Aside from the problem of too many folks without tickets showing up to party in the parking lots, the atmosphere inside the shows changed, too. Many young people in the huge influx of 1987–88 did not understand the subtle dynamics of the Grateful Dead concert experience and hadn’t gone through the natural socialization and education process that fans who saw the band repeatedly had experienced. Some of these neophytes—disparagingly labeled “Touchheads” and “In the Darkers” by veterans—came to Dead shows just to get drunk or high and to hear “Touch of Grey,” which, the Dead being the Dead, the band did not play at every show (though they did at all six of their football stadium concerts on that tour). There were thousands of new fans who did not want to hear the gentle, folkish strains of “Peggy-O,” who couldn’t lose themselves in the sweet, sad beauty of “Stella Blue” and who were put to sleep by “drums” and “space.” To be fair, there were also thousands of other newcomers who definitely “got” what was special about the Dead’s music, immediately felt part of the scene and became true-blue Deadheads from that point on. So the success cut both ways.
But it wasn’t just young rockers who turned out in force for the Dead’s stadium shows that summer. Dylan concerts traditionally drew an older audience, and the combination of Dylan and the Dead on the same bill seemed to attract many people who might not go see either group alone, plus fans who had long since stopped going to rock shows regularly but were intrigued by the pairing or seduced by the hype. No doubt some showed up expecting to see a re-creation of a ’60s concert, with the Dead and Dylan faithfully parading through their “hits.” What they got was something considerably different.
Depending on the depth of their knowledge of the Grateful Dead, these fans probably heard enough songs they recognized to keep them happy. There were always several familiar early-’70s touchstones like “Truckin’,” “Playing in the Band” and “Uncle John’s Band” sprinkled in the Dead’s sets. The Dead also made an effort to play more uptempo material than usual—ballads and slow shuffles were few and far between—and because they were also playing a full ninety-minute set with Dylan, their own sets tended to be more concise and accessible, for better or worse. At the first two Dead-Dylan shows, the Dead broke with tradition and played only one long set alone, much to the consternation of many Deadheads. By the time the tour reached Giants Stadium, however, the Dead were back to playing two sets by themselves—the New York crowd probably wouldn’t have let them get away with doing only one!
The sets with the Dead backing Dylan varied tremendously in quality from song to song. The long stretch of time between the rehearsals in California and the first show had at least one negative consequence: “We rehearsed up to eighty songs, and we couldn’t even remember the songs we’d rehearsed,” Weir said with a laugh shortly after the tour. Garcia added, “When we went on the road we didn’t have the slightest idea of what we were going to do!” In the end, the Dead and Dylan eschewed all the interesting and odd cover tunes they’d worked up in practice and instead played only Dylan songs, albeit an impressively large selection of popular and obscure ones. Besides tackling acknowledged classics like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “All Along the Watchtower” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” the group also played lesser-known numbers like “John Brown,” “Man of Peace,” “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” “Dead Man, Dead Man,” “Joey” and “The Wicked Messenger,” to name just a few.
From their first moments onstage with Dylan at Schaefer Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, on July Fourth, the Dead had their work cut out for them trying to keep up with Dylan’s unusual phrasing and oddly atonal mumbling. Though the Dead had to work hard to keep the music together, they appeared to have a great time backing Dylan. The Dylan portion of the show always saw a slow but steady trickle toward the exits by people who were either burned out from the Dead’s sets or didn’t like Dylan, but those who stuck around were generally very attentive and willing to follow the musicians down every road they chose. And though Dylan was the ostensible “star” of this segment of the concert, Garcia’s solos consistently drew the loudest cheers, and the biggest ovation usually came at the point in the show when Garcia sat down behind a pedal steel guitar (which he hadn’t played in public since the early ’70s) to pick a tune like “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” or “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” Most Deadheads had never seen Garcia play steel onstage before.
For his part, Dylan almost never acknowledged the Dead’s existence onstage with him and seemed to be off in his own world, which only occasionally intersected with the Dead’s. Still, when the partnership really clicked—such as on the Dead’s striking arrangements of “All Along the Watchtower,” “Slow Train Coming,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile” and a few others—the results were spellbinding and showed how truly magical the collaboration could have been if they’d rehearsed more, played more shows or if Dylan had made a greater effort to listen to what the Dead were playing behind him moment to moment. Even so, most fans went away satisfied. It helped that at five of the six Dylan-Dead shows the encore found Dylan joining the Dead for exuberant renditions of “Touch of Grey,” which was followed at four of the concerts by either “Watchtower” or “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
Meanwhile, in the culture at large the Dead were suddenly big news. There were innumerable articles in the press about the neo-hippie movement the Dead supposedly presided over, and much to the Dead’s own surprise, most of what was being written about them was favorable. “We’re sort of like the town whore who’s finally become an institution,” Garcia joked. “We’re finally becoming respectable. I also notice there’s turnover in the press. There’s a whole bunch of different journalists than there were even ten years ago. There are probably a lot more of them who’ve grown up with the Grateful Dead as part of their—if not foreground cultural material, at least certainly something they’ve all heard of.”
In another interview he noted, “Back in the ’70s, we had the same phenomenon of all these young kids [coming to shows]. But now those are the people who are in medical school and law school; they are college people and professionals. They still come to the shows. So now there are Deadheads everywhere. They’ve kind of infiltrated all of American society—everybody knows one: ‘I’ve got a cousin who loves you guys!’”
Predictably, there was also some ’60s-bashing in the press, with some writers criticizing the Dead for being merchants of nostalgia, and dismissing the group’s young fans as would-be hippies caught in a time warp. But Robert Hunter wondered, “Can you have nostalgia for a time you didn’t live in? I think some of our music is appealing to some sort of idealism in people, and hopefully it’s universal enough to make those songs continue to exist over the years.”
On the same subject, John Barlow said, “I find it sort of curious that there’s a pejorative attachment to the fact that there are people who refuse to let go of a certain time and place—especially when the values that that time and place represented were the best we’ve seen in our lifetime. These are soulless times now, and I don’t see anything wrong with people who want to fix themselves on times that were a lot more enriching.”
No doubt about it, the summer of 1987 was the Dead’s Big Moment in America. When they had been popular in the early ’70s they were still largely an underground phenomenon, supported by an unusually large counterculture. In 1987 the Dead brushed up against the mainstream in a way they never had before. They were practically inescapable that summer, between the radio and TV popularity of “Touch of Grey” and the tremendous media coverage of the Dead-Dylan tour. “Touch of Grey” became the Dead’s best-selling single ever, eventually making it up to number 9 on the Billboard singles chart. It even hit number 15 on the Adult Contemporary chart. In the Dark made it as high as number 6 on the Top 200 album chart and became the first Grateful Dead album to sell more t
han a million copies in the year it was released. The So Far video, too, was hugely popular, staying on top of music video sales charts for fifteen weeks (and later winning the American Film Institute’s Best Music Video award). The Dead also made the cover of Rolling Stone for the first time since the early ’70s. Mikal Gilmore’s story was the first to talk candidly about Garcia’s drug problems through the years.
“Nineteen eighty-seven was like one straight peak experience,” says Len Dell’Amico. “I worked every day, morning till night, in 1987, trying to help further this thing that was happening with the hit album, the tour with Dylan, the long-form video, the short videos. Obviously this was their moment to go mass. And nobody ever said, ‘Well, now we’ll have to do stadiums.’ Nobody was really thinking of the consequences of that kind of mass success. Because nobody was planning it. It was just what had to happen. Nobody was foreseeing it or planning it, but you couldn’t resist it, either. Everybody was in the same boat, just working, working, working all the time, but loving it; it was a real high. And it emanated from Jerry’s rise from the ashes.”
Though Deadheads were thrilled that the band had finally achieved an unprecedented level of success, many were also understandably concerned about what long-term effects mass success might have on the already overpopulated Dead scene. As Robert Hunter observed, “Over the years, it seemed a blessing that we were able to work and be dynamic and stay down there out of public view. That sort of attention eats people, and it eats groups; anybody who reads Rolling Stone knows what happens. . . . Are we going to be eaten now? Who else ever had an underground swell as large as ours and had it meet with another wave of aboveground approval? Look out: This is critical mass.
“I’m excited about it, and I have misgivings. I would like the world to know about the Grateful Dead; it’s a phenomenal band. But I don’t think the Grateful Dead is going to be as free a thing as it was. That’s the devil we pay.”
While Garcia also acknowledged that mass success “presents itself as just a new level of problems,” he admitted that the group’s new popularity was “a happy surprise,” and added, “it’s gratifying to have an audience.” In several interviews he also indicated that he was pleased that the Grateful Dead provided an alternative reality for large numbers of people disenchanted with the passionless, “lame America” of the Reagan years.
“We represent some part of the modern adventure in America—like Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac—and just hit the road,” he told the British rock magazine Q. “You need an excuse to be out there, and I guess the Grateful Dead is a pretty good excuse. It also provides a lot of support; there are always a lot of Deadheads traveling around, and they represent a kind of moving community. They’ve become more sophisticated through the years, with the older Deadheads hanging in there and younger Deadheads coming in and discovering all this stuff. I guess in the ’30s, when people used to ride the rails, you’d have to learn from the old hobos how to do it, and the Deadhead traveling thing is sort of along those same lines. It’s one of the last American adventures you can have—to follow the Grateful Dead on the road somewhere.”
In between Dead tours, Garcia stayed extremely active. He, Weir and Brent sang backup vocals on a Robert Hunter–Bob Dylan song called “Silvio,” which came out on Dylan’s Down in the Groove CD in 1988. (A second Hunter lyric, “The Ugliest Girl in the World,” was also set to music by Dylan and appeared on that record.) And Garcia contributed heavily to a Robert Hunter solo effort called Liberty (recorded in 1987 but released in the spring of ’88), laying down bright, tuneful solos on nearly every song—it was the most Garcia had ever played on one of his partner’s albums. The experience obviously had some lasting impact on Garcia, too: a few years later he rearranged the playful title number and performed it with the Dead.
Sometime late in the summer of 1987, Jerry, Mountain Girl and the girls finally moved out of the house on Hepburn Heights and into more spacious digs on Reservoir Road in San Rafael. “It was apparently a famous house in San Rafael for parties,” M.G. says. “Some big-shot developer had owned it and had major, ritzy parties in there. It was pretty big—about four thousand square feet—and it had a great pool that Jerry loved. But it was definitely kind of funky, too, so the kids couldn’t ruin it. It was a wonderful house; we had a good time there. Jerry was even doing his runs on the treadmill; he was really trying to stay in shape, though it was very brief—you would have had to have been there,” she chuckles. “We had an exercise bicycle, but it was very difficult to get him to commit to anything like that, so basically I boiled it down to trying to give him good food, vitamins every day, fresh juice, lots of salads.”
M.G. says that for much of his adult life Garcia was afflicted by severe sleep apnea, a condition that would cause him to stop breathing for short periods while he slept. Being asthmatic as a child probably led to his later apnea, which was also exacerbated by his lifestyle. “He definitely had obstructed airways,” M.G. says. “He would get into these patterns of deafening snoring that made him kind of hard to live with sometimes. As he got older it got worse. And it definitely got worse if he was smoking a lot. And it was also worse if he was really tired or fucked up. He’d be snoring away and all of a sudden he’d just stop. And a minute would go by. And then he’d almost sit up and take a huge gasp; it would be a struggle to get it in, and then he’d go back to his regular breathing pattern for several minutes and then he’d do it again.
“He used to have terrible nightmares, too, which I gather is common with sleep apnea. Your brain is trying to tell you to wake up and take a breath, so it startles you awake.”
Sandy Rothman, who lived on Reservoir Road with the Garcias for a couple of months in the second half of 1987 (“basically because I was homeless living out of my car, and so Jerry said, ‘Why don’t you stay here?’”), clearly recalls Garcia’s fitful nights, too: “I’m a night owl and he isn’t, and he’d usually go to sleep long before me. My bedroom was right across the hall from theirs, and I could hear him waking up ten to fifteen times during the time I was in there reading before I fell asleep. So then sometimes his light would go on, and maybe he’d read for a bit, have a cigarette and then fall asleep again, and this could go on for hours. I felt bad for him because he wasn’t getting much sleep at night.”
Fortunately, Garcia never had much trouble napping on planes or backstage at gigs or just sitting in front of the TV, so he caught up on his sleep a little that way. The downside of that was that sometimes people suspected he was nodding off because of drugs rather than innocently napping.
Rothman says that when Garcia was off the road and at home, the two of them spent time listening to Jerry’s huge record collection, which took up an entire wall of the house. “We’d listen to old gospel vocal groups a lot; really, all sorts of stuff. He had very broad taste.” They also sat around picking acoustic instruments from time to time, which no doubt influenced Garcia’s return to playing string band music that summer and fall.
Actually, Garcia first seriously expressed interest in playing acoustic music again shortly after he arrived home from the hospital in the summer of 1986, following his illness. Rothman and David Nelson, instruments in tow, visited Garcia at Hepburn Heights and the threesome ended up picking and singing one old folk and bluegrass tune after another deep into the night, Garcia plucking a banjo and singing trios with the others. Then, on Thanksgiving night in 1986, Garcia, Nelson and Rothman played informally at the annual turkey bash of the extended Dead family. That year it was held at the American Legion’s Log Cabin, a wonderfully cozy, old-style redwood lodge in San Anselmo. The trio mostly played old-time country favorites, much to the delight of the gathered family. “One of our traditions,” Rothman recalls, “was trying to remember all the verses to ‘Little Glass of Wine,’ a Stanley Brothers number. That night was no exception—David and I were impressed by how many of them Jerry could remember.”
The following spring, the threesome, along with John Kahn on acoustic b
ass, played a few songs at a benefit concert at the Fillmore Auditorium to raise money for a coalition of ’60s San Francisco poster artists who were fighting against Bill Graham and Chet Helms to gain some control of the copyrights of their posters. Garcia had always felt a kinship with the artists—particularly Rick Griffin, Kelley and Mouse, and Victor Moscoso—whom he viewed as fellow travelers on the psychedelic highway. The group’s six-song miniset was very well received by the Deadheads who packed the Fillmore to see Garcia’s first appearance there since the ’60s, but the most enthusiastic person at the club that night just might have been Bill Graham, who came backstage after the group’s set and raved about how great he thought it was. David Nelson recalled Graham saying, “‘This is such a great thing. I’ve got to take this somewhere. I’ve got to put this on somewhere. But I don’t know where. I need an idea.’ Jerry went, ‘Uh, take it to Broadway, Bill.’ And we all went, ‘Yeah, right.’ It was just a joke. And Bill went, ‘Broadway!’ He left the room and the next thing I knew we were booked to do eighteen shows at the Lunt-Fontanne theater.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 58
