In 1984, I had gone to the house on Hepburn Heights Road in San Rafael where Jerry Garcia was living with Rock Scully, who by that point was no longer managing the Dead. They were both using heroin, and although few of us ever visited what was obviously a no-fly zone, I have always been a willful fool on behalf of hesitant angels. So I decided to go up there to see what was going on and spend the afternoon with Garcia, who, as I had expected, was in terrible shape.
He had an Exercycle in the corner of the living room with three-tenths of a mile on it and a deep layer of cobwebs. He had more spent stick matches around him than it would have taken to build a model of Chartres Cathedral. We tried to make small talk. It was so small that you couldn’t hear it. This was a dramatic change from the wonderful conversations I’d had with Garcia on many occasions, where we could talk with wild enthusiasm late into the night about any damn thing at all.
Playing conversational basketball with Jerry Garcia was one of the most entertaining sports I had ever engaged in, but there was none of that now. Finally, I blurted out, “You know, sometimes I think I wish you’d just die so we can all mourn you properly and get it out of our system.” I will not attempt to describe the look Jerry gave me as he got up, padded sadly down the hall into his bedroom, closed the door, and put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on it.
With Jerry, it always depended on what cycle he was in. I had watched his weather cycles for years to see if he was in the dark or the light. The sun would be coming out and everything was groovy. Then he would be all the way back down in the darkness. You could always see that coming from a long way off.
One of the few times he really got furious with me was after In the Dark had gotten really big in 1987. I used to put out a little semiannual newsletter, and I wrote an article in it about the irony of the anti-materialist Grateful Dead suddenly being incapable of staying anywhere but in a Four Seasons Hotel when they were on the road.
I walked into the studio on Front Street one day, and this was the closest Garcia ever came to wanting to hit me. He was so angry, and he said, “If it isn’t the author of the celebrated Barlowgram who thinks he can sit in the seat of judgment.” And I said, “It is funny, isn’t it?” He said, “Maybe you think it’s funny. But I think it’s fucking betrayal.” I said, “I try to call them as I see them.” And he said, “If you want to stay around here, maybe you should call them as they are.” And I said, “None so vigorous in their own defense as the justly accused.”
Jerry also pointed out just how much money I had been making by writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead. In his eyes, I was biting the hand that was feeding me. My response to this was that I would be biting the hand that was feeding me if I did not tell the truth. That just made it all even worse.
I turned around and walked out, and then I wrote him a long letter about how I wasn’t going to be intimidated by him or anyone else in the Grateful Dead who thought they could exercise authority over me. Silence fell on the scene, and nothing went on for a long time. When I saw Jerry again, it was as though none of it had ever happened between us.
The last real interaction I had with him was when the Dead were playing two shows at Giants Stadium in June 1995. As it happened, we were all staying at the Four Seasons Hotel, and I was teaching Weir how to Rollerblade. We had skated through the great neo-fascist marble hallways of the hotel on Rollerblades and as we went out through the front door, we found Jerry standing there in the sunlight.
It was the first time I had seen him in the sunlight in I don’t know how long. He was totally white. White as death itself. He was like a Fellini vision, or something out of an Ingmar Bergman film. He radiated this incandescent paleness, and his frailty was overwhelming.
Jerry looked at us and snorted. “If you guys get killed out there, I’m not going to your funeral.” I said, “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been to funerals with you where we were there for less.” He said, “But I won’t go to yours.” And I said, “Jerry, I’ll go to yours.” He said, “Fine. Do that.” And off Weir and I went into the park, where we had a truly psychedelic experience.
Later that summer I was in Australia in August a few days before Jerry died when an interviewer suddenly said to me, “You know Jerry Garcia, right?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “What’s it like knowing Jerry Garcia?” The question threw me for a loop, and I said, “I don’t know. I mean, the guy and his various manifestations have been so thoroughly embedded in every aspect of my life for so long that I don’t know what it would be like not to know him.”
The day before Jerry died, I had just come back from that trip and I was swimming in my mother’s pool in Salt Lake City. I was totally toasted from jet lag and floating around like a dead body. Suddenly, I started thinking about Garcia and the Dead in this completely mercenary way. I began thinking I was doing well enough now that even if the Grateful Dead went away, I would be all right financially.
Then I thought, “Why would the Grateful Dead go away?” The answer was that Garcia would die, and for me that became a whole different issue. Never mind the Grateful Dead. It was going to be a drag not to have those wonderful conversations with Garcia that were always like the Inner Galactic Olympics of the Mind. And I realized I hadn’t had one of those conversations with him in the past two years, because he had really been down into the heroin thing for that long.
And then at about six o’clock in the morning on August 9, 1995, my mother came in and shook me and said, “Wake up, John Perry. Your life is about to change completely.” She told me that Jerry had died. He was fifty-three years old.
I began thinking about something he had said to me back when there were always all these Hells Angels around the Dead. Jerry’s voltage was so high that the polarity reversal he generated created a lot of infection and heavy weather around him. He could go from being the very embodiment of enlightened affirmation to the darkest, most death-affirming person I had ever encountered. He knew this about himself as well.
In terms of the Hells Angels, I finally said to Jerry, “You know, being a decent human being is tough enough without constantly surrounding yourself with a lot of people who don’t even care whether they are or not.” And he said, “You know, you’re right about that, but good wouldn’t be very much without evil, would it?” Because of the way he’d framed this, it made complete and utter sense to me.
On a good night, what Jerry was always trying to do onstage was become utterly invisible and one with the music and the song and the rest of the universe as well. When Jerry had first started using a synthesizer attachment, he did this guitar solo that sounded just like Miles Davis, as Miles himself had always wanted to play. It was unbelievable, and I came up to Jerry afterward and said, “Man, you could have been a fucking great trumpet player.” And he said, “I am a fucking great trumpet player.”
Jerry could always honor the music in himself, because he saw it as an independent entity. But he was never willing to do that with all the other independent entities within himself. Like the soul that camps out in the body. For Jerry, the body was this thing that had been put on him like an electronic manacle. It was the thing in which he’d been exiled from all the sweetness and the light. For him, it was like being in prison. He always hated his body. He was locked inside it and he treated it accordingly. Just like a prisoner, he put graffiti all over the walls. He broke the toilet. He set the mattress on fire.
It may have been no way to live, but nevertheless, there were many other people who were doing it the exact same way. The other side will always have its way. If you’re going to manifest a lot of light, you also have to pay the bill.
Jerry also always had overwhelming personal charisma. Saint Thomas Aquinas and the original Scholastics defined charisma as unwarranted grace. Unearned, undeserved, completely gratuitous grace. So that was yet another burden he had to carry with him, both onstage and off.
Just as I had promised him, I went to Jerry’s funeral. It was held at a church in Belvedere in Marin County. Jerry’s widow refused to allow Mountain Girl to be there. Some of us thought that was heinous. Indeed, many of us thought that. It was all about who was going to get the money from Jerry’s estate, and at one point during the service I turned to Eileen Law and said, “There hasn’t been this much intrigue in one room since the Borgias.”
Four days after Jerry died, I went to the big memorial gathering held for him in Golden Gate Park. I was standing at the front of the crowd when Bob Barsotti, one of Bill Graham’s guys who had worked more Dead shows than I could count, asked me to go up onstage and say something about Jerry.
I told Bob I didn’t want to be up there, but he insisted that I say something. So I walked to the microphone and said, “They asked me to come up and speak and I’ve only got one word to say and the word is love.” And then I turned around and walked off the stage.
It took me a really long time to finally accept that Jerry was gone. Part of the problem was that I had thought about his departure so many times and said, “It’s coming” over and over again to myself that every time I experienced his death in my mind, I developed a little more callus against it.
The callus grew so thick that once Jerry actually died, I could not really experience it because I had developed this incredibly strong defense against it happening. And no matter how hard I tried to strip it away, I could not bring myself to shed a single tear for Jerry Garcia. Not one.