“We stayed in touch for a while after that, and a few weeks later she called me to say that she was going for a job at the Grateful Dead ticket office in San Rafael that Spencer had arranged for her. She then called me to say that she had not taken the job because she smoked cigarettes and the office was smoke-free and suggested I try for the job. I went to the Dead office in San Rafael and was offered the job right away.”
When Bear walked by Sheilah Manning at the show at the Greek Theatre, she already knew who he was. After someone introduced them, they began talking. Moving quickly, as he always did when he was attracted to a woman, Bear invited her to attend a wedding with him in Sonoma County. After they had gone out to dinner together, Bear asked her if she wanted to visit him in Australia. Her response was “Not particularly.”
After assuring her that property now in fact had a toilet, Bear then sent Sheilah a round-trip ticket. “In Australia, I took acid with him fairly quickly. We were sharing a shed with another couple, and I stayed with Bear for a couple of months before heading back to California. I liked being there, but it was so different from what I was used to that I wasn’t sure I wanted to live there. I did really like being with Bear though. We enjoyed one another’s company, and I missed him when I went back to California.”
For the next four years, Bear and Sheilah Manning continued to see each other in Australia as well as whenever he would come to America to sell his wares on Grateful Dead tours. “Bear came back to the United States for a while, and then we went back to Australia together. Because we only had tourist visas, we had to leave the country every six months and come back to America. I still wasn’t sure I wanted to move permanently to Australia, but what was clear to both of us from my first visit on was that we wanted to be together.
“On one of our trips back to the United States, the Australian authorities noticed that we had been regularly going in and out of Australia for the past few years. As this was against regulations, they permanently canceled our tourist visas right then and there and told us that we would not be able to return until we had applied for residential status from outside of the country. For the next two years, we rented a house in Marin County while Bear applied for residential status as a ‘distinguished artist.’”
Since one of the primary criteria for the visa was that the applicant had to have been internationally recognized for outstanding achievements in the arts, Bear began obtaining what eventually amounted to thirty letters of support attesting to his artistic skills from people like Jackson Browne, Bill Graham, and Bob Weir.
The testimonial that probably did Bear the most good came from a most unlikely source. Having purchased a gold crocodile medallion as well as several other pieces of jewelry from Bear while touring America with the Rolling Stones, lead guitarist Keith Richards sent the Australian authorities a handwritten letter verifying that Bear was in fact an artist of international repute. Not surprisingly, he was granted official permission to reside permanently in Australia.
Sheilah, who had been looking after Phil and Jill Lesh’s children while Bear once again began growing weed in Marin County, finally decided to migrate with him to Australia. After they had both moved back to the property, Bear set about re-creating the kind of scene that no one had experienced since the long-lost days of the Acid Tests by throwing a gala party that soon became a local tradition.
Once a year by invitation only on the last Saturday in Capricorn (anywhere from December 22 to January 21), musicians from as far away as Brisbane and Sydney would come to Bear’s property to play continuously from eight thirty at night until four thirty in the morning for as many as a hundred people, all of whom were tripping on their host’s best-known product.
“The party itself was always absolutely awesome,” Bear recalled. “We never had anything that good back in the sixties and seventies. It was actually a lot more magical than almost all of the Dead shows between 1964 and 1980, and yet it was just a party in the bush. I always held it on Saturday night because that was the Acid Test night.
“I’d turn my gym into a performance area with a complete PA mounted in the trusses including monitors and a perfectly adjusted central cluster. I had microphones that cost two or three thousand dollars each, and you could go hundreds of meters from that building and the music would still sound clean and separate and perfect.”
Just as he had so often done while setting up the Grateful Dead’s equipment onstage before a show, Bear could still get so fixated on a task that he would become completely oblivious to everything else that was going on around him. As Sheilah would later say, “Redbird was getting married in a beautiful private resort and Bear wanted to do the sound for her wedding, and of course it had to be perfect. He brought all the speakers with him and the setup took him much longer than he thought it would.
“He was so hung up on trying to get it all exactly right that he was missing out on the party. Starfinder and I finally had to take him aside and remind him, ‘Bear, your daughter is getting married here. Stop adjusting the gear!’ He then managed to relax and enjoy the reception.”
On August 9, 1995, a month after the Grateful Dead had performed at Soldier Field in Chicago and eight days after his fifty-third birthday, Jerry Garcia died in a rehab facility in Forest Knolls in Marin County. Burdened by a heroin habit he could not kick, Garcia had been in poor health for years. The official cause of his death was listed as coronary artery disease that had been worsened by diabetes.
Although right from the start Bear’s closest relationship within the Dead was with Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia had always been the brilliant sun around which all the other planets in the Grateful Dead universe revolved. A Buddha-like figure who seemed to radiate his own special kind of light while also viewing the world around him with a distinct sense of wry amusement, Garcia’s personal life had always been chaotic. Through the power of his music as well as his personality, he had always been able to draw others into his orbit both onstage and off.
After people had called Bear in Australia to tell him that Garcia had died, Bear began reflecting on a relationship that had begun nearly thirty years earlier at the Muir Beach Acid Test on December 18, 1965. “What happened to Garcia started in 1975 or 1976. Someone gave him what he was told was opium to smoke and it wasn’t. It was ninety-five percent pure heroin base. So-called Persian. The thing about heroin when it’s smoked is that the material condenses in the lungs as a tar, but it’s soluble and the body slowly absorbs it so it’s like sticking a needle in your vein with a drip. A constant supply.
“I had conversations with him when he was off the stuff and he said, ‘Well, I really like what it does.’ And I said, ‘From the outside, you’re not a very interesting guy to be around when you’re using. You’re really unpleasant.’ He said, ‘Well, maybe so, but I like what it does.’ When he was using, his music was shit. He lost the jam and the jazz and just played the same old nonsense over and over again and it had no soul. He was like a machine. Like a tape of Garcia.
“I told him that whenever we saw one another but when he was using, he wouldn’t even talk to me. When he saw me coming, he would go the other way. He would turn in the hall and say, ‘I’m busy. Don’t come in here now.’ Or he would have someone bar his dressing-room door. When he was straight, his eyes would light up whenever he saw me and he would call me in to come sit down to talk.
“Back when we were all living in that house in LA and then later when the Dead were at 710 Ashbury, there were occasions when I would come across a little notebook Jerry had that was full of doodles. He would sit down and draw a whole page, these beautiful pen-and-ink figures of all the things he would see when he got high on acid. Beautifully detailed interlocking motifs that faded in and out of each other. Exquisite, like the finest artwork you ever saw. When most people come back down from a trip, they can’t draw what they had seen anymore. But he could. He could draw it all perfectly.
“I really loved the guy. He was a remarkable individual and he was very
important to me in a lot of different ways that are difficult to describe. He wasn’t a godlike figure to me. He was an infinitely curious, infinitely intelligent, infinitely creative brother and in lots of ways an inspiration. When I heard about his death, I wasn’t too terribly surprised at first. It didn’t really hit me as a heavy loss until later in the day when Sheilah put on ‘Stella Blue.’ That blew out all the stops and I had a good cry.”
Three months later, Bear and Sheilah Manning were married at Carrington Gardens in Atherton. A hundred people, Bear’s daughter Redbird among them, attended the ceremony. Many years later, Bear would say, “Sheilah is the most important thing that ever happened to me. We are truly soul mates. We have been in love together ever since we first met, and our love is as strong today as it was in the beginning. How many people can say that?” As always with Bear, the question itself contained the answer.
20
Old and in the Way
In May 2000, Bear got his first taste of his own mortality when a doctor informed him that he had “a blockage in the main artery feeding the lower part of my heart that dated from my teenage years but had never progressed. Even when I was in my twenties and studying ballet, I’d suffered terribly from angina without ever knowing what it was. I thought it was just tired muscles in my chest. Because of this gnarly blood vessel that had twisted around itself, I had a blockage of ninety percent.”
After seeking out “the best surgeon in Australia, the guy who taught this technique,” Bear went to Sydney to undergo double-bypass surgery. “They did an off-pump operation using my mammary artery, and they didn’t have to stop my heart. Because of my workout routine and my all-meat diet, I had such a well-developed athletic heart that the operation was beautifully successful. Both my endurance and fitness improved after the procedure, and I could still jump on a bicycle and beat Sheilah to the top of the hill.”
While someone else might have thought twice about continuing to take LSD at this point in life, Bear was not about to change his ways. “I now try to do it at least once a year. Maybe twice. Because I worry about losing access. I’d love to take it more often, but it takes me like three or four days to recover from it when I do, and my days are really full.”
On May 21, 2002, the Other Ones, a band composed of Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann, joined by Jimmy Herring on guitar, Jeff Chimenti on keyboards, and Rob Barraco on keyboards and vocals, performed at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin. In John Perry Barlow’s words, “Bear would store LSD in odd places. He hid some in a tree stump in Marin County that he dug up years later and recrystallized, and it worked in a really raw way.
“When the Dead had that supposed reunion concert at Alpine Valley, Mountain Girl and I were there, and Bear gave us some of this ancient acid and it was really gnarly. We had kind of forgotten what the real stuff was like. There was a certain point where Mountain Girl and I looked at one another and went, ‘Holy shit! Fuck! Bear has messed with us.’ We’d seen him take the same amount, and pretty soon we found him and he said, ‘Yeah, this stuff is a little rough.’”
Despite how completely dysfunctional they could so often be, the Grateful Dead in all their various incarnations had for years been the only real family that Bear had ever known. As he grew older and his time with the band on the road decreased, his son Starfinder and his daughter Redbird began to play a far more important role in his life than they ever had before. Which was not to say that he had ever been a conventional parent to any of his children.
Although Bear had never lived for long with either of his two ex-wives, he had reached out to his son Peter when the boy was a teenager and brought him to California, where they had lived together for a while. After having located his sixteen-year-old daughter Nina, Bear called to inform her that he was her real father. While his contact with both of them remained fairly limited, the same could not be said for Bear’s relationship with his son Starfinder and his daughter Redbird.
Because their mothers had such wildly differing personalities, Bear always found it far easier to deal with Melissa Cargill than Rhoney Gissen. In her memoir Owsley and Me: My LSD Family, cowritten with Tom Davis and published in 2012, Gissen paints what can only be described as a none-too-flattering portrait of Bear while noting, “It was hard for us to agree about anything. Neither of us was agreeable by nature.”
Although they were never married, Gissen had legally changed her last name to Stanley when she had entered dental school in New York City. Despite having never taken Bear to court for child support, Gissen Stanley did want her son to have an ongoing relationship with his father and so would send Starfinder to stay with Bear each summer while he was still living in California. Not surprisingly, the consequences of these annual visits were often not what she had expected.
After Starfinder’s plane had landed in San Francisco one summer, Gissen Stanley was called by someone from the airlines, who informed her that no one had come to the airport to pick up her young son. Knowing Bear, she explained that he would be there at some point. Late as always, Bear finally appeared.
During another visit, Gissen Stanley called Bear and asked to speak to their son, only to have him tell her that he had sent Starfinder to Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow in Laytonville, a two-and-half-hour drive from Marin County. Having sent Starfinder to be with his father, Gissen Stanley was furious, but she then learned that the boy was having the time of his life learning how to juggle and walk on a tightrope while also taking guitar lessons at the camp. One summer, Gissen Stanley called Bear only to learn that he and Starfinder were out on the road with the Grateful Dead at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado.
Gissen Stanley and Starfinder would also see Bear whenever he came to New York City. In the fall of 1982, Starfinder, who was then twelve years old, had just begun going to a new school, where he was being given so much homework that he could not stay out late at night. For this reason, Gissen Stanley arranged for them to meet Bear in the late afternoon at Gallaghers Steakhouse on West Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan.
After sitting down at a small table near the bar, in a restaurantthat was then still empty, the two of them waited patiently for Bear to arrive. Starfinder passed the time by drawing on a sketch pad, while his mother immersed herself in a book. Over the phone earlier in the day, she had “already read Bear the riot act” by saying, “If you’re late, I won’t wait. If you want to see your kid, be on time.” Bear’s completely inappropriate response to her was “If you have to wait for me, the fact that you have a kid will make you more attractive.”
Arriving only fifteen minutes late, which for him was a small miracle, Bear appeared wearing a pair of tight jeans, Tony Lama boots, “and a white T-shirt a size too small for his bulging pecs.” He was also accompanied by a skinny girl, who said she was an artist from New Orleans. When Bear saw the drawing that Starfinder was sketching, he complimented his son and began looking at all the other work he had done on the pad.
From his aluminum briefcase, Bear took out a lined velvet jeweler’s case, which he opened and placed on the table. Handing Gissen Stanley a jeweler’s loupe so she could examine the pieces of jewelry in the case in detail, Bear showed her “a Pegasus enameled in white with tiny rubies in the wings.” After Gissen Stanley told him that she loved the piece, Bear quoted her what he called “the family price” of $10,000. When Gissen Stanley expressed shock that he actually wanted her to buy the Pegasus, Bear’s blithe reply was “You’re a dentist. You can afford it.”
As soon as the blood-rare steak that Bear had ordered for dinner appeared, he began eating it without waiting for his girlfriend to be served. Informing Gissen Stanley and Starfinder that he was planning to leave for Australia in a month, Bear asked them both to come with him. If they did, Bear promised to help teach his son how to further his obvious artistic talent. Feeling threatened by his proposal, Gissen told him that she would think about it. A month later, Bear and his girlfriend left for Australia with
out either Gissen Stanley or Starfinder.
In 1985, when he was fifteen years old, Starfinder ran away from home. After Gissen Stanley had spent a frantic week not knowing where her son had gone while having terrible nightmares about him in the worst situations imaginable, Starfinder called to say that his father had sent him an airplane ticket to California. The two of them were now living together in the Panama Hotel in San Rafael while Bear waited for his return visa to Australia to be renewed.
After having boarded the next plane to San Francisco, Gissen Stanley burst into tears when she saw her son. To her, the boy looked ill. His neck was swollen and he could barely speak above a whisper. The next day, Starfinder returned with his mother to New York, where a pediatrician diagnosed him as suffering from severe mononucleosis. Rather than filling the doctor’s prescription for steroids to treat the illness, Gissen Stanley followed Bear’s advice and fed her son calves’ liver cooked rare.
After having kept her son in bed for five days, she drove Starfinder to school so he could take the PSAT. She then put him back to bed and fed him yet more liver. A week later, he was fully recovered. When Gissen Stanley learned that her son had achieved “a perfect score” on the test, she was elated. Starfinder then graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and began working as a veterinarian.
Shortly after having celebrated his seventy-second birthday, Bear portrayed his role as a father: “Both Starfinder and Redbird are now exactly half my age. He is three weeks older than her, and their mothers Rhoney and Melissa are still good friends and raised them as brother and sister. I participated as much as I could. In the end, it all worked out fine for them, but it was never easy for any of us.
Bear Page 15
