So Many Roads

by David Browne

  Clair wasn’t the only one to notice that a younger, rowdier, or more inclined-to-excess crowd was starting to take over Dead shows as the nineties dragged on. In 1992 Steve Marcus started joining the band on the road; counterfeiting had become such a problem that Marcus set up “Ticket Verification” tables to differentiate the genuine stubs from the ones supposedly forged by the mob in New Jersey. At Rich Stadium in the Buffalo suburbs that June he was confronted with an equally worrisome problem. As he examined tickets outside the venue Marcus saw a large group heading in his direction “like a pack of wild animals,” he says. After running around the parking lot, they made straight for one of the entry gates, smashing it open. Grabbing his walkie-talkie, Marcus reported to security inside and heard the chilling response: “Get your table and get the hell inside.”

  Moments like that were still largely the exception: more common was the amusing sight at a show in Maine, where a state trooper holding a police manual was hurriedly flipping through it to learn whether or not he should arrest a fan for having nitrous. But the aggressive tactics of 1989 made a comeback at the start of the Dead’s summer 1995 tour at the Franklin Valley Field in Highgate, Vermont. A show at the same venue the previous year had gone off without problems, but tonight promoter Jim Koplik heard kids were trying to pull down the chain-link fence around the venue. Grabbing a few security guards, Koplik raced to the scene and saw tens of thousands of kids on the other side of the metal links, pushing to get in. “It shocked us,” he says. “It was definitely not Deadheads.” He’d thought he and his crew could hold on to the fence and keep it in place, but realizing they were overwhelmed, Koplik ran in the other direction. To avoid the riot and spare the fences, organizers had no choice but to open the gates and allow thirty thousand crashers—about twice the number who could fit into a typical indoor arena—in for free. As they rushed in, Gary Lambert, then working for the Dead’s merchandising office, saw portable toilets knocked over with people still inside.

  For now, at Deek Creek in Indiana, the calm held. When “Dire Wolf” finished, the Dead dove into a cover of Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” followed by Robbie Robertson’s exquisite “Broken Arrow,” sung by Lesh. Then, as Clair and his friends at his car watched, a handful of people in the parking area suddenly ran up the steep hill. Two of them stopped, cupped their hands together, and hoisted the other three up over the fence. “Wow, they got over the fence,” Clair heard one of his friends say. Another group followed, hoisting the remaining two who’d been left behind. And then another group of ten, and another group of twenty after that. Five or six waves of fans jumped over, all without damaging the fence. Security guards began shouting, “Get off the hill!” But for now there wasn’t much more they could do.

  Inevitably Garcia had to leave Hawaii and return to the mainland, and the Dead road machine cranked up again. The band’s schedule was set in particularly hardened concrete: tours each spring, summer, and fall, with spring shows in the Carolinas and up through New York; summer stadium shows, then the multiple fall runs at arenas in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Specific dates, even venues, were reserved as much as a year in advance. The labor paid off: in 1993, according to the concert-industry outlet Pollstar, the band was the top-earning touring act, pulling in over $45 million, and the following year the number jumped to $52 million. Tickets were almost always sold out in advance, thanks to a mailing list that had started in the early seventies with 26,000 names and now including more than 200,000. After Garcia’s collapse in 1992 additional shows had to be added the following year to compensate for the loss in revenue. The band had had to deal with another crippling blow in October 1991, when Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash. “That was a big deal,” says Trixie Garcia. “He was a mentor, friend, and uncle figure.”

  As the band well knew, their success came with a Faustian bargain. Grateful Dead Productions now employed thirty people (including the band), some who’d worked for the Dead for decades. Another fifteen worked at Grateful Dead Merchandising, and GDTS (Grateful Dead Ticket Sales) was home to another few dozen. In 1973 total monthly salaries for the band were $60,769. By 1995 the band’s monthly overhead, including salaries, rent, and insurance, could top $750,000 when the Dead toured stadiums (less when they were doing indoor shed or arena tours). “We were no longer just a band,” Hart says. “We had a payroll and families. We weren’t getting that much money; we were spreading it around. We couldn’t stop. We were a snake eating its tail. There was no way for us to take a rest. We were locked into tour, tour, tour. I’m sure I wanted to take a break, but there were no options.” Garcia had a high overhead himself, which included monthly $20,833 payments to Mountain Girl from their divorce. The couple had amicably met behind closed doors at the office of lawyer David Hellman in 1993. When Hellman questioned the number Mountain Girl proposed, Garcia said he was fine with it.

  A degree of midlife stability had settled over the band. By now Lesh and his wife, Jill, had two sons, Brian and Grahame. In 1989 Hart had struck up a relationship with Caryl Ohrbach, a San Francisco public defender who’d previously been an environmental lawyer, and the two married soon after. Weir was in a relationship with Natascha Muenter, whom he’d met at a Dead show years before but didn’t hook up with until later. As they settled into their late forties and midfifties, some health issues dogged them. Realizing it was time to leave Front Street in favor of more professional digs, the Dead decided to buy a former Coca-Cola building on Bel Marin Keys Boulevard in Novato. At over thirty thousand square feet, the space was huge and could accommodate a recording studio more advanced than the one at Front Street. According to McNally, the band members were required to take physicals for insurance on the property, and what came back were diagnoses of high cholesterol, hepatitis, and other ailments. Polygram, which owned part of Scher’s Metropolitan company, took out a death-and-disability policy on the Dead. The paperwork didn’t stem from overt concerns about the Dead’s well-being; corporate policy dictated that key executives as well as recording artists who had influence over the business had to be insured. In this case only Garcia and Weir were included because someone assumed that the primary lead singers were the key to the Dead’s success.

  Far more troubling was the moment during one of Garcia’s Hawaii trips when Vicki Jensen found Garcia talking about hard drugs again. “He said something like, ‘There were some really good things about it,’” she recalls. “And I thought, ‘Don’t delude yourself, man.’” But he had, and Manasha soon learned that Garcia had fallen back into old habits. She never saw him use heroin or other opiates, and he was never “visibly addled,” she says. But in 1992, she says, Garcia’s doctor, Randy Baker, informed her that Garcia was “inhaling small quantities of opiates” and that he was a “maintenance user,” a term she’d never heard before. Garcia’s drug use and how it would affect Keelin, then five years old, became Manasha’s foremost worry. “It was my concern that Jerry was getting into a pattern that would not end well,” she says, and for a few days she considered leaving him. “Honey, if you go, I’ll find you and bring you back!” she says he told her, which made her decide to stay. “We talked about the situation, his health, and the future,” she says. “We shared a very intimate loving evening together.” Then a few nights later came Garcia’s hand-delivered note.

  Garcia and Manasha Matheson Garcia had at least one more conversation. Right before Easter 1993, she says, Garcia called her from the road, saying, “I miss you” and asking whether they could reunite for the holiday. “Although I loved him deeply, I still had unresolved feelings about seeing him right away, given the circumstances of our separation,” she says. “I said, ‘I’d like to wait’ and explained I’d made Easter weekend plans already with a friend who was visiting from the East Coast.” Garcia replied, “I’m going to keep trying.” It would be her last conversation with him. A week later Manasha called him back, and according to her, a woman answered the phone, said “very impolite words” to her, and hun
g up on her.

  Garcia’s reunion with Meier proved short lived. She noticed how snappish he could be and, after speaking with his doctor, realized he was an addict. “I remember thinking about it and naïvely saying to myself, ‘Well, we’ll take care of that! That won’t get in the way!’” she recalls. “Words like ‘the golden era’ were being thrown around. Now, do you say no to that?” When she talked about it with Garcia, Meier learned he wasn’t particularly open to such discussions, and their relationship ended almost immediately after. (“He would say, ‘I’m fine—I’m fine,’” recalls photographer Herb Greene, who brought up the topic with Garcia during this period. “He didn’t like people talking to him about that stuff.”) In another jarring twist in years filled with them, Garcia also told Meier he’d run into another ex-flame, Deborah Koons, and couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  During a band rehearsal at Front Street in December 1993 Garcia pulled McNally aside and said he needed some help. As everyone soon discovered, he and Koons had not only reunited but were going to marry. The news came as a surprise to nearly everyone, especially members of Garcia’s own family. “We were all excited,” says Trixie about her father’s reunion with Meier. “‘He’s going to marry his high school sweetheart! How sweet is that?’ And all of a sudden he’s with Deborah Koons. And we were like, ‘Who’s that?’” A good chunk of the Dead community dutifully attended the couple’s wedding in Sausalito on Valentine’s Day, 1994. (Garcia didn’t make it to his bachelor party and therefore missed strippers and nitrous tanks.) When a bearded, long-haired guy in a car with a Dead sticker drove by the church during rehearsals, McNally ran out and begged him not to tell anyone, and the man apparently complied; the wedding wasn’t besieged with Deadheads.

  Even newly remarried, Garcia remained everyone’s concern, especially when his stage performances during 1994 shows grew increasingly erratic and slothful. “The nineties was my least favorite period, because of Jerry’s declining health,” says Hart. “He was missing so many damn notes.” Hart says he soon learned one of the reasons why Garcia was making those mistakes. Garcia told him that due to clogged arteries, he could no longer feel his guitar pick, which was starting to freak him out. Garcia was also grappling with carpal tunnel syndrome and diabetes. At a show at Giants Stadium, most likely in 1994, Bralove watched as the band started “Crazy Fingers” and Garcia began playing the opening riff again and again, as if in an addled loop. “Jerry couldn’t get out of the beginning triplets,” he says. “He got stuck in this groove. I remember thinking, ‘Did he have a stroke?’ I thought, ‘Oh, it could happen this way, where he just keels over in front of forty thousand people.’ There were other times when he was taking solos when I thought, ‘What’s going on? What’s he doing?’ Maybe it was one fret off, so he was a half-step off the whole solo. He was going through some routine—the physiology of it—but not actually listening.” Bralove would look over and see pained expressions on band members’ faces, especially Lesh. Fans began writing into the Dead office complaining that Garcia was forgetting lyrics. Ever willing to invest in new technology, the Dead began using in-ear monitors that allowed them to press a foot switch and speak to one another without the audience overhearing. Garcia’s impatience now had a vocal outlet: “The chord is A minor,” he was once heard saying in the middle of a song.

  Around the country promoters heard the ominous rumors and speculation about Garcia’s health. Shows would often be preceded by a series of unsettling phone calls. “I’d ask, ‘How’s Jerry doing?’” recalls Atlanta promoter Alex Cooley. “They’d say, ‘It’s gonna go—he’s going to play. Just do it.’ There was no show without Jerry, so we relied on people’s words. We were dealing with millions of dollars, and people were giving me verbal okays over the phone. It was scary.” Koplik would tell his team, “Don’t worry about it—it’s going to happen or not happen. You don’t have control over it.” It was about all anyone in his position could say. In one of Garcia’s guitar cases his old friend Laird Grant left a poignant note: “Hey Jerry, please take care of yourself out there. Your friend, Laird.”

  The new contract they’d signed with Arista in 1989 demanded an eventual album, and by late 1994 the time had finally come to assemble one. For any other band the scenario would have been promising. They chose the Site, a studio tucked away in the postcard-ready hills of Marin County, and arrived with nine new songs, each road tested. “Lazy River Road,” the Hunter and Garcia song inspired by Garcia’s fleeting reunion with Meier, was one of them, but their two other contributions were even deeper and more soulful. Worked out in the pool house of Hunter’s home, “Days Between” felt utterly innovative for them: a slow, meditative crawl of a song, comprised of four verses of fourteen lines each, its lyrics autumnal and reflective. The same late-in-life ambience ran through “So Many Roads,” which continued the majestic feel of “Black Muddy River” but with a new coat of world weariness.

  As with Built to Last, the other songs were a grab bag of approaches and sensibilities. “Way to Go Home,” a collaboration between Welnick, Hunter, and Bralove, locked into and sounded most like the Dead when Garcia’s guitar burst out into a solo. (The same went for Welnick’s other song, “Samba in the Rain,” which attempted to weld the rhythms in its title to the Dead’s trademark groove.) The blues—thicker, growlier, and more dramatic—also inhabited Weir’s “Eternity,” cowritten with Rob Wasserman and blues legend Willie Dixon. The song was more musically grounded than Weir’s other contribution, “Easy Answers,” which continued the tangled, tempo-shifting feel of “Victim or the Crime” and other consciously adventurous later-period Weir songs. For the first time since “Box of Rain” Hunter and Lesh were about to commit one of their collaborations to record; atypically pop and breezy, especially for Lesh, “Wave to the Wind” struck fans as either a lovely diversion or one of the corniest songs the Dead had ever written. Lesh also brought along his more complex, solo-written “Childhood’s End,” its title but not subject borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi novel.

  First in November 1994 and again three months later the band settled into the Site to transform the motley collection of songs into a record. But in an unfortunate reminder of the Fantasy sessions of a decade before, little usable work emerged from it. The Site’s isolated setting was amenable to recording, and Welnick’s acoustic piano never sounded better. But Garcia would often show up late, carting along egg creams and egg salad sandwiches with extra mayonnaise, despite his health issues. “Jerry was pretty fucking smooth,” says Bralove. “He would come in, apologize, have an excuse. He was a charmer. But he was in rough shape.” When the work began, whether due to drug use, his diabetes, or other ailments associated with his smoking, Garcia wasn’t always up to the task. The band would run through the songs, but according to Lesh, Garcia played only a total of “a few minutes” during the entire run at the studio. Eventually the band decided to record tracks without him and overdub his guitar parts later, yet even that plan was never realized.

  Garcia had appeared tired and increasingly disoriented during shows in 1994, but as the band entered its thirtieth year in 1995, his descent became more obvious. Visiting her father at his home in Tiburon during the early months of the year (he and Deborah Koons maintained separate residences), Trixie let herself in and found Garcia lying face down on the bed. When she playfully tickled his feet to wake him up, he leapt up, startled. “He was passed out in the middle of the day on his bed, and he was probably high,” she says, “but I didn’t put it together.” Around the same time, Garcia agreed to be interviewed for a history project, Silicon Valley: 100 Year Renaissance, produced and directed by John McLaughlin, the Palo Alto native who’d taken drum lessons from Kreutzmann long before. Garcia was friendly and chatty, but with his creased, sagging face, he looked at least twenty years older than he was, and every fifteen to twenty minutes he’d ask for a break to go into the pantry to, as he put it, look for his car keys. Given the rumors around Garcia and his past issues,
it was easy enough for the film crew to assume he was taking one substance or another during those breaks. Lesh grew deeply concerned when, right before the summer 1995 tour, Koons fired Garcia’s assistants, Vince and Gloria Di Biase, who saw to his day-to-day needs; the last thing anyone in the Dead world wanted was Garcia left to his own devices.

  Meanwhile band and family grappled with what was ailing Garcia. He clearly wasn’t healthy and was coping with lung and heart issues. Was he happy? Was his live-for-the-moment fatalism coming into play? What could anyone do about it? Kreutzmann would later admit that Garcia had been worn down by the Dead’s predictable touring regimen. “Jerry had gotten kind of bored with the Grateful Dead, and it was sort of like a marriage that had maybe gone on too long,” Kreutzmann told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I think a lot of it, I hate to say, was really a financial obligation. He needed to earn the money for some things.” To Allan Arkush, Garcia referred to touring as “homework, a chore—it was like doing a term paper every night.” (Speaking of his 1992 setback, Manasha says, “I personally think what was being demanded from Jerry in terms of working, touring, et cetera, contributed to his need to self-medicate.”)