(left to right): Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Jerry Garcia

 

One Way or Another

Please don’t dominate the rap, Jack If you got nothing new to say If you please, don’t back up the track This train got to run today....

One way or another
One way or another
One way or another
This darkness has got to give.

—Robert Hunter, “New Speedway Boogie”

It wasn’t surprising to get busted. It was surprising if you didn’t get busted.

—Jerry Garcia, interview with author, 1988

 

16

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: We bought a little TV and settled into some sort of domestic life. We had a big Plymouth station wagon with a back window that didn’t roll up, and that was what we got around in. Right about this time, we took our one and only camping trip. Jerry and I went camping in the Sierras. They’d played a show at a bowling alley in Lake Tahoe. We just hated the motel. Jerry said, “Let’s camp out.” I said, “Camp out?” I loved camping but I had never tried anything like this with him. I figured, “I’ll have to do it all.” So I made my checklist and got some food and made sure we had sleeping bags and something to sleep on. He drove up to some little logging trail and on out into the woods. Bumpety bumpety bumpety down into this really beautiful spot that was there off the road. He slammed the station wagon down there and I was going, “Oh, hell. We’re going to be stuck here forever.” The sun immediately set and the mosquitoes came out. Jerry really surprised me. He bustled all around and built a little fire and he cooked some steak and potatoes in tin foil and we made ourselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sat out there. We spent the night looking at the stars and it was as sweet as it could possibly be. That is one of my most treasured memories because it was the only time we ever did anything like that and it was completely on his whim. In the morning, he threw everything back in the car and packed us all in there. I was so sure we’d never get that car out of there because it was so damp and we were way down in. He just hauled ass. Spinning mud all over, just booow-wow, he came up out of the woods and heaved this station wagon back up on to the logging road and we were out of there. It was really a lot of fun. When we got back, everybody said, “Where were you guys? You missed a great party.”

There was a very very strong cohesive addiction that we all had to each other and to getting high together. It was hard to break off from the group and get high separately. It felt lonely. When you were used to that connection being made for you all the time, you were being reflected back in a circular group. You were aware that it was limiting on a certain level. But you’re also aware of the nurturing, and the comfort level was much higher. I’m talking about taking psychedelics. I don’t think any of us were ready for the spiritual development that it would have required for us to go off and get high by ourselves and sit in a dark room and trip our brains out. That wasn’t what we were doing at all. We were forming a social nucleus. It was very nuclear and it was very centered on the band members. Phil was a very strong-minded member. Phil never seemed to lose his consciousness of the situation or of the players or of the humor that was inherent in any of the silly stuff we did. I remember Phil as being one of the funniest people I’d ever heard in my whole life. Just a needle wit and he could keep you giggling when you really didn’t want to laugh anymore because your face hurt.

Bill Thompson: The Grateful Dead and the Airplane started the Carousel Ballroom. This was in ’68. The Airplane and the Grateful Dead got together and we were both going to be given ten percent of this club. We played there for free and we had lots of jamming shows. In return for that, we got ten percent. Ten percent of nothing. A guy named Ron Rakow ran the Carousel. Later, he would start Round Records for the Grateful Dead. He was our first mistake. He had cut a very bad deal. A hundred and some thousand dollars a year for rent. At that time, it was a lot of money.

Ron Rakow: I didn’t want to do the Carousel. I made a deal for the ballroom which later was written up as the worst lease in show business. The deal I made was seven thousand dollars a month against fifteen percent of the gross. The deal my lawyer, who was incompetent, wrote up was seven thousand dollars a month plus fifteen percent of the gross. I had to sign it. By the time the papers were drawn up, we already had guys in the building with sledgehammers, chopping the building up.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: There were two major critical errors made. The first one was that the previous owner of the Carousel had convinced Ron Rakow that the capacity of the place was greater than it was. In most places like that, the fire capacity is generally no more than two thirds of the actual amount of people it can hold. It turned out that the previous owner had bribed the fire department and the fire capacity of the place was the physical capacity of the place. Ron always believed the true capacity was another fifteen hundred higher than that. That was one thing, and the other one was that he based his projection on carrying that place on the shows of the Grateful Dead, who could not play every night.

Ron Rakow: The fire capacity was not accurate. We knew we could get more people in there. But it was not a democracy. I ran that place. It was my mistake and I paid for it. It wasn’t a communal thing.

Owsley Stanley: Rakow was charging too little and he was paying too much and he wasn’t paying attention to what was going on. The band had nothing to do with it. They just contributed a certain amount of money to it in the beginning. Bill Graham offered people more money and told them that if they ever played for the Carousel Ballroom, they would never play for him. He wanted the hall for himself. It was a better location than the Fillmore.

Ron Rakow: The night Bill Graham and I were sitting in Zim’s making the deal for him to take over the Carousel, Bobby Kennedy got assassinated. Prior to that, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed. For eleven weeks in a row, no dance halls made money. It was a bad business time. Also, I overpaid for every act because I had this bear barring people from playing for me. That was Bill.

Bill Thompson: It lasted less than a year. Then it became the Fillmore West.

Jerry Garcia (1988): We thought we’d give it a try. It was terrible! But we did have some crazy times. We had a lot of fun. It was one of those things that we just couldn’t make work. We weren’t ruthless enough.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: In that group situation, we all had a tendency to generalize and not be specifically one-on-one with people and just let the energy move around the room. It was not soul searching. It was soul involvement. It was admitting that you were part of this group and that you were involved with this group energy. And it wasn’t necessarily good for you as an individual during your individual growth. Jerry floated in it like nectar. He loved it because it allowed him lots of freedom. In it, he was pretty golden. He definitely had the gift of charming people and it almost seemed like the bigger the job, the harder he worked at it. Everyone sort of waited for his say-so. I know that Rock and Danny Rifkin wanted to run things a little bit more their way but Phil and Bill Kreutzmann both had strong leadership impulses. Jerry was really good at undermining them by changing the plans at the last minute.

Owsley Stanley: I got busted in December 1967 and while I was locked up, it changed. It became partitioned. The guys on stage had little black curtains between their little cubbies. It all got divided up. It became, “This is my territory and this is your territory and this is my job and that is your job.” People started going off into their own dressing rooms and their own little cubicles on stage. To me, that was absolutely alien. It was more of a star trip. Somebody told me, “Things aren’t the way they were in the old days. We’re much more professional now.” Weren’t we always professional? We were writing the book on rock ’n’ roll.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Through the years, I mistrusted women less than I mistrusted a lot of men that came through our scene. I felt there were men who came through that were far more dangerous than any of the women. I felt equal to the men in the group. But I also felt the possessiveness of the situation. That in a certain way, I belonged to the group. I also felt it from Jerry. He was definitely a possessive person when it came to me. As far as I was concerned, it was a monogamous relationship. The playing around that went on, I tolerated it. The part I didn’t like was women coming through the scene who were too messed up to look after themselves. I really frowned on that. They were never the ones who were after Jerry. His were more clever than that. They didn’t come and stand in front of me. They knew better. But the ones who were interested in Bobby or Laird or Pigpen, they’d trail through the house. Basically, they were just looking for a place to lie down. I could feel that they were searching for something they could get their hooks into and that always really upset me.

 

17

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: We moved out of the Haight into that little apartment. After that, the rush was on to Marin. Jerry and I found a little cottage which is gone now over in Larkspur. It was rented to us through Gino Cippolina, who was John’s father and a sweet old man. Jerry and baby Sunshine and I moved over there and it was pretty bare bones. It was a really funky old place and we had to do a lot of cleanup. We lived there for about six months. While we were gone one time, we actually had everything stolen out of that house. We had no furniture left. Nothing but the bed. They left the mattress on the bed and I think one chair but everything else had been moved out. They even stole Jerry’s banjo.

Jerry had gone to rehearsal and I was sitting on the porch just feeling really sad and this guy walked up and he was this really weird-looking guy. He had another guy with him that was skulking around and looking around the corners really weird. He said, “If Jerry wants his banjo back, it’s going to cost you about a hundred dollars.” And I went, “Hah, okay. Got the message. Check back with us tomorrow. Same time, same station.” When Jerry got home, I told him the story and he was like, “Oh, wow.”

So we got together ninety bucks for this guy and bought Jerry’s banjo back. But we didn’t get anything else back. The baby bed and the baby clothes were gone. They even took my diapers. These guys were a bunch of junkies and it turned out they were guys that Jerry knew a little bit. We were really lucky that he did because I don’t think we’d ever have gotten any of those things back. For a lot of this time, I knew nothing about nothing. I didn’t understand that there were junkies out there that would steal stuff from you. They’d steal stuff from their mother.

We were really broke during those days. We had no extra anything. It was hard to stay honest when you were that broke all the time. I was not above boosting a pint of strawberries from the grocery store. Luxuries were out of reach. But life was a lot less expensive in those days. I think we paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month for that cottage.

Bob Weir: Needless to say, for the first many years of our existence, we didn’t run a very tight ship businesswise. God knows how much money got away from us. More often than not, we’d be going through pretty lean times. After a fair bit of that, we started to try to streamline things so that our managers wouldn’t take our money and run. So we would be able to function fairly comfortably without having to be constantly scrounging. Bill Graham came and made a presentation to us. Basically, he was too organized for us. We weren’t ready for even that much structure. We were a complete democracy. The band and the crew and the family would all come to our meetings. With Bill, there would be shouting. In rapid order, we sort of drifted apart.

Jon Mcintire: We were at Mickey Hart’s barn in Novato and Mickey said something like, “Okay, so we’ve got a problem here. We’ve got a crisis. We don’t have anybody managing us. We have a problem with keeping track of stuff. We’re hippies and we need something more, and enter Lenny Hart, my father....” On cue, Lenny entered from behind this door. There was this concrete runway through the middle of the room and Lenny started rapping like a charismatic minister and he was a self-appointed Pentecostal minister. “Okay. We’re talking about the spirit. We’re talking about the spirit of God. We’re talking about the spirit of the devil. We’re talking about the same thing. It’s the spirit. We want to bring out the spirit. We’re the spirit of music, we’re the spirit of …” He was going on and on and on and walking the whole time, throwing out this charismatic rap and they hired him. The same way I became their manager was the way Lenny became their manager. He was there. At that moment.

At the really big junctures, Garcia called the shots. He was always the goose that laid the golden egg. But Garcia didn’t believe in being very consciously selective about these kind of things. Especially the stuff that he didn’t take very seriously. Such as management. In terms of Lenny Hart, he wanted to believe. Absolutely. Anybody that Garcia chose, he was going to give full belief to. You had to fuck up bad before he would cut you loose. You had to be a jerk. You could make any number of mistakes and Garcia would say, “Of course, mistakes are made. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It just didn’t work out.” That was the way they did it on stage with music. They would go down different musical lines and try it and then say, “Well, that one didn’t work out.”

Bob Weir: Then Mickey’s father came in and that was a fiasco. Mickey’s father didn’t argue with us. He didn’t have the time. He was too busy pocketing money.

Owsley Stanley: They wanted to play the bigger shows and they had to keep renting sound systems that didn’t coordinate very well with the gear that was there. They turned to me and said, “Do something.”

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: After we lost that cottage, we had a second house on Madrone Avenue. Hunter lived with us and that was where American Beauty came together. John Dawson lived right across the street. Our house was 271 Madrone and we lived there for almost two years. It was during that time that Annabelle was born. It was also the period of time during which Altamont took place. The band had just done Woodstock so they were still high on that Woodstock vibe. The Woodstock thing had been so incredible. It really set the stage for Altamont because it raised everybody’s expectations about how everybody would come together and how this thing would be so great. In other words, the audience would lend their participatory energy to making this a wonderful event. That didn’t happen.

Nicki Scully: I went by myself to Woodstock and discovered co-incidentally that I was on the same plane with the band so I sat with Jerry and he took me under his wing. I ran with Jerry for a day or two until I found Rock. It was a fun trip. Everyone was up for it. I remember we wound up at some motel. The first time we went into the site, I went with Jerry and it was pretty easy to get in. We checked things out. And then when I tried to get back in with Rock at four in the morning, it took hours and hours.

Owsley Stanley: Woodstock was a disaster because the wrong sort of people tried to control it instead of just flowing with it. The helicopters and all those guys with their weird announcements about things that could have easily been avoided.

Nicki Scully: I had been carrying around this bag with brown acid. I hadn’t been giving it out because I’d already been told it was bad. I had it and nobody was going to get any more. Then I looked and there was a hole in the bottom. I had been trickling brown acid wherever I walked.

Owsley Stanley: On stage, they had four of these large plywood cookies with two-by-four structure and casters underneath. They would set up two bands back-to-back on the cookies, roll them into place, and that was their way of getting rid of the time lag between sets. Ramrod and I looked at this and we said, “This is not going to work. Our equipment is too heavy. We’re gonna have to set up on stage.” They told us, “Absolutely not. You have to do it this way.” The time came for our set. The guys hooked up the ropes. The plywood moved approximately one foot and all the casters broke. Wham. Down the thing came on the floor. We had to take everything down and set it up again. Everyone was bitching and saying it was our fault. We hooked it all up again on the stage. Phil turned on his bass amp. Out came the helicopter. We were getting the helicopter radio on Phil Lesh’s bass. It was not a great show.

Nicki Scully: I was standing on stage as they played. It was night. The wind was blowing, nearly tipping over the stage. It was an ominous moment. I was so high that I knew it was my fault. I knew if I weren’t there, everything would have improved instantly. Looking out over that sea of people in every direction, there was obviously no place to go. No way out. I tried to dance. I couldn’t dance. I really struggled to help them by trying to get myself out of the funk I was in. It was like a bad acid trip. It was a bad acid trip.

Jon Mcintire: I was their manager at Woodstock. They got off stage and they’d sucked the hairy root. They were just horrible. I’d never heard them play so badly. I was feeling it personally and I was crestfallen. I was so embarrassed. But I would never have talked to Jerry about it. Later on, when I felt more at ease talking with each of them about musical things, I would have said, “God, that was awful!” But at that point, I didn’t feel it was my place to make any musical comments. I just happened to be standing there when Garcia was walking off stage. He walked up and looked at me and said, “Well, it’s nice to know you can blow the most important gig in your career and it doesn’t really matter.” There it was. The epitome of cool.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: Jerry and MG and Sunshine lived in Larkspur. I was still recuperating from Woodstock and I was living in Mountain Girl’s bus. At nine o’clock in the morning every day, Jerry and I would watch Sesame Street, essentially with Sunshine. But if Sunshine wasn’t there, we watched it anyway. We liked the psychedelic images of the show.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I didn’t go to Woodstock. I was pregnant with Annabelle and decided not to make the trek. I regretted not being there. I watched it on TV and I heard all the stories. But it set the stage for Altamont, which was a series of errors. It has been exhaustively autopsied but each of us had a different path through that thing and it was all scary.

Owsley Stanley: Altamont was an example of greed, the inability and unwillingness of the Rolling Stones to take care of one of their problems, which was with the company that owned the Sears Point Raceway, and the energy of the event. It was December 6, the day before Pearl Harbor Day, which is a very low energy moment in the yearly cycle anyway.

Jerry Garcia (1988): Originally, the Rolling Stones were just going to come out and play in Golden Gate Park. They made the stupid mistake of announcing that they were going to play. That was it. That was the end of it right there. They should have just called it off from then on. But the Stones were traveling in a bubble. They couldn’t be contacted. You couldn’t explain. Somebody, I think it was Emmet Grogan, wrote on the bulletin board up at Alembic Sound up by Hamilton Field where we were rehearsing and a lot of planning was going on—“First Annual Charlie Manson Death Festival.” Before it happened. It was in the air that it was not a good time to do something. There were too many divisive elements. It was too weird.

Owsley Stanley: We were driving to Altamont in a sports car that I had. All of a sudden, we looked up and there was this rocket blowing up in the sky. I said, “That’s got to be some kind of strange sign.” We couldn’t figure out where to get off the freeway. Most people drove along until they saw the site and then drove right onto the grounds. We took a turnoff somewhere and the road kept getting weirder and weirder and the trees kept getting closer and closer and eventually we were going through a tunnel. We came out of this tunnel into this moonscape of crushed auto bodies. Crushed and crunched. As we drove along, we looked over to the left and we saw this place that looked like a skull. It was the actual arena in which they had these demolition derbies. And I thought, “Oh, my God. This place smells of death. And of the energy of people who come here to watch other people crashing these cars and hoping they die.” I thought, “This is the worst possible place to hold something like this.” I realized that if you took acid at this show, you were going to have a trip you didn’t really want to do.

Jon Mcintire: Lenny Hart, Mickey’s father, was the co-manager with me during Altamont. Before we went there, we were on the helicopter pad with the Rolling Stones. Lenny ran over to Mick Jagger and said, “Mick! Mick! You remember Jerry?” and he dragged him over. They’d never met. Of course, they put the Rolling Stones on the helicopter first. They were more famous.

Jerry Garcia (1988): And that place. God. It was like hell. It was like one of those things you could watch happening. You could see it coming and you couldn’t do anything about it. Like watching trains. I ended up acting like a security person. Trying to keep people off the stage and off stuff. I never was threatened. But it was horrible. We went there expecting to play but we didn’t play. It was so horrible for one thing. For another thing, Pigpen got lost in the traffic flying in and out and he didn’t show up. We had another gig that night but we blew it out. We said, “Fuck it.” We were too depressed.

Laird Grant: Straight people used to say to Jerry, “Oh God, man. The Hell’s Angels, you ought to take their jackets away from them.” But he would say, “No, man. It’s a good thing they have the jackets on. At least you know where they are and who they are. All those straight people wearing the same colored suit walking down the street are the sons of bitches you got to look out for because they’re all wolves in sheep’s clothing. At least here you can see the wolves. You can know who they are when they growl at you.” That was the basic thing of the Dead. We got out there and growled. Sometimes we bit. Sometimes we got bit back.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Altamont was a terrible blow. It was organized originally in my living room and it seemed like such a good idea at the time. And to have it turn into such a nightmare was frightening for us. We were still pretty addicted to the peace and love generation. To have it turn into such a nightmare was a serious wake-up call. After it all went down, we all felt guilty and really concerned about the people who had gone out there and gotten hurt. Every single one of us saw different terrible things that happened there. I think it made the band aware of the danger of calling attention to yourself and calling for mass attendance at these kind of events.

 

18

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: The Dead had just gotten back from a road trip and they were at their place in Hamilton Field. They had a big barnlike building with an office that they used as a studio and a rehearsal hall. I was hanging out up there and Garcia said, “I got this brand-new pedal steel guitar.” I said, “Can I come over and hear it?” And he said, “Sure.” So I brought my guitar and a few of my songs and he just jumped right into it. Like not even sticking his toe in the water to see what the water temperature was. He just jumped in and started playing pedal steel.

I played him some of my songs and he said, “Oh yeah, this is cool. That’s nice. I like that. When are we going to do this again?” And I said, “I’ve got this gig down in Menlo Park.” On Wednesday evenings, I was the entertainment in a Hofbrau House not far down the street from Guitars Unlimited. I’d play for a couple hours for the people eating their roast beef sandwiches. Garcia invited himself along. He had this little foreshortened school bus, just as big around as a regular school bus but squashed, only four rows of seats in it. They had converted that to a hippie van slightly bigger than a Volkswagen. He put his pedal steel together and he would drive all the way from Larkspur down to Menlo Park every Wednesday and unload the stuff and set it up.

I’d sit there and do my songs and he’d accompany me on the steel. There wasn’t any money involved and there was no importance to the thing. But it got to be pretty good. On Wednesday evenings at about seven o’clock, you could see all the kids emptying out of the Round Table Pizza Parlor which was their normal hangout up the street. They’d come marching down the street and pay their fifty cents or a dollar at the door of the Underground, which was the name of this Hofbrau House.

David Nelson: I was staying at Jerry’s house. Hunter came downstairs one day and said, “I’ve got a name for you. The Riders of the Purple Sage.” We’d called ourselves the Murdering Punks and we’d also had some other names. I said, “There already is a Riders of the Purple Sage. Foy Willing and the Riders of the Purple Sage. How about New Riders of the Purple Sage?” And he said, “You just like names with new in ’em.” Because I had just been in the New Delhi River Band. And we’d all always liked the New Lost City Ramblers.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: After the Underground, we said, “Let’s make a little bar band out of this.” Like the country and western guys who played in bars and had a good time. So we got Nelson and we rehearsed a bunch of stuff.

David Nelson: When we were starting the New Riders, I was staying at Jerry’s house in Larkspur. That was where I first heard all the Grateful Dead’s new songs because the band would come in and do vocal rehearsals in Jerry’s house. I got to hear “Attics of My Life” and “Candyman” and “Cumberland Blues.” God, it was great. On Workingman’s Dead, I play acoustic guitar on “Cumberland Blues.” It’s pretty apparent that song is about Cumberland, the mines, and the southern Appalachians. After the big chorus and singing, it comes back into a rest on G and gets more country. Jerry was going to play banjo there and I was going to play guitar. Just like we did in the Wildwood Boys. But the banjo playing didn’t mesh with the drums. It had never been done and it was too much trouble so Jerry stuck with the little banjo-y sound on the electric guitar and he had me play the acoustic part. I know he did do a banjo track on that. Maybe they just mixed it down. But it was him and me playing some bluegrass on there.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: This was when Hunter came up with the idea for “Friend of the Devil.” Hunter was living in Garcia’s house. He came over to my house and said, “I’ve got this brand new song.” He had the melody. “Okay,” I said. “So you can do that twice. Then you gotta go somewhere else.” I came up with the other place to go to. “A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.” I came up with the chorus. The hook part. Together, we evolved that song.

David Nelson: I ran the tape recorder and strummed along while they worked out this tune, “Friend of the Devil.” Actually, Hunter had it pretty much worked out. It was just me and John playing along as far as I was concerned but Hunter swears that John really helped write it. I have the piece of paper that Hunter wrote the lyrics on and it has lyrics on it that aren’t in there. Before Hunter thought of, “Set out runnin’ but I take my time,” it was “Looks like water, tastes like wine. Run like the demon from the thousand swine.” That was crossed out. Then in place of it is “Set out runnin’ but I take my time, a friend of the Devil is a friend of mine.” They changed “Got a girl in Boston, babe and one in O-hi-o” to “Got a wife in Chino, babe, and one in Cherokee. First one says she’s got my child but it don’t look like me.” It’s in his handwriting and the chords are A minor, E minor, F, E minor. F, C, F, C.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Garcia listened to it and said, “Fine, fine. That’s very nice. But it needs a bridge.” So Hunter said, “Okay,” and he scribbled out some more words. No problem for Hunter. He could do it. He could write ’em out. Just turn him on. “Got two reasons why I cry …” That was the bridge. Hunter wrote the words and Garcia came up with the tune for that and that was how the three of us got that song together. Garcia would make Hunter agonize over a single turn of phrase. Over a single word. Hunter would have to sit there and come up with it because it wasn’t good enough for Garcia. Garcia couldn’t do that himself but he was a judge of it and he appreciated where Hunter was coming from. Hunter was the only guy that he ever wrote with. Except for that one occasion.

David Grisman: If Jerry came to the East Coast, we’d hang out. If I came to the West Coast, we hung out. I was in a band called Earth Opera and our last gig was somewhere south of L.A. I came up to visit a friend in San Francisco for a weekend right after that. Somehow we ended up in Fairfax at a baseball game between the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. I ran into Jerry and that was where he asked me to play on American Beauty. If I hadn’t gone to the baseball game, I would not have gotten asked. He saw me and said, “I got some tunes that you’d sound great on.” Which turned out to be “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple.” I played two mandolin parts on “Ripple.” It was just an overdub session. No interaction other than a couple of the guys had suggestions. I certainly didn’t realize then that these tracks would become landmarks in the Grateful Dead repertoire.

David Nelson: During the two-year period before all this when I hadn’t seen Jerry, he’d gone through a transformation. He had the full beard and he was wearing the Levi shirt and that poncho all the time. He looked beatified. I thought he looked like an angel. Like an angel with a bad streak.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: We played a gig at a benefit for the Hell’s Angels. That was at Longshoreman’s Hall and the Bear [Owsley Stanley] was our soundman. This night at Longshoreman’s Hall, something fucked up with the PA. I don’t know what it was. I don’t think the Bear knew what it was. But the Bear started whipping out all this shit. Here was the soldering gun coming out. And here were these six-foot Hell’s Angels coming up and saying, “Uh, you think you could play some music?” And I was saying, “We need the PA, man. We sing and we have to have the PA.” “Hey, man. Couldn’t you just play? You don’t need the PA. Just play some stuff.” We were saying, “Bear, come on. Get this goddamn thing fixed.” Eventually he got it on and we actually played a couple of songs for the people. We played for the Angels on a couple of occasions when the Grateful Dead had nothing to do with it. We played for Sonny Barger’s birthday party in Folsom Prison.

Sonny Barger: The Grateful Dead actually had always been our friends. They’d been friends of the Hell’s Angels since the sixties. I guess Jerry was the main reason. Jerry liked us and we liked Jerry. Other people in the band sort of came and went but Jerry was always there. Jerry said he was scared of us but I don’t believe it.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: In the New Riders, we got Mickey Hart to play the drums and Phil to play the bass. In order for us to go on the Grateful Dead’s tour, Jerry needed only two more tickets. He only needed to add my name and Nelson’s name to the itinerary. Because everybody else was already in the band. We gave them an opening act for cheap. For the price of two tickets, he got a new five-piece band to open for the Dead.

David Nelson: Those nights were great. The New Riders would do a forty-five-minute set. Jerry could sit down and play pedal steel. There was no pressure on him because it was not his band and he wasn’t singing anything. Then he’d do the acoustic thing in between. That was the Dead actually but me and John would come up and do a couple songs. Then they did the full electric set. It was called “An Evening with the Grateful Dead.” Jerry would be on stage all night long. In those days, the show wasn’t over at two in the morning. Sometimes, it was over at like six in the morning. Not every gig. But sometimes.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: The first time we played Fillmore East was “An Evening with the Grateful Dead Featuring the New Riders of the Purple Sage.” Jerry was in heaven. Because he was a picking junkie. If he was ever going to be accused of being a junkie, accuse him of being a picking junkie first. Before he got to be uncomfortable without some heroin in his blood, he got to be uncomfortable without a guitar in his hand. That was his first draw.

Jerry Garcia (1988): We did our great shows at Fillmore East. We worked for ’em. The crowd was sitting down and they got it out of us. They pulled it out of us. In the Bay Area, it was almost too easy.

Joshua White: The Dead started coming to Fillmore East. When it started, the Dead were just this band with Pigpen. Then the Deadhead concept began to develop. So the concerts went longer and longer and later and later and Owsley was around.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: We always stayed around after our set was over to watch the Dead. The real magic was in the days when there were still people allowed on stage. When they still allowed their friends to have backstage passes. It was almost like a church hierarchy. After a while, they evolved it so that nobody got on stage except a band member or a member of the crew like Steve Parish or Kid or Dan Healy or Harry Popick. Only those people. Nobody else. In the days when it was really cool was when everybody was hanging out there. When it got truly apocalyptic at the end, there was this feeling that “Okay, this is a model of how the world could be.” Everybody having a good time and everybody getting off. Everybody going “Ohhhhh woww!” during one of those churning ongoing jams.

Joshua White: It wasn’t just the band coming to play. It was the band with their whole environment that they brought with them. People were hanging around to score Owsley acid and then they wanted to do the show on Owsley acid. I remember visiting the light show backstage during the winter of 1970. By then, I had already moved into large-screen video projection. All my former colleagues were still performing the light show for the Grateful Dead at Fillmore East. Sparks were coming out of their heads. They were not people I knew anymore. To me, they were aliens who were so deeply involved in this Dead concert that nothing could distract them. The concerts themselves began to go on until five in the morning.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: In the first days, the length of the sets was due to the LSD because that gave you that unlimited amount of energy. You didn’t even know when you were tired and you couldn’t go to sleep. There was no fucking reason to even try to go to sleep. Because it was brighter with your eyes closed than it was with them open. There was more noise that way. That was how they evolved into playing these three and four and five hour long sets. In terms of how tired Jerry would get on stage, Garcia was not known for his James Brown imitations. He just stood there and sang. Still, the Dead would try for that magic each time. Sometimes they would get it. The magic of all of them seeming to think together, possibly because of all the times they had played together. Garcia was the one who was the blind leading the blind. None of them knew where they were going. Especially in those spaces. They were just looking around. Garcia would be there playing around with something and Weir would be playing around with something and everybody would be doing five things together on the stage and people would still be listening and saying, “What the hell is going on here?”

Dexter Johnson: I saw Jerry with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane do a duet show at the Fillmore. Jorma and Jerry just traded licks and it was unbelievable. I remember the light show flashing the words “The Grateful Airplane.” In “Dark Star,” it was like he was finding new notes. They weren’t new notes of course but a new way of doing it.

Tom Constanten: If you listen to, say, “Dark Star,” the reason you won’t hear as much black blues is because Jerry’s using more pentatonic-type scales. He was not using your flat fives, your flat threes, the little signals that say “blues.” But that was a minor technical adjustment in his own playing. It wasn’t like he was saying, “I’m going to adopt this entire style of playing or go with this style of playing.” The trappings or components of a style make more difference to a reviewer or listener. Whereas when you’re playing, you’re just dealing with mechanical things. You get into the inner kernel that way and there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t make any difference. During “Dark Star,” I don’t think Jerry would be thinking, “I’m affecting this or that style.” He was merely adapting the mode to the mode of the subtext of the piece. Except to the degree that he might want to make some implication or some sort of reference like “First there is no mountain, then there is....” Throwing in that sort of thing. There were a lot of pieces that sounded real good but they were very hard to fly like one of those World War I biplanes. You had to have a crew of six, each minding these gauges to make sure that it came out okay. “Dark Star” was the opposite of that. It was sublimely easy to fly and it worked wonderfully well and you could go any number of places. Rhythmically, you could superimpose triplet patterns. You could do twoplet patterns. You could take them either direction you wanted to go. For that reason, I don’t know if it was even rehearsable. It was only ever a showcase for Jerry’s playing to the same degree that ninety-five percent of all the tunes they played were showcases for his playing. In terms of the lyrics, like a lot of the words, they were words that if you were on the psychedelic mountain, you could just let them reflect and refract and do what they do. They would reflect the moment as it was and as you perceived it at that time. “Dark Star” is going on all the time. It’s going right now. You don’t begin it so much as enter it. You don’t end it so much as leave it. Any Fillmore East “Dark Star,” I would recommend.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: After a couple of tours back there, the New Riders got their own record deal. Clive Davis had his eye on Garcia the whole time. I think he recognized that Garcia was the true talent in that mob. He wanted him and the only way that he was going to get him was by getting the New Riders. Like Garcia used to say, man. “Sell out? Sell out! Where do I sign?”

Joshua White: They had this thing with dosing people. “Whhheeee. Wicked. Awful stuff.” Trying to dose Bill Graham and dose this person and dose that person. Basically, they were all taking cocaine or speed. That’s what it really all was. It was a very hypocritical time.

Peter Rowan: One thing I didn’t really like about the Dead was this kind of obligatory dosing that went on. It was a mind-control thing. Being backstage with them, you’d often find yourself high on acid. The rule was, “Go with the flow.” So it was like, “Oh no, the flowers are talking at me again. Not that bass solo now. Oh, no.” I would be trying to go to the men’s room and Phil Lesh would decide it was time to kick in some new invention he had that dropped the octave to the center of the earth. The walls would be caving in and all I wanted to do was take a piss.

Joe Smith: They always said they would get me. They would nail me. They would dose me. Because I couldn’t understand their music unless I did. I never did. But I wouldn’t eat around them or drink around them. One time in New York, they were playing the Electric Circus in the Village. I was having dinner four blocks away at the Coach House. It was a cold night. One of those wind chill specials and I had on a light raincoat but I wanted to see them. I went running down the street and I was really freezing. I got up the stairs of the Electric Circus and they were on a break. Bill Kreutzmann and Pigpen were there. They were so surprised to see me and they were hugging me and saying, “Jesus, it’s cold. You want some coffee?” I said, “Yeah. God, get me some coffee.” As they started to get the cup, I said, “Wait. I’ll get my own coffee.” They said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “No. I’ll get my own coffee. I’ll get it. Don’t get it for me. Don’t do me any favors.” I once inhaled the gas with them. I did that. The laughing gas. I thought, “I’ve now broken eight of the Ten Commandments.” The Top Ten Commandments.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Jerry used to be doing up acid behind the stage. Back in the magic days when everybody was able to be on stage, everybody would be stoned on acid and then you’d smoke some DMT. Bear swore to me, and I’ve heard other people say this, too, that when they were smoking the DMT, the meters on the amplifiers would actually crank up about ten or twenty percent. You could actually see the meter going up when the DMT was being smoked back there.

Joe Smith: With the Grateful Dead, the use of drugs was so pervasive and innocent at that time. Crack makes you crazy and speed gets you nuts but acid really turned the world upside down so you didn’t know where reality let off and fantasy began. My adventures with the Grateful Dead were dumbfounding. They never fired a manager. They never got rid of anybody. When we’d have a meeting, sixty people would show up. Mothers nursing babies. Owsley mixing up God knows what on the side. Everything. It was a phalanx that moved in.

David Nelson: Jerry was not yet doing coke. Not that I knew about it. I wasn’t familiar with that until the New Riders started hob-nobbing with some of the high rollers around the country. I wondered, “What’s everybody doing?” Garcia told me, “Oh, it’s coke, man. Here. Try it.” I remember thinking, “I don’t like this. Oh, no. This is going to be another one of those speed things.” I had written when I was on speed, on methedrine. I was so gung ho when I was doing it and then I’d read it later and it was just drivel. The most self-indulgent self-satisfying kind of drivel you could imagine. Really trivial and it had no substance whatsoever and it was not soulful. And pushy to boot. I hated that. Musically, I thought, “Okay, here go the ideas out the window. Nothing’s going to be valid for the time.... How long does this stuff last?” I cautioned myself about it. Nevertheless, I got bit by the same thing that everybody did. It was such a wonderful thing to have that frontal brain activity out there. To have all those thoughts. If you didn’t get too self-indulgent with that, it could be useful. Otherwise, I just thought it was nowhere.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: As to joints, Garcia usually had his own. Mountain Girl was a fabulous farmer. He’d be sitting there at the beginning of a session twisting up a couple of doobs and then he’d have them ready for when he wanted them. I don’t remember him having done particularly more or less than anybody. I do remember the evening that everybody was passing around the Acapulco Gold and the joint was just about finished or a couple of joints were just about finished. Everybody was sitting there and Garcia said, “I want to make enough money to stay high like this forever.”

 

19

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: As far as the drugs went, my mom was not worried about Jerry. She figured it was trendy. She was a nurse so she had gone back to nursing. She worked the night shift and she would go to work at four in the afternoon. She had a dog that I had given her and she’d take the dog up to Twin Peaks and let him run before she went to work. Then she’d drop him off at the house and go to San Francisco General, the hospital she worked at. She had stopped the car. Before she put it in park and set the hand brake, the dog got really excited and got between the brake and the gas. She put her foot on the gas and her Oldsmobile Cutlass went off a cliff into a tree. You wouldn’t believe it could happen. From the windshield and the dashboard back, everything was totally intact. Everything in front of that was shredded. The engine included. It couldn’t have stuck out more than a foot or two.

This was in 1970. She was sixty and in excellent health. Jerry was the one that told me about it. My wife and I were living back in the city at Harrington Street so he knew where to find me. He came by there and left a message. “Mom’s in the hospital.” He was hanging out there until I got home from work and then we both went to the hospital. Jerry was working at Wally Heider’s and I was working in the Post Office. He’d pick me up at the Rincon Annex and we’d go to the hospital. Every night for a month. We both lost twenty pounds. It was that stressful. She had multiple injuries. Slowly, she was fading. There were other things where you couldn’t count on Jerry. You couldn’t count on his being regular to show up for events. Just like me. But he showed up for this. We both did.

Jon Mcintire: When I would ask, Jerry would tell me about the members of his family. I asked him once, “How come you don’t ever see them?” And he said, “That’s just not the kind of family we are.”

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry’s mom died while they were working on American Beauty at Wally Heider’s. Jerry had never wanted me to meet his mother. All I can say is that we were not family oriented at that time. We were still into the rebellious stage. My parents were not particularly welcome at all. Even my brothers weren’t particularly welcome. One of the problems of the group scene was it took over from your blood family. It became your true family. I didn’t meet his mom until we got to the hospital. She was lying there just miserable. Fully conscious and in pain and on a breathing tube with casts everywhere. It was very sad. I took Annabelle in there to see her so she did get to see her granddaughter. After she died, I felt pretty bad that I hadn’t insisted on developing a relationship with her.

Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Although Jerry and I had been split up for some years, his mother and I were very close. During the two weeks she took to die after her car accident in 1970, I was teaching nursery school at a Quaker school in Palo Alto in the mornings. Then I’d drive up to the city and be with her in the afternoons. Jerry and I were in the elevator there together once before she died. I remember trying to talk to him about seeing each other and his mother being in such bad shape and I remember him saying, “God! You even wear the same perfume that my mother wears.” He couldn’t stand it. It reminded him too much of his mother and he couldn’t deal with it.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: I don’t think either Jerry or I cried because to tell you the truth, I think we were all cried out when my father died. Sometimes, you expel all your emotions only once in a lifetime. The rest of it tenses up and it’s hard for people to release it. Instead, you keep stuff built up inside.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry took her death really hard. He was so saddened by it. I could tell there were issues with his mom that had not been resolved. Then he came to that moment when he knew they could never be resolved. When Jerry came to that, he was spending quite a bit of time with Tiff.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: We were warm with one another. That was the thing. We were pretty warm. But the other thing was that I was standoffish. I never got involved in his shit because a lot of the drug dealers used to hang around and it was just a little sleazy. Basically, I was not a night person. I hated the bar atmosphere or anybody that got drunk. I generally never bothered him at shows because everybody was trying to bother him and I figured he needed the space and I didn’t have a hell of a lot to say to him anyway. The time wasn’t right.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: After his mom died, Jerry sank into a rather serious depression for a while. It was hard for him to finish that record. He had no joy for a long time. It lasted for months. He got very close to the children at that time and he told me lots of stories about his upbringing and his mom I’d never heard before. As far as he was concerned, what she had done wrong was that she had remarried. Think about it from the kid’s point of view. His father drowned. This was all terribly sad. Then she married a stranger who expected to be able to discipline these little boys. Apparently, he was real hard on them. He was somebody with quite a temper. Jerry just hated this guy and that is so typical. Think of women who have lost their husband or been divorced and then the boyfriend comes in and the kids are growling at him from the corners. That was why Jerry wound up at Grandma’s house. Ruth couldn’t deal with Jerry’s passion about her new husband. Tiff was older. He wasn’t a little kid. I have a feeling this guy was pretty hard on Tiff, too. I know Jerry was furious when they buried his mother next to this guy. Oh, Jerry was mad about that. He didn’t like her being buried next to this guy. But that was where her plot was.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: After the funeral, Jerry and I rode around the cemetery smoking a joint. It was nice. My cousin gave us a joint and it was sweet.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry never blamed Ruth for what happened to his father. It was just that he had witnessed it and it was terrible. He said to me that his childhood had been so painful that for him to seek any kind of therapy or go back over that stuff would be so dreadful that he couldn’t even conceive of doing it. To bring all that stuff up again would be so painful that he couldn’t make himself do it. That was really all the information I had to go on but of course it broke my heart. I felt so bad about it and was terribly sympathetic. Somehow, his mom passing away brought us closer together. He remembered that he really loved his brother and it was a sweet time for us. We had lots of time together without anybody else hanging around in the living room and it made for a very close family scene there for quite some time.

 

20

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: We moved to Stinson Beach. I wanted to get away from those people who would come over to our house, take up space, and drive me crazy. They would sit around the living room and talk to Jerry. Our circle of acquaintances had expanded considerably and some folks had come to work for the band that I couldn’t stand and there was an element around that was the hustler kind of element. What I never understood before was just how much of the power went with us. When we went out there, a lot of people moved out there with us. I thought, “Oh, you guys are moving out to Stinson too? How cool.” Ron Rakow was our neighbor. Big Steve Parish moved out there. The Rowan brothers were out there. It changed our social set.

Richard Loren: Gino Cippolina got us this house in Stinson Beach. David Grisman and I and the Rowan brothers all moved in. David was at Ed’s Superette and Jerry was in there buying cigarettes. David came back and said, “You know who lives in Stinson Beach? Jerry Garcia. He lives on the hill.” I said, “No shit. Isn’t that a pisser?” David and I started visiting Jerry mornings up at the house on the hill. MG was there. Jerry would wake up, have his coffee, and we’d sit around and bullshit for a couple of hours about the music business. We’d smoke big joints and listen to everything from the Swan Silvertones to Stockhausen. We’d listen to whatever was turning Jerry on at the time and it was never necessarily some new rock band. We had a lot of questions about the music business. Granted, I’d been an agent for years but Jerry told me inside stuff about his dealings with Warner Brothers and Joe Smith. The things to avoid and the pitfalls of the industry.

Joe Smith: The Grateful Dead could go to New York and sell out any place but the first two albums didn’t sell that well. Somehow, they never captured what they were on stage. We decided to do a live album and record it in different places. In terms of making an album back then, thirty to forty thousand dollars was a major investment. I figured, “Okay. We’ll give them thirty grand.” With their great indecisiveness, with the drugs, and with their running around, three would be straight and two would be stoned, and two would be straight and three would be stoned, and four would—and then they’d all be stoned. They ended up spending ninety grand. Which at the time was unheard of. Then they wanted to call the album Skull Fuck. I remember we were all sitting around and talking and Phil Lesh, the bass player, said, “I’ve got a great idea. We’ll go to L.A. and we’ll record thirty minutes of very heavy air on a smoggy day and then we’ll go to the desert where it’s clear and record thirty minutes of clear air and we’ll mix it and we’ll use that as a pad and we’ll record over it.” I was waiting for people to laugh. But nobody laughed. He was serious and they all agreed it was a great idea. I had to tell them the American Federation of Musicians wouldn’t allow it. So they couldn’t do it.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Everybody was sick of Warner Brothers Records and their little routines and trying to stay on the edge rather than just lay back and not sell records very much. Because the Dead’s records just didn’t sell worth beans compared to the Airplane, who had really hot record sales. We didn’t and it was tough.

Joe Smith: At one of our interminable meetings, the Dead convinced me that we didn’t know how to promote their records. They hated everybody. They just hated me a little less. I was the guy they would talk to. They said, “You guys just don’t know how to do this. Let us promote the record. Set up these cities. We’ll send out members of the family and members of the band. We’ll go out.” In excruciating detail, we set up sixteen cities they were going to. Our promotion people were going to pick them up at the airports. We had lined up all the alternative radio stations, the FM people, and so forth. All the members of the group failed to make the planes they were going on. They were not going on the same plane. Different times. Different planes. Different cities. Every one of them blew it. I had sixteen people standing out there at the airports in Baltimore, in Seattle, in Boston, in Miami. Nobody showed. Because nobody made the plane.

Richard Loren: I don’t think Jerry had anything bad to say about Warner Brothers at the time. He had just gotten a record deal from Joe Smith to do a solo album. The one where he played all the instruments with “Sugaree” on it. That was the album that was coming together in his little studio which he had built outside of his home on the hill at Stinson Beach. I think it was the first record project that he’d done outside of the Grateful Dead and it paid for the house. He would talk with us and then he’d go up and record.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Basically, I just wanted a place where I could grow a garden and have some privacy. We had a beautiful yard. It was so private and pleasant up there. God really smiled on us. The cosmos really looked out for us because it was a gorgeous spot and we got it at a good time for us. The kids were small and it was safe. It was secure and a place where if you wanted to sit in the sun and do nothing, you could. Jerry built a studio there. Old and In the Way rehearsed in the living room, which was just great. Bob Dylan even came over and visited us. Trixie was born. Theresa was nicknamed Trixie as soon as she was born. It was all very idyllic. That place was paradise.

Peter Rowan: David Grisman, with whom I’d been in Earth Opera, was living in California and producing my two younger brothers, Chris and Lorin, for Clive Davis on Columbia. I’d heard some of Garcia’s playing on their demos and I thought, “Cool. This is going to be interesting.” After Sea Train broke up, I moved out there as well and we all ended living in Stinson Beach. I remember there was a sign outside Garcia’s house. It said SANS SOUCI, which means “without care.” The word “serendipitous” became this big word. Synchronistic happenings. We were out there on the San Andreas fault line smoking dope and going, “Man, I don’t know what it is. But man, this is, this is, this is …”

The guy of course that we all gravitated toward was Jerry. For me as a musician, the reason for hanging out with Garcia was to play music with him. For other people, it might have been an intellectual thing. Because Jerry was a tremendous conversationalist as well. As a musician, it was so rare for me to see another musician who loved to let the discursive thought net subside. Between musicians, there’s always a lot of eye contact and nodding of the head. With Jerry, it was, “Yeaaahhh.” Once it was yeah, it was yeah.

David Grisman: Jerry’s daughter, Annabelle, used to play with my daughter, Gillian. They were the same age. This was an idyllic period. I thought, “Wow, this is it. This guy’s got it made.” He lived in the highest house in Stinson Beach. He had a great old lady and a family. He had his studio. He was making his own album. He could do this. He could do that. It was just a great time.

Peter Rowan: We started going up to Garcia’s house. David would say, “Garcia’s home and he wants to play some banjo,” and I’d say, “Cool.” We were living in each other’s living rooms most of the time. We’d go up there and hang out at Jerry’s house and Jerry would often greet us at the front gate with his banjo on. That was the real Garcia to me. Then I saw how he had to be a businessman in some way because the Dead kept getting twirled around by business deals.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: That was where I lost track of Jerry. Our life in Stinson Beach was isolated because we were a long way from the Grateful Dead office in San Rafael. Once I moved our domestic scene over the hill to Stinson and I had kids in school and I was running them back and forth and doing all those things, I took my eye off the ball. Jerry came and went when he wanted to. It wasn’t easy for me to let go of him but I had to. At that point, I felt like I had to let go and not concern myself with where and what he was doing every day. We were watching the Watergate trials on TV, which was just a fascination for us. Remember how long that went on for? We sat there for months and watched that stuff. Jerry would get up in the morning and turn on the Watergate hearings and we’d have breakfast and get the kids off to school. He’d hang till one and then he’d go over the hill and rehearse or go to the office and then he’d come back later.

Richard Loren: Jerry did the Rolling Stone interview and they asked him, “Are there any other groups in San Francisco that you’ve seen that you like?” He said, “The Rowan Brothers. They’re great. They’re like the Beatles.” Very reluctantly, we went out with the Grateful Dead. It was the worst mistake that could have been made. We put them in front of a Dead audience, who were looking for a band that jammed like the Dead. They wanted to like them because Jerry had said they were great. They weren’t booed like a lot of other bands that were put on out of respect for Jerry but it wasn’t the right chemistry. They opened maybe five or six gigs but it just wasn’t right. It just wasn’t right and then boom, it went downhill from there.

Merl Saunders: A girl singer told me to come by a place where she’d been hanging out and I met Michael Bloomfield. He was producing an album with Nick Gravenites. I went to a session and I met this guitar player called Jerry. We hit it off very good because we had this chemistry. We just had this warmness. This thing. Gravenites picked up on it and he passed the word. Pretty soon, people started booking us together. We did a whole lot of sessions together and that was how we became friends. For about five or six months, I didn’t know who he was. I had no idea. I had listened to the Grateful Dead but I never put the two together. All I knew was that he was Jerry with the smiling face. Then I began to know.

Jerry would say, “Hey man, I’m working down at the Matrix. Come on down, man.” I’d go, “Okay.” We’d sit there at the Matrix and play open jazz, free. Very few people showed up. We were totally out there. We were getting paid about ten dollars a night and we’d split the money up. Then people began to get into it. Fifty people. A hundred people. Pretty soon, the place was jam-packed, lines outside. People were flying in from Baltimore and New York to see us. I had an album to do over at Fantasy Records. I said to Jerry, “You helped me develop these tunes, you might as well come and do them.” So that was where it started.

Richard Loren: Merl and Jerry were doing their thing together and Jerry was starting to play the Keystone. I said, “You need some help?” He said, “Yeah. Let’s do it.” I became Jerry’s personal manager and his tour manager. I set up the gigs and I started handling everything. I handled his money as well as all the business that didn’t really have to do with the Grateful Dead. I didn’t even go to their office. I’d known Jon McIntire a little bit but I was really not plugged into their scene at all. I was just this guy that Jerry met who was living with David Grisman in Stinson Beach. Miles away from San Rafael and the hub of what was going on. At the time, Sam Cutler was managing them. This was the era of Bear building the big sound system. Jerry’s thing was to go and play on Friday and Saturday nights. It didn’t get in the way of the Grateful Dead. Jerry started to like that a lot. He wanted to play a few more gigs. Even though no one would come out and say it, the Merl and Jerry Band became a little bit of a threat. I’d have to go to Cutler and McIntire and say, “This is what Jerry wants to do. Is it all right? Is this getting in the way of your tour?” “Oh no. Yes it is. No it isn’t.” I’d have to work with them. On the surface, it was cool. But I think there was a little uneasiness amongst a lot of the band members to accept it. They wanted Jerry all to themselves.

Merl Saunders: Jerry would always ask me about different runs I would do and I would teach them to him. The first tune I taught him wasn’t a standard. It was “Imagine” by the Beatles, which he could have probably figured out himself. One of the standard tunes that he did learn from me was “My Funny Valentine.” I taught him classics like “The Man I Love” and “Georgia.” We hung out a lot. One night, he called me. “Merl, you know Kenny Burrell?” I said, “Yeah, I know Kenny Burrell, he’s at the El Matador. Why don’t we go see him?” After the show was over, Jerry wanted to meet Kenny Burrell. He asked him questions and Kenny didn’t know who in the hell Jerry was till after I talked to Kenny the next day.

Donna Godchaur Mokay: Jerry and his band were playing at the Keystone Corner in San Francisco with Merl Saunders and John Kahn. Keith and I sat in the audience and Jerry and the band took a break. Jerry walked by us and I tugged on Jerry’s arm and I said, “My husband and I have something to talk to you about.” Jerry said, “Fine. Come on backstage.” That was just the way he was. I don’t know how many other human beings would have been as out front as I was either. It was a combination of both. Jerry went on back and Keith and I just sat there. I said, “Gosh, how are we going to do this? I don’t know that we can just go backstage and do this. This is pretty weird.” We continued to sit in the audience.

A few minutes later, Garcia came out from backstage to get me. He came right down in the audience and he said, “I still want to talk to you.” Keith was facing in such a way that he couldn’t see Jerry. I turned to Keith and I said, “Honey, I think that Jerry’s here and he wants to talk to you.” Keith looked at me and Jerry and he put his head down on the table and said, “You’ll have to talk to my wife. I can’t talk to you right now.” So I said, “Jerry, here’s the deal. Keith is your piano player and I need your phone number so that we can call you.” He had no idea who we were. None. But he gave us the number of the office and his home phone number and he said, “Okay. We could use a piano player.” Little did I know that Pigpen was dying and they were going to have to have another piano player.

We called the office a few times and I would say, “This is Donna Godchaux and Jerry said to call.” Because I didn’t really want to call him at home. So this message never got through. I would call and say, “Look, if you don’t tell him that we called, I’m going to have to call this guy at home and I don’t want to. And I mean it.” I was very forceful. Finally, I did call Jerry at home. He had never gotten the message. He said, “We’re having a Grateful Dead rehearsal on Sunday. I’d like for you to come on down.” So we went. The rehearsal was at a little warehouse on Francisco Boulevard West right off the freeway in San Rafael.

Lo and behold, the band had not given Jerry the message that there wasn’t a Grateful Dead rehearsal. So Jerry was down there alone and Keith and I showed up and Keith and Jerry played. Jerry was really knocked out. He called Kreutzmann and said, “You got to come down here and hear this guy play.” The next day, there was a Grateful Dead rehearsal so the entire band was there. Having never played a Grateful Dead song in his life, Keith played with the Grateful Dead and they asked him to be in the band.

At that time, Jerry also asked me to be in the band and I said no. Back in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, I had sung backup vocals on “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge and “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto” by Elvis Presley. I had worked with Joe Tex, Ben E. King, Joe Simon, and Solomon Burke. But I said, “No. I don’t want to right now.” I wanted Keith to get the opportunity before me. Maybe that was southern.

Richard Loren: At this point, Steve Parish was my ally because he was working equipment for Merl and Jerry. I would do the business stuff and Steve would do all the equipment. Basically, the three of us, Jerry, Steve, and I, became very close. We’d get there early at the gigs. We’d hang out. We’d get high. We’d bullshit. Jerry would be backstage at the Keystone hours before the gig. He’d get there at three or four o’clock in the afternoon for a nine o’clock show. He’d sit backstage and play and diddle with his guitar and get high and people would come in and he’d talk. He was so open that way. In the later days, he’d isolate himself. Everyone would isolate themselves in little rooms and you couldn’t get into them. In these days, it was wonderful. In the early seventies, it was free. Everybody respected who he was and we didn’t need any guards at the doors. After the gig at two-thirty in the morning, vroom, I’d drive over the hill and we’d follow one another. Next morning I’d wake up, go up to his house, and we’d take care of business. At the time, the Grateful Dead weren’t yet big enough to smother him. He was allowed to do these side projects, including playing music with any number of groups. I think this was the best time of his life.

Merl Saunders: Jerry never talked to me about how hard it was to be part of the Grateful Dead. We didn’t have to discuss it. I could tell it and hear it. The Dead was not his band. He never did want to be put in that position. It was not his band. He always said, “It’s the Grateful Dead.” But they pointed to him because he was the influence of the whole thing. In the early seventies, they took a sabbatical. He said, “I just want to play with you, man.” I’d say, “We ought to book a tour and I want to book it around the Dead.” He’d say, “Don’t worry about that. Just book the tour.” So everybody started looking at me. I was the bad guy. They still consider me the bad guy. Because Jerry disappeared with me for three or four years.

Richard Loren: Jon McIntire came up to me and said, “Richard, Sam Cutler is no longer working for us. Would you like to book us?” I went to Jerry. I said, “Jerry, I was just asked to book the band.” I hadn’t been an agent for years but Jerry had told them that I’d had a lot of experience booking rock ’n’ roll bands in New York. Unlike Danny Rifkin and Rock Scully, who’d taken care of the needs of the Grateful Dead when they were living on Haight Street and were perfect at that time, I really had experience in the true business world. While they were doing that, I was learning the ropes as a traditional agent. Jerry said, “Yeah. We’d love you to do it.” It was a decision that he’d made. Sam Cutler had been the big man for the Grateful Dead. He got fired for some impropriety. Then Ron Rakow came in and got involved forming a record company called Round Records.

 

21

Ron Rakow: It was after Europe, ’72. I was riding in the car going to the office in San Rafael when I got a bolt of lightning as to how the Grateful Dead could unhinge from the entire record business. I saw exactly how it would work. What I didn’t know was anything about the record business. So I immediately went to Jerry Garcia and said, “I see that the record industry does nothing for the Grateful Dead. It’s the other way round. The Grateful Dead should sell its own products through its own fans and make more money and support its own people as opposed to those who don’t admire them. I want to investigate this.” Jerry said, “Do it.” He called in Jon McIntire for me to explain it to him. Jerry was already maximally enthused. That was something I could do to him at any time.

Steve Brown: Hale Milgrim was the manager of Discount Records in Berkeley and a gonzo Deadhead so anything Dead-related was in the front window, big, with homemade handcrafted displays, arrows, and glossy eight-by-tens. Hale told me since he was locked into what he was doing that maybe the timing was right to go in there and hit them with the idea of doing their own thing. Jerry had seen me over the years. I’d been at a lot of Grateful Dead gigs and I already had a certain amount of credibility from being around productions he was familiar with. I knew people he knew. But he didn’t really know me personally. I said I understood that their Warner Brothers contract was coming up and could I propose something to them in regards to an independent venture that they might want to consider for themselves on their own.

With that, I proceeded to sit down and write out my own proposal of how it would work. Meanwhile, they’d had the same idea and had enlisted their friend and previous financier of sorts, Ron Rakow, to also do research on the financial end as to what it would take to do it. He put together his own proposal known as the “So What Papers” because you’d hand them to a band member and they’d say, “So what?” They’d read it and say, “So what?” It still wasn’t anything. It was just words on paper. Although Rakow read my papers, my first meeting wasn’t with him. It was with Jerry. Rakow called me in to meet Jerry.

Being a fan of the band for all these years and in and around the scene, I was still in awe of Garcia. “Are we going to hit it off? Am I going to do okay?” This was my shot. I went in there and I had everything I needed to know about the record business just nailed to the tits. Everything he could ask me, I knew I could answer it. He didn’t ask me one thing about the record business. We talked about growing up in San Francisco. We talked about what kind of music experiences we’d both had. We talked about the kind of art we liked. We talked about all kinds of music. We laughed a lot, told some funny stories, and barely got into any kind of talk at all about record business stuff. He was checking me out and hanging with me. It was a thing really of vibing out if he could work with me out of the blue.

The main thing I had going for me at that time was the fact that I’d had five years working with Don Sherwood, a disc jockey in San Francisco. From the age of fifteen to twenty, I’d worked at KSFO as his production assistant. He was notorious in his lifestyle and pretty much a San Francisco icon. He’d established himself as a Peck’s bad boy, an outlaw kind of guy. My credentials for working with somebody like Jerry Garcia or the Grateful Dead were bolstered by the fact that I’d survived five years with Don Sherwood.

Alan Trist: We had our huge wall of sound. We had our own sound company. We had our own business thing. But Grateful Dead Records was not really the model that Ron Rakow had in mind. It was a compromise. Because he wanted something much more revolutionary. He wanted to have all the records sold by ice cream vendor type people on the street corners around the gigs. I remember a meeting we all had out at Sonny Heard’s place in Forest Knolls where Ron laid this out on a big blackboard. Some thirty of us were sitting there, all going, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”

Ron Rakow: July Fourth, 1972, Ron Rakow Presents the “So What Papers” at Bill Kreutzmann’s home with charts and graphs. The entire project was going to be funded through MESBIC, Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Company. I got us declared a minority by the United States government, which meant that all we had to do was come up with thirteen hundred and fifty dollars and they’d give us three hundred grand. Bonnie Parker, who was their bookkeeper at that time, said, “Small business? Oh, no. No. No. I worked for an SBIC. The government …” I could see the whole meeting going down. I stood up, reached into my waistband, took out a Puma staghorn handle knife that was sharp as a fucking razor, and I cut that part of the chart out. I said, “We’re not going to do that part. Don’t worry.” Jerry was my ally in this. Every morning, I would go to Jerry’s house in Stinson Beach. He liked my desire to have a lot of random events going on.

Richard Loren: Ron Rakow was very very intelligent and I never trusted him from the first day I met him. I think Jerry was very impressed with his mind and with his contacts on Wall Street. He was an action man and a gambler and that appealed to Jerry. Rakow was an outlaw and I don’t necessarily say that disparagingly. That was the kind of guy he was and he filled a certain need for them there.

Hal Kant: The Warner Brothers contract was up and Rakow convinced them to start their own record company and they started two. One was Grateful Dead Records, which produced the Grateful Dead’s records, and the other was Round Records, which produced other band members and their own endeavors. I told Jerry that he should focus on the fact that what Ron was doing as president of both those corporations created a terrible conflict of interest because of commingling the band’s finances with these other ventures and that the band didn’t own Round Records. Jerry and Rakow did. And that wasn’t appropriate.

At that point, Jerry blew his top and he said words to the effect of, “I tell you what. You don’t represent the record company anymore. You represent the band but not the record company. We’ll get someone else to represent the record company.” A week later, he took me aside and said, “Gee Hal, I’m really sorry for blowing up like that but Ron is such a weak guy and if we confronted him with this, he’d fall apart. I knew you could handle it but I didn’t think he could.” He just wanted people who would do what he wanted them to do but frequently he had trouble deciding what that was.

Donna Godchaux Mckay: Jerry and Ron Rakow were in the process of putting together Round Records. If the band was going to go for it, it had to be a band thing. Jerry was very much for it. Rakow was very much for it. Keith and I were for it. I didn’t know where the other band members stood at that time. We were having a band meeting to discuss if we were going to go through with this record company thing. We all came to this big meeting to decide whether we formed a record company or not. It was pretty much Jerry’s baby. It was his and Ron Rakow’s brainstorm. Jerry didn’t show up to the meeting.

Jon Mcintire: He didn’t like business meetings. At one point, Garcia and I were alone and he said, “You know what I’d like you to do for me, Jon? I’d like you to be my personal representative and attend band meetings and be my voice. I don’t want to be there for them.” I said, “Man, I can’t do that for you. That wouldn’t work.” He said, “I just can’t handle it. I’m telling you, I can’t take it. I can’t play and do that. So you gotta do it.” It was not that I refused. I just couldn’t do it. But Jerry didn’t like being the leader and he didn’t like taking care of business. To put it mildly.

Donna Godchaux Mckay: If there was something that Jerry did not want to get involved in, he would just be absolutely absentee. On a certain level, Jerry was very out front and aggressive but then when it came to certain things, he was very much a coward. I called him the Cowardly Lion and I would say that to his face.

Steve Brown: Jerry really had that outlaw side to him. That dark side. And he liked Rakow the phone screamer. Vicariously, he was getting off on it. Because Jerry was not going to get on the phone and yell and scream at people. It would have been very very rare for him to get uptight like that. He’d have to be beside himself. But here was Rakow, this wheeler-dealer. He was our Bill Graham and he was our record company weasel and Jerry would sit in that office and watch Rakow perform on the phone and just laugh and laugh, loving it.

Ron Rakow: Not on the phone. They would bring them in. They liked it when Bill Graham and I were face-to-face. Jerry wasn’t the only one. Phil loved it. Phil would sit next to Bill and Bill would lay out all the numbers for a tour and I would do them so fast in my head that Phil would only say one thing, “Bill, what the fuck are you doing? Listen to Rakow.” I was the family barracuda. Everybody knew it.

Steve Brown: Jerry liked having this guy whom he knew he couldn’t trust but he trusted. It was another one of those “thought he could get away with it” kind of deals for Jerry.

Hal Kant: Jerry was one of the most insightful people into human nature and character I’ve ever known and again, that was why he could enjoy and work with people like Rakow and protect them. He wasn’t fooled by them. He just dealt with them on the terms he thought worked for him.

Ron Rakow: Clive Davis sat with the Grateful Dead and me and we had a debate. Should they sign with Clive Davis who was the man in the record business or with Ron Rakow? We were sitting around this phenomenal oval table in thirteen hand-carved Gothic chairs which themselves were a fright trip. Owsley sat down next to Clive. As Clive was trying to score the Grateful Dead, Owsley was talking in a monotone in his ear, saying, “I really have the greatest respect for you but I don’t think you really fully understand what this music means to our lifestyle. For example, there are references in Janis Joplin’s live album which you put out about her being a loose woman and drinking a lot …,” On and on and on he went like this gnat buzzing inside his ear. He was getting Clive crazy. Clive went on a diatribe about Miles Davis and how his relationship with Clive was a stabilizing force and the linchpin in the life of Miles Davis. Finally, I said, “Clive, if you’re going to brag about how you take care of your family at a business meeting, that’s ridiculous.” Miles Davis/Clive Davis. I told him Miles was his brother and everyone went nuts. Then Bob Hunter passed around a little note that said, “Shiva Devil C.” Hold it up to a mirror. Except for the “h,” it’s “Clive Davis” spelled backwards. I had never sold a record in my life and I won.

Jon Mcintire: Jerry had such a generous spirit to everyone and he would forgive so much and not judge. But all you had to do was disagree with something he felt deeply about and he would go after you ruthlessly. The first time he really dumped on me irrationally, I thought, “Oh, God, I guess I’m really close now. I’ve just been dumped on.” There were certain things I felt very strongly about and I would go to bat for when I felt that the Dead were being foolish. I don’t remember what it was about but I do remember him jumping up out of his chair and saying, “Well, you’re not in the band, man,” and he stormed out and went down to Bonnie Parker’s office. He felt I was forcing my ideas too much and that he knew better and I felt that whatever it was I was standing up for was in their best interest and it was really important so it was worth a try.

But it was really devastating being dumped on by Black Cloud or Blackjack Garcia. I mean, whoo. He was extraordinarily powerful. After I composed myself and pulled it together, I walked down the hall and went into Bonnie’s office. I think he already knew that he had just blown it way out of proportion because when I walked in the door, he looked sheepish. I kind of squatted down beside him, my knees not touching the floor, and I said, “Look, man. I know I’m not in the band. I know that. Can we just talk a little more?” And we talked rationally about what it was I was really trying to say and why I thought it wouldn’t work.

Robert Greenfield: Jerry Garcia and I spent the last night of 1972 together. He was up on stage playing at Winterland in San Francisco with the Grateful Dead while I wandered through that cold and cavernous, incredibly funky hall, wondering what the hell I was doing there. New Year’s Eve with the Dead then was not yet the elaborately staged ritual it would eventually become. It was more an unofficial town meeting for long-haired freaks from up and down the coast, all drawn from their little post-hippie enclaves by what they hoped would be the transformative power of the music. Shoving forward, they fought for space right at the very front of the stage, trying hard to get closer to Jerry and the band so that when midnight came, they would not all be turned back into pumpkins and mice again.

Bill Graham: There is no space on this planet that is better than the period of five minutes to midnight until ten minutes after midnight when the balloons come down and the lights go on and the Grateful Dead play to bring in the new year. There is no better energy. Anywhere on the planet.

Jerry Garcia (1988): New Year’s Eve was usually our worst show of the year. It’s the night when everybody you’ve ever known is there and you can’t even say hello to most of them and everybody’s also partying their asses off. So everybody’s drunker than shit or wired or whatever. It’s NEW YEAR’S EVE! and we’re working. You would love to be able to party but you can’t get too fucked up because you can’t play. There’d be times when all the balloons would fall on stage and then everything sounds like “VVRRRRVRRRRRVRRRR.” You can’t hear anything. It sounds awful. I just have real mixed feelings about the New Year’s Eve things. They’re great parties. Everybody loves ’em but we’ve never played worth a shit on New Year’s Eve. Just passable, you know? Passable is usually the way it goes.

 

22

Joe Smith: When I sent them to Europe, I wanted to write a book, “How We Did Europe on Five Thousand Dollars a Day.” We sent them on Air India because we had a lot of Air India due bills and we couldn’t get our money out of India. I was thinking, “Holy shit. They’ll turn on the whole cockpit crew. They’ll get ’em crazy.”

Ron Rakow: The Grateful Dead came back from Europe and I met them at the airport in New York. They had a four-hour layover so I got TWA to give us a private executive lounge. I had a couple hundred slides, a projector, and a screen. They loved Rakow slide shows. While they were looking at the slides, I gave them an item-by-item business report about the record industry. Essentially, I was talking to Jerry, who was the most interested.

Two days before, I had gone to Albert Grossman and I’d pumped him dry. Finally, he got mad at me. He said, “What the fuck are you doing this for? I’ve been to Grateful Dead shows. I don’t get it.” I said, “I’m doing this because Garcia is a great guitar player.” Grossman said, “That’s where you’re wrong. Not only is Garcia not a great guitar player, Garcia is not a good guitar player. In fact, he can hardly play at all.” I was sitting in the dark at the slide show telling this to the entire Grateful Dead family. In the most childlike voice coming out of that dark cave, Garcia said, “Jesus, Rack. I may not be a great guitar player. I may not even be good. But Rack, I can play a little.”

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: After the trip to Europe in 1972, I decided that I wasn’t going to tour with them again. In retrospect, that was a momentous decision. I had two little girls and they were going to school. After the trip to Europe in 1972, I could not make myself leave them again. Because I’d left them and it was tough coming back. They weren’t sure who I was. It only took a little while for things to come back on-line but there was a moment when I could feel I was skidding a bit. For a few minutes, it was very shaky and it was a terrible feeling. I never wanted to have that happen again.

Justin Kreutzmann: When I was born, my dad was touring nine months out of the year and so I would never recognize him. He’d come home and I’d wonder who this guy was until he’d say, “I’m your father, man.” And I’d say, “Oh, yeah! That’s right!” Because when you’re a kid, little blocks of time like a month seem like forever. Annabelle Garcia and I were talking recently and rehashing the old days. In the same year, our parents both went off to tour in Europe. On the night that both our parents got home, we had almost the exact same identical dream. We both remembered the exact same night they came home from this tour when we were both four years old. I woke up to the sound of the front door opening and I ran down in my pajamas and my dad was coming home from Europe and light was coming through the trees and she remembered the exact same thing from the same tour. As a kid, you’d get used to life. For a while, he was the guy on the phone. Then all of a sudden he was back home and everything changed.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: As far as Jerry was concerned, it was license to play around. Right around that time, he began to stray pretty heavily and I wasn’t able to do anything about it because I had set myself apart from the group to the point where I wasn’t in the loop any more. No information didn’t get me anywhere. I can look back on that and say that I took my eyes away from stuff I didn’t want to see or hear about. I didn’t want to hear about it and I didn’t want to see it.

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius: Mountain Girl told me one time that in order to get a point across to Jerry when they were having an argument, she would have to turn her back on him. She couldn’t argue with him and look him in the face because she loved him so much. When she was looking at him, she couldn’t remember why she was pissed off. So she used to turn away from him to try to get her point across.

Donna Godchaux Mckay: Keith and I and Jerry and Mountain Girl lived probably a quarter of a mile apart in Stinson Beach for a couple of years. Mountain Girl and I got to be very close friends and we would hang out. When we weren’t on the road, Jerry would come over and Keith and Jerry and I would sing and play old gospel songs. Jerry would play acoustic guitar. I would sing and Keith would play the piano. We were very much into that for quite a while.

He and Mountain Girl had a very unique relationship but it was hard for her because she could never have Jerry all to herself. Of course she was very defensive because it was like all the women in the world wanted her husband. I was at her house one day and Mountain Girl said, “Now, Donna. I want you to tell me about you and him.” And I said, “Mountain Girl, I’m so pleased to be able to tell you that there never has been a thought, much less any action on my part, and I would be very surprised if there was any on Jerry’s part toward one another physically or sexually. It’s just never been there. Never.” She said, “Well, that’s good.” I could tell something in her didn’t want to believe me but she knew me well enough to know that it was the truth. I wouldn’t have lied about it. To lie to my friend about it would never have even entered my mind.

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius: Really way early in the game, I was Jerry’s girlfriend. I was his girlfriend for years. On the side. I was one of his sweeties. Garcia always had sweeties. I would just hang around and wait for him till he finished at the studio. He’d drive me home, come up to my house, whatever.

Donna Godchaux Mckay: Jerry was one of those people who learned late in life how to have real relationships. It took him a long time. Sometimes with people like that, because they do have so much natural ability and they have so much just naturally, it usurps the place that relationships should have in their life. I think there was a part of Jerry that was very inaccessible because of some of the tragedy that he had early on in his life that affected him. I think it went back to his childhood. Doesn’t it for all of us?

 

23

Richard Loren: I was booking the Grateful Dead and I was also booking Merl and Jerry and all of a sudden, Old and In the Way started up.

David Grisman: We just got together one time in Jerry’s living room and started playing bluegrass and Jerry said, “Wow, we ought to go play some gigs.” Me and Pete probably needed the bread. Not that we didn’t enjoy playing.

Peter Rowan: Vassar Clements, David Grisman, myself, John Kahn, and Jerry, we all had these nicknames for each other. Because I’d written “Panama Red,” I was “Red.” For some reason, Grisman was “Dog.” Garcia gave him that name. Vassar Clements was “Clem.” John Kahn was “Mule” and Jerry was “Spud Boy.” That was how we referred to each other. We wouldn’t say, “Hey, Jerry.” I’d say, “Hey, Spud, how do you like this one?” It was like a world within a world. Just the way that Jerry would walk to his front door and let us in with a banjo on, we couldn’t wait to get our instruments out and pick. I remember Garcia’s first solo at our first gig at the Lion’s Share in San Anselmo. I don’t know if it was a sight gag or what but he was looking for knobs to turn on his banjo. This was before volume pedals. He was standing there turning knobs on his banjo that he did not have.

David Grisman: Jerry wanted me to be the leader because I was always more of a disciplinarian, wanting to get things tight. Bluegrass is a tight music. It’s a precision music. Pete was kind of on the other end of it.

Peter Rowan: I look at bluegrass music like this sort of glowing ball. The point is to relax the technique around the glowing ball of feeling. Really, that was what Jerry did. He let the skin of his music settle over the burning fire of feeling. When it got fine, when it got right, and the intensity and the burning sensation of really energetic music was on, Jerry would just gasp with laughter and go, “Oh, my … heart.”

David Grisman: You make music with people. If they’re loose and you’re tight, you get a little looser. They get a little tighter. We were all having a good time. It was like nobody wanted to take charge. We played these gigs and Owsley was there recording them. He had just gotten out of prison. When he left, he was the soundman of the Grateful Dead. When he came back, he was unemployed. He was trying to reattach himself to the scene and Jerry just didn’t want any of it. He would go out of his way to make it hard on him to even set up his microphones. He’d bump into him. He didn’t make it easy for him but he allowed him to come there. Owsley had a stereo Nagra. He followed the band around and taped everything because I guess that was the only thing that he could do. And he made some real good recordings.

Owsley Stanley: They started doing shows and I had a Nagra tape recorder and I said to them, “If you cover the tapes, I’ll do it.” I loved that music. I’d grown up in rural Virginia and that was the music I had listened to back there.

Peter Rowan: We were playing up in Berkeley at that old club, the Keystone. We were standing on stage as usual with Old and In the Way, having a nonintroduction. Nobody had said who we were. A lot of people were out there nodding their heads and going yeah and the big yeah wanted to happen. The big yes was ready to be heard. We were ready but every time we’d approach a microphone, it would feed back. We wouldn’t say anything. We’d step back and turn to the other musicians and tune a little more and then approach the microphone, thinking that it would go away. The microphone kept feeding back and I was standing next to Garcia when he nudged me. He said, “Hey, man. Look up in the sound booth. Look at Owsley.” And there was Owsley in the sound booth like Lucifer. He had patch cords around his neck. He had wires in his teeth. From way down below, we could only see this maniacal grin on his bottom-lit face. Garcia said, “He really loves his job, you know? He really loves it, man.”

Richard Loren: It was just the band and me. There was no road crew. Bear [Owsley] took care of the equipment and recorded them. I was road managing and booking and there were the five musicians and that was it. It was unencumbering. It was just a lot of fun.

Peter Rowan: We never stopped playing. In bluegrass, there’s a sort of fanaticism about picking. It’s because the techniques are so hard. From the day you all get together, basically you don’t stop playing until the end of the whole thing. We’d show up at the Boarding House at four-thirty or five in the afternoon and Garcia would already be there with his carton of Camels and his roadie. Garcia would just be sitting there, puffing and playing. The only thing we could do was unpack, tune up, and get with him. He’d look up and say, “Where’s it go from here?” and then we’d jump in with material. Jerry had this quality of reciprocal enthusiasm and the ability to give off a kind of a light. If you tickled his fancy, he would just come forth with so much loving energy that everyone would do better. When you played with Garcia, he could make you rise up to your full capacity. He could make you do that and I think it was reciprocal. He felt he could jump to his full capacity surrounded by the players he loved to play with. I never experienced any ego when he played. He was against any discursive criticism of the moment. He could make every player feel that whatever part they had to contribute was part of the overall experience. He was generous.

Richard Loren: When Jerry was doing Old and In the Way, he would take the banjo on the road with him on Grateful Dead tours. I’d go into his room and he’d be practicing banjo for upcoming gigs with Old and in the Way. Because he cared. He didn’t want to bomb. He wanted to play well. David Grisman’s playing always inspired Jerry to play his very best.

Peter Rowan: I remember Jerry at one gig during this supercritical phase of Old and In the Way. After every set, there were players in the band criticizing what we had done and how it wasn’t this and it wasn’t that. I remember going into the dressing room after a show one night. Jerry turned and looked at everybody. His eyes were glaring and he said, “No thoughts!” He was like a Zen master. No slate. We don’t want to talk about it. In other words, he had a faith in things holding together of their own energy. If it was worth holding together.

Richard Loren: I loved Old and In the Way. The thing that amazed me most about them was that they were a unique entity. They weren’t bluegrass. They weren’t rock ’n’ roll. Jerry wasn’t playing guitar. He was playing banjo. It was so unique because they played some gigs on the East Coast in front of Deadheads. They filled up massive auditoriums and whatever Jerry did, it was great. The mistakes, whatever it was, they loved it. Then right after that, we’d go play at a bluegrass festival where nobody knew Jerry. “Who’s that guy with the banjo?” They knew David Grisman. They knew Peter Rowan. They knew Vassar Clements. But who was that guy?

Peter Rowan: During the Old and In the Way time, Jerry would stand in the hallway and those fans of his would be standing there and he’d be looking at ’em and there was a relationship there. Once the Dead were so huge and Jerry was into his habits, I don’t think he ever had that kind of contact with the audience again. Old and In the Way was the last time that Garcia could look up on a hill in Virginia and see this hallucination of a herd of buffaloes in cut-off blue jeans and T-shirts running over the top of the hill and waving at Jerry. That was what it looked like to me. That was what I saw.

David Grisman: When Vassar Clements came into the group, he really energized the whole scene because he was a hero to the three of us and a legend in his own right. Vassar was at the height of his powers then. It was like being next to Charlie Parker in his prime. We were all in seventh heaven but particularly Jerry because unlike Pete and myself, he had never worked with “real” bluegrass musicians.

Peter Rowan: Jerry would do a night with the Grateful Dead and then do a night with us. He loved his chops being so up that the transition was effortless. We’d be at the Dead gig hanging out backstage and the next night we’d go play at this concert hall and then he’d do two more nights with the Dead and three nights with Old and In the Way. From the Dead standpoint, I got the feeling that this was not exactly approved of. With the Dead, it was like being in the engine room of a rocket ship. It was like, “Duck or you’ll get stepped on.” It was very intense. One night, I remember Garcia turning around during the Dead’s set. I was standing beside his amp and he looked at me. He looked right through me. I was scared. It was the volume and the electricity and the energy and who knows what else in terms of chemicals and stuff. He was fierce. With Jerry and the Grateful Dead, I always thought it was like a sailor who had the best gig on the best ship. When he was ashore, you could have a great time with the guy but then it was, “Hey, the ship’s moving, pal.” No matter how much you felt a part of his life, when the ship went, he went. The ship was the Dead. And if you weren’t on that ship … you know what I mean? With the Dead, that sense of destiny from the inside must have been fierce. All I can say is they were fierce.

Dexter Johnson: Old and In the Way did a concert at the Corvallis High School auditorium up in Oregon. There was a guy who’d seen me with all these instruments and he was a Deadhead. I didn’t know about Deadheads. This was Old and In the Way. This was bluegrass. This was my dream come true—Jerry playing five-string banjo with an all-acoustic hot bluegrass band. Jerry opened the door and the guy immediately threw himself on Jerry and made an ass of himself and I was horribly embarrassed. The guy said, “I live in a dormitory and we play all your music. We only play Grateful Dead and we sing along with all the songs …” I was like, “Oh my God. What a geek!” He’d used me to get in. Jerry just kept saying, “Hey, that’s plush, man. That’s really plush.” I was so relieved. He didn’t say, “Hey, what’s this, man? Why did you bring this geek around? Get out of here.”

Steve Brown: At this point in his life, Jerry was just a dedicated guitarist who really wanted to only play guitar. His guitar was pretty much sewn to his body for all those years of the seventies as I remember. He would be on the road playing his guitar while he was in the car being driven somewhere. He would take it to the hotel room with him. He had a little Mesa Boogie amp or before that other little amps that he’d play through everywhere he went. Even when he came to the record company office, he would sit in the kitchen and play guitar. He carried it in the back of his car most of the time so he’d have it with him. His dedication was to that and to coming up with songs and being able to play more.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: It was my favorite period. Old and In the Way rehearsed a lot in the living room and the kids all grew up listening to that music. It was as sweet as it could possibly be because it wasn’t amplified. It didn’t require the infrastructure of people and equipment and gear and preparation and you could just pick it up and do it. So it had a spontaneous quality that was pretty special. Jerry was also playing pedal steel at this time and somehow it served him to be playing in three bands at once. If I say I didn’t see very much of him during those times, it was because he was really really busy and that was one of the reasons I didn’t worry about him too much. Because I knew what his workload was and I also knew that the less interference, the better. Because he had so much he had to get done and there were only twenty-four hours in a day. Plus he was commuting back and forth from Stinson Beach. He’d get home around one-thirty in the morning and be hungry. I’d have to get up and feed him something and he’d often sleep until eleven or so in the morning. Then there would have to be quiet in the morning. We watched a lot of Sesame Street. “Daddy is sleeping. Don’t touch the guitars.” Still it was warm and a good friendly scene.

Peter Rowan: Old and In the Way broke up. Dave wanted to do some other kinds of music. Somewhere along the line, we had worked together too long under too much pressure and too many drugs. I know that David had enough and I certainly wasn’t evincing great care and love about Old and In the Way. I was probably being very cavalier. When things get weird in a band, you’re talking about smoke screens and levels of ignoring each other that make you want to kill yourself. It was awful.

David Grisman: We made a studio album and I remember listening to it with Jerry at my house and we decided it wasn’t good enough to release and that was the end of the band. Perhaps there were musical differences between me and Peter Rowan but we never discussed them. We were young and didn’t see the value of keeping it going. Now I see that one real value would have been for Jerry to have this outlet.

Peter Rowan: Jerry was like, “Hey, if these guys can’t keep it together, I’m not going to keep it together.” I’ll tell you what Jerry told me personally at the very end. He said, “David doesn’t want to do it anymore but I do.” Did I say, “Cool. I know this guy named Ricky Skaggs. Let’s call him up”? No. I didn’t say that because Old and In the Way was a group. If one of the members of the group didn’t want to do it, it was like honor among thieves. We could all agree not to get together anymore because one guy didn’t want to. Which was stupid. Because it needed to keep going. It just needed to. It wasn’t a throwaway thing for Jerry.

David Grisman: Shortly after, I started playing with Richard Greene in this loose acoustic aggregation called the Great American String Band. Jerry played some gigs with us. Old and In the Way got left behind. Like it was not official enough for anybody to start or end.

Peter Rowan: We should have had more responsibility about keeping the thing going from Jerry’s point of view. As something he needed. But we never thought of that. The terrible thing about show business is that aura of stardom. We always thought, “What a star this guy is. We wouldn’t exist without Jerry.” With Old and In the Way, people finally got to feel, “If we are beholden to Jerry who is actually beholden to the Dead, then where’s our own sense of what we can do?”

 

24

Rock Scully: When I first saw them, the Grateful Dead was pretty much Pigpen’s show. Everybody followed him. That was basically what the early Grateful Dead was all about. They were comping rhythm and backing up Pig doing “Love Light” and “Running down the road, feeling bad,” and all those old blues things that they did so well.

Jon Mcintire: There was a band meeting in the middle of one of the recording sessions and they were attacking Pig. I think Jerry was furious at him about the music. They were saying, “You drink all the time. You just hang out. You’re zonking out in front of the television all the time. You don’t do anything.” And on and on. With this beatific smile, Pigpen would nod and say, “Yup, that’s who I am. That’s who I am.” Here they were saying what to me sounded like the most devastating things about someone that anyone could say. I hadn’t really ever heard anybody handle their frailties like that before.

Rock Scully: Garcia really loved him and respected him, even if they had their falling-outs. They had their tough moments. He tried to have me fire Pigpen one time and Bob Weir too for that matter. He said, “Scully, you go fire them. I can’t work with them anymore.” He wouldn’t do it. He had me do it. He said, “Bobby’s not playing electric guitar and if I’m going to get good at my instrument and play the way everybody wants me to play and the way I want to play, I need a solid, electric rhythm behind me.” Which was weird because what happened was that Garcia developed his style from having to comp a lot of rhythm. He became sort of a lead rhythm player, which I think made him so brilliant and popular. I went to Weir and I said, “You’re out of here.” I went to Pigpen and I said, “You’re out of here.”

Jon Mcintire: I wasn’t there but I do know that Bobby was fired. Although the band at one point said he wasn’t, Bobby said, “I most definitely was.” He left the room where he was fired and hitched a ride because he didn’t have a car and it had been raining and then the ride let him out and he stepped out and fell facedown into a ditch in the mud. Musically, Bobby hadn’t yet taken the bull by the horns. Pigpen’s timing and pitch were off because of his drinking but Bobby just hadn’t matured yet as a player. I would also like to add that it was totally in character that Garcia would ask Rock to do it rather than doing it himself. More properly speaking, Garcia should have done that himself.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: Jerry was enormously frustrated with Bobby. Bobby would get spaced out. My experience back then was that when they would be all stoned together and really go out there, I would see Bobby standing on the stage not playing. Jerry would be taking off on his new thing and Bobby would be standing there, holding his guitar.

Owsley Stanley: Garcia had a background in acoustic music but when it came to electric music, their thing was “Turn it up to eleven and go for it.” That produced a monotone on stage. While I was in the joint, they took singing lessons and they became competent as singers. Whereas before, it was hopeless. I would tell them, “Please don’t sing. At least not all of you at once anyway. One at a time, that’s okay.” I tried for years to get them to put headphones on. They wouldn’t.

Rock Scully: Garcia knew what he was doing. He was just scaring their asses. Rattling their cages. They took a couple of weeks off. Weir went and got some more electric guitar training. Pigpen had just moved to a Hammond organ so he got some help from friends and learned how to play the foot pedals and how to expand his knowledge. Between the two of them, we were just getting a lot of fill. We were getting a lot of mid-range mush. Phil Lesh had taken his instrument into a lead bass-playing thing and there was no bottom end. It was totally up to the drummers.

Owsley Stanley: When you get up on stage, your ego gets amplified. Pigpen was the front man. He was a rooster. He loved to strut his stuff. He was a very powerful little guy but he was also very shy and he had to drink a lot just to get up on the stage. The fact was that the Grateful Dead never considered themselves Garcia and band or Pigpen and band or Lesh and band. They were always the band. And the bottom line was that they liked to play and they spent money as fast as they got it and they had to keep doing it. Nobody bought their albums much so they had to go out on the road and keep doing it.

Jon Mcintire: Garcia came into my office one day and said, “Look, we’re going to lose Pigpen. I know you know a lot about medicine. Just do some research and find out what can we do. We’ll do anything. We’ll send him anywhere.” So I started doing research and I found out about Sheila Sherlock’s clinic in London. Then my doctor said there was a guy at the UC Medical Center in San Francisco who would be as good. We put Pig with that guy but it was already too late.

Owsley Stanley: Pigpen had been rather sickly. He had ulcers that were a lot worse than anyone knew about. It wasn’t his liver that was the problem. It was under control at the time. He’d pretty much given up drinking. He actually asked me for a few joints and I’d given him a couple a few days before he died. But he had a perforated duodenal ulcer and he bled to death. That was what killed him.

Rock Scully: When Pig died, Jerry said, “That’s it. That’s it for the Grateful Dead.” He said, “The Grateful Dead just died, not just Pigpen.” That was how he really felt. This was a heartbreaking thing for Garcia. He loved Pig. As far as Jerry knew the Grateful Dead, that was it. Two weeks later, they reinvented themselves.

Jorma Kaukonen: When Pig died, a lot of my interest in the band changed. A lot of music that I really loved was personified by Pig and that’s not a criticism of them. It was just that I was really rocking with Pig. In terms of Jerry becoming the focus of the band, I don’t think there was much of a choice really. In the old days, he was definitely the leader of the Palo Alto scene. Pig was an important color on the palette but the Dead have always been, sorry guys, Jerry’s band.

Owsley Stanley: Garcia always played with his head down and went up to the microphone somewhat reluctantly to sing in this soft voice. The only other one really happy belting them out was Weir. When Pigpen died, everyone wondered, “What the fuck are we going to do now?” It was traumatic.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Pigpen being so sick and then passing away was terrible. And then they took that long hiatus. They quit work for a long time after Pigpen died and went in the studio and poked around and did this and did that and didn’t do much.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Pigpen was the other person that they couldn’t replace. And they never really did replace him.

 

25

Sue Swanson: As soon as coke came in, things got different. That was when I took like a fifteen-year hiatus. I couldn’t deal with that drug. We had this office in San Rafael. Jerry came into my little office and he sat down and he said, “So why are you leaving?” He was pissed. “Why are you leaving?” I got defensive. I said, “I’m going home to take care of my kids, man.” Before we could have a conversation, these two people came in. I didn’t know who they were. They sat down at his feet facing him and he gave them his attention. I got up and left. I said, “You wonder why I’m leaving? There’s your answer.” Maybe that was why he wasn’t a good father. He gave it to everyone else. I didn’t even want to try to understand that one.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson: He’d put up with all these hippies who would come in and lay their trips on him. Every fuckin’ hippie in the world wanted to talk to Jerry. They all had some cosmic thing that they had to get him to explain to them or they had to explain to him. Everybody had to talk to Garcia, man.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: We used to go to Winterland for the New Year’s run, which was four or five or six or seven shows around Christmastime, and it would be freezing in there. You’d get in there at three in the afternoon for the sound check and it was like forty-five degrees and so cold and it wouldn’t warm up until the audience came in. They would finish the run and we’d all go home and have the flu for ten days. Everybody would just get sick as a dog. A lot of people wouldn’t even make it to the end of the run. They’d be sick by the time we were halfway through it. Going and doing all those shows was hard work.

Rock Scully: It was funky. You were living out of the sunlight in these back rooms in these basements. Walking down cement hallways, cinder block rooms, insurance lighting, bankers and union guys and everybody working in this really cold harsh environment until the lights went down and the crowd was there and the band would go on. Then it would turn into this magical wonderful land.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I decided I couldn’t live with going through all those changes all the time. All the emotional worry and obsession. I copped out. That’s not quite the right phrase. I went into this state of “I’m not going to think about this. I’m going to cook breakfast and I’m going to cook dinner when he gets home and I’m going to be as nice as I possibly can be, do the laundry, make sure he’s got clean T-shirts, and roll ten joints so he can go to work.” I was growing pot and I was writing my book on growing and I was doing some painting and reading a tremendous amount. It was really a time that I took for myself.

Rock Scully: As far as Jerry was concerned, he was living in this box and all he really had was his guitar and a joint. I think what led to the cocaine was a couple of things. One was the show business aspect of the recreational quality of the drug. In the early days, it was very pure and fun. Later on, when we were working seventeen days in a row, it became a tool. Because we were not going to bed until four A.M. and we had to be up at eight to get in the limos or the rent-a-cars to get our asses out to the airport and get on a plane. It was a get-go thing. To a man when we’d get home, cocaine was a done deal. It was a road drug. We’d get home and nobody would care about it. All we wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and be with our families and see our kids grow up for a week or two before we went out again.

Laird Grant: He was using cocaine to keep himself pumped. The coke was to keep him running. But he was doing a lot. If you ask me, he was doing too much.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I literally couldn’t stand the scene at that point. It had become different. It had become chatty without being friendly. It was unfriendly chat and it had become social in a way. I didn’t want to spend too much time trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I just wanted to go find someplace else to be. And we had become the establishment. For all the rebellion and all the craziness that we’d done, suddenly now it was the record deal. It was this. It was that. It was the appearances. We were the establishment and the Grateful Dead was setting higher and higher ticket prices. I could feel it changing and it was a disappointing time for me. I was far more invested in my relationship with him than I was with the group. He had to take care of the band. “We’ve got to play here, Jerry. We’ve got to go there.” I too would come when called and they called me when they needed me for something. I’d be right there. But I discovered that I could go home and be quiet and nobody would care.

Owsley Stanley: In ’74, they decided they wanted to play these big outdoor shows. That was what they wanted to do. Garcia mostly went along with stuff but it was the others who decided they wanted to play big shows and that was what they ended up doing.

Jon Mcintire: One time I was driving him home over the hill because I lived in Bolinas. We were going up to his pad and he said, “It’s kind of neat having the most impressive pad in town.” He had the biggest house in Stinson and he had Deborah Koons in a different house over in Bolinas. It was just the next town. That was awfully close by.

Steve Brown: I think it was Jerry’s decision to get out from the living situation and the relationship he was in at the time. In that sense, I don’t think that Deborah came in as the other woman. I think Jerry had already made up his own mind about being his own guy in his own space. It may have had something to do with the extra energy that comes from having young children around and wanting more space. It’s hard to speculate on what the actual reasons were. Mountain Girl is a pretty strong person and it may have just been a wearing-out point. I know relationships get that way sometimes.

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius: Mountain Girl was pregnant with Theresa. I don’t exactly know how long Jerry had been running around with Deborah behind MG’s back but there was a real famous scene that went down at Weir’s house when MG picked Deborah up and threw her through the studio doors. Deborah was just sitting there in the studio. MG came in and gave her the bum’s rush. MG was pregnant at the time.

Jon Mcintire: At one time, evidently he and one of the women in the office had a sexual tryst and he was on the road with the band and she was too. He came off the stage and she looked at him and I happened to be standing right there and she said, “You don’t play music. You just play games.” I thought, “Wait a minute. We’re off the deep end here.” After the gig, I got in the car with ferry because I had to figure out what to do. I didn’t let anybody else get in the car because I wanted to have this private talk with him. I said, “Okay, tell me what’s going on and tell me what to do about this.” And he said, “Don’t worry, man. It’s just my fucked scene with chicks. It’s always been this way.”

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius: Jerry was always such a wimp about dealing with these things. Donna Jean [Godchaux McKay] told me that one time Jerry made her pack up all the clothes of the woman he was living with at the time and take her to the airport and he wouldn’t even talk to her. He just backed into a corner and freaked and sent her packing. That was his thing with a lot of problems. Throw money at it. Get Steve Parish or somebody else to deal with it. He did that whenever it was too hard for him to face up to things.

Jon Mcintire: I remember one time MG and Hunter and I were together and MG was talking about how generous Jerry was. Hunter looked up and said, “Generous? Generous with what? Generous with money? Stuff? He doesn’t give a shit about money or stuff. That’s not generous!” Absolutely so. Jerry’s time and emotion went into the music.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: One day he just left and I never knew what had happened to him. But he had left once before. He had gone off for a couple of weeks. I was busy. My responsibility level was up. I didn’t really have time to go chasing after him.

Sue Swanson: I stood in for Jerry at the birth of both their kids. One time he was in New York, one time he was in Paris. He thanked me profusely both times. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t think he was adequate. But I stood in for him for both of his children with Mountain Girl.

Steve Brown: When Jerry left Mountain Girl, he went to live in a rented house in Tiburon for a while where he also shared some time with Deborah Koons, who was then his girlfriend. Either by coincidence as a filmmaker or by her own plan, she got involved when we shot the Grateful Dead movie in October of ’74. Then she helped in the editing.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: It was around the time Theresa was born that it really started to get to be a problem. He had wandered off and found somebody else to spend time with and then he would come back and that went on like Ping-Pong, back and forth for a while until I realized that I was losing sleep, losing weight, losing energy, worrying a lot, and it wasn’t good for me. I started to put my foot down and deliver ultimatums. That was absolutely the wrong thing to do and we had one good solid argument and he stomped off and I didn’t see him for a week. I realize now that was an unfair thing for him to do. But at the time I took it the other way. My feelings were hurt and it was a tough time. There was a lot of misunderstanding going on that we weren’t working very hard to clear up.

By 1975, it was really getting severe. He disappeared again and I said, “Ah, the hell with it. I can’t handle this.” I tried to fight it out with him a little bit but he was enjoying himself. I got really upset and went on a physical fitness program and lost some weight and really tried to pull my act together to win him back and I succeeded. Off and on. But he definitely didn’t seem to think that home life was enough for him. He wanted more and I couldn’t handle it and finally I moved up to Oregon for a year and a half and I bought a little place out on the coast with the money I made from my book because I didn’t have any money. He wasn’t giving me any.

The first six months, I called Jerry several times trying to get some support money. I kept asking him to come up and visit us but he never did. Meanwhile, I was trying to track him a little bit through our network of friends to find out what he was up to and the news was not good. So I decided to play my hand independently of the group. The news was not good. And now I really was away.