In 1989, the Dead released Built to Last. Although no one knew this at the time, it would be their last studio album. I wrote the lyrics for five songs on the album, four of them with Brent Mydland and just one, “Picasso Moon,” with Weir.
Although Bobby and I had not exactly split as songwriters, he had gone off and written a song in March 1988 with the actor Gerrit Graham. I couldn’t figure out why Weir had done this, but mostly I thought that it was his form of retribution for my having been unfaithful to him by writing songs with Brent. Bobby knew that I didn’t like Gerrit.
The two of them wrote “Victim or the Crime,” which is still arguably the worst Grateful Dead song ever. My real problem with it, shared by other members of the band, was that the first line contained the word “junkie.” For the life of me, I could not see Bobby singing that while standing onstage next to Jerry. As it turned out, Jerry didn’t seem to mind at all, but that was just how he could be.
Did I actually go on the radio to urge Deadheads to write Weir with their objections to this song? I may have done that. I don’t really remember, but I think Weir reacted to what I had said by putting his fist through a wall.
Jerry Garcia wasn’t the only one who thought it was what he called “an idiot song.” During a show one night while the band was doing “Victim or the Crime,” their longtime roadie Steve Parish came up to me and said, “How does it feel to be the guy who wrote the worst Grateful Dead song ever?” And I said, “I didn’t write this song, Parish. Gerrit Graham did. Talk to him about it.” Without saying another word, he just turned around and slunk off.
Over the course of the 1980s, Brent Mydland had become something like the invisible spine of the Dead. I realized this for the first time when I was given the opportunity to experience the onstage mix, and the only person that everyone listened to was Brent. He was a genius piano player who had the best voice in the band. He could sing his ass off and transpose and improvise like a motherfucker, but they were all still treating him like the new guy in the band. They treated him like shit, and it made him feel like shit.
I knew Brent was shooting heroin, and I knew that it was going to take him out just like it eventually would do to Garcia as well. I saw that Brent was going to die unless I could get the Deadheads to really dig him. I thought that would save him. So I decided to get together with Brent full-time and begin writing more songs with him, which turned out to be unbelievably easy and amazingly different from working with Weir.
Brent and I had afternoons where we wrote four or five songs together in his house in Martinez in the East Bay. It absolutely helped that he was a piano player, but I also had complete faith in his ability to take my lyrics and sing them in the melody that I had in mind.
That was what happened on “Just a Little Light,” which is about the gloom that seemed to be gathering around Brent and Jerry and everything that was then going on backstage at Dead shows. I wanted people to notice that there was also still a light left in the world. I was writing about what happens to everyone after a while. Like Hunter’s line in “Scarlet Begonias,” “Once in a while, you get shown the light / In the strangest of places if you look at it right.” Although I wasn’t consciously quoting that, it is one of my favorite Hunter lines.
The song I wrote with Brent that I like best is the lullaby “I Will Take You Home.” I wrote the whole thing—melody, words, the works—as I was going up the driveway of his house. Then I sat next to him at the piano as he played it for the first time. It was about his daughters and mine and a promise I needed to make for both of us. That whatever happened, we would be there to take them home. Only Brent didn’t live to do that.
Writing songs with Brent was the most intimate thing I have ever done with a man. He would go off to do heroin in the bathroom and then come back and sit down on the piano bench. But when he looked at me, his pupils would be wide open. Totally dilated. Usually when someone is smacked out of his head like that, his eyes become pinwheels. But Brent’s would be huge because it was such an emotional experience for him. Brent had a vocabulary of about three hundred words, but when he was connecting with the emotions of a song, he was right on top of it. He was incredible.
I was doing an interview with John Markoff of the New York Times for an article about the Internet on July 26, 1990, when he told me that Brent had died. I was in my office in Pinedale and I started to cry. And even though I had anticipated it, I couldn’t stop crying for days. I went to the funeral and fully expected to give the eulogy, but Weir insisted on doing it himself. It was okay with me, but it wasn’t okay.
The pallbearers consisted of the remaining members of the Grateful Dead and me, and while we were waiting in the pallbearer room, they acted like a basketball team that was doing just great at the half. They were being assholes together. I was not crying because you don’t cry around the Grateful Dead. That just ain’t done. By then, we had all adopted a level of emotional availability that ran the full gamut between spite and irony. I have subsequently learned not to gainsay anybody’s way of dealing with grief. But they definitely had a weird coping mechanism.
Then I got into the limo with Jerry and his girlfriend to go to the cemetery. Talk about a strange ride. I said, “You know I’m probably the only person who’s really able to be a Deadhead and be onstage as well. As such, I think I’m going to go out front for a while because it seems safer there.”
Garcia looked at me with an expression of colossal melancholy. “I’d do that if I were you,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s exactly what I would do if I could? But that’s the last thing I can do.” Around the Grateful Dead by then, it had gotten just that dark.