins, and Jerry and Chesley sat in their van across the road from a gathering of tinkers, Irish gypsies with horse-drawn caravans. Garcia pulled out the banjo Chesley had inveigled him into bringing, and a crowd collected to listen, no one having any idea who he was. Perhaps it was memories of his grandfather Pop Clifford, but there was something about Ireland that gave Garcia a continuing string of déjà vu feelings, and he raved about Galway, Connemara, Sligo, and the Burren upon his return.

Unfortunately, the trip ended with a grim reminder of the boundaries of his life. While in Ireland he’d spoken frequently about how much he was anticipating an upcoming trip to Japan, his first. He’d been offered $1 million to make appearances there on behalf of his art. On his return to San Francisco, the band and its staff pointed out to him the risks of the journey—the lack of time before an upcoming tour, the danger to his health—and he canceled. Aside from feeling guilty about what this put his art manager, Vince Di Biase, through, he felt weighted down by all of his responsibilities. The more the Dead made, and by now they were extremely prosperous, the more they needed him.

For many in New York in the early nineties, it wasn’t fall until the Dead hit the Garden. In 1993, the band sold out the usual six nights, grossing nearly $3 million on 105,000 tickets. Backstage guests ranged from Tony Bennett to opera star Kiri Te Kanawa to Jets quarterback Glenn Foley, and the amenities included “smart” high-protein/aminoacid drinks with names like Orbit Juice, and virtual-reality game machines. The Boston visit was especially sweet, with superior shows that made up for the tired mediocrity of ’91 and the canceled shows of ’92. After the tour the band scattered to their private lives. Weir underwent successful surgery for nodes on his vocal cords, while Kreutzmann set off on a monthlong ocean odyssey to the Revillagigedo islands off Mexico on the
Argosy Venture,
an elegant 101-foot motor sailing ketch owned by Bill Belmont. Twenty-five years after first road-managing the Dead, and after years of advising them on foreign music business affairs and helping lead the 1990 tour of Europe, Belmont was still taking care of the Dead.

Two events in the fall were potent markers of the future for Dead Heads. The season saw the first
Almanac,
edited by Gary Lambert, which swiftly grew to an unpaid circulation of around 200,000, offering news as well as merchandise from the band. By far the most significant merchandise, of course, would be music, and on November 1 the band released the first of a series of (by and large) complete shows from the vault, “Dick’s Picks.” It was an important step. Dick—archivist Dick Latvala—was the ultimate true believer in psychedelics and the Dead’s music. Baptized in the Fillmore, raised up at the Avalon, he’d washed his spirit in “Dark Star” and pledged his soul to the cause. After a brief spell as a Berkeley postal carrier, he’d moved to Hawaii to grow pot and make tapes. In the 1980s he’d bribed the crew with enough fine Hawaiian Green to gain access, and eventually he’d become the studio gofer. He’d come to impress band members with his knowledge and diligent meticulousness, and he’d eventually supplanted Willy Legate as the vault’s archivist. “Dick’s Picks” was the ultimate fulfillment of his dream, although it came with a full load of Dead politics, pain, and disagreements. What Dick, as a Dead Head, thought was a great show did not match the notions of, say, Phil Lesh or John Cutler. Eventually, Lesh and the band would see the wisdom of having two separate series—the two-track, funky “warts and all” “Dick’s Picks,” and the multitrack “Vault” series.