Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  “At first they wouldn’t let me see him. He was a little bit wakey when I went in at about one-thirty. He was just sort of coming to, and he was really glad to see me. He was in pretty serious shape and they shooed me out of there really fast. He was going in and out. He was having a lot of breathing problems. What it was is they’d given him thirty milligrams of Valium IV—he claims to have been allergic to Valium so it stopped his heart and his respiration; it shut his whole body down. His chart is how I found out about that. The doctor admitted to me that when they took him in they didn’t know what was the matter with him and they couldn’t figure it out so they decided to give him a CAT scan and he was sort of thrashing around and moaning during the CAT scan. . . . It was a diabetic coma, for Christ’s sake; how hard is that to diagnose? Any paramedic should have picked that up, but they didn’t look at it until the middle of that afternoon when they checked his blood sugar and it was just sky-high; it was off the charts. ‘Oh, is that what it is!’ So no tracheotomy, no more heroic measures.

  “So the scene in the hospital was a lot of people trying to defend Jerry from the doctors; at least that’s the way it felt to me. Yes, they had him very carefully suspended, but the slightest little thing would set it off, and he had a number of close calls. He had a systemic candida infection that put him back in ICU for four days. It’s a yeast infection of some sort that you can get in the hospital. It comes into your whole body. It’s a very dangerous systemic fungus infection. It was growing in his mouth and throat—this white stuff. Oh, man, it was really bad.

  “They had to do all this emergency dialysis and that was unbelievable. And bloody. He had a complete kidney shutdown for ten days. He didn’t pee for ten days. So they did this big emergency dialysis every couple of days. And he was not getting any better and every time they do it it’s very dangerous.”

  Garcia was in and out of a coma for four days, and during that period it was not clear that he was going to live. He had a fever of 105 degrees for several hours and his system fluctuated erratically for several days.

  “The doctors said they’d never seen anybody as sick who wasn’t dead,” Garcia said just two months after the episode. “So if that’s any indication, apparently I was real sick. Although I gotta tell you, I didn’t experience any pain or discomfort, really, apart from being wired and having tubes and holes and all kinds of things in me.”

  “I must say, my experience never suggested to me that I was anywhere near death,” he said in another interview. “For me, it had just been this weird experience of being shut off. Later on, I found out how scary it was for everybody, and then I started to realize how serious it all had been. The doctors said I was so dehydrated my blood was like mud.”

  Garcia’s delirium took on a weird, science fiction quality: “My main experience was one of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic spaceship vehicle with insectoid presences. After I came out of my coma, I had this image of myself as these little hunks of protoplasm that were stuck together kind of like stamps with perforations between them that you could snap off,” Garcia recounted with a laugh. “They were run through with neoprene tubing, and there were these insects that looked like cockroaches which were like message-units that were kind of like my bloodstream. That was my image of my physical self, and this particular image lasted a long time. It was really strange.

  “It gave me a greater admiration for the incredible, baroque possibilities of mentation. The mind is so incredibly weird. The whole process of going into the coma was very interesting, too. It was slow onset—it took about a week—and during this time I started feeling like the vegetable kingdom was speaking to me. It was communicating in comic dialect in iambic pentameter. So there were these Italian accents and German accents and it got to be this vast gabbling. Potatoes and radishes and trees were all speaking to me. It finally just reached hysteria and that’s when I passed out and woke up in the hospital.”

  Word of Garcia’s calamity spread quickly through the Deadhead community. At first, representatives from the Dead organization called a few well-connected Deadheads to say that someone in the band—they wouldn’t confirm who it was—had fallen desperately ill and that the Ventura concerts that weekend would be canceled, so spread the word—and pray. Of course it wasn’t long before it became known, through sources at the hospital, that it was Garcia who had been stricken, and the news went across the phone lines all night long on July 10, as worried fans broke the news to friends far and near. Unfortunately, the dire news didn’t reach everyone who needed to hear it—more than a thousand Deadheads, many of whom had driven from the East Coast and were expecting to camp outside the venue, arrived in Ventura on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning expecting to see a concert. They were turned away at the gates and had to find other places to camp up and down the California coast. The cancellation was a disaster for Ventura’s many hotels, too: the annual Dead concerts there had become the city’s busiest tourist weekend.

  Given Garcia’s well-publicized drug bust in 1985, it was not surprising that there were lurid rumors that the guitarist had OD’d on heroin. The Grateful Dead said nothing publicly about the illness the first day. The following afternoon they released a fairly detailed statement to the press and also put a message about Garcia’s condition on the band’s telephone “hotline,” which usually carried information about upcoming concerts. That first weekend alone, the hotline received more than ten thousand calls from concerned Deadheads, and as the days passed the message was updated periodically with medical reports. Northern California newspapers and television stations gave the story significant play, and by and large the press coverage was very sympathetic. Garcia was that rare local figure whose popularity transcended his actual following. Even people who had no interest in the Grateful Dead knew him as the smiling Haight-Ashbury veteran who was still rockin’ on the road and selling out a dozen or more local concerts every year, the most visible and vocal member of the group.

  The first few days after the collapse it was difficult to obtain reliable information about Garcia’s condition. News spread that he had lapsed in and out of the coma several times and didn’t seem to be improving. This led to considerable conjecture that even if Garcia didn’t die from the diabetic episode, he might have suffered brain damage or developed a permanent kidney condition that might require regular dialysis or perhaps even a kidney transplant.

  Len Dell’Amico, who was working in Texas when he heard about Garcia’s collapse, says, “When they said the word coma I was stricken pretty bad, because most times that doesn’t have a good outcome—you either stay there or you’re damaged. And the idea of a damaged Garcia was really, really repellent because you’re talking about somebody who’s much more interesting and evolved and beautiful than most people. That was not a happy idea.”

  “At one point the doctors said Jerry might not walk again,” Mountain Girl says. “There was talk about nerve damage and heart problems and all sorts of other bad stuff. It was very confusing for a while. Nobody seemed to know what was going to happen.”

  Eventually, she says, Garcia came out of the coma and suddenly announced, “I’m not Beethoven,” meaning, “I’m not deaf. I can hear what you’re saying.” After that, “I was pretty scrambled,” Garcia said. “It was as though in my whole library of information, all the books had fallen off the shelves and all the pages had fallen out of the books. I would speak to people and know what I meant to say, but different words would come out. For the first few days it was mostly sort of Joycean inversions of language, and then after a while I started to remember how it worked. But I had to do that with everything. They had to teach me how to walk again. . . . The bits and pieces were there, but I didn’t have ready access to them.”

  Once he was out of immediate danger, Garcia was allowed to begin having visitors, and a steady stream of faces from his past and present stopped by to offer their love and support—band, crew and office members; picking mates like David Nelson an
d Sandy Rothman; his old childhood friend Laird Grant; brother Tiff; his daughters with M.G., Annabelle and Trixie; and his ex-wife Sara and daughter Heather, whom he hadn’t seen in many years. Sara says Jerry cried when he saw Annabelle and Heather standing together by his bedside.

  “I got to see him, I’d guess, sometime within a week,” says Len Dell’Amico. “His brother was there. It was very dark in the room. And he and Tiff were reminiscing about their dad and other things from their childhood. It was a process of reconstructing memory. He was free-associating and they seemed very close. I was teared up anyway, but this was just so great to see. So I had a very warm visit with him and I was encouraged. Then I visited again a couple of weeks later when he’d moved to the cardiac ward. I believe in the power of prayer and he expressed that he had felt the influence of hundreds of thousands of people putting their energy with him; it’s a feeling I don’t think you or I will ever experience.”

  Indeed, Garcia said, “I’m not a believer in the invisible, but I got such an incredible outpouring. The mail I got in the hospital was so soulful. All the Deadheads . . . it was kind of like brotherly, sisterly, motherly, fatherly advice from people. Every conceivable healing vibe was pouring into that place. I mean, the doctors did what they could to keep me alive, but as far as knowing what was wrong with me and knowing how to fix it—it’s not something medicine knows how to do. And after I’d left, the doctors were saying that my recovery was incredible. They couldn’t believe it.

  “I really feel that the fans put life into me, and that feeling reinforced a lot of things. It was like, ‘Okay, I’ve been been away for a while, folks, but I’m back.’ It’s that kind of thing. It’s just great to be involved in something that doesn’t hurt anybody. If it provides some uplift and some comfort in people’s lives, it’s just that much nicer. So I’m ready for anything now.”

  Garcia called the episode “another one of those things to grab my attention. It was like my physical being saying, ‘Hey, you’re going to have to put in some time here if you want to keep on living.’ Actually, it was a thought that had never entered my mind. I’d been lucky enough to have an exceptionally rugged constitution, but the thing of getting older, and basically having a life of benign neglect, had caught up with me. And possibly the experience of quitting drugs may have put my body through a lot of quick changes.”

  Two days before Garcia was released from the hospital—on his forty-fourth birthday, August 1—Nora Sage was informed by Jon McIntire that Garcia had decided he wanted her to move out of the house, and she was given twenty-four hours to clear out her things. Though earlier in his convalescence Garcia had told several people that he didn’t want to live with Mountain Girl again, M.G., McIntire and and a few others convinced Jerry that it would help his recovery and be good for his spirits if M.G., Annabelle and Trixie moved into the house to help him.

  “When he got out of the hospital, Jerry was feeling really, really cheerful,” M.G. says. “Some of his confidence was coming back. Things were looking really bright—he wanted to go for long drives; he wanted to get out. He wanted to eat something besides sandwiches with no mayonnaise. He was ready for life again. But he was pretty weak physically, so it took a while for him to get his strength back again.”

  In the third week of August, about six weeks after the collapse, M.G. says, “We went up to Oregon together to get my stuff, and he looked around my place in Oregon and said, ‘Jeez. This is great. Why are we leaving here? Why don’t we stay here for a while?’ So we stayed there for about a week and it was great. We also stayed for a weekend on a houseboat on Lake Shasta at the tail end of that. We met Big Steve [Parish] and Robbie [Taylor, of the road crew] in Packer’s Bay and rented a houseboat. We swam in the warm water. At that point, Jerry hadn’t really played the guitar yet. Steve brought Jerry’s banjo down to the boat and Jerry tried to play a little bit, but it hurt his hands. His calluses were gone. He definitely had a long, long way to go.”

  “When I was in the hospital,” Garcia said later, “all I could think was, ‘God, just give me a chance to do stuff. Give me a chance to go back to being productive and playing music and doing the stuff I love to do. Shit, man, I’m ready.’ And one of the first things I did—once I started being able to make coherent sentences—was to get a guitar in there to see if I could play. But when I started playing, I thought, ‘Oh man, this is going to take a long time and a lot of patience.’”

  Interestingly, it was not a member of the Dead but Merl Saunders who, at M.G.’s urging, took on what looked to be a Herculean task of helping the physically weak and mentally scattered Garcia recapture his musical abilities. Even before he was ready to attempt to play, Merl helped him get some of his strength back: “I’d take him for a walk. We’d take ten steps, then take ten steps back. His attitude was great. He wanted to get better, but he was scared, too. He got tired very easily, but he never really got discouraged. The most he’d say would be, ‘Oh man, this is harder than it looks!’”

  Once Garcia picked up a guitar, “It came back very slowly,” Merl says. “He had to learn chords all over again and he had a lot of trouble remembering how to do even the simplest stuff. And I didn’t want to push him. ‘Man, I’m tired.’ He’d been playing for five minutes. ‘Okay, that’s fine. Put it down. Let’s go for a walk.’ And we’d do that for a few minutes until he’d get tired. We’d talk about music. I’d tell him about songs I was working on and that would get his mind going. We’d talk in musical terms. And slowly he started to get his strength back. But it sometimes took an hour or two for him to get even a simple chord down. Then, as we got farther into it, some things started to come back to him a little, but it took a lot of work. The first song he wanted to learn again was ‘My Funny Valentine.’”

  Len Dell’Amico remembers that once Garcia was out of the hospital and back home at Hepburn Heights, “I’d talk to Jerry on the phone and he’d always say, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’ He’d never say, ‘I don’t feel well.’ You could never tell what his real condition was—or maybe he was being completely honest; I don’t know. I’ll never forget that first time I went and visited him at home. Merl was sitting at the piano—God bless Merl, because that must have taken a lot of strength, because he was there a lot—and they had sheet music out and Jerry had a guitar in his hands, but there wasn’t a whole lot happening that was terribly coherent. But Merl had this very positive attitude that I’m sure was somewhat forced. And Jerry had this lost-puppy look; kind of the opposite of the leonine ‘I know what I’m doing’ look. But gradually what he and Merl were doing paid off.”

  “The first couple of times I saw Jerry try to play guitar after the coma, you could see that his mind was working faster than his hands could move,” said John Kahn, who joined in the effort to get Garcia playing again after Merl and Jerry had been at it for a week or two. “But his attitude about it was always so good that I was never that worried that it wouldn’t all come back. You know Jerry—he’d be playing and then he’d fuck up and he’d just laugh; like, ‘Good one, Garcia!’ I remember one night after he was starting to play pretty well, we played ‘Like a Road,’ with him on acoustic guitar and me on piano, and it was so beautiful, we both had tears in our eyes. That was when I knew it was gonna be okay.”

  “Gradually everything sort of came back,” Garcia said, “but it wasn’t without a certain amount of work. I had to do everything at least once to remind my muscles about how something worked. It was the thing of making the connection between mind and muscles, because I hadn’t been away from playing for so long that my muscles had forgotten. The neural pathways were there and the reason for doing it and why it worked—the intellectual part of it—was also there, but they were all separated. I had to pick them up like, here’s a hunk of how music works, over here is a hunk of why I like to play it and here’s a hunk of muscles that know this stuff. It was a matter of putting my hands on the guitar and actually playing through tunes and trying to solve the structure of how each tune
works—addressing the whole thing.”

  Garcia’s illness forced the Dead to cancel their entire late-summer and fall schedule of shows, a loss of several million dollars for the Dead organization. A number of people were laid off for a few months because of the sudden cash flow shortage, and some projects that had been under way, such as the long-form video, were suspended. Ultra Sound, the company that supplied equipment for the Dead’s concerts, had to scramble to find new clients to avoid taking a financial bath, and of course Deadhead vendors of T-shirts and other crafts who relied on the income they earned outside Grateful Dead shows found themselves with no outlet for their wares.

  Meanwhile, the band’s fans got their dose of Dead wherever they could. Bill Kreutzmann and Brent Mydland put together a group with former Santana members David Margen and Alex Ligertwood called Go Ahead, and toured clubs in the East and Midwest. In early August Bob Weir broke his shoulder in a spill from a mountain bike, but even with his arm in a sling he managed to play a gig the first week of September with a re-formed version of Kingfish at a festival called Ranch Rock ’86, on the Paiute Indian Reservation near Pyramid Lake in Nevada. That show, which was billed as a healing ritual for Garcia and the Deadhead community, also included Robert Hunter’s first Western appearance in two years, backed by a band featuring Mickey Hart and David Freiberg. And for the occasion, Hart assembled a group, dubbed Mickey and the Daylites, with Freiberg, Barry “The Fish” Melton, John Cipollina and Kathi McDonald, the gutsy and talented singer who had replaced Janis Joplin in Big Brother and the Holding Company.

  A few nights later in San Francisco, Bill Graham Presents put on an event called “Night of the Living Deadheads” at BGP’s club, Wolfgang’s. The event was a benefit for the Dead’s recently established philanthropic arm, the Rex Foundation (named for the late Rex Jackson), and featured a pair of Dead-inspired local bands, a Deadheads crafts bazaar and an auction that included such items as books and records autographed by the Dead and even one of Garcia’s humongous T-shirts (size Big Man 4X). Phil Lesh appeared in an interview videotaped that afternoon. He talked a bit about Garcia’s improving health and suggested that when the Dead eventually returned to the stage, “we’re going to have a more flexible format. Some of the things that occurred in the first or second set may be switched around, and we might not take a break—I don’t know. But the whole structure, the whole flow of the concert, is liable to be different when we come back.”