In another late-’80s interview Garcia noted, “Drug use is kind of a cul-de-sac. It’s one of those places you turn with your problems, and pretty soon all your problems have become that one problem. Then it’s just you and the drugs.
“I was never an overdose kind of junkie. I’ve never enjoyed the extremes of getting high. . . . For me, it was the thing of just getting pleasantly comfortable and grooving at that level. But of course that level doesn’t stay the same. It requires larger and larger amounts of drugs. So after a few years of that, pretty soon you’ve taken a lot of fucking drugs and you’re not experiencing much. It’s like a black hole, really.”
But life went on apace, and the summer ’84 Grateful Dead tour contained a number of powerful shows. Weir reintroduced the band’s late-’60s (non-disco) arrangement of “Dancing in the Streets” and sang “Love Light” for only the second time since Pigpen’s death. “Dark Star” made a rare appearance at the Greek Theater in July—played as the encore, as slides of space scenes were projected on screens behind the band. At a few shows, Phil gamely attempted to sing Paul McCartney’s raucous “White Album” novelty “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” with hilarious results. And at Red Rocks, Brent and Garcia sang Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” for the first time, and the words sounded as if they could’ve been written for Garcia:
Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a tune
Something to make us all happy
Do anything, take us out of this gloom
Sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy
You are the one who can make us all glad
But doing that you break down in tears
Please don’t be sad if it was a straight life you had
We wouldn’t have known you all these years
Former road manager Jon McIntire had been away from the Dead scene for several years and was living in St. Louis when a friend persuaded him to go see the band’s show in Kansas City that July. He hadn’t spoken to anyone in the organization for more than a year, but reports of Garcia’s condition had made it to him. McIntire said he found the concert “very depressing. I felt there was a great deal more energy coming from the audience to the stage than there was from the stage to the audience. I didn’t think there was anything new going on. It was wonderful seeing my old friends again, but the actual concert was disturbing to me.”
The next night at dinner, Weir asked McIntire if he would come back to work for the band because Danny Rifkin was planning to take some time off to be with his wife and the baby they were expecting. McIntire was nervous about getting involved, as the band seemed to be in such desperate straits, but a couple of months later, after talking to Phil, longtime road-crew chief Ram Rod, Rifkin and Hunter—all of whom said that things seemed to be taking a turn for the better—he agreed to return as road manager, beginning with the fall ’84 tour. Once McIntire got out on road again, he quickly glimpsed the Dead’s dark underbelly, and like everyone else was heartsick about Garcia’s condition.
In November 1984 Garcia and Kahn and opening act Robert Hunter played a ten-show acoustic tour of the East Coast. According to Hunter, “The Grateful Dead were on the financial skids in ’84 and things were not looking like they were going to get better. No new album for many years; [Jerry] wasn’t interested in writing. This tour looked like a moneymaker with no appreciable overhead—just Jerry, John and me traveling by bus with a skeleton crew.” But ten days before the tour began, Hunter had been part of a meeting where Garcia’s drug problem was discussed at length, and the specter of doing an intervention on him—in which the band and roadies would confront him and insist that he get treatment—was raised. “Hard to know what to do. Hard to know what not to do,” Hunter wrote in his journal at the time. “Hard, hard, hard. Classic conundrum. Personal paradox.”
Hunter said he undertook the acoustic tour with Kahn and Garcia “with misgivings, persuaded by many who thought I might be the only one able to get through to Jerry. I wasn’t so optimistic. Phil called the morning I left and wished me ‘Godspeed’ in the mission.”
Alas, near the end of the tour Hunter wrote that he’d had almost no contact with Garcia during the entire two weeks and that “the humanitarian side of this venture is a total failure. He goes in his compartment at one end of the bus journey and stays there till the destination. At least I’ve seen with my own eyes what has been told me.
“There is no cry for help here—just a powerful individual doing what he damn well pleases. The loyalties he commands are staggering. He is, of course, more than a person—he’s an industry.”
Even Garcia’s most ardent admirers acknowledged that the tour was uneven at best, with the moments of leaden and uninspired playing outweighing the good parts at several shows. John Kahn said he talked to Garcia about his drug use during this period, “and he’d say, ‘Leave me alone. I’m fine.’ But I had to say it anyway. People said that to me at one time or another, and I said ‘Fuck you’ to them, too. He felt people should stay out of his business. And I agree.”
By January 1985 the die was cast, and the band decided to proceed with the intervention. In Garcia’s rosy telling of the event later, “everybody came over to my house and said, ‘Hey Garcia, you got to cool it; you’re starting to scare us.’” Hunter’s recollection, in his on-line journal in 1996, is probably closer to the truth: “We went en masse to Jerry’s house. Knocked. He opened the door and said, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ We refused. Into the lion’s den we boldly entered, steeled to the deed to be done. He listened, anger slowly relenting. . . .” Garcia was told that he had to choose between drugs and the band and that if he didn’t get help the group would disband or go on without him. They tried to persuade him to enter a program immediately, but Garcia managed to convince them that he would go in for treatment in a few days.
“It was really organized and everybody participated,” Mountain Girl recalls. “We got twelve people to go over there. A lot of people didn’t want to do it, but we talked them into it. I remember how awful it was, and how he ducked it. We were trying to get him into this program over at Lake Merritt [in Oakland], because that seemed like the most humane program in the Bay Area; I checked them all out. I had spent four or five days making all these calls, using a phony name, finding out about different treatment programs and what they cost and all that.”
On January 18, a few days after the intervention and the day before he had said he was going to enter a rehab program, Garcia was busted for possession of heroin and cocaine in Golden Gate Park. He was sitting in his BMW near Metson Lake, off Middle Drive, adjacent to the Polo Fields, smoking some Persian, when a policeman happened by and saw that the registration tags on the car had expired. When he approached the car he smelled something burning, and he found Garcia holding “a piece of tin foil paper which had a brown sticky appearing substance on it,” the officer wrote in his report. Garcia quickly shoved the foil under his seat. There were more pieces of tin foil with burned brown residue on them sitting in an open briefcase, along with twenty-three paper bindles—some empty, some containing small amounts of heroin and cocaine—assorted drug paraphernalia, lighters and, for a reason we’ll probably never know, a seven of hearts playing card.
Garcia was arrested and briefly jailed in a downtown San Francisco precinct. A few hours later, bail of $7,300 was paid for him and he was released on his own recognizance. Of course the story was immediately all over the local television news, and a photo of Garcia being arraigned appeared prominently in the next day’s paper.
Many Deadheads had been aware of Garcia’s drug addiction for some time, but many thousands had no idea Garcia was a junkie, and the distressing news of the bust was the first they heard of it. “I think after the bust he got really embarrassed and he suddenly realized, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not invisible. People are looking at me,’” M.G. says.
“I’m the sort of person,” Garcia said later, “that will just keep going along until something stops me. For me and drugs, the bus
t helped. It reminded me how vulnerable you are when you’re drug dependent. It caught my attention. It was like, ‘Oh, right—illegal.’ And of all the things I don’t want to do, spending time in jail is one of those things I least want to do. It was as if this was telling me it was time to start doing something different.”
CHAPTER 18
If Mercy’s in Business, I Wish It for You
month to the day after his bust, Garcia was back onstage with the Grateful Dead at the Oakland Auditorium (newly refurbished and renamed the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center) for three shows celebrating the Chinese New Year. The bust was Topic A in pre-show conversations among Deadheads, and there was a palpable tension in the air. Some of that tension evaporated the minute Garcia came onstage the first night of the series. He looked the best he had in some time—perhaps ten pounds lighter—and in a move that was noticed by every veteran Dead-watcher on the scene, Garcia had replaced his trademark black T-shirt with a more festive reddish-maroon one (immediately giving rise to TROUBLE AHEAD, JERRY IN RED bumper stickers, playing off a line in “Casey Jones”). The shows were raggedly played, but Deadheads took delight in the obvious changes in Garcia’s stage demeanor. Rather than standing stock-still and staring blankly ahead as he had at most 1984 shows, he bopped around and even broke into grins from time to time. The most cathartic moment of the three-show run came during the second night when, during a second set-opening version of “Truckin’,” the band came to the lines “Busted down on Bourbon Street / Set up like a bowling pin . . .” With every eye in the arena fixed squarely on Garcia, the crowd screamed out the lyrics. Garcia smiled slightly and the crowd roared, then he backpedaled to his amp, shook his head and grinned broadly after the line “They just won’t let you be . . . oh, no.”
Although he was still addicted to heroin and also using cocaine regularly, Garcia had begun what would be a fifteen-month incremental process of stepping away from those drugs completely. Rather than going into a drug rehabilitation program, Garcia was able to convince the judge in his case, Raymond Reynolds, that he would seek the treatment he needed independently. Additionally, he agreed to attend a Narcotics Anonymous–like drug diversion program just a couple of blocks from his Hepburn Heights house, and to perform a benefit concert for the Haight-Ashbury Food Project.
The changes came slowly at first—sometimes he’d even duck out of his diversion sessions during a break to go home and get high. But by the spring Garcia had made a commitment to change his lifestyle, aided considerably by his housemate, Nora Sage. Nora had worked as a cook in the household since the early ’80s, when she lived down the street. She moved in following Rock Scully’s departure in 1983 and acted as a de facto housekeeper, too, all the while attending law school in San Francisco. In fact, the day he was busted, Garcia had driven Nora to school, which was highly unusual for him, and then gone on to the park and gotten busted. In the weeks after the bust, Nora, in consultation with Jerry, conceived of an unorthodox method of weaning him from drugs that would be less radical than enrolling in a live-in facility.
The first stage was to get Garcia to openly admit he was a junkie and thus stop the elaborate subterfuge and sneaking around to score dope. Part of the household budget was set aside for his drug habit, but it was up to Nora to ration the drugs, cutting Garcia’s usage little by little over a period of about a year. She also tried to get Jerry involved in as many activities as she could to keep him busy. She encouraged him to get into painting for the first time since his art school days, and she also bought him various model kits, because he loved doing projects with his hands. During this time Garcia built seven remote-control cars, which he would take down to a nearby park and race around. He also put together a number of model guns from kits, including an Uzi submachine gun. (Garcia’s love of guns is something he rarely talked about, but at various times from the mid-’60s on he owned a number of different kinds of pistols, including a James Bond–style Beretta.)
“If it wasn’t for Nora Sage,” Tiff Garcia says, “Jerry probably would have been dead a lot earlier. She really tried to take care of him. She turned him back on to art, got him an airbrush outfit and various things, and tried to get him to eat a little healthier. And yeah, she got dope for him, too, if he needed it, but she was really the one who was most responsible for his turnaround.”
Not everyone in the Dead scene was thrilled with Nora or the stepping-down program, which one skeptical member of the Dead organization termed “a junkie’s solution, where Jerry had all the power and could do whatever he wanted.” There were those who felt Nora was excessively controlling and made too many decisions about who could have access to Garcia—always an issue, since so many people wanted or needed to talk to him. Others correctly noted that without some professional guidance and the aid of therapists who could help Garcia understand the root causes of his craving for drugs, he was a poor candidate for long-term addiction recovery. After all, Jerry was someone who was famous for giving in to his appetites—what would change that behavior in the long run?
Nevertheless, even skeptics had to be impressed by Garcia’s gradual transformation from an emotionally closed-off physical wreck, content to while away the hours getting high and watching TV, to someone who enjoyed hanging out with people again and working on different musical projects.
In the spring of 1985 there was still no sign that a new album was forthcoming from the Grateful Dead. The band’s one attempt in the studio since the making of Go to Heaven in 1979 had come during the darkest days of Garcia’s addiction in ’84. It had produced nothing but anxiety over Garcia’s utter lack of interest in the sessions, and, in the case of the drummers, over Bob Weir’s using a drum machine as a click track in hopes of establishing surer rhythms for his songs. There was some talk about trying to delay recording and waiting until Arista threw up their hands and released the Dead from their contract, thus enabling them to sign with a new company for more money. But Clive Davis was always patient and encouraged the group to take their time and record when they were ready to.
Instead of working on the new album, the band decided to make a long-form video (many songs as opposed to just one) with Len Dell’Amico once again directing, aided closely by Garcia. Shortly after a very spirited and successful East Coast tour at the end of March and the beginning of April (marred only by nagging vocal trouble for Garcia caused by a persistent case of his old nemesis, bronchitis), the band secretly gathered in the intimate, 2,000-seat Marin County Veterans Auditorium in San Rafael for three long days of videotaping and multitrack recording without an audience. The group had played superb shows there in 1983 and ’84, so it was a familiar room, and, miraculously, word about the sessions didn’t leak out to the public. Dell’Amico had the band set up as if they were playing a gig, except with Weir facing back toward the drummers, and Garcia and Brent turned more toward each other. A full video crew shot the group from many different angles, while John Cutler, who had been part of the Dead’s sound crew for a number of years, captured the performances in a mobile recording truck parked outside the auditorium. Over the course of three days the Dead ran through most of their recent unrecorded songs, as well as classic Dead tunes like “Terrapin,” “Playing in the Band,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Cassidy,” “Comes a Time” and “Jack Straw.” There were oddities like “Hi-Heel Sneakers” and Booker T.’s “Green Onions,” and chilling versions of a new Dylan cover tune Garcia had played once on the spring tour, “She Belongs to Me.” Because there was no audience, the band could start and stop songs when they pleased and play multiple versions of the same song if they wanted. They taped for three days in April and three days in November, hoping to get enough good performances to provide a skeleton frame for the video; from the outset the intention was to combine the Marin Vets footage with other, more conceptual video approaches.
“There was a year of all these different possibilities being explored,” Dell’Amico says. “For example, we wrote an entire script with dialogue, sc
enes and action involving animated creatures. And an outgrowth of that was an idea of having Jer do the artwork, so we pursued that a bit. He did a lot of drawings, we went to an effects house and animated them. Then, one day, the band decided they didn’t like that approach anymore. For me it was like, ‘Oh, okay. Maybe something else,’” Dell’Amico said with an amused shrug.
Garcia was involved in another prospective film project around the same time. Several years earlier he, Richard Loren and John Kahn had acquired the movie rights to Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, and through much of 1984 Garcia had been in close contact with Tom Davis as the writer/comedian prepared the first draft of a script. According to Garcia, The Sirens of Titan “occurred to me as a real cogent cinematic experience in my mind’s eye.” By early 1985, Gary Gutierrez, the skilled animator who had worked on the Grateful Dead movie, was preparing detailed storyboards for the film-to-be, which would be directed by Garcia.
“If I’m going to make movies,” Jerry said in March 1985, “I’m going to make them on my terms. I’m not going to become a filmmaker as a career. I’ll do it like Jean Cocteau—do a couple of tasty movies and that’s it. I don’t know if I could do somebody else’s ideas, for one thing. I don’t know if I’d want to. And making a film is a hassle. You have to live with an idea for an awful long time, which means the idea has to have great power. You have to love it a lot or else you have to be really tolerant.
“For me, ideas lose their sheen, lose their exterior real fast; and it’s only the power and longevity of some ideas that have made me want to stick it out to that extent. Sirens is one of those long-lived ideas that has stayed good no matter how much I’ve thought about it and how much time has passed. That kind of freshness, that kind of real love for a piece, is the only thing that would make me want to make a film of a piece.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 53
