by David Browne
Along with the likes of Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin, the Deer Creek Music Center had become a destination spot, a revered haven, for the Dead and their fans alike. Springing up amid cornfields and cow pastures a half-hour north of Indianapolis, the amphitheater was, like the band, an enclave unto itself. Out there the straight world never felt so distant. Although the Dead had played Deer Creek six times before without major incident, tonight began on a sour note. On their way from their hotel (north of Indianapolis) to the venue word filtered down to band and its management: a death threat had been called into Deer Creek’s box office. Similar calls and warnings had arrived before, but this one felt creepier. An anonymous person had called local police claiming to have overheard the distraught father of a young female Deadhead. The information was unclear, but the implication was that the girl couldn’t be found and had run off on the road with them, and that the father was planning to attend the show and shoot Garcia.
Huddling backstage with Ken Viola, Scher’s head of security, the band grappled with what to do. Verifying the threat was difficult, but Lesh, the most immediately concerned because his family was there, made the case for canceling the show and heading out. “I was not going to stand up there and be a target,” he recalls. But Garcia brushed it off, saying he’d dealt with crazies before and wouldn’t let this one stop him. “Would you sacrifice yourself for the music?” Hart recalls of that night. “All those things run around in your brain. But I remember joking, ‘Jerry, could you move over six inches onstage? At least I’ll make it!’ We were screaming laughing. The decision was made and everyone came around. We were worried, of course, but we didn’t want some lunatic to shut us down.” Indiana state police made their way into the crowd and the stage pit; there they were joined by other Dead employees, including publicist Dennis McNally and Steve Marcus of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, all nervously glancing around for . . . something. No one knew what the supposed shooter looked or dressed like, and no one even knew for sure whether the threat was real. But they weren’t about to take any chances.
Ironically, the show opened with “Here Comes Sunshine,” the twinkling kaleidoscope of a song that was dropped from the repertoire after 1974 but had returned starting in 1992. With Welnick playing synthesizer, the song was rearranged, sounding tighter and firmer but still evanescent. After Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues,” Garcia swung into the honky-tonk intro notes of “Dire Wolf.” At one point in the show a piece of electronics gear began misbehaving, and Bob Bralove, who usually stood behind the keyboards or drum riser, was forced to walk to the front of the stage to fix it. He’d performed the task dozens if not hundreds of times before, but never before had he felt as if a bull’s eye was plastered on his chest. “You could feel it,” he says. “This was normally the place that was always safe and you felt the love from the audience. But all of a sudden I’m realizing I’m standing next to the guy they said they wanted to kill. It was very, very intense.” After tending to the repair Bralove quickly retreated back to the darkened part of the stage.
For years they’d defied the odds; so many times they’d been written off creatively, physically, or economically, only to return, sometimes as vital as before. But the last few months had made even those closest and most loyal to the Dead wonder whether they, Garcia especially, would be able to pull back from the darkness. During a set break Garcia called his loyal driver, Leon Day. “I had a threat on my life,” he told him. Day joked back: “I got your back—you got mine?”
Still, Garcia sounded unnerved. “He’d gotten threats before,” Day says, “but for some reason this one seemed to hit home.” The driver made plans to pick up Garcia at the airport when the tour finished in a few more days. Then, as Garcia was beginning to tell members of his inner circle, he would finally consider rest, recuperation, maybe even a serious stint in rehab. Thirty years after the Warlocks had played Magoo’s pizza parlor, they all needed to reassess what everything had come to.
Just over two years before, the past had circled back to Garcia in a far more intoxicating way. The day before New Year’s Eve 1993 he’d jumped on a plane to Hawaii, where he’d been scuba diving and escaping the Dead world regularly since 1988. Joining him were two companions from the comparatively carefree early days in the Peninsula, two reminders of the time before relentless touring, deaths in the Dead family, and other complications and tragedies.
First was Barbara Meier, Garcia’s long-ago girlfriend from the Chateau era three decades before. Then living in Colorado, where she was painting, writing, and working with the Naropa Institute, the Buddhist-inspired college in Colorado, Meier had built a completely new and separate life since she and Garcia had broken up. (She loved American Beauty but hadn’t kept up with most of the band’s other music.) When she published a collection of poetry Hunter came across a copy in a bookstore and passed it along to Garcia, who sent a letter to her, by way of her publisher, that read in part, “I’ve always loved you and still do.” The two connected backstage at the Shoreline Amphitheater in May 1991. The last time Meier had seen her old boyfriend he’d had black hair and a black goatee and was trim; now the man facing her reminded her of Santa Claus. He told her he felt they’d lived parallel lives and that she was always part of his “psychic future.” In what seemed like a heartbeat, they’d reconnected; Garcia went onstage to do the second set, and Meier sat weeping in her seat, overcome by the reunion and its possibilities.
Although she was in the midst of working toward a graduate degree, Meier took the Garcia plunge again. As an excuse to see him again, she interviewed him for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review magazine and began visiting Marin. Driving with director Len Dell’Amico in his BMW one day, Garcia unexpectedly announced he was in love with, he said, “Barbara, this girl I knew a long time ago. She’s like the sun.” Hearing comments like those, the Dead community geared up to re-insert Meier into Garcia’s life.
When Meier arrived at Hunter’s house on December 30, 1992, according to Lesh’s account, she found not only Garcia and Robert and his wife, Maureen, but also Phil and Jill Lesh. Garcia had left home that morning without telling Manasha anything about his plans to leave her for Meier, but he had to say something about what he’d done, so his friends helped him write a note, then had it hand-delivered to Manasha by Garcia’s assistant, Vince Di Biase. “I immediately sensed it was not written in Jerry’s voice,” Manasha says, but there was little she could do. The next day Dead crew members whisked Garcia and Meier to a Holiday Inn near the airport to spend the night before being flown to Hawaii. “They had all the logistics lined up like a military operation,” Meier says. On the flight out the couple chuckled when the pilot walked back to first class and told Garcia, “Usually, I’m at your gig on New Year’s Eve.”
Along with the Hunters and the Leshes, Garcia and Meier settled into a condo complex in Maui, and the heady, creative rush of almost thirty years earlier appeared to breeze back in. Garcia and Meier took strolls on the beach and went scuba diving together. After a mini-studio was set up in his room, with recording gear and a keyboard, Garcia and Hunter sat down to pen new material. The two had written together only sporadically since the early eighties, but the stress-free atmosphere, removed from Marin and the Dead community, seemed to inspire them. Soon enough they’d finished “Lazy River Road,” a lively stroll inspired by Garcia and Meier’s reunion. “The more beautiful world tapped us on the shoulder again, so we thought we’d have a second chance,” Meier says. “And we all felt it. It felt like, ‘This is right.’”
The sense of renewal couldn’t have arrived at a better time for Garcia and the Dead. In the months after confronting Garcia backstage in Boston, Bruce Hornsby had continued playing with the band, but his enthusiasm seemed to wane with each show. “Let’s be honest here,” he says. “Jerry was in and out of his problems. There were times when he was all there, but other times he wasn’t. Jerry was my main reason for doing it.” As the New York Times noted of a 1991 show, the two-keyb
oard setup could result in overbaked arrangements: “The band is clearly still trying to figure out what to do” with Hornsby and Welnick onstage together, wrote critic Peter Watrous, adding, “With four chordal instruments onstage, the sound at times became clotted and busy.”
Feeling Welnick could handle the parts by himself and wanting to spend more time with his twin sons, born January 30, 1992, Hornsby found a nonconfrontational way to quit his part-time job with the Dead. By way of management Garcia found out before Hornsby had a chance to tell him, but Hornsby was still able to have an amicable conversation about it with Garcia. “I said, ‘I think Vince has it—you don’t need me anymore,’” Hornsby recalls. “I felt my role was to be the transitional figure between Brent’s death and the time Vince got comfortable. But I also felt there were too many nights it didn’t have that spark. I didn’t tell that to Jerry, but it was definitely a reason for me.”
Garcia took the news well, but Scher, still the band’s principal promoter and a trusted adviser, was taken aback. He knew Hornsby had little tolerance for sloppiness or lack of rehearsal and would practice piano several hours every day. Hornsby had been complaining to Scher for some time, but Scher never expected the keyboardist to pull the trigger and leave. “It was a big disappointment to me and a great lost opportunity,” Scher says. “They were a better band with Hornsby in it. Bruce loved Jerry, and he liked most of the guys in the band. But at that stage in their career, when they were being sloppy and weren’t playing well often enough, he got disillusioned.”
Lesh would later write that the band’s less-than-polished approach to playing Hornsby’s own songs was an issue, and Hornsby generally agrees. “They wanted to play some of my songs, so I arranged them for the Dead shuffle style,” he says. But unless the songs were rigorously rehearsed and played repeatedly, Hornsby realized the band would often forget the arrangements. “By the seventh time playing ‘The Valley Road,’ it was really rough,” he says, “and I went to them and said, ‘Hey, come on, guys—unless we rehearse it, let’s not do it anymore. It’s nice that you want to play my songs, but I’ve got this other forum, so it’s okay.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, we’ll rehearse.’ But we never really did.” After his last official shows with the band, at the Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in late March 1992 Hornsby was gone as a full-time member, although he would join them for select performances in the future, easily gliding back into his role.
With the Dead back to a single-keyboard lineup, Welnick did a capable job playing and adding harmonies. (He even led the band on arguably its least likely cover ever, the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” starting the summer of 1992.) But because the Dead world would never be entirely settled, other troubles sprang up soon enough. Still in a relationship with Manasha as of the middle of 1992, Garcia had moved with her and their daughter, Keelin, into a luxurious ten-acre home in Nicasio. (In a sign of how economically far the Dead had come, this was the same town where the ragged, woodsy Rukka Rukka Ranch had once been home to Weir, crew members, and anyone else who needed someplace to crash.) At that house in August Garcia crumbled from exhaustion soon after returning home from a Garcia Band tour, which had followed a short run of Dead performances. “It was too much for him,” says Manasha. “He had a hard time saying no and just went along with the program until he collapsed.” At Garcia’s request, Manasha called the Dead office and told them he wanted to cancel the band’s planned fall tour.
As it had six years before, after Garcia’s diabetic coma, the brakes were suddenly slammed on the Dead organization. This time no one in their office was laid off, but concerns mounted as never before. According to Nancy Mallonee, staffers were worried either about Garcia dying or the band giving up touring or winding down altogether: “People would ask, ‘How long do you think it’s going to be?’”
With a small crew of healers—two holistic physicians, an acupuncturist, a dietician, and an alternative-medicine homeopath—the hospital-wary Garcia began to physically improve at home. He drank fresh organic juices prepared daily by Manasha, avoided fats in his diet, became a vegan, and lost about sixty pounds. In an even more hopeful sign, he announced he wanted to give up smoking, his longtime passion, and was soon down to only a few cigarettes a day, according to Manasha. He granted Manasha durable power of attorney for his heath decisions and, to keep himself busy during recovery, invited Bralove to their house to help him score black-and-white films and print out his computer artwork. Garcia’s dark sense of humor remained untouched: watching Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, still-creepy 1920s horror films about the undead, he looked at Bralove and said, “This is too close!”
But Garcia’s most restorative retreat from his workaday world was Hawaii, where he’d been introduced to diving by Vicki Jensen; the former Dead family member (and Hart ranch worker and resident) was now living on the Big Island, where she’d become a dive master. On his first dive Garcia had to take it slow; Jensen noticed his legs were nearly purple from lack of circulation, and he primarily stayed in one spot in the water and did 360 turns. He was so overweight that, on that and later dives, he had to be weighed down with thirty-two pounds (more than usual) to make sure he stayed below the surface. (In diving, weight makes people more buoyant.)
But in stark contrast to his increasingly sloth-like stage presence, both with the Dead and the Garcia Band, Garcia seemed to come alive in the water. “It was so wonderful to see him dive and see that sparkle again,” says Jensen. “It was, ‘Oh my God, he’s back.’ He was roly-poly, but his face glowed. The grapevine was saying the diving’s going to kill him. But I thought, ‘No, he might be around longer.’”
Garcia immersed himself in diving with the same intensity as when he was learning banjo or guitar decades before; in effect, it became his new addiction. He took dive classes, bought a diving suit, and had prescription lenses put into his mask in order to clearly see underwater. Within time he lost enough weight to need only an additional eighteen pounds attached to his gear, and over the years he went on over five hundred dives. “He could be the Jerry he used to be,” says Candelario, who accompanied Garcia on numerous trips to Hawaii. “To see Jerry in Kona was a totally different guy. He was happy and not on drugs and not having people hit on him. On that dive boat nobody bothered him.” When Manasha and Keelin joined him, he’d bring them seashells and return from dive trips with stories of seeing sea turtles and whales. Even then Garcia remained a risk taker. During one night-time dive Jensen saw him trying to befriend an eel, even though she’d warned him to be careful around them and not stick out his fingers. “I thought, ‘God, I don’t want to be responsible for him losing another finger!’” Jensen says. “But the thing accepted him.”
By the early nineties the members of the Dead weren’t seeing much of each other off the road; they were business partners but rarely socialized. “When they got home they shut each other out a little bit after so many years of working together,” says Trixie Garcia, who stayed in the Bay Area and went to community college after Garcia and Mountain Girl split up again post-Manasha (Mountain Girl returned to Oregon). “Typically Jerry would be pretty exhausted for a week after a tour. Almost catatonic. He wanted a simple existence. He didn’t want to go anywhere or have visitors. Very shuttered.” Hawaii helped to change that dynamic for the better; on various trips Garcia invited along Weir, Hunter, Hart, Kreutzmann, and crew members like Candelario and Parish. (Noticeably absent from pre-1990 trips was Mydland; no one ever recalls seeing him scuba dive with the band.)
After he’d left Manasha, an old romance renewed and new songs being crafted with his longtime friend and creative cohort, Garcia struck Meier as relatively happy, and his devotion to his new hobby was more than evident. Settling into the water as if it were his second home, he showed her how to slow down her breathing and not waste oxygen in the tank. Underwater, away from the pressures of the Dead, the two held hands and watched giant sea turtles swim by, and he told her not to be scared when sharks passed them. “Jerry
was very Buddha-like in that underwater world,” she says. “He was buoyant, free of his body. It was as if he belonged there.”
The tickets for Deer Creek announced a 7 p.m. start time, but as always, the devoted—and those who simply wanted to have a good time—began arriving early for parties outside the venue. Those who’d been to Deer Creek before and didn’t have tickets knew that one of the best spots to hear the band was at the bottom of a hill outside the venue, and several thousand people and their cars began congregating there.
From his car Chris Clair, wearing a tie-dye shirt and sporting a curly Afro, could see the prohibitive wooden-slat fence that separated them from the Dead and the inside of the Deer Creek Music Center. He could see the security guards driving around in golf carts keeping an eye on anyone who might want to run up the incline and into the venue. He could smell the pot in the air and hear Dead tapes blasting from sound systems in the thousands of cars parked in a semicircle around him.
Having gone to his first Dead show in 1989 when he was nineteen, Clair, then attending college at Indiana State, was part of the post-“Touch of Grey” wave of Deadheads. He loved Hunter’s lyrics, the sound of Garcia’s guitar, the sight and sound of two drummers, and, especially, Mydland’s voice and energy; he actually preferred Mydland’s singing to that of Garcia and Weir. Yet he was starting to feel that Dead concerts hadn’t been the same since Mydland’s death. At twenty-six, a veteran of roughly fifty shows, Clair now felt like a grizzled veteran compared to the nitrous-inhaling teenagers around him. “I was looking at the young kids and feeling they were ruining the party,” he says. “They were coming for the drugs and didn’t know much about the music. They were raining on the parade.” The music was straining his loyalty as well: the sound of Garcia’s weakened voice made him sad, as did the sight of Garcia not remembering lyrics. To Clair, Welnick was no Mydland. Clair began growing nostalgic for an earlier era: “I used to talk about the eighties,” he says, “the way other people talked about the sixties.”
