“He was more in ‘the now’ than anyone I’ve ever met in my life,” Vince notes. “He was always creating. He couldn’t turn it off. He always had half a dozen sketch pads around, a number of books he was reading—a couple of mystery thrillers, the Oxford English Dictionary, health books, esoteric books, music books—as well as magazines and newspapers. He’d have his main computer on in one room and he’d be working on something in there. He’d have his laptop on his bed and he’d be working on something else in there. He had a couple of guitars and a banjo lying next to the bed he might pick up. He had a synthesizer in another room with other guitars, plus another dozen guitars lying around.”
“He would take catnaps throughout the day and night,” adds Gloria DiBiase, who took care of the household. “He snored like a bear, and if he stopped breathing [from the sleep apnea] I would wake him up.”
“In my opinion he was overworked,” Vince says. “Too much traveling, too many tours. And the art business was picking up, with more demands for Jerry to show up for openings and do art interviews. Then, when he was home, everybody wanted him for something—play on their album, do this, do that. People were always groping at him to work on their projects and he couldn’t say no. Some of them were musicians he’d known for twenty or thirty years, and how do you say no to those guys, especially when he wanted to play with them?”
On the Dead’s tour of the Midwest and East in March and early April 1994, Garcia was once again highly erratic—muffing lyrics, missing cues and, most disturbing, seemingly unable to execute certain musical passages that required a high degree of fingering dexterity. On fast runs he sometimes resorted to a sort of guitar shorthand in which he’d simply play fewer notes than he usually did in that situation, or else he’d play chords instead of clusters of individual notes. Even when he could get his fingers to play complicated parts—such as on “Slipknot” or the speedy instrumental interludes in “Samson and Delilah”—he occasionally lagged a split second behind the rest of the band, so everything would either be slightly out of sync, or the other players would have to slow down to play at his pace. But Garcia’s malaise was completely unpredictable. He might play brilliantly on one song and then seem inept and even disoriented on the next. By and large, he was best on his ballads—there were versions of “Stella Blue” and “Days Between” on the spring tour that were overflowing with emotional singing and sensitive playing. And at many shows the rest of the group played well enough that Garcia’s deficiencies were not apparent to the casual observer.
Most of the grousing among Deadheads came from hard-core fans who followed part or all of the tour and could see the disturbing pattern in Garcia’s performances. Not surprisingly, most of the critical Deadheads were concerned that Garcia’s lapses were a result of his drug use. It appears more likely, however, that there were physical reasons for his slide. For several years he had been afflicted with carpal tunnel syndrome in his left hand and forearm which had caused him to periodically lose feeling in the tips of his fingers. This is actually fairly common among musicians, and Vince, Bob and Mickey also complained of the problem. Garcia’s condition was exacerbated by the heaviness of his guitar, which pulled down on his left shoulder, and by the hand position he had developed for his left-hand fingering through the years.
While Garcia said in a 1993 interview that he felt his problem was in check, by the following year it had started to bother him again, and the numbness had even traveled up the underside of his arm to just below the elbow.
“Having something like the carpal tunnel is not something one is pleased to announce,” says Bob Bralove, “so I would think it was probably even worse than he indicated. It must have been scary for him. It would scare me.” According to Steve Parish, by the middle of 1994 the problem was serious enough that he and Garcia were looking into getting Jerry a more ergonomic guitar. Garcia also saw a hand specialist, who recommended certain exercises.
“Jerry told me he was losing the feeling in his hands,” Vince Welnick says. “I think some of it was carpal tunnel, but he also had diabetes on top of that, and it’s a very common side effect of diabetes to lose the feeling in your extremities.”
Garcia did nothing to curtail his busy schedule after the spring of 1994. In the second half of April he played a series of shows with the Jerry Garcia Band at the Warfield Theater, and in mid-May the Garcia Band went out on another Western tour, playing five shows in large amphitheaters in Southern California, and one in Phoenix. Actually, he only played half a show in Phoenix. Garcia was so sick when he went onstage at the Desert Sky Pavilion there that he only made it through five songs in the first set before he took a break and collapsed backstage. The rest of the show was canceled, and though some of those close to Jerry urged him to go the hospital because he looked so bad, he refused and instead flew back to the Bay Area that night.
“It was pretty awful,” John Kahn remembered. “He was sick and weird and he was playing bad, and if there’s anything he hated it was that. He knew he was in terrible shape, but he would never ditch a gig in a million years. I finally went and asked him if he wanted me to set it up so he could split, and he said, ‘Yeah.’ And it was to save him from having to play bad; that was part of it. I was worried about him. I knew there was something wrong with him. I don’t know exactly what it was, but it wasn’t a drug thing.
“I caught crap from everyone. The band hated me for losing the money. The Grateful Dead hated me; I should think they would have liked that we canceled the show for his health. But I can see why they wouldn’t like it, because they should have done that a lot of times in the past. He played [Dead] gigs where he had to piss in a garbage can on the side of the stage, he was so sick. But they’d never cancel a gig for him.”
There was considerable antipathy between some people in the Dead organization and John Kahn because they believed Garcia’s drug intake increased whenever he gigged with the JGB. Vince Welnick is unusually blunt on the subject: “I swear to God, if it would’ve been up to me, John Kahn would’ve been out of the picture a long time ago. I don’t know if that would’ve saved Jerry. A lot of people say that Jerry would’ve done what he did with anybody he could’ve done it with, but there was something about Kahn I felt was bad news. More than a couple of times I thought of dealing with John on my own; I’m going to leave it at that.”
A more sympathetic view is expressed by Annabelle Garcia: “Yeah, Dad did drugs with John and Linda [Kahn], but that was just the way it was. They offered my dad a safe haven—a place he could come to get some drugs if he wanted it, and a place to sleep if he needed it, and the company that he needed. Dad was one of those classic lonely folks who had a lot to talk about and talked a lot, but he didn’t have that many super-close friends when it came to really talking about his feelings. And I think that John and Linda offered him a place to really let out his feelings. And even though drugs were involved, I can’t really condemn that, because drugs were always involved. In my mind, I can’t separate the old man from that, ’cause it’s one and the same. It’s just the way he was, for almost as long as I can remember. John and Linda were very sweet people and I know at least they made my dad feel comfortable.”
Once Garcia was back home from Phoenix, his doctor, Randy Baker, determined that Jerry was was suffering from a recurrence of the diabetes that had nearly killed him eight years earlier. Garcia bowed out of a scheduled trip to Ireland with Deborah (who went anyway), and Vince and Gloria DiBiase moved into Garcia’s house for about a month in an attempt to help restore the guitarist’s health. Dr. Baker devised a health regimen that included certain medications and herbs, and he suggested various diet and lifestyle changes, which Jerry paid lip service to but largely ignored.
The Dead’s summer touring schedule began in early June, when Garcia was clearly in no condition to be onstage. Before the first concert at Cal Expo in Sacramento, one member of the sound crew wondered aloud whether the summer tour would finally be the one on which Garcia would kee
l over onstage. Another complained that the band was running on inertia and that the only reason they were out on the road was to make money. Many Deadheads were alarmed at Garcia’s ghostly pallor and slumping posture at Cal Expo. His playing rarely rose above the ordinary, and at times it was simply awful. True, there were some hot musical moments in Sacramento and at most of the dates on the summer tour, which took them to amphitheaters and stadiums in the East and Midwest. But Garcia was obviously struggling to keep up with the other members of the band, and at points he seemed either bored or spaced out (or both), unable to muster enough will or energy to bring many of his songs fully to life. Again, he seemed most comfortable and engaged on his ballads—perhaps because they were his most personal songs, with their intimations of mortality and existential longing.
“I think except for Jerry the band was playing great,” Bob Bralove says. “I think they also knew they had to play great to get a performance across. If they didn’t deliver it, there was no guarantee. I think everyone was worried about Jerry and that they all rallied on some level. I also think that what you do as a friend to somebody who’s having trouble with a dependency problem sometimes is say, in effect, ‘Look, we’ve got this to offer. We’ve got a cooking band here. Why don’t you come play with us, man?’ Give him some place to be inspired to clean up for. Not that I think they were just playing well for him—they were playing well for themselves and the fans, too.”
Among Deadheads, the summer ’94 tour was probably the most negatively criticized tour the Grateful Dead ever played. Many of the fan reviews on the various Internet computer bulletin boards devoted to the Dead were quite harsh—but at the same time nearly everyone expressed great concern about Garcia.
There were several shows on the summer tour that were fairly solid, with flashes of real brilliance. Even so, the word of mouth about the summer tour was so bad that when the Dead went on the road again in late September, for the first time since anyone could remember the group’s shows at Boston Garden and Madison Square Garden did not sell out in advance. The band’s spokesperson chalked this up to playing too many shows in the Northeast in too short a time span, but privately bandmembers admitted that they needed to play better if they were going to keep the fans coming back. And on that fall tour they rose to the occasion more often than not. The biggest difference was in Garcia, who seemed more alert than he had been at any time since the spring of ’93. There were several excellent shows on this tour—with colossal versions of “Scarlet Begonias” > “Fire on the Mountain” in Boston and New York, for example—prompting more than a few Deadheads to believe that Garcia’s troubles were behind him. But closer inspection of Garcia’s playing revealed that there were still periods in which he had difficulty getting his fingers to do what his mind wanted them to, and other times when he seemed to be playing on autopilot—noodling aimlessly with no clear intent of where he wanted to go in a jam.
In November the Dead finally began work on their new album at a secluded studio in the wilds of West Marin called the Site. The Dead worked on basic tracks for nearly all of their unrecorded songs, but after about twelve days of sessions they didn’t have much on tape to build upon. Garcia seemed distracted and out of sorts much of the time. He arrived late for some sessions, left others shortly after arriving and skipped a few altogether. But the problem wasn’t just with Jerry. In Vince’s opinion, “We weren’t getting a good sound in the studio. Here we were in this great studio, great view, great equipment and it just didn’t sound good.
“It was frustrating that we couldn’t get a decent take,” he continues. “We’d do the song and somebody would inevitably ruin it, which was kind of like how the way we played live came back to haunt us. You can get away with that onstage, but when it’s supposed to be for keeps, that can be tough. I mean, I have a rehearsal tape of us doing ‘Days Between’ that sounds much better than any of the thirteen takes or whatever we did of it at the Site.”
Despite the largely positive word of mouth the Dead’s fall East Coast tour had received, Bay Area Deadheads were apparently still wary about the state of the band: only one of the group’s four shows at the Oakland Coliseum in early December sold out, and at the last two there were thousands of empty seats. Even news that the band soundchecked “Saint Stephen”—which they hadn’t played in eleven years—before the penultimate show in the run wasn’t enough to fill the coliseum the next night. (Some cynics suggested that the sound check was actually a ploy to sell tickets for the last show. At the sound check the band didn’t perform the entire song, and they didn’t play it at the show, either.)
Besides the poor ticket sales, the other major topic of Deadhead conversation at these shows was the band’s use of video monitors to help the singers remember the words to their newer songs. This wasn’t unprecedented in the rock world—the Rolling Stones used lyric monitors on their 1994 tour. And Garcia had employed a discreet music stand with sheets of lyrics for his appearances with David Grisman (nothing easy about remembering all the verses of those old sea chanteys and murder ballads) and for a couple of songs at ’94 Dead shows, such as “Days Between” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” But the move still raised a few eyebrows, and most people assumed it was primarily a face-saving measure for Garcia. The monitors did make an immediate difference in the group’s performances of their ’90s songs, but they did nothing to stop the musical miscues, and Garcia still suffered from lyric amnesia on his older songs, which were not programmed into the monitors.
In strictly financial terms 1994 was the Grateful Dead’s most successful year ever. The band played eighty-four shows and grossed $52.4 million dollars from touring alone, making them the fifth most popular road act that year, behind the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Eagles and Barbra Streisand. (The previous year the Dead was the number one touring attraction in the United States, grossing $45.6 million dollars on the road with weaker competition.) Add to that the income from merchandising and CDs and you have an improbable corporate giant—a millionaire band that still had a hippie image in the straight world. And Garcia’s income was augmented further by his work with the JGB, recording royalties and money he pulled in from his artwork and line of ties.
Despite the overflowing coffers, which, as usual, translated to generous bonuses throughout the Dead organization, there wasn’t much jubilation in San Rafael as 1994 turned to 1995. True, by December most of the next year’s touring schedule had been preliminarily sketched out, and it promised to bring in even more cash than the group had earned in ’94. But there was a deep-seated concern about Garcia’s health and well-being that gnawed at everyone, from the bandmembers to the good folks who staffed the Dead’s ticket operation. A sense of fatalism gripped some people—a few even began quietly investigating job possibilities in preparation for that dark day they believed might be a tour or two away if Garcia didn’t get into shape. Others hoped for the best and took comfort in the knowledge that there had always been a return from the brink before. But even the optimists admitted that something had to give.
CHAPTER 23
There’s Nothing You Can Hold for Very Long
f the Grateful Dead had been a typical American show-business phenomenon, they would have turned 1995 into a yearlong celebration of their thirtieth anniversary, and earned tens of millions of dollars on top of what they would ordinarily make on the road. They would have finished their new album and released it in June in time for a big thirtieth-anniversary stadium tour, sponsored by a giant corporation. The group, at the urging of some high-powered New York publicity firm, would make strategic television appearances to support the album and tour—The Tonight Show, the Late Show with David Letterman, maybe an MTV Unplugged appearance that could later be spun off into a CD and commercial video. Or they could have gone the classier cable TV route—half a million people in Manhattan’s Central Park for a free concert broadcast live on HBO; a Woodstock of the ’90s. They probably could have played the White House for the ultimate ironic photo o
p. A world tour would have taken them across Europe, Asia and Australia, culminating on New Year’s Eve with a meticulously planned pay-per-view event from some exotic locale—the Great Wall in China; Ayers Rock in Australia; Easter Island!
Instead, the Dead basically chose to ignore the anniversary, as if they knew that with Garcia’s tenuous health a threat to their future, there was no reason to be popping champagne corks or attracting global attention when they weren’t playing their best. To the outside world, which understood the Dead only as a successful sociocultural phenomenon and couldn’t be expected to have tracked Garcia’s subtle musical decline, the Dead appeared to be sitting pretty. They were more than just survivors of the rock ’n’ roll wars; they were living icons whose very existence in 1995 was symbolic of the durability of some of the ideals of the ’60s. Garcia generally disavowed the ’60s mantle, but Phil Lesh noted in 1994 that the Grateful Dead were “the last holdout—the last piece of that culture that really exists in this era. It’s history, and for some, I suppose, it’s nostalgia. But it’s very much alive—that’s the key. . . . If it is the only remnant of the ’60s, thank goodness there’s something left. Because there really isn’t much else that survived the ’60s intact.”
Garcia’s first three gigs in 1995 were Jerry Garcia Band shows at the Warfield Theater in mid-January. He seemed to be in fine spirits at these concerts, which broke no new musical ground but were fairly well played. By this time Garcia could do JGB shows at the Warfield in his sleep—and there are those who will tell you he did nod off at a few gigs there. The atmosphere around those smaller shows was always more relaxed than at any Dead concert. People’s expectations were perhaps lower, too, so they were rarely disappointed.
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