The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down You can’t let go and you can’t hold on You can’t go back and you can’t stand still If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.
—Robert Hunter, “The Wheel”
For me, drugs are just like the softest most comfortable possible thing you can do. In a way, it’s the thing of being removed from desire. It’s a high state of being and you can get there all the time. Every time you do it, you get off. Except for things like forgetting to eat and all the other little things in life. All that shit slips right past you. That’s why people die.
—Jerry Garcia, interview with author, 1988
Justin Kreutzmann: From the late seventies through to the mid-eighties was a really dark time. It was weird. Even if the sun was shining on the Grateful Dead world, it was always a cloudy day. They were playing the same songs and they cared and the audience really cared. But if you saw the way the band was acting, you had to wonder, “How can those kids really get off on this?”
Alan Trist: In the early seventies, the band was growing up and becoming a bigger deal. It required more to look after it and to protect it from the outside world. Still, the desire was to have people who were cool and part of that family scene. The new paradigm we were all talking about in Palo Alto was still operative in Jerry’s mind and he wanted it to be that way. He wanted to have people around who were both friends and business associates to take care of what needed to be taken care of and interface with the outside world. For a while, it worked. It was really working. Maybe it worked up until the end, and goes on working.
Chesley Millikin: I went to visit the Dead at the offices and Rock was there and the New Riders and the Dead were about to go to Europe. Jerry said, “You take care of the New Riders.” So I took them on the first half of their world tour. As everything. Cook, slut, butler, baby-sitter, the whole bloody works.
Richard Loren: We did Europe in ’74 and Jon McIntire got fired from the Grateful Dead. Kreutzmann fired him. God knows the reason. I can’t remember why.
Chesley Millikin: Why? Oh, who knows why? Too much of this and too much of that.
Jon Mcintire: I had been in Paris advancing the gig and I came back and I was dressed up. As the band came off stage, this beautiful woman came running at me and threw her arms around me and I put my arms around her and I happened to hit Kreutzmann in the face as I did it. As he was coming off stage. That moment personified something to him. Here I was looking kind of spiffy with this beautiful woman around my neck and I hit him. Also, there were a lot of drugs going down. At three or four in the morning, I got called by Kreutzmann and asked to come to his room. In front of several people, no band members included, Kreutzmann proceeded to vent all over me. He said, “I realize you could get the band and buck me on this but I want you out of here.”
The next morning, I got a call from Richard Loren who said, “I’ve been hearing weird stuff. What’s happening?” I told him and he said, “We gotta talk to Garcia.” So we went into Jerry’s room and I told Jerry what had happened and he said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I’m leaving. I’m out of here. I can’t do this anymore.” He said, “I don’t blame you. If I were in your shoes, I’d do the same thing. I’d say, ‘Fuck the Grateful Dead.’” Then Richard said, “Jerry, if they’ve attacked McIntire, I’m next and I’m going, too.”
So Richard and I rented a car and drove to Paris. The way Hunter put it later to some interviewer was, “It was a matter of difference in style. McIntire would show up with a ballerina on each arm and no one else in the Grateful Dead could understand that kind of stuff.”
Chesley Millikin: One day on the Europe tour, I came down and Hal Kant, the lawyer friend of mine, was there. I said, “What are you looking so glum about?” He said, “Didn’t you hear?” I said no. He said, “The band fired Jon McIntire, Richard Loren, Rock, and I don’t know who else. They fired them all.” I said, “Who’s the new manager?” He said, “You are.” I said, “What? These guys?”
Jon Mcintire: Jerry and I actually talked about this because I was trying to figure out just what it was that I was doing there. In between the times I was manager, we’d have long heart-to-heart talks. I was trying to follow. Trying to create consensus, trying to soothe the pain, and also trying to be in the background as much as possible. It was never my band. Hunter did not write “Uncle John’s Band” about me. He wrote it for Jerome John Garcia. But even Hunter after some years called me Uncle John so everyone assumed it was me.
Richard Loren: A month later, I became their manager and agent. Now I was not only booking the band, I was dealing with the money. I was called the general manager of the Grateful Dead. At this time, the Grateful Dead were not rich people. “It’s not what you make, it’s what you don’t spend.” I quoted that to them many times. The musicians had needs but the salaries were never quite high enough to take care of them. They were all chipping away at expensive drugs. You had the coke and the beginnings of the heroin thing. They were also paying their employees far more than the going rate.
Peter Barsotti: The thing about the Grateful Dead was that they were like a primitive tribe. That explains a lot about their closed family, about their clan, about the way they reacted to everybody, about the way they dealt with everything that went wrong within their tribe. Basically, no one was ever rejected unless they got to the point where they ejected themselves. You could make a hundred mistakes, you could be stupid for your whole life, you could blow it a thousand times, and you were still fine. Mainly, it had to do with total subservience of your life to theirs and total acceptance of them as it. “Just buy in behind it, man. A hundred percent.” They also took pride in having no business sense.
John Perry Barlow: We were a totally primitive tribe. We were like a completely isolated village in Sicily. We had this sort of mafiosi code of honor that was extremely blunt. There was a great deal of loyalty there but it was a hard loyalty. Part of the deal was that as the Deadheads became more and more sweetness, light, love, charity, openness, emotional evolution, the darker we were.
Hal Kant: They wanted to produce this Grateful Dead movie and I had killed it and killed it and killed it because I had told them the way they were going to go about it was a crazy idea, as in those days there was very little money. I showed up at Winterland for a series of concerts and four different crews were shooting for four days and nobody had ever told me about it. Rakow had gotten them all into doing it and they had a budget of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I said, “Ron, what you’re shooting here is not going to be processed for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Forget about anything else. You’re not going to be able to process the film.”
As it turned out, the processing costs alone were just under two hundred thousand. Jerry, being the wonderful person he was, had a great, great curiosity, creativeness, and inventiveness and all those things went into, “Yeah, let’s do a movie. Yeah, let’s do a record company. Cool. Great. Let’s do it.” The way creative people deal with their art is not the way you deal with a business. What’s the downside if you do a painting you don’t like? You throw it in the corner. Or if you do a piece of music you don’t like? You just leave it in the can. All his projects were the same. “Let’s try it.”
Steve Brown: The Grateful Dead movie was shot in October of ’74. Jerry was very involved with it. From way back, he’d always wanted to make movies. He loved film. We used to go to movies when we were on the road. We’d go before sound checks. He’d get up early and we’d go out to a movie at noon. Jerry really had an artist’s eye for detail and he was a superb film editor because he really could see continuity and rhythm and flow. He went through the footage deciding first of all what performances were suitable and what he liked of himself and the band. Later, he helped decide what needed to be in the final cut. He was right there at the table. He was running the thing forward and back himself. He wasn’t standing over somebody’s shoulder doing it. He was sitting there doing it. In terms of the animated sequence that begins the film, Jerry was the main proponent of that.
Gary Gutierrez: Their idea at that time was to take a bunch of posters from all the years of posters for the Grateful Dead and use that as a background for a title sequence and we would animate some of that. That was how it began. I went over one night to meet with Jerry where they were editing and we hit it off and I told him I had some ideas. They didn’t have much money for the title sequence. I think they had like five or eight thousand dollars. I had learned a lot of things doing animation for Sesame Street that made me want to try much wilder things. I saw this as my big opportunity. This thing just grew and grew and it went from eight thousand bucks to I guess eventually about twenty-five thousand. It turned into an eight-minute animated extravaganza of Grateful Dead mythology.
That was partly my fault and partly Jerry’s fault because he would see stuff and he would have ideas and he seemed to like my ideas. I remember driving back from L.A. when I heard this “Uncle Sam” song and immediately, a bell went off in my head of a Grateful Dead skeleton as Uncle Sam and then all the other ideas sort of flowed from working with Uncle Sam and using that song as the main basis of it. To use a New Age term, one of the great things about Jerry creatively was that he was really validating. Francis Coppola has a similar quality. Both he and Jerry share that ability to get the best out of you by actually giving you a lot of trust and actually throwing a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. They describe the problem and what they want to accomplish without telling you how to do it and they are open to ideas. Nothing is too corny or weird or out there for them to think about.
Steve Brown: It was really supposed to be done a lot cheaper and a lot quicker. What wound up happening is the goddamn animation became this black hole where more and more money and more and more time were required. We began refinancing deals. Really, the film broke our balls financially.
Gary Gutierrez: We were over at Bob Weir’s studio where we were doing all of the various sound effects and remixes for the movie. We spent several days in a booth with Jerry. Attached to the basic mixing board were stacks of stuff that they would bring in and plug in and rewire to get weird effects. When Uncle Sam is riding the motorcycle and he says, “All right” or “Wow,” it was Jerry talking through a plastic hose that was hooked into some kind of actuator on an early kind of synthesizer to make his voice sound like dry bone. He was in his glory there. He had a lot of fun watching the animation play back, listening to the music, and doing lots of overdubs.
Steve Brown: The money to set up the record company had come from First National Bank of Boston. Half a million I think to get us rolling. The independent label, Round Records, had Jerry’s Old and In the Way album and Robert Hunter’s Great Rum Runners solo album. At the same time, we’d set up production for the Wake of the Flood album, which was the first venture on Grateful Dead Records. That was done at the Record Plant in Sausalito in the late summer and fall of ’73. Everything started off really good. We ran it pretty straitlaced, just like the suits would have done. We’d put out an album and run a tour to support it and it went fine. Now we had some merchandise to lay out to people in the way of promotion when we were at the concerts. We’d set up our own booth at concerts and give away postcards and sign people up for our mailing list. This was where the real start of the Deadhead database kicked in. By the time the record company had pretty much run its course and we turned it over to United Artists in ’75, we had about eighty thousand names.
Ron Rakow: Jerry and I got loaded one day on the porch of his music room, which was above his house in Stinson Beach. We looked out at the ocean and Jerry said, “Hey, man. Wanna do something far out? Let’s buy our way to the sea.” Meaning, “Let’s buy every single piece of property that comes up for sale in Stinson Beach that gets us closer to the ocean so we’ll have a path to the sea.” We didn’t have any money but we had this relationship with the First National Bank of Boston. They were our factor. They guaranteed the credit of the stores and distributors we sold our records to. So I went to the First National Bank of Boston and told them that we were going to get involved in other projects around which Garcia had expertise. I asked for a two-million-dollar credit line with no collateral. That was a lot of bread. I told them we were going to be in Boston in three months and I asked them to arrange for the senior executives of the bank to have lunch with Garcia at the bank. Then they would know they were in the hands of a genius.
But I knew Jerry wouldn’t show up just for lunch. I needed a cookie to get him there. So I had their chief economist agree to show us her predictions of where the worldwide economy was going. Then I went to Jerry and told him that one of the biggest banks in the world was going to give us a private briefing on the worldwide economy that they only gave to top executives. He went nuts.
Jerry and I and Deborah Koons, who was then his girlfriend, went to the First National Bank of Boston. We walked into the twelfth-floor executive dining room and Jerry Garcia was wearing, guess what, Levi’s and a black T-shirt. We sat down with the chairman of the board of the First National Bank of Boston, three billion dollars at the time. The chairman turned to Jerry and said, “My daughter wants to play the clarinet. But my music person says it would be much better to start her on the violin. What do you think?” Jerry said, “Let her do what she wants.” The guy said, “Oh, yeah!”
The president of the First National Bank of Boston turned to Jerry and said, “We’re getting a sound system. I’m going to get EPI speakers. What do you think of them?” Jerry turned to me and said, “Rack, don’t we have a deal with them? Don’t we trade them records for speakers? What about those?” I said, “They’re good.” Jerry said, “I’ve listened to them. I think they’re really good. I think you’ll be very happy with them.” The guy said, “Oh, great!”
After the appetizer, we started walking around the room and looking out over Boston. Jerry walked over to me and whispered in my ear, “We’re gonna own this place. This is fuckin’ backstage, man.” They gave us the money. Did we buy our way to the ocean? We came damn close.
Richard Loren: In the end, the record company turned out to be the thing that burned their ass because Ron Rakow walked away with a quarter of a million dollars. A quarter of a million dollars was a lot of money at the time.
Ron Rakow: For years and years and years, the name of the game was that I was the family barracuda. You don’t ever want to fuck with your barracuda because the barracuda will do what barracudas do. He will fucking eat you. What happened was that the Grateful Dead became convinced that it was in their best interests to fuck me. Garcia and I had a meeting on it and Garcia looked me right in the eye and said, “It’s clear that this is going to happen.” Because I went across a really entrenched interest in the Grateful Dead and that was Hal Kant.
Steve Brown: Ron Rakow was down in L.A. on the rug at the United Artists Records office saying, “Really, the album is in the mail. It’s coming now.” And there was Mickey Hart up at his barn saying, “Let’s put one more drum track on this part here.” To really slam back at the treatment he felt he was getting, Ron Rakow cut himself a check for about a quarter million and freed himself from the whole thing and he disappeared. Now we were really broke. We had to finish this movie and get it out.
Ron Rakow: Jerry and I were making this movie that was hemorrhaging money. The band had stopped working and the movie was sucking up one huge quantity of money and the band was sucking up another huge quantity of money and there was no output of any kind. My strategy was really simple. I walked into United Artists Records in Los Angeles and said, “I need a million dollars. I’ll give you four more Grateful Dead albums, one Garcia album, and one Weir album.” They said, “We already have all these Grateful Dead albums. Why do we need to give you a million dollars to have four more? You’re giving us nothing.” I said, “Not true. Because if you don’t give me the million dollars, I am going to bankrupt the Grateful Dead and all the individuals in it and we’ll make a deal with Warner Brothers the next day. Because the bankruptcy trustee will nullify all existing contracts.”
When I’d told Garcia about this beforehand, he’d said, “Is this true? Can you do this?” I said, “I don’t know. Let’s find out.” Garcia loved it. He fucking loved it. He was jumping up and down and he said, “This is brilliant. You go and do it. I got your back covered. There is no Grateful Dead without Jerry Garcia. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
I was down in L.A. doing this and on Sunday, a meeting of the Grateful Dead at Front Street in San Rafael was called to explain what I was up to. I had been sick so I stayed down in L.A. My attorney was supposed to go to that meeting to explain my strategy along with Garcia. Fifteen minutes before the meeting was supposed to begin, my attorney was called and told that the meeting had been canceled. But it had not been canceled.
Garcia got there and everybody jumped on him. “What the fuck is this guy doing? Do you understand it?” Garcia had nobody to bounce off of. So he sat down in this secretary’s chair on wheels and slowly wheeled himself out of the room. He went into the studio, picked up a guitar, and played scales for four hours.
The next day, I went to United Artists’ offices and they handed me a check for two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. As the guy handed me the check, with both of our hands still on it, the secretary said, “Emergency call for Ron Rakow.” I picked up the phone and my lawyer said, “Ron, I don’t know how to tell you this. The Grateful Dead had a meeting yesterday after all and they fired you.” I said, “The call you got has no status and this call does not compute.” And I hung up the phone. I knew I had just been fucked. I asked myself, “Do I quietly fold my tent and go away feeling fucked? Or do I make sure everyone feels at least as fucked as I do?”
Steve Brown: We had this horrible Steal Your Face sound track which was recorded badly because a few of the tracks were fucked up by a guy who happened to have a cocaine problem. When Ron Rakow left, Jerry was angry and depressed. I think he felt he’d let down everybody else by having his guy rip us off. Here was Jerry being slapped publicly as it were within the organization by Rakow in front of everybody. I think he was humiliated by it.
Ron Rakow: I went to a bank on Santa Monica and La Brea and I deposited the two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars into a temporary account I had set up for the Grateful Dead. I wrote a check for ten grand to a secretary I had hired away from United Artists and could not now employ. I wrote a check so this Hell’s Angels movie we had made a commitment to could get finished. I wrote a check to Rolling Thunder, the Shoshone medicine man who had taken an option on some land so Native Americans could move back to it. And I wrote a check for my services for two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars which I cashed. I had 30 seventy-five-hundred-dollar cashier checks and this big amplifier box filled with Grateful Dead bills I was going to pay. I taped up the box and wrote on it in big marker pen, “Shove Up Ass,” and I sent it to the person at the Dead office who had called my attorney to say the meeting had been canceled.
Richard Loren: They had almost finished the Grateful Dead movie. In addition to all those other things I was doing, I now became the new executive producer of the Grateful Dead movie. They needed forty thousand dollars to finish it. Where were we going to get the money from? Bill Graham lent us forty thousand dollars. At the time, it was a lot of money. Like what four hundred thousand would be now. Bill was not going to give us anything without a hook somewhere. But he never let the band know that. The band were the ones he’d always have his arm around. “There’s nothing like you guys.” Jerry knew but I had to tell the other guys, “Bill’s your friend on one level and on the next, he’s not.” What I was talking about was money.
Steve Brown: Jerry was pretty depressed by the situation but no more so than any other fine mess they’d gotten themselves into. It seemed to be their own weird karma of doing business the way they wanted to do business. As an outlaw business entity. They really never wanted to play the game the real way. They wanted to do it their way and this was the price they paid.
Ron Rakow: For years, the game for me was “Brothers” and I was good at it. I fucked with anybody who fucked with my brothers. Then the game turned to “Fuck Your Brother.” And I was good at it. I was the best there was. But Garcia, that was another story. My first public meeting with Jerry after this happened was at the Grateful Dead house at Fifth and Lincoln. Jerry said, “Rack, you should have been on the last tour!” With the most enthusiasm he could muster, he described to an old friend everything that had blown his mind about that tour. He said nothing about the money. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
All the lawyers went out to a restaurant and made a deal. They came back and I said, “Jerry, it was nice seeing you.” He said, “It was nice seeing you and I’ll see ya.” The other people in the room, McIntire and some of the equipment guys and some of the other guys in the band, were fucking livid. But no one even said, “You fucking dog.”
The day after Rex Jackson died, I met privately with Jerry Garcia in a restaurant in Tam Junction directly over the spot where Jackson had gone off the road and died. Jerry and I talked and I told him what my realities were. During that lunch, Jerry said, “I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you one bit. I’ve checked out everything that went on around the time of that meeting. We were definitely set up. I don’t know if I would have done what you did. But I wouldn’t have done nothing, that’s for sure. As far as I can see, it was a mass freakout.”
I didn’t pay them back. Not a fucking penny. We’d made a deal to buy me out for seven hundred and fifty grand. So this was one third of what I was supposed to get by legitimate contract.
Peter Barsotti: The bottom line was that if one guy didn’t want to do something, they wouldn’t do it. That was the Dead principle. It was very unnerving because you could say, “Man, we can do this. We could do this. We could do this.” One guy would say, “I don’t wanna.” This huge beautiful plan. One guy saying, “I don’t wanna,” and that was the end of it. You’d resent it and really feel frustrated. But if you thought about it, that was the reason they could exist. That was the only way they could possibly go on as a group.
Alan Trist: Quite honestly, I think Jerry always felt that at some level there was enough justice in what Ron did for him to forgive it. It wasn’t that it was cool but it was like Jerry wasn’t going to be all that upset about it. At some level, he understood it. I never heard any acrimony from Jerry about it. For Jerry, it was over with. He was willing to move forward. Others felt differently, though.
Richard Loren: After Ron Rakow left, it started to become more and more difficult for Jerry to keep all his things together. With Jerry, the group came first. Jerry was always looking for somebody else to take the lead. No matter what it was, Jerry never ever wanted to be the leader of anything. That was why he never spoke on stage. He told me one time, “I was on acid once and I had this vision of speaking on stage and it made me feel like Hitler.” Or words to that effect. He never wanted to tell people what to do.
Ken Kesey: Jerry never let anybody pin him down. Drove women nuts. Drove the whole Grateful Dead spectrum nuts. They wanted him to be pin-downable. You’d never see Jerry take a strong political stance. Because he knew that once he did, they’d have a bead on him. Even if the stance he had taken was correct. That had nothing to do with surviving as an artist and providing what he’d really promised as an artist. Like the Beatles sang, “You’ve got to hide your love away.”
Hal Kant: The Grateful Dead always had a huge overhead because they couldn’t have been more generous with employees and they always had a huge number of people on the payroll. By ’73, they were worn out from touring but they also didn’t know what kind of direction they wanted their music to take. They felt that time off would be a revitalizer. They were going to work on their individual projects and sort of reenergize and come back.
Owsley Stanley: At one point, we had three staging crews out on the road, building and tearing down stages. It was exactly what I had warned them about but I got the blame for it in the end. It just fell apart. No one could sustain it. That was when they went off on sabbatical for a year.
Hal Kant: I wasn’t physically there but I heard that during the Dead hiatus, Jerry couldn’t go a night without playing. If one of his other bands wasn’t gigging, he’d go down to a bar and play.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: I actually got a toke on Jerry’s dragon one day. This was probably around ’75. He was chasing the dragon down a piece of aluminum foil. Because that was what he did. He never shot it. He would have never been a shooting junkie. He would have harmed himself in any other kind of way but I don’t think he would have stuck a needle in. I said, “Can I check some of this out?” He was not willing to share it or talk about it. It was just, “This is what I’m doing. If you want to have something to do with it, I’ll give you a hit because you’re here and I’m about to do it. I’m not going to stop because you’re in front of me. I’m going to do it and if you want a hit, then fine.” But he wasn’t particularly volunteering it.
Elanna Wyn-ellis: At the Keystone years ago was where I first noticed him doing it but I didn’t understand. I said, “What are you doing, Jerry?” He looked at me and he said, “You’re just like Marmaduke. You want to know everything.” Instantly, he regretted being snappy. He said to me, “This is what I’m doing,” and he showed me.
Richard Loren: It got brought to us in 1976 and I’ll never forget the first time it came. This brown powder. People were saying how wonderful this stuff was. You just smoked it. It was not really heroin. It was Persian opium. People said, “Hey man, let’s try it. Whew. This is great.” I’ll never forget telling Jerry, “Jerry. This stuff is great but I’m going to wait till I’m fifty-five years old. When my bones start to creak and things start to hurt, maybe that’s the time for it. But I don’t want to get strung out on this now.” It was very seductive. So I stayed away from it. I never really got into it. But Jerry did. The guy could never say no. He had what I would call an addictive personality. Whether it was sugar or cigarettes or coffee or whatever, it was very difficult for him to say no. His thing was, “If you’re not having fun, don’t do it.” Besides music, fun to him was cigarettes, pot, coffee, cocaine. If he had a weakness, that was it. He was human, after all. For all his other incredible traits, this was his weakness.
Owsley Stanley: Garcia started in ’75 or ’76. Someone gave him what he was told was opium to smoke and it wasn’t. It was ninety-five percent pure heroin base, so-called Persian. I don’t think he knew what it was that he was getting. Garcia smoked the stuff thinking it was a very pure form of Persian opium. The thing about heroin when it’s smoked is that the material condenses in the lungs in a sort of tar that is soluble and the body slowly absorbs it. So it’s like sticking a needle in your vein with a drip. A constant supply. People who shoot up heroin, the body metabolizes it and it’s gone. When you smoke it, the stuff builds up in your system to a high level and stays there continuously for as much as seventy-two to ninety-six hours. The result is that many people become hopelessly addicted on just one smoke. Let alone two or three smokes.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: I had a couple pokes. I didn’t like it. I got uncomfortable. You know how junkies shoot up and then go puke? I felt like that the whole time. I tried to go to sleep and there were ugly pictures in my head. Like those recurrent dreams that you have after you’ve had too much to drink at night. That loop is a bad loop. It’s not a fun loop. Something’s bothering you and you keep on thinking that you’re working it out and you’re not. That was what smack did for me.
Owsley Stanley: Within a week or so, he was addicted. He liked it. I had conversations with him when he was off it and he said, “I really like what it does.” I said, “From the outside, you’re not really a very interesting guy to be around when you’re on it. You’re really an unpleasant person to be around.” He said, “That may be so but I like what it does. I like the hallucinations. I like whatever it shows me.” I don’t think he understood the depth of the changes that occurred in his personality when he was using. Just by looking at him from fifty feet away, I could tell. Simply by the way he stood and held himself and the expression on his face.
Laird Grant: He was snorting smack. I guess he tried shooting it for a while but it was not his thing. I don’t think he had the veins for it and he wasn’t one of those kind of people. He wasn’t into the mystique of the whole operation more than to get high. The ritual of shooting up is like being addicted to firing up that cigarette and puffing on it. When I found out that he was doing it, we had some very heated words on that. He was saying that it was cool and he could handle it and I said, “That’s what they all say. Look at it on down the line, man.” I said to him, “What happened with pot?” He said, “That’s not good enough, man. It fucks with my throat. I can’t sing on it.” When I was seventeen or eighteen, I was into shooting up heroin. Next to good sex, it’s probably one of the most incredible experiences in the world. But sex doesn’t kill you. Unless you have a heart attack. Whereas kicking that gong … pretty soon, the gong’s going to kick you.
Owsley Stanley: He wouldn’t talk to me when he was doing it. He would turn in the hall and go the other way and say, “I’m busy. Don’t come in here now.” Or he’d have Parish bar the door. As he grew older and got into heroin and other things which make you very egocentric, Jerry had a tendency to use his power more. Parish became his roadie. Parish was very much someone born in the year of the tiger. The kind of guy who liked wielding that power and being physically imposing.
Jerilyn Lee Brandelius: The Dead and the Who played together in the Oakland Coliseum in October 1976. This was after they came back from their hiatus. On the second day, they opened the show. We were sitting in the dressing room during the break. Pete Townshend came in and he said to Garcia, “I’ve seen you play three sets and I’m wondering how you figure out what you’re going to play. Because it doesn’t seem to me like you have a list or anything like that. We’ve been playing the same set on the entire tour. The same songs.” Jerry said, “Gee, man. I don’t know. I never really thought about it. We just kinda get up there and do it.” Pete said, “Wow, that’s incredible. That’s just amazing.”
A couple weeks after this conversation, we were on the road somewhere and Weir said, “I’ve been thinking about what Pete Townshend said. I think we should make up a set list.” The guys went, “Ahh, Weir. Stuff it.” He was going, “No, no, no. I think we should have one.” So they said, “Okay, Bob. Make up a set list, we’ll play it.” They made up this list of songs and they went out there and started playing. They were playing along and they came to a point where Weir was supposed to know the list. They turned to look at him. Weir looked back at them and they all stopped playing. They just stopped. Because they didn’t know what they were supposed to play next.
Pete Townshend: With the Dead, it was all on stage. They were having a good time. They enjoyed one another’s company. One of them might walk off halfway through and go chat with somebody. It was slow. It was easy. They were taking their time. They were being almost mystical about the process. They were not striving for success. There was no stress. There was no success ethic. They were moving like Gypsies across the planet and they just happened in that place. I always knew they would carry on until Jerry Garcia was old and gray.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Jerry would insist on his right to do whatever he wanted. If Mountain Girl got on his case about the smack, she would have been out of there.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: A year went by and I was getting really tired of where we were living in Oregon. I packed everybody back in the VW van, rolled up the rug and put all the books in, and off I went back to the house in Stinson Beach. I’d been back about six weeks and there was a knock on the door and it was Jerry. He came in, looked around, and he said, “I’m moving back in.” And that was it. He moved back in. I guess he was tired of running around. I never did really find out what precipitated this but he moved back in and things went back to the way they were before and I was thrilled. I was so happy to see him. I was just ecstatic and the kids were ecstatic. At the time, Annabelle was seven and Trixie was three. We’d gotten him back. We’d gotten another go-round. Unfortunately, the day before he knocked on the door, I had sold the house. I’d made a deal with a guy the night before and then here came Jerry and he wanted to move back in. I said, “Well, sweetie, that’s great but …” Instead, I moved us up to this beautiful house in Inverness with a pool. It was really neat. We moved out there and we went to Egypt. We took the Grateful Dead to Egypt.
Richard Loren: The Dead went on hiatus. During that period of time, I got a chance to take a vacation. I went to Egypt for three weeks. I loved it. I came back and I said, “Jerry. God, Egypt was really fantastic.” I went back the next year. I was on a horse around the pyramid and I looked at the pyramid and I saw this stage. I said, “Wow, maybe the Dead could play here.” I looked at the Egyptian people. They smoked hash, they were high, they had this wonderful attitude about life not unlike the Deadheads. The place had an appeal that was absolutely timeless. I came back to Jerry and I said, “Let me lay this on you because I don’t know if this is something you want to do.” When I said Egypt to Jerry, his ears perked up right away. He said, “We have to meet with the band.” We met with the band. They all said, “Yeah, let’s do it man. Yeah, far out.” For the next year, I tried to put this thing together. I made three trips to Washington. Phil Lesh and Alan Trist came with me and we met the Egyptian ambassador. Later, we went to Cairo and met with the American ambassador to Egypt.
Alan Trist: The key moment was when Phil, Richard Loren, and I had an audience with the Egyptian ambassador in Washington. He was the one who was going to say yes or no. He said to Phil, “Why do you want to do this?” Phil gave him a musician’s answer. He said, “Over the years, we have learned that we play differently in different places. This is what interests us and we can’t think of anywhere we would really like to hear how we would play more than at the Great Pyramid.”
Richard Loren: We didn’t announce it to the press until the night before we took off. We did a press conference and we were on the plane the next day. So nobody could cancel it. I was extremely careful because I didn’t want this to be a drug bust setup for them. I had the assurances of the State Department that we weren’t being set up there. So I felt comfortable going there and sure enough it was a great success. We played three nights in a row under a full moon in lunar eclipse.
Mickey Hart: We said, “We could be a finger on the hand of peace.” This was during the whole Sadat thing. They were having peace talks and it was a time when we could have made a difference. We always wanted to go to the pyramids. It was a Grateful Dead fantasy right from the beginning. This just happened to be the time that the wheel came around in the revolver. And we wanted to take all of our family. The kids, the dogs, the cats. We wanted everybody to go to Egypt for a blast.
Sue Stephens: Traveling with Jerry through Egypt was a kick. In Egypt, they called anybody with excess hair “The Moustache.” In Egypt, Jerry became “The Big Moustache.” He just had this presence. We were starting to call him the “Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah.” One of the ways that the Egyptians would inspect you was they would make you step out of your shoes and walk around your shoes and then put them back on. Maybe people smuggled stuff in their shoes over there. Poor Jerry. Everywhere we would go on these short little hops, they kept picking on “The Big Moustache.” They totally zeroed in on him. Not knowing who he was as far as a rock star or anything. He drew that kind of attention. He was just that kind of person. I think his molecules were more dense than most people’s.
Ken Kesey: They played for the smallest paying audience since the Acid Test. There were six hundred and ninety some people there who had paid. But they would take the spotlights and shine them out into the desert and there would be thousands and thousands of bedouins with camels. There was only a fence and then there was the Sahara Desert. The way the Nile Valley was, they could hear the concert all the way in Cairo.
It started off with Hamsa el-Din playing the oud. He had flown in twenty-four of his old schoolmates. They were blacker than a pair of binoculars and they wore these beautiful pastel djellabas and pastel turbans. Light light blue and light yellows and purples. I couldn’t see their hands or their faces. All I could see were their eyes and teeth floating around out there. The Egyptians and the Saudis had come to hear rock ’n’ roll and here were these black kids doing this little kid’s dance. It was equivalent to “patty-cake, patty-cake.” As they worked it, Mickey Hart went out there and began to drum with them. They had tambourines and they were doing this little chant. Phil picked it up. Pretty soon, I heard Jerry pick up the lick on guitar. Gradually, all the Dead were playing this. Without a grinding of gears, those twenty-four dancing Sudanese began to fade back into these piles of equipment.
Without changing the beat or changing chords, the Dead went right into “I wanna tell you how it’s gonna be …” I thought, “This is the way cultures really get to know each other. Not around the diplomatic table but through music. Taking a twelve-tone scale and a very complicated rhythm and working it right into Buddy Holly without a glitch.” It was the best show business I had ever seen in my life. Bar none. Just absolutely wonderful.
Richard Loren: I was counting on that show to raise a half a million dollars to pay for the trip. We wanted to do a three album set. “The Grateful Dead in Egypt” with pictures and so on. It was going to be wonderful but what happened was that there wasn’t a set out of the three sets that they did that they could even put together to make one album. It was so bad and there was a reason for that. Just before they left America, the piano tuner quit because the crew wouldn’t let his family on stage during the show. In Egypt, we couldn’t find a piano tuner in time and the piano kept going out of tune. It wasn’t because of the King’s Chamber or because they tried to do something special. Because of a stupid little thing like that, we lost a half a million dollars. If you don’t think that had an effect on the Grateful Dead’s finances over the next five years, it did.
Mickey Hart: We were going to make a record, which never turned out. We were going to make a film, which never turned out. We were going to pay for it, which never happened. We ended up half a million dollars in debt.
Alan Trist: If he could have, Jerry would have done more of this stuff. Having fun and doing all the interesting gigs. We wanted to play everywhere. The Egypt concerts brought up other fantasies: “Let’s go and play in Israel. Let’s go play in the Antarctic. Let’s go and play Easter Island, India, everywhere. Let’s go around the world and play in all the great spaces.” The difficulty of moving everything around was part of the problem. The other part was drugs. Because at this point, Jerry was moving into a definite needfulness. That was what withheld him from being able to do the things he really wanted to do.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: It was a terrific trip but Jerry was starting to chip on painkillers. John Kahn had broken his ankle and Jerry and John Kahn got into a thing with painkillers over there. All I knew was that Jerry was getting into taking downers of some sort. He was getting into downers and it was really hard for us because we didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. All I knew was that he seemed to be really depressed. To me, depression reads as unhappiness. To me, that meant he was unhappy with me. So I was constantly trying to compensate for all that and that was a lot of work. I started to get this really bad backache. In retrospect, I can see that I was carrying a huge load at this time. I had the kids. I had a business that was losing money and Jerry wasn’t very supportive of me. I couldn’t feel his support anymore for what I was doing and I suddenly realized I had to quit that business. I tried to find somebody to take it from me and failed and then I finally did find somebody.
By the time I did, Jerry was starting to get sick. He was starting to become a junkie. I didn’t know what that was. I just knew that it was bad and that it was wrong and I couldn’t deal with it. None of this language about recovery had yet been invented. No one knew a darned thing about it. As far as I was concerned, I was out there all by myself on the North Pole with it. Basically, I just told him that it was over. Until he got straightened out, I didn’t want him to come back to the house. It was not a good scene. Because he couldn’t understand why I had suddenly turned on him like that. I said, “Look, man. If this is what you’re going to do, I don’t want any part of it. I can’t have any part of it.”
In retrospect, it was the biggest mistake I ever made. I wasn’t at fault but I didn’t know that then. So I took it really hard when he didn’t bounce back. That was really a tough time. Just to get away, I went off to the East Coast. But I remember the appalling sadness that we all felt.
Hal Kant: You have to distinguish the band from the individuals. They all treated their finances differently. Jerry treated his as though he really didn’t care about what he was making. As long as he had his per diem and he could create, he was happy.
Richard Loren: So now we were in debt. We had a bank loan we had to pay, we were in debt from the movie, we were in debt from Egypt. I had to work the next four or five years as a manager trying to get them solvent. I never had the luxury of being with a wealthy Grateful Dead. Before ’72, they’d had nothing. They had just been a working man’s band. Now they knew what the taste of a new car was. They knew what the taste of owning a home was. A new guitar. Now they had a taste for money. Plus there was the introduction of heroin.
Tom Davis: I’d first met Jerry in 1971 when I wandered backstage at Winterland at a benefit for the Sufi dancers. I had this beautiful girl on my arm and we’d been taking barbiturates and LSD and the crowd just parted for us and we walked right through doorways and upstairs. I got right behind Jerry’s amp and it looked like a joint that he was smoking. I took a huge hit off of it and smoked the whole thing till I discovered it was a Pall Mall cigarette. I had no business being there at all but nobody kicked me off until the show was over. I just smoked his cigarette and he let me sort of drool on the amplifier which at that time had tie dye on it.
In 1978, I was doing Saturday Night Live in New York and I asked Lorne Michaels to book the Grateful Dead. He did not want the Grateful Dead on the show because they were not hip enough. I literally got on my knees and begged, “Please, do me one favor and let the Grateful Dead play. Please, please.” And he said, “All right, all right.” They ended up playing “Casey Jones.” I remember the director put an ‘X’ on the floor and said, “Jerry, this is Dave the director. Where are you going to be when you’re playing like that?” Jerry said, “I don’t know.” “You’ve got to tell me where you’re going to be or you’re not going to be in the picture.” Jerry said, “I don’t care.” At that point, Jerry was ready to walk. He was pissed but they did the show. NBC came very close to getting their entire staff doped that day. Their coffee machine came very close to getting dosed.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: I met Jerry in ’78 in Chicago on Mickey Mouse’s fiftieth birthday. I was going to Shimer College in Illinois. My friends at college mentioned to me that they had bought Jerry a pumpkin the year earlier when he played in the Chicago area and inside the pumpkin, they had written a note that said, “Manasha says hi!” I didn’t even know that they had done this. I’d actually had a dream about Jerry a few nights before he played on Saturday Night Live, which was November 12. I had dreamed that he had done the peace sign and when he was on Saturday Night Live at the end of their last song, he did do the peace sign so I was amazed.
My friend and I went to the concert that weekend in the Uptown Theatre in Chicago. I thought it would be a good idea to do a pumpkin again. My friend was into topographical maps and I found a spot on the map called Terrapin Ridge and there was a train station that ran through it. It’s the highest point in Illinois. So I had a copy of the map and I put it inside this pumpkin and I carved the pumpkin in a hotel. I went to the show and that was November 17, 1978. I went up to the front and I gave Jerry the pumpkin. He had just come on stage. He hadn’t started playing yet. He took the pumpkin from me and said, “Thank you,” and he was really delighted.
After the show, a studio drummer came from backstage and said, “Would you like to meet Jerry Garcia?” and I thought to myself, “Well, sure.” I thought, “Wow, why me?” He told me a time the following day where Jerry would be and I went with my friend. Jerry was there and he let us in and it was like an adventure. We went in and talked to Jerry and Jerry invited me to stay for the show. So I went to the show that night and Jerry invited me back to the hotel afterwards for the gathering. They were having a party and I went back to the hotel and visited for a while. Then I actually slept on the floor. I took the bedsheet from his bed and I slept on the floor of his room. I had never been in that world before and I think Jerry assumed things were going to happen that weren’t going to happen and I told him they weren’t going to happen. He was a little bit put off by that but we stayed in touch after that for many years.
I started connecting with the music and I would get backstage passes periodically from friends and sometimes from Jerry and I’d be backstage and we’d visit. We just were friends and I’d call him and tell him that I was concerned about his health. He told me later that he thought that was very dear and very sweet.
Bill Graham: The night the Grateful Dead closed Winterland, New Year’s, 1978, was a great night. Before the show, I wrote a letter to the Dead. Basically, I asked them to rehearse for this gig. I told them there were certain songs that they had not played in a long time. That night, I put a billboard outside Winterland. It said, “They’re not the best at what they do. They’re the only ones at what they do.” Which was something I had said about them in an interview. Right underneath the billboard on the night of the show, some kid was standing with a sign that said, ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE DAYS SINCE LAST SF “DARK STAR.” So I wasn’t wrong about the crowd wanting to hear certain songs. For whatever reason, the Dead invited too many bikers backstage. To some extent, that rained on my parade. Two days later, Herb Caen wrote something about how coke was being snorted backstage. The Dead played for six hours.
Bob Barsotti: There were Hell’s Angels there and it got to the point where no one was really in control of what was going on. But the Grateful Dead and the Blues Brothers were a real fitting ending to that place.
Donna Godchaux Mckay: By 1979, the really hard drugs had started to come in. There were so many fights. It was just a fight after every gig. As a couple, Keith and I were fighting like crazy. We half killed each other on the road. One night, I rammed my BMW into Keith’s BMW. Three times. Then I drove my BMW into a telephone pole and took a taxi home. We were wasted spirit, soul, and body. It had come to a point where we were discussing how in the world were we going to quit and we thought, “We’re not quitters.” There was a meeting at our house and the band came over and they said, “We think it’s time for you guys to move on,” and we said, “We know it’s time for us to move on.” It was a very mutual decision.
Robert Greenfield: A year and a half after being asked to leave the band, Keith Godchaux was killed in an automobile accident, thereby becoming the second Grateful Dead keyboardist to die. The Grateful Dead had already hired a third. Brent Mydland joined the band in April 1979. On stage, he and Jerry had a very close and intuitive musical relationship.
Tom Davis: After they did Saturday Night Live the second time in 1980 and played “Sugar Magnolia,” they were a lot more comfortable. Everyone went to the Blues Bar afterwards to hang out. Was it a competition to see who could do the most drugs? That was what those years were called.
Jerilyn Lee Brandelius: I remember when Rex Jackson, who was our road manager at the time decided that limousines were too high-profile. So we went from the hotels to the gigs and the airports in Winnebagos. Actually, it was a lot of fun. But people were running after the Winnebagos and jumping on the ladders and crawling on top of them. I remember some guy jumping in front of our Winnebago and saying, “Run over my arm, Jerry. Jerry! Run over me, please.” Like it would be a great honor to be run over by Jerry’s Winnebago. Jerry just went, “Euuuuuh!”
Len Dell’amico: Many times I’d sit at the kitchen table at the Grateful Dead office on Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael. Front Street was the macho scene and then there were “the girls,” as they called themselves, in the office. Front Street was where the serious doobies would go down. The office was girls, sugar, and caffeine. Many times I saw Jerry sit there. He would just come in to bullshit. As soon as people knew he was there, he’d get a stream of people coming with business. Always, there would be, “This arrived for you. Here’s the book you wanted. Here’s the tapes. Here’s the …”
After an hour, he’d have this pile in front of him. Without fail, he’d say, “I gotta go.” He’d thank everybody for the stuff and then just get up and leave and leave the stuff. One time, he left an ounce of some really expensive pot in a vacuum seal bag. Hawaiian or something. I could see the orange fibers. He left without it. What was I going to do? Just leave it there? It was illegal. I ran after him with it and I said, “Don’t you want this?” He said, “Ah, okay, whatever.” It was like he never kept anything. It was the black T-shirt and the pants and the keys to his car and the cigarettes and that was it.
At that time, he was renting a house at number twelve Hepburn Heights in San Rafael. Rock Scully had the upstairs and Jerry had the downstairs. I was surprised that this guy was basically living in the basement of this place.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry moved from our house in Inverness to Hepburn Heights. We’d go over there to visit him but he was not really in any kind of shape to visit by this time and I’m not sure how the band kept playing. Their income level was really low. I went to live in Berkeley and I was waiting for Jerry to pick up the phone and say, “Let’s get it back together here. Let’s get a place. I’m going to straighten myself out.” But that phone call never came. Every time I tried to call him, the connection didn’t get made. After about a year of waiting around, I gave up on it.
Nicki Scully: This was a house that I found in ’79 and moved into and then Jerry moved into it. There was definitely more interaction between us and Jerry in the beginning but there was never a lot. There was no interior stairway between our level and his so I had to go outside to bring him food or he would come up. We were kind of his surrogate family but he would not go out of his way to come up and be familial. That was not his way. The kind of wall that Jerry built was nothing that required any words. It was never articulated. He never yelled “Leave me alone” at anybody. There was just a palpable wall around him that grew larger and thicker and deeper and more consistent, depending on the deepness of the habit.
Alan Trist: In the early eighties, I remember Jerry and I had discussions about what he was doing to himself. I said, “Is it the exposure to the public?” Immediately, he said, “Yes, that’s part of it.” Couple that with Jerry’s well-known dislike of being put in the place of being the leader. He had a real dilemma there. All of this goes to the business of experiencing life to its fullness as well as dealing with the uncomfortable aspects of life. Those contradictions were all present in Jerry.
Nicki Scully: In the fall of 1980, the Dead celebrated their fifteenth anniversary with shows at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco and then at Halloween at Radio City Music Hall in New York. That run was fraught with difficulties. Rockefeller Center had to close down because there were so many kids camped out waiting for tickets to go on sale that people couldn’t get into the buildings to go to work. After the first bunch of people bought tickets, there were none left. They had all been pre-scalped. This was what precipitated the Dead doing their own tickets.
There were also forged backstage passes. Rock had asked me to give this guy a pass. I think I knew this was a squirrelly thing and this guy was their connection. But Rock made it very clear that he didn’t want this person backstage. He could go to the show but he had to stay away from backstage. I got to the hall and they gave me my stack of backstage passes and told me to sign them. I went and found the guy and I told him not to come near backstage. But they were re-routing everybody with backstage passes through a backstage entrance so they could monitor who was using the passes.
When two of the roadies saw this guy, they pulled him out, took him into an elevator shaft, beat him up, and tossed him out because he was Jerry’s connection. Then they came and found me. They put me up against the wall and said, “Did you give this guy a pass? Did Rock tell you to?” I said, “What the hell’s going on here?” I was infuriated and I refused to answer their questions. I refused to lay it on Rock. There was a lot finger pointing and very little understanding and no real communication. They were acting to protect Jerry, who never knew anything about it.
Jerilyn Lee Brandelius: One New Year’s Eve, my son, who was thirteen at the time, and one of the older kids saw a vial drop out of a guy’s bag in a dressing room. Nobody noticed it but the kids. There was a “C” scratched on the top of this vial and they thought that meant “cocaine.” When the band came back off after their first encore, the kids were drooling, foaming at the mouth, couldn’t speak. My son was screaming, “I’m dead! I’m dead! I’m dead!” Wavy Gravy was going, “You’re not dead, man. Here, look at this mirror. There’s fog on it.” He was saying, “It must be LSD. I’ve seen this loop before.”
Because they had immediately started feeling weird and nauseous, they had tossed the vial in a trash can. Rock Scully searched all the trash cans. It took all night. Rock dumped out every trash can. Finally, he found the vial. It was crystal LSD and they’d whacked out a couple big lines for themselves. Those kids didn’t come down for days. The band did not go back on that night. It was one of the only New Year’s Eves where they only did one encore.
Garcia’s comment at the time was that he said he realized it was time for us not to tell the kids what not to do but to tell them what to do. They had seen us taking these things rather casually and he said, “This is a real important lesson for us right now because these kids are gettin’ to that age where we don’t have much control of them anymore. They’re like young adults now and we need to help them understand how to make these choices.”
Justin Krentzmann: It was cool because when I was a kid, Jerry would tell me all about Buddy Holly and about all the people who’d turned him onto rock ’n’ roll and all I had to do was trade him for my Marvel Comic Books. There was this one great Superman versus Muhammad Ali and he saw it. I was holding it in the elevator on the way up and I never saw the magazine again. I didn’t even make it to my room and Garcia had already swiped it up and read it right in a second.
Jerry in particular was somebody that if you just looked at his side of a conversation, you wouldn’t ever know that he was talking to an eight-year-old at all. He never underestimated you and he’d start going off and I’d stop him and say, “Jerry, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” And it was like, “Oh, you should read this book, this book, and this book.” I was fourteen by then but I couldn’t even pronounce those authors’ names.
If I happened to be sitting next to Phil on a plane, stewardesses would ask him what I wanted and he’d go, “Why are you asking me? Ask him.” When you were a little kid, you’d think, “Yes!” They never really kept anything like drugs from us. They always gave us the parental thing of, “You know, you shouldn’t do this. It’s bad for you,” but they weren’t hypocritical. It was pretty hard to hide what was going on back then but they didn’t make an effort to try to pretend it wasn’t happening. They didn’t want us doing it but it was not something that was hidden.
Stacy Kreutzmann: Along with Sunshine and Heather, I was one of the first generation of Dead kids. I think most of us felt closer to the families of other band members than our own biological parents. It was sort of like a musical kibbutz. Like, “Hey, my dad’s playing. Jerry will give me some candy.” For me, Jerry’s voice was a focal point. It was the sweetest lullaby I’d ever known. Because as a child, I would fall asleep at the shows. I would literally fall asleep on the stage. Jerry was always soft towards me because I reminded him a lot of Heather. I remember him saying to me, “You’re a lot like my daughter who I never see.” People would be surprised at his tenderness towards me. Whenever I’d hear Jerry singing or a loud guitar, I’d get incredibly sleepy. I found nothing more relaxing than listening to that. It just took me right back to being a little kid when if Jerry was singing, everything was right with the world.
David Graham: For Creek Hart, Justin, Annabelle, the Scully girls, Winterland was our home. Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium was our home. Those were our homes. Behind the Kaiser, there was this whole other theater that was our kingdom and our domain. There was no child care. We would play football in the foyer. We used to do things like slide tickets through the door and give them to fans.
Sage Scully: At Hepburn Heights was when I was closest friends with Jerry. At that time, it wasn’t a very nice living situation for him. Jerry wasn’t healthy. Rock wasn’t healthy. I remember one time we were coming back from the New Year’s show and it was me and Trixie and one of her friends and we were all sitting in the back of the car sleeping. Jerry woke up and he looked up at me out of the corner of his eye and he went, “Am I crowding you?” That was the sweetest thing ever. I was eight years old and I said, “Jerry, please. Go back to sleep.” What happened to me was that you lose what you think a normal parent should be to you to the band and the drugs and the schedule. You begin to take a backseat and I think I felt it and Annabelle must have felt it like I did in my life. It was hard to understand that this was how it was.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I guess it was the winter of ’81 when Jerry and I got married at Oakland Auditorium. I had decided that I would just talk to him on birthdays and Christmases and holidays and try to do it that way. That almost worked out and actually kept the thing going. We came down for Christmas and knew that he was playing with dangerous stuff. I realized that he could die at any minute. I said, “Look, you know you’re going to probably croak here or something bad might happen. I would feel better if we were married.” The reason we hadn’t gotten married before then was that we were still both married to our previous spouses. We also had always both thought that we didn’t need a piece of legal paper to maintain our family and our relationship. He said, “You know, I’d feel better, too.” I said, “Well, do you want to get married?” He said, “Yeah, you know, I’ve been thinking about it for a really long time.” And I said, “Gee, me too.”
We still loved each other very much but now it was through this incredible series of impediments. I had taken the high moral ground and couldn’t come back because I couldn’t do what he was doing. And he couldn’t step out of what he was doing because by now he was really into it. I had really wanted to get married for so long for the sake of the kids and because I loved him so much even though we were so far apart. I thought if we got married, that was going to do it and we’d move back in together. I was really hoping that this would be the thing that would set us back on the road to his recovery from the drugs but he said, “You know, if we get married, I’m still not sure if I want to live with you.” I said, “Well, okay, dear, I understand. You certainly can have all the space you need.” I was saying all these platitudinous things.
We got married in Oakland Auditorium on New Year’s Eve in his dressing room. Before Jerry went out and played that night, he was warming up and he played this thing on the guitar for me, and it was so beautiful that it would have melted a stone. It was glorious and just left us all in tears. A longtime friend who’d become a Buddhist monk did the whole ceremony. In Tibetan. I kept laughing all the way through because it was completely incomprehensible. We did the ceremony during the break. It was quick but it was sweet. The kids and I were all back there hugging and talking and it was really nice and then he went out and played and then they did the midnight thing.
When the shows were over, we went in different directions and there was a snowstorm and a terrible flood. We were staying at Hepburn Heights with Jerry and they closed all the freeways, the Golden Gate Bridge, the tunnel, and the Richmond Bridge, and I couldn’t get home to Oregon. Jerry was saying, “I don’t think you should move back down here quite just yet. Maybe this spring but not right now. Not right now, you know?”
The flood was so severe that it gave me four or five days there at Hepburn Heights. Things were so strange and uncomfortable that I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I remember jumping up and saying, “Oh, it’s time to go. I’ve got to go,” and I was thinking, “Poor Jerry, he has built this for himself and it’s not very nice.” Back we went to Oregon. Jerry would come through on tour or we would go down there to see him but we didn’t see very much of him at all. Jerry and I got married but that didn’t change a goddamn thing. We got married and it didn’t make a damned bit of difference.
Rock Scully: Pete Townshend called me and asked for the Grateful Dead to come bail them out of their European tour when the Who were breaking up. Pete wanted us to be the co-band with them and do London and Germany. It was such a great opportunity. We were going to go to one TV station in West Germany and play this rock TV show that went to thirty-two countries. It was like doing a whole tour of Europe in one city and with the Who. Garcia was very reluctant to go because there were no drugs and he was strung out and he didn’t know what to do about that. I had to go to the rest of the band and tell them how Jerry was going to be covered. I had to have Pete call back and say he would have somebody there at the airport to meet Jerry and we didn’t have to worry about it. There would be something there for him the moment he arrived. Pete was already clean but he knew where Jerry was coming from. Then we had to convince Jerry. First, I had to convince all the rest of the band that this would be a really good trip to do and then in a band meeting, everybody went, “Jerry, we’ve got to do this,” and then Jerry for it.
Pete Townshend: I think it was in Germany that Jerry said to me, “I know none of this stuff is academic enough for you. Do you want to play some Wagner?” I said, “Come on, let’s try. Götterdämmerung? What key is it in? Let’s go for it.”
Richard Loren: Jerry and I were still very very close but he was doing heroin and I wasn’t. Then Rock Scully started coming into the picture. He was not helping Jerry. The last thing Jerry needed was somebody to encourage him to take drugs. Rock was the provider of that need.
Rock Scully: We got started independently. I don’t think it was about the same time. Personally, we had no idea what it was when it came up on us. We figured it was an opiate but we didn’t know just how pure it was. It was a smokable thing. Jerry never did shoot it. Me neither. I never shot. We’ve all known junkies who shoot up. Sticking a needle in your arm is fucking yourself basically. You’re into that whole ritual and you’re fucking yourself. Women are no longer important and relationships don’t matter and it’s a very isolating thing. Doing any kind of opiate or any kind of drug secretly is isolating. You end up in a bag you don’t want to be in. For Jerry, who was so outgoing, to end up that way was just really depressing. That was what was going on. I was becoming the middleman between the band and Jerry. Because he didn’t want to see anybody. So if they wanted Jerry’s opinion on something, I had to go and ask him. It was a very tough place. I was between the rock and a hard place. It was impossible for me.
Steve Brown: Steve Parish was locked in as Jerry’s guy. He took care of his equipment personally and subsequently he took care of Jerry personally as I did actually for a little while there, too. We shared that responsibility. We’d be out shopping at Marin Surplus getting Jerry’s latest wardrobe of Levi’s and corduroy pants and T-shirts. Black and blue. Although I’d throw in a few green ones occasionally just to keep him off balance. Jerry didn’t shop for himself and I don’t recall too many stories of him ever going to the mall. He’d been getting things taken care of for him pretty much from the sixties on. Having people procure for him and I’m not just talking about drugs. We’re talking about taking care of his life. From renting houses to renting cars to paying bills. Even to the tools that he used in his trade. He had that all taken care of for him and delivered and brought up to him. He was pretty much locked into being catered to. Hanging around with other people in the business who had habits seemed to make it feel okay for him to indulge, too. That was the other part of the problem.
Richard Loren: What happened quite frankly was that I was basically aced out of the picture. I was doing all the work and during the night when I wasn’t working, the Rock Scullys and the others were telling the band what a crook I was. On the Europe tour they did in March ’81, I got fired. One night, five in the morning, coke-fueled. “Boom, boom, boom” on my door. “Wake up.” I woke up and Bill Kreutzmann walked into my room. He grabbed me by the collar, slammed me up against the wall, accused me of stealing from the band and this, that, and the other thing, and fired me. When they returned from the tour, they apologized and rehired me. Six months later, I resigned. I had never been in it for the money. I was in it because of Jerry. I would have done anything for him because I loved him more than I loved anything. I loved him because he was such an almost perfect person. He was unpretentious. He was compassionate. He was humble. In a way, he was a Buddha.
Steve Brown: Jerry was very much a catered-to person. Which was not to say that he wouldn’t stop off at times at either the Whole Foods on Miller Avenue in Mill Valley or subsequently at the 7-Eleven, depending on which mood was hitting him at that moment. Sightings at both places in the same day were known to have occurred. In the daytime, you’d see him at lunch eating organic. After the gig, you’d see him at night at the 7-Eleven with the Häagen-Dazs and a chili dog. That was him exactly. The guy who would give you the black and the white, the yin and the yang. He could be the pure guy going for the coolest hippest thing to be. He could be a slob like all of us, going for the really easy, not-good-for-you life. He thought he could get away with having both. He was an artist at it. To me, it’s pretty much how the true American really is. We have these high goals of the lofty idealistic way that things should be and we go in that direction and he did, too. But when reality sets in, there are a lot of bad things and cheesiness and funkiness.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: We used to have arguments about why he was destroying himself. He used to argue in a way that I could never really penetrate, “Why live?” Jerry’s worst period was when he lived downstairs from Rock. At that time, I lived right down the street. I saw him many times in Hepburn Heights. Jerry was living like a badger. Rock had the upstairs and that was when Nicki was with him and their two girls.
Sage Scully: Jerry could also be a bear. He could be very scary. He scared me a lot also. Because he was moody. He never barked at me but he had a bark. He definitely had a bark. My room was right above his and I used to listen to him try to go to bed. I used to like taking these hangers and I’d write little notes on them and stick them out my window and lower them to him if Rock was down there or I’d go get a broom.
Sue Swanson: Mountain Girl said to me that they had a conversation where Jerry said, “Isn’t it weird that I would pick the one drug that you absolutely will not tolerate?” They had a Christmas up there. After Christmas, Annabelle said to MG, “God, wouldn’t it have been nice if Dad had been here?” Dad had been there.
Steve Brown: By the middle part of the eighties, it was getting funky. I didn’t enjoy being around and hanging out during that period. Jerry was not physically healthy and there was a certain attitude of protection that was starting to be reinforced more strongly by the palace guards who were sensitive to his condition and trying not to let it be too well known or too well exposed to outside people. All of a sudden, it was, “Why do you want to see him?” Then there was the kind of shallow pleasantness that wasn’t the real Jerry. It was like he was struggling with something and so he smiled at you with this kind of “Leave me alone, just be kind” smile. “I’m acknowledging you and being nice to you but that’s all I can afford.” There was a gulf that didn’t used to be there. Before, there was a lot of talking and laughing and it was easy and free. Now it was like if you had to say something, you better make it cool and if you didn’t need to say something, you better not even say anything. You better not even be there. So it felt a lot different.
John Perry Barlow: At one point in 1984, I went over to Hepburn Heights. I don’t think anybody in the scene besides possibly Steve Parish had been there in a year and a half or maybe two years. Nobody dared go in there. But being how I am, a willful fool for treading where angels won’t go, I went in there just to see what was going on and I spent the afternoon with Garcia. He was in terrible shape. Finally I said, “Sometimes I wish you’d flat die so we can all mourn you and get it out of our system.” He gave me this incredibly dark look and he got up and he padded down the hall. He went into his bedroom, closed the door, and put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on it.
Jon Mcintire: One time, again when I wasn’t manager, I was living in St. Louis and I came back to California and I called Jerry at home and said, “I’d like to come by and see you and talk to you.” He said, “Great, come on over.” So I went over and it was the first time we had basically seen one another since he had started doing a lot of heroin. He opened the door and said to me, “I’ve been a stone fuckin’ junkie for the last two years. What you been doin’?” Those were his first words to me. In other words, “Let’s pop this bubble right now.” He was not at all judgmental. He wasn’t saying, “I regret it.” He was just saying, “Here’s who I am now. Who are you now? What’s been happening?” He knew I was going to know this. So let’s just bypass the bullshit and go right to the heart of the matter and really talk about what was happening with ourselves in life. That was what he meant. I was there to be intimate. I was there to talk turkey. I wasn’t there to be judgmental or to do an intervention or anything like that.
Justin Kreutzmann: He called that his vacation. His new way to take a vacation for a while. It was a long vacation. Maybe it finally got to him or maybe he just got tired. He described it as just trying to take a break the only way he knew that he could. Because in his mind, with all the pressure from all the overhead, he couldn’t stop playing. It must have been a fantastic amount of pressure to have. To be supporting that many people and have everything be so dependent that when he blew a tour, they basically were in financial chaos. That would really bum me out or piss me off. I don’t know how you would react to that or towards those people. You’d either probably feel really sorry for them or you’d want them to all fuck off because you were tired of having to be the guy to support everybody. But I don’t know.
Rock Scully: Heroin was a great drug and it had worked very well for Garcia in the studio because he could really concentrate with it, but once it became a real habit, this wasn’t like cocaine. He wouldn’t shower and he wouldn’t shave. He didn’t shave anyway because he had that beard but he wouldn’t look after himself and he started burning up the bedroom and the hotel rooms and so on. His nods got to be very scary. Being his road manager for the Garcia band, it got to be very very harsh.
I knew I was strung out and obviously Garcia was strung out and I was very frightened about his physical condition. In an effort to clean myself up, I told him I was going to quit and I told him the reason I was going to quit was that I couldn’t be scared anymore. It was too scary. I didn’t know if I was going to wake up in the morning and find him dead, dying, or swollen. Because his ankles were swelling up. This was when the diabetes started kicking in. All he was eating was hot dogs and steaks and Hâagen-Dazs.
We had to have all our band meetings up in my living room because Jerry wouldn’t leave the house. Even then, coming upstairs was a big deal. It just got to be too hard on me so I called a doctor and I had him come over to the house to take a look at Jerry. From then on, me and Jerry were at odds. He did not like acknowledging the fact that he was sick but we’d had to buy him new shoes because his ankles were so swollen. He had a whole new size foot and he’d never lie down. He’d never put his feet up. He’d sit there on the edge of his bed, play his guitar, smoke his Persian, nod off, and drop his cigarette in his moccasin. That would wake him up, yelling and screaming.
This stuff was starting to happen in hotel rooms and it was too scary and I was afraid that he was getting sick. I knew he was strung out. I was. I understood that part of it. But I couldn’t understand why he was getting all swollen and pasty and wouldn’t take a shower and wouldn’t change his clothes. I couldn’t understand why he was getting all feisty and would not talk to the band and did not understand that there were real-time things going on.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: Back then, I saw Jerry once a month. If he was at his worst, he would avoid me because he’d be ashamed. Before he would see me, I was one of the people he would always try to put himself together for. He had all these burn holes on his shirts and on his carpets and we were all terrified about that. We talked to Rock and Nicki about putting a smoke alarm downstairs.
Nicki Scully: Fire hazard was certainly a definite concern. We tried to keep an eye on things without being intrusive. Rock and Jerry were in it together but Rock always looked after Jerry. He really cared about Jerry. There certainly were some distortions in the relationship because of their unhealthful habits and because of who they were but I never for a minute questioned Rock’s love for Jerry. When I began to understand the nature of the habit, I felt Rock didn’t have love for much of anything but heroin. That superseded everything and that was true for Jerry as well.
David Nelson: I didn’t want to believe it but when the New Riders were on the road, one of my roadies told me about Jerry. I kept saying, “No, no! Couldn’t possibly be, man.” He laughed and said, “You haven’t seen one of their shows yet.” I said, “Jerry’s nodding?” And he said, “Yup. Sorry.” I went and talked to Jerry but you don’t go to your old friend like a big brother or a priest or someone with that counselor kind of attitude. What did he say about it when I talked to him? “It’s my medicine.”
Jon Mcintire: For him, I think accepting the opiates was the desire for the feeling of no-feeling. I remember one time saying to Garcia, “Look, I’m a tremendously independent person yet I depend on you and if I depend on you along with so many others, what’s the effect of this on you?” He said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m so hard on myself, you could never be as hard on me as I am.” For him, the opiates put a veil over things and softened the edges.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: I was pretty close to Nora Sage. She was the person taking care of Jerry. At that time, he was totally asexual. The opium wiped out his sexual drive. He just wasn’t there.
Nicki Scully: I used to find these little gardens planted around the house. Nora was being this little elf who came and beautified the place by planting flowers. I said, “Jer, that isn’t me. Do you know what’s goin’ on?” He said, “Oh, that’s Nora. She works down at the health food store.” The next time I went down there, I got Nora pointed out to me and I thanked her because I did think it was really sweet. She became my babysitter and I became dependent on her. She was fabulous with the kids and they adored her.
Laird Grant: He kept drinking liquids but it didn’t do him any good. He just bloated. On top of everything else, he was so fat. His shit was hanging. It was coming over the top of his socks. You could sit there and see the fat bulging out over the top of his shoes. He looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. His skin was pasty, pale white. He looked like he could hardly move. I said, “Hey, man. Packing all that weight around, you’re going to fucking cack off from a massive heart attack. You ought to get rid of it.” He said, “Oh, I puts it on and I takes it off.” I said, “Yeah, well, you ought to start fucking taking some of it off, man.” And then I didn’t see him for a while.
Rock Scully: Finally, my wife and kids moved out and went up to Oregon and that left me as a bachelor upstairs and Jerry as a bachelor downstairs. This was trouble. We were this mutual denial society.
Nicki Scully: When I left Hepburn Heights at the end of January ’81, Rock’s brother Dicken moved in. Rock and Dicken and Jerry were hopeless. And helpless.
Rock Scully: The doctor came. Jerry didn’t want to see him but I forced him down his throat. Because I felt that I needed some backup on it, I told Phil, Bill, Bobby, and Mickey that I was doing it and when I was doing it. Mickey and Phil and Bill came over to the house. They were upstairs. I went downstairs, knocked on Jerry’s door, and said, “Look, the doctor’s here and wants to take a look at you. I’ve told you that I can’t go out on the road with you anymore until you get looked at because you could be getting very very ill.” He was there with his swollen ankles and discoloration and all kinds of scary stuff. Garcia said, “Okay.”
Garcia was staring daggers at me because he was very pissed off about having his personal life looked into like this. Because this guy might stick a finger up his ass or something. The doctor went down there and spent about twenty minutes with Garcia. He came back up, he was ashen gray. He said, “Rock, it’s a good thing you called me. This man is about to die.” That was what he told me. Then I had to go back downstairs and tell Garcia. I said, “Garcia, now you’re going to have to get some blood work done because the doctor is really freaked.” He went, “Okay, I’ll go in next week. Set up an appointment.” I said, “No, the nurse is upstairs. She’s coming down now.” He went livid. I said, “No, we have to do this. The doctor says you are in desperate shape and it has to be checked out. It has to be. You might die.”
He didn’t want to hear about it. He said, “Scully, that’s it.” He was so pissed off at me. The nurse went down and drew his blood. They took it away and did a workup on it immediately. While the nurse was downstairs doing this number on him, the doctor was upstairs talking to the band about his condition because I’d said, “Look, you ought to explain this to them.”
I wanted him to tell them that this was not my doing. I knew I was going to get the blame for this, no matter what. Certainly from Garcia. But I was already getting the blame from the rest of the band because I was doing the same drug. I wasn’t the only one. God, it was obvious. It was very obvious because they’d used it themselves. They knew exactly what was going on so I was not going to lie about that. I had to be the stand-up junkie, which was not a cool role to be in. I was going to be the fall guy no matter what and I knew it. So I figured I might as well be the fall guy with some fucking effect. That was when I brought the doctor in.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: There was a period of time when there was a struggle within the band about Rock. I came from the outside and tried to help push Rock out. It wasn’t because I disliked Rock as a person. It was because I thought he was so strung out and that was why Jerry was in that situation.
Nicki Scully: Many people saw Rock as the root of the problem and tried to oust him. But I think in the end, when they were in that position, they became enablers, too. Just like everyone who loved Jerry.
Rock Scully: The band never went down and talked to him. Garcia was so livid, he didn’t want to talk to them. No way was he going to talk to somebody. For this, I got fired. About a month later, I was out of there. Because of Jerry’s lack of support for me but also because I had to go into rehab. I went off to rehab and I was supposed to come back. I was going to do a month in rehab and a couple of months readjusting to a life without drugs and that was what I did. Jerry and I, we actually had a truce and he said I could come back. It wasn’t true, though, because Jerry didn’t want to quit.
Nicki Scully: Few people choose to leave the Grateful Dead scene. If you became a big enough drain for long enough, you’d get ostracized. At a certain point, they’d had enough of Rock and sent him off to rehab at their expense. Billy Kreutzmann came in the limo, we went to the airport and put him on the plane, and Rock was history. I’m sure it saved his life. But when you’re history, you’re history. No one in the scene supported his recovery after he came out of rehab. Hardly anyone ever talked to him or acknowledged him again. As soon as Rock was fired, I lost many of my privileges as well.
Owsley Stanley: They drove him out of the scene because he was Garcia’s supplier. He wasn’t allowed to come to the shows for years. They couldn’t control it all but Rock was too close. He was one target they could get a handle on.
Jon Mcintire: During that period away from the Grateful Dead, I had been a domestic violence and rape crisis counselor in St. Louis. I’d had chemical dependency training. When they hired me back as manager, they knew what I’d been doing. So I came back under the mantle of, “We now want to reform ourselves.” I felt it was important to do an intervention about chemical dependency or the things that were keeping people from being really conscious about how they were living. I felt it was pernicious and it wasn’t just Jerry. There were the Jerry things and there were the other things and I brought in a counselor to deal with everyone.
Rock Scully: For me and heroin, that was it. That was eleven years ago. One of the things I learned in rehab and then in the three years I spent in AA and NA is that drugs and drinking, no matter what they are, have a tendency to isolate. Being in the limelight all the damn time, Jerry wanted to go away into his privacy, into his own private scene, his own private life, with his own private drug. That was what he did. I hate to say it but that was what he did.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: That place you come to between sleeping and waking was where Jerry got his inspiration and his energy and his life lessons. The stuff that was important to him happened during that time and I think that with these drugs he was able to spend a lot of time there. It was a waking dream state. To my way of thinking, this was his shamanic quest and I felt somehow very respectful of his desire to pursue that state and could never really call him all the names that some people might think I ought to have called him. For him, that in-between state was the crack between the worlds that Castaneda talks about in the Don Juan books.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: I never tried this drug so I don’t know what it does but I know he always avoided emotional pain and he had a lot to avoid. Isn’t it supposed to make you feel good? I think he was a very wounded soul and wanted to escape. You can see the pattern with his escaping women. Whoever he was connected with in his primary relationship, he was always sneaking around to take drugs or be with another woman. I don’t know why. I couldn’t read his mind. He didn’t talk about his internal crises or his emotional process. Really, I don’t think anyone could have stayed married to this person.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: The major issue for me which had to do with his addiction was that he didn’t feel he was worthy. He told me on several occasions that all the fame and adulation he had embarrassed him. It was amazing that he was so successful because what most people do in his situation is that they feel they’re unworthy and then they do things to prove that. His situation with women was to me clearly that. If they gave him affection, there was something wrong with them.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry was a mystic from the beginning. He really wasn’t that interested in our small little human world that much. Even though he was not in good condition and seemingly disconnected, to my way of thinking this was intimately connected with everything that we’d been trying to do up to that point. I couldn’t live with seeing him go down like that but frankly, I was a little envious of his ability to just sit there and trip out. In retrospect, I don’t think it was a great position to take. I should have been more interfering. Because he went so far, it was scary. He and I had a real communications problem about it. Like I said, I didn’t want to challenge him about it. Frankly, I didn’t think it was any of my business. My business was different. It involved living things and my kids and family and keeping it together.
When I would get with Jerry, I would feel like I was just spinning my wheels. I’d talk about the kids in school and he’d say, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” I realized that I just didn’t have a lot of clout with those kind of talks. I couldn’t get him with any of that stuff anymore so I just let it go.
Jon Mcintire: I started back with the band and I was taking them on the road. I would go around at night to their hotel rooms to give them road money, talk with them about the scheduling, whatever. This was the darkest period in Garcia’s life that I witnessed. He just looked horrid and when I’d go to the door to give him something, he’d barely open the door and I’d slip the money through and ask him quickly whatever I could before he’d slam the door and go back into his hibernation. Back into his stupor.
This one time, he opened the door completely with this grand gesture and his pant legs were up above his knees and his legs were all open sores. And he stood there looking at me. Now, he could have rolled his pant legs down. He could have kept me waiting at the door while he did that or he could have just barely opened the door and grabbed the money and slammed the door. But this time, he flung the door open and he was standing there and I saw these open sores all over his legs and that was when I made the decision to do the intervention. I came back off the road and I thought, “This has got to stop. I gotta do something.” Because I thought it was a plea for help. That was what it was.
Robert Greenfield: In September 1984, Jerry Garcia stepped out on stage in the Veterans Memorial Auditorium at Marin Civic Center to perform at a tribute for Bill Graham being put on by the Mill Valley Film Festival. Because Bill put me there, I was sitting in the second row, far closer to the action than I needed to be. God but Jerry looked awful that night. Not just dead but like a creature who’d returned from beyond the grave. His skin was so pale that in the lights, it seemed to glow a dull gray-green. Had he brushed his hand across his clammy forehead to wipe off the sweat and come away instead with spots of festering mold and sticky cobwebs, no one would have been surprised.
Jon Mcintire: When I did that intervention with Garcia, I wanted Hunter to take part in it and he said, “I support you in what you’re doing. I cannot take part in it.” I was talking to Hunter later on and he said, “One thing we need to realize is we’re dealing with a character flaw here that’s been there from the beginning. It’s not something that just came on with the heroin.”
Robert Greenfield: Unlike other musicians from the Fillmore’s golden days, Jerry was not there for the meal preceding the show. He did not come to the dance party that followed. He just played and he left. Once he was gone, it did not seem possible he could keep going like this for very much longer. While freebasing in his BMW in Golden Gate Park four months later, Jerry was busted for possession of twenty-three packets of heroin and cocaine.
Laird Grant: He had just gone and copped. It was enough for an army, man. But that was his score for the week.
Len Dell’amico: This was after an attempted intervention. He just could not deal with what they were saying or doing. His way of dealing with it was to go and behave in such a way as to get busted and that wasn’t good for him. Look at the circumstances of what happened. To park in a no-parking zone in a big rich car? Why not just put out a sign and ask for it?
Jon Mcintire: He was on his way from Marin County to a treatment program in Oakland and he was in Golden Gate Park and he chose to stop and turn on in plain view. Essentially, he was saying, “Stop me from doing what I’m doing.” Which was going to treatment. Or it may have been a last hurrah. I can’t know what was really going on inside his mind. We only know the circumstances.
Richard Loren: Garcia said, “God yeah. I’d love to make a movie. I really love this Kurt Vonnegut book, Sirens of Titan.” One thing led to another and we bought the rights to Sirens of Titan. Then we renewed it and renewed it and we renewed it. Tom Davis, of Saturday Night Live and Franken and Davis, and Jerry were working on the script.
Tom Davis: He and I actually spent about a month and a half writing the screenplay. It was not in the right form to be done professionally but at the time, Jerry was going, “Fuck it. Write the scenes and don’t worry about it.” When we worked, Jerry was always in the recliner. Then he would doze in front of the set. I was telling him, “If you keep consuming all this stuff, you’re going to get sick in the middle of something.”
Richard Loren: We couldn’t get it sold because they didn’t like the script and Jerry didn’t want to change it to suit the way Hollywood wanted to make it. Jerry wanted to direct it so it was very difficult to make that deal. We got Bill Murray to read the book. He loved it and he wanted to make the movie. We got Tom Davis, Bill Murray, and Michael Ovitz in a room. We signed a development deal with Universal to make this movie.
Gary Gutierrez: It was Tom Davis and Bill Murray, Jerry and me, and a bunch of attorneys and this guy from Universal sitting around this huge table. The only memorable thing to me about it was that Bill Murray and Tom were at opposite sides of the table and during this very serious discussion about the deal, there was Bill Murray making his mouth like a billiard pocket at the edge of the table and Tom Davis was rolling gumballs across the table trying to get them into Bill Murray’s mouth. We did a bunch of storyboards and they were really beautiful.
Richard Loren: Then it fell apart because Bill Murray had that unsuccessful movie of The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. It flopped and he disappeared for two years. During those two years, the project became orphaned at Universal. After that, Jerry fell apart. He was being pummeled by the drug dealers, his own weaknesses, and the demands and needs of the band prior to “Touch of Grey.”
Len Dell’amico: It was an expensive script. Garcia hung on to the rights to Sirens for I don’t know how many years, paying that option money over and over and Vonnegut would keep saying, “When are you going to make the movie?” Jerry loved that story and I just wish to hell that it could have happened. It may happen someday based on one of those screenplays.
Gary Gutierrez: It would have been a great movie and it ought to get made and I thought Tom’s script was pretty good. Its only flaw may have been that it was very close to the book and the structure of the book is a very non-film structure. It’s a kind of chaotic, rambling story. But it was always Jerry’s dream to do it and I was sad that it never came about.
Tom Davis: If I ever become rich and powerful, I’ll do the fucker. I want it to get done and if I don’t do it, I hope someone else does it. But it’s my fantasy to be able to get it done before I fold.
Len Dell’amico: Happily, to everybody’s delight, by the spring of ’86, Garcia was his old self. I remember everybody more or less just beaming about it. He’d done it completely by himself and he was proud of himself and everything was going great. On their tour with Dylan in ’86, Jerry was supposed to come to my house in Buffalo, New York, where I was raised, to have lunch with my mom. The appointed hour came and he couldn’t do it. He said, “I’ve got a toothache and I feel terrible.” I said, “Have you seen a dentist?” and he said, “Yeah. I saw somebody in Chicago.” He didn’t sound good. I was concerned but I went off to do a mixdown on a Fats Domino and Ray Charles show I was doing in Texas and that was where I heard he was in the hospital. It was one of those things where you find out how much you care about somebody because your body tells you. I felt like I’d been kicked in the guts.
Sue Stephens: He broke down in Washington, D.C. At this point, his freezer was full of Häagen Dazs ice cream. Smoking and weighing as much as he did—he was definitely no lightweight as far as his consumptive habits went. Everything to excess. Everybody was really concerned about him but when you would try to approach him about things, he would snarl and lash out. Nobody could be the lion tamer.
David Nelson: It had to do with being overweight and totally dehydrated and having an impacted wisdom tooth infection that got into his bloodstream. I was in the van as we were going out of the parking lot at RFK Stadium in Washington and Jerry said, “Anybody got anything to drink? I got dry mouth like you wouldn’t believe, man.” All I had was a beer. I said, “Anybody have water?” Nobody had water. Everybody was drinking bottled water then but for some weird reason, nobody had water. So I gave him some beer and he was drinking it and that helped wet his whistle a little bit. But because beer dries you out even more, he was going, “Gaaah. Is that all you got?”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: The summer tour in ’86 was grueling. I got a phone call in the middle of the night from Jahanarah Romney, Hugh Romney’s wife. She was calling me from Camp Winnarainbow because Trixie was there. She said, “We heard about Jerry. Is he going to be all right?” I said, “What?” I knew nothing. Jerry was in the hospital in Marin. Nora, his housekeeper, had found him in the bathroom lying on the floor moaning and had called 911 and gotten him out of there and then the hospital had been unable to diagnose his problem.
What they did was get him in there and decide maybe he had a brain tumor or an aneurysm in the brain or a stroke and so they decided they better give him a CAT scan. It was eleven o’clock at night when I got the call and I thought about driving and I thought, “No, fuck it.” I called the airlines and there was a plane at six A.M. so I got on that. But I didn’t make it to the hospital until almost ten-thirty because the plane was late and I had to take the airporter and then get a cab. Because he’d been thrashing around pretty good in the hospital, they shot him up with Valium to get him to lie still for the CAT scan. Jerry was allergic to Valium. They killed him. His heart stopped. He died. The hospital didn’t want anyone to know this but he died. They had to resuscitate him, put him on a respirator, give him a bunch of zap, zap, zap. Code Blue. They shocked him back. They had to do it twice to get him to come back and then they had to keep him on the respirator for over forty-eight hours before he could breathe on his own again.
I got there and the doctor came out and he said, “I’m really sorry. We don’t expect him to live past the hour.” I was going, “What the fuck is the matter with him?” He said, “We just figured out that he’s in a diabetic coma.” I said, “A diabetic coma? It took you twenty-four hours to diagnose that?” Because the first thing you’d check if you were an emergency medical technician was blood sugar. How hard was that? It was a piece of cake. Somehow, they managed to miss the most obvious thing. Meanwhile, Nora had been telling the hospital all this stuff about Jerry’s drug use and what a mess he was. I doubt she knew he was allergic to Valium.
Basically, he went into full shock, respiratory arrest, and renal failure. They brought him back and they patched him back together and kept him on the breathing machine long enough that he started coming out of the diabetic thing and they got his blood sugar down with a bunch of insulin. His blood sugar had been fifteen hundred. Apparently, it was the second highest blood sugar they’d ever seen at Marin General.
I knew he was tough. I knew he had the constitution of a horse. Nobody could bounce back from flu as fast as Jerry. Just bingo, he could come back. So I had complete confidence in his ability to recover from this. About one o’clock, I finally got them to let me in and see him. He was lying in bed with the tubes down his throat and up his nose and in his arm and everywhere and he opened his eyes and looked at me. He was so glad to see me. He pulled me right down and gave me sort of a little cheeky-cheeky. It was as close as we could get to a kiss. Then he went for a pad of the paper and he wrote on it, “Be tactful.” I said, “Okay, I’ll be nice to everybody. I promise.”
When I went out, I didn’t land all over the doctors. I didn’t say anything about it to anybody. About a week later, I read his chart. That was how I found out what had happened. They’d given him thirty milligrams of Valium, IV, and it just put him out. They also wanted to do a tracheotomy right then and there because he was having so much trouble breathing. I told them they absolutely couldn’t do that. Because of his voice. He would never have forgiven me. I knew he would have been furious about it if he woke up and he’d had a trache. Can you imagine?
I figured he’d pull through anyhow. That was my bet. Because I’d looked at him when they’d let me in to see him and he didn’t look so bad to me. They’d already cleaned up a bunch of the stuff and gotten his blood sugar down and he was getting enough oxygen on the respirator. He was fighting the respirator. That was why they wanted to do the trache. Because he was fighting it and was physically pretty active and they were having trouble controlling him.
Jon Mcintire: I was the go-between between Jerry and his doctors and the press. In terms of the Valium and his heart stopping, there was a time in the hospital where that happened, yes. The coma also went on longer than the press reported. He was out for days. I know people were saying it was like thirty-six hours. It was much longer than that.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: At the hospital, some people were thinking about canceling the Ventura shows and all of a sudden, it was business. I expected that. You have to expect that. They didn’t say, “You know, there’s a guy almost dying in there.” They didn’t think that way. It was also part of business. But everybody was concerned. Everybody was genuinely concerned.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: The doctor came out and he said, “We don’t think he’s going to make it. We’ve rarely ever seen anybody this sick in here.” They thought the blood sugar was going to cause so many problems that Jerry wouldn’t walk again. They were giving us all the bad news. Peripheral nerve damage, possible heart complications, and then Jerry went into total kidney failure. That took a long time to resolve. So it was one thing after another in there.
David Nelson: After he got out of the hospital, Jerry told me about his fever dream. About what he saw while he was in the coma. He saw these bugs running in tubes. He saw these big beetles rushing into tubes. The vibe was not pleasant. It wasn’t good. But it was the one thing about it that he did remember.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: The coma was really tough. Because he was asleep and dreaming and he was kicking at the same time.
Jon Mcintire: I don’t think Jerry had that pivotal moment when he saw the line between life and death very clearly. In some people’s cases, they actually choose to come back. I don’t know that Jerry had that. I think also that at this point, Garcia’s inability or unwillingness to make critical hierarchical decisions and his acceptance of what was worked against him.
David Nelson: After the hospital, I remember talking to him about the smack and he was saying, “It gets to be a drag to have to take care of your monkey before everything. It’s a drag. A little chore.” So I thought, “With that kind of attitude, it can’t get the best of him. He’ll always see it that way and just think, ‘Ahh. I’ve had enough of this shit.’” When he got out of the hospital, he said, “God, I was so glad to get off of that.”
Justin Kreutzmann: I didn’t understand his take on it till after he’d gotten clean in ’86 after the coma. He came out and he said that because of how much money he made, he didn’t have to be that guy on the corner who steals to cop dope. But he said he would have been if he had to. It was like, “Whoa. Shit.” He said, “The only difference between me and that guy on the corner is that I play in a successful rock band and I could maintain my habit.” Everyone else in the band had their own little things, too. It was just that his was the most apparent and I think everyone thrust their own paranoia on that. Because he was the only one really into heroin and since he was the main guy and everyone was looking to him, to have him looking so bad and being just sort of day-to-day brought everybody’s anxiety up and made things a lot less comfortable. Because sometimes you never really knew. Sometimes he’d look so bad that you didn’t know what the hell was going to happen.
Laird Grant: I wasn’t there when Jerry came to but I heard what he said. “I’m not Beethoven.” When I heard that, I said, “He’ll be okay. The guy comes out of a coma and he’s making jokes.” Like, “Why are you looking at me? I’m not Beethoven. I’m not dead.”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: He said, “I’m not Beethoven.” As in, “I’m not deaf. I can hear what you’re saying.” I’m sure that was what that was.
Len Dell’amico: I got back there as soon as I could and I saw him in the hospital a bunch of times. The first time, he was barely awake. Jerry was talking to his brother, Tiff. They were reminiscing. Basically, Tiff was reconstructing memories. The next time I saw Jerry, he was with Annabelle and he was walking around.
Sue Stephens: It was terrifying for me to see him fail like that and know that he was not indestructible. I was there when he was conscious but he still had the tubes down his throat and all that. What was terrifying was that vision of him as no longer being the zooming-through-the-airport, indestructible kind of guy.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Luckily, my girlfriend, secretary, confidante, and baby-sitter lived three blocks away in Kentfield and so I was able to borrow her rickety old Schwinn—the wheels went blubl-blubl-blubl—and ride over to the hospital in the morning and go in there and hang out all day until they made me leave at night.
Laird Grant: When I called MG, she said, “Get down here right now. We need you.” The Angels had been handling security for Jerry there real nice. Which freaked the hospital out. The Hell’s Angels had taken over one of the top floors. It was like, “What’s going on up there?” I spent a week there and took care of whatever business I could for the man.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry was in the hospital for almost four weeks and they tried to kill him so many times in there, I can’t tell you. He had total kidney failure but he still had to eat. But there were all sorts of things that he couldn’t eat because his kidneys were shut down. If you can’t process this stuff, you die of all the poisons built up in the body. They would bring him food and it would have all the food groups and two thirds of them would be things that he was absolutely not supposed to eat. There it would be on his tray, salt, tomatoes, all those things. There were a thousand things like that in there. The hospital is a terrible place to be sick.
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia: Jerry was no longer in the coma when we got to the hospital. He recognized Heather and he cried when he saw her and Annabelle together. These girls had never met before and the two of them looked so much alike.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Annabelle and Heather were there at the hospital. They had never met. Sara was there. Her husband came over. Tiff was there with his wife and kids. Nelson. Hunter. A lot of the time, Jerry was too sick to see people so I would have to go see them outside. Basically, we had our own waiting room. Just for us. John Cutler, the truck drivers, the stage manager, they all came by. So did Ramrod, who’s not much for hospital scenes. Big Steve Parish would come by. They would all come by for some period of the day and then I could go get a sandwich. But the staff would wake Jerry up four times during the night to take blood. It was ridiculous. It was insane what they were doing in the hospital that was policy.
Jon Mcintire: In some very important ways, he was not emotionally up front. When he was in the hospital with the diabetic coma, he asked me to go and have the woman with whom he had been living leave the house. So I went and divorced him from his prior caregiver. He had me go deal with her.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: When Jerry came out of the hospital, he was really, really, really weak. So weak that we had to help him everywhere and he hated that. He was trying so hard to be a good patient but his patience was really wearing thin. Plus, he wouldn’t pick up a guitar. The last week Jerry was in the hospital, Steve Parish brought over his guitar and stood it in the corner of the room. I had to put it in the closet because it was really upsetting Jerry. Because he couldn’t play. His hands were too weak. It was sort of a macho challenge thing. “Come on, asshole. Get better or your guitar’s not going to love you anymore.”
David Nelson: When Jerry got out of the hospital, the doctors said that anybody who’d been in a coma, it was good for them to see old things. So I brought old tapes to his house of the stuff we had listened to in the Wildwood Boys. His hand muscles were a little shaky but that was all. He was totally there and totally back. I’m sure he was grateful to be alive. For him, it was the second time. The first was that car accident in Palo Alto.
Sue Stephens: When he came off that one, that was like—this is not your average bear.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: All I wanted was to just get our little family scene back together for a while and that did come to pass during that period of his recovery. He spent a lot of time just walking around the house. We were still at Hepburn Heights. Rock was gone. Nora was gone. Nicki was gone and the place was insane.
Laird Grant: I helped take apart the whole place where they were staying. I had to go through everything and see if there were any stashes. I found stuff in places you wouldn’t believe. In books. Album covers. Underneath the rug. Tucked in the heater vents. It was the nature of the beast. It started out as an incredible seductress and ended up being the bitch from hell.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: We were cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, and throwing stuff in the Dumpster. I was frantically looking for another place for us to live and we had no money. I had saved up five thousand dollars from the sale of my cows in Oregon and we were living on that for the first couple of months. There were folks coming to the door twenty-four hours a day. “Ding dong” and I’d get up and say, “I’m really sorry. Jerry can’t see anybody right now.” I absolutely exhausted myself with this. Plus, we were trying to feed him really well to try to get him to rebuild his blood supply because he’d had all this emergency dialysis in the hospital, which just racked up his blood cells like crazy. So he was just super weak.
The kids started to deal with the mail. We got two Dumpsters full of mail. After Jerry got out of the hospital, it was great fun to go through the mail. He’d take all the Hallmark cards and line them up. “These are the ones that sing this little song and this is the Snoopy card and this is the Little LuLu card …” and we’d have twenty-four of these and eighteen of those and we saved all the ones that were hand-drawn.
Len Dell’amico: I happen to believe that the thousands and thousands of prayers that were going on, and they were deep and heartfelt prayers from all over, had a lot to do with his recovery.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: After about three weeks, Jerry felt able to really start seeing some people and we got Merl Saunders to come over to the house. John Kahn came over to the house and they started talking about music and getting him interested and it went from there. But that first three weeks back at the house was really exhausting.
Len Dell’amico: I visited Jer at Hepburn Heights. Mountain Girl had come back into the picture. At the hospital was the first time I had seen her since 1980. Those two, they were made for each other. Jerry was a Leo and she’s a Taurus. It was like you do not want to fuck with this woman. She was the kind of woman you wanted on your side when you were in trouble. Watching that come back together was a beautiful thing.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: I went to the hospital to see Jerry and I saw Bob Hunter and Bob said, “He has tubes in him and you wouldn’t want to see him this way.” So I sent some books up on holistic health.
Merl Saunders: I went in to see Jerry in the hospital every day. When he got out the hospital, I would go see him at the house. I never did mention the guitar. I would sit at the piano though, noodling. I knew I could get him that way because he loved me to play. I’d be playing and talking. “Here’s this new song I learned. When you back playing, this is the song I’m going to teach you.”
When he finally picked up the guitar, I’d say, “This chord just goes like this.” He’d spend four or five minutes just getting the chord. Then he’d set the guitar back down. It was so bad. He couldn’t form chords. He couldn’t do nothing and he’d set it back down. I would never say nothing. I’d just keep on playing. We’d talk and I’d say, “Let’s go for a walk.” We’d go outside, take no more than four or five steps, and he’d say, “I’m tired.” I’d say, “Let’s go back.” Back inside, I’d say, “Okay, let’s do the chord again.” It would take maybe two hours for him to do two or three chords. We’d do it and process it until he felt he could do it. This went on every day. Every day I would be there.
Len Dell’amico: I visited up there in August and Merl Saunders was teaching Jerry how to play. It was really something for me to come into that room and see one of the greatest players who had ever lived stumbling around with the guitar with this hangdog, lost puppy look on his face while Merl was very brightly sitting at the piano saying, “This is what we got to do.” It was all I could do to keep my emotions in order and say, “This is great. Everything’s going to be great. It’s going to all come back together again.” Because at that point, it was not at all apparent that it was.
Merl Saunders: He had forgot how to do it. I couldn’t help him on the mental part. I would just make him do it so much that he would say, “Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” Then I would say, “That’s it. That’s it. Look at your hand, Jerry. Look at it. That’s it.” It was either the chord or a new way he formed it.
The one thing that I’m very good at, and I knock on wood about this, I’m good with children. He was a child again. It was like teaching my kid to go potty. I thank the man upstairs that gave me the courage and the things to tell Jerry because I didn’t know what I was doing. But I kept coming. Nothing was going to stop me because this was my friend that I loved. I’d come there, kiss him on the forehead, and kiss him when I left every day. I let him know that I loved him. I wasn’t there because he was Jerry Garcia. When first I met him, I never did know he was Jerry Garcia till about a year later. So he knew I wasn’t around him just because of that.
We started very slowly. It was like the baby crawling. It was just like teaching a baby. Crawling, then he wants to stand up and hold on, and then he wants to take the first step. It was just like that. Then, “Hey, I’m jogging!” “I’m back, I think.” That was what he said. And then he went out and played.
Len Dell’amico: Lo and behold, goddamn, it all did come back together. One of the great things we did was go see Los Lobos at New George’s in San Rafael. Me and Jerry and Annette Flowers and Sue Stephens. This was his first time out in public and Mountain Girl made me promise to have him back after the early show. It was not long after the hospital and I said I’d have him back. After the first set, we went backstage. Carlos Santana was there. They hadn’t seen each other in years. Big reunion hugs. Then he met David Hildago and the band and the same thing happened. Now we were staying for the second set. Off Jerry went. He was dancing with somebody in front of the stage. I was like, “He’s drinking! He shouldn’t be drinking! He had a drink!” I was like, “He’s out of control! I can’t stop it!”
In the middle of the second set, they called him up on stage. Now he was up on stage and they were doing “La Bamba” and it was like “He’s playing!” He was playing a guitar that he’d never held before and he dropped in this incredible solo and that was it. He was back. In big letters.
Then it was two in the morning and we couldn’t find him anywhere. The place was closed and Sue Stephens and I were freaking out, saying, “We lost him! Mountain Girl is going to kill us.” Finally, we walked out into the street and there he was waiting for us, talking to the fans one at a time. As I was driving him home, he turned to me and said, “You know, I haven’t talked to these people in years.” It was like he didn’t really remember how much they cared for him and had missed him.
Sandy Rothman: David Nelson told me about Jerry’s illness and we said, “We’ve gotta go see him,” which we hadn’t done in a long time together. We went over there and Mountain Girl made us dinner and we brought our instruments. At the time, I think he was still in the process of getting back his guitar playing. That day, he played banjo. I was always trying to encourage Jerry about his banjo playing because for years he had been down on himself for not keeping it up any better than he did. Mainly, we sang a bunch of trios. That was probably what MG found to be the healing part. It’d been a long time since she’d heard him let loose on that kind of stuff. Traditional ballads and stuff. She and Sunshine were sort of standing there rapt because they hadn’t seen Jerry feel so good and have such an obviously unfettered good time in a long time. She felt this visit was very useful for Jerry, to have a couple of old friends come by.
Very shortly after that, Jerry called and said, “Why don’t you guys come to the Thanksgiving party and bring your instruments?” This was a “company party” that the Grateful Dead family had every year. They’d have a big Thanksgiving party and then Grateful Dead Tickets would host a Christmas party at which Nelson and Hunter and I played for the last three or four years.
David Nelson: We went to the Log Cabin, which is this neat little log cabin that is an American Legion post in San Anselmo, for the Grateful Dead family’s big gala Thanksgiving dinner. After dinner, we got out the banjo and guitars and me and Sandy were just having fun. There was no pressure and we were remembering old tunes and it turned out Jerry remembered more words than we did. It was really incredible. That was a charge for everybody because we were saying, “Oh, good. We’re not going to have to be feeling sorry for this guy.”
Sandy Rothman: We sang just about everything we could remember that we used to do. It was probably only about a third of it but still quite a lot. Jerry was pretty excited. In terms of us going out and playing together again, I remember he said, “We can make us some folding money.”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry and I actually rented a houseboat on Lake Shasta, goofed around, and swam in warm water for a weekend and that was really pleasant. I had to move down from Oregon. We both went up for a week and I parked him over at Kesey’s to be entertained during the day while I was packing out my house to move back in with him. That was what he wanted so I was totally ready to do that. As far as I was concerned, it was a matter of life and death. We really didn’t want to lose him and the kids were just thrilled to have another period of Dad, nonstop. Really, we had a great time. He was clean for the first time in how many years? He was there. He was available. He talked. He smiled. He wasn’t smoking any cigarettes. He talked a lot about what had happened. He felt like he had a new chance. A new chance to make stuff work for him. He felt like he had transcended the junk and the drugs and that he had an opportunity to go back to work and be his full being and he was excited by that process.
He really wanted to write some tunes but he was so physically exhausted. It took him an awful long time to get that back together. With all that was happening, I didn’t have time to consider what it all meant as I was doing it. I was just doing it as fast and hard as I could to get him back on his feet. I remember that period as being one of the very happiest periods that we ever had. There was little conflict. There was a really clear chain of events going on. We were clearly working toward a goal together. It was fun.