Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Bob Weir was the first to make a public statement about Garcia’s death, when he appeared in a brief interview with MTV’s Kurt Loder on September 9. Asked if grieving Deadheads had been approaching him on the streets, Weir remarked, “All the time. They’re pouring out a little bit of their hearts. They’re assuming that I’m taking this a lot harder than I am. Death is so final that I can’t really react to it that much. Because it’s a change you absolutely have to accept, right now. I can’t take Jerry’s death personally; he didn’t do that to me. When they come up to me on the street, I think they’re trying to give me a little strength that I don’t really need; they could keep it for themselves. But if they feel like they have to share something with me, well, here I am.”

  Mickey Hart says that after Garcia died, “I couldn’t play Grateful Dead music around the house for a long time. It was just too painful to hear his guitar. Three years later it’s still painful for me; it’s still a little close. And I really thought I would never play Grateful Dead music again. But you have to put the past behind. I dug in here at my studio for months and didn’t come out.” Hart was already working on a solo album—called Mystery Box—that featured songs with lyrics by Robert Hunter. But Garcia’s death gave the project a new urgency and also a new direction: some of Hunter’s lyrics seemed to address the uncertainty Deadheads and the musicians were facing in the post-Jerry age, while at the same time optimistically positing the notion that love and music were the keys that could unlock life’s mystery box: “Depend on the wind of distant drums / We’ll know the next step when it comes.” Another song, “Down the Road,” included a touching verse about Garcia, written just days after August 9:

  From the corner of my eye I saw the sun explode

  I didn’t look directly ’cause it would have burned my soul

  When the smoke and thunder cleared enough to look around

  I heard a sweet guitar lick, an old familiar sound

  Heard a laugh I recognized come rolling from the earth

  Saw it rise into the skies like lightning giving birth

  It sounded like Garcia but I couldn’t see the face

  Just the beard and glasses and a smile on empty space

  Interestingly, the bandmember who was perhaps the most severely affected by Garcia’s death was the most recent addition, Vince Welnick. “When Jerry died my whole world came apart,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll ever be the same again. That was the happiest time of my life, playing with those guys. Jerry’s death completely changed my life from the happiest time in my life to the unhappiest. I’m only now [a year and a half later] even able to talk about it. If you had tried to interview me a year ago, I would’ve had nothing to say; there was nothing I could say. I was like a vegetable. I could barely stand to go to the wake and the funeral. I remember when I was seeing Jerry in the coffin I was thinking, ‘He moved!’ And the thing in Golden Gate Park was like the worst acid trip of my life, because you’re out there seeing all these people and it’s a beautiful day and Jerry’s fucking dead and you can’t believe it, not even for a minute, and you can’t change it.

  “I was just not ready, not in the slightest, for that to go down. It took every bit of life out of me; I’ve never been in a darker time. I was like a walking zombie. I was very depressed and wound up in a depression clinic around Christmas of ’95.”

  Not coincidentally, it was in early December that it became clear that the Grateful Dead would not continue without Garcia. Throughout the fall there had been rampant speculation that the band might try to carry on with a new guitarist—popular choices of the rumor mill included Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton, Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Jorma Kaukonen. One scenario had Branford Marsalis and Bruce Hornsby filling the vacant slot; another suggested that the Dead would use a number of different players over the course of a tour. But all this was little more than wishful thinking. In truth, no one was ever approached about taking Garcia’s place. December 7 was to be the first full band meeting since Jerry’s death, but Bill Kreutzmann elected not to attend, effectively scuttling any serious talk about the future. Kreutzmann made it clear that he had no intention of going on without Garcia; still, a couple of his bandmates were miffed that he didn’t even show up to discuss the situation. Nevertheless, the others talked for nearly five hours. The following day, December 8, the Dead formally broke the suspense by announcing that they had officially disbanded.

  “Everybody sort of knew inside,” Mickey Hart told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Of course it was hard. But everybody had a feeling. It just wasn’t there. We put it to pasture, righteously, as it should be. We went out looking good.

  “I think we’ve done it about as good as it can be done,” Hart reflected. “This thing was a conversation, a very intimate conversation between us; the band and the audience. It’s something you can’t really manufacture. It’s not something you sign up for or sign out of. Think about it: We went through presidencies, Vietnam. Thirty years. It was never planned. It was spontaneous, with a giant helping of magic. It was a great ride.”

  Garcia’s passing had an immediate and calamitous economic impact on the Dead organization and various businesses that depended on the band for a sizable percentage of their income, such as Ultra Sound (which supplied the Dead’s sound system), Bill Graham Presents and John Scher’s Metropolitan Entertainment. At Dead headquarters in San Rafael, there were a number of layoffs, and several people from the office staff were reassigned to work at Grateful Dead Merchandising (GDM), which was inundated with orders after Jerry died. Ironically, the person in charge of handling the huge volume of orders at GDM in Novato was Tiff Garcia. Salaries were slashed across the board, and those who had been connected primarily with the Dead’s touring operation found themselves struggling to justify a position on the payroll. Despite Garcia’s collapses in 1986 and 1992, the organization had no real plan for what would happen if the Grateful Dead ceased to exist.

  Deadheads coped with the loss however they could. There isn’t a Deadhead alive who doesn’t remember where he or she was when the bad news came in—that paralyzing phone call; the dispassionate radio report; the newspaper headline seen in a sidelong glance; the sobbing friend at the door. The myriad Grateful Dead on-line conferences provided an important outlet for thousands of Heads to express their feelings and stay connected with each other in the absence of Dead concerts, as did Robert Hunter’s Web site. David Gans, whose syndicated Grateful Dead Hour radio program continued to bring music and interviews to more than eighty different radio markets, compiled a moving book called Not Fade Away: The On-line World Remembers Jerry Garcia, filled with eloquent reflections and memories plucked from cyberspace in the month following August 9.

  Many Deadheads found that they were unable to listen to Dead tapes for months after Jerry’s death because it made them too sad. Others listened obsessively in hopes of absorbing some joy from the music. Bands that played mainly Grateful Dead music—from unassuming little combos with acoustic guitars to highly evolved and ambitious electric groups that could truly summon the fire of the ’68 (or ’77, or ’89) Dead—took up some of the slack. Bars and clubs that played Dead tapes one night a week (or sporadically) for dancing Deadheads also proliferated. Of course it wasn’t the same as going to a Dead show; no one expected that. But many found familiar flashes of that Grateful Dead high here and there—“in the strangest of places if you look at it right.” And, above all, there was the warm camaraderie that had always suffused Deadhead events. That did not die with Garcia.

  Where did the tourheads go? By the time Garcia died, some were already following the popular band Phish, a tremendously skilled, vibrant, fun-loving and eclectic quartet with a penchant for jamming, big grooves and playing long sets of highly improvisational music. Phish is more like the Grateful Dead in approach than in sound, and though there was an overlap of fans for years, Phish has always attracted its own, mainly younger, crowd of non-Deadheads, too. A similarly obsessive subculture has g
rown around Phish, too, with tapers and statisticians and merchants and hard-cores who hit entire tours.

  Other commercially popular bands that attracted large followings of young Deadheads in the mid-’90s were the Dave Matthews Band and Blues Traveler. The next tier of less mainstream groups admired by many Deadheads for their jamming prowess included Rusted Root, moe., Widespread Panic, God Street Wine, String Cheese Incident, Zero, Max Creek, Leftover Salmon and Medeski, Martin and Wood. None of those bands sound like each other; mostly they share a sense of adventure and musical daring that is attractive to Deadheads.

  On the fringes of the Dead family, there were a number of groups that provided a sense of musical continuity for Deadheads: Merl Saunders’s Rainforest Band played a number of the tunes that the old Garcia-Saunders group used to perform in the early ’70s, as well as jazzy versions of “Sugaree,” “Fire on the Mountain,” “Franklin’s Tower” and occasionally “Dark Star.” David Nelson’s band also played a few Dead covers, as well as songs from his New Riders days and a scattering of impressive original songs, including a few with lyrics by Robert Hunter. The Nelson Band’s Barry Sless was the most overtly Garcia-like lead guitarist of all the Dead family bands, though he was much more than a clone.

  Without question the most controversial Dead family group to tour in the long shadow of Garcia’s death was Bob Weir’s band, Ratdog. Here was a group consisting entirely of rhythm players and no lead instrumentalist. The contrast between the Grateful Dead, where Garcia’s guitar lines spun graceful melodies that danced in the air, and this group, with its thin and monotonous sound, could not have been more striking. Weir made a point to not play his best-loved Grateful Dead material—“Let It Grow” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Estimated Prophet,” etc.—yet he did play some of his least popular Dead tunes in Ratdog—“Victim or the Crime,” “Throwing Stones” and “Eternity.” The band was able to fill small theaters and clubs, but the word of mouth from their first tour was not good. Maybe in some other time they would have been embraced more, but in the wake of Jerry’s death they seemed pale and surprisingly joyless.

  Nevertheless, Ratdog was chosen to headline the first Furthur Festival in the summer of 1996. Sensing that Deadheads might still be interested in turning out to see a lineup of bands that were capable of rekindling some of the Dead’s spirit, Weir, John Scher, Dead tour manager Cameron Sears and Mickey Hart conceived a roving festival along the lines of already popular summer touring rock cavalcades such as Lollapalooza and HORDE, and named it after Kesey’s bus, that eternal icon of ’60s fearlessness. They assembled a strong bill for their first tour: Hot Tuna, Los Lobos, Bruce Hornsby’s band, Ratdog and Mickey Hart’s Mystery Box (which included several world-class percussionists and a black British female vocal sextet called the Mint Juleps). Each Furthur show offered seven hours of music, culminating in a mini jam session that found Weir, Hart, Hornsby, Jorma Kaukonen and members of Los Lobos trading licks on a wide variety of classic rock tunes, from “Not Fade Away” to “White Rabbit.” Hippie vendors paid for the right to sell their wares inside the amphitheaters and parks where the tour traveled, and the Dead’s ticket operation, GDTS, handled some of the ticketing. The tour was a moderate success commercially, selling an average 65 percent of capacity—not terrific by the Dead’s lofty standards, but, as John Scher notes, “better than either Lollapalooza or HORDE did in their first years.”

  Though the tour was not specifically designed to be a tribute to Jerry Garcia, there was no escaping his ghost—his absence was like a great unseen presence. At the Shoreline Amphitheater Furthur concert I attended, Los Lobos dedicated a spellbinding rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?” to Jerry before slamming into “Bertha.” Bruce Hornsby played a piano fantasia based around “Terrapin” during his set, and later brought out both Hart and Weir for a “Jack Straw” that featured the same sort of deftly executed dynamic shifts that made the tune soar with the Dead. At many shows Hornsby also played “Wharf Rat,” which had long been one of his favorite Hunter-Garcia songs. Mickey closed each of his sets on the tour with with his spoken-rapped version of “Fire on the Mountain,” one of the first songs he and Hunter wrote together.

  At Shoreline, Phil Lesh joined the group for “Fire on the Mountain,” playing a thundering bass solo over the song’s fat, loping rhythm—something he never did with the Dead. After the song, he and Mickey embraced warmly in a touching show of deep kinship. And Phil, Mickey, Bobby and Bruce were reunited for the show-closing jam session, which included “Truckin’” and “The Other One,” with David Hidalgo, Jorma Kaukonen and hard rocker Sammy Hagar (a friend of Mickey’s) blazing away on guitars, each in his own style. It offered a glimpse of how exciting a tour by the surviving Dead members could be if they ever decided to make the leap.

  While the former members of the Grateful Dead pondered their next moves in the year after August 1995, a very different kind of drama connected to Garcia’s will was unfolding in the Marin County court system. The will, which was written in May 1994, was quite straightforward and simple; so much so that it was praised by Money magazine for the clarity of its intent. Jerry left one-third of his estate and the bulk of his material possessions to Deborah Koons Garcia. Of the remaining two-thirds, he left a fifth to each of his four daughters—Heather, Annabelle, Theresa and Keelin; and the remaining fifth split between Sunshine Kesey (whom he helped raise for several years) and his brother, Tiff. Additionally, Jerry willed the custom guitars that had been built for him by Doug Irwin back to the luthier. At the time of Jerry’s death there was no detailed accounting of either his assets or the potential value of the estate, so it wasn’t immediately clear how much money there was to divide.

  And then things started to get complicated. Within a few months, more than $38 million in claims had been filed against the estate, ranging from a $980 claim from Jerry’s personal trainer, Sherwood Cummins, to a $15.6 million claim from Vince DiBiase, whose ownership of a number of Garcia’s original artworks and his right to sell reproductions of those works was challenged by the estate—represented by Deborah. In between those two figures there was a wide array of other claims, among them:

  Carolyn Garcia (Mountain Girl) asked for $4.6 million still owed her under a $5 million divorce agreement she and Jerry signed in 1993 guaranteeing her more than $20,000 a month for the next twenty years. Jerry had been making the payments up until his death, when Deborah abruptly stopped them and then decided to challenge the fairness and legal authority of the thirteen-line document Jerry and M.G. had signed. Theresa Garcia asked for $22,000 she said was owed her after the estate stopped making payments on a Toyota 4-Runner car. Jerry’s daughter Heather Katz filed a claim for $30,000 she said Jerry had promised toward a down payment on a home she was buying in Oakland. Barbara Meier sued to receive the remaining $21,000 due her under her 1993 agreement with Jerry to pay her a total of $108,000; the monthly $3,000 payments had been cut off by Deborah in May 1995. Manasha Matheson filed a claim for $3 million, saying that was the figure owed her under an agreement Jerry had made in return for her dropping her option of suing him for palimony and child support. John Kahn claimed he was owed an undetermined amount of JGB royalties and money for a recording console he’d purchased. Perhaps the most bizarre claim was filed by Eric Storace, who asked for $10,000, saying that back in 1970 Garcia had agreed to buy the rights for a never-completed concert film that included the Dead called Pot Luck Sock Hop Dog Fuck.

  * * *

  In late May 1996 John Kahn died in his sleep in the Mill Valley house he shared with his wife, Linda. As fate would have it, I had interviewed him for this book just a week earlier. That night he looked pale and drawn, but he was in good spirits and he spoke optimistically about the prospects for his new band—featuring Melvin, Jackie and Gloria from the JGB and a new guitarist and singer—which had played a couple of gigs in Santa Cruz. As had happened with Garcia, Kahn’s heart simply gave out. Though there were drugs in his system at the time of his
death, it was not ruled an overdose. In a particularly cruel twist, the police who came to the Kahns’ house to investigate the death busted Linda for possession of a small amount of cocaine found in a search of the premises. A celebration of John’s life at the Log Cabin in San Anselmo a few days later drew dozens of friends and former musical partners who swapped stories about this kind and gentle man, as a CD player blasted music by the JGB, the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band and Old and in the Way. Stanley Mouse dropped by with a whimsical cartoon he’d drawn of Garcia and Kahn happy together in heaven; a nice thought, everyone agreed.

  At the end of 1996 the court battle between Carolyn Garcia and Deborah Koons Garcia came to trial in the futuristic Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Marin County courthouse. This legal contest probably would not have drawn much interest outside Deadhead circles had it not been for the decision by the Court TV cable network to televise the trial nearly in its entirety, assuring that the “War of the Wives” (as People magazine dubbed it) would be a spectacle.

  The estate’s strategy in the case was to prove that Jerry’s marriage to M.G. was a sham carried out for business reasons, and that Jerry had been coerced into signing the $5 million divorce settlement without obtaining anything tangible in return. Though Judge Michael Dufficy ruled early in the trial that he viewed the 1981–93 marriage between Jerry and M.G. as legal and binding, the estate’s blustering and aggressive lawyer, Paul Camera, produced a series of reluctant witnesses, including Phil Lesh and Steve Parish, to testify that M.G. rarely traveled with the Dead and didn’t live with Jerry during the time of their marriage, except for a few years after Jerry’s coma. (Later in the trial it came out that Jerry and Deborah had not lived together during their marriage, either.)