by David Browne
The perks of the job continued unabated: large homes, BMWs, home studios. On tour the Dead sometimes flew in a private Gulfstream III plane complete with a bar and made-to-order food. But to some friends or intimates Garcia would make his wishes known. Before his breakup with Meier he told her about a $125,000 payment he’d received from Ben & Jerry’s for use of the Cherry Garcia name. (Garcia hadn’t objected to the usage at first, done without his permission, but attorney Hal Kant convinced him to ask for a percentage of the sales.) Garcia mentioned how he’d love to quit the Dead and live off the ice-cream money; when she asked him why he didn’t pursue that option, he mentioned all his employees. (When she wondered why he didn’t simply get rid of the deadwood, he didn’t respond.) Garcia told Candelario he wanted to move to Italy, sign up for art classes, and only play with the Dead on weekends. “We were so excited,” says Candelario. “That was his dream. He wanted to put the Dead on sabbatical. There was plenty of money to be able to do that.”
The time had come to address not just the machinery of it all, but everything that had built up over the last three decades: the sometimes-overwhelming intensity (and devotion) of their fan base, the live-and-let-live philosophy within the band, and, equally important, the way it was affecting the music. At band meetings the thought of shuttering the unwieldy Dead operation and allowing Garcia to regain his health would be brought up. (Garcia canceled the second half of a Garcia Band show in Phoenix in the spring of 1994 after he felt sick backstage.) According to Lesh, a three-point plan was laid out after Garcia’s breakdown in 1992. If the Dead played only Bay Area shows for the rest of that year, they would cut back on salaries and equipment and “hopefully go back to full salaries in January,” according to an internal report. If the concerts didn’t resume at all until December, salaries would be cut in half in November, rather than by one-third (as in the first plan), before eventually returning to normal pay levels. In the third proposal, which assumed the band wouldn’t play at all for the rest of the year, salaries would still be cut, but expenses would be reined in by “laying off everyone except for those necessary to maintain office and operations until we regroup in 1993.”
That outline was the closest the Dead came to mapping out a specific plan of action. Otherwise, band and management would meet in the Dead’s conference room and grapple with if, when, and how to leave the road, at least temporarily. Garcia’s inconsistency onstage—weak performances followed almost immediately by strong ones—also confused matters. (At a show in Albany, New York, shortly before Deer Creek, his guitar had moments of ageless beauty even if Garcia himself—looking drawn and frail, his long white hair drooping forlornly to his shoulders—seemed prematurely aged.) “They talked about it, but they never made a decision to do it and figure out exactly how to do it,” says Mallonee. “Jerry felt he was on some kind of assembly line and needed more time at home, and the band knew it was hard on him. But they were stuck in this pattern. They’d laid people off in the seventies, but [the machine] wasn’t nearly as big then.” Recalling similar discussions, Scher says, “There were a couple of times—and, believe me, they were not serious confrontations—if the band said, ‘We’re not going out until you get yourself together,’ he just would have gone out with the Garcia Band. He said, ‘John, I play guitar every single day. I might as well get paid for it.’” Indeed, the JGB, still anchored by Garcia and Kahn but also by now featuring keyboardist Melvin Seals, was still a going concern up through the early months of 1995.
Ironically, one of the non-Garcia-related problems the band was increasingly facing—outsiders who crashed the shows and made the road less enticing—could have been their salvation. According to Weir in Rolling Stone in 2013, “The last year or two, we were actually faced with more than just the possibility that we’d have to knock off for a while and let things cool down. There was a lot of trouble we had to deal with, the crowd-control problems.” Far more so than the crowds in Pittsburgh and at other troubled cities in 1989, this new breed of concertgoer seemed less interested in the music and more attuned to the party—and more eager than ever to crash that party without paying. But again, canceling entire tours would, in their minds, be more difficult than coping with bad shows. Garcia would wonder aloud whether some of their employees, given how long they’d worked for the band without any other experience, would even be able to find work anywhere else.
Swanson saw the hugeness of the operation when she returned to their fold in the late eighties to work in the merchandise office. She’d never seen so many limos before, and the Dead office in San Rafael was now packed with employees. Swanson also noticed the band’s mixed feelings toward their success. “They could have called it at any time, but none of them did,” she says. “They could say it was all about the machine, and all of that was true. But fame is a sort of seductress, and they were seduced—staying in really nice places in New York City and taking limos back and forth. It was hard to walk away from that, and they treated everybody well. Once you do that, you can’t go back.”
In the meantime road work beckoned, as it always did. When driver Leon Day picked up Garcia for a soundcheck at the Silver Stadium in Vegas in May of 1995, he had to throw pebbles at his boss’s window to get his attention. Finally Garcia came down, looking bedraggled and tired. “Oh, come on, you’ll outlive us all,” Day joked. Garcia replied, “I won’t see the end of the year.”
The next group who clambered over the fence at Deer Creek didn’t simply want in; they wanted destruction. Instead of jumping over and heading toward the music, they settled atop the fence and began shaking the wood slats back and forth. As Clair and a friend watched in astonishment, the barricade began breaking down, splinters of wood flying through the air. “They were like monkeys, hollering,” Clair says. “You could hear people inside the stadium yelling, ‘Get off the fence!’ But the majority of the people outside were cheering them on, like, ‘Go, go!’” Although Clair heard security radioing for backup, it seemed shockingly clear that no one had a plan if the fence was attacked.
Suddenly but inevitably, a huge chunk of the barrier crashed down completely, and with it, the people in the parking lot transformed into a stampede, running up the hill and into the venue. Clair had no interest in jumping a fence, but now that all gate-crashing hell had broken loose, what was the harm in following everyone else in and catching the show? “I’m not proud of it,” he says. “I thought, ‘These kids who just came for the drugs and the scene got into my show in my hometown. That’s not fair. I should be in there too.’” Clair and his girlfriend looked at each other, didn’t say a word, and made a run for it.
Sergeant Scott Kirby of the Noblesville police department was among the first to arrive at Deer Creek. On the police radio he’d heard a few dozen cops at the venue desperately calling in for help: from what he could gather, they’d never seen any part of the fence dismantled before, and police were now outnumbered. When Kirby drove into the venue on a side road he saw the situation for himself and was stunned. He’d worked security at previous Dead shows and knew the community welcomed Deadheads, if only for the extra revenue they pumped into the economy. But tonight thousands of people were walking on the road, barely moving out of the way of his squad car. “It was like running a gauntlet,” he says. “They were everywhere. I had never seen that many people there before.” Kirby managed to reach a command post on one side of the venue, but even there rocks and bottles began bouncing off the police cars.
Kirby realized two different groups—the Deadheads who rarely caused problems and what he calls “the party group” looking for trouble—were vying for control, and the latter were winning. Every so often someone would burst out of the crowd and taunt the cops; when police advanced, the kid would run back into the crowd to cheers. Realizing they were hugely outnumbered—fifty to thousands—the police made a decision: they wouldn’t fight the mob. “It was, ‘We’ve lost the venue and we’re not going to get it back,’” Kirby says. “We needed to take another
tack.” Hearing the Dead, Kirby and the other police hoped they’d stop playing, giving the people less impetus to cross the road that separated the crowd from the cops. But the band thought otherwise and continued; Lesh later said the band thought the rioting would only worsen if the music ended.
Clair had almost reached the top of the hill when the tear gas canisters and pepper spray hit him. By then other police had arrived and begun following the mob up the embankment from the parking area. Clair had been running alongside his girlfriend, but now he grabbed her, did an about-face, and began scurrying back down, holding his breath the whole time. With the air thick with tear gas, he felt as if he were driving with a fogged-up windshield. Back down at the bottom the smoke wasn’t as thick, and Clair and his girlfriend could see people screaming, vomiting, and holding twisted ankles all around the hill. To Clair it felt like a war zone.
The band had just started into Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” when a very different wall of sound hit them. Because the crowd was still lit up by the lights, due to the death threat, the Dead could see what was happening in the distance, and the sight of thousands of fans smashing through a fence and rushing in their direction astonished even the most hardened road warriors among them. “I looked up, and they were pouring over the fence,” says Bralove. “Bodies were flying. And you realized that all precautions were gone. All this stuff based on trust between the band and the audience had this energy of paranoia at that moment. Now it’s like, ‘These are the people who could be bringing the guns.’ It was very freaky.” Lesh had a look of disgust, Weir of shock, and the song momentarily stopped. The band said nothing to the crowd and eventually resumed playing, a noticeable snarl heard in Weir’s delivery.
The Dead soldiered on, took a typical break between sets, and finished the show. Sears, walking in the crowd, was hit with bottles; with his walkie-talkie, he was mistaken for a cop. When the show was over the band’s exodus quickly began: women and children were sent out first through the crowd in vans—which struck one member of the organization as a strange type of decoy—while band members and crew clambered aboard a bus that took them out the back of the venue. Gazing out the windows, those inside could see fans lighting fires and banging on the bus, and the more zoned-out wandered in front of the moving bus like zombies. “People were so fucked up they were almost daring the bus to run them over,” says McNally. “It was eerie.” Adding to the weirdness, the driver opted for a side road to get to the freeway, and the bus ran into a ditch. After the crew were unable to pull it out, a tow truck eventually yanked the bus out of the hole, and the Dead finally were on their way back to their hotel.
Back at his car in the lot, Clair took a swig of vodka to clear his throat—it was the only liquid in sight—as angry fans around him, those who hadn’t jumped the fence, berated him: “You shouldn’t have done that—the show is over!” and “Thanks for ruining the party, asshole!” The crowd dispersed, and Clair made it back to the apartment he was sharing with roommates. The smell of the tear gas, or whatever it had been, lingered in his throat and eyes. When he told his Dead-hating roommates what had happened, they simply laughed, and Clair had trouble sleeping that night.
A second show at Deer Creek had been scheduled for the following night, but local police told Dead management that if problems arose again, officers would only be on duty to direct traffic, not defend the venue. Because no one wanted a repeat performance of the riot, the show was canceled, and everyone in the Dead camp was told to assemble in their hotel lobby at 1 p.m. to leave early for the next show in Missouri. In his job as spokesman, McNally drafted an open letter to fans from the band about what had happened and the consequences of gate-crashing. Titled “This Darkness Got to Give” and signed by each band member, the letter was more emphatic and angrier in tone than the messages they had sent to fans after the troubles of 1989. “At Deer Creek, we watched many of you cheer on and help a thousand fools kick down the fence and break into the show,” it read near the start. “We can’t play music and watch plywood flying around endangering people. . . . Don’t you get it? . . . A few thousand so-called Dead Heads ignore those simple rules and screw it up for you, us and everybody. We’ve never before had to cancel a show because of you. Think about it.” The letter went on to warn against vending and against coming to shows unless people had tickets: “This is real. This is first a music concert, not a free-for-all party. . . . Many of the people without tickets have no responsibility or obligation to our scene. They don’t give a shit. They act like idiots. They think it’s just a party to get as trashed as possible at.” It warned that allowing “bottle-throwing gate crashers” would only “end the touring life of the Grateful Dead. . . . A few more scenes like Sunday night, and we’ll quite simply be unable to play. The spirit of the Grateful Dead is at stake, and we’ll do what we have to do to protect it.”
Arriving at Deer Creek the next day fans saw the letter posted at the entrance. That same morning Kirby spotted a group of Deadheads at a local grocery store, stocking up on food for the show. When he told them it was off, they initially refused to believe him, then gathered around a car radio to hear the news for themselves. Some looked dejected; others began crying. Kirby didn’t quite understand it, but he’d never seen anything quite like it before and realized how vital to their lives those tours were.
Four shows remained—two at Riverport Stadium in Maryland Heights, Missouri, and two at Soldier Field in Chicago—and the Dead managed to slog through them. But catastrophes of varying scales dogged them. Before Deer Creek, lighting had struck three Deadheads in a parking lot at the show at Washington, DC. After Deer Creek 108 fans at a campground miles away from St. Louis were hurt when a porch they’d crowded onto collapsed. (One other died of an overdose in the same campground.) By the time the band reached Chicago for the last two shows, July 8 and 9, eleven TV crews had arrived to chronicle any further calamities, and John Scher flew in from New Jersey after hearing the Deer Creek news. Even though Garcia would sometimes flinch when Scher tried to talk with him about his smoking, Garcia admitted he knew his health was teetering and told Scher he was going to Hawaii after the tour to relax and recuperate. Compared to past conversations, Scher was pleasantly surprised and hopeful, even if the scene around the Dead still appeared shaky. “Things were pretty fractured at that point,” says Scher. “Everyone was a bit on edge and tired of what was going on, at, and for Jerry. It had all gotten out of hand.”
The final night in Chicago, July 9, didn’t feel right from the opening notes—and not only because, thirty years before, a Ouija board in the band’s rented house in Los Angeles had announced that day as some kind of finale. Starting with “Touch of Grey,” Garcia’s voice wavered in and out of key, and the harmonies were shaky. When Garcia peeled off a solo the tone was spry and fluid. Roaring out the “we will get by” refrain at the end of the song, the crowd seemed eager to voice its own positive outlook toward him and the Dead. The rest of the show was typically spotty, but at moments—especially on a version of “Lazy River Road”—Garcia’s voice settled into its deeper, lower register as if he were sinking into a comfortable old sofa. The slower, more elegiac songs were clearly speaking more to Garcia, made jarringly clear to Steve Marcus when he and some coworkers watched closely as their boss sang “So Many Roads,” with its desolate Hunter lyrics about easing one’s soul. “We were looking at each other like, ‘What’s going on with Jerry?’” Marcus says. “He was putting more into that song than we’d seen him do for years.”
Standing at the soundboard, Caryl Hart looked up at a screen broadcasting a close-up of Garcia’s drawn face and was saddened. Dan Ross, the Michigan Deadhead who’d attended 423 Dead concerts since 1988, did something he’d never done at any of the shows he’d seen: finding the experience of watching his beloved band in such a weakened state, he headed for the parking lot before it was over. “When I left,” he says, “I was thinking, ‘It’s time.’”
As the band ended the show and prepare
d for an encore, word filtered out through crew walkie-talkies of a double encore: “Black Muddy River” and then, at Lesh’s suggestion for a more upbeat ending to the show and tour, “Box of Rain.” For three decades the band had put itself through a seemingly nonstop cycle of ups and downs: rejuvenation followed by collapse or near-collapse, followed by another renewal. The pattern was as much a part of their story as their music, and it was only natural to assume that the pattern would continue, that Garcia would again rise up.
On the flight back to San Francisco Hart sat next to Garcia and watched as his band mate of twenty-eight years nodded off, falling into a deep sleep, accompanied as always by his thunderous snore. (That peculiarity could be useful: when he fell asleep in hotel rooms on the road it was a way for the organization to tell he wasn’t dead.) At one point in the flight Hart looked over and saw Garcia’s heart literally beating through his T-shirt. “I went, ‘Wow, have I ever seen that before?’” Hart says. “His brave heart was beating on, but that baby was really tired.” After such a difficult run of shows, everyone needed a rest, but no one more than Garcia.
The Dead reunited backstage (with Warren Haynes, second from right) at the Gramercy Theatre, New York, 2009.
PHOTO: BENJAMIN LOWY/GETTY IMAGES REPORTAGE
EPILOGUE
NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 30, 2009
On an inordinately chilly dawn-of-spring night they were back to doing what they’d perfected night after night, year after year, for over three decades. This time they were backstage at a midsized theater in midtown Manhattan. Bent over a coffee table, Lesh, now a lean sixty-nine-year-old, was jotting down a list of songs they’d be attempting that night. The first issue literally on the table was the length of the set; in a very un-Dead-like scenario, they’d only have an hour to play.
