A Long Strange Trip (83 page)

A couple of days after he got home, on Thursday, July 13, Garcia called David Grisman and said, “What’s happening in your studio? I got this recording session for you, I gotta record a Jimmie Rodgers song. You’ll get paid. Can you do it today?” “No, how about Sunday the sixteenth?” “Okay, I’m leaving Monday.” Bob Dylan had been working on a tribute album to Rodgers, “the singing brakeman” and one of the creators of country music, and Garcia wanted to participate. He added, “John Kahn’s got a percussionist, can you get that chick dobro player [Sally Van Meter]?” He confirmed on Sunday, but added that they needed a drummer, and Grisman got George Marsh. By 11 A.M. they’d gathered at Dawg’s studio. “[Garcia] didn’t look that good,” Grisman thought, although he was “upbeat and into it.” Over the next few hours they recorded Rodgers’s “Blue Yodel #9.” Decibel Dave, the engineer, slated take one and they began, but Garcia stopped them, saying that the tempo was too fast. “Down from the bottom, brother,” he said. “Say way down from Dixie now. That’s it, that’s the feel. Nothing is moving on the river.” Garcia’s playing was fair, but his vocals, especially the yodels, were weak, as though he lacked enough breath. “Talk to me, David,” he said. “You should talk to me a little bit in my solo.” “Hi, Jerry. Nice solo you’re playing.”

Upstairs, Deborah told Grisman’s wife, Pam, where Jerry was going on Monday, which was the Betty Ford Clinic in Southern California. Of course, what Garcia’s reluctance to deal with doctors had long concealed was that his drug use not only medicated depression and anxiety but masked major physical illnesses, including raging diabetes, a congested heart, and lungs destroyed by thirty-five years of cigarettes and fifteen years of smoked hard drugs. He did not appear to have received any treatment for them. As they left Grisman’s studio, Garcia turned to Grisman and said, “Can you finish this up?” Grisman would learn only later that Garcia had already signed a contract identifying Kahn and Grisman as coproducers.

Garcia’s stay at the Betty Ford Clinic was painful and hot, and after two weeks he sent for Deborah and Parish to bring him home. Just after his return, he had a long, sweet phone conversation with Bruce Hornsby, regaling him with stories about meeting an old associate of Django Reinhart’s there, as well as plenty of ideas and plans for the future. Garcia was clean and clear, and once back in Marin County, cheerful. He went to some AA meetings, met with a recovery psychiatrist, worked on his visual memoir
Harrington Street,
and decided to check into a local substance-abuse clinic, Serenity Knolls, at least in part because he mistakenly thought it was on the site of Camp Lagunitas, where he had spent part of the magical summer of 1966. Close enough; it was perhaps half a mile down the road. The day before he was to check in, he went by Sue Stephens’s office at the annex across the street from 5th and Lincoln. He spent an hour and a half there, reminiscing, and telling her that he felt “shaky, and his willpower wasn’t up to par, and he could tell how much his body had aged now that he was more or less straight.” Still, he intended to “take a big bite out of the apple this time.” There were other calls, including an unusually affectionate one to Hunter. He also visited a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant for what was doubtless an orgy of cholesterol before settling in at Serenity Knolls on August 8.

That night Robert Hunter’s wife, Maureen, found it difficult to sleep, anxiously awakening about 4 A.M. Weir, who was in New Hampshire touring with his band RatDog, was deep in a dream about that time. “I was on the road with RatDog, and we were backstage and I’d discovered some invisible paint, and we were playing with it. And in the middle of the dream, Jerry showed up. Dressed in a long dark cape, his hair was black, he looked regal and Castilian, like a tall Spanish nobleman. He was very purposeful, and he wasn’t interested in this invisible paint. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to fool around with the paint . . . He seemed preoccupied.” Weir woke up to pee, and noticed it was a little after 7 A.M. in New Hampshire.

At 4:23 A.M. on August 9, a nurse passed by Garcia’s room, and she became aware that his stentorian snores were no longer audible. She went to check, and discovered him dead of what proved to be a heart attack. He had a smile on his face.

The mayor of San Francisco flew a tie-dye flag at half-mast over City Hall. Dead Heads gathered at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. President Clinton paid tribute with respectful remarks. Even more effectively, so did Bob Dylan. “He is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal . . . There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly, and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle.”

The open-casket funeral was at St. Stephen’s Church in Belvedere, Marin County, and David Grisman played “Amazing Grace” before slipping a pick into Jerry’s coat pocket. Hornsby flew in from Virginia, Dylan from Los Angeles. Hunter read a wonderful poem, Parish made heartfelt remarks, and daughter Annabelle told the truth, as her father would have loved: “He was a shitty father, and a great man.” In her pain, Deborah repeated a mantra she would clutch in the years after, a belief that had led her to ban her “enemy” Mountain Girl from the funeral: Deborah, and Deborah alone, was the love of Garcia’s life. “He said-a dat to me,” said Barbara Meier, who’d slipped into the church with the Hunters. “He said-a dat to me,” said Sara Ruppenthal Katz, ditto. Bit by bit the band struggled to cope. They vetoed the idea of a performed memorial, and twenty thousand Dead Heads gathered in Golden Gate Park a couple of days after the funeral to listen to taped music and oral testimony. Once again, it was Annabelle who got off the best line. “We love each and every one of you because you put us through college and we didn’t have to work at Dairy Queen.”

The band finally met in December, and Kreutzmann told his brothers that he could not tour. In solidarity, they agreed that the name “Grateful Dead” would never again appear in connection with a live performance, and left the rest to the gods. The decision particularly devastated Vince Welnick, who’d been seriously depressed ever since Garcia’s death. Late in the month Sears announced that Weir and Hart would do some sort of summer tour, briefly nicknamed Deadapalooza and later the Furthur Festival. He failed to inform Phil Lesh of this announcement in advance, however, and over the next years the Furthur Festival would ignite a division between Lesh and the rest of the band. When the band wasn’t quarreling within, the heirs of the estate of Jerry Garcia were quarreling without. He had left behind $30,000 worth of comic books, a quarter million in instruments, some furnishings, fine arts, and computers, two cars and a Honda scooter—and royalties and a share of Grateful Dead Productions. Taken altogether, there was so much division that the band and Deborah couldn’t even agree on a day to scatter Garcia’s ashes.

Early in April 1996 Weir and Deborah went to Benares, India, to scatter a small portion of the ashes in the Ganges. Being a filmmaker, Deborah naturally hired a local film crew to record the proceedings, and news of the event spread swiftly from Indian newspapers to the United States. Though Weir later swore that he had tried to call Annabelle before his departure, the news hit Garcia’s daughters and ex-wife, M.G., with a devastating impact, for they were convinced that
all
the ashes had been strewn and that they’d been totally excluded from the memorial ritual. On April 12, Bruce Hornsby passed through San Francisco and played the Fillmore, and both Weir and Lesh sat in, an event only somewhat complicated by the fact that their relationship was quite strained, at least from Weir’s point of view.

Finally, on Monday, April 15, the last tour gathered at a dock in Marin to carry Garcia home to the sea on the motor-sailer ketch
Argosy
Venture.
The vessel was captained by Bill Belmont, piloted by Janice Belmont, and crewed by Randy Waggoner and Allen Gross. Jerry’s brother, Tiff, and his oldest friend, Laird Grant, were there, Ram Rod and Frances Shurtliff, Steve Parish and his old friend Angelo Barbera, and Garcia Band crew members David Faust and Corky Varra. Annabelle, Theresa, Sunshine, and Jerry’s firstborn daughter, Heather Katz, boarded. Sue Stephens, his loyal assistant. Cameron Sears and Cassidy Law. Scrib. Bob Weir and his future wife, Natascha Muenter. Phil and Jill Lesh.

In a sign of rifts to come, Mickey had been so exasperated by a phone call that day from the Leshes, who were planning a benefit, that he elected not to come. After Deborah Garcia boarded, M.G. stood on the dock and asked to join them. Deborah denied her. In pain, Theresa said, “Deborah, she’s my mother.” Deborah replied with the meaningless but clearly malevolent “Are you sure?” Then she shouted to get the boat under way or she’d leave. Weir tried to talk with her, got nowhere, and was about to leap off the boat as it pulled away. Past the Golden Gate Bridge the ocean was choppy, with seas of six feet and swells to ten. The skies were gray, spitting a light rain, appropriate weather for a solemn day. Halfway between Land’s End, the northwest corner of San Francisco, and Point Bonita, the southwest corner of Marin County, at the entrance to the Golden Gate, they stopped.

Parish opened the plastic bag that contained Garcia’s remains. All who so desired reached in and helped tip the bag over. Garcia was gone, the Grateful Dead with him.

54

Finale: Metaphysics and Other Humorous Subjects

Without its unifying center, the band’s individual members largely sought independent directions. Initially, Kreutzmann and Lesh retired, while Weir worked with a blues band called RatDog and Mickey Hart experimented with various configurations oriented toward world music, first with Mystery Box and then a new Planet Drum. The one attempt at a revival of the basic Grateful Dead model, “The Other Ones” in 1998, included Hart, Lesh, Weir, Hornsby, and friends John Molo, Steve Kimock, Mark Karan, and Dave Ellis. It was a smashing success in terms of musical satisfaction and audience appeal, but—again, without the unifying center—its internal dynamics could not find any functional equilibrium. A possible repeat in 1999 was deferred when Phil Lesh underwent major surgery, receiving a liver transplant, and after his recovery, he went his own way, establishing a band called Phil and Friends that would focus on the progressive improvisation that was his favorite aspect of the Dead’s music. Weir’s RatDog would turn into a rock band and naturally enough orient itself toward his repertoire, while Hart would dally briefly with a rock and rollish Mickey Hart Band before, in 2001, establishing Bembé Orisha as his world music-oriented performance outlet. In the interval, he had become a national figure in music preservation and a trustee of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. After dabbling with lower-profile ensembles in his Hawaiian retirement, Kreutzmann in 2001 returned to the main-land to organize the Trichromes with Journey veterans Neil Schon and Sy Klopps.

But the primary legacy of the Grateful Dead, at least at the time of writing, appeared to lie in four parts: stylistic and social influence on other bands, the philosophical underpinnings that Dead Heads will carry with them to their graves, and the recorded music itself that the band left behind. No other American band, before or since, has united the improvisational nature of jazz with rock modalities in quite the same way, but a flock of bands—the so-called jam bands—have adopted improvisation as their first stylistic bulwark. Moreover, many of these bands, from Phish to Widespread Panic to String Cheese Incident and on and on, have consciously patterned their social behaviors, their relationship with each other and with their audience, after the Dead. That will continue.

But the Dead’s ultimate legacy is their audience and their music itself. First with Dick Latvala and John Cutler and later with David Lemieux and Jeff Norman as the guides, the contents of the band’s legendary vault have poured forth, many vault releases and twenty-three “Dick’s Picks” by late 2001, and many tens of thousands of Dead Heads and other listeners continue to appreciate this music as an extraordinarily profound document of American electronic folk music in the late twentieth century. By the late 2001 release of the epic
Golden Road
box set, the band’s body of work could lay serious claim to comparison with that of Ives, Gershwin, Ellington, and (Miles) Davis, or any of the other great American composer/performers. So long as there are people who listen to music, there will be Dead Heads. And so long as there are Dead Heads, they will be guided by the principles of freedom, spontaneity, caring for each other and their planet, fellowship, and fun.

It all rolls into one
and nothing comes for free
There’s nothing you can hold
for very long
And when you hear that song
come crying like the wind
it seems like all this life
was just a dream . . .
—“Stella Blue”

Dan Healy: “I’ve discovered over the years that two things are true. One is that what you like is what you like, and two, it isn’t necessarily the medium that you use—it’s what you do with it.”

Garcia: “Say you were the first supreme being and there was no real reason for you to manifest life in the universe, except for it to have the ability to surprise and delight you. For it to be something out of your direct control, and something you couldn’t have a lot of knowledge about, or predict. That’s what I’d want.”

Garcia: “There’s an old Prankster proverb that goes, ‘The mind believes what the mind believes.’ Our experience has been the more the merrier.”

Willy Legate: “Everyone around here [the Front Street studio] knows that he could be wrong—but everyone around here knows that everybody’s right.”

Garcia: “Basically I prefer the light . . . What I do know is that we need the All.”

There is no Grateful Dead philosophy, but if there were, a central tenet would be Jung’s concept of synchronicity, a “series of events connected by simultaneity and meaning . . . a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.” Dreams are a definite evocation of synchronicity.

Garcia: “We know from our own experience that enough things happen that
aren’t
the result of signals or planning or communication that we’re aware of, but that are miraculous manifestations, that keep proving it out, that there’s no way to deny it. We’re just involved in something that has a very high incidence of synchronicity. You know, the Jungian idea of synchronicity? Well, shit, that’s day-to-day
reality
for us.”

Garcia: “Synchronicity. There’s a large element of what we do that we have no control over. We have to beg off from what’s happening—it isn’t us that’s doing it, we’re only like the tools through which it’s happening. And it’s okay. We have faith . . . Our music is never counting. For us the One is always Now. In time—whether it’s 7/4 time, 4/4 time, or whatever—we’re always coming back to the One.”

Two passing flashes of Grateful Dead synchronicity: In 1982 the band came to Centennial Coliseum, Reno, Nevada, for a show. As Dead Heads approached the venue, they passed the Golden Road Motel, Uncle John’s Restaurant, and the Answer Man hardware store in the space of two blocks, each name a fragment from a Dead song. In October 1978, the Dead showed slides of their journey to Egypt at Winterland during a concert, and as they played “Eyes of the World,” three slides flashed in perfect synchronization to the song’s lyrics: Mickey on a white Arabian stallion looking dashing on the dunes—“And sometimes we ride on your horses”—Garcia watching the sun rise from the top of the Great Pyramid—“sometimes we walk alone”—and the band on stage singing— “Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.”

Garcia: “Uncertainty is what’s happening to me. Are we living out some predetermined script in which the ending is already known? If so, why are we doing it? . . . Or is it possible that the gift of consciousness has a direct relationship to the atoms of the sense and purpose in the design of organisms, you know. I mean, we’re surrounded by artifacts of the mind, things we’ve invented. All these things are metaphors—they’re telling me something about what my mind is . . . It’s furious manipulation, man, and it’s coming from my mind. It’s what separates us from IT. I’m curious because I’ve had my fucking mind blown. What is IT?”

Garcia: “It’s an imperfect universe.”

Robert Hunter: “You hear the same sound going out as coming in. The difference is that now you know it’s music.”

Garcia: “But what the fuck do I know, anyway?”