Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

Next thing there’s a fire

  The trouble with love

  Is its other face

  You just want the cup

  You don’t want the race

  No, you don’t want the race . . .

  The most interesting song on the album was a Hunter-Garcia-Kahn composition called “Midnight Getaway,” which painted a vivid noirish picture of a man lying in bed and listening to his lover slip out of the house for a secret rendezvous. There are few rhymed lines, just bursts of near-prose:

  Heard you stop and turn back once

  Then I thought I heard you sigh

  Or maybe it was the breeze

  Heard the jingle of your keys

  Then you stumbled and cursed the cat

  That was sleeping on the stairs under the stars

  Garcia played acoustic guitar on the song, which closed with a nicely executed, open-ended jamming coda. The JGB never performed the song live.

  The album’s remaining tunes were a rather turgid reading of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (which was even deadlier in a JGB second set at one-thirty in the morning in some sweaty club) and Hunter and Kahn’s “Leave the Little Girl Alone.” All in all, a rather erratic collection that was also a commercial failure.

  “That was not our greatest work,” Kahn said in 1996. “That was a bad time. Right after that record I moved to L.A. for two or three years. The scene had become such a drag. I couldn’t stand it anymore, with Scully and Alan Trist and that whole thing up at the house. I couldn’t stand Jerry’s thing with Rock, so I needed to get away for a while. The band stayed in existence; we played some gigs; not a helluva lot. I got a place in Westwood, but I hated it. I was hoping to work down there and get into my own thing again doing sessions, but it just never happened. I never met anybody interesting; I never ran into anybody. I was happy to move back up here when I did. But it was something I had to do at the time; I wouldn’t undo it.

  “I had to get my own self together; that was part of it,” he continued. “First of all, I didn’t make nearly enough money to be carrying on with Rock and Jerry at their level. When I moved to L.A. there was no way I could keep it going so I just stopped doing [heroin]. I was sick for a while and then I was better, and that lasted a long time—two or three years.”

  In late August 1982, at a Dead concert at the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, Oregon—Prankster country—Garcia introduced two new songs he’d written with Hunter. “West L.A. Fadeaway” was a musical and lyrical departure for Hunter and Garcia. In form it was a fairly straight blues shuffle, but the main character was a creation far removed from Hunter’s or Garcia’s worlds: a small-time mob hustler on the lam. The song always had a dark, creepy edge to it that was heightened by Garcia’s ripping fuzztoned solo in midsong. “Keep Your Day Job” was musically reminiscent of both “Deal” and “U.S. Blues,” the rare Garcia song that sounded a bit like a retread. Hunter’s lyrics were undeniably clever, but the message of the song—“Keep your day job until your night job pays”—was not one most perennially free-spirited Deadheads wanted to hear.

  “Day Job” was one of the few Hunter-Garcia songs to be actively disliked by a large segment of Deadheads. It was played fairly often as an encore from the summer of 1982 until the end of 1986, and it always sent many fans scrambling for the exits. Why? My conjecture is that the lyrics essentially endorsed attitudes of the straight world, a perspective that clashed with the sort of mythic universe that was constructed song by song over the course of a typical Dead show. “Day Job” was, to use the hippie colloquialism, a “buzz crusher.” In his book of lyrics, Hunter wrote, “This song was dropped from the Grateful Dead repertoire at the request of fans. Seriously.”

  On that same summer tour Garcia revived three songs that hadn’t been played in a few years: “Stagger Lee” (missing since 1979), “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” (’78) and, most exciting of all, “Crazy Fingers” (absent since 1976), which magically appeared during a second set at the Ventura Fairgrounds.

  On the East Coast tour that fall Garcia introduced another new song, “Touch of Grey,” which had been intended for a Hunter solo album that Garcia, Hunter and John Kahn did some preliminary work on in the fall of 1981. (Hunter wrote the first draft of the lyrics in September 1980.) That project never got off the ground, but Garcia liked the lyrics enough that he asked Hunter if he could reset them to his own music. Garcia’s music was bright and tuneful, with a steady percolating rhythm that made the song a cousin to romps like “Bertha” and “Scarlet Begonias.” Hunter once said that the lyrics were an expression of his own “intense alienation” from a Grateful Dead scene riddled with personal and financial problems, but what is communicated is a message about perseverance in the face of the negativity that bombards us from all sides every day. Hunter wants to view the cup of life as half full:

  I see you got your list out

  Say your piece and get out

  Yes, I get the gist of it

  But it’s all right

  Sorry that you feel that way

  The only thing there is to say

  Every silver lining’s got a

  Touch of grey

  I will get by / I will get by

  I will get by / I will survive

  Coming from most writers, this sort of sentiment might be viewed as passive resignation, but everything about the music and the way Garcia sang “Touch of Grey,” with Weir and Brent joining in on the chorus, made it feel like an anthem of triumph. And then on the final chorus it switched from “I will get by / I will survive” to “We will get by / We will survive.” That took the song from being a seemingly personal declaration of faith and commitment from Garcia as he hit forty—“Oh well, a touch of grey / Kind of suits you anyway / That was all I had to say / It’s all right”—to something much more inclusive, as if the “we” were all Deadheads, or all humanity.

  Though Garcia had said at midyear that the next Grateful Dead album would be out by Christmas 1982, the group never even got together to record any of their new material. In fact, it would be five years before the Dead made another record. The group’s year-end shows at the Oakland Auditorium were uneven and only occasionally inspired, though the band’s third set New Year’s Eve was a keeper. Rhythm and blues legend Etta James fronted the Dead—whom she labeled “the baddest blues band in the world”—for a set of tunes that included three songs Pigpen used to sing: “Love Light,” “Hard to Handle” and “Midnight Hour.”

  Nineteen eighty-three was an odd year for the Grateful Dead. Garcia’s drug addiction made him more insular with each passing month. When he was off the road, he almost never left Hepburn Heights. Band meetings were few and far between and usually had to take place at Garcia’s house, because he no longer came to the Dead office at all. His onstage demeanor gradually changed, too. Whereas in 1980 and 1981 Garcia had still smiled quite a bit while he played and he seemed physically aware of his surroundings—interacting with the other bandmembers and occasionally acknowledging the dancing throngs in front of him—by the middle of 1983 he barely moved onstage at all; he played with his head down staring forward at nothing in particular. He rarely looked at his bandmates and he completely ignored the audience. He looked terribly unhealthy—he had put on quite a bit of weight and his skin was a pallid grayish-white, similar to the color becoming dominant in his beard and hair. Sets got a little shorter, and in the pre-“drums” portion of the second set Garcia often bolted from the stage without jamming after the song that led into Mickey and Billy’s segment. The sets at Garcia Band shows, particularly the ones in Bay Area clubs, shortened dramatically, usually consisting of just five songs. Following a shaky set of Grateful Dead shows in Ventura in late July, a brief Garcia Band tour was canceled because of an infected insect bite on one of Garcia’s feet; when he returned to the stage in late August with the Dead he was perkier than he had been in a while, though still pasty-skinned and overweight. At gigs he almost never left his dressing room, and he raced through hot
el lobbies to avoid having to stop and interact with Deadheads. When he did stop, though, he was unfailingly courteous to his fans.

  “In the ’80s, things sort of closed up around Jerry,” says Susan Crutcher. “You couldn’t just go backstage and say hi. It got a lot darker, and as someone who hadn’t really kept up that much, I didn’t really know why. So I basically stopped going. Then, if I did go, I’d hang out with Healy, who I always liked a lot.” But Healy, too, got swept up in the rising tide of opiate use.

  “There was a time in the ’80s when Jerry was really reclusive, and I was pretty worried about him,” Tiff Garcia says. “I’d go see him and he’d be in this big house, downstairs in this small, dark room, and he’d never leave. He had everything he wanted in there—a stereo, headphones, a guitar—but he would never leave that fuckin’ room. People would come visit him and they wouldn’t go down there; they’d be afraid to go down there because they’d feel like they were invading his privacy. I almost felt guilty because he was talkin’ to me, ’cause all these other people wanted to talk to him and he wouldn’t talk to anybody. I felt like saying, ’Jer, c’mon, these people have been part of your life for a long time. Respond to them somehow. Give ’em some feedback. Yell at ’em or something!’ He wasn’t lookin’ good at all.”

  “There was definitely a wall around Jerry,” remembers his old friend Laird Grant, “but I could walk through it with no questions. There were times when it was difficult, especially at shows, but on the day-to-day, I had no problem going to my friend’s door and walking in without even having to knock. Naturally, when I saw what was going on with him, I was concerned. I knew what it was; I held his hand a couple of times, and we talked about it: ‘What the fuck are you doin’, man? Didn’t you read the story about Billie Holiday?’ And like everyone who’s in it, he’d say, ‘Man, I can take it or leave it. At this point I’m takin’ it.’ It’s like what Mark Twain said about quitting smoking: ‘Hell yeah, I can quit smoking. I’ve done it thousands of times—every time I put out a cigar.’”

  Despite Garcia’s plainly visible malaise, the Dead played better in 1983 than they had in 1982. In fact, they improved each year through the first half of the ’80s, as if Garcia’s deteriorating physical condition almost didn’t matter. In the early part of the year, to the delight of Deadheads everywhere, he reintroduced “Help on the Way” and “Slipknot” after not having played them since the fall of 1977. The band’s late-summer tour, which hit Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Texas, was loaded with strong and energetic shows. And at Madison Square Garden in the fall, Garcia brought back “Saint Stephen” after a five-year absence, in an arrangement closer to the late-’60s version than the late-’70s variant. (Alas, the song was played only three times that fall before going into dry dock again, this time permanently.) Garcia also tried out an unusual new cover tune: “Revolution,” by John Lennon. Predictably, Garcia opted to sing the slow version of the song (“Revolution #1” off the Beatles’ “White Album”), but could never quite learn all the words—he’d simply mutter his way through most of the verses until he got to the part of the song that clearly appealed to him, the refrain: “You know it’s gonna be all right.”

  By 1984 there was widespread concern in the Grateful Dead organization over Garcia’s worsening physical condition. He had ballooned to close to three hundred pounds, and it wasn’t just a fat stomach, though he certainly had that. His legs and ankles became swollen from edema. In Living with the Dead, Rock Scully talks about how during this period, Garcia almost never slept in his bed—he’d just grab a couple of hours here and there sitting in his chair smoking Persian and base cocaine and watching television or doing nothing. His cigarette ashes burned holes in all the furniture in Hepburn Heights, and even his trademark black T-shirts had burn holes in them. He rarely showered—as his greasy hair, black elbows and strong body odor showed—and his diet consisted mostly of ice cream and other junk food. Scully’s account on this subject is probably spot-on—he witnessed it and was in his own degraded state at the time.

  Len Dell’Amico recalls, “In ’84 I started hearing some rumors that I found hard to believe, because they didn’t correspond to what I knew in ’81. I was disturbed and in denial, and one day I realized I really cared a lot about this guy and I had to do something. It was one of those things where I didn’t feel like I had any choice. Coincidentally, he had Sue Stephens send me some tapes from the ’84 Greek shows, and I thought, ‘This is great!’ So I went to see him in Pennsylvania on a JGB tour and then I saw him in Long Island with the Dead in mid- to late ’84. And the rumors were true. And I was scared to death. It was a turning point for me. Now what—you wanted to find out, now you know, now what are you going do? Among other symptoms, he had some edema. When the toxins in your body reach a certain point, your tissue begins to swell. You’ll see that in an ICU ward—usually you’ve got weeks or, if you’re lucky, months.

  “My analysis was that his problem essentially was boredom and that he had this amazing mind that had evolved in an unprecedented way, plus a passivity bred by being a rock star: ‘Everything comes to me so I don’t have to decide what I’m going to do. The people in the family make demands and I fulfill demands, like a Papa— We need the JGB tour. We need this . . . We need money.’ And there’s no point at all in telling someone superintelligent that if they do continue with the substance abuse they’re going to die. They know that. So I started proposing activities: ‘Why don’t we do a Garcia Band video?’ he said, ‘Okay, but first we’ll do the Grateful Dead, for political reasons.’ I said fine, and that started the seven-year haul that produced the So Far video, two pay-per-view events, a bunch of network appearances, the rain forest benefit, the AIDS benefit . . . And we never got to do the Garcia Band project.”

  Others confronted Garcia more directly about his addiction, but he was always dismissive, sometimes even hostilely so. There were also attempts to rid Garcia’s inner circle of people who were deemed bad influences. In late 1983, Alan Trist, who was a serious cocaine abuser, was let go. Rock Scully was forced into rehab the following year, and even after kicking heroin he became a pariah in the Dead scene. Though he claims he was given the option of coming back to work for the band, he drifted off into other things and never returned. Unfortunately, the departures of Trist and Scully didn’t have much of an impact on Garcia’s drug use. (Trist was rehired in 1994 to help with the administration of Ice Nine Publishing, a job he holds to this day.)

  In 1992 Jerry’s daughter Annabelle remembered 1983–84 as being particularly painful for her: “It got to the point where he’d call me up on the phone in Oregon and nod off while he was on the phone. There was nothing I could do except wait till he woke up and then finish the conversation. That kind of stuff is naturally really disturbing. It was a long period of time my father wasn’t himself at all. I’d go visit him and nothing would happen—I’d just sit there and watch him burn holes in things with cigarettes and fall asleep and then wake up, do some more drugs, and then fall asleep and wake up and do some more. It was really awful; really super-awful.

  “When he was doing those drugs, there wasn’t much I could do,” Annabelle continued. “I felt really young and real small and he was so grumpy at those times anyway, I was half-scared of him a lot of the time—not scared for my life, but of a presence. I realized that most of the reason he was doing it was because he was so damn bored. He had his music, but that was about it. He couldn’t go outside anymore because so many people bugged him.

  “But the biggest problem I had with that whole time is everybody else in the band and the roadies and all the women would say, ‘Well, why don’t you say something?’ And I’d say, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want to sever any bonds with my father. I’m afraid that if I say anything to him, he won’t want to see me anymore.’ That was my big fear at thirteen or fourteen years old.

  “That whole period of time has a real dreamlike quality and a real strange, surreal quality for
me, and for everybody else, too. Because everybody felt they were walking on eggshells around him. And there were always creepy people coming on tour and making sure my dad was going to live through the tour. It was the epitome of the rock star’s mistake—the worst you can do and still not die.”

  Mountain Girl, who at the time was living in Oregon “in relative poverty,” says she received panicky phone calls about Jerry: “The bandmembers would call me and say, ‘God, M.G., you’ve gotta do something.’ So I’d drive down there and try to do something and it was just extremely difficult because he didn’t want to do anything about it. He was really strung out for a long time.”

  “I was pretty out there,” Garcia said in the late ’80s, “but I was still mainly a maintenance junkie. I never enjoyed sitting around smoking freebase. If I didn’t have heroin and freebase, I didn’t want freebase. For me, I liked the heroin much better, but I liked to be able to stay awake to enjoy it. So the heroin and freebase thing was about right for me, but I never got that high. I just developed a huge habit; but it was still a maintenance habit.

  “The drugs I was taking were escape drugs. It was like a long vacation. It worked good; I mean, I got my ‘vacation.’

  “For a long time there I sort of lost heart. ‘I don’t know if I want to do this. I don’t know what I want.’ It was that thing: ‘Fuck. Is this right? Is this good? Is this the thing I should be doing?’ For a long time—about eight years—I felt like I wanted to get away from everything somehow. But I didn’t want to just stop playing, or have the Grateful Dead stop because that’s what I wanted to do. And I didn’t even know consciously that that’s what I wanted. I don’t think I really realized it until lately [late ’80s]. Looking back on it I see certain patterns.

  “Part of my nature is deeply pessimistic. And it’s something I have to fight with a lot. Part of me is overconfident, too, so it’s these two polar opposites.”