Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Offstage, however, Garcia’s personal life was in turmoil. Though he appeared to be healthier than ever, Manasha learned that he had started to dabble with hard drugs again, and she made no secret of her disappointment:

  “In December we went to Colorado, and by that time I knew the symptoms of the substance problem,” she says. “He’d get sleepy and perspire a lot. He’d have disappearances into the bathroom. So I noticed these things were happening again and it worried me a lot because we’d almost lost him the prior summer. So Yen-wei came to Denver and Randy came to Denver. I was concerned; it was a big issue with me. I asked Jerry about it and he didn’t care to be confronted about it, and I understand that, but I was worried. And I think that sort of led to our separation. I was concerned and there was nothing I could really do. So I told him we were going to leave and he asked me not to go. But it continued and I said, ‘Listen, you’re going to have to make a decision about what you want to do. We have a five-year-old. . . .’”

  What Manasha did not know was that Jerry had fallen in love again with Barbara Meier, his girlfriend from back when he was just nineteen and living in Menlo Park. (He had had other girlfriends during his time with Manasha, too, including one out-in-the-open relationship with a Deadhead that lasted several months.) After nearly three decades apart, Barbara and Jerry reconnected in 1989, after Robert Hunter gave Garcia a book of poetry Barbara had written entitled The Life You Ordered Has Arrived. According to Barbara, Jerry wrote her a letter saying how much he loved the book and that all these years later, he still loved her. By this time, she was a poet, painter and occasional program coordinator at the Naropa Institute, the Boulder, Colorado, school founded by the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. When the Dead came to Denver toward the end of 1990, Barbara and Jerry nearly got together backstage, but at the last moment Garcia backed out of the meeting—she says he later told her it was because he was strung out at the time.

  Then, half a year later, when Barbara was in the Bay Area to do some poetry readings, the two did meet backstage at Shoreline Amphitheater for the first time in twenty-eight years, and as she said to Robert Greenfield, “My heart chakra exploded. Aside from the fact that he was in a different body with white hair and white beard, nothing had changed at all. He was sitting there and he was very nervous and smoking, but we entered a timeless space and we were right where we left off.” In Denver at the end of the June 1991 tour they got together again under the pretense of Barbara interviewing Jerry for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, and then, “I started creating every opportunity I could to go to the Bay Area, where we’d go out to lunch or just hang,” she said.

  When the Dead came to Denver in December 1992, Garcia promised Barbara that he would figure out a way to extricate himself from his situation with Manasha, so he and Barbara could have a relationship again. He said he didn’t want to drop this bombshell on an unsuspecting Manasha before Christmas, so he waited until a couple of days before New Year’s—and then had someone else give Manasha the news. In what even the most charitable Garcia apologists would have to admit was an act of extreme cruelty and cowardice, he left his Nicasio home one afternoon and simply never went back. Instead, he hooked up with Barbara at Hunter’s house and the two lovebirds flew to Hawaii for nearly a month, leaving poor Vince DiBiase to deliver a breakup note to Manasha. Garcia never saw Manasha or Keelin again.

  If guilt was eating away at Garcia in Hawaii he didn’t show it. He and Barbara had a blissful time on Maui and the Big Island, taking long beach walks, diving and spending endless carefree hours reconnecting with each other, trying to understand the twists and turns their lives had taken in the intervening decades. They shopped at a health food store to find the proper nonfat foods for Jerry’s strict diet (fortunately, Barbara was already a vegetarian), and after a few days they met some hippies who regularly brought them meals. For the last two weeks the couple was joined by Robert and Maureen Hunter. It was a happy and creative time for Garcia and Hunter, who worked on several new songs while they were in the Islands.

  “That whole month we were in Hawaii was so unbelievable,” Barbara says. “It really did feel like we had created a time warp and we were right back where we left off. He called it ‘psychic fascia’ that we had that between us. And that really was true, and continued to be true. We were able to have this great month together, and he even asked me to marry him.”

  A day before Jerry and Barbara returned to the Bay Area, Gloria DiBiase found the couple a furnished condominium rental on Red Hill Circle in Tiburon, with a spectacular view of the harbor there, and for a couple of months things went along smoothly. Garcia spoke effusively to anyone who would listen about how he’d finally found true love and how his life was heading in the right direction.

  People throughout the Dead family remarked that they hadn’t seen Garcia this happy in years, and because of this Barbara was welcomed warmly wherever she traveled in Grateful Dead circles. This had not been the case with Manasha, who was never really embraced by some members of the inner circle and largely stayed apart from the Dead family by choice. Barbara even befriended Mountain Girl, Sara, and Jerry’s daughters.

  Annabelle Garcia remembers, “He introduced me to Barbara and told me they were engaged to be married and he was happier than I’d ever seen him. Ever. It made me so happy. It seemed like perfection. I’d never seen him glow like that. He was jumping around introducing her to everybody. I was all for it.”

  “Everyone around Jerry at that time kept saying that it felt so good,” Barbara says. “It really felt like a rebirth of those early Menlo Park days, that same energy. It was there. It was happening. I thought, ‘M.G. loves me, Sara loves me, the girls love me; we can all work together. There’s all this love around, and Jerry’s writing songs again with Hunter and it’s all coming together.’ Everyone was saying it. Even he was saying it: This is going to be the golden age of the Grateful Dead. We’re really going to sail off to the sunset now, and everything’s going to be healed and resolved, and we’re going to do all these great things—we’re all going to rent a live-aboard dive boat. It really felt like the community was coming together in a way that it had not for many, many years.”

  “Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to have the feeling that you’ve been given another chance and it’s like you get a clean slate,” Garcia said in early 1993. “That’s the way it feels to me now with Barbara.”

  CHAPTER 22

  A Broken Angel Sings from a Guitar

  he hopeful mood in the Dead scene spilled over to the band’s first two concert series of 1993 at the Oakland Coliseum. At the Chinese New Year shows at the end of January, Carlos Santana sat in with the band one night. And during the final night of the February Mardi Gras series, Ornette Coleman, whose band opened the Fat Tuesday concert, played screeching, mind-bending sax on “space” and “The Other One,” then added tasteful lines to “Stella Blue,” “Lovelight” and “Brokedown Palace.” Earlier, Garcia had played on the final number of Ornette’s set. The real news from the February shows, though, was the introduction of several new songs, including three by Hunter and Garcia.

  “Lazy River Road” was one of the warmest love songs the pair ever wrote, a nifty fingerpicking tune that sounded like a cross between an Elizabeth Cotten or Mississippi John Hurt folk blues and an early pop-jazz tune such as “Russian Lullaby.” No doubt it was influenced musically by Garcia’s acoustic guitar outings with David Grisman during this period; it was certainly of that genre. It was the only song from the Hunter-Garcia Hawaii writing sessions to be completed, and anyone who was aware of the relationship between Garcia and Barbara Meier couldn’t help but be struck by the sentiment of the lyric:

  Thread the needle right through the eye

  The thread that runs so true

  All the others I let pass by

  I only wanted you

  Never cared much for careless love

  But how your bright eyes glowed

  Wa
y down, down along

  Lazy River Road

  The second new Hunter-Garcia song was a musical rewrite of an existing Hunter lyric—“Liberty” had been the title track of Hunter’s 1988 solo album, which Garcia played on. Garcia junked Hunter’s “Scarlet Begonias”– like melody and reset the words in an arrangement reminiscent of the Dead’s version of “Samson and Delilah.” The lyrics were like an anthem for libertine misfits; perfect for Garcia, who loved to think of himself as an incorrigible and untamable noncomformist rebel, which he certainly was to a degree.

  Say what I mean and I don’t give a damn

  I do believe and I am who I am

  Hey now, mama, come and take my hand

  Whole lot of shakin’ all over this land

  If I was an eagle, I’d dress like duck

  Crawl like a lizard and honk like a truck

  If I get a notion I’ll climb this tree

  Or chop it down and you can’t stop me

  Then Vince and Bob would join in for the sing-along chorus:

  Ooo freedom, Ooo liberty

  Oh, leave me alone

  To find my own way home

  To find my own way home

  Whereas the mood of both of those songs was light and uplifting, the haunting ballad “Days Between” had a reflective, almost melancholy tone. This turned out to be the last song Hunter and Garcia wrote together, and it was one of their most powerful efforts. “I wrote a verse while Jerry was working out something on piano,” Hunter recalled of the song’s genesis. “I gave it to him, he said he liked the rhyme scheme and idea, and began working out the melody. As he was doing that I wrote the rest of the verses. An hour’s work.”

  Enigmatic and highly evocative, “Days Between” is painted in an emotional chiaroscuro, at once fond and foreboding, filled with promise and dread. In one verse, “Summer flies and August dies / The world grows dark and mean.” But in another “a hopeful candle flickers / in the land of lullabies.” One part of the final verse has “Hearts of summer held in trust / still tender young and green,” then immediately offsets that with “left on shelves collecting dust / not knowing what they mean.”

  “‘Days Between’ joined the Grateful Dead oeuvre right at the time—1993—when old-time Deadheads were asking themselves if Garcia and Hunter were still capable of creating art that had a primordial, frightening intensity: the beauty at the edge of terror that Rilke described,” comments Steve Silberman. “As the other songs written roughly in the same period seemed to mine well-worn images and attitudes—almost reveling in their seasoned facility to create an archetypal mood, like ‘Lazy River Road’—‘Days Between’ slipped between your clothes and your skin like a chill wind out of a grave. I think it’s the most uncompromisingly adult lyric Hunter ever wrote.

  “The verses present a panorama or mandala of existence in which each thing is in its place, but no place is completely safe. It’s a world where both the sighs of young passion in springtime and the lonely horseman, leaving only his torn song in the world as he vanishes—as the singer himself was about to vanish—coexist and inform each other, together creating a universe of joy and horror side by side. ‘Days Between’ was the final battlefield where the Dead dared to face the elementary questions of existence, and refused to flinch. It has the same fated, tragic majesty that bears witness to the life force in all truly great art.”

  Hunter offered this tantalizing glimpse of what inspired the song in a “letter” to Garcia, written on the first anniversary of the guitarist’s death and posted on the Internet:

  “Obviously, faith in the underlying vision which spawned the Grateful Dead might be hard to muster for those who weren’t part of the all-night rap sessions circa 1960–61—sessions that picked up the next morning at Kepler’s Bookstore, then headed over to the Stanford Cellar or St. Mike’s to continue over coffee and guitars. There were no hippies in those days and the Beats had bellied up. There was only us versus ’50s consciousness. There were no jobs to be had if we wanted them. Just folk music and tremendous dreams. Yeah, we dreamed our way here. I trust it. So did you. Not so long ago we wrote a song about all that, and you sang it like a prayer. ‘The Days Between.’ Last song we ever wrote.”

  There were days

  There were days

  And there were days I know

  When all we ever wanted

  Was to learn and love and grow

  Once we grew into our shoes

  We told them where to go

  Walked halfway ’round the world

  On promise of the glow

  Stood upon the mountaintop

  Walked barefoot in the snow

  Gave the best we had to give

  How much we’ll never know

  Never know

  The song did not have a conventional pop structure. There was no chorus, no bridge; just four long verses that started with spare and simple accompaniment and then built in intensity as the instruments played increasingly grand ornamental fills. Vince Welnick described it nicely: “It would go from this poignant but intense space to this big, majestic thing that would just pour out. That song and ‘So Many Roads’ really meant a lot to Jerry; you could tell.” In its early versions, the song had no solo break between the verses, but it had a moody and unusual open-ended instrumental coda that wasn’t tied to the melody of the song, but rather spilled off in other more musically abstract directions.

  Garcia’s relationship with Barbara Meier, so filled with hope and promise in early 1993, fell apart during the beginning of the Dead’s spring tour that year. Barbara had observed that Jerry had periodically gone through moods when he seemed dark and distant, and at the Dead’s first tour stop in Chicago he seemed “cold and withdrawn,” she said. According to her account of the breakup, Barbara learned that Jerry was using heroin again and confronted him about it, stressing that she would stick with him through thick and thin. But Garcia reacted angrily, and out of the blue asked her to leave. Before the tour, at the urging of a hypnotherapist who was trying to help him quit smoking, Jerry had admitted to Barbara that he was having “thoughts” about his old flame from the ’70s, Deborah Koons, whom he had encountered outside a health food store in Mill Valley a few weeks earlier and secretly contacted afterward. At that time he had insisted he wanted to be with Barbara, but now, out on the road, he acknowledged that he was in love with Deborah. “I cannot tell you how weird, brutal and shocking it was to hear all this,” Barbara says. Nevertheless, she and Jerry spent the next day and night together, and they parted sadly but without rancor. After that, Barbara never saw him again.

  She left hurt, confused and disappointed that heroin exerted such a strong pull on him and transformed him from an open, loving person to a brooding, emotionally closed loner. Did Barbara understand what Garcia got out of heroin? “Absolutely—oblivion,” she says. “He had let things slide so terribly for so long that to do the kind of fine-tooth combing one needs to do to set things straight—make amends, tie up loose ends, complete things, have closure, just tidy up your psychic emotional life—was too daunting for him.”

  She was disillusioned to learn that the Dead’s touring retinue seemed to accept Garcia’s addiction as a fact of life. “I can remember raving to Steve Parish that I couldn’t believe how enabling and co-dependent the whole scene was with Jerry,” she says. “And Steve said, ‘Listen, man, you know we’re just going, and we gotta go forward. This is moving down the road and we’ve gotta move it down the road, okay? And we’re gonna just do it the way we gotta do it.’ It just felt like there was this machine—the gears were in gear—and there was no way to stop it.”

  In fairness to Parish, it should be noted that Barbara was probably unaware of how many times over the years he and everyone else on the road crew had tried to help Garcia take steps to conquer his addiction. There was no lack of compassion there; more a resignation born of futility. As Bob Bralove put it, “I think the reality is, there is only so much you can do. If you respect all th
ese freedoms, you can state your concern. But you can’t lock somebody up because they’re doing something bad to themself. You can’t make somebody stop those bad behaviors. You can take them aside and tell them you’re concerned, but beyond that, what can you do? I know some of that went on with Jerry. Should it have gone on more? I don’t know. How many interventions are you doing to do? If you’ve put yourself out several times over thirty years and you get slapped down each time, and it doesn’t seem to do anything, and then you stop doing it, is that noninterventionist?”

  By the end of the spring tour Jerry had brought Deborah out on the road to be with him, and their relationship continued to deepen back in Marin County after the tour was over. The news that Garcia had broken up with Barbara and was back with Deborah spread quickly through the Dead organization and was, frankly, greeted with disapproval and disappointment in some quarters. There were a number of people in the organization who simply never liked Deborah—some even referred to her as Black Deborah because of her penchant for wearing black and what they perceived as a malevolent streak in her. Others who did not know her at all in the ’70s had heard negative stories—some perhaps true, some undoubtedly groundless—that had become part of the Grateful Dead oral mythology. This was always an extremely gossipy scene in which people who fell out of favor for whatever reason were branded as pariahs and privately scorned. Deborah, who had spent much of her time since the late ’70s establishing her own documentary film company, Signs of Life Films, reentered the Dead world with two strikes against her in many people’s minds: She was viewed as the woman who had broken up Jerry and M.G.’s supposedly idyllic (but actually very complex and troubled) relationship in the early ’70s—a gross oversimplification at best—and now Deborah had come between Garcia and the widely liked Barbara Meier, the golden girl who was going to once and for all bring Jerry the personal happiness he’d been seeking his whole life. But the fact is that heroin was starting to come between the two of them before Deborah did, and on some level Jerry resented the idea that he would have to “change” for anyone.