Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  But the concert’s most magical moments didn’t come from the band. During “drums,” ten maroon-robed members of the Tibetan Buddhist Gyuto Monks, who had a long association with the Dead, mostly through Mickey Hart and Danny Rifkin, came onstage and electrified the crowd with their hypnotic, guttural chanting. What does it say about a Grateful Dead concert that the band could surrender the stage to a group of Tibetan holy men for fifteen minutes and nobody in the crowd thought it was the least bit out of place? To the contrary, the audience was transfixed, and the appreciative roar when the monks slowly filed off the stage had the Tibetans beaming and waving. Whether it was Olatunji or Ornette Coleman, Carlos Santana or Edie Brickell joining the Dead onstage, Deadheads were always open to new infusions of interesting energy from whomever or whatever. It was all in the noble service of blowing minds.

  At the second Shoreline show, on Saturday night, Garcia was in fine fettle again. In the first set he was the earnest but convivial storyteller, regaling the throng with atmospheric pieces about three very different women: “Althea,” Delilah Jones from “Brown-Eyed Women” and Delia DeLyon, the heroine of “Stagger Lee.” The second set opened with a perky, neatly executed “China Cat Sunflower” segueing (as usual) into the always uplifting “I Know You Rider.” Through all his ups and downs, Garcia almost never played a bad version of “I Know You Rider.” Musically and lyrically, the old folk blues tune was one of the simplest songs in the Dead’s repertoire and that’s precisely why it was always so effective. Every person in the arena, amphitheater or stadium—from the bandmembers to the Heads spinning in the farthest reaches of the venue—could relate to the song’s determined optimism, as Weir sang the second verse, straight out of American mountain music:

  Well, the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday

  You know the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday

  March winds gonna blow all my troubles away

  Then Garcia would step up to the microphone, and his verse, which he always delivered with as much passion as he could muster, tapped into everyone’s natural wanderlust:

  I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train

  I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train

  I’d shine my light through the cool Colorado rain

  Later in the set Garcia led a triumphal sing-along on “Uncle John’s Band,” and in his post-“drums” ballad slot he offered a spellbinding version of “Stella Blue” that was filled with heart. Garcia seemed completely inside Hunter’s lyric that night—the giant video screens showed his face in extreme close-up and he couldn’t have looked more clear-eyed and present. When Garcia was truly in the moment on his ballads, he was able to communicate the most complex feelings and emotions with a directness and simplicity that could touch almost any soul. He was singing about life and death, “broken dreams and vanished years.” It was sad and beautiful, especially when he came to the last verse. The music dropped to a whisper—the silence between each note palpable—and the crowd hung on every word as he sang

  It all rolls into one

  And nothin’ comes for free

  There’s nothing you can hold for very long

  But when you hear that song

  Come crying like the wind

  It seems like all this life

  Was just a dream

  Stella Blue

  And he smiled ever so slightly, recognizing that the crowd and band had experienced a moment of the soul together—had walked in the same shoes and seen from the same eyes, if only briefly. It was that kind of enlightened moment, a shared reality full of spiritual nourishment and humanity, that kept Deadheads coming back for more. I’ll always carry with me the vision of Garcia, his eyes scanning the crowd, desperately trying to connect with every person at Shoreline, and in the process drawing them into the depths of his own soul.

  The show ended on a bright note with “Liberty,” Garcia charging through it with delight and gusto, rocking back and forth on his heels to the beat and seemingly as full of energy as he’d been during the evening’s first song. I was ready to believe that bright days were ahead.

  But Sunday afternoon’s show was another story altogether. Garcia was distracted by equipment problems for much of the first set, and spent an inordinate amount of time conferring with Steve Parish about the vexing sound gremlins. His attention appeared to wander at times while he was singing, and his playing lacked the crispness of the first two nights. During “Victim or the Crime” in the second set, he sounded completely lost, hitting “clams” and wrong chords left and right, and even during “Unbroken Chain”—which was the first version ever played in California—he wasn’t in sync with the rest of the band and his melodic fills sounded perfunctory. He rallied enough energy to deliver “Eyes of the World” at a robust clip, but basically he’d run out of gas by “drums,” and the late-second-set “Days Between” was mostly a shambles. Still, “Brokedown Palace” was a sweet and nicely played encore, more in the spirit of the first two concerts than the disjointed and occasionally disturbing third. And as fate would have it, the last words I ever heard Jerry Garcia sing were a moving good-bye:

  Fare you well, fare you well

  I love you more than words can tell

  Listen to the river sing sweet songs

  To rock my soul

  June was the last time Mountain Girl saw Jerry, too—they sat across from each other at a Rex Foundation meeting. “We had a really nice chat,” she reports. “He was kind of pale; his color wasn’t good. I noticed that his shoulders were a lot thinner. When he was swimming a lot he’d develop these big swimmer’s shoulders; he just loved our pool [on Reservoir Road] and of course he liked swimming in Hawaii. But his spirits were good.”

  It was around this time, too, that Deborah Garcia came to grips with the fact that Jerry was strung out on heroin again. As she recounted to Rolling Stone after his death, “I said to him, ‘I know you’re doing drugs. I want to tell you that if you want to keep doing drugs for the rest of your life, I will love you anyway. We will deal with it, and at least it won’t be something you have to hide or be afraid of. But do you want to stay on them?’

  “And he said, ‘No, I don’t. It’s a pain in the butt.’ That’s exactly what he said. ‘I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life.’ It was right before the summer tour. We decided it would be better for him to go to a treatment place.”

  But first Garcia had to make it through one more tour—a monthlong trek that took the Dead to stadiums, amphitheaters and arenas in the East and Midwest, and paired them with Bob Dylan’s band on five of the first seven concerts. (Dylan opened the shows and never played with the Dead.) It would be the Dead’s final tour.

  In the summer of 1994 the Dead had played a very successful concert in a giant field surrounded by beautiful pine-covered hills in Highgate, Vermont. The show had drawn about 60,000 people from all over the Northeast, and though there were some logistical problems with the site—the traffic jams coming and going were horrendous—it proved to be a mellow setting for such a big event. The Dead began their summer ’95 tour at Highgate, with Dylan opening, and this time there was trouble. More than 100,000 turned up and there was an ugly gate-crashing episode in which some fences were knocked down, injuring a number of people in the process, and thousands of rowdy fans swarmed into the concert site.

  The Dead later determined that there was a large element of party animals who were not necessarily Deadheads who had decided on a lark to be part of the madness at a big outdoor Dead show and didn’t think twice about the consequences of their disruptive behavior. It was widely reported by fans that Garcia was in poor shape at this show, blowing lyrics and not doing much on the guitar.

  By the next concert, three nights later at Giants Stadium, Garcia was playing a little better, but he still went through periods during the show when he seemed zombielike and out of it. Bob Bralove remembers, “There was a moment where he got caught in the beginning of ‘Wharf Rat’ and he
didn’t seem to be able to get out. He got lost; he couldn’t find his way out. And that’s when I started getting scared: ‘Is this drugs? Is this physical? What’s goin’ on?’”

  The sound at the show was terrible, in part because Garcia kept the volume of his guitar turned so low he could barely be heard at times, so the group sounded unbalanced. This was a problem at numerous Dead shows in 1994 and 1995—on nights when he lacked confidence, Garcia would turn himself down in the mix, and as a result the sound seemed to have a hole in it. Mixer John Cutler was powerless to control it from the soundboard; it was Garcia’s choice, and it frustrated his fans to no end.

  From Giants Stadium the caravan moved on to Albany, New York, where there was another (much smaller) gate-crashing incident outside Knickerbocker Arena that culminated in numerous arrests and a few injuries to fans and police. The scene outside hot, humid and occasionally rainy RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., was less chaotic, but there was weirdness there, too: three fans were struck by lightning before one of the concerts (all survived). Bruce Hornsby played piano with the Dead a final time at the first of the two RFK shows, but he seemed unusually restrained. Garcia, on the other hand, was surprisingly lively, and he even joined Bob Dylan at the end of his set for a bluesy reading of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” and a festive romp through “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” that had nearly every person in the stadium shouting out the famous refrain: “I would not feel so alone / Everybody must get stoned!”

  Things went well during the next three shows on the tour. Like Knickerbocker Arena, the Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan—home to professional basketball’s Detroit Pistons—felt like a relatively intimate venue for the Dead in the midst of their stadium tours, and they usually played well there. This summer was no exception: though Garcia had trouble with lyrics on both nights, the level of his playing was generally high. Even with Jerry playing respectably (but not consistently) at most of the tour stops, backstage there was great concern about his health. His breathing was often labored, he looked uncomfortable much of the time and it appeared to be a struggle for him to get from place to place.

  “During the summer tour we were all aware he was pretty sick,” Vince Welnick says. “I was actually worried that he was putting himself in a position where he would become incapacitated or unable to play. He was unhappy, he was tired, he was asleep a lot. When he wasn’t asleep he was kind of grouchy. He seemed a little bit disoriented and he wasn’t the happy-go-lucky Jerry. He was obviously suffering. And you know the guy had enough money to buy whatever drug he wanted to make him feel right, but that wasn’t working. I think he knew he was dying, and I guess the truth of it is he was. But I think everybody in the band thought, ‘Well, let’s just get through this tour and it’ll all be better.’”

  Was there ever any thought of not doing the tour? “No, because when we went out, it wasn’t that apparent. In the spring tour prior to that it wasn’t that noticeable.”

  After a stadium show in Pittsburgh, the tour went to Deer Creek amphitheater in Indiana, which was probably the most popular Midwestern venue for the Dead since the band had stopped playing Alpine Valley after 1989. The band had a history of playing good shows there, also, and because it was a lovely, midsized venue, holding 20,000 people in seats and on a sprawling lawn in the back, the demand for tickets was always extremely high. The previous couple of years when the band played Deer Creek there had been the usual hordes of ticketless fans outside, but there hadn’t been any real problems. That changed on July 2, 1995.

  Unbeknownst to the thousands of people attending the show, Garcia had received what everyone in the Dead camp regarded as a very serious death threat from someone who claimed he was going to gun down the guitarist. On a tour plagued with disturbing violent episodes, this was the last straw.

  “That was scary,” Vince Welnick says. “I remember Phil wanted to pack up and leave right then and there, and then we decided, well, if it’s Jerry’s life, let him call it. And Jerry said, ‘There’s no way I’m going to let that stop me; hell no.’ He said, ‘I’ve been getting crackpots all my life.’ But if he hadn’t said that, we absolutely would have gone home, because Phil was already packed.”

  Both the local police and the FBI were put on alert, and metal detectors were quickly set up at the gates to the venue. “We didn’t know about the death threat at the time,” says Peter Toluzzi, who attended the show. “And the scene outside was fairly mellow before the show. There were an awful lot of people with no tickets, but that wasn’t particularly unusual. It’s interesting in retrospect that during the band’s sound check that afternoon, which we could hear outside, Garcia played the first verse of ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy,’ which they hadn’t played since Brent died. Then he stopped it and went into ‘Visions of Johanna’ and then ‘Here Comes Sunshine,’ which they opened the show with.

  “The metal detectors made it so it took a long time for most people to get inside,” Toluzzi says. “Then, once the show started, I thought it was strange that there were so many security people up in the catwalks and in the front rows. We didn’t know what that was all about.”

  If Garcia was nervous, he didn’t show it. In fact, he provided his own ironic commentary on the situation when he chose to play “Dire Wolf,” with its chipper “Don’t murder me” refrain. (This closely mirrored a night in 1979 at Madison Square Garden when he received a death threat and played “Dire Wolf.”)

  But two-thirds of the way through the set, while Phil was leading the band through his arrangement of Robbie Robertson’s moving “Broken Arrow,” something very disturbing happened. Thousands of ticketless kids broke down the rear fence of the venue, pushed aside security guards and swarmed onto the back lawn, as many fans inside cheered them on. At the perimeter of the amphitheater, police used tear gas, pepper spray and German shepherd attack dogs in an attempt to keep order, but the fighting continued for some time. Within a couple of hours of the incident, CNN broadcast video footage of the Deer Creek riot, and those pictures then popped up on news programs all over the country.

  The inundation of ticketless rowdies made the amphitheater crowded and uncomfortable for many people, and the security forces inside realized that the breach of security could have let in a potential assassin, so tensions were high backstage and in the area in front of the stage. “The whole thing was really very weird,” Bob Bralove says. “You look out [from backstage] and the lights are on and you’re watching everybody and you can see the guys with the bulletproof vests on and all the security people are looking so serious. It was very creepy. It was a shock to look out at this sea of faces that had been a source of nothing but positive energy—you know, the dark, warm, fuzzy area out there—but it was brightly lit and you were looking for people with guns. Then you look up at the fence and people are pouring over it, so there goes your security.”

  In the face of this frightening anarchy, it’s amazing Garcia was able to play at all, much less play quite well in spots. The house lights were left on during the entire second set for security reasons, adding to the strangeness of the event. Obviously distracted, Garcia sang only one of the three verses of “Fire on the Mountain” during the second set, but his guitar work on the song was quite intense; darkly inspired. In this setting, his struggle through “New Speedway Boogie” seemed like a plaintive entreaty, and the celestial harmonies of “Attics of My Life” washed over the chaotic scene like a soothing balm.

  The next morning, after consulting with police and the management of Deer Creek, the Dead decided to cancel the second scheduled show there. The next stop on the tour was Riverport Amphitheater near St. Louis three days later, and when Deadheads arrived they found a massive police presence awaiting them, complete with dogs and extra barbed-wire fencing.

  Things were peaceful, even subdued, the first night at Riverport. There was obviously some residual weirdness from the Deer Creek debacle; it was in the air. The house lights were left on during the show again,
which added to the constrictive vibe of the event. Even though the show went on without incident, there was bad news this first night. A couple of hours after the concert, about 150 Deadheads were injured—some seriously—when a porch at a campground collapsed under the weight of too many people. This incident, on top of the Highgate and Deer Creek disasters, also became a national news story. The band dedicated the next night’s show to the injured Heads, and put in a solid performance. By the second set that night the house lights were turned out, and most believed that things were returning to what passes for normal at a Grateful Dead show.

  The Tour from Hell, as it was dubbed by many Deadheads, limped into its final port of call, Chicago’s venerable Soldier Field, on July 8. Even though the Dead had played the stadium without incident the previous four years, the negative press from the tour got some city officials in such a lather that Mayor Richard Daley had to reassure them that extra security precautions would be taken. Outside the show, a number of Deadheads took it upon themselves to spread the word about responsible behavior at Dead shows. One group sold black-and-yellow GATECRASHERS SUCK! bumper stickers.

  Inside, the mood was considerably more festive than it had been in St. Louis. The Band opened the two Chicago dates, and their hit-heavy sets were very well-received. This wasn’t exactly a reunion of two of the titans of Watkins Glen—both groups were ragged and on the other side of their best years—but their shared history added to the warmth of the event.

  The Dead’s sets at Soldier Field weren’t much better or worse than most of the ones that preceded them on the tour. Garcia flubbed lyrics left and right but occasionally turned in a great performance of a song; the rest of the band sounded comparatively strong and confident. The first night, Jerry’s standout was the one song where he was aided by the lyric monitor, “Visions of Johanna.” He dug into Dylan’s words with tremendous feeling, even pumping his fist into the air to punctuate the line “Mona Lisa must’ve had the highway blues / You can tell by the way she smiles.”