NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA, JULY 2, 1995
Three songs into the show, the house lights still on, the time had come for “Dire Wolf,” but with a perverse twist no one had anticipated. Twenty-five years had passed since the Dead had recorded that song at Pacific High studio. They’d played it innumerable times since, occasionally slowing it down a half step. But tonight, in the middle of Indiana, they again injected it with the crisp, merry gait of the recorded version, and even the song’s refrain harked back to its original impending-death inspiration. “Please, don’t murder me,” Garcia sang again, now in a voice weathered by age and abuse, as cops pivoted their heads, hoping to catch sight of the man who’d vowed to kill Garcia before the night was over.
Along with the likes of Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin, the Deer Creek Music Center had become a destination spot, a revered haven, for the Dead and their fans alike. Springing up amid cornfields and cow pastures a half-hour north of Indianapolis, the amphitheater was, like the band, an enclave unto itself. Out there the straight world never felt so distant. Although the Dead had played Deer Creek six times before without major incident, tonight began on a sour note. On their way from their hotel (north of Indianapolis) to the venue word filtered down to band and its management: a death threat had been called into Deer Creek’s box office. Similar calls and warnings had arrived before, but this one felt creepier. An anonymous person had called local police claiming to have overheard the distraught father of a young female Deadhead. The information was unclear, but the implication was that the girl couldn’t be found and had run off on the road with them, and that the father was planning to attend the show and shoot Garcia.
Huddling backstage with Ken Viola, Scher’s head of security, the band grappled with what to do. Verifying the threat was difficult, but Lesh, the most immediately concerned because his family was there, made the case for canceling the show and heading out. “I was not going to stand up there and be a target,” he recalls. But Garcia brushed it off, saying he’d dealt with crazies before and wouldn’t let this one stop him. “Would you sacrifice yourself for the music?” Hart recalls of that night. “All those things run around in your brain. But I remember joking, ‘Jerry, could you move over six inches onstage? At least I’ll make it!’ We were screaming laughing. The decision was made and everyone came around. We were worried, of course, but we didn’t want some lunatic to shut us down.” Indiana state police made their way into the crowd and the stage pit; there they were joined by other Dead employees, including publicist Dennis McNally and Steve Marcus of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, all nervously glancing around for . . . something. No one knew what the supposed shooter looked or dressed like, and no one even knew for sure whether the threat was real. But they weren’t about to take any chances.
Ironically, the show opened with “Here Comes Sunshine,” the twinkling kaleidoscope of a song that was dropped from the repertoire after 1974 but had returned starting in 1992. With Welnick playing synthesizer, the song was rearranged, sounding tighter and firmer but still evanescent. After Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues,” Garcia swung into the honky-tonk intro notes of “Dire Wolf.” At one point in the show a piece of electronics gear began misbehaving, and Bob Bralove, who usually stood behind the keyboards or drum riser, was forced to walk to the front of the stage to fix it. He’d performed the task dozens if not hundreds of times before, but never before had he felt as if a bull’s eye was plastered on his chest. “You could feel it,” he says. “This was normally the place that was always safe and you felt the love from the audience. But all of a sudden I’m realizing I’m standing next to the guy they said they wanted to kill. It was very, very intense.” After tending to the repair Bralove quickly retreated back to the darkened part of the stage.
For years they’d defied the odds; so many times they’d been written off creatively, physically, or economically, only to return, sometimes as vital as before. But the last few months had made even those closest and most loyal to the Dead wonder whether they, Garcia especially, would be able to pull back from the darkness. During a set break Garcia called his loyal driver, Leon Day. “I had a threat on my life,” he told him. Day joked back: “I got your back—you got mine?”
Still, Garcia sounded unnerved. “He’d gotten threats before,” Day says, “but for some reason this one seemed to hit home.” The driver made plans to pick up Garcia at the airport when the tour finished in a few more days. Then, as Garcia was beginning to tell members of his inner circle, he would finally consider rest, recuperation, maybe even a serious stint in rehab. Thirty years after the Warlocks had played Magoo’s pizza parlor, they all needed to reassess what everything had come to.
Just over two years before, the past had circled back to Garcia in a far more intoxicating way. The day before New Year’s Eve 1993 he’d jumped on a plane to Hawaii, where he’d been scuba diving and escaping the Dead world regularly since 1988. Joining him were two companions from the comparatively carefree early days in the Peninsula, two reminders of the time before relentless touring, deaths in the Dead family, and other complications and tragedies.
First was Barbara Meier, Garcia’s long-ago girlfriend from the Chateau era three decades before. Then living in Colorado, where she was painting, writing, and working with the Naropa Institute, the Buddhist-inspired college in Colorado, Meier had built a completely new and separate life since she and Garcia had broken up. (She loved American Beauty but hadn’t kept up with most of the band’s other music.) When she published a collection of poetry Hunter came across a copy in a bookstore and passed it along to Garcia, who sent a letter to her, by way of her publisher, that read in part, “I’ve always loved you and still do.” The two connected backstage at the Shoreline Amphitheater in May 1991. The last time Meier had seen her old boyfriend he’d had black hair and a black goatee and was trim; now the man facing her reminded her of Santa Claus. He told her he felt they’d lived parallel lives and that she was always part of his “psychic future.” In what seemed like a heartbeat, they’d reconnected; Garcia went onstage to do the second set, and Meier sat weeping in her seat, overcome by the reunion and its possibilities.
Although she was in the midst of working toward a graduate degree, Meier took the Garcia plunge again. As an excuse to see him again, she interviewed him for Tricycle: The Buddhist Review magazine and began visiting Marin. Driving with director Len Dell’Amico in his BMW one day, Garcia unexpectedly announced he was in love with, he said, “Barbara, this girl I knew a long time ago. She’s like the sun.” Hearing comments like those, the Dead community geared up to re-insert Meier into Garcia’s life.
When Meier arrived at Hunter’s house on December 30, 1992, according to Lesh’s account, she found not only Garcia and Robert and his wife, Maureen, but also Phil and Jill Lesh. Garcia had left home that morning without telling Manasha anything about his plans to leave her for Meier, but he had to say something about what he’d done, so his friends helped him write a note, then had it hand-delivered to Manasha by Garcia’s assistant, Vince Di Biase. “I immediately sensed it was not written in Jerry’s voice,” Manasha says, but there was little she could do. The next day Dead crew members whisked Garcia and Meier to a Holiday Inn near the airport to spend the night before being flown to Hawaii. “They had all the logistics lined up like a military operation,” Meier says. On the flight out the couple chuckled when the pilot walked back to first class and told Garcia, “Usually, I’m at your gig on New Year’s Eve.”
Along with the Hunters and the Leshes, Garcia and Meier settled into a condo complex in Maui, and the heady, creative rush of almost thirty years earlier appeared to breeze back in. Garcia and Meier took strolls on the beach and went scuba diving together. After a mini-studio was set up in his room, with recording gear and a keyboard, Garcia and Hunter sat down to pen new material. The two had written together only sporadically since the early eighties, but the stress-free atmosphere, removed from Marin and the Dead community, seemed to inspire them. Soon enough they’d finished “Lazy River Road,” a lively stroll inspired by Garcia and Meier’s reunion. “The more beautiful world tapped us on the shoulder again, so we thought we’d have a second chance,” Meier says. “And we all felt it. It felt like, ‘This is right.’”
The sense of renewal couldn’t have arrived at a better time for Garcia and the Dead. In the months after confronting Garcia backstage in Boston, Bruce Hornsby had continued playing with the band, but his enthusiasm seemed to wane with each show. “Let’s be honest here,” he says. “Jerry was in and out of his problems. There were times when he was all there, but other times he wasn’t. Jerry was my main reason for doing it.” As the New York Times noted of a 1991 show, the two-keyboard setup could result in overbaked arrangements: “The band is clearly still trying to figure out what to do” with Hornsby and Welnick onstage together, wrote critic Peter Watrous, adding, “With four chordal instruments onstage, the sound at times became clotted and busy.”
Feeling Welnick could handle the parts by himself and wanting to spend more time with his twin sons, born January 30, 1992, Hornsby found a nonconfrontational way to quit his part-time job with the Dead. By way of management Garcia found out before Hornsby had a chance to tell him, but Hornsby was still able to have an amicable conversation about it with Garcia. “I said, ‘I think Vince has it—you don’t need me anymore,’” Hornsby recalls. “I felt my role was to be the transitional figure between Brent’s death and the time Vince got comfortable. But I also felt there were too many nights it didn’t have that spark. I didn’t tell that to Jerry, but it was definitely a reason for me.”
Garcia took the news well, but Scher, still the band’s principal promoter and a trusted adviser, was taken aback. He knew Hornsby had little tolerance for sloppiness or lack of rehearsal and would practice piano several hours every day. Hornsby had been complaining to Scher for some time, but Scher never expected the keyboardist to pull the trigger and leave. “It was a big disappointment to me and a great lost opportunity,” Scher says. “They were a better band with Hornsby in it. Bruce loved Jerry, and he liked most of the guys in the band. But at that stage in their career, when they were being sloppy and weren’t playing well often enough, he got disillusioned.”
Lesh would later write that the band’s less-than-polished approach to playing Hornsby’s own songs was an issue, and Hornsby generally agrees. “They wanted to play some of my songs, so I arranged them for the Dead shuffle style,” he says. But unless the songs were rigorously rehearsed and played repeatedly, Hornsby realized the band would often forget the arrangements. “By the seventh time playing ‘The Valley Road,’ it was really rough,” he says, “and I went to them and said, ‘Hey, come on, guys—unless we rehearse it, let’s not do it anymore. It’s nice that you want to play my songs, but I’ve got this other forum, so it’s okay.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, we’ll rehearse.’ But we never really did.” After his last official shows with the band, at the Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in late March 1992 Hornsby was gone as a full-time member, although he would join them for select performances in the future, easily gliding back into his role.
With the Dead back to a single-keyboard lineup, Welnick did a capable job playing and adding harmonies. (He even led the band on arguably its least likely cover ever, the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” starting the summer of 1992.) But because the Dead world would never be entirely settled, other troubles sprang up soon enough. Still in a relationship with Manasha as of the middle of 1992, Garcia had moved with her and their daughter, Keelin, into a luxurious ten-acre home in Nicasio. (In a sign of how economically far the Dead had come, this was the same town where the ragged, woodsy Rukka Rukka Ranch had once been home to Weir, crew members, and anyone else who needed someplace to crash.) At that house in August Garcia crumbled from exhaustion soon after returning home from a Garcia Band tour, which had followed a short run of Dead performances. “It was too much for him,” says Manasha. “He had a hard time saying no and just went along with the program until he collapsed.” At Garcia’s request, Manasha called the Dead office and told them he wanted to cancel the band’s planned fall tour.
As it had six years before, after Garcia’s diabetic coma, the brakes were suddenly slammed on the Dead organization. This time no one in their office was laid off, but concerns mounted as never before. According to Nancy Mallonee, staffers were worried either about Garcia dying or the band giving up touring or winding down altogether: “People would ask, ‘How long do you think it’s going to be?’”
With a small crew of healers—two holistic physicians, an acupuncturist, a dietician, and an alternative-medicine homeopath—the hospital-wary Garcia began to physically improve at home. He drank fresh organic juices prepared daily by Manasha, avoided fats in his diet, became a vegan, and lost about sixty pounds. In an even more hopeful sign, he announced he wanted to give up smoking, his longtime passion, and was soon down to only a few cigarettes a day, according to Manasha. He granted Manasha durable power of attorney for his heath decisions and, to keep himself busy during recovery, invited Bralove to their house to help him score black-and-white films and print out his computer artwork. Garcia’s dark sense of humor remained untouched: watching Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, still-creepy 1920s horror films about the undead, he looked at Bralove and said, “This is too close!”
But Garcia’s most restorative retreat from his workaday world was Hawaii, where he’d been introduced to diving by Vicki Jensen; the former Dead family member (and Hart ranch worker and resident) was now living on the Big Island, where she’d become a dive master. On his first dive Garcia had to take it slow; Jensen noticed his legs were nearly purple from lack of circulation, and he primarily stayed in one spot in the water and did 360 turns. He was so overweight that, on that and later dives, he had to be weighed down with thirty-two pounds (more than usual) to make sure he stayed below the surface. (In diving, weight makes people more buoyant.)
But in stark contrast to his increasingly sloth-like stage presence, both with the Dead and the Garcia Band, Garcia seemed to come alive in the water. “It was so wonderful to see him dive and see that sparkle again,” says Jensen. “It was, ‘Oh my God, he’s back.’ He was roly-poly, but his face glowed. The grapevine was saying the diving’s going to kill him. But I thought, ‘No, he might be around longer.’”
Garcia immersed himself in diving with the same intensity as when he was learning banjo or guitar decades before; in effect, it became his new addiction. He took dive classes, bought a diving suit, and had prescription lenses put into his mask in order to clearly see underwater. Within time he lost enough weight to need only an additional eighteen pounds attached to his gear, and over the years he went on over five hundred dives. “He could be the Jerry he used to be,” says Candelario, who accompanied Garcia on numerous trips to Hawaii. “To see Jerry in Kona was a totally different guy. He was happy and not on drugs and not having people hit on him. On that dive boat nobody bothered him.” When Manasha and Keelin joined him, he’d bring them seashells and return from dive trips with stories of seeing sea turtles and whales. Even then Garcia remained a risk taker. During one night-time dive Jensen saw him trying to befriend an eel, even though she’d warned him to be careful around them and not stick out his fingers. “I thought, ‘God, I don’t want to be responsible for him losing another finger!’” Jensen says. “But the thing accepted him.”
By the early nineties the members of the Dead weren’t seeing much of each other off the road; they were business partners but rarely socialized. “When they got home they shut each other out a little bit after so many years of working together,” says Trixie Garcia, who stayed in the Bay Area and went to community college after Garcia and Mountain Girl split up again post-Manasha (Mountain Girl returned to Oregon). “Typically Jerry would be pretty exhausted for a week after a tour. Almost catatonic. He wanted a simple existence. He didn’t want to go anywhere or have visitors. Very shuttered.” Hawaii helped to change that dynamic for the better; on various trips Garcia invited along Weir, Hunter, Hart, Kreutzmann, and crew members like Candelario and Parish. (Noticeably absent from pre-1990 trips was Mydland; no one ever recalls seeing him scuba dive with the band.)
After he’d left Manasha, an old romance renewed and new songs being crafted with his longtime friend and creative cohort, Garcia struck Meier as relatively happy, and his devotion to his new hobby was more than evident. Settling into the water as if it were his second home, he showed her how to slow down her breathing and not waste oxygen in the tank. Underwater, away from the pressures of the Dead, the two held hands and watched giant sea turtles swim by, and he told her not to be scared when sharks passed them. “Jerry was very Buddha-like in that underwater world,” she says. “He was buoyant, free of his body. It was as if he belonged there.”
The tickets for Deer Creek announced a 7 p.m. start time, but as always, the devoted—and those who simply wanted to have a good time—began arriving early for parties outside the venue. Those who’d been to Deer Creek before and didn’t have tickets knew that one of the best spots to hear the band was at the bottom of a hill outside the venue, and several thousand people and their cars began congregating there.
From his car Chris Clair, wearing a tie-dye shirt and sporting a curly Afro, could see the prohibitive wooden-slat fence that separated them from the Dead and the inside of the Deer Creek Music Center. He could see the security guards driving around in golf carts keeping an eye on anyone who might want to run up the incline and into the venue. He could smell the pot in the air and hear Dead tapes blasting from sound systems in the thousands of cars parked in a semicircle around him.
Having gone to his first Dead show in 1989 when he was nineteen, Clair, then attending college at Indiana State, was part of the post-“Touch of Grey” wave of Deadheads. He loved Hunter’s lyrics, the sound of Garcia’s guitar, the sight and sound of two drummers, and, especially, Mydland’s voice and energy; he actually preferred Mydland’s singing to that of Garcia and Weir. Yet he was starting to feel that Dead concerts hadn’t been the same since Mydland’s death. At twenty-six, a veteran of roughly fifty shows, Clair now felt like a grizzled veteran compared to the nitrous-inhaling teenagers around him. “I was looking at the young kids and feeling they were ruining the party,” he says. “They were coming for the drugs and didn’t know much about the music. They were raining on the parade.” The music was straining his loyalty as well: the sound of Garcia’s weakened voice made him sad, as did the sight of Garcia not remembering lyrics. To Clair, Welnick was no Mydland. Clair began growing nostalgic for an earlier era: “I used to talk about the eighties,” he says, “the way other people talked about the sixties.”
Clair wasn’t the only one to notice that a younger, rowdier, or more inclined-to-excess crowd was starting to take over Dead shows as the nineties dragged on. In 1992 Steve Marcus started joining the band on the road; counterfeiting had become such a problem that Marcus set up “Ticket Verification” tables to differentiate the genuine stubs from the ones supposedly forged by the mob in New Jersey. At Rich Stadium in the Buffalo suburbs that June he was confronted with an equally worrisome problem. As he examined tickets outside the venue Marcus saw a large group heading in his direction “like a pack of wild animals,” he says. After running around the parking lot, they made straight for one of the entry gates, smashing it open. Grabbing his walkie-talkie, Marcus reported to security inside and heard the chilling response: “Get your table and get the hell inside.”
Moments like that were still largely the exception: more common was the amusing sight at a show in Maine, where a state trooper holding a police manual was hurriedly flipping through it to learn whether or not he should arrest a fan for having nitrous. But the aggressive tactics of 1989 made a comeback at the start of the Dead’s summer 1995 tour at the Franklin Valley Field in Highgate, Vermont. A show at the same venue the previous year had gone off without problems, but tonight promoter Jim Koplik heard kids were trying to pull down the chain-link fence around the venue. Grabbing a few security guards, Koplik raced to the scene and saw tens of thousands of kids on the other side of the metal links, pushing to get in. “It shocked us,” he says. “It was definitely not Deadheads.” He’d thought he and his crew could hold on to the fence and keep it in place, but realizing they were overwhelmed, Koplik ran in the other direction. To avoid the riot and spare the fences, organizers had no choice but to open the gates and allow thirty thousand crashers—about twice the number who could fit into a typical indoor arena—in for free. As they rushed in, Gary Lambert, then working for the Dead’s merchandising office, saw portable toilets knocked over with people still inside.
For now, at Deek Creek in Indiana, the calm held. When “Dire Wolf” finished, the Dead dove into a cover of Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” followed by Robbie Robertson’s exquisite “Broken Arrow,” sung by Lesh. Then, as Clair and his friends at his car watched, a handful of people in the parking area suddenly ran up the steep hill. Two of them stopped, cupped their hands together, and hoisted the other three up over the fence. “Wow, they got over the fence,” Clair heard one of his friends say. Another group followed, hoisting the remaining two who’d been left behind. And then another group of ten, and another group of twenty after that. Five or six waves of fans jumped over, all without damaging the fence. Security guards began shouting, “Get off the hill!” But for now there wasn’t much more they could do.
Inevitably Garcia had to leave Hawaii and return to the mainland, and the Dead road machine cranked up again. The band’s schedule was set in particularly hardened concrete: tours each spring, summer, and fall, with spring shows in the Carolinas and up through New York; summer stadium shows, then the multiple fall runs at arenas in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Specific dates, even venues, were reserved as much as a year in advance. The labor paid off: in 1993, according to the concert-industry outlet Pollstar, the band was the top-earning touring act, pulling in over $45 million, and the following year the number jumped to $52 million. Tickets were almost always sold out in advance, thanks to a mailing list that had started in the early seventies with 26,000 names and now including more than 200,000. After Garcia’s collapse in 1992 additional shows had to be added the following year to compensate for the loss in revenue. The band had had to deal with another crippling blow in October 1991, when Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash. “That was a big deal,” says Trixie Garcia. “He was a mentor, friend, and uncle figure.”
As the band well knew, their success came with a Faustian bargain. Grateful Dead Productions now employed thirty people (including the band), some who’d worked for the Dead for decades. Another fifteen worked at Grateful Dead Merchandising, and GDTS (Grateful Dead Ticket Sales) was home to another few dozen. In 1973 total monthly salaries for the band were $60,769. By 1995 the band’s monthly overhead, including salaries, rent, and insurance, could top $750,000 when the Dead toured stadiums (less when they were doing indoor shed or arena tours). “We were no longer just a band,” Hart says. “We had a payroll and families. We weren’t getting that much money; we were spreading it around. We couldn’t stop. We were a snake eating its tail. There was no way for us to take a rest. We were locked into tour, tour, tour. I’m sure I wanted to take a break, but there were no options.” Garcia had a high overhead himself, which included monthly $20,833 payments to Mountain Girl from their divorce. The couple had amicably met behind closed doors at the office of lawyer David Hellman in 1993. When Hellman questioned the number Mountain Girl proposed, Garcia said he was fine with it.
A degree of midlife stability had settled over the band. By now Lesh and his wife, Jill, had two sons, Brian and Grahame. In 1989 Hart had struck up a relationship with Caryl Ohrbach, a San Francisco public defender who’d previously been an environmental lawyer, and the two married soon after. Weir was in a relationship with Natascha Muenter, whom he’d met at a Dead show years before but didn’t hook up with until later. As they settled into their late forties and midfifties, some health issues dogged them. Realizing it was time to leave Front Street in favor of more professional digs, the Dead decided to buy a former Coca-Cola building on Bel Marin Keys Boulevard in Novato. At over thirty thousand square feet, the space was huge and could accommodate a recording studio more advanced than the one at Front Street. According to McNally, the band members were required to take physicals for insurance on the property, and what came back were diagnoses of high cholesterol, hepatitis, and other ailments. Polygram, which owned part of Scher’s Metropolitan company, took out a death-and-disability policy on the Dead. The paperwork didn’t stem from overt concerns about the Dead’s well-being; corporate policy dictated that key executives as well as recording artists who had influence over the business had to be insured. In this case only Garcia and Weir were included because someone assumed that the primary lead singers were the key to the Dead’s success.
Far more troubling was the moment during one of Garcia’s Hawaii trips when Vicki Jensen found Garcia talking about hard drugs again. “He said something like, ‘There were some really good things about it,’” she recalls. “And I thought, ‘Don’t delude yourself, man.’” But he had, and Manasha soon learned that Garcia had fallen back into old habits. She never saw him use heroin or other opiates, and he was never “visibly addled,” she says. But in 1992, she says, Garcia’s doctor, Randy Baker, informed her that Garcia was “inhaling small quantities of opiates” and that he was a “maintenance user,” a term she’d never heard before. Garcia’s drug use and how it would affect Keelin, then five years old, became Manasha’s foremost worry. “It was my concern that Jerry was getting into a pattern that would not end well,” she says, and for a few days she considered leaving him. “Honey, if you go, I’ll find you and bring you back!” she says he told her, which made her decide to stay. “We talked about the situation, his health, and the future,” she says. “We shared a very intimate loving evening together.” Then a few nights later came Garcia’s hand-delivered note.
Garcia and Manasha Matheson Garcia had at least one more conversation. Right before Easter 1993, she says, Garcia called her from the road, saying, “I miss you” and asking whether they could reunite for the holiday. “Although I loved him deeply, I still had unresolved feelings about seeing him right away, given the circumstances of our separation,” she says. “I said, ‘I’d like to wait’ and explained I’d made Easter weekend plans already with a friend who was visiting from the East Coast.” Garcia replied, “I’m going to keep trying.” It would be her last conversation with him. A week later Manasha called him back, and according to her, a woman answered the phone, said “very impolite words” to her, and hung up on her.
Garcia’s reunion with Meier proved short lived. She noticed how snappish he could be and, after speaking with his doctor, realized he was an addict. “I remember thinking about it and naïvely saying to myself, ‘Well, we’ll take care of that! That won’t get in the way!’” she recalls. “Words like ‘the golden era’ were being thrown around. Now, do you say no to that?” When she talked about it with Garcia, Meier learned he wasn’t particularly open to such discussions, and their relationship ended almost immediately after. (“He would say, ‘I’m fine—I’m fine,’” recalls photographer Herb Greene, who brought up the topic with Garcia during this period. “He didn’t like people talking to him about that stuff.”) In another jarring twist in years filled with them, Garcia also told Meier he’d run into another ex-flame, Deborah Koons, and couldn’t stop thinking about her.
During a band rehearsal at Front Street in December 1993 Garcia pulled McNally aside and said he needed some help. As everyone soon discovered, he and Koons had not only reunited but were going to marry. The news came as a surprise to nearly everyone, especially members of Garcia’s own family. “We were all excited,” says Trixie about her father’s reunion with Meier. “‘He’s going to marry his high school sweetheart! How sweet is that?’ And all of a sudden he’s with Deborah Koons. And we were like, ‘Who’s that?’” A good chunk of the Dead community dutifully attended the couple’s wedding in Sausalito on Valentine’s Day, 1994. (Garcia didn’t make it to his bachelor party and therefore missed strippers and nitrous tanks.) When a bearded, long-haired guy in a car with a Dead sticker drove by the church during rehearsals, McNally ran out and begged him not to tell anyone, and the man apparently complied; the wedding wasn’t besieged with Deadheads.
Even newly remarried, Garcia remained everyone’s concern, especially when his stage performances during 1994 shows grew increasingly erratic and slothful. “The nineties was my least favorite period, because of Jerry’s declining health,” says Hart. “He was missing so many damn notes.” Hart says he soon learned one of the reasons why Garcia was making those mistakes. Garcia told him that due to clogged arteries, he could no longer feel his guitar pick, which was starting to freak him out. Garcia was also grappling with carpal tunnel syndrome and diabetes. At a show at Giants Stadium, most likely in 1994, Bralove watched as the band started “Crazy Fingers” and Garcia began playing the opening riff again and again, as if in an addled loop. “Jerry couldn’t get out of the beginning triplets,” he says. “He got stuck in this groove. I remember thinking, ‘Did he have a stroke?’ I thought, ‘Oh, it could happen this way, where he just keels over in front of forty thousand people.’ There were other times when he was taking solos when I thought, ‘What’s going on? What’s he doing?’ Maybe it was one fret off, so he was a half-step off the whole solo. He was going through some routine—the physiology of it—but not actually listening.” Bralove would look over and see pained expressions on band members’ faces, especially Lesh. Fans began writing into the Dead office complaining that Garcia was forgetting lyrics. Ever willing to invest in new technology, the Dead began using in-ear monitors that allowed them to press a foot switch and speak to one another without the audience overhearing. Garcia’s impatience now had a vocal outlet: “The chord is A minor,” he was once heard saying in the middle of a song.
Around the country promoters heard the ominous rumors and speculation about Garcia’s health. Shows would often be preceded by a series of unsettling phone calls. “I’d ask, ‘How’s Jerry doing?’” recalls Atlanta promoter Alex Cooley. “They’d say, ‘It’s gonna go—he’s going to play. Just do it.’ There was no show without Jerry, so we relied on people’s words. We were dealing with millions of dollars, and people were giving me verbal okays over the phone. It was scary.” Koplik would tell his team, “Don’t worry about it—it’s going to happen or not happen. You don’t have control over it.” It was about all anyone in his position could say. In one of Garcia’s guitar cases his old friend Laird Grant left a poignant note: “Hey Jerry, please take care of yourself out there. Your friend, Laird.”
The new contract they’d signed with Arista in 1989 demanded an eventual album, and by late 1994 the time had finally come to assemble one. For any other band the scenario would have been promising. They chose the Site, a studio tucked away in the postcard-ready hills of Marin County, and arrived with nine new songs, each road tested. “Lazy River Road,” the Hunter and Garcia song inspired by Garcia’s fleeting reunion with Meier, was one of them, but their two other contributions were even deeper and more soulful. Worked out in the pool house of Hunter’s home, “Days Between” felt utterly innovative for them: a slow, meditative crawl of a song, comprised of four verses of fourteen lines each, its lyrics autumnal and reflective. The same late-in-life ambience ran through “So Many Roads,” which continued the majestic feel of “Black Muddy River” but with a new coat of world weariness.
As with Built to Last, the other songs were a grab bag of approaches and sensibilities. “Way to Go Home,” a collaboration between Welnick, Hunter, and Bralove, locked into and sounded most like the Dead when Garcia’s guitar burst out into a solo. (The same went for Welnick’s other song, “Samba in the Rain,” which attempted to weld the rhythms in its title to the Dead’s trademark groove.) The blues—thicker, growlier, and more dramatic—also inhabited Weir’s “Eternity,” cowritten with Rob Wasserman and blues legend Willie Dixon. The song was more musically grounded than Weir’s other contribution, “Easy Answers,” which continued the tangled, tempo-shifting feel of “Victim or the Crime” and other consciously adventurous later-period Weir songs. For the first time since “Box of Rain” Hunter and Lesh were about to commit one of their collaborations to record; atypically pop and breezy, especially for Lesh, “Wave to the Wind” struck fans as either a lovely diversion or one of the corniest songs the Dead had ever written. Lesh also brought along his more complex, solo-written “Childhood’s End,” its title but not subject borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi novel.
First in November 1994 and again three months later the band settled into the Site to transform the motley collection of songs into a record. But in an unfortunate reminder of the Fantasy sessions of a decade before, little usable work emerged from it. The Site’s isolated setting was amenable to recording, and Welnick’s acoustic piano never sounded better. But Garcia would often show up late, carting along egg creams and egg salad sandwiches with extra mayonnaise, despite his health issues. “Jerry was pretty fucking smooth,” says Bralove. “He would come in, apologize, have an excuse. He was a charmer. But he was in rough shape.” When the work began, whether due to drug use, his diabetes, or other ailments associated with his smoking, Garcia wasn’t always up to the task. The band would run through the songs, but according to Lesh, Garcia played only a total of “a few minutes” during the entire run at the studio. Eventually the band decided to record tracks without him and overdub his guitar parts later, yet even that plan was never realized.
Garcia had appeared tired and increasingly disoriented during shows in 1994, but as the band entered its thirtieth year in 1995, his descent became more obvious. Visiting her father at his home in Tiburon during the early months of the year (he and Deborah Koons maintained separate residences), Trixie let herself in and found Garcia lying face down on the bed. When she playfully tickled his feet to wake him up, he leapt up, startled. “He was passed out in the middle of the day on his bed, and he was probably high,” she says, “but I didn’t put it together.” Around the same time, Garcia agreed to be interviewed for a history project, Silicon Valley: 100 Year Renaissance, produced and directed by John McLaughlin, the Palo Alto native who’d taken drum lessons from Kreutzmann long before. Garcia was friendly and chatty, but with his creased, sagging face, he looked at least twenty years older than he was, and every fifteen to twenty minutes he’d ask for a break to go into the pantry to, as he put it, look for his car keys. Given the rumors around Garcia and his past issues, it was easy enough for the film crew to assume he was taking one substance or another during those breaks. Lesh grew deeply concerned when, right before the summer 1995 tour, Koons fired Garcia’s assistants, Vince and Gloria Di Biase, who saw to his day-to-day needs; the last thing anyone in the Dead world wanted was Garcia left to his own devices.
Meanwhile band and family grappled with what was ailing Garcia. He clearly wasn’t healthy and was coping with lung and heart issues. Was he happy? Was his live-for-the-moment fatalism coming into play? What could anyone do about it? Kreutzmann would later admit that Garcia had been worn down by the Dead’s predictable touring regimen. “Jerry had gotten kind of bored with the Grateful Dead, and it was sort of like a marriage that had maybe gone on too long,” Kreutzmann told Rolling Stone in 2012. “I think a lot of it, I hate to say, was really a financial obligation. He needed to earn the money for some things.” To Allan Arkush, Garcia referred to touring as “homework, a chore—it was like doing a term paper every night.” (Speaking of his 1992 setback, Manasha says, “I personally think what was being demanded from Jerry in terms of working, touring, et cetera, contributed to his need to self-medicate.”)
The perks of the job continued unabated: large homes, BMWs, home studios. On tour the Dead sometimes flew in a private Gulfstream III plane complete with a bar and made-to-order food. But to some friends or intimates Garcia would make his wishes known. Before his breakup with Meier he told her about a $125,000 payment he’d received from Ben & Jerry’s for use of the Cherry Garcia name. (Garcia hadn’t objected to the usage at first, done without his permission, but attorney Hal Kant convinced him to ask for a percentage of the sales.) Garcia mentioned how he’d love to quit the Dead and live off the ice-cream money; when she asked him why he didn’t pursue that option, he mentioned all his employees. (When she wondered why he didn’t simply get rid of the deadwood, he didn’t respond.) Garcia told Candelario he wanted to move to Italy, sign up for art classes, and only play with the Dead on weekends. “We were so excited,” says Candelario. “That was his dream. He wanted to put the Dead on sabbatical. There was plenty of money to be able to do that.”
The time had come to address not just the machinery of it all, but everything that had built up over the last three decades: the sometimes-overwhelming intensity (and devotion) of their fan base, the live-and-let-live philosophy within the band, and, equally important, the way it was affecting the music. At band meetings the thought of shuttering the unwieldy Dead operation and allowing Garcia to regain his health would be brought up. (Garcia canceled the second half of a Garcia Band show in Phoenix in the spring of 1994 after he felt sick backstage.) According to Lesh, a three-point plan was laid out after Garcia’s breakdown in 1992. If the Dead played only Bay Area shows for the rest of that year, they would cut back on salaries and equipment and “hopefully go back to full salaries in January,” according to an internal report. If the concerts didn’t resume at all until December, salaries would be cut in half in November, rather than by one-third (as in the first plan), before eventually returning to normal pay levels. In the third proposal, which assumed the band wouldn’t play at all for the rest of the year, salaries would still be cut, but expenses would be reined in by “laying off everyone except for those necessary to maintain office and operations until we regroup in 1993.”
That outline was the closest the Dead came to mapping out a specific plan of action. Otherwise, band and management would meet in the Dead’s conference room and grapple with if, when, and how to leave the road, at least temporarily. Garcia’s inconsistency onstage—weak performances followed almost immediately by strong ones—also confused matters. (At a show in Albany, New York, shortly before Deer Creek, his guitar had moments of ageless beauty even if Garcia himself—looking drawn and frail, his long white hair drooping forlornly to his shoulders—seemed prematurely aged.) “They talked about it, but they never made a decision to do it and figure out exactly how to do it,” says Mallonee. “Jerry felt he was on some kind of assembly line and needed more time at home, and the band knew it was hard on him. But they were stuck in this pattern. They’d laid people off in the seventies, but [the machine] wasn’t nearly as big then.” Recalling similar discussions, Scher says, “There were a couple of times—and, believe me, they were not serious confrontations—if the band said, ‘We’re not going out until you get yourself together,’ he just would have gone out with the Garcia Band. He said, ‘John, I play guitar every single day. I might as well get paid for it.’” Indeed, the JGB, still anchored by Garcia and Kahn but also by now featuring keyboardist Melvin Seals, was still a going concern up through the early months of 1995.
Ironically, one of the non-Garcia-related problems the band was increasingly facing—outsiders who crashed the shows and made the road less enticing—could have been their salvation. According to Weir in Rolling Stone in 2013, “The last year or two, we were actually faced with more than just the possibility that we’d have to knock off for a while and let things cool down. There was a lot of trouble we had to deal with, the crowd-control problems.” Far more so than the crowds in Pittsburgh and at other troubled cities in 1989, this new breed of concertgoer seemed less interested in the music and more attuned to the party—and more eager than ever to crash that party without paying. But again, canceling entire tours would, in their minds, be more difficult than coping with bad shows. Garcia would wonder aloud whether some of their employees, given how long they’d worked for the band without any other experience, would even be able to find work anywhere else.
Swanson saw the hugeness of the operation when she returned to their fold in the late eighties to work in the merchandise office. She’d never seen so many limos before, and the Dead office in San Rafael was now packed with employees. Swanson also noticed the band’s mixed feelings toward their success. “They could have called it at any time, but none of them did,” she says. “They could say it was all about the machine, and all of that was true. But fame is a sort of seductress, and they were seduced—staying in really nice places in New York City and taking limos back and forth. It was hard to walk away from that, and they treated everybody well. Once you do that, you can’t go back.”
In the meantime road work beckoned, as it always did. When driver Leon Day picked up Garcia for a soundcheck at the Silver Stadium in Vegas in May of 1995, he had to throw pebbles at his boss’s window to get his attention. Finally Garcia came down, looking bedraggled and tired. “Oh, come on, you’ll outlive us all,” Day joked. Garcia replied, “I won’t see the end of the year.”
The next group who clambered over the fence at Deer Creek didn’t simply want in; they wanted destruction. Instead of jumping over and heading toward the music, they settled atop the fence and began shaking the wood slats back and forth. As Clair and a friend watched in astonishment, the barricade began breaking down, splinters of wood flying through the air. “They were like monkeys, hollering,” Clair says. “You could hear people inside the stadium yelling, ‘Get off the fence!’ But the majority of the people outside were cheering them on, like, ‘Go, go!’” Although Clair heard security radioing for backup, it seemed shockingly clear that no one had a plan if the fence was attacked.
Suddenly but inevitably, a huge chunk of the barrier crashed down completely, and with it, the people in the parking lot transformed into a stampede, running up the hill and into the venue. Clair had no interest in jumping a fence, but now that all gate-crashing hell had broken loose, what was the harm in following everyone else in and catching the show? “I’m not proud of it,” he says. “I thought, ‘These kids who just came for the drugs and the scene got into my show in my hometown. That’s not fair. I should be in there too.’” Clair and his girlfriend looked at each other, didn’t say a word, and made a run for it.
Sergeant Scott Kirby of the Noblesville police department was among the first to arrive at Deer Creek. On the police radio he’d heard a few dozen cops at the venue desperately calling in for help: from what he could gather, they’d never seen any part of the fence dismantled before, and police were now outnumbered. When Kirby drove into the venue on a side road he saw the situation for himself and was stunned. He’d worked security at previous Dead shows and knew the community welcomed Deadheads, if only for the extra revenue they pumped into the economy. But tonight thousands of people were walking on the road, barely moving out of the way of his squad car. “It was like running a gauntlet,” he says. “They were everywhere. I had never seen that many people there before.” Kirby managed to reach a command post on one side of the venue, but even there rocks and bottles began bouncing off the police cars.
Kirby realized two different groups—the Deadheads who rarely caused problems and what he calls “the party group” looking for trouble—were vying for control, and the latter were winning. Every so often someone would burst out of the crowd and taunt the cops; when police advanced, the kid would run back into the crowd to cheers. Realizing they were hugely outnumbered—fifty to thousands—the police made a decision: they wouldn’t fight the mob. “It was, ‘We’ve lost the venue and we’re not going to get it back,’” Kirby says. “We needed to take another tack.” Hearing the Dead, Kirby and the other police hoped they’d stop playing, giving the people less impetus to cross the road that separated the crowd from the cops. But the band thought otherwise and continued; Lesh later said the band thought the rioting would only worsen if the music ended.
Clair had almost reached the top of the hill when the tear gas canisters and pepper spray hit him. By then other police had arrived and begun following the mob up the embankment from the parking area. Clair had been running alongside his girlfriend, but now he grabbed her, did an about-face, and began scurrying back down, holding his breath the whole time. With the air thick with tear gas, he felt as if he were driving with a fogged-up windshield. Back down at the bottom the smoke wasn’t as thick, and Clair and his girlfriend could see people screaming, vomiting, and holding twisted ankles all around the hill. To Clair it felt like a war zone.
The band had just started into Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” when a very different wall of sound hit them. Because the crowd was still lit up by the lights, due to the death threat, the Dead could see what was happening in the distance, and the sight of thousands of fans smashing through a fence and rushing in their direction astonished even the most hardened road warriors among them. “I looked up, and they were pouring over the fence,” says Bralove. “Bodies were flying. And you realized that all precautions were gone. All this stuff based on trust between the band and the audience had this energy of paranoia at that moment. Now it’s like, ‘These are the people who could be bringing the guns.’ It was very freaky.” Lesh had a look of disgust, Weir of shock, and the song momentarily stopped. The band said nothing to the crowd and eventually resumed playing, a noticeable snarl heard in Weir’s delivery.
The Dead soldiered on, took a typical break between sets, and finished the show. Sears, walking in the crowd, was hit with bottles; with his walkie-talkie, he was mistaken for a cop. When the show was over the band’s exodus quickly began: women and children were sent out first through the crowd in vans—which struck one member of the organization as a strange type of decoy—while band members and crew clambered aboard a bus that took them out the back of the venue. Gazing out the windows, those inside could see fans lighting fires and banging on the bus, and the more zoned-out wandered in front of the moving bus like zombies. “People were so fucked up they were almost daring the bus to run them over,” says McNally. “It was eerie.” Adding to the weirdness, the driver opted for a side road to get to the freeway, and the bus ran into a ditch. After the crew were unable to pull it out, a tow truck eventually yanked the bus out of the hole, and the Dead finally were on their way back to their hotel.
Back at his car in the lot, Clair took a swig of vodka to clear his throat—it was the only liquid in sight—as angry fans around him, those who hadn’t jumped the fence, berated him: “You shouldn’t have done that—the show is over!” and “Thanks for ruining the party, asshole!” The crowd dispersed, and Clair made it back to the apartment he was sharing with roommates. The smell of the tear gas, or whatever it had been, lingered in his throat and eyes. When he told his Dead-hating roommates what had happened, they simply laughed, and Clair had trouble sleeping that night.
A second show at Deer Creek had been scheduled for the following night, but local police told Dead management that if problems arose again, officers would only be on duty to direct traffic, not defend the venue. Because no one wanted a repeat performance of the riot, the show was canceled, and everyone in the Dead camp was told to assemble in their hotel lobby at 1 p.m. to leave early for the next show in Missouri. In his job as spokesman, McNally drafted an open letter to fans from the band about what had happened and the consequences of gate-crashing. Titled “This Darkness Got to Give” and signed by each band member, the letter was more emphatic and angrier in tone than the messages they had sent to fans after the troubles of 1989. “At Deer Creek, we watched many of you cheer on and help a thousand fools kick down the fence and break into the show,” it read near the start. “We can’t play music and watch plywood flying around endangering people. . . . Don’t you get it? . . . A few thousand so-called Dead Heads ignore those simple rules and screw it up for you, us and everybody. We’ve never before had to cancel a show because of you. Think about it.” The letter went on to warn against vending and against coming to shows unless people had tickets: “This is real. This is first a music concert, not a free-for-all party. . . . Many of the people without tickets have no responsibility or obligation to our scene. They don’t give a shit. They act like idiots. They think it’s just a party to get as trashed as possible at.” It warned that allowing “bottle-throwing gate crashers” would only “end the touring life of the Grateful Dead. . . . A few more scenes like Sunday night, and we’ll quite simply be unable to play. The spirit of the Grateful Dead is at stake, and we’ll do what we have to do to protect it.”
Arriving at Deer Creek the next day fans saw the letter posted at the entrance. That same morning Kirby spotted a group of Deadheads at a local grocery store, stocking up on food for the show. When he told them it was off, they initially refused to believe him, then gathered around a car radio to hear the news for themselves. Some looked dejected; others began crying. Kirby didn’t quite understand it, but he’d never seen anything quite like it before and realized how vital to their lives those tours were.
Four shows remained—two at Riverport Stadium in Maryland Heights, Missouri, and two at Soldier Field in Chicago—and the Dead managed to slog through them. But catastrophes of varying scales dogged them. Before Deer Creek, lighting had struck three Deadheads in a parking lot at the show at Washington, DC. After Deer Creek 108 fans at a campground miles away from St. Louis were hurt when a porch they’d crowded onto collapsed. (One other died of an overdose in the same campground.) By the time the band reached Chicago for the last two shows, July 8 and 9, eleven TV crews had arrived to chronicle any further calamities, and John Scher flew in from New Jersey after hearing the Deer Creek news. Even though Garcia would sometimes flinch when Scher tried to talk with him about his smoking, Garcia admitted he knew his health was teetering and told Scher he was going to Hawaii after the tour to relax and recuperate. Compared to past conversations, Scher was pleasantly surprised and hopeful, even if the scene around the Dead still appeared shaky. “Things were pretty fractured at that point,” says Scher. “Everyone was a bit on edge and tired of what was going on, at, and for Jerry. It had all gotten out of hand.”
The final night in Chicago, July 9, didn’t feel right from the opening notes—and not only because, thirty years before, a Ouija board in the band’s rented house in Los Angeles had announced that day as some kind of finale. Starting with “Touch of Grey,” Garcia’s voice wavered in and out of key, and the harmonies were shaky. When Garcia peeled off a solo the tone was spry and fluid. Roaring out the “we will get by” refrain at the end of the song, the crowd seemed eager to voice its own positive outlook toward him and the Dead. The rest of the show was typically spotty, but at moments—especially on a version of “Lazy River Road”—Garcia’s voice settled into its deeper, lower register as if he were sinking into a comfortable old sofa. The slower, more elegiac songs were clearly speaking more to Garcia, made jarringly clear to Steve Marcus when he and some coworkers watched closely as their boss sang “So Many Roads,” with its desolate Hunter lyrics about easing one’s soul. “We were looking at each other like, ‘What’s going on with Jerry?’” Marcus says. “He was putting more into that song than we’d seen him do for years.”
Standing at the soundboard, Caryl Hart looked up at a screen broadcasting a close-up of Garcia’s drawn face and was saddened. Dan Ross, the Michigan Deadhead who’d attended 423 Dead concerts since 1988, did something he’d never done at any of the shows he’d seen: finding the experience of watching his beloved band in such a weakened state, he headed for the parking lot before it was over. “When I left,” he says, “I was thinking, ‘It’s time.’”
As the band ended the show and prepared for an encore, word filtered out through crew walkie-talkies of a double encore: “Black Muddy River” and then, at Lesh’s suggestion for a more upbeat ending to the show and tour, “Box of Rain.” For three decades the band had put itself through a seemingly nonstop cycle of ups and downs: rejuvenation followed by collapse or near-collapse, followed by another renewal. The pattern was as much a part of their story as their music, and it was only natural to assume that the pattern would continue, that Garcia would again rise up.
On the flight back to San Francisco Hart sat next to Garcia and watched as his band mate of twenty-eight years nodded off, falling into a deep sleep, accompanied as always by his thunderous snore. (That peculiarity could be useful: when he fell asleep in hotel rooms on the road it was a way for the organization to tell he wasn’t dead.) At one point in the flight Hart looked over and saw Garcia’s heart literally beating through his T-shirt. “I went, ‘Wow, have I ever seen that before?’” Hart says. “His brave heart was beating on, but that baby was really tired.” After such a difficult run of shows, everyone needed a rest, but no one more than Garcia.