The tour provided a great excuse for thousands of American Deadheads to travel overseas and experience the shining capitals of Europe (Stockholm! Paris! London! Berlin! Essen?), and to see the band in smaller venues than they usually played in America. It’s a good thing those Americans came along, too—the Dead had a minuscule fan base in Europe and couldn’t possibly have filled the medium-sized halls that were booked without the traveling Americans. (Were the Dead too “American” for European audiences, or simply absent from the Continent too long?) Smaller versions of the Grateful Dead bazaar sprang up outside each venue, down to the pitiable ticketless hippies with raised index fingers hoping to score “miracle” ducats.
The concerts varied in quality, but none hit the heights the band achieved those last few nights at Madison Square Garden in September. The group worked up two of Bruce’s songs—“The Valley Road” and “Stander on the Mountain”—but generally stuck to the tried and true. The last couple of days of the tour, at venerable Wembley Arena in London, Garcia was sick, and he could barely sing at the final concert on November 1. Nevertheless, it was one of the best-played shows of the tour.
Garcia was obviously run-down physically when he returned from the European tour, but just eight days later he went ahead with two weeks of already booked Garcia Band shows in L.A. and the Bay Area. The shows were spirited and well-played for the most part, with Garcia exhibiting surprisingly little wear and tear from the previous months’ pressures of finding a replacement for Brent and then touring the East Coast and Europe with the Dead. Perhaps he felt momentarily energized just being away from the Grateful Dead.
That fall Garcia reconnected with David Grisman for the first time in many years. Through the latter part of the ’70s and the ’80s Grisman had stayed away from Garcia and the Dead, apparently holding a grudge for perceived financial transgressions related to the Old and in the Way album. Grisman had gone on to become the most important mandolinist in modern folk music, an innovator whose distinctive fusion of bluegrass, jazz, old-timey and various ethnic styles influenced an entire generation of pickers. His groups were a training ground for some of the best players in acoustic music, including Darol Anger, Rob Wasserman, Mike Marshall and Tony Rice; sort of the folk equivalent of the Miles Davis or Bill Monroe bands that spawned so many great musicians. After not seeing each other for fifteen years, in early 1990 Garcia and Grisman found themselves working together on a song for an album by Pete Sears called Watchfire.
Later, Grisman said, “Jerry came over to my house one day, checked out my home studio and asked me, ‘How about putting out some more Old and in the Way tapes?’ I said, ‘Frankly, Jerry, I’d rather see us put out something new. We can put out the old tapes when we’re in wheelchairs.’”
A couple of weeks later Grisman received a call from the Dead office informing him that he was to be the recipient of the Rex Foundation’s 1990 Ralph J. Gleason Award, a cash grant given to someone who has made a significant contribution to music. “Later, I found out that Jerry was responsible and I called him to thank him,” Grisman remembered. “We made a date to get together at my house, and he showed up with his acoustic guitar. I mean, he just walked right in and said, ‘We should make a record and that would give us a reason to play.’ I asked him if he was under contract to a record company. Garcia told me, ‘I can do anything I want; only the Grateful Dead is under contract.’ When I told him about my small record company [Acoustic Disc], he said, ‘Great, so we can do it for you.’ When I asked, ‘When do you want to start?’ he said, ‘Now!’”
The first day’s recordings were just a foundation for a CD that would eventually include Grisman’s superb rhythm section—percussionist-fiddler Joe Craven and bassist Jim Kerwin—and cover quite a range of styles: a peppy string band workout on the B. B. King hit “The Thrill Is Gone”; Hoagy Carmichael’s sleepy “Rockin’ Chair”; Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby”; the folk blues “Walkin’ Boss”; and “Friend of the Devil,” which was one of the two songs from American Beauty Grisman had played on back in 1970. A song Garcia and Grisman wrote together called “Grateful Dawg” was a fanciful marriage of their two songwriting styles, filled with the sort of intricate melodic runs that are Grisman’s specialty, and the bright, country-influenced chording that marked Garcia tunes like “Bertha” and “Touch of Grey.” In an interesting twist, Garcia wrote the “Grisman” part and Grisman the “Garcia” part. But the true centerpiece of the CD—titled Jerry Garcia–David Grisman and released in the spring of 1991—was a sixteen-and-a-half-minute multipart instrumental written by Grisman called “Arabia,” which artfully blended Arabic and Spanish themes into a dramatic mood piece.
For Garcia, playing with Grisman became an avenue to explore some of their shared roots, and it also allowed him to venture into new territory, investigating Grisman’s longstanding fascination with unison melody lines, for example. Garcia was game for any style that came up, and he always managed to inject his personality into the music through his improvisational soloing.
Garcia, Grisman, Craven and Kerwin first played together live in mid-December at a private Christmas party at Village Music, a Mill Valley (Marin County) record store that specializes in hard-to-find discs and American roots music of every kind. The group’s real coming-out, though, was at the Warfield Theater in early February 1991, where in addition to tunes from their forthcoming album, they played such songs as Miles Davis’s “So What,” the Civil War–era tune “Sweet Sunny South,” the Stanley Brothers’ arrangement of “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” and “Ripple.” The group had a warm, gentle camaraderie onstage, and Garcia seemed to be unusually relaxed, perhaps because Grisman was such a commanding instrumentalist that Garcia wasn’t in the spotlight every second. In interviews, Garcia freely admitted that his acoustic guitar chops weren’t nearly up to the level of Grisman’s mandolin playing—not surprising given the fact that Grisman is one of the best mandolinists ever, and Garcia was mainly an electric guitarist. But Grisman inspired Garcia to play cleaner and more fluidly than he had back in 1987 in the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band (which was Jerry’s first serious acoustic outing in many years), and the pair’s easy onstage manner made for a friendly and intimate concert experience. The shows took place during the peak of the military buildup for the 1991 Gulf War, when the United States was pouring armaments and soldiers into Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries. So songs like “Arabia”—which Grisman admitted had been inspired in part by the recent events there—and the sad old war ballad “Two Soldiers” seemed particularly resonant.
It was difficult not to think about the Gulf War, too, when Garcia surprised the crowd at the first Grateful Dead concert of the year, at the Oakland Coliseum Arena in late February 1991, by playing the churning, apocalyptic “New Speedway Boogie” for the first time since 1970. All the doubt and confusion inherent in the lyrics, originally penned in the wake of Altamont, seemed apt for the Persian Gulf crisis, down to the closing lines, which in this new arrangement featured Garcia, Weir and Welnick singing in harmony: “One way or another / One way or another / One way or another, this darkness got to give . . .”
Those three Oakland concerts were all played without Hornsby, who had been nominated that year for a Grammy Award and elected to attend that ceremony rather than appear with the Dead. This was the way it went during the pianist’s twenty-month tenure with the group. He was there most of the time, and when he was he gave his all, but he also missed certain series because of his commitment to his solo career. So it was difficult for the band to build the kind of momentum from tour to tour that they were capable of because of the uncertainty in the keyboard slot. The Dead was two different bands—with Bruce, and without Bruce. This made things doubly hard for Vince, because his role in the music was completely different if Bruce was playing, and switching back and forth between roles was difficult. On the spring ’91 tour, for example, Bruce played the four-concert series at the Capital Centre in Maryland, then missed the sh
ows at Knickerbocker Arena in Albany and Nassau Coliseum, but returned for the Southern swing, which took the band to Greensboro, Atlanta and Orlando. However, Garcia expressed gratitude that Hornsby played with the Dead at all: “It’s a wonderful gift to the band to have him in it now,” he said that summer. “It’s a lucky break for us.”
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That spring, partly at Manasha’s urging, Jerry reconnected with his ex-wife Sara and his daughter Heather, whom he had seen only once—fleetingly, when he was in the hospital after his coma—during the preceding seventeen years. First, Sara saw him alone.
“Manasha was extraordinarily supportive of my making contact,” Sara says. “And Jerry was so grateful that I’d come and he so looked forward to seeing and meeting Heather again.
“He had planned to go see her alone, but he chickened out and called me up saying, ‘I can’t do it by myself, man. You gotta come with me.’ It was terribly moving to see them together after all these years. I took the roses he’d brought her off to the kitchen to put into water, to give them some time together and so I could cry with relief at this momentous occasion. There they were in the other room, finishing each other’s sentences—they have this uncanny similarity in certain ways, of interests and a sense of humor and the way they think. It must be genetic. He was so proud that Heather was a musician, and they talked about music together, about how he would take her to the Smithsonian to play those Stradivarius fiddles and about composers they both loved.”
Heather is a classical violinist who plays in chamber groups and in the Redwood Symphony on the Peninsula. Later that year, Jerry and the conductor of the Redwood, Eric Kujawsky, hatched a plan for Garcia to commission several short works for guitar and orchestra, which he would perform with the Redwood. With great glee he told Sara, “I let him think I was doing him a favor, but I’ve always wanted an orchestra!” Heather would be the musical liaison between the composers and the orchestra, and would help her father learn the music. Although Jerry did contact some composers and Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco was tentatively booked for the performance, this was one of the great plans that Garcia never managed to complete.
Sara had been totally out of touch with the Dead scene since the early ’70s, though she occasionally heard news about Jerry (much of it bad and drug-related). In the intervening years he’d become a wealthy rock star and a cultural icon, which she observed firsthand:
“I remember Leon [Day] driving us in the limo to a restaurant in Berkeley that first day we went to see Heather. Going down Telegraph Avenue we saw all the hippies and the tie-dyes and I said to him, jokingly, ‘You know, you’re responsible for this!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, man, I’m so sorry!’” she laughs. “And the people on the street were saying ‘It’s Jerry! It’s Jerry!’ ’cause he’s got the window open for his cigarette. People were handing him gifts—‘Here, man’—and he was embarrassed by it. But he was really gracious. He never hurt people’s feelings, even though it must have been incredibly annoying to be so trapped in his celebrity and have no privacy.”
* * *
In the spring of 1991 a flood of CD releases kept Garcia’s visibility high in the press. Jerry Garcia–David Grisman was an immediate success. It sold more than 100,000 copies and essentially paid for the operation of Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label for the next few years. The duo granted a number of joint interviews to promote the record, mostly in guitar magazines, and in a move that was unusual for acoustic music, they also shot a conceptual video for a song, “The Thrill Is Gone,” directed by Bill Kreutzmann’s son, Justin. The arty black-and-white film featured the Garcia-Grisman group playing in a ’30s nightclub setting, complete with couples decked out in night-on-the-town finery, cigarette girls and dancers. Garcia wore a suit and a fedora for the video, which was shot at the On Broadway club in San Francisco’s North Beach. “Jerry’s quote to me was, ‘I’d never do this for the Grateful Dead, never in a million years,’” Justin said with a laugh. “We cut his hair, put him in a suit and tie, and had him there for twelve hours. There were Deadheads lined up outside trying to get autographs. It was a real scene.”
Around the same time that album came out, the Garcia-Grisman group, augmented by keyboardist–harmonica player Howard Levy of banjoist Bela Fleck’s band, went into Club Front to provide some improvised musical accompaniment for a CD by ’50s “word jazz” pioneer Ken Nordine called Devout Catalyst. It had been many years since the deep-voiced Nordine had made an album of his hip, strange, funny and scary poems, stories and observations; for decades he had made his living primarily as a voice-over announcer. But through David Gans, Nordine did some work on the Dead’s 1990 New Year’s Eve broadcast, and Dan Healy was so excited about meeting this hero of his youth that he offered to record a new word jazz album with him. Garcia, too, had been a huge Nordine fan back in the ’50s and offered his services.
“You’ve got to go back to seventeen-year-old me growing up in the Bay Area when I first heard Ken’s records—Word Jazz and Son of Word Jazz,” Garcia recalled. “For me, listening to those records was like a religious experience. It was not only a completely different way of thinking, but a fantastic combination of words and music that wasn’t songs. It wasn’t poetry and it wasn’t songs exactly and it was wonderfully peculiar. It was like the kinds of things you think that only you think about, maybe. That was from a time in my life that I was reading Kerouac and I first started smoking pot somewhere in there; a lot of things that were formative and significant and helped build my own sense of aesthetics come from right there.
“I had no idea what had happened to Ken Nordine in that intervening thirty years or so, but I was really delighted to find out he would have anything to do with us, much less come here and work with us. So for me, that was more than an honor.”
In May Arista Records put out a two-CD live set called simply Jerry Garcia Band, culled from six performances at the Warfield Theater in 1990. The two discs, expertly recorded by John Cutler, captured the full range of the JGB’s repertoire of covers—gospel songs, Dylan and Beatles tunes; a dash of Motown; one song each by the Band and Los Lobos; and the group’s lone extended jamming number, “Don’t Let Go,” which Roy Hamilton originated in the ’50s. Like a real JGB show, the CD was ballad-heavy, but the rocking tunes—“Deal,” “Evangeline” and “Tangled Up in Blue”—showed the spark the band was capable of. The album was an excellent showcase for Garcia’s unadulterated guitar sound at a time when so much of his Grateful Dead work was being colored by MIDI timbres. Though any number of the JGB’s tunes could’ve benefited from a Garcia “horn” part, he chose to leave his playing essentially effect-free in that setting.
Since the introduction of compact discs in the early ’80s, Deadheads had been pressing the Grateful Dead to put out CDs from the band’s archive of thousands of live tapes. Everyone in the group agreed it was probably a good idea. But no one in the band was interested enough to actually go into the Dead’s tape vault and wade through God knows how many shows to choose some for release. In his later days Garcia almost never listened to old tapes. He said he didn’t want to look back; that he found it “embarrassing” to hear his playing from the late ’60s: “I hear what I meant, as opposed to what I played.” So he put no energy into the idea. After years of disinterest and inaction, Dan Healy finally sifted through some of the Dead’s live multitrack tape masters and, in consultation with Phil Lesh, chose the Dead’s 1975 appearance at the Great American Music Hall for a CD, entitled One from the Vault, that was released in the spring of ’91. That show featured some of the first performances of material from Blues for Allah, as well as sparkling versions of jamming favorites like “Eyes of the World” and “The Other One.” Released through the Dead’s own merchandising company, the album sold more than 150,000 copies, making it a highly profitable venture. By the end of 1998 the band had put out more than a dozen other vintage CDs, most of them chosen by the band’s vaultkeeper/archivist Dick Latvala with little input from members o
f the group. In 1994 Phil said, “I’m really glad there’s a demand for it because that’s our old-age insurance in a way.” Once Garcia died, the pace of releases quickened.
Despite this flurry of exciting CDs, Garcia’s upbeat pronouncements in the music press and the optimism rippling through the Dead scene because of the high quality of Dead and JGB shows, by the spring of 1991 Garcia was privately beginning to express some dissatisfaction with the Grateful Dead status quo. Since his death-defying recovery in 1986 he’d been working at a dizzying pace, with scarcely any letup, even after Brent’s death. The number of gigs the band played didn’t change much from year to year (about seventy-five), but the sheer size of the Grateful Dead touring machine seemed to grow each season. By the early ’90s the Dead were one of the top-grossing bands in the world, bringing in tens of millions of dollars just in tour revenue, and more on top of that in merchandise and record sales. Salaries and overhead rose every year, along with employee lifestyles. The only way to support the dozens of people directly or tangentially connected to the Dead was to play more large gigs, and Garcia made no secret of his unhappiness with that state of affairs.
Garcia: An American Life Page 63
