by David Browne
Garcia insisted to Matheson that his relationship with Mountain Girl was platonic, but when Manasha became pregnant Sue Swanson saw the hurt look on Mountain Girl’s face. (To writer Robert Greenfield, Mountain Girl would add, of the baby, “He really enjoyed that little girl. . . . For him, the magic was in this relationship with that little girl, and there was nothing I could do about those things so I just let go. That was extremely hard to do but it did get done.”) Friends had nothing but praise for the way Mountain Girl had helped Garcia through his recovery after his coma. “MG kept people away from him,” says Linda Kahn. “She was able to protect him. I’m not sure how much he appreciated that after a while, but for the time, he did.” But as Parish would later note, Garcia had a habit of ending one relationship by diving into another; unpleasant confrontations were to be avoided as much as possible.
Other additions backstage were more musically oriented. After Bruce Springsteen temporarily dissolved the E Street Band, Clarence Clemons relocated to the Bay Area in search of new opportunities. Given how much he loved music, sitting in with bands, dropping into clubs, and partying, it was inevitable that he and some of the Dead would intersect, and they did, running into each other at clubs like Sweetwater in Mill Valley. It wasn’t long before Clemons was backstage at Dead shows. At the Oakland Coliseum a bag of mushrooms was passed around backstage. Seeing the container on a table, Clemons exclaimed, “I wanna get high with the Grateful Dead!” Handing him the bowl, Garcia cracked, “Well, here you go!” Big and gregarious, Clemons dropped to his knees between Weir and Garcia, reached into the batch of mushrooms with his large hands, grabbed a handful, and tossed them down. Clemons seemed fine—until he sat in with the band and, halfway into the set a large, confused smile overtook his face.
Clemons responded both to the band’s musicianship and especially their blues and R&B covers, and according to Weir, the saxman would have loved to have joined the Dead full time. Weir and Garcia were actually amenable to the idea, but not everyone else in the Dead was. “A couple of our guys hate the saxophone,” Weir has said. “So not everyone else would have gone for it. In the Dead back then anyone in the band had the power of veto.” Sensing the objections, Weir didn’t push too hard for Clemons to join. Still, Clemons sat in with the Dead and the Jerry Garcia Band a handful of times in 1989, and even stranger, he floated an unusual idea to Weir and Garcia. Clemons suggested the three of them move in together for what Weir says would have been “a bachelor pad.” As odd as the idea sounded, Weir has said he and Garcia gave it serious consideration, at least for a while; after all, all three loved a good party. “It would’ve been a lot of fun,” Weir has said. “But I don’t think anyone would have survived. That would’ve been a toxic environment.” In the end, they passed on the idea—yet another example of the surprises that could await them backstage.
Shortly before they hit the road again they needed to record new material for their all-important—at least to Arista—follow-up to In the Dark.
“Can we do it a few more times?” Weir asked about a new song, “Shit Happens.”
It had been another long night at Club Front, and as Justin Kreutzmann watched, one of the Dead cast a withering glance at his band mate. “I will play that song twice,” he said, “and if I play it a third time, it will curdle my blood.”
The growing, sometimes unruly crowds at their shows were one thing, but even in the studio the Dead universe seemed to be off its axis compared to the preceding two years. The first hurdle was obvious: they hadn’t road-tested the fresh songs as much as they had the material on In the Dark—a lovely Hunter-Garcia song, “Standing on the Moon,” had made its stage debut only in February. But they had to maintain the momentum of a hit album, and Arista convinced the band and management that an October 1989 release date would be ideal, if only in terms of marketing. (Halloween! Dead!)
At Club Front and George Lucas’s nearby Skywalker Studios they again tried to play the songs live as a band. But something wasn’t clicking, and they opted to painstakingly overdub each of their parts onto basic rhythm tracks. Anyone stopping by Club Front would have encountered the unusual sight of Garcia, headphones clamped down onto his silvery mane, sitting by himself and adding leads, or Weir doing the same, with no one else around. John Cutler was back, assisted this time by Bob Bralove, who’d graduated from helping them with electronics on stage (he was practically an unofficial seventh member of the band) to taking an associate producer role on the album. Onstage Bralove continued to stand near the drummers and help with MIDI and other sonic enhancements to make the Dead sound more high-tech than they had before.
Bralove had grown accustomed to the Dead’s unpredictability and sonic adventurousness. On his first tour with the band, during their summer 1987 shows with Dylan, Bralove watched, stunned, as Hart began smashing pedals with a metal pipe during one Drums segment. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God!’” he recalls. “Everything was in the red and distorted. I went, ‘Oh, there’s a different reality in performance for these guys.’ I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This was education by fire.”
In theory the new recording plan could have worked. Dating back to Anthem of the Sun, the Dead had used the studio as a large instrument, and technology had vastly improved since 1968; with Bralove’s help, they could use digital recording, MIDI, drum loops, and other effects far more effortlessly. “It was, ‘Maybe we should try this—who knows? We’ve never done it that way!’” Bralove recalls. “That was all part of it. I saw it as a desire to experiment. For a band that comes off as so casual about so much, the desire to improve sound quality and production techniques was huge.”
For their part the Dead were trying their best to stay on a relatively even keel and be good boys. Yet tempers, frustrations, and old habits intruded as the band attempted the arduous task of piecing together an album practically note by note. Garcia was looking haggard again, and that newly darkened mood cast a pall over the sessions. “The camaraderie was still there,” recalls Shelley Kreutzmann, “but it was all contingent on how well Jerry was doing and if he was chasing the dragon. The healthier he was, the better everyone got along.” Worn down after repeatedly playing to a click track that would keep him on the beat, Bill Kreutzmann snapped, “I’m done playing this—I’m going home.” (And, according to his son Justin, he did.)
For his central contribution, Weir brought with him “Victim or the Crime,” lyrics courtesy of Gerrit Graham, an actor who had come into the Dead world by way of a mutual friend, Andy Leonard. The song was melodically complex to start with; for all the teasing he endured, Weir was now the one pushing the band into the most unexplored song-structure territory. But according to Graham, at least half the band were unhappy with the use of the word “junkie” in the song; Graham assumed it had to do with band members afraid of using it in Garcia’s presence. “We were all supposed to understand automatically what the problem was and why Jerry must be protected from this unthinkable offense,” Graham later wrote. “Words like ‘inappropriate’ and ‘unsuitable’ were getting heavy workouts.”
The ensuing storm made Weir want to stick with the song even more, which only made the sessions tenser. “They wanted to use the studio as an instrument, but it wasn’t as much fun,” recalls Justin Kreutzmann, again hired as an assistant. “It was very un-Dead-like, and people lost patience. I remember days and days of ‘Victim or the Crime’—days and days of that chord progression. You start to shake after a while.” Hart was spending enormous amounts of time at his home studio piecing together percussion parts. Lesh would later dub the making of what came to be called Built to Last “a nightmarish briar patch of egotistical contention.” That was especially the case with “Shit Happens,” a mediocre Weir-Hunter collaboration; the band took two stabs at cutting it and then canned it altogether. It was never completed nor included on any Dead album.
It fell to Mydland—and his recurring lyricist partner, John Perry Barlow—to write the bulk of the new material,
especially with a deadline looming closer than the band was accustomed to. “Nobody was writing songs,” Barlow says, “and we had a commitment.” An instinctively creative musician, Mydland could pump out a melody in as little as a half-hour, and before long he and Barlow had finished a handful of songs. How his songs fit in with the Dead would be open to debate: comparisons to pop-soul singers like Michael McDonald were apt. Yet Mydland’s creativity on keyboards clearly enhanced their music; during the sessions for the new album his parts on “Picasso Moon” and “Foolish Heart” made the songs three-dimensional.
At the same time, Mydland was also showing signs of distress. Just before the album was mastered he turned up at the studio in no shape to work but desperate to remix “I Will Take You Home,” the touching ballad he’d written for his daughters. (By now Mydland and girlfriend Lisa had wed.) Even though Bralove had to leave for Los Angeles with the master tapes the next morning, somehow they got it done despite Mydland’s condition. His troubles were hardly a secret to the Dead, but few knew how bad they would get in the months to come.
Assuming their positions on stage at the Civic Arena on the second night, April 3, the Dead were a study in subtle contrasts, grown men who revealed the different ways they were handling middle age. Wearing a sweater, Lesh looked like a nicely coiffed college professor. Weir was in stylish gray slacks, his long hair pulled back in a ponytail. As always, Garcia was sporting a black T-shirt, of which he had a closet full, and his white hair was swept up over his forehead and cascaded down to his shoulders. Even though he was parked in front of his synthesizer and B3 organ, Mydland remained the most animated member of the band. At times he seemed to be heaving himself onto the keyboard with a desperate, almost manic energy, as if an electric-shock switch had been inserted under his piano bench.
The Dead rarely if ever rehearsed before packing their suitcases for the road, and some of the early shows on this spring 1989 tour reflected that; the band sounded tentative or just average. Yet at some point along the way the beast awakened and began to roar, and Pittsburgh was one of those moments. Garcia was now standing next to Mydland (he and Lesh had switched places onstage), and the two alternated expressive solos on “Blow Away,” one of the new Barlow-Mydland collaborations. Mydland sparkled on a keyboard solo on “Greatest Story Ever Told,” the galloping Weir-Hunter song from Ace, and his harmonies continued to boost warhorses like “Uncle John’s Band,” which ended with a dramatic, chord-crashing crescendo before leading into the Drums and Space segments. “We were real tight,” Weir opined to Rolling Stone in 2013. “We could hear and feel each other thinking, and we could intuit each other’s moves readily. And at the same time, our vocal blend was at its peak. Jerry and Brent and I, we all individually reached new plateaus as singers. And when we were all singing together it was pretty strong. We packed a punch. For me that was our best era, the late eighties. There was a lot of electricity going on onstage besides the stuff that was plugged in.”
Garcia’s voice continued to show the strains of his debilitating lifestyle of the previous decade; on “Crazy Fingers,” he sounded creaky. Flashes of his old strength came and went, and his guitar solos retained the quality of stones skipping over the water. The previous fall the Dead had broken out a new song, a loping Hunter-Garcia collaboration called “Built to Last” about healing, hope, and reconciliation that brought out the best in the band’s casually bubbly Kreutzmann and Hart rhythms and Garcia’s still-sweet delivery, and the song became a high point of the second night at the Civic Arena. Inside the arena Deadheads reveled in it all, roaring when Garcia stepped to the mic for “Bertha,” his first solo vocal of the night, or when the spotlight hit Lesh for one of his rare turns as lead singer, this time on a cover of Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”
Yet outside the arena was another, far less blissful story. By the time the Dead kicked into their first song of the night, another part of the touring routine was in effect: the hundreds upon hundreds, sometimes thousands, of fans who’d come without tickets and opted to hang out and party in the parking lot. Depending who was asked, the number without tickets for the second night in Pittsburgh swelled to anywhere between three and ten thousand, all circling an arena that held sixteen thousand. Hearing the music emanating from inside, those who already had tickets began swarming in to the few glass doors that were open (or were cracked open by fans inside, which happened sometimes).
The police on duty panicked because there weren’t enough of them to adequately corral the fans. With memories of the tragedy at the Who’s 1979 concert at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium in mind—eleven fans died of asphyxiation when the crowd rushed in—the cops called for backup, and in roared the traffic police on their motorcycles. The result was a perfect horrible storm. A small number of people, stoned or drunk and unfamiliar with the unwritten rules of a Dead show, began throwing bottles, and a handful of police decided enough was enough. One cop, later claiming a fan grabbed his arm too tightly and refused to let go, punched that fan in the face as he was being led to a police van, all of it captured on video by a local TV news crew. Other cops on duty kicked a fan in the head (allegedly for having pissed on a police motorcycle); another fan had his head slammed against a van. In the end twenty-two others were arrested on charges of drinking and drugging, and even a local TV reporter was briefly detained.
The immediate aftermath of the chaos ranged from ridiculous to infuriating. Sophie Masloff, Pittsburgh’s seventy-one-year-old mayor, was well known (and sometimes beloved) for her malapropisms; Bruce Springsteen was, in her words, “Bruce Bedsprings.” When she weighed in on the Civic Arena mess she referred to the band as the “Dreadful Dead” and added, of their loyal fans, “I don’t want those Deadenders ever back again.” According to local reporters, Pittsburgh bike cops at the time had a history of aggressive behavior, but they accused the city of not preparing enough for the fans. Deadheads insisted fans hadn’t attacked police, whereas others pointed to newbies who shouldn’t have acted out or been there in the first place.
On the basis of videotape of one cop slugging that one fan as well as other clips of the chaos of that night, three officers were brought up on disciplinary action. The judging panel consisted of fellow officers, as per procedure, and their defense lawyer argued that the issue was “whether the force used was necessary under the circumstances. That tape was not, in and of itself, enough to show that.” Under the circumstances it was hardly a shock when the charges were dismissed. Mayor Masloff said she disagreed with the verdict—but added that she wouldn’t pursue another hearing because “another trial board would have had the same results.”
In terms of the Dead’s relationship with Pittsburgh, the repercussions of the fuzzy events of that night would be relatively minor. The Dead would continue to play there, albeit at Three Rivers Stadium, which held many more people. (Even though they tried to avoid uncontrollable outdoor stadium shows, they always wound up being pulled back into them.) The incident itself was seen within the organization as a fluke based on unfortunate planning. The show was the Dead’s only date in the Northeast until the summer, and given the enormous number of Deadheads who still lived in the New York–Washington corridor, it was inevitable that many would converge on Pittsburgh to catch the band’s only local performance of the season. With a guileless smile Weir told MTV, “If it gets really bad, then we’ll go to Europe or Asia or something and play over there, wait for things to cool down.”
But they couldn’t talk away the growing perception that Dead shows were a problem, even when they weren’t. Managers of the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, where the Dead were scheduled to play five nights after Pittsburgh, immediately beefed up security. During a later Philadelphia Spectrum show Scher spied cops with billy clubs; when he ran up to them and started screaming for them to put them away, he was picked up and heaved out the back door. A little over three weeks after Pittsburgh ninety-one people were arrested at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater, charged with dru
gs, “alleged assaults,” and other instances. (Deadheads countered by saying that drunken yuppies were to blame.) By comparison, earlier incidents—like the Houston teenager busted for LSD at a show in 1984 whose probation mandated that he couldn’t attend any Dead concerts for five years—seemed frivolous.
At a June 1988 band meeting in San Rafael the Dead grappled with the influx of new fans—and what they were leaving in their own wakes. The goal was to craft a carefully worded statement warning ticket holders to tidy up and not flaunt anything even vaguely illegal in the vicinity of the show. But the band had to be careful: How to get the message across without patronizing their fan base? Now the time had come to get serious. Before the Dead’s shows at Giants Stadium in July 1989, management at the venue informed the band they couldn’t accommodate overnight parking (a euphemism for “camping out in the lot,” as most Deadheads knew). That practice meant the venue would have to provide local city services—medical tents, portable toilets, medical supplies—for a miniature city of the ten thousand that everyone predicted would take over the lot.
Faced with the potential of losing out on yet another profitable venue, the band decided they had to tamp down on camping and reluctantly agreed to break the news themselves to the fans. When the Dead office sent out tickets for a later show, they attached a letter, written by McNally and signed by the band: “We’re going ahead with camping and vending this summer full of doubts as to whether we can continue them,” it began, adding, “we’re running out of places to play. . . . Camping and vending have turned it into a largely social scene that is potentially a real and ominous threat to the future live performance of the music itself.” The letter then announced “a limited amount of onsite camping available at each gig.” Vending booths would be limited to an area the size of a blanket.
