by David Browne
When Garcia heard she was leaving he stopped by Swanson’s office to talk with her. But before she could say anything, a couple of strangers walked in and symbolically sat at Garcia’s feet, distracting him. “All he would have had to do was say, ‘Can you guys give us a minute?’ and we could have shut the door and had a conversation,” she says. “But it wasn’t my place to do that, so we never really talked about it.” She also left without talking to her old friend Weir. The scenario seemed like a depressingly fitting end.
The Dead were on sabbatical, but most of its members weren’t. The year before, Weir had approached his Atherton school buddy Matthew Kelly, who’d formed a band called Kingfish that leaned toward jammy country rock. Kelly was shocked when Weir said he wanted to sit in with them, and the band, with Weir in tow, recorded an album for United Artists that would be released in 1976. “It was fun for him because it was so different from the Dead,” Kelly says. “In the Dead Jerry was more of the star. In Kingfish Weir was more or less the star of the band, and that was the first time he experienced something like that. He really enjoyed that role, but he handled it gracefully.” Garcia, meanwhile, opened an office in Stinson Beach—right above Ed’s Superette, a local grocery—with his new personal manager, Loren. His club-jamming with friends had evolved into a band, first called Legion of Mary and eventually simply the Jerry Garcia Band, and he and Loren began booking club and theater shows. The Garcia Band had less overhead, fewer crew members, and far less backstage and offstage drama than the Dead, all good reasons for Garcia to embrace the idea of the band in the early months of 1975.
Of all the band members Lesh may have been hit the hardest by the decision to stop touring after the Winterland shows. “I was never into taking a break,” Lesh says. “But I knew why it happened. Jerry wanted to take a break. Jerry wanted to make the movie out of the Winterland shows. What are you going to do?” In his mind there was “no point” in voicing any disagreements. More and more Lesh began turning to drink, which, he says, was a direct result of the hiatus. “I didn’t know whether it was ever going to start up again,” he says. “I’ll be honest with you—that drove me to drink. That fear. I didn’t have a future. I didn’t have any side bands. The Grateful Dead was my band. I helped create it.”
In terms of home lives, Garcia’s was particularly tangled. His second child with Mountain Girl, Theresa, or Trixie, had been born in the fall of 1974. (As with Annabelle, Garcia was on the road and unable to make it to the hospital for the delivery.) Yet to the dismay of many in the Dead scene, Garcia and Mountain Girl’s relationship, so integral to the community, was melting down. Many knew Garcia slept with other women, especially on the road, but they hesitated to tell Mountain Girl for fear of hurting her. “It’s very difficult when you’re friends with two people and one is cheating and the other doesn’t know,” says Loren. “How most people dealt with it was by avoiding Mountain Girl. I hated that, because I liked her, but I didn’t want to answer a question, ‘Is Jerry with somebody else?’ I could see that he was primed for something else.” Mountain Girl was growing exasperated with Garcia, and she learned that when arguing with him, it was best to literally turn her back on him. “I really had no experience with expressing anger or really any strong emotions and found it safer to just not be all reactive,” she says. “I was afraid to be angry. I didn’t want to lose it. And he would turn on the charm, when needed, and I would be disarmed immediately.”
Allan Arkush, the NYU film student who’d worked as a Fillmore East stagehand and had since relocated to California to start a film career, saw the growing tensions in the Garcia–Mountain Girl household during Christmas 1973. After an evening watching Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, Mountain Girl announced it was time for dessert and opened up the freezer, crammed with bags of pot. But one of their guests brought an unwanted gift—cocaine. Mountain Girl was suspicious of the drug, and Arkush saw her and Garcia have a tense exchange; Garcia made an excuse for using it and the conversation ended, at least for a short while.
Garcia was starting to see Deborah Koons, a Cincinnati-born filmmaker he’d met at a Dead show in 1973; she accompanied him to Europe on the Dead’s fall 1974 tour. Compared to the out-front Mountain Girl, Koons was a more enigmatic presence, quiet and frequently dressed in black. The quasi-triangle blew up soon enough. At Weir’s studio a few months later, in August 1975, Frankie Weir was in her kitchen with Cagwin. Both were accustomed to strange noises—usually musical ones—emanating from the studio, but this time came the sound of yelling and a door being thrown open.
Because it was Garcia’s thirty-third birthday, Mountain Girl had dropped by with Annabelle in order to give him a present, only to find Koons there. Even though she and Garcia had been drifting apart for a while, with Garcia implying he felt constrained living in a two-bedroom home with three kids, Mountain Girl was infuriated; grabbing Koons, she dragged her out of the studio, pulling the door off its hinges in the process. After Garcia had spoken to them both to quiet them down, he wandered into the kitchen, sat down, and said to Frankie and Cagwin, “Women—I just don’t understand ’em.” The women exchanged knowing, he-has-a-lot-to-learn glances but didn’t lecture Garcia.
By then a friend had arrived and wound up driving Garcia back home after the altercation. “I hate this shit,” Garcia told him. “I can’t tell you how much I hate it. I’m gonna get myself strung out to escape this shit.” The friend couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not, but Garcia was clearly out of sorts about the situation.
Assembling on the night of March 5, they heard another bit of sobering news: Lenny had died about a month earlier. At first Garcia didn’t know who they were talking about, but the response came soon enough: Mickey’s long-departed father.
The story was true: just over five years after he blew out of Marin with so much of their money, Lenny Hart was truly dead to them in every sense. The Dead had hired private detectives to hunt Hart down, and they found him in San Diego as he was “baptizing Jesus freaks,” in the words of Rolling Stone at the time. The Dead eventually sued Hart and were able to retrieve a portion of the stolen money; Hart was also convicted of embezzlement and spent half a year in jail. “When they sued him I was sitting outside the courtroom, and I said, ‘How could you do that?’” recalls Joe Smith. “He said, ‘The Lord has forgiven me—I hope the boys will.’ I said, ‘The Lord didn’t lose seventy-five big ones.’ He didn’t know how to manage a band. Any story they wanted to hear, he would tell them.” After his time in jail Hart was back in the area, although no one in the band was keeping track by that point.
Whether Lenny knew it or not during his last days on the planet, his son had worked his way back into his old band. Mickey Hart’s four years in Dead Siberia had been difficult. One by one, most of those who’d crashed at this Novato ranch had moved on to other digs or left due to the increasingly tense, shadowy atmosphere. “I rarely went to Mickey’s after 1970,” says Vicki Jensen. “Things got dark there.” Jerilyn Lee Brandelius, who’d met the band in 1968 and had subsequently worked for her uncle, an executive at Warner Brothers, was given the task of finding a ranch to hold a party for one of the label’s acts. Flashing on Hart’s home, she thought it ideal and called the house. An unnamed friend told her to come up from San Francisco but added she wasn’t allowed to bring anyone with her. Making her way to Hart’s front door, Brandelius was told he wasn’t available. The same went for another visit. The third time Brandelius demanded to see Hart, who poked his head out from behind a door, a smirk on his face. They came to a financial agreement to hold the party there, but to guarantee Hart’s isolation, Brandelius had to ensure no one would know or remember the exact address.
Not long after, Brandelius moved onto the ranch with her young daughter and, in doing so, saw how removed Hart was from the Dead scene. The band kept in touch with him. Hart was recording solo music there, including one album that was released (the all-star Rolling Thunder) and another that wasn’t, but Hart still s
eemed in shell-shock. “He was a complete hermit, and he was very depressed and broken-hearted,” says Brandelius. “I didn’t meet his family for years. He cut himself off from everybody. He was so upset with everything that happened with his dad and the band. No one blamed Mickey ever, but Mickey blamed Mickey.”
The week the Dead were playing their final shows at Winterland, in October 1974, the phone at Hart’s ranch began ringing. Eventually Hart took the call and spoke with one of the Dead’s crew. At first he hesitated, but on the last night Hart had a change of heart; throwing his drum kit in the back of a friend’s car, he drove to Winterland in his Porsche and walked into the band’s dressing room. To his and Brandelius’s relief, everyone seemed happy to see Hart again, and someone asked whether he’d be up for sitting in during the second set.
Just then Kreutzmann walked in and was told Hart would be joining them for part of the show. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, adding that the band was playing new songs Hart had never learned. Shrugging, Hart began walking out the door. “Bill was a bit on edge,” Hart says. “He was probably surprised out of his fucking mind. He was holding onto something but never told me what it was.” (The fact that Kreutzmann had been holding down the drum fort alone—and incredibly well—was probably a major factor.)
Fortunately, the suddenly tense backstage vibe didn’t last much longer. Rex Jackson followed Hart and Kreutzmann out of the dressing room, and at the bottom of a backstage ramp he grabbed each by the backs of their necks and brought their heads so close their foreheads were touching. “You’re playing together tonight—you got that?” Jackson barked. “You guys gotta get your shit together. Get . . . it . . . together.” The matter settled—few wanted to pick a fight with the mammoth Jackson—Kreutzmann slung his arm around Hart, and the two walked out together during the second set. Taking it all in, Swanson said Hart resembled “a kid on Christmas morning—he was so happy to be back.”
The pain and sense of betrayal Hart felt after his father bilked his own band never left him; decades later he would still sound grief-stricken. But after following his father’s trial in the newspapers and hearing the news of his passing, Hart worked up the inner strength to visit the funeral home where Lenny’s body lay. After asking members of his father’s new family to leave the room for a bit, Hart pulled out a pair of his father’s old drumsticks, played what he called “a drummer’s farewell” on the casket, and put the sticks inside next to his father. But the son wasn’t finished. Using a camera he’d brought along, he took a photo of Lenny. Later he printed it out, wrote “The Rat Is Dead” on it, and mailed it to a relative. “And then it was over,” Mickey says. “That put the period on the sentence.” Lenny’s son would have the last word on a particularly traumatic period for himself and the Dead.
During his visit Rakow told them the album needed to be completed by the first week of May, which took them by surprise. In fact, the United Artists contract called for a delivery on July 10 for the first album of their new deal, followed by another to be handed in on October 31 and a third on January 31, 1976.
There was work to do, fast, but as was their want, they still took their time and worked at their idiosyncratic pace. Garcia would inevitably arrive first, as early as 7 a.m., and Cagwin would make a fresh pot of coffee for him and everyone else who showed up. As Cagwin recalls, “Bob’s house provided a much more relaxed environment for those guys to work in.” For dinner they’d order in steaks, send one of the Dead label employees on food runs, and smoke and snort whatever was around. Between takes they’d talk about their pets—the way Garcia’s dog walked counterclockwise around his house—or the quality of Dead merchandise T-shirts. Lesh remarked that he was always inclined to give a ride to any hitchhiker who sported a Dead shirt.
Among those who stopped in were Hunter, Quicksilver Messenger Service’s John Cipollina, and their old pal David Crosby, who lived in Mill Valley and had wrapped up a fraught Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion tour months before. With Garcia avidly listening, Crosby expounded on his favorite type of pot and talked about the arrival of his upcoming baby. And at times they even found time to make music. One evening they spent hours working up a new Crosby song, “Homeward Through the Haze,” that Crosby had tried cutting unsuccessfully with CSNY, who were already falling apart again.
The sessions also revealed the Dead’s personalities and how they’d changed—or, in some cases, not—over a decade. Lesh was the chattiest and most technical, calling out chord changes and chord names. Kreutzmann wisecracked the most, and Weir remained the most relentlessly earnest, talking in his slightly halting way about local loggers versus the Sierra Club or the Wide World of Sports TV show. When he was at the sessions, Hart kept a low profile and didn’t talk much, reflecting the ways he was slowly working his way back into the fold. “I just hung out,” Hart recalls. “I had a great feeling from everyone every day. You couldn’t move in Bobby’s tiny studio. It was really tight. But it felt the same. My relations with the guy was always the same. You didn’t have to talk about these things.” (People like Parish and Swanson felt that Hart seemed to be more tentative at this point, careful not to overassert himself as a way of mending fences and re-insinuating himself into the Dead.) A far more mysterious and fleeting presence was Keith Godchaux.
When Garcia spoke, everyone else would quiet down and listen. Even if he was just discussing a Don Reno and Chubby Weiss bluegrass show he’d attended, Garcia remained the unquestioned center of attention. He mentioned that the band had received an offer to play in the Middle East. Just a few weeks later, on March 25, Faisal would be assassinated, and the resulting album, Blues for Allah, would be named in his honor.
They needed a rock ’n’ roll tune, and late one evening Garcia volunteered, reminding everyone that “Loose Lucy,” the slinky rocker off From the Mars Hotel, had taken him all of twenty minutes to write. But conventional rock ’n’ roll, even in the Dead’s loose definition of that phrase, wasn’t what anyone had in mind as the days and weeks at Ace’s gradually unfolded. Garcia wanted the band to sound fresh, to blow away all the musical and financial headaches of the last few years, and the solution was having no new material at all—to come up with it on the spot. A song might start with Lesh strumming chords on an acoustic guitar (or humming the melody to what would eventually transform into a song, “Equinox,” that the band wouldn’t attempt to record until their next album). It might launch with Lesh, Weir, and Garcia all playing simultaneously, sometimes for hours, trying to find the right new tone or direction.
Or, as it did on the night of February 26, it might start with Garcia playing a few, well-chosen guitar chords. When they found something, Hunter would show up and write lyrics along with the music, an atypical approach even for him. “It was comfortable being in Weir’s house,” says Candelario. “That was generally the mood in those days. They got along with each other. It was fun to hang out. Making records wasn’t one of their professions, but that album was totally different.” The less stressful atmosphere would be easily heard in the more relaxed, elastic song structures and rhythms in songs like “Help on the Way/Slipknot!” (which Lesh would later call “one of our finest exploratory vehicles”), the reggae sway of “Crazy Fingers,” and the breezy “Franklin’s Tower,” partly inspired by the “doo-da-doo” chorus on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
As the weeks at Weir’s studio continued, it became obvious that their enforced hiatus wasn’t about taking a break from each other as much as it was from the overwhelming industry of the Dead. Even when the band was frittering away time, the experience at Weir’s studio reinforced that music could still be their bond. Despite all the personal and business headaches swirling around the band, they could still come together in a small space, pick up their instruments, and continue the sonic journey they’d begun a decade before. In a heartbeat or something close to it, they could return to those days at Dana Morgan’s music studio in Palo Alto, or the Acid Test nights, or the long days ensconced
in professional studios creating Aoxomoxoa or Anthem of the Sun. And even better, they could still enjoy it.
Late the night of March 5, after almost a month of tossing around ideas and trying to invent a new sound, they began hitting on that mysterious, intangible new approach. Garcia suggested playing in unison, either a chord or just a note. The others guffawed or chuckled, as if in disbelief, but he continued: how about holding one note for two bars, then having two of the players shift to the third bar? The idea was to all play octaves simultaneously and musically hop around each other. It was an audacious thought, and they decided to go for it.
To demonstrate, Garcia played an F on his electric guitar; Weir and Lesh followed suit with the same chord, and finally Kreutzmann joined in. The result was a mammoth drone, a Wall of Sound in the studio, and everyone was palpably excited by it. They kept working on a piece—what would eventually come to be known as “Unusual Occurrences in the Desert”—and Garcia was thrilled, telling them he felt like he wanted to keep playing it forever. Even when the band would stop playing, Garcia rarely would; his guitar, that ambrosial sweet sound, would continue reverberating around the walls of the studio.
When would they complete the material, and when would they perform any of it live and work it up onstage? Those questions were still unanswered. As it was, they’d already committed to one show, a Bill Graham–organized benefit for SNACK (Students Need Athletics, Culture, and Kicks, a nonprofit founded by Graham) at Kezar Stadium. “Even though the band wasn’t playing and everybody needed some breathing room, there was a large sense of family that never went away,” says Debbie Gold, then working in the Garcia office with Loren. “They were around each other, and there were family events. It was a small community of people, but everybody needed some breathing room. Bill [Graham] willed that to happen. He said, ‘I want the Dead to play.’ He was so passionate and determined and would not take no for an answer.”
