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If I told you all that went down/
It would burn off both your ears.
—“Deal” (Lyrics by Robert Hunter)
INTRODUCTION
A Dance with the Divine
Rock ’n’ roll was never meant to be institutionalized. When it first came out, it couldn’t be contained. It broke every rule and regulation, amendment and guideline. It played by its own set of rules and then it broke those, too. It was supposed to inspire an uprising and fuel the revolution. It was meant to be something your parents feared and your teachers scorned. The very moment that Bill Kreutzmann dedicated his life to rock ’n’ roll, his father warned him, “You’ll never make any money at it.” Parents aren’t always right, you know. That might be the first lesson of rock ’n’ roll.
Look: Rock ’n’ roll was meant for rebels and revolutionaries. It was meant for outcasts and outlaws, misfits and desperadoes. That’s why it was meant for every kid in America. That’s also why it was the perfect outlet for the Grateful Dead. They may have been seen as subversive in the context of their mid-1960s birth, but even that helped cement their status as the quintessential, All-American Band. They waved that flag. If you bought the ticket, they’d take you on that ride.
Even though they played shows in front of some of the largest audiences of all time, they were still considered an underground phenomenon. Eventually, their secret handshake became so well known that the exclusive became inclusive; by the time Deadheads started proclaiming—validly—that “we are everywhere,” the band’s insignia had become an international symbol of American counterculture; the David had turned into a Goliath.
But on a small island of the Hawaiian archipelago, two decades after the Grateful Dead disbanded, drummer Bill Kreutzmann lives a pretty normal life. Well … “normal” as far as the hippie lifestyle goes. He lives on an unassuming island property, with cockroaches in the basement and two black Labs—“Iko” and “Lucy”—running around the yard. It’s the kind of house you might go to for a Friday night game of poker with the boys, but it has a few aces up its sleeve, of course—like a gold record stashed behind a pile of stuff in the living room and a Grammy Award on the bookshelf.
It took more than a month of me coming over to Billy’s house, every day, before I even noticed the Grammy Award. And, sure enough, sharing shelf space with the Grammy—and an array of interesting books—is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame statue. Billy could give a fuck about the statue itself; after all, it’s just a fabricated object. It’s not a totem and it doesn’t have magical powers. (If it did, surely he would’ve already tried to eat it—or smoke it—by now.)
“Oh, that? It’s a good bookend,” he said, almost absentmindedly, when I finally asked him about it one day. We had been up late, drinking, getting high and talking about the days of the Grateful Dead. I understood his point, so I wrote down his response and nodded in agreement; but I didn’t forget that, as a teenager, I would sing “Scarlet Begonias” in the shower before school every morning and daydream about my next Grateful Dead concert. Bill Kreutzmann is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. As well he should be.
When you’re with him, it’s easy to forget the superfluous. He doesn’t measure himself by awards or accolades. When we started converting his life story into words on the page, he was never afraid to say things like, “We really blew that one!” (Woodstock … no big deal), or “What were we thinking?” (the album cover for Go to Heaven).
Rock ’n’ roll might be part smoke and mirrors, but the Grateful Dead bored easily of such trivialities. They didn’t have synchronized dance moves and they didn’t set their instruments on fire. Who they were onstage is exactly who they were when they walked off it.
Rock stars are supposed to be immortal, even after death. The Grateful Dead’s very existence, however, was fragile from the start. They were infinitely human; it was their music that seemed to come from another dimension entirely. It transcended the earth while grounding you to it, connecting you to everything on the planet all at once. The band’s immortality was a result of their rhythms and melodies, not their show outfits and stage banter. They went for what mattered most. It didn’t always work and it wasn’t always good … but when it was, it was better than great. It was a dance with the divine.
Billy was there from the very beginning, before the ragtag group of music-heads that would become the Grateful Dead were even called that. Back then, they were just wild-eyed kids, standing around the back room of a music store in Palo Alto, rubbing two sticks together. But those sticks quickly heated up and caused a spark that caught just enough wind and air to ignite, eventually exploding across the sky like Kerouac’s “fabulous yellow roman candles.” And, when it did, it set the rickety ole house of rock ’n’ roll ablaze. It burned down the walls. It turned the ceiling into ashes. It refused to be stuck inside any confined space … or time.
Rock ’n’ roll, by its very nature, likes to shed its skin every generation or so. But when the Grateful Dead formed, there was nothing there yet to shed. Rock music was still too new. It was always about breaking the rules, but the rules had yet to be written down. So the Dead broke them all.
They didn’t play their hits. They barely even had any hits, at least in a traditional sense. They would practice endlessly, but it was impossible to “rehearse” music that’s meant to be in the moment. And although that moment ended, in some ways, in the Summer of 1995, it is still a thirty-year moment that will live on forever. And not just in the minds and in the memories of aging hippies, prep school dropouts, and those lucky enough to have seen the band play live. Already, Grateful Dead music has been passed down to the next generation and it will be passed down to the generation after that. Nobody knows why it endures so persistently, although plenty of other books have attempted to answer that question. This book doesn’t even attempt to ask it.
That’s because this is not the story of the Grateful Dead. It does include that band’s entire history, in a comprehensive manner that may be more complete than any other book out there. So let me rephrase that: this is not just the story of the Grateful Dead. This is the story of the man who drove the Grateful Dead’s music forward each night with his beats and with his rhythms. His beats have become all of our rhythms but his stories are uniquely his.
And it’s a story that took him from poaching deer on the side of Highway 1 in California to living out of a tepee in the Nevada desert under the guidance of a shaman. It’s a story of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, sure. But it’s also a story of cowboys and Indians, a story of cops and robbers, a story of heroes and crooks. It’s a story of Northern California in the last half of the twentieth century. It’s a story of friends
lighting things on fire and racing cars and causing all kinds of trouble in hotels across the world. It’s a story of endless renewal. Like any good story, it calls upon the angels of love to sing its chorus. But like any story worth telling, it also wrestles with the demons of loss, who huff and puff the verses like sheets of rain against the walls. It’s the story of staying high, if not dry, and of weathering the storm. Of staying the course. It’s the story of an extraordinary life well lived, and it is a story that is still far from having an end.
Lots of people can tell you about the Grateful Dead, and all of them will allow that there are many sides to that tale. This is Bill Kreutzmann’s side. This is Bill Kreutzmann’s story. This is his … DEAL.
—Benjy Eisen
San Francisco, December 7, 2014
1
Hawaii
Sometime in the late 1980s, Jerry Garcia and I took a trip that didn’t involve dropping acid, but it was still long, strange, and psychedelic. Our band, the Grateful Dead, had recently hit the high-water mark, both creatively and commercially. After twenty-some years of taking stabs in the dark, our latest album, In the Dark, was a hit. We had a Top Ten single (“Touch of Grey”) and its accompanying video was in heavy rotation on MTV. We sold out a five-night stand at the world’s most prestigious arena—New York’s Madison Square Garden—and we had recently come off an incredibly successful stadium tour with Bob Dylan.
We decided to celebrate by getting as far away from it all as possible.
The Grateful Dead had toured all over the world—including Alaska, Luxembourg, and even a few shows at the base of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. There were few places we could go where someone didn’t come up to us, telling us that they met their future husband or wife at one of our concerts, or that in the middle of one of our jams they realized they wanted to change careers, or—even—that they came out of a coma when their family played them a tape of one of their favorite Dead concerts. Every experience was different; personal, intimate. But they all had one thing in common: the Grateful Dead changed their lives. It’s hard to explain how that makes you feel, being a part of it. In some ways, I was no more a part of it than anyone in the audience. But as a band member, I also knew that with that privilege came a duty to the fans and to the music. Everyone felt like they owned a little piece of the Grateful Dead, and I think, philosophically speaking, that’s probably true. For those of us on stage, however, all of that came with a great and heavy responsibility to always be the band that everyone wanted us to be. That was a weight that we were glad to bear. But that was a weight.
Gravity has different rules, underwater, though. Weight is balanced by buoyancy. So we decided to give it a try and see if we could become weightless in the deep.
There was a dive shop across the highway from where we recorded In the Dark—in San Rafael, California—and we signed up for lessons. It was me, Jerry, and our roadie, Steve Parish. I was the only one who had gone scuba diving before, but it was reckless: I had no experience and little instruction. It was in Laredo, Mexico and I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I wasn’t certified. I never minded getting in over my head, but I knew it wasn’t safe.
I decided to get certified and I convinced Jerry and Parish to do it with me. We flew to Hawaii for our open water certification dive. Jerry was in a wetsuit, with an oxygen tank strapped to his back. In that moment, he didn’t look like a famous guitarist. He looked like an explorer. Which, I suppose, he was. He also looked like something straight out of a comic book or, perhaps, a character from one of the sci-fi novels that he loved so much. The underwater world that we were about to explore was easily as strange and unusual and captivating as anything we had read about in Kurt Vonnegut books. That was fiction; this was not.
Also: It was as psychedelic and far-out as anything we had seen during the Acid Tests, or at Woodstock, or during our strange days wandering around San Francisco during the Summer of Love. And yet, we were sober for this one. After years of persistent pot smoking, psychedelic excesses, alcohol benders, cocaine binges, and heroin abuse, scuba diving was going to be our new drug.
The first time out together, we just got our feet wet. We were in, maybe, twenty feet of water, just off a pier. We didn’t really know much about diving yet. We were there to learn. But one thing we did know was that we were on the other side of the forest from the multi-beast known as the Grateful Dead.
Jerry and I were submerged under the water, digging this weird, new landscape and trying to get lost in its vastness and implications. Just then, a woman instructor swam up to us, with a waterproof notepad that you can write on under water. It looked like she was about to write an instruction but, instead, she asked Jerry for his autograph. Twenty feet below the surface! I nearly spat out my regulator from laughing so hard.
Afterward, back on solid ground, Jerry looked at me and said, “I can’t get away from it, Bill.” I nodded: “We’ll get deeper next time.”
Which we did. Many times, in fact.
We started doing exotic dives with a shop called Jack’s Diving Locker in Kona. The Big Island. We went diving with dolphins and pilot whales and white-tipped sharks and conger eels and all sorts of strange, far-out creatures that we never even imagined existed. That far out on the water, and that deep under the surface, we found that we could, actually, get away from the world above. It was the one place we could go where we weren’t rock stars; we were just friends, exploring an underwater landscape. It was our great escape.
Palo Alto, California
The first time I met Jerry Garcia, he was standing in the doorway at my parents’ house, asking for my dad and clutching a fistful of dollars. My father always wanted to play a stringed instrument, so he bought a five-string banjo. But he wasn’t very good at it, so he listed it for sale in the classifieds of the Palo Alto Times. He ended up selling it to Jerry for fifteen bucks. Years later, when Jerry and I reminisced about it, he said, “You know Billy, it’s actually a really great banjo.” He enjoyed playing it.
Jerry’s banjo playing would become world-famous, but it was his skills as a guitarist, singer, songwriter, and improviser in the Grateful Dead that made him a legend. I played drums in the Grateful Dead from our very first rehearsal down to our very last gig, thirty years later. During those three decades, we sold millions of albums and moved even more concert tickets. We toured the world and played thousands of shows. We traveled Canada by train, Alaska by plane, Europe by bus, and Egypt by camelback. A nation of Deadheads followed us wherever we went, bearing torches lit from the flames of the 1960s even when the rest of the country got swallowed up in 1980s bullshit. We weren’t just a band; we were a community, a culture. We became a brand and a lifestyle. And Jerry Garcia was our leader, our nucleus, our heart.
But that day, I had no idea who Jerry Garcia was, what he did, or why he wanted that banjo. It didn’t compute. I must’ve been around twelve years old and I wasn’t listening to bluegrass or any kind of banjo music at all. And, even though he was four years older than me, which at that age feels like lifetimes, in truth, Garcia was also just a kid. He was just someone in the doorway, buying something from my dad.
Jerry Garcia: I was his fan before I was his bandmate. (Herb Greene)
Hawaii
During one of our Hawaiian scuba diving trips—either in the late ’80s or early ’90s—we were hanging out and talking in the back of the dive boat. We were both high from being in the water. On it and under it. We really loved diving. We loved being in the Grateful Dead, too, but it wasn’t exactly calming. Not like being in the ocean. Back on the mainland, everything around us was whirling and buzzing, a constant three-ring circus, going full-throttle all the time. Tours, records, fans, press, parties, nonstop noise. But out there on the water, we could really relax. It was also good for our health. When you’re diving, you can’t drink your weight in booze the night before or stay up all night plowing your nose through a pile of cocaine. Your eyes, your nose, and your mind all have to be clear.
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I can still picture us in the back of that boat, watching the water go by, with no sign of land in any direction. Jerry and I looked at each other and made a promise that if the Grateful Dead ever ended, we would both move to Hawaii, go on dives, get healthy, and live a much different lifestyle. He never had a chance to fulfill his end of the bargain. But after he died, on August 9, 1995, I fulfilled mine.
I chose the island of Kauai because it was the most remote, the least touristy, and it reminded me, in a way, of California’s “Lost Coast,” up in Mendocino where I lived on a ranch for many, many years. At first I moved to Kapa’a, then up the shore some to Anahola, which is basically a small residential community that’s mostly made up of island natives. Pacific Islanders. They’re suspicious of Americans, no matter how long you’ve lived there. There remain various tensions, unspoken resentments, injustices, racial undercurrents, and all that horrible crap, between Pacific Islanders and mainland transplants. The natives call the white intruders haoles (“howl-ies”). All Caucasians are haoles. It means “without breath” because, when Captain Cook “discovered” the archipelago in 1778, he refused to greet people the traditional Hawaiian way, by inhaling their breath. He opted for shaking hands instead.
Well now, I found a house right on the beach in Anahola, and I decided to take it. I dug right in. I bought a twenty-two-foot Sea Cat, a power boat that I named the Far Eagle, and kept her right out front, in my yard. This really, really large Hawaiian nicknamed Big Joe used to walk past my house and harass me all the time: “Billy, when are you going fishing in that thing? Get the boat out! C’mon, the fish are running today!”
Big Joe wasn’t the friendliest to haolies like me; in fact he had a reputation for altercations. That’s putting it kindly. But for whatever reason, I was the exception. He was an experienced fisherman, so I agreed to take him out fishing if he’d help me get the boat in good shape. It was a deal and we went out fishing for our first time together.
Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead Page 1
