by David Browne
For nearly twenty years the Dead had lived by a credo: no one would lecture anyone about his or her lifestyle as long as it didn’t affect the music. For what seemed like forever, that rule worked reasonably well; in spite of their excesses, records had been made and tours had been completed. At one time the hallucinogenic (or otherwise) enhancements had even helped in the process and enhanced their art. Besides, they’d lived with chaos for so long that it almost felt second nature. But now lifestyle choices, temptations, and recurring craziness were no longer cause for amusement; they were seriously beginning to affect the way they worked and functioned as a band. The dark was starting to overtake the light, and there would be no better reminder of that frustration than the wine bottle sticking out of the wall in the Fantasy lounge.
The fifteenth anniversary shows in 1980 should have augured a new era. Though few in the band or fan base were taken with Go to Heaven, “Alabama Getaway” had made a bit of noise on rock radio. The Dead pulled off a rare-for-them business coup: opening an office solely devoted to mail-order ticket sales. Onstage Brent Mydland was becoming an electrifying force, pushing them in ways Keith Godchaux no longer had; a new generation of Deadheads were also pulled in by his songs, voice, and very physical performances. Other than Weir, Mydland was now the most animated player onstage.
Yet even by Dead standards, the years leading up to the wine-bottle moment had been difficult ones. Lesh’s fears of the band never coming together again after the Winterland shows in 1974 had been alleviated once they returned to the road two years later. But of all the band members, Lesh was arguably also the least satisfied with the more radio-friendly music the band had started making with Terrapin Station. “Jerry and Hunter and Bobby and Barlow and I were still writing good stuff,” he says, “but somehow it wasn’t about the music anymore. That’s the feeling I had. It was about the scene—being touring musicians, being rock stars. It just seemed less about the music and where we could take it.” Regarding some of the studio albums that had started with Terrapin Station, he adds, “I wasn’t deeply involved in those records. I felt like a sideman.” As a result of his unhappiness, both with his band’s music and his own life, Lesh began spiraling downward, medicating himself with drink. His marriage fell apart, and he wasn’t having a particularly good time with a postmarriage girlfriend. Finally, in 1982 he met Jill Johnson, a local waitress, and was smitten. They would marry two years later. (As for Weir, the guitarist was never lacking in companionship, as Matthew Kelly witnessed during one backstage scene: “All the girls loved Bobby. When he would walk into a room full of attractive college girls, he would look around like a Roman emperor. It was hysterically amusing.” Weir would happily confirm such stories in the 2014 documentary The Other One.)
In the few years leading up to the Fantasy sessions, Garcia and his issues had put the band through what seemed like a never-ending roller coaster ride. During a European tour of 1981 they’d written a letter to him accusing him of not being professional, but he’d ignored it. (Years later it was discovered crumpled up in an ashtray in his home.) Garcia was now living in that darkened basement apartment in Rock Scully’s house in San Rafael, both men deeply ensnared in heroin use. The situation had grown so out of control that Scully’s partner, Nicki, moved out in 1981. “I did everything in my power to keep Jerry in touch,” Rock Scully says, “to the point where it drove my family out of my house because he wouldn’t leave, and I’d have the band come into my living room and do the meetings there.”
Dating back a decade, Allan Arkush had been accustomed to hanging out with Garcia, talking and watching movies (Garcia could recite all the dialogue from Network, for instance); in 1981 Garcia provided, via his guitar, the “voice” of a robot baby in Arkush’s comedy Heartbeeps. By the early eighties, though, that interaction stopped. Rarely did Arkush pick up his phone anymore to hear Garcia’s voice merrily say, “Hey, come over and watch movies.” Instead, Arkush would call Garcia and hear his friend intone, “I gotta go meet Rock,” implying drugs. “It was obvious what was happening,” Arkush says. “Then he’d say, ‘Call me’ but never pick up the phone.”
On New Year’s Day 1982, at the Oakland Coliseum, Garcia and Mountain Girl, who’d reconnected as friends at the end of the previous decade, were belatedly married in a dressing room backstage; David Hellman, the lawyer who advised the Dead on tax matters, had suggested it for that very reason. Then living in Oregon, Mountain Girl only occasionally attended Dead shows with her children during this period. “I was out of the loop, deliberately,” she says. “It was a dangerous place to be with kids at the time. So many creepy people around the band. I didn’t want to be a part of that. It felt dreary to me. A lot of the life had gone out of it.” Garcia’s brother, Tiff, now a postal worker, stopped going backstage to visit his brother for the same reasons. A drug counselor who assessed Garcia’s situation in 1983 decided he wouldn’t be able to get fully clean in that atmosphere.
By 1983 Garcia was looking particularly sickly; on stage he was pasty skinned and ghostly pale, and at moments he barely seemed to move. (A Garcia Band tour that year was canceled for mysterious reasons.) Offstage he grew increasingly disconnected from his band mates, a combination of the drug use and a deepening resentment about the constraints on his time and the pressures of supporting the organization. When a friend asked why he didn’t simply stop touring so much, he replied, “Gotta feed the bulldog.”
To the increasing wariness of the other members of the Dead, Garcia was still spending time with Kahn and playing regularly with the Jerry Garcia Band. Garcia’s close friendship with Kahn made many in the Dead less than friendly toward the bass player and the JGB, which the Dead saw as an unwelcome distraction. Kahn later admitted to writer Blair Jackson that drugs had crept into the JGB era of the late seventies, but added, “I really don’t believe that drugs were as important a thing as it’s probably perceived. Everything would have been the same. . . . Our relationship didn’t have to do with that.” Garcia clearly enjoyed playing and spending time with Kahn, and as Kahn’s wife, Linda, says, “John and Jerry liked old movies and they loved to joke. We were an escape for Jerry.” (Annabelle Garcia would concur, telling Jackson that the Kahns were “very sweet people” and provided her father with a “safe haven.”)
A certain amount of unease also existed toward Bobby & the Midnites, the side project Weir had formed with the help of accomplished players like jazz drummer Billy Cobham and former Steppenwolf guitarist Bobby Cochran. The band had released its first of two albums in 1981, and Andy Leonard, the former Grateful Dead Records employee who was now managing the Midnites, would be lectured by Dead management about the importance of the “mothership.” The sense of musical stagnation in the Dead, combined with Garcia’s issues, was beginning to affect everyone.
The period was particularly difficult for Weir, who wasn’t averse to a good time but also stuck to his exercise routines as much as possible. (When the band played a New York show Nicki Scully remembers seeing Weir leave their hotel for a run, and, she says, “all these girls were following him as he was jogging to Central Park.”) Garcia’s issues especially affected Weir, according to his friend Andy Leonard: “There was nothing he could do about it. Clenched-fist silence.”
In 1982 the Garcia band and Weir’s Bobby & the Midnites shared a bill at an outdoor festival. There, Leonard caught his first sign of Garcia’s transformation. “I had never seen a human being that color before in my life,” he says. “He was the wrong color. I thought he was going to die onstage. It scared the crap out of me.” As a result, Leonard suggested Garcia’s set be cut short, and Garcia left the stage with no complaints. Afterward Weir broke down. Given the way Weir often kept his feelings to himself, it was a telling moment.
“You’re watching this?” Kreutzmann snapped, walking into the lounge at Fantasy and finding the band sprawled on couches and watching The Rockford Files, the TV detective show. “Come on—let’s go play.”
As always, the
music should have saved them; it had before. In August 1982 they’d returned to a field in Veneta, Oregon, for a benefit for the then-struggling Springfield Creamery, an organic dairy company run by Chuck Kesey, Ken Kesey’s brother, and his wife, Sue. They’d first played a benefit for the Creamery on a brutally hot day in 1972; the temperatures climbed to over 100 degrees, making their instruments lurch in and out of tune, and the facility almost ran out of water. In spite of the conditions, they’d rallied, playing a stunning set that included an epic “Dark Star” that would still make Ken Babbs, the Merry Prankster who served as master of ceremonies that day, swoon decades later. Staring at the thousands of stoned, naked fans in front of them, Lesh turned to the band and Babbs and cracked, “They’ll be fucking on the ground in front of us.”
The Dead who returned to raise additional funds for the Creamery in 1982 were not quite the same band anymore, but they could still catch fire: they could revel in “China Cat Sunflower,” and Garcia’s voice and guitar on “Tennessee Jed” retained the old spark. Peter Rowan, Garcia’s friend from the Old and in the Way era, was booked to play on a side stage at the fair. He arrived with certain trepidations: he sensed lingering resentment within the Dead camp in light of the way Old and in the Way had taken Garcia away from the mothership almost a decade before. But at the fair Rowan felt comfortable—he had a blast hanging out with Weir—and eventually went in search of Garcia. Garcia’s trailer, he learned, had been set up in the middle of the backstage area, in full sight of everyone. Getting in to see him was another matter, however. Rowan saw a Tibetan lama drop in, and then Rowan waited his turn. He waited outside for nearly two hours, and Garcia never emerged. Finally Rowan gave up and left.
Despite so much uncertainty enveloping them, the Dead still managed to play a number of exceptional shows during this period. (Dead historian and Garcia biographer Jackson maintains that the Dead’s playing overall kept ramping up several notches during each year of the eighties, and they even slipped in “Help on the Way/Slipknot!” for the first time in many years.) Now came studio time. At Fantasy Phil Kaffel, an experienced recording engineer who’d befriended Hart during previous studio work, was hired to record the band. From previous encounters with them he knew the Dead could be fairly loose. They hadn’t sent him tapes of the songs they might cut, and he hadn’t had any swanky preproduction meetings or dinners with them the way Keith Olsen had before the making of Terrapin Station.
Kreutzmann’s comment was apt: they were ready to play, at least some of them. Once the full band was set up in Studio D, Kaffel was impressed with their mountains of gear; it looked as if they were setting up to play a live show. With Garcia set up in his own booth, they’d started that day’s session with “My Brother Esau,” for which Weir offered up a fairly growled vocal. The take was fine, until Garcia hit a bad note toward the end. They took another crack at the song, and this time it sounded stronger, especially Mydland’s organ and synthesizer parts.
Even so, the mood wasn’t encouraging. “Well, it’s not getting worse,” Garcia muttered. The band took a five-minute break in the lounge before reconvening in the recording room, where they went at “My Brother Esau” one more time. It wasn’t the easiest song to play: the rhythms had a tumbling, falling-down-the-stairs quality, and the song didn’t have a genuine chorus to speak of. Yet bit by bit it seemed to be congealing. Lesh was bouncing on his toes, and Kreutzmann’s rhythm was firm and steady. (Between takes Lesh complimented the drummer: “I’ve been trying to figure out how you swing for years, man.”)
But again Garcia’s musicianship was off, and “My Brother Esau” ground to a halt. During one of several subsequent takes Weir stood up, as if they were doing a show, and everyone had the feeling they were approaching a final, finished version of the song. “We’re getting so close,” Weir deigned to say, perhaps jinxing matters.
But it wasn’t to be; the band took another break, and the lounge again beckoned.
Other distractions were nipping at them as the Fantasy sessions were underway; by 1984, more members of their organization were falling away. Given Scully’s role as a codependent in Garcia’s life, the band was increasingly distrustful of the longtime former manager, who was now doing publicity for the band. Matters finally came to a head when Scully was called into a band meeting and accused of pilfering money during a New York trip with the Jerry Garcia Band. According to Scully, the hotel had mistakenly thought they’d overcharged the band, and Scully had walked out with roughly $2,600 in what he thought was honest cash. Few in the Dead office believed him, though, and office workers complained about unpaid hotel bills and other expenses. At the meeting Hunter spoke on Scully’s behalf but to little avail; Scully was soon given what he called his “walking papers” and went into rehab himself.
Scully would be the latest stalwart of their organization to be gone by the summer of 1984. By then Mydland and Betty Cantor had been in a relationship for several years. With her encouragement and seasoned help, Mydland had started working on an album of his own songs, on which Garcia and John Kahn had guested. “He was trying to make a statement on his own, separate from the Dead and trying to prove himself,” she says. “And it was really good work.” But when the couple broke up, Cantor parted ways with the Dead camp soon after. “I had become an ‘ex old lady,’” she says. “I thought, ‘How could I be considered an ex-old lady? I’ve been working all through this.’ They were afraid it would cause problems. They thought Brent would be uncomfortable. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to get the hell out of Dodge.’ I had to go on to a new life for a while.” With that, another key member of their organization—in this case, on the technical and recording side—was no longer around.
In 1981 Richard Loren was beginning to feel fried after roughly a decade of managing Garcia and then the Dead. During a brief European tour that spring, when the band was playing Germany with the Who, Kreutzmann burst into his room and accused Loren of stealing money from the band and lying about it—and then fired him. (When Kreutzmann told Lesh what he’d done, Lesh, in his memoir, retorted that firing Loren was “a stupid move.”) Later, back in California, Kreutzmann apologized and Loren kept his job, but the incident was a sign to Loren that managing the Dead in the new decade had become a tiresome, thankless job. Still, Loren had one more grand idea up his sleeve and decided to run it by the band. In what would amount to an Egypt-like experience but on American soil, he envisioned renting a riverboat and sailing down the Mississippi to New Orleans; the Dead would play and hold seminars, and well-heeled Deadheads would fork over hundreds of dollars for tickets. The whole endeavor would be filmed for a movie. It was, in Loren’s words, “a no-brainer,” and unlike Egypt, they would be paid upfront and have control over the event.
Attending a band meeting in May 1981, Loren made his case for the project, abetted by photos and cost estimates. He was under the impression Hart and Weir were willing to take part, but no sooner had he finished his presentation than Garcia intoned, “We don’t want to do that.” The gesture was striking: at board meetings Garcia rarely spoke first, preferring to let everyone else weigh in and then, peering over his glasses, weigh in yea or nay. Everyone would look to him for comment and gauge their moods by what he said.
Garcia’s immediate dismissal of the idea stunned Loren; the concept was dead on arrival. Back home Loren tried to grapple with what had happened. Maybe, he thought, Garcia didn’t like the idea of being holed up on a boat with Deadheads who would see his physical deterioration up close. Maybe Garcia was worried about how he would get drugs in such a setting. Whatever the reason, Loren came to a depressing realization. “The Jerry who rejected that presentation from me was a different man,” he says. “It wasn’t, ‘Gee, that would be fun!’” With that, Loren parted ways with the Dead.
For all the psychodrama, the business of the Dead was increasingly robust, especially on the road. In 1983, thanks to Danny Rifkin, the Dead decided to take concert ticketing into their own hands because counterfei
ting was becoming a major issue. The band opened their own ticket office to handle mail-order sales, and it worked: in 1983 they sold 24,500 tickets, and in 1984 the number spiked to 115,000. “We added $2 to each ticket as a service charge, and that’s how we operated the ticket office,” says Steve Marcus, who eventually ran it. “The ticket business never cost the Dead a penny, the only business of theirs that didn’t.” At first, employees worked out of an apartment in a building next to Front Street, where police would routinely arrive to deal with drugs, hookers, or domestic violence calls in other apartments. No one suspected that several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of tickets and cash were in the small apartment downstairs. The first show sold through mail order was at the Warfield in March 1983, and it proved revealing of the fascinating, back-and-forth rapport between the Dead and Bill Graham, who continued to promote their West Coast shows. The Dead made sure their guests at that Warfield show had quality orchestra seats—and Graham’s guests were relegated to further back in the balcony. The Graham people complained, deigning it unacceptable, but the Dead’s people laughed it off. In the end, though, both camps respected each other, and the Dead’s Graham-produced New Year’s Eve shows, with Graham himself dressed as Father Time, were eagerly awaited annual events.
