Actually, the historic Broadway run took place seven months after the Fillmore gig, and during the interim the acoustic group performed only once, at a sunbaked hippie-fest on the banks of the Eel River near French’s Camp, in rural Humboldt County, three hours north of San Francisco. This concert was a benefit, too—for the Hog Farm collective, which maintained a large piece of land in nearby Laytonville—and it began a tradition of Labor Day weekend Hog Farm benefits that continues to the present day. The Jerry Garcia Band was also on the bill, so the string band, sometimes a quintet with the addition of JGB drummer David Kemper, opened the show with a nine-song set; then the JGB came out and played two sets of electric music. This would provide the model for Garcia’s Broadway shows, which were billed as “Jerry Garcia, Acoustic and Electric.” (On Broadway the JGB played only one set per show.)
It’s putting it mildly to say that Broadway and the Lunt-Fontanne had never seen anything quite like the scene that surrounded Garcia’s eighteen-concert run, which stretched from October 15 through Halloween night 1987 and included five days where the groups played both a matinee and an evening show. The Lunt-Fontanne is one of the city’s most historic legitimate theaters—in seventy-seven years it had hosted everything from the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921 to The Sound of Music and Richard Burton in Hamlet. For Garcia on Broadway, Bill Graham’s troops hung Grateful Dead flags on the outside of the theater and decorated the lobby. Tickets, at thirty dollars apiece (expensive by Dead standards, but cheap for Broadway), sold out in just a few hours, breaking the theater’s single-day box office record. This, naturally, guaranteed that swarms of Deadheads looking for tickets would congregate outside the theater every night—quite a sight for straight theatergoers on their way to nearby productions such as Cats, 42nd Street and Les Misérables. The series had its own Playbill program, featuring a photograph (by Herb Greene) of a smiling Garcia dressed in a magician’s cape and conjuring his electric guitar out a black top hat, cartoon lightning bolts zapping out of his outstretched fingers. Generally speaking, Deadheads were very respectful of the lovely theater, though a few people smoked pot discreetly in their seats, and there was lots of sitting around on the floor of the lobby before the show and between sets—a time-honored Deadhead tradition.
The acoustic band, which was augmented by the fine New York bluegrass fiddler Kenny Kosek, a friend of Sandy Rothman’s, opened the evening with an easygoing forty-five- to fifty-minute set of old-timey, folk and bluegrass tunes. Garcia played lead guitar; Nelson, rhythm guitar; Rothman, dobro, mandolin and banjo; Kosek, the only Broadway veteran in the bunch, having played in the house band for the hit musical Big River, played fiddle; John Kahn played his big string bass; and David Kemper sometimes came onstage to keep time on a snare drum. Garcia sang lead on all but a couple that were handled by David Nelson, and the three-part harmonies by Garcia, Nelson and Rothman were consistently soulful and often more on-pitch than Grateful Dead harmonies. The acoustic repertoire consisted of thirty songs (ten of which were performed each night), covering a tremendous variety of folk styles, from ageless mountain tunes to bluegrass to blues. Among the American greats the band drew from were the Blue Sky Boys (“I’m Troubled,” “Short Life of Trouble”), the Stanley Brothers (“If I Lose”), Flatt and Scruggs (“Gone Home”), Mississippi John Hurt (“The Ballad of Casey Jones,” “Spike Driver Blues”), Big Bill Broonzy (“Trouble in Mind”), Jimmie Rodgers (“Blue Yodel #9”), Elizabeth Cotten (“Oh, Babe, It Ain’t No Lie”), the Monroe Brothers (“Drifting Too Far from the Shore”), Webb Pierce (“I Ain’t Never”), Leadbelly (“Goodnight Irene”) and Riley Puckett (“I’m Ragged but I’m Right,” which sort of became the group’s unofficial theme song). The group also played “Ripple” at three shows—to no one’s surprise, that tune fit in neatly with the classics from earlier eras.
Garcia appeared to relish his time onstage with the acoustic band, perhaps because it tapped so deeply into his own pre–Grateful Dead roots. He happily shared the solo spotlight with the other players—Kosek’s fiddle playing and Rothman’s instrumental work were especially impressive—and he seemed completely comfortable onstage in this group setting, which was not usually the case when he and John Kahn played acoustic shows together.
The electric sets by the Jerry Garcia Band on Broadway drew from completely different musical traditions than the acoustic sets. There were no new additions to the repertoire, but the selection of songs was already broad and deep, encompassing reggae (“The Harder They Come,” “Stop That Train”), funky R&B (“Think,” “Get Out of My Life, Woman”), Dylan tunes (“Forever Young,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “I Shall Be Released”), gospel-flavored R&B (“My Sisters and Brothers,” “Lucky Old Sun”), a dash of Chuck Berry (“Let It Rock”), the Beatles (“Dear Prudence”) and Los Lobos (“Evangeline”), and a healthy dose of Hunter-Garcia songs (“Run for the Roses,” “Gomorrah,” “Deal,” “Mission in the Rain,” “They Love Each Other”). By the end of each performance, Deadheads had usually heard songs from every decade of this century, all filtered through Garcia’s guitar playing, singing and the strong ensemble work of his mates. It was no less a Broadway revue than Ain’t Misbehavin’ (which featured the music of Fats Waller) or Side by Side by Sondheim; just a little looser and less predictable from night to night, since the repertoire constantly changed.
All in all, it was quite a heady couple of weeks for Garcia and his bandmates—“definitely one of the coolest things we ever did,” John Kahn enthused. “I thought it would be tiring and that maybe it would be tough switching back and forth between electric and acoustic, but everyone was so relaxed, and the crowds were so great. It was the most fun I ever had playing in New York, that’s for sure, and I think Jerry had a lot of fun, too. I know he and Steve [Parish] would wander around and do stuff, and for whatever reason—maybe people were giving him his space—the New Yorkers weren’t in his face as much as usual.”
* * *
On December 20, 1987, Garcia became a father for the fourth time when Manasha gave birth to a girl, Keelin Noel Garcia, at her house in San Anselmo. By all accounts, Jerry was thrilled to be a dad again, and he pledged that he would be more involved with the child than he had been with his other three girls.
The year ended on another high note, with four Dead shows at the Oakland Coliseum, the last of which—New Year’s Eve—was broadcast nationally on radio and televised on pay-per-view. Once again the Dead got into the spirit of the event by allowing themselves to be mocked and humiliated in a series of skits written mostly by Tom Davis. Garcia appeared as Santa Claus at one point, and wearing a chef’s hat in a Cooking with Jerry segment in which he shared his recipe for pigs in a blanket. Not exactly Oscar-worthy, but at least he was game.
The Dead played much better this New Year’s Eve than they had for their televised concert in 1985, and the difference in Garcia was like night and day. The show ended in the wee hours of the morning, January 1, 1988, when members of the Neville Brothers—one of the opening groups—joined the Dead onstage for a short third set that mixed New Orleans and Caribbean flavors (“Man Smart, Woman Smarter,” “Iko Iko,” “Day-O”) with old-time rock ’n’ roll (Bobby Freeman’s “Do You Wanna Dance?”) and a sobering and reflective final choice that somehow managed to bring the entire miraculous year into focus: Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which Garcia sang straight from the heart.
Come wipe these tears from my eyes
I won’t shed them anymore
The sun is setting in Western skies
And I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door
Knock, knock, knockin’ on heaven’s door
Just like so many times before . . .
CHAPTER 20
Show Me Something Built to Last
few days after New Year’s, Jerry, Mountain Girl, Trixie and Annabelle flew to Kona, Hawaii, for a couple of weeks of relaxation and fun in the sun. The Garcias had
first gone to Hawaii together in November 1986, when Jerry was still recovering from the diabetic coma, and everyone had fallen in love with the Big Island’s natural beauty and lazy pace. That year he took a helicopter tour of the Kilauea volcano, hung around the pool at the posh Mauna Kea resort and spent time regaining his health and reconnecting with M.G. and the kids. A few Hawaii trips later, after his strength had returned, Jerry took up scuba diving, which became one of the great passions of his later life.
“It takes up some of the space that drugs left, insofar as it’s like going to a different world,” he said in early 1992, when he was already a veteran diver. “You’re in a different place. It’s very sensual. There’s lots of new information there, a lot of levels, a lot of things to think about. And physically it’s good for you. But it satisfies that thing of going to space. You’re in a place where there’s no gravity, you’re surrounded by a whole raft of interesting new life-forms, many of which are interactive. You can’t go to the forest and pet raccoons, but you can go into the water and pet eels and octopuses and things. I do things I would never have believed I was capable of doing diving. I really love it; it’s an amazing experience.”
“What he really loved about it was the freedom of the water,” daughter Annabelle says. “He and I went a couple of times together. You spend most of your life overweight and kind of low energy and doing bad things to yourself, and then you get in the water and you can pretty much do whatever you want and go wherever you want without worrying about the physical aspects. I remember him saying many times, ‘It’s better than taking drugs. It’s better than psychedelics. It’s a living theater of psychedelia; just incredibly beautiful.’”
In the late ’80s and early ’90s Garcia went to Hawaii whenever he had a gap of a few weeks in his insanely demanding schedule. The Hawaii vacations were his chance to really get away from the pressures of his everyday life and also, as time went on, occasions to socialize with his friends. On one trip to Kauai, Bob Weir came along. On another Big Island excursion it was Steve Parish’s family. Bob and Maureen Hunter went over and at Jerry’s insistence got their scuba certification, as did Laird Grant, Phil and Jill Lesh and others. Garcia was intoxicated with Hawaii and diving and wanted to share it with the people he loved.
At the end of March the Dead went out on their first big tour of 1988, which took them to arenas on the East Coast and the Midwest. The shows sold out almost immediately in every city, and up and down the tour route, municipalities gritted their teeth and braced for the Deadhead onslaught that was certain to materialize when the band hit town. Though few ugly episodes occurred, there were still numerous complaints about unruly crowds outside the venues, and in several cities there were calls from local government officials to ban the group.
So beginning in the summer of 1988, the Dead sent a small squad into the parking lots to try to educate people about behaving responsibly—what became known as “Deadiquette.” They organized groups of volunteers to pick up trash in the parking lots after shows and filled notebooks with ideas from Deadheads about how to better control the scene. After each show, the liaison crew prepared a report outlining problems they’d seen or that had been reported to them, and in many cases they made recommendations about how things might be improved at the next stop on the tour. The bandmembers themselves took a keen interest in the reports, and they did what they could, too—they taped radio messages asking the fans to behave nicely.
Unfortunately, these preemptive maneuvers seemed mainly to reach the faithful rather than the rabble. Nearly everywhere the Dead went that summer there were problems, ranging from horrendous traffic snarls—at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, some 20,000 people without tickets showed up—to minor gate-crashing incidents in Hampton, Virginia, and the Meadowlands in New Jersey. In Saratoga there was considerable violence when hundreds of fans stormed the fences surrounding the venue and were beaten back by panicky police.
To their credit, the bandmembers never let the intense drama that was swirling around every venue they played affect their music. Rather, they continued to improve with each tour. In general there was more jamming in 1988 than there had been in 1987, and an infusion of new material around midyear took the group into some interesting new spaces.
Garcia introduced two new songs at Alpine Valley in June. “Foolish Heart” was an immediate hit with most Deadheads, in part because it was the first Hunter-Garcia tune since “Shakedown Street” in 1978 that was clearly designed to open up to jamming. It was a clever tune, too, with a lilting melody and a flowing, slightly sensuous midtempo pace not too far removed from “Franklin’s Tower.” The arrangement felt relaxed and airy, yet there was also a fairly sophisticated web of interlocking lines and subrhythms being laid down by the entire band, basically for the entire song.
The lyrics were classic Hunter: in each verse Garcia instructs us to undertake some impossible, unwise or absurd task, then in the last line of each verse he sings, “But never give your love, my friend, unto a foolish heart”:
Shun, shun a brother and a friend
Never look, never look around the bend
Or check a weather chart
Sign the Mona Lisa
With a spray can, call it art
But never give your love, my friend
Unto a foolish heart
“I don’t even know whether ‘Never give your love, my friend, to a foolish heart’ is decent advice,” Garcia said. “I had some trouble with Hunter about that. I said, ‘Do we really want to be telling people this?’ I mean, sometimes it’s fun to get involved in something completely frivolous. The tone of the song is definitely ironic, but that goes over most people’s heads. That doesn’t surprise me anymore. A lot of songs we do are ironic in tone and people don’t understand that.
“For me, though, ‘Foolish Heart’ is not about the text,” he continued. “It’s about the flow of the song. There’s something about it that’s charming, but as usual I don’t exactly know why. I like that it’s got a sort of asymmetrical melody that’s very natural-sounding. That part of it is successful from my point of view.”
Garcia’s other new song was a slow ballad called “Believe It or Not,” a love song Hunter described as “a C&W lyric reminiscent of the kind of stuff I remember hearing from tavern jukeboxes in 1948, when my father would stop in to have a few while I waited out in the car.” Hunter casts Garcia in the role of a simple guy who’s seen a lot of hard times (“Done time in the lockup / Done time on the street / Done time on the upswing / and time in defeat”) and now longs for the simplicity of a blissful reciprocal love
Musically, the song was one of Garcia’s most derivative efforts. It appropriated its main melodic motif from his own “Gomorrah,” and both the glacial pace and Garcia’s understated vocal phrasing were reminiscent of “Lucky Old Sun,” which he performed often with the Jerry Garcia Band during this period. It even had a big, swelling R&B-style vocal ending that someone like Ray Charles could have had a field day with. Original or not, the song did have a certain quiet power. Garcia performed the song only seven times (six times in 1988 and once in 1990), so on some level it must not have worked for him. It remains a little-known curio for the most part, one of the few songs Hunter and Garcia wrote together that was never given a chance to develop much beyond its first versions.
When the Dead hit the road in September for a nearly monthlong tour, they tried something a little different, playing multiple nights in just three different venues—four each at the Capitol Centre in Maryland (outside of Washington, D.C.) and the Spectrum in Philadelphia, and then an unprecedented nine concerts at Madison Square Garden. This, naturally, cut down on the amount the band had to travel, and it also helped satisfy the incredible demand for tickets in three of the group’s biggest markets.
Actually, Manhattan was one of the few places the Dead played regularly where the Deadhead presence wasn’t a major nuisance—since the city is so inhospitable to begin with, and expensive to boot, the shows at t
he Garden didn’t attract the caravans of dilapidated cars filled with would-be campers that stops on the summer tour did. Hanging out on 34th Street didn’t offer much to ticketless tourheads, and the presence of so many New York policemen, some on horeseback, discouraged the usual carnival atmosphere outside the arena. Occasionally little parties would spring up in parking garages on side streets near the Garden, but it was a far cry from the scene that developed at, say, Alpine Valley.
Which is not to say that things were any less festive inside the Garden. At this series in particular, the energy surrounding the shows seemed unusually high. Part of it was the sheer length of the run, which was the Dead’s longest since the 1980 Radio City stint. Producer John Scher made sure that anyone traveling past the Garden during the eleven days the Dead were in the city knew who had taken over that West Side neighborhood—over the entrance he put up a thirty-foot inflatable King Kong, decked out for the occasion in a Kong-sized tie-dyed shirt; quite a sight.
Garcia once said that playing New York under any circumstances was “a sweat,” in part because the fans there were so demanding: “It’s like Bill Graham used to say—they want the sword swallower, they want the juggler. In New York they really want you to sock ’em with the rock ’n’ roll. I mean, they’re tough!” Garcia laughed. The fall 1988 Garden shows were even more draining than usual because the final concert of the series was a big, high-profile, multiartist benefit that required lots of planning, preparation, promotion and rehearsal. Though the Dead had played countless benefits over the years, and in the ’80s had donated money to dozens of groups through the Rex Foundation, the Garden benefit was different: It was designed to be both a money- and consciousness-raising event centered on a specific issue, namely protecting the world’s rapidly vanishing rain forests.
Garcia: An American Life Page 59
