So Many Roads

by David Browne

  Upon visiting the basement apartment in Hepburn Heights for the first time in her life Trixie saw what she calls “dirty little pieces of tin foil and straws” all around—good news of a sort because it meant her father wasn’t shooting up. The refrigerator was filled with little but Tang, the fruit-flavored beverage powder, and the armrests in his favorite chair were covered with cigarette burns. Before Garcia returned, Mountain Girl and Grant went to work cleaning up the apartment. Grant hunted for leftover stash wherever he thought his friend may have hidden it. He found nothing inside album covers, but bits of heroin were taped to the bottoms of cereal boxes in the kitchen cabinets.

  Garcia may have been back home, but rehabilitation was a dicier matter. With the help of Saunders, he slowly began playing the guitar again, but his progress was glacial. “Slowly he started to get his strength back,” Merl Saunders told writer Blair Jackson, “but it sometimes took an hour or two for him to get even a simple chord down.” One day Saunders brought by Bralove; the two keyboard players had collaborated before, and Bralove had worked on mixes for a new theme the Dead had cut for an updated version of The Twilight Zone series. Although hardly a newcomer to the pop world, Bralove was startled by what he saw—a bloated man smoking cigarettes nonstop and watching cartoons on a large-screen TV in a basement. “My reaction, was, ‘This is the guy?’” he recalls. “Jerry was vulnerable then. I couldn’t quite understand it.” Garcia seemed wary—he didn’t seem to grasp whether Bralove was a fan or a fellow musician—but he didn’t turn grumpy and dismissive, which was a positive sign.

  Just after 7 p.m. that May night at Leguna Seca the fog rolled in, the temperatures began to fall, and the Dead returned to the stage to begin filming their first music video. The men who filed back onstage after playing a full show were middle-aged rock warriors, yet collectively they looked about as scrubbed, healthy, and camera-ready as imaginable. Garcia’s hair wasn’t as untamed as it had been during the worst days of his heroin addiction, and Mydland now sported a shag, replacing the shoulder-length mane from his earliest days in the band.

  As the musicians took their places behind their instruments, Gutierrez noticed the first signs of the trauma the Dead had endured almost a year before: Garcia was wearing special padded sneakers for his swollen ankles, largely due to his diabetes. The director arranged a seat by the side of the stage so Garcia would be able to rest during breaks in the shooting.

  The song that would be the basis for the video was “Touch of Grey.” After hearing it and zeroing in on its “I will survive” refrain, Gutierrez had pitched the band on a clever idea for the video: depicting the Dead as rocking skeletons who’d morph into the actual musicians onstage. “It just seemed to fit with the song,” Gutierrez says. “I don’t know if the song is all about aging, but it’s about the wisdom that comes with age.” Garcia—who first asked the director to listen to the whole album they’d just finished and pick what he thought would be the single—instantly took to the idea, and the rest of the band went along with it. (If Garcia was happy, everyone else was too.) Plans were made to film it at one of the two shows at Laguna Seca, and Arista allotted a $150,000 budget to drag the Dead into the MTV age. Gutierrez’s company bought anatomically correct skeletons from a medical supply company, asked the band members for their correct heights, and, with puppeteers Chris and Mark Walas (who’d done similar duties on the film Gremlins), got to work. The band was so game that Lesh donated one of his tie-dyed shirts for a puppet, Hart his Celtics jacket.

  The months that had led up to this moment were agonizing for Garcia and everyone in the Dead camp. As soon as Garcia was able to play his instrument again, the Dead began rehearsing in October 1986 at Front Street, and the initial reports weren’t encouraging. During visits to the nearby Dead office Hart and Lesh would shake their heads and mutter alarming comments like, “It’s not there.” Employees began to worry whether Garcia had suffered permanent damage and whether the Dead were effectively over. Finally, in late October, Hart returned to the office again and was smiling. “We just did a really good ‘Dark Star,’” he told them, adding, “It’s back.” The Dead’s ticket office booked comeback shows that same day, starting December 15 at the Oakland Coliseum. In early November publicist McNally visited Garcia’s place on Hepburn Heights—Mountain Girl was cooking—and asked for his old job back, and Garcia just chuckled and rehired him. Flashing back to past employees, Garcia told McNally, “Usually when I get somebody a job there, they fuck up on me. But you didn’t, so it’ll be okay.”

  The newly buoyant mood continued at Thanksgiving. The days of congregating for a meal at 710 Ashbury were long gone, but a re-creation of a sort was arranged at the Log Cabin Dugout Bar in San Anselmo, part of an American Legion Hall built for Boy Scouts in the 1930s (and still decorated with flags and other patriotic Americana). Gathering at long tables, most of the band (save Mydland, who was absent), employees, and longtime friends like Sue Swanson shared food and laughs. Garcia arrived with a banjo, and eventually he and his longtime pals in acoustic music, David Nelson and Sandy Rothman, huddled together and played bluegrass for several hours. Lesh, sitting nearby with his wife, Jill, yelled out a request for “Wild Horses” from Garcia’s Old and in the Way days. For once the air around the band wasn’t tinged with tension and grousing; everyone’s jobs were again secure, and the sight of Garcia with a banjo, which he hadn’t played publicly in years, was another welcome sign.

  The Dead played several well-received comeback shows the following month at the Oakland Coliseum, but the surest sign that Garcia and the band were fully in operational mode arrived January 6, 1987. Starting then and continuing through January 15, they recorded the basic tracks for a new album on the stage of the empty Marin Veterans Auditorium in San Rafael, in front of two thousand empty seats. Coming so soon after Garcia’s collapse, the efficiency of the sessions was nothing less than miraculous. The reasons behind it were multiple. Except for “When Push Comes to Shove” and “Black Muddy River,” they’d been playing most of the material for years and had settled into arrangements worked out on the road. Garcia’s near-death experience had instilled a now-or-never urgency that had never permeated the Dead bubble before. Joining Garcia as coproducer was John Cutler, an astute, detail-minded recording engineer who’d worked with members of the Dead starting in the seventies. Cutler was comfortable with the Dead, compared with the name producers they’d worked with on their previous three studio albums, which made the recording even less stressful.

  The songs were a relatively strapping lot. “Black Muddy River” had been written on Keith Godchaux’s old piano at the Front Street studio. Garcia had begun playing in a gospel style and grabbed a stack of Hunter lyrics atop the keyboard; after leafing through them he had, in no time at all, written the song, which had the stately feel of a parlor ballad from the previous century. Thanks to changes in technology, they could record essentially live, playing together in a large room as if in concert. The borderline-toxic milieu from Fantasy Studios three years earlier were nowhere to be seen or heard. They even tackled—and nailed—versions of “West L.A. Fadeaway” and “Throwing Stones,” both first attempted at the Fantasy sessions. The band had purchased an array of synthesizers and emulators and hired Bralove to help to operate them; the Dead were even ready to sound like a radio-friendly band.

  In light of everything they’d been through—and the striking fact that they hadn’t made a studio album in seven years—the energized brawniness of In the Dark was truly remarkable. (The album title derived from one Marin Vets session where the band played with the lights out.) Whether the lyrics were written by Hunter, Barlow, or Mydland, the songs were cantankerous, pessimistic, bleak, or a combination of all three. Teetering relationships, bondage-loving girlfriends, bikers, decaying planets, and sleaze ran through the songs. The eloquent finale, “Black Muddy River,” felt like a weary farewell after a lifetime of travails.

  Thankfully the music drove away the gloom and doom of many of
the words. Bolstered by subsequent overdubs at Front Street, the Dead played with burly, confident energy; nothing about the tracks felt remotely defeated. The joyous swing in “Touch of Grey,” with its soothing layer of Mydland organ, was just the start. With Mydland’s barrelhouse piano pushing it along, “When Push Comes to Shove” had a similarly rollicking tone, and the band playfully snarled on “Hell in a Bucket” and “Throwing Stones.” Despite everything it had been through, Garcia’s voice held firm, and Weir let loose with a falsetto finale in “Hell in a Bucket.” Rarely had the Dead been so primed to assert themselves on record, and rarely had they conveyed such pleasure at making music without an audience staring at them.

  Keeping it as always all in the family, Justin Kreutzmann had been hired as an assistant and noticed some of the differences for himself. In the past at Front Street Garcia would disappear into one of the back rooms; no one was allowed in. Now he was once more accessible and engaged. During one session Bralove looked over and saw Garcia in a corner, snoring loudly. But this time, at least, they knew it was simply exhaustion.

  The plan at Laguna Seca called for the Dead to lip-synch for several hours—monumentally torturous for a band who could barely keep it together for a photo shoot. (To ensure they wouldn’t bolt those sessions, McNally would resort to reading gags from a joke book to keep them in a good mood and in one place.) “Everybody was all touchy about selling out,” recalls Trixie Garcia, who, at twelve, was scampering around the set that day. “Jerry had his compass, and they would never dumb themselves down.”

  But as the band began to lip-synch, something wonderfully peculiar happened: most of them actually appeared to be enjoying the experience. Behind the drums, miming along with his part for “Touch of Grey,” Bill Kreutzmann was actually caught smiling. (Before the shoot he’d even engaged in some animated quasi-standup for the crowd.) Lesh remained unconvinced about the job at hand. “I never understood why it was important to have some kind of visual analog to the song,” he says. “And why people preferred to watch that than listen to the song. The visual is always going to dilute the impact of the song.” Still, he and Weir joked with each other as they pretended to play their instruments.

  The song they’d begun lip-synching had its own tangled, drawn-out history. Nearly seven years before, Hunter had written the lyrics to “Touch of Grey”—which could be interpreted as an ode to enduring day-to-day-struggles, although Dead historian McNally referred to it as “a superb rendering of the morning after a cocaine binge”—and with the help of Garcia and John Kahn, Hunter attempted a version of it for one of his own albums. But Garcia was intrigued: he asked whether he could rewrite the melody, and he could be heard wandering around the upstairs kitchen on Hepburn Heights happily playing the lick he’d devised for it. The Dead began performing the song onstage as early as 1982 in Maryland.

  Hearing the band rehearse “Touch of Grey” one night at Marin Veterans, Justin Kreutzmann told Garcia he thought this song was the one—the hit that had always eluded them and that they’d deserved. “No one’s going to like this song,” Garcia scoffed, thinking the lyrics were too personal. “No one’s going to get the significance of it.” More troublesome, Garcia was also having trouble nailing the guitar solo, the result of lingering issues with his coma. “He just couldn’t quite get it,” Hart recalls. “He’d sit there and play it over and over. Endless takes. For some reason he had a hard time. He’d had to relearn his instrument and regain his confidence.” Finally one night, as in the “Dark Star” moment, out it came, and they finally had the part and the song they needed.

  Throughout this period Arista Records was removed from the process but patient. Although the label wasn’t badgering the band for new product, they were still, in their way, keeping tabs on the band’s progress. By chance an employee of the label’s art department was a Deadhead who followed the band around on her summer vacations, and her cassettes, which she would pass along to Arista senior vice president Roy Lott, became the label’s primary way of hearing the band’s new material. When Lott received a tape from the band with the nearly finished “Touch of Grey,” sent overnight to his home, he couldn’t have been more pumped. Lott was immediately struck by how produced the song was. Starting with the switch from “I will survive” to “we will survive” in the end and the sense of uplift in the final verse, the Dead had somehow managed to concoct a follow-the-bouncing-melody song that could conceivably be played on Top Forty radio. (Some of that credit belongs to Bralove, who helped spruce up the sonics during overdubbing sessions at Front Street; he helped Hart overdub antique cymbals that sounded like bells.) Lott brought the tape to a Monday morning meeting and played it for the staff, and the reaction was uniformly positive; even those who didn’t care for the Dead had to admit it was a hummable song.

  Even before the “Touch of Grey” video was completed, the Arista wheels began turning in ways they never had before for the Dead. The label was stocked with executives who’d grown up with FM rock, were fond of the Dead, and related to the band more than to the label’s MTV-geared pop. But In the Dark was the last release on the band’s contract. Although Arista had come to be known as a pop label, thanks to its enormous successes with the likes of Whitney Houston and Barry Manilow, label head Clive Davis didn’t want anyone to forget that Arista had fostered plenty of rock ’n’ roll, dating back to Patti Smith, Graham Parker, and other acts of the seventies. Holding onto the industry-wary Dead became crucial for both the label’s image and rock-press credibility. “We knew that if it didn’t work, we would have lost the band, no question about it,” says then Arista vice president Don Ienner, “and that gave us impetus.”

  In his job as aggressive head of radio promotion, Ienner began working “Touch of Grey” as soon as its video was underway. Convincing radio to play a song by a band that had never had a hit—and was the antithesis of pop in the eighties—would be tricky, but Ienner and his department were up for the challenge. To help his cause, Ienner wasn’t above leveraging some of the label’s biggest acts. “People were amazed that the Dead were still alive and [would say] ‘Are you fucking serious? I haven’t played a Dead song ever,’” Ienner recalls. “It was, ‘If you want me to give you the next Whitney Houston single before I give it to the [radio programmer] across the street, you’re gonna be dealing with this fucking Grateful Dead record.’”

  But it was most telling that at that point in their career the Dead were willing to play ball with a business they’d normally viewed with antipathy or suspicion. But they now had wives, ex-wives, children, alimony, mortgages, and expensive cars. That turnaround became most apparent in the spring when, before a New York show, Garcia, Hart, and Weir had a brief meeting with Arista executives in a hotel conference room. At least for a moment the combative days of the past—the Dead versus the likes of Joe Smith—evaporated. Davis, Ienner, and Lott pledged commitment to the project; no one in the band objected. The one concern arose when Garcia turned to Lott after a discussion of obligations and said, “I don’t have to do Dick Clark, do I?” They all laughed at the very thought of the Dead on Clark’s Top Forty TV show, American Bandstand, but they also knew Garcia had his limits.

  It wasn’t only the musicians who had to adjust to the idea of a video. As the filming continued, McNally had the unpleasant job of wading into the audience and busting anyone with a flash on his or her camera. (At least the crew hadn’t wrapped him in duct tape, part of his initiation hazing when he joined on as PR person.) One Deadhead thought McNally was hitting on his girlfriend and threatened to deck him; for the rest of the night McNally asked a security guard or two to follow him around.

  Otherwise the filming was largely uneventful, one indication that the Dead were working hard to keep their past excesses at bay. Garcia’s was the most dramatic rehabilitation, but he wasn’t the only one who’d straightened his rudder. With his first baby on the way (Grahame, his first son, was born December 1986), Lesh had stopped using drugs and had seriously cut back o
n drinking. In terms of maintaining Garcia’s recovery, Lesh and Weir laid down a law: no more cocaine on stage. (“That’s possible,” Lesh says of the story, “but I don’t remember that.”) Nitrous would still be allowed there, but it too was eventually banned during shows: “That SSSHHHHHH was coming through the microphones,” says Bralove. “It wasn’t doing anything for the music and it was destroying the sound.”

  In the way they were trying to straighten out the Dead were mirroring the times as much as they always had. The all-for-one sixties were gone, as were the solipsistic seventies that the Dead had reflected in the formation of their own label. Now they were echoing the clean-and-sober stance of many of their peers. Steve Winwood and Peter Gabriel made themselves over as GQ-level cover models. David Crosby, their old friend and partner in excess, had been busted for freebasing, had served jail time, and was now living a healthier lifestyle. Former Eagle Glenn Frey posed with his newly firm biceps in ads for a health-club chain. The punk rock and new wave that had made the Dead and their peers seem passé had outlived its welcome, and the sixties—even a reunited Monkees—were resurrected. Unintentionally the Dead had picked the ideal moment to connect with the masses.