Although no one knew it at the time, the July 9 concert at Soldier Field would be the Grateful Dead’s last. For that reason it has taken on a perhaps unjustified historicity, with some scouring the tapes for clues to prove that Jerry knew he was dying and was playing his final show. This much is clear: by that last night, Garcia was spent. He looked pale and drawn, he had trouble even getting up the stairs to the stage and some backstagers observed that he appeared fidgety and uncomfortable. Did he know that exactly one month later he’d be dead? Certainly not. Otherwise, why would he reaffirm his commitment to clean up after the tour? Why open his final concert with “Touch of Grey”? Not for irony’s sake.
His most vital and revealing number that night was “So Many Roads,” with its compelling mixture of weariness, resignation and, ultimately perhaps, acceptance. “So Many Roads” is a song aimed at someone in the late autumn of life—not at a typical fifty-year-old—and it seemed more meaningful to Garcia each time he sang it. That final set at Soldier Field, he sang the repeated ending refrain, “So many roads to ease my soul,” with as much verve and passion as he could physically muster in his obviously weakened state. He changed the phrasing each time through, and built to a crescendo in which he was nearly shouting the words, like some testifyin’ preacher. This was Garcia’s soul laid bare, and the audience responded by cheering him on, empathizing with him, struggling with him. Many people were in tears by the end of the song, and the deafening ovation it received showed that Jerry and most of the crowd had truly connected and experienced the song together. This mystical union of artist and audience was at the core of the Grateful Dead’s appeal. There was always a sense that the band was using these songs—this immeasurably rich body of tunes that encompassed cautionary tales, swirling seas of metaphors and allegories, little bursts of wisdom at every turn, black comedy, fantasies, surrealism and the down-home “I know you rider, gonna miss me when I’m gone” blues—in the same way the crowd was: as constantly shifting touchstones for their own lives.
Garcia’s final musical statement at Soldier Field couldn’t have been more appropriate for the ultimate outcome of the Garcia saga—the darkly existential “Black Muddy River,” played as the encore. The moment that song ended, Phil launched into a powerful, hope-filled version of “Box of Rain” that lifted everyone’s spirits. But the poignant last words of that song work as a closing quotation mark on Garcia’s life journey: “Such a long, long time to be gone / And a short time to be there.” Fireworks exploded over the stadium as the crowd filed out, and no doubt there were thousands of animated conversations about catching some or all of the next Dead tour.
The mood of the band was considerably more serious. “I was just glad we got through it,” Vince says. “I thought, ‘Thank God that’s the last date!’ There was always something cool about playing Soldier Field, especially with the fireworks show and everything. But when you play for that many people, you always want it be spectacular and all you could really say about that was, ‘Thank God it’s over.’”
Once he returned home to the Bay Area from the summer tour, Garcia had a week of leisure before he went down to the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, California, near Palm Springs, to go through their famous detox program. In his many years of battling heroin addiction, this was the first time Jerry had ever agreed to try a multiweek residential facility. It was at Deborah’s urging, and his acquiescence showed that he knew he was seriously ill and strung out. The move caught many in the Dead scene off guard because it was such a radical departure for him.
“I was pretty surprised when he went into Betty Ford,” said John Kahn, who also offered this unorthodox minority view: “I don’t think he was hooked on drugs at the time, to tell you the truth. I really doubt that he was. He didn’t have a very hard time down [at Betty Ford] on that level. The drugs were the least of his problems.”
On July 16, exactly a week after tour’s end, Garcia played on his final recording session—a version of the Jimmie Rodgers song “Blue Yodel #9 (Standing on the Corner)” cut at David Grisman’s studio for a Rodgers tribute album spearheaded by Bob Dylan. The band that day consisted of Garcia on acoustic guitar and lead vocals, Grisman on mandolin and banjo-mandolin, Kahn on stand-up bass, jazz drummer George Marsh on percussion and Bay Area string band veteran Sally Van Meter on dobro.
“Jerry said he was getting over a bronchitis cold,” Van Meter says, “but his spirit was totally there. He was completely professional and in a good mood and really very friendly. Very talkative. Obviously very intelligent. Actually, when John Kahn arrived, I thought he looked worse than Jerry did.”
Shortly after the session, Garcia flew to Southern California accompanied by Deborah and Steve Parish and checked in to the Betty Ford Clinic for what was to be a monthlong detox program.
“The first week he was there,” Deborah told Rolling Stone, “he called and said he really liked all the people there and that he was really sick—he had a pretty serious jones going. But he was very committed to getting off [heroin], and he did—the hard way. He suffered physically.
“Then, after two weeks he called me and said it was really hot, he hated the food, he wanted to come home. So Parish and I went down. Jerry came out, and he looked just great. He’d lost weight and he was smiling. He was doing really well, and he was strong. He was clean. You’re supposed to stay a whole month, but he wanted to come home. So I said, ‘You can come home if you continue in the recovery stuff.’”
Parish suggests that once Garcia was clearheaded and apparently on the road to physical recovery, he was turned off by the Ford clinic’s rehab rhetoric and generally stifling milieu. And though Parish acknowledges that Garcia’s decision to leave before his program was completed was potentially dangerous, he supported the guitarist’s urge to continue his rehabilitation in a more pleasant and laid-back environment. So Garcia got his wish, and he was able to spend his fifty-third birthday back in the Bay Area.
Over the days that followed his release, Garcia lay low, attending a few AA-style meetings and talking with a couple of recovery psychiatrists “who he felt understood him,” Deborah said. A number of people in the Dead scene had their last encounters with Jerry during the first week of August, and to a person they reported that he was extremely warm and optimistic about the future. At the same time, they recognized his physical frailty.
Steve Parish says that Jerry went to the Dead’s brand-new recording studio in Novato and talked excitedly about building a special guitar room there. Vince Welnick was there that day and he heard Garcia’s upbeat rap about the guitar room, too. Vince adds, “He was in a great mood. He was telling these old ‘war stories’ about being in the clinic. He had a Kentucky Fried Chicken sack with him; yup, he’d been to the Colonel! Anyway, he was one of the main proponents for building Club Front 2. He was very enthusiastic.
“But I could tell right away his guts were fucking with him, which could be expected. He looked like he was in pain. You could sort of hear the fluid on his lungs when he talked. But if he knew he was dying he was fooling everybody, because he was making plans like he was going to live. I don’t think he knew he was dying; I think he just felt particularly cruddy, which could be expected from just getting out of rehab.”
On August 4 Jerry called his old friend Bob Hunter out of the blue. A couple of weeks after Garcia’s death, Hunter attempted to reconstruct this last conversation in his journal (and later shared it with the world on his personal Web site). Parts of it went like this:
RH: Hey, Bozo!
JG: Hey, Hunter, it’s Garcia. I just got out of the Betty Ford Center!
RH: How was Betty?
JG: She was a great fuck, man!
RH: Did they wean you off or what?
JG: Naw, it’s strictly cold turkey. They give you some pills to help the sleep and convulsions, but basically it’s the shits. And the food—aargh—it makes airplane food seem like gourmet dining. It’s a good thing I wasn’t hungry! I think the plan is to m
ake you so miserable you don’t ever want to go back. The only good thing was this old guy who watched the ward at night—he used to play with Django, man! You shoulda heard his stories. I sat up all night talking to him a couple of times; I couldn’t sleep anyway, and it was incredible. I’ll tell you about it later.
Garcia mentioned his excitement about working on the Harrington Street book, even recounting an episode from his childhood that was part of the book. Then he told Hunter:
JG: . . . What I called about was I’m feeling real creative and I’m hot to get writing. I got to thinking about all the stuff we’ve done while I was at Betty Ford. I don’t seem to be able to get to it without you—somehow when we get together the ideas start coming. You know, I’ve been singing some of those songs for over twenty-five years, and they never once stuck in my throat, I always felt like they were saying what I wanted to be saying . . . It’s like they’re . . . It’s like they’re . . .
RH: Real songs?
JG: Yeah, that’s it! Real songs! And besides, I miss you, man.
RH: Hey, don’t get sentimental on me . . . Get your ass over here and let’s start crankin’.
JG: All right! I’d come over now but I think the wifey has some plans for the weekend.
RH: What’s a couple more days? We got forever.
Hunter and Garcia never did get together for that songwriting session. Racked with pain, Garcia turned to heroin for relief again. Then he unilaterally decided that he needed to go into another rehab program to get the medical help he knew he needed.
“Jerry said that when he was in Betty Ford, they were giving him medication for his heart, for his cholesterol, for everything the whole time he was there,” Linda Kahn says. “And when he left they told him he should go to a doctor and have those medications continue; that if he didn’t take them he’d die. But I guess instead he went to some holistic doctors or something.
“That’s why he went to Serenity Knolls [a drug rehab facility in Forest Knolls, in northwest Marin County]. He was originally planning on going up to [a program in] Napa for three months. He hadn’t picked out a place, but he was so scared because of what they’d said at Betty Ford about the medication that he hadn’t been getting, that he went to Serenity Knolls thinking that he would get it there. But it wasn’t that kind of a place.”
John Kahn recalled, “I saw him at my house a couple of days before and he didn’t seem very well at all. He told me he was an old man. He was trying to explain to me how bad he felt. I was saying, ‘Naw, c’mon. It’s not that bad. You’ll be okay.’ And he was saying, ‘No, really.’ He put it in terms of being a seventy-year-old man in a fifty-year-old body. I know he’d lived a lot of life. But there was something really wrong with him. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. He told me the hardest thing was just getting out of bed in the morning.
“He told me he was going to go somewhere where nobody could find him, and then he’d let me know. I know he had a big argument with his old lady the night before he went in—a big fallout. She really hurt him in a lot of ways—things about money. I felt for him. It was kind of sad to be hassling about that.
“I really got the feeling that he was going to cut a lot of things loose,” Kahn continued. “He didn’t exactly say what; my feeling was everything—the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia Band, his wife, drugs. He really wanted to get away from everybody. That was the last thing he told me. That was the way he thought he could do it. I guess he got away.”
Garcia told John and Linda Kahn that one reason he chose Serenity Knolls is that it used to be a Boy Scout camp where he and the band had crashed occasionally in the mid-’60s. Garcia planned to stay at the facility for twenty-one days. He told very few people of his plan; most people in the Dead organization believed he was going to Hawaii. He even kept the news from Deborah, who found out shortly after he’d checked in on the afternoon of August 8, and, according to Linda Kahn, was very angry about having been kept in the dark. She received permission from Serenity Knolls to take Jerry out to dinner, and the two dined together at a Mill Valley Italian restaurant called Piatti. Then she drove him back to Serenity Knolls, a twenty-minute drive.
A Serenity Knolls counselor passed by Garcia’s room at around 4 A.M. and heard him snoring loudly. Twenty minutes later the counselor passed Garcia’s room again, and this time he didn’t hear any sound. When he went into the room to check on Garcia, he found him dressed in a blue polo shirt, gray sweatpants and white socks, lying on top of his bed, his eyes open slightly, apparently lifeless. The orderly called in a staff nurse and Marin County paramedics and they tried to resuscitate Garcia, to no avail. Jerry Garcia was pronounced dead at 4:23 A.M. on August 9, and the county coroner was called in. Pending the results of an autopsy, the cause of death was listed as a massive heart attack.
Deborah Koons Garcia later wondered if Jerry’s chronic apnea had contributed to his death: “It’s when you’re sleeping and you can’t breathe. You stop breathing and then you snap out of it. He’d had it for thirty years. And I think he was too weakened to breathe through it. He just stopped breathing. They tried to revive him, and they couldn’t.”
Garcia’s body was moved to a Marin funeral home, and Deborah went over right away. “It’s strange to say, but he looked so peaceful,” she said. “And Jerry had this smile on his face. I said to the guy at the funeral home, ‘Look, he’s smiling. Did you do that to him?’ And he said, ‘No, that’s exactly the way I found him.’ His face was so at peace. At the funeral we decided to have an open casket because he looked so good.”
* * *
Word of Garcia’s death spread quickly through the media, and the many Grateful Dead conferences on the Internet were inundated with stunned fans looking for comfort and sharing their feelings and memories. By the time Garcia died, most hard-core Deadheads had already heard through the Grateful Dead grapevine about his stay at the Betty Ford Clinic, and there was a widespread feeling of optimism that Jerry was beating his demons and raring to get healthy again. The last year of his life there was no concealing how sick he was—he wore it on his face—yet when the end actually came, nearly everyone professed shock and disbelief. Garcia seemed like one of those guys who, despite his reckless and abusive lifestyle, would probably outlive us all. He might have believed that, too.
In San Francisco a couple of thousand grieving fans crowded onto Haight Street, some banging on drums and playing flutes, while others kept a silent and respectful vigil outside 710 Ashbury. A large group of mourners headed over to the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park for an impromptu get-together at the site of the Human Be-In twenty-eight years earlier. In New York City, about a thousand people gathered in Central Park at Strawberry Fields—a shrine to another fallen rock star, John Lennon. In cities all over the country, from Philadelphia to Chicago to Portland to Los Angeles, Deadheads gathered to console each other, to mourn and to celebrate Garcia’s legacy.
Garcia’s death received prominent coverage on the national news broadcasts that evening, and the next morning the story was front-page news in many of the country’s largest newspapers, including the New York Times, which ran a fond but sober headline: JERRY GARCIA OF GRATEFUL DEAD, ICON OF ’60S SPIRIT, DIES AT 53. Within hours of Garcia’s passing, television, radio and the news wires were cluttered with fond remembrances from Garcia’s musical peers, from friends, admirers and even President Clinton, who said that he and his daughter, Chelsea, represented two generations of Dead fans, and that he wore J. Garcia ties and gave them away as gifts. “He was a great talent; he was a genius,” he told MTV. “He also had a terrible problem that was a legacy of the life he lived and the demons he dealt with. And I would hope that all of us who loved his music would also reflect on the consequences of self-destructive behavior.”
The most heartfelt tributes came from musician friends past and present, and Jerry’s counterculture peers.
Carlos Santana: “He was a profound talent both as a musician and as an artist, and he cannot be replaced. I
take solace in the thought that his spirit has gone to join the likes of Bill Graham, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis and other greats who have left us too soon.”
David Crosby: “Musicians and people who love music have lost one of the brightest, most articulate minds of this generation. He was a great man, a friend and the creator of an incredible amount of wonderful music.”
Ornette Coleman: “Jerry Garcia was one of the original American icons. He played naturally and beautifully.”
Branford Marsalis: “There is not a sentence in the world that could respectfully do justice to the life and music of Jerry Garcia.”
Paul Kantner: “The universe is a cold, indifferent place if you don’t believe in Jesus. As Jerry Garcia said, ‘[Rock ’n’ roll] provides what church provided for in other generations.’ The Grateful Dead went a long way toward providing something appropriate to this current universe that worked. Jerry was the master of that particular paradigm. He was an exquisite man despite all his faults, many of which we all have. Let us all remember exquisite men.”
Maria Muldaur: “He had a flock. He didn’t choose it. He didn’t say, ‘I want to be a big icon and guru’ to what is now several generations. But I think it was because in his own unassuming way he made himself completely an instrument of higher good energy, which is the real reason people need music so much. They don’t get their money’s worth most of the time, but with Jerry Garcia, they sure did.”
Ken Kesey: “Jerry was a great warrior. If he was a good leader, then we don’t need him anymore; it should be time for people to become active and follow instructions, and his instructions were fairly simple. He’s just a straight-out Christian acidhead, speaking of love and mercy and mischief, all those wonderful things from the ’60s.
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