Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  By mid-1981, though, Garcia’s coke and heroin problem was escalating again. In the winter, when he had been working on the Dead Ahead video and helping put together the first of two double-LP sets from the Warfield and Radio City series—the excellent acoustic album Reckoning—Garcia seemed to be in fine form. But in Living with the Dead Rock Scully writes that by spring Garcia was reluctant to tour Europe with the Dead because he was concerned about being able to score his beloved Persian on the road. As it turned out, this was not a problem—if we’re to believe Scully, friends of the Who’s Pete Townshend made sure Garcia (and Scully) were taken care of in that regard. Though he was clearly strung out, Garcia still managed to play fairly well on the tour, which was just a week long—four nights at the Rainbow Theatre in London and a televised concert with the Who in Essen, Germany, where Townshend even joined in on a few numbers. Garcia also managed to be his usual, cheerful self for the obligatory round of interviews with the British rock ’n’ roll press.

  Writer David Gans and I interviewed Garcia twice in the first half of 1981—at the end of April and during the second week of June—and he seemed incredibly charming, vibrant and together. Of course this impression bore no relation to what Garcia’s drug use was at the time, but it indicates that at the very least he was capable of appearing “normal,” which for him meant being funny, curious, engaging, self-effacing and very articulate about both the philosophy behind and the structural mechanics of the Dead’s music.

  Appearances aside, there’s no question that Garcia’s drug use drove a wedge between him and the rest of the band during this period. He and Scully were in their own world to an extent, and about the only time Garcia would get together with the other bandmembers was at gigs. In 1980 and ’81 the Dead didn’t do any recording at all; in fact, these were the first years since the Dead started that the band introduced no new original songs. That made it a rough time for Robert Hunter, too, who more or less lost his writing partner to a Persian haze. The two were not particularly close during this period, when Garcia was spending nearly all his time getting high in his dark room in the downstairs of the Hepburn Heights house, or touring with the Dead or the many incarnations of the Jerry Garcia Band, where John Kahn was always a waiting co-dependent.

  The Garcia Band went through numerous permutations between the fall of 1979 (after the dissolution of Reconstruction) and the fall of 1982—seven groups of varying membership and musical quality, with John Kahn the only constant in all of them. From the fall of 1979 until the fall of 1980 Garcia’s main musical foil in the band was a talented keyboardist-singer named Ozzie Ahlers, who had worked with Van Morrison, Jesse Colin Young, Robert Hunter and others through the years. In December 1980 he was replaced by two keyboardists who were polar opposites. Electric pianist Jimmy Warren was, to put it delicately, sympathetic to Kahn’s and Garcia’s offstage behavior, while organist Melvin Seals, who would play in the Jerry Garcia Band for the next fourteen years, was a straitlaced man of the church. Most of the material the Garcia Band played between 1979 and 1982 had been in the repertoire for several years, and the quality of the shows varied widely. On the road, where much was expected of them, they usually played fairly well. In the Bay Area, sets and entire shows often dragged and seemed unfocused. Rock Scully suggests that the main reason the Garcia Band played as often as it did during this period was to support Scully’s, Kahn’s and Garcia’s drug habits—which could cost several hundred dollars a day. But in truth they performed many fine shows then, and one of the 1981 lineups, with the two keyboardists, drummer Daoud Shaar (another Van Morrison band alumnus) and singers Essra Mohawk and Liz Stires, played a number of exceptional dates. Still, even John Kahn admitted that “things got kind of out of control around then. Jimmy Warren was just sort of a friend. It didn’t work out and it went on too long; it wasn’t one of our better bands.”

  Kahn believed that most people had a mistaken impression of his and Garcia’s drug use: “It wasn’t a way for us to hang out; it was quite the opposite. It was an antisocial thing. It’s not something you do with a lot of people; it’s sort of private. In fact, that’s the thing that kept me and Jerry apart more than anything. It wasn’t a shared thing; it was always real private. ‘That’s your stash and this is my stash.’ He’d be uncomfortable because he wouldn’t do it while I was around, because he’d think he’d have to give me some or something like that. It wasn’t a great time for anybody. It’s just something that happened.”

  Like Garcia, Kahn also believed that the Persian didn’t affect the music much. “Not in any obvious way, like the tempos didn’t get slower or anything,” he said. “The breaks got longer and we started later. I really don’t believe that drugs were as important a thing as it’s probably perceived. Everything would have been the same. We would have had a band. We would have played the same kind of music. Our relationship didn’t have to do with that [drugs] and our band didn’t have to do with that. Without Scully I don’t think it would have had any influence at all on anything. He was the one who propagated it on a larger scale. You have a manager saying, ‘They won’t go on until they have a snort,’ not musicians saying, ‘We won’t go on until we get a snort.’ That’s the truth. So I don’t think it’s as important as it’s played up to be. But peripheral things are: what it did to certain relationships and things it brought out in people—how people would fold when things got tough; how people would cop out on you and act like they weren’t your friend because it got too difficult for them. But everything would have happened regardless of whether the drugs existed. We still would have gone to Front Street all those nights and we would have made all those records.”

  In Grateful Dead circles there was tremendous concern over Garcia’s drug habit, but who was in a position to say anything to him? Others were strung out on junk and cocaine, too, and some of those who weren’t had other problems—Phil Lesh once described this period of his life as “the Heineken years.” Plus there was a sort of unwritten rule in the Grateful Dead that you didn’t tell other people in the organization how to behave. Part of the reason the Dead had succeeded artistically through the years was that the bandmembers had been able to follow their creative muses to their heart’s content, and if that involved drugs, so be it.

  “Classically, the band has had a laissez-faire attitude in terms of what anybody wants to do,” Garcia said. “If somebody wants to drink or take drugs, as long as it doesn’t seriously affect everybody else or affect the music, we can sort of let it go. We’ve all had our excursions.”

  However, Steve Brown notes, “I think the noninterference idea was a cop-out in a lot of ways, to be able to not have to deal with stuff that maybe needed dealing with. That’s because they were an alternative, risk-taking kind of an entity, they were allowed to get away with this stuff—‘We’re not going to tell people to do anything.’ That whole philosophy came from Garcia as far as I can tell. I think he was the one who instilled it into the Grateful Dead body as the ethic of you don’t tell how people how to behave, because he was the guy who didn’t want to be told how to behave. That kind of ruled for a long time, and then it was too late by the time people started mentioning stuff.”

  And even if people in the band and organization weren’t talking directly to Garcia about his problem in the early ’80s, they were talking among themselves and to each other behind his back. “People were always talkin’ to me about Jerry’s dope problem,” says Richard Loren. “And I was as much enmeshed in it as Steve Parish was. He and I were driving him to places to get clean; to doctors who could help. We saw the man suffer through withdrawal.”

  Was Garcia embarrassed by his addiction? “Not at all,” Loren says. “He didn’t have fear and he didn’t have guilt. He was never a guilt-ridden person and he wasn’t intimidated by what other people thought. He knew what he was doing when he was doing it, and he was smart enough to know about it. But eventually, of course, you start needing a whole lot of it, and it gets to be a monkey on your back. I
t takes pleasure away, too, and you’re in pain, like if you have the DTs.”

  The great majority of Deadheads were blissfully unaware of Garcia’s drug problems during this period. Some heard ugly rumors but discounted them—“Not Jerry!”—while others were simply out of the information loop. The extended Grateful Dead family was so numerous that there were always plenty of people who did hear the dirt about Garcia and others, and they in turn spread the gossip freely. But by and large the news didn’t filter out to the rank-and-file Deadheads, who continued to show up in droves at every Dead and Garcia Band appearance and dance deliriously the way fans had since 1965.

  And the truth is the shows themselves were the best thing about the early ’80s Dead scene. In California in 1981 and ’82, the Dead began playing at some midsized outdoor venues that were positively magical and made every show feel special. The 9,000-seat Greek Theater in Berkeley was a wonderfully intimate cement amphitheater surrounded by eucalyptus trees, where everyone could see each other and the band played in front of bas-relief Greek columns (and for the first couple of years there, beautiful tie-dyed hangings made by Courtney Pollack, famous for his dyes since the early days of the art form). Frost Amphitheater, on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, was a genteel oasis of terraced grass enclosed by a perimeter of California trees and shrubs—incredibly beautiful and serene. It comfortably accommodated 9,000 fans, who would park and party in adjoining eucalyptus groves. And down the California coast an hour north of Los Angeles was Ventura’s dirt-floored rodeo stadium/fairgrounds, just a few hundred yards from the blue Pacific Ocean.

  Between shows in those places and venues like Red Rocks, Oakland Auditorium (site of the Dead’s New Year’s bashes from 1979 to 1982), sumptuous Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, Compton Terrace in Arizona and the large but beloved Madison Square Garden, Deadheads were able to enjoy the band in some exceptional environments. No wonder so many more Deadheads hit the road to follow the band in this era.

  In the midst of all this endless touring and craziness, and in some quarters, consternation, Garcia unexpectedly married Mountain Girl in a brief ceremony backstage at the Oakland Coliseum on New Year’s Eve 1981–82. According to M.G.’s account of the event in Robert Greenfield’s Dark Star, she and the kids had gone down to the Bay Area from Oregon around Christmas, and as soon as he she saw Jerry, “I knew that he was playing with dangerous stuff,” she said. “I realized that he could die at any minute. I said, ‘Look, you know you’re probably going to croak here or something bad might happen. I would feel better if we were married.’

  “We still loved each other very much, but by now it was through this incredible series of impediments. I had taken the high moral ground and couldn’t come back because I couldn’t do what he was doing. And he couldn’t step out of what he was doing because by now he was really into it.”

  Though Mountain Girl said she had fantasies about the two of them getting back together and living as a family with the kids, Jerry quickly put that notion to rest, saying he still wanted to live apart. There were tax reasons that made getting married advantageous to both Jerry and M.G., and that’s one reason it was important for the wedding to take place that New Year’s Eve, before 1981 became 1982. So right after the Dead had played a set backing Joan Baez (who was involved with Mickey Hart at the time), Jerry and M.G. were married in Jerry’s dressing room by a Buddhist monk friend, who performed the ceremony in Tibetan as the couple’s daughters, Steve Parish and a few others looked on. Shortly after the ceremony, Garcia strapped on his electric guitar and went out onstage for the first of three Dead sets that night. One has to wonder if Garcia’s second song choice that set was meant to be serious, ironic or funny—it was “Cold Rain and Snow,” which opens with the lines “I married me a wife / She’s been trouble all my life / Run me out in the cold rain and snow.” Whatever was going through Garcia’s head that night, he played a magnificent show, even pulling out “Dark Star” for the first time in three years to open the Dead’s last set sometime after two in the morning.

  M.G. stayed for a few days at Hepburn Heights after the New Year’s shows but, as she told Greenfield, “Things were so strange and uncomfortable that I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I remember jumping up and saying, ‘Oh, it’s time to go. I’ve got to go,’ and I was thinking, ‘Poor Jerry, he has built this for himself and it’s not very nice.’ Back we went to Oregon. Jerry would come through on tour or we would go down there to see him, but we didn’t see very much of him at all. Jerry and I got married but it didn’t change a goddamn thing. It didn’t make a damned bit of difference.”

  * * *

  From a strictly musical standpoint, 1982 started out quite promisingly with a pair of fine benefit shows (for eleven mainly local nonprofit groups) in mid-February at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, followed by concerts in Los Angeles and San Diego. The first three weeks of April they played more strong shows on an East Coast swing that took them to two Southern states that were proving to be rabid Dead Country—North Carolina and Virginia—and some of their oldest proven markets—Philadelphia, Long Island, northern New York state, Hartford, Providence and Baltimore. Halfway through the tour Garcia and Weir appeared on Late Night with David Letterman for the first time. They performed “Deep Elem Blues” and “The Monkey and the Engineer” on acoustic guitars and chatted amiably, if nervously, with Letterman.

  That spring of 1982 also marks the beginning of Garcia and John Kahn playing shows as an acoustic duet. Actually, the first acoustic show, which took place at the Capitol Theater on a night between two Dead shows, featured Garcia alone—the only time since his folk days that he had played without supporting musicians. And he hated the experience. He looked nervous and was somewhat sheepish in both his singing and playing.

  John Scher, who had persuaded Garcia to play solo shows, remembers, “He went out there and he played a short first set and he came off just freaked and pissed at me, which was unusual—I could count on one hand the times he was even annoyed with me. I followed him into his dressing room and he was just fuming. I said, ‘Aw, come on. It’s not so bad.’ But he just did not enjoy it; he didn’t like playing alone. By the next night we had John Kahn out there.”

  It was in fact eleven days between the first night at the Capitol and the next acoustic shows, at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, two nights after the end of the Dead’s tour. With Kahn backing him on stand-up bass, Garcia was much more confident, though frankly he never looked completely at ease playing in an acoustic duo. For Deadheads it was a chance to hear a different repertoire, one that included many of the same cover tunes and Dead songs that he’d sung during the 1980 acoustic sets, as well as a few numbers from the Garcia Band songbook—“Gomorrah,” “Reuben and Cherise,” Dylan’s “Simple Twist of Fate” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”—and rarities like Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home,” which he hadn’t sung since the early ’70s. Because he hadn’t really kept up his acoustic guitar chops, Garcia’s playing could be a little clunky and imprecise. But when he and Kahn were clicking and the music flowed, the acoustic sets were quite powerful, especially on ballads, where the spare arrangements took on a haunting, fragile intimacy.

  Back on the West Coast, the Jerry Garcia Band, with the two keyboardists, two women backup singers and Bill Kreutzmann on drums, played sporadic gigs in Northern California and Oregon in the spring. Then, beginning in mid-June, they went on a three-show Northeast tour with Bob Weir’s solo band, Bobby and the Midnites, followed by more East Coast dates and then eleven shows by Garcia and Kahn acoustic that took the duo from Washington, D.C., out to Boulder, Colorado. It did not escape the notice of those who were concerned about Garcia’s and Kahn’s drug use that these acoustic concerts netted the musicians much more money than regular JGB gigs, where the night’s take was always divided evenly by what was then a septet; all the better to feed their increasing habits. In fact, some suggested that was the main reason they play
ed the acoustic concerts. Many of the sets they played were very short—at least by Grateful Dead standards—but in general Deadheads seemed to enjoy seeing Garcia’s playing in this stripped-down context.

  Garcia and Kahn also put together a Garcia solo album over the course of spring and summer. Run for the Roses (released in early October 1982) was a rather uneven collection of material. Two songs were leftovers from the 1974 sessions for Garcia’s second album, with new lead vocals added: Clyde McPhatter’s “Without Love” and one of the must puzzling covers Garcia ever attempted, a reggae version of the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There.” There were two new potent Hunter-Garcia songs. In the bluesy “Valerie,” which chugged along in a loping cadence somewhat similar to “Sugaree,” Garcia’s character is desperate to prove his love for a hard-hearted two-timing gal who won’t give him any satisfaction. In one verse, at Valerie’s command, “I went downtown with my pocketknife / Cut your other man but I spared his life.” In another, “I shot my dog ’cause he growled at you / Valerie, won’t you be good to me.” Tragic stuff, but Garcia’s delivery usually brought out the humor in Hunter’s hapless, whipped hero. It’s one of the neglected gems of their partnership.

  The title cut, “Run for the Roses,” was a common set-ender for the JGB in the second half of 1982, a bouncy melodic number in the tradition of “Bertha.” It’s littered with several different metaphors, bits of advice, observations—a typically playful and sage Hunter hodgepodge that could be autobiographical or directed at Garcia or aimed squarely at the audience:

  Reach for the rose

  Get caught on the briar

  You’re warming to love