Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  “You kind of have to trust it,” he continued. “It’s like an invisible bridge over a huge chasm and if you don’t look down, you’ll be okay. Trust it, just put one foot in front of another and say, ‘It’s there! No matter what it looks like, the bridge is there and I’m walking across it.’ There’s that quality to it. . . .

  “It’s tough to talk about. I’ve gone all over the place looking for metaphors, but it always ends up being gibberish. You know—‘What the hell’s this guy tryin’ to say?’ It doesn’t lend itself to articulation very well. But musicians know about this stuff and [so does] anybody who’s ever done something where being ‘on’ counts.”

  On the summer and fall tours in 1989 the band was clearly energized by their newer material—particularly the odd, angular “Victim or the Crime,” “Foolish Heart” and “Standing on the Moon.” And the overall quality of their playing was so consistently high that Garcia felt confident enough to dig into the band’s songbook to pull out a few old treats for the Deadheads, the majority of whom had never seen the band before the mid-’80s. That summer, the group ended several shows with a cappella versions of “We Bid You Goodnight,” which the Dead hadn’t played since the ’70s. The next revival was “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” missing from the repertoire since 1970, in a slightly different arrangement that had Garcia, Weir and Mydland each singing a verse, instead of Garcia carrying the entire song vocally.

  But the Dead saved their most cherished nuggets for their October East Coast tour, which began with two hastily arranged, completely unpublicized (to keep away the touring rabble) “guerrilla” shows at Hampton Coliseum in Virginia, where the Dead were billed as “Formerly the Warlocks.” Garcia brought back several favorites: “Help on the Way” and “Slipknot” were joined again with “Franklin’s Tower” for the first time since 1985. “Dark Star” had been played just twice in the early ’80s before the band eased into it the second night at Hampton to the deafening, ecstatic cheers of the lucky 15,000 mainly local fans who had managed to get “Warlocks” tickets. Both “Help on the Way/Slipknot” and “Dark Star” benefited tremendously from the group’s MIDI setups because the open-endedness of those tunes encouraged the band to experiment freely with different timbres and textures. Deadheads attached to the sound of the early Grateful Dead argue that the versions of “Dark Star” the band played in the ’80s and ’90s lacked the vision, imagination and commitment to true weirdness of the song’s late-’60s and early-’70s counterparts. Better or worse, it was certainly a different animal in its later incarnations, but its function was unchanged—it provided a framework for sonic exploration—and the exquisite simplicity of the basic melody was no less evocative in 1989 than it had been in 1969.

  The final chestnut Garcia brought back at Hampton was perhaps the most surprising—“Attics of My Life,” dormant since 1972 and extremely rare even in the early ’70s. Here was a tune almost none of the band’s current fans had ever heard performed live, and for the first time ever, the group had a harmony blend that brought out the full passion and power of the American Beauty version. The song fit neatly in the late-second-set Garcia ballad slot that was usually reserved for darker, more sobering meditations; by contrast, “Attics” was an uplifting, compassionate hymn—another glimpse of the otherworldly psychic landscape shared by the band and its fans:

  In the secret space of dreams

  Where I dreaming lay amazed

  When the secrets all are told

  And the petals all unfold

  When there was no dream of mine

  You dreamed of me

  On Halloween, five days after the end of the Dead’s East Coast tour, Built to Last was released by Arista Records. Like nearly every other Grateful Dead album, it proved to be a strong out-of-the-box seller, helped no doubt by the unprecedented success of In the Dark. But sales tapered off quickly. Arista was never able to break a single from the record (“Foolish Heart” was the only song to get substantial airplay); reviews were mainly negative (the honeymoon between the press and the Dead in the wake of Garcia’s recovery had long since ended; now the Dead were regarded as dinosaurs with boorish fans); and even many Deadheads dismissed the record because it contained more Brent tunes than Hunter-Garcia songs. MTV, which had loved the “Touch of Grey” video so much, failed to embrace Gary Gutierrez’s equally imaginative treatment of “Foolish Heart,” and completely ignored Gutierrez’s moody performance lip-synch video for Brent’s “Just a Little Light.” Even so, Built to Last sold more than 800,000 copies in the first six months, which would have been considered phenomenal in the days before In the Dark. And all over the country, Deadheads let out a sigh of relief that there wasn’t going to be another hit of the magnitude of “Touch of Grey” to bring in thousands of new fans from the mainstream.

  The same day Built to Last was released, Garcia played a gig at the Concord Pavilion, an hour east of San Francisco, with the Jerry Garcia Band. This had been a great year for that group, too. The freshness and vigor that marked Garcia’s playing with the Dead carried over to the JGB, elevating the entire band in the process. There were a pair of new additions to the already extensive repertoire of cover tunes: John Kahn dug up “I Hope It Won’t Be This Way Always” from a late-’70s record by a Philadelphia-based group called the Angelic Gospel Singers; and JGB singer Gloria Jones suggested Garcia tackle Canadian folksinger Bruce Cockburn’s moving 1986 tune “Waiting for a Miracle,” which became one of Jerry’s favorites for a while.

  As usual, most of the JGB’s gigs in 1989 were in California, but the band also made one two-week foray into the East and Midwest in September, playing many of the same venues the Dead frequented—the Spectrum, the Meadowlands in New Jersey, Hartford Civic, Alpine Valley, Poplar Creek in Illinois. This was the first time the Garcia Band had undertaken an entire tour of larger venues, and the move was viewed with some skepticism by Deadheads who thought of the JGB as a club and small theater band, not an arena act. Sweetening the pot for the fans was the addition of the duo of Bob Weir and bassist Rob Wasserman as opening act for the tour. And at four of the shows the JGB was joined by E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who had also sat in with the Dead on a few occasions. Garcia liked having the amiable and physically imposing Clemons as a visual foil and soloist, and though he is not exactly a saxophone titan, he had great spirit and added another layer to the JGB’s occasionally thin sound.

  Even at this peak of Garcia’s personal popularity, the JGB never attracted the same sort of fanatical devotion as the Grateful Dead. The band didn’t really make records, didn’t tour enough to build a following around the country and, frankly, there were many Deadheads who simply never cared much for the group. Some didn’t connect with the multitude of R&B, gospel and other cover songs the way they did with Hunter-Garcia tunes. Others believed that, unlike in the Dead, none of the musicians in the JGB were up to Garcia’s musical level. Certainly the JGB lacked both the dynamic ensemble interplay and the exciting, reckless edge of the Grateful Dead. And then there was always a segment of listeners who simply couldn’t stand hearing so many slow ballads and midtempo tunes.

  But what the JGB had to offer those fans who could get beyond the Grateful Dead comparisons was a rich and varied body of music, a relaxed and friendly atmosphere with none of the pressures and expectations endemic to Dead shows, and heaping helpings of Garcia’s guitar work—he played longer solos than he did with the Dead, and there was less competing with his guitar, so he crafted his lines a little differently; more precisely, perhaps. And because Garcia fashioned the set list at each show according to what he alone wanted to sing and play, there was an intimate quality to the performances, as if the emotions in those particular songs were what he wanted to communicate to the audience at that concert. The fact that the band’s repertoire ranged from earthy, direct R&B to circuitous Dylan song-paintings and Bible-thumping gospel just showed some of Garcia’s inner complexity and range of musical tastes.

  “Eve
ry song he chose, every note he played was a reflection of something inside him,” John Kahn commented in 1996. “A lot of times it was probably more the emotional feel rather than the literal meaning of a song that appealed to him, but it had to touch him somewhere in his soul or he just wouldn’t do it. It wasn’t hard to tell when a song wasn’t working for him—he couldn’t play it or sing it that well and he’d drop it. The ones he kept were the ones that spoke to him. And if he loved a song, it was hard not to love it, too, because he’d play it so well that it would touch your soul, too.”

  Asked in 1997 what the Jerry Garcia Band audience wanted to get from a show, drummer David Kemper replied, “That’s easy: the audience just wanted to be in a room with Jerry. They didn’t care if they were hearing fast music or slow music; they wanted to be in the same room with Jerry. That’s all I could see. And it didn’t matter if it was good or bad or who he had onstage with him. The crowd didn’t come to see me or John or Melvin. They came to be in the same room with Jerry. It’s that simple. And I don’t blame them. Being in the same room with Jerry was a pretty damn wonderful place to be.”

  * * *

  By the fall of 1989 Garcia had moved out of the Reservoir Road house he’d been sharing with M.G. and the girls and settled into a house on Palm Avenue in San Rafael, across the street from the campus of Dominican College. Actually, the property had four buildings on it—three two-bedroom houses and a one-bedroom house, plus one of the largest private swimming pools in Marin County. Annabelle lived at Palm Avenue on and off for a while, but Jerry spent much of his time during this period with Manasha and Keelin at their house on Echo Court in San Anselmo. Jerry sometimes commuted between Palm and Echo Court on a four-cylinder Honda motorcycle M.G. had given him one recent Christmas, and he became a familiar sight puttering along the tree-lined streets of San Anselmo (though when he wore a helmet he was difficult to recognize).

  “Jerry loved Keelin and was trying hard to be a good father,” comments Gloria DiBiase, who worked as Keelin’s full-time nanny during this period. “I think he may have felt as though he had failed with his other kids, so he tried to make up for that with Keelin.”

  Gloria and her husband, Vince DiBiase, would play significant roles in Garcia’s life from the late ’80s until just a few months before his death in the summer of 1995. Vince had first entered Garcia’s orbit in the early ’80s, when the guitarist became fascinated by Vince’s pioneering work in holography—he had been involved in the field since the early ’70s and was well-known in holography circles for his complex three-dimensional artworks, called Chromagrams. Vince sent a number of examples of his holographs to Garcia, and the two carried on a phone relationship for a couple of years before finally meeting. By 1985 Vince was making trippy holographic stickers and buttons with Dead iconography on them and selling them through Grateful Dead Merchandising.

  Gloria, who was an artist herself and co-owner with Vince of VinGlo Designs, came into Garcia’s world by a different route. One afternoon in February 1987 she left work at the San Rafael holography gallery she managed and took a bus to Oakland to attend one of the Dead’s concerts at the Oakland Coliseum. On the bus she struck up a conversation with Manasha Matheson—this is before Manasha was romantically involved with Jerry—and the two became fast friends. Later, after Keelin was born, Vince and Gloria’s daughter, Mariko, occasionally baby-sat for the littlest Garcia—sometimes Manasha would send a limousine to pick her up. One time, Mariko wasn’t feeling well, so Gloria baby-sat in her place, and that led to her becoming a full-time nanny for Keelin.

  Gloria says, “We have four children of our own and we’ve been together for twenty-five years now, so it was nice to relate to Jerry on that level. He was a family man and father, and he liked having our family around.

  “Jerry was, like many of us, a typical hippie parent of the ’60s with very few parenting skills. He was not a disciplinarian, but he was a very gentle, kind and generous father. He took a lot of pride and delight in Keelin. She was the apple of his eye.” Adds Vince, “I got the impression he really wanted to make it work. He really wanted to be Keelin’s daddy. He wanted to be there for her. He loved her.”

  * * *

  In mid-December the Dead got a bad scare when Brent Mydland was secretly hospitalized after overdosing on a mixture of heroin and cocaine. Brent’s main vice had always been alcohol, the abuse of which had led to a number of DUI episodes and even a brawl or two through the years, also unpublicized. But during the second half of 1989 he started dabbling more with hard drugs, to the alarm of people in the Dead organization familiar with his extreme mood swings. Whether this turn was precipitated by his separation from his wife and daughters, or by the pounding he took in the press after Built to Last came out, we’ll never know for sure. But he recovered quickly and fully from the OD, and the Dead went on to play their traditional New Year’s series at the Oakland Coliseum Arena as planned.

  When the Grateful Dead traveled to the East Coast in mid-March for their first tour of 1990, spirits were high. Brent appeared to have bounced back from his drug crisis. On March 15 Phil became the first member of the group to turn fifty, and he was in terrific shape, mentally and physically. He and John Cutler had taken on the task of assembling a live album from recent recordings to help celebrate the Dead’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1990—the first time he’d gotten so involved in a Dead album project since the ill-fated live album Steal Your Face. The band shook the cobwebs from a few more old tunes: Brent brought back “Easy to Love You,” which he’d ignored since 1980; Weir finally bowed to public pressure and revived “Black-Throated Wind”; and Garcia dusted off and improved “Loose Lucy.” These last two tunes hadn’t been played since October 1974.

  Several shows on the tour were broadcast locally in an effort to keep crowds away from the venues, and by and large things ran smoothly. Musically, the shows were almost uniformly strong, with the runs at Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, New York, and Nassau Coliseum on Long Island being particular standouts. Lesh drew nearly a third of his selections for the 1990 live album, Without a Net, from the Nassau shows, and in 1996, the Dead released a triple CD from the Knickerbocker series, Dozin’ at the Knick. The middle night of the Dead’s three-show run at Nassau quickly passed into Deadhead legend when the group was joined onstage by jazz sax giant Branford Marsalis, who met the band for the first time that night. Though he had never heard much of their music, Marsalis fearlessly tackled some of the Dead’s most exciting open-ended material—“Bird Song,” “Dark Star,” “Eyes of the World,” “Estimated Prophet”—soloing as if he had been playing this music forever and returning the challenge by pushing the Dead with his own abstract musical ideas.

  The band truly smoked that night, as well as on the handful of other occasions over the next four years when Branford played with them. Of all the guest musicians who shared the Dead’s stage through the years—and they were many and varied—none embodied both the Dead’s adventurous, questing spirit and their obsession with beautiful melodies and accessible structures quite like Branford did.

  With the arrival of summer came a return to mega-gigs. By 1990 the Dead had more or less settled into a comfortable pattern of playing arenas in the spring and fall, and stadiums and large amphitheaters in the summer. The Dead had opted not to push the twenty-fifth anniversary angle in advertising for their concerts because they were afraid it might attract too many people to the scene outside the shows (“Twenty-five years? Parrrrty!”), but among Deadheads there was celebration in the air anyway. The opening acts were a nice selection of simpatico groups: Little Feat; Edie Brickell and New Bohemians; Crosby, Stills and Nash; Bruce Hornsby and the Range. Crowds were large but well-behaved for the most part. Most agreed that the music was as dynamic as ever.

  What Deadheads didn’t know, however, was that Brent Mydland was going through a rough time. Outwardly, he seemed to be fine. He sang one or two of his songs in most shows on the tour, and his playing was unusually asserti
ve—at points distractingly so. But offstage he was obviously depressed. According to Garcia, Brent was mortified about the pospect of having to spend a few weeks in jail following the tour for an earlier DUI conviction. He turned again to heroin for relief, but vowed to go into a treatment program once the summer road trip was over.

  “The last year or so Brent was taking some risks,” says Bob Bralove. “I think he was pushing himself on a lot of levels, including musically. He really played some incredible shows, but in truth, to balance his nights of brilliance, there were some nights of rough playing. Things were getting very problematic for him and I think people were very concerned about him. Everyone was very moved when he could communicate in the music. Everyone understood that it was real; that he was a soul communicating right through the music—isn’t that the point? He went right to the heart of it. It was completely soulful, but it was also accompanied by all sorts of other problems in his life, and things were rough and confusing for him. He expressed some seriously sorrowful stuff sometimes. It was hard to watch on one level, but it was also completely compelling.”

  Two nights after Brent returned to his home in the comfortable East Bay suburb of Lafayette following the summer tour, he shot up a mixture of cocaine and morphine (what’s known as a speedball) into his left arm, and the potency of the combination killed him—probably almost instantaneously. The Contra Costa County coroner reported that the levels of both drugs in his system were lethal. He was thirty-seven years old, and all indications were that it was a tragic accident, not a suicide.