by David Browne
CHAPTER 12
SALINAS, CALIFORNIA, MAY 9, 1987
They weren’t entirely convinced they should be there. They’d endured grueling tours, Acid Tests, even moments behind bars, but few of those experiences compared to what was ahead of them. In a dressing room behind the Laguna Seca campgrounds, just east of Monterey, Lesh, Weir, and Hart gathered to discuss the unparalleled task ahead of them. Hart, always open to adventure and self-promotion, flashed a wily smile: “This is gonna be it,” he enthused. Lesh’s skepticism was apparent in his rigid body language and words. “Let’s do one music video,” he told them in a voice that made it clear the topic wasn’t open for debate. “And be done with it.”
As they were talking, golf carts had begun zipping around the campgrounds and national park in Salinas, accompanied by loud voices booming out of bullhorns: “We’re going to shoot something, and everyone’s welcome to watch!” The concert had ended about an hour before, and the echoes of the last song, “Iko Iko,” had faded into the night. But a portion of the more than ten thousand Deadheads at the show began streaming back into the venue. There they saw cameras onstage, one in the audience, and a man in a baseball cap and black leather jacket—director Gary Gutierrez, who’d worked with the band on the animated portions of The Grateful Dead Movie. As hard as it was to believe, the Dead were indeed preparing for their first-ever video.
During the sessions for the album that came to be known as In the Dark, Garcia would pass the time watching hours of MTV at Front Street. One day a typical hair metal band of the era, complete with Spandex and puffed hair, blared on the set. Sitting nearby, Justin Kreutzmann, Bill’s son, asked Garcia what he thought of it. “It’s so . . . mindless,” Garcia said, with genuine puzzlement. “They’re not playing anything.” Garcia spent hours watching junk-food television—he could stay up all night absorbing hours of Dr. Gene Scott, the white-haired, white-bearded quasi-hippie preacher—but music videos were far more inexplicable to him.
Up to that point the Dead hadn’t bothered with them. When they rolled out their last studio album, Go to Heaven, MTV was still a year away from debuting. In the spring of 1987 that landscape had dramatically changed, and to the surprise of just about everyone, the Dead had agreed to make a visual counterpart to their new single. Part of it was economics—no video was a virtual guarantee your record could easily be ignored—and part of it was that rare commodity in the Dead world: positive vibrations. The previous twelve months, if not years, had been exceptionally rough; they’d almost lost their charismatic leader, along with a chunk of their income. In that regard the prospect of standing onstage for a few hours and lip-synching a song was the least they could do—even if, as Lesh indicated, they weren’t planning on doing it very often.
Naturally it wouldn’t be the world of the Dead without a degree—or two or three—of backstage drama. At a band meeting a few days before the taping employees began complaining about difficulties obtaining backstage passes for friends. No one questioned how hard the road crew toiled in preparing for each show—speakers, microphones, even precise rug placement had to be set up relatively quickly. Wives and girlfriends were allowed, but the crew were more than willing to bark at anyone they didn’t know or, even if they knew them, felt they didn’t belong. “We had eighty thousand tons of gear to get out onto the stage, and people would say, ‘You’re very uptight about stuff,’” says Candelario, who by then was in charge of Lesh’s and Mydland’s setups. “I would say, ‘They didn’t hire me to worry about guests. They hired me to do a job.’ I didn’t have time to worry about whether they were getting to see Phil or Jerry, and I’ll admit it took me all day long to set that shit up and make sure it was all working and running. People said the crew had too much power, but the band would say no to us just like they did to everyone else.”
Physically the crew weren’t quite as wild-eyed and hairy as they’d been a decade or two before, but to some in the Dead organization they remained merciless when it came to anyone who wandered backstage without a pass. “We had to pick and choose a lot of times who we’re going to have up there, who we were going to deal with,” says Parish. “We don’t know these people. If somebody was brought up and introduced properly and escorted around, that was one thing. But apparently all those people who worked for us, not in the band or crew, decided they had friends who belonged onstage.” Parish maintains that Garcia had asked the crew to help with security as far back as a Winterland show in 1970, when he told them, “We’re in front of the amps, and we’ll take care of that—you guys take care of what’s back there.” Whether out of fear or a general laissez-faire attitude, the band rarely complained about the situation to the crew—but that hands-off stance changed with the meeting prior to the videotaping. The crew was told in no uncertain terms to oversee and protect the equipment and stop being stage guards. (In Lesh’s memory, though, “We were trying to get them to increase security; we asked them to tighten it up.”)
The crew listened, absorbed the comments and made a decision. “We said, ‘Fine, we’re not going to do [security],’ and I called it off,” Parish says. “It was a thankless job anyway. Let someone else do it.” As the first set at Laguna Seca was about to begin, Dead employees and the Dead themselves noticed something odd: people they didn’t recognize were wandering around onstage, sometimes within feet of the musicians. Bob Bralove, an affable keyboard player and synthesizer programmer who’d worked for years with Stevie Wonder, had been hired to sonically upgrade the band and had been invited to see the show at Laguna Seca. Watching by the side of the stage, Bralove saw “the stage fucking filled with people. The band would look around, and they couldn’t find a familiar face or anybody they knew. It was hysterical.”
Not everyone found the situation remotely amusing. Noticing a complete stranger standing beside him as he was playing, Lesh called Parish over to his side of the stage. “I was really pissed,” Lesh says. “I said, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’” Lesh grabbed Parish by the bicep so hard that he left marks on his arm. The next day the bruise was still evident; when asked what had happened, Parish shrugged, “Bass player fingers.” As Lesh recalls, “There we are: we’re playing a show and there are all these hippies—not even hippies, teeny boppers—walking out onto the stage and staring while we’re trying to work. It was outrageous.”
After the show another meeting ensued—and tellingly, the band reneged on its earlier dictum. “We said, ‘Hey, you said for us to just do our job without doing security,’” recalls Candelario. “They go, ‘We got a lot of valuable shit up there. That’s it—you guys are back on. Do your job and security.’” The matter was settled, and no one would again confront the men who toiled behind and around the band anymore. “It was all nonsense—no policy was made at all,” Parish says. “It went away, and it shut everybody up. Nobody ever mentioned it again.” With another dose of standard drama behind them, the Dead could get back to their new job at hand: convincing the world that they were no longer a dead issue, in any sense of the phrase.
The rebirth had started the year before under the worst possible circumstances. On the morning of July 10, 1986, Garcia’s housekeeper found him slumped over in the bathroom of the house on Hepburn Heights in San Rafael. Earlier that day he’d complained of being thirsty; now he was unconscious and was being rushed to the hospital. Someone in the Dead office called Kreutzmann, then living in San Anselmo, relatively close to Garcia’s house. He and son Justin leapt in a cab and arrived at Marin General Hospital, tucked away on a tree-lined street in Greenbrae, near Mill Valley, just as the ambulance with Garcia was pulling up. Because no one else was around to check Garcia in, the elder Kreutzmann pretended to be his brother.
As the Kreutzmanns saw for themselves, Garcia was visibly discombobulated, arguing with the ambulance workers and unsure of where he was and what had happened; he would later claim not to remember anything between passing out in the bathroom and waking up in the hospital. The Kreutzmanns weren’t
allowed to see Garcia, who was wheeled in and vanished, so they waited in the emergency room. Bill called his third wife, Shelley, then visiting family across the country, to tell her the news. “Billy sounded pretty calm about it,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I want to tell you before you hear it on the radio.’”
To his son, though, Kreutzmann sounded far more disconsolate, telling him forlornly, “This is the end—it’s over.” After waiting to see Garcia and ultimately not being allowed into the emergency room, the two hitchhiked home because they couldn’t find a cab. On their way out they saw the ambulance still parked outside, the emergency workers shaking their heads and saying, “Yeah, that was Jerry Garcia we just brought in.”
The possibility of a Garcia collapse had been building for over two years, but few in the organization were in a position to challenge him, and Garcia himself either downplayed his addiction or fended off offers to help. “I was medicating myself so I didn’t have to think about it,” Lesh says. “I often think, ‘If I’d tried to make a deal with him—I’ll quit drinking if you stop.’ And I was ready to do that at one point.” According to Lesh, his attempt to talk to Garcia about the band’s music during one of those confrontations was rejected by the intervention specialist, causing Lesh to walk out in disgust. “I was very frustrated,” he says. “That was my last chance to have made that offer.” Hart recalls confronting Garcia with some Hells Angels in tow, telling him to check into rehab right then or, as Hart recalls, “Angelo [one of the Angels] will take you right out.” Garcia went along with the idea but checked himself out. “It was really hard,” Hart says. “He would eat a hamburger and milkshake in front of you and laugh. We did about all we could possibly do. The heroin was stronger.”
Finally, in 1984, over a dozen people—including the band, Mountain Girl, and Hunter—crashed Garcia’s home for just such a discussion, and Garcia promised he’d go into treatment. To prove it, he and Lesh drove to a clinic in Oakland, where Garcia signed up and said he’d return later. But back home afterward he hardly seemed to take it seriously: he didn’t say anything and acted as if their words of support had barely penetrated him.
The next day Garcia declared he was ready for change. On the way to a clinic he parked his BMW in Golden Gate Park. (According to a source, the car was only his in theory because it had been given to him by a fan and the paperwork hadn’t been completed.) Noticing that the car’s registration had expired the previous September, a cop approached Garcia, asking for identification; Garcia responded by “looking down at his hands in which he held a piece of tin foil paper that had a brown sticky-appearing substance on it,” as the police report read. Clearly nervous and unsure what to do, Garcia tried hiding the foil on the right side of the driver’s seat. When asked for his license and registration, he said he didn’t have the former but did produce the latter. “I recognized his name, and he confirmed he was from the Grateful Dead band,” the officer reported later. On the front passenger seat police found an open briefcase with more tin foil with brown residue, a glass cooker, seven cigarette lighters, eleven paper bindles with brown residue, and a plastic baggie with a yellow-legal-pad bindle with white powder (which, almost comically, was labeled “1/2 Gram”). Some speculated Garcia was simply in search of one last high before he committed himself to treatment; if so, it was ironic that a lapsed registration sticker undid his plans. (Decades later some would still wonder what became of that briefcase, which also contained music and lyrics of new songs.)
Garcia was arrested and booked, but afterward, back at home, he barely mentioned the incident and acted as if the bust wasn’t cause for major concern. At his hearing a few Deadheads who appeared in court offered to spend time in jail on his behalf, but it wasn’t necessary: Garcia, who didn’t at the time think he had any sort of problem and rejected therapy, asserted he would seek treatment.
In spite of Garcia’s health issues the Dead machine hardly slowed down. After a rehearsal at Front Street in December 1985, the band gathered in the front lobby to chill. Gradually talk turned to touring plans for the following summer—and how the Dead had no choice but to make the switch from amphitheaters and indoor arenas to vast outdoor stadiums. “Yeah, man, you’re right,” Garcia said with little enthusiasm, and everyone agreed, with varying degrees of reluctance. “The tone was resignation as much as anything,” says McNally, who’d been hired as the band’s publicist (Rock Scully’s former job) in 1984 and attended the meeting. “Jerry did not want to play stadiums, but it was necessary. He said to me repeatedly, ‘It cartoonizes the playing.’” (Fans sometimes agreed: as early as 1973 Deadheads wrote to the band arguing against playing stadiums like Kezar, saying they were too big and the sound systems were awful.) With that topic settled—the thought of bigger paychecks didn’t hurt—conversation turned to the best possible coheadliner, Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton. Over the next decade the stadium decision would have enormous consequences, good and bad, but at the moment it was simply about making room for the unrelenting increase in fans. Even without a new album to promote, ticket sales rose each year.
Starting with first-rate shows the band performed in the summer of 1985, Garcia battled back, and by the time the Dead started a short tour with Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers the following summer, Garcia seemed in better shape than he’d been in some time. He gradually kicked drugs, and his interest in art and sketches returned. But the shows with Dylan and Petty proved to be his undoing. As straight as Garcia tried to stay, mysterious brown packets would still be handed to him in elevators, sometimes by strangers, and his mood grew less than pleasant. Taken to a dentist in one city for an infection, he was given codeine, which didn’t help his drug jones, and he seemed to be urinating more than usual. During shows Weir would run around the stage like a bronco, partly as a way to compensate for Garcia’s increasingly sedentary stage presence. At a hellishly hot July show at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, Shelley Kreutzmann saw Garcia’s condition for herself. “We were all in an elevator together, with a friend of mine who’s a nurse,” she recalls, “and she said, ‘He doesn’t look too good.’”
Back home on Hepburn Heights all Garcia seemed to want to do was drink beverages, preferably Orange Julius, and urinate, and soon enough, he’d collapsed. At Marin General the days and weeks that followed were unlike anything the Dead community had confronted before. “We watched all the tubes running in and out of his body,” says his brother, Tiff, “and he was passing all this shit you don’t want to know.” Garcia’s heart momentarily stopped after it was determined he was allergic to a type of valium, and his kidneys shut down for over a week. Dead employees were told his blood sugar level was off the charts and that Garcia was one of the sickest people they’d ever seen admitted to the hospital. He was in a coma—brought on by adult-onset diabetes, a new condition for him—for almost a week. (Scully says that right before Garcia’s bust in 1985, he’d brought in a doctor who told him Garcia was on the verge of catastrophic diabetes, but the issue, perhaps due to disarray in the band’s organization at that point, wasn’t addressed.) In his hospital room with Tiff, Garcia watched the movie Elephant Parts at such a high volume that Tiff was worried they would irritate the other patients.
In scenes that recalled Vito Corleone’s hospitalization in The Godfather, the Dead operation went into protective action. Told to report to the hospital and protect Garcia, the crew found Deadheads in the parking lot, some building makeshift altars in front of the emergency room, phoning the hospital relentlessly, and overwhelming the staff. Additional security, including some Hells Angels, was called in to stand guard at the hospital’s front entrance to ensure Deadheads didn’t enter the building. “They were crafty,” says Candelario. “We’d find them in the stairwells. We weren’t physical, but we had to say, ‘This is not the time.’” Employees of the ticket office, including Steve Marcus, were stationed in the waiting room as extra backup and routinely went outside to ask fans to quiet down. When Marcus saw an unconscious Garcia himself
one night, the sight was both disconcerting and encouraging: the tubes were there, but his complexion was healthy pink. “He was still in a coma,” Marcus recalls, “but it was the healthiest he’d ever been.”
People from Garcia’s life, past and present, flashed before him: not just Mountain Girl, who flew down from Oregon, but also old Palo Alto friend Laird Grant and Garcia’s first wife, Sara, and their daughter, Heather. One early morning, around 3 a.m., Hunter showed up, telling Marcus, “I don’t know why, but something told me I should be here.” At that moment, Marcus recalls, a nurse emerged to tell them Garcia had just woken up and wanted to see a friendly face, and Hunter went in and spent time with Garcia. Still, Garcia could be an incorrigible patient: He would ask visiting friends and employees to bring him egg sandwiches or pork rinds from a nearby Chinese food store.
Popping into the hospital to visit his boss, Garcia’s limo driver, Leon Day, looked down the hall and saw a slew of Angels. Day was shocked but not surprised by Garcia’s health problems. A few months before, he’d gone to the house to pick up Garcia to drive him to a show, something Day had been doing since the early eighties. He knocked and knocked and rang the doorbell but received no response. Using his own set of keys, Day went inside and found Garcia lying in bed, looking comatose. “His mouth was wide open and he wasn’t breathing,” Day recalls. “The minute I got near him, he jerked himself out of it. He said, ‘Glad you let yourself in.’”
The business of the Dead ground to a halt for the first time since the band had formed. Hart and Lesh called McNally into the conference room and laid him off. Fall concerts were canceled. Executives at Arista stayed away, hoping for upbeat reports from anyone in the Dead home office. Discharged in August 1986, Garcia returned to Hepburn Heights, now with his former family of Mountain Girl, Trixie, and Annabelle in tow. Trixie, a teenager very much a child of the eighties, down to dressing like Michael Jackson for a spell, had been in summer camp in Oregon when she’d been pulled aside by a counselor and told about her father. Until that point the Dead’s massive popularity hadn’t fully hit her. She’d regularly tease Garcia (whom she called “Jerry,” not “Dad”) about being a rock star who wore dirty T-shirts, and based on the band’s name alone, most of her high school friends thought the Dead was a death-metal band to be avoided at all costs. (“Only the kids who’d grown up backstage could master the arena thing,” she says. “I lost a couple of friends trying to bring them to Dead shows. So after a while I stopped trying.”) At Trixie’s summer camp in Oregon, though, Garcia’s coma was major news. One day she found the entire camp, counselors and campers alike, standing together, holding hands, and saying a prayer for her father. “I thought, ‘Wait, everybody cares? This is a big deal?’” she recalls.
