Dark star crashes Pouring its light into ashes
Reason tatters the forces tear loose from the axis.
—Robert Hunter, “Dark Star”
He was the focal point. The central catalyst. If you look at it in electrical terms, when you’ve got a huge field that is reversing polarity, the induction is intense. You get this induction as the field collapses and rebuilds that energizes everything around it. That’s the dark star. The neutron star that sucks everything in and blows it out. And sucks it in and blows it out.
—John Perry Barlow
Len Dell’amico: Nineteen eighty-seven was the big year. Basically, from the fall of ’86 all the way through ’87 was the year when the Grateful Dead went to the next level. There was so much going on. I worked all day every day that entire year for the band and so did everybody else and it was more fun than anyone should have been allowed to have. It could have been because of Garcia’s energy or because of the band’s commitment to what they were doing or because they were going to make the album that became In the Dark. The album came out in the summer. But the train was rolling way before the album came out.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: We tried being a family again and it worked out for quite some time. It was really really nice. We bought a great house in San Rafael. But nothing lasts and the Grateful Dead had to go back on the road. Seeing Jerry trying to go play, that was so cruel. It was really tough. The Dead did their first show on December 15 and it was way too soon. It was much much too soon but Jerry’s ego was not going to let him sit in that chair any longer and he forced himself to go and do those shows, which he did partly sitting down and it was much too soon.
Merl Saunders: I left town when he played because I wasn’t invited. I wasn’t even told when he played. I was furious. This was the Grateful Dead and they were always protecting him and they knew I had this connection to the man. Whatever they put up, cement or whatever, I could just put my hand right through it to Jerry. It was something they just didn’t understand.
Justin Kreutzmann: In December ’86, right after Jerry came out of the coma, I remember him sitting down backstage in Oakland and saying, “God. I never realized what a great band this is. I haven’t been listening for years. Mickey and Bill just played so well and Phil and Bob were just so on tonight.” He was like a Deadhead. I wished I’d had a video of it to show him because the next week, it was, “Fuck, man, they played outta time. Jesus Christ!” Just for that one moment, it seemed like he really got off on the music. It was cool to see him like that because they were so critical of themselves. Even if it was in some really boring town in the middle of some tour no one was all that happy about, stuff would happen that would remind Jerry why they were doing it, and those were the moments that they lived for.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Back on the road, Jerry decided that maybe family life was a little bit too limited for him. When they went back out on the road in March was when Manasha showed up. That was a real surprise to me.
Laird Grant: Jerry had stage fright from day one. He’d be scared shitless, man. He’d be backstage and I’d be talking to him before he’d go on and he’d be a nervous fucking wreck. Then the minute he went up there, it was gone. He’d zero in on somebody in the audience while he was playing. He used to say, “There are people out there with good vibes and people out there whose vibes are bad. If I can lock into one of the good ones with that good energy when I get up on stage, I can work that energy and work that whole audience through that person and we have a good evening. If I lock in on a bad one, it’s fucked.”
Sandy Rothman: Jerry always looked out at the audience. He was quite tuned in to who was out there when he played. That was how he met Manasha. She was a front rower for a long time, I’m told.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: Jerry was on stage playing and we knew each other already. This was at a Dead show at Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I had longer hair then and I cut my hair off in the front row. He looked down and I was cutting my hair. I guess he was laughing. Later, he told me he thought it was funny. I’d had a class back at college in living art. Fluxus, Yoko Ono, John Cage. I did it as that kind of avant garde weirdness.
Justin Kreutzmann: Jerry or Annabelle told me stories of how Jerry would fall in love with people on the road. If he saw this particular girl in the front row at every show, he would do a great show and he’d play the songs for her. I was laughing because I thought of all those Deadheads out there who have said, “Wow, he’s playing for me tonight.” But this one woman, she actually was playing Jerry. Had she known, it probably would have been awe-inspiring.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: In 1986 when Jerry had his near-death experience in the hospital in Marin County, he told me that he promised himself that if he made it, he was going to see me. If he lived, he wanted to get together with me. This was what he told me later. In March ’87, he was back on the East Coast at Hartford. I called him and I said, “Jerry, I’d love to see you.” All these years we had almost been getting together but it didn’t happen. He was reclusive. We’d talk a lot on the phone. We’d visit backstage but he was always doing something else. He was otherwise occupied with women. In Hartford, he invited me to his room. He said, “Could you please come by? I’d like to see you now.” I said that I had heard that Mountain Girl had moved back and he assured me that it was just a friendship and that they weren’t involved. I went and then we got together and hung out and talked a lot and I told him that I really cared a lot about him and that was when he told me that while he was in the hospital he had made a commitment to himself that he was going to see me and wanted to become involved with me. I thought about it and I went on that tour with him. During that tour, I talked with him a lot in detail about his family and the feelings he had about them and I told him I wished that we could be together and have a family. He thought that was a good idea and he told me he thought it was very dear and very sweet. He wanted a child. Because up to then, he had been an absentee father and I think he felt guilty about that.
The last show on that tour was in Chicago and that was where he told me he loved me. I went back to my parents’ house and he gave me the phone number in Los Angeles where he would be. He was working on a video project and he asked me to get in touch with him after the tour. So I called him and he said, “Why don’t you come out here where I am?” He sent a ticket out to me through the computer at the airline under my name. I met him in Los Angeles and then he asked me to come back up to Marin County. I was at a crossroads. I wasn’t sure if I was going to stay back east or if I was coming out here.
Len Dell’amico: They were going to make In the Dark. Simultaneously, we were editing the video retrospective So Far, which Garcia and I co-directed. So Far was at least as much Garcia’s vision as mine but more to the point, it was a vision. It was its own vision. It was not like anybody made it. This was the second or third thing we’d done together and it was a known thing that nobody was in charge. The key to understanding Grateful Dead was that the situation was in charge. This was credited to Steve Parish but it was a truism. If you could understand that and internalize that concept, you could get along with them. If you could be in that flow and wait or have patience or whatever it took until it became clear, then what was supposed to happen would happen. Once you saw it in action and it became a lifestyle, you didn’t question it and you didn’t need to have words to explain it. It just was. When I saw this translated to stadium tours and ninety thousand fans, eighty-ton cranes and semi-truck trailers, and all of the logistics, I realized it could be done this way.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I often think that everything after ’86 was a total gift because Jerry came so close to dying so many times when he was in the hospital. There was one crisis after another. The outpouring when he went into the coma was pretty major. Everybody noticed and it raised the interest level tremendously in the Dead. I think it multiplied their business by about a factor of ten.
Len Dell’amico: They had fulfilled their contract with Arista with In the Dark. Clive Davis had been after them. Jerry treated Clive with great respect but he referred to all people in the record industry as “weasels.” Starting in ’85, I began going to all the Grateful Dead board meetings because I was now in the circle and I would hang out. Davis wanted them to re-up and sign a new contract and they were like, “All we’ve got to do is deliver this album and we’re out of the contract. Do we want to sign a new one? He wants to make a long-term deal. Obviously, the smart thing to do is to be free of any contract. Have a hit album and cash in.” So then they were like, “Ah, we don’t want to talk to them about it.” Davis wanted to meet with them personally and they went, “You tell Davis that if he’ll come to Front Street and meet with all of us by himself, we’ll meet with him.” They were all going, “He’s not going to do it,” and I was hearing, “It’s done.” All he had to do was have the nerve to walk into a room with these guys and he was made. He did that and it was. He outbid everybody for So Far. Now they were in business together on this video.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: It was so cool because suddenly they had a hit record. When they began to notice that the ball was rolling, they jumped on it very strongly. They did “Touch of Grey” and then they started getting into the videos. Jerry just loved doing those. That was a big challenge for him and he got to hire his friend Gary Gutierrez to do them. We adored Gary Gutierrez and they worked together really really well and were very simpatico. Jerry was excited about these projects and spent a lot of time plotting them out, making sure that everything went right.
Gary Gutierrez: Jerry sent me the album or at least most of the songs and asked me for my take on what would be a cool video. I listened to it and I called Jerry back and I said, “‘Touch of Grey’ is the hit on this album.” He said, “Yeah. That sounds cool. If you have an idea.” I said, “It’s about surviving and going on, no matter what. So what if we made these full-sized skeletons of you guys and at some live concert, we build a rigging over the stage so we can puppet them like marionettes and then at some point they would transform into the real band to do the last verse and chorus.” He said, “That sounds cool.” Then he started laughing. He just couldn’t get over the idea because it was so weird. “You mean, like each band member would have a skeleton of themself? I got these puppeteers backstage to a concert and they watched the band. They watched their basic attitude and their posture and their little ticks. Then we went to Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey and we built this big scaffolding up over the stage. The puppeteers sat up in that scaffolding and they each had a little monitor focused on their puppet. After the concert, they asked the crowd to stay and be a part of the making of this video. Most of the twenty thousand people stayed. They reacted to the skeletons being puppeted on stage to the playback of “Touch of Grey” as if they were the real band. They thought it was hilarious.
The skeletons were full size. We bought anatomical medical skeletons from a medical supply company and then the puppeteers reconstructed the skeletons so they had the same height and body posture of each band member and we got duplicate clothes. Without moving anything, the band members then took the same marks on the stage so we could dissolve between one and the other. Jerry hung out for a long time watching that night because he was interested in the process.
When I finished “Touch of Grey,” I showed it to them while they were rehearsing with Bob Dylan at Front Street. They were really tickled. The video itself got one of the biggest test scores ever on MTV and it was the only one of their videos that got much air play. Primarily because it was the only real hit. The song was the great thing. It was one of those anthems that people could relate to. It had a great feeling about it and I recognized that instantly. I really love the moment in the video when the skeletons come to life and Jerry shakes his head the way he does and says, “I will survive.” That shot is a classic image of Jerry.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: It was really the first time that they had tried anything quite so radical. Then they went on and did “West L.A. Fadeaway.” That was a lot of fun and they did the “Hell in a Bucket” video. It was play for them. It was like, “Finally we’re getting to the point where we can actually play with this stuff,” and that felt really good to the band members. Jerry loved it.
Len Dell’amico: When he was with Mountain Girl and doing well healthwise, I was a regular at their house. I’d go to dinner up there and we’d go to movies and we watched a couple of Super Bowls together and worked on projects.
Sandy Rothman: I was still in my homeless-with-a-car mode and Jerry knew that. At some point when I was hanging out at his house one day, he said, “Why don’t you just stay here?” which was typical of Jerry in those days. So I moved into a spare bedroom that Mountain Girl had there. This was after they’d moved to their big spread in San Rafael with the swimming pool, the last place they had together. Basically, I lived up there for a couple of months and my room was right across the hall from Jerry’s room. Whenever we were sleeping, we were about ten feet apart so I became rather intimately acquainted with his sleep habits. Also from hanging out in the main room, where he had these two great big leather recliner chairs. We would sit there watching movies and talking and listening to music and he would nod out a lot and I wondered if it was drug-related. After I had been staying there for a while and I saw his sleep habits, I realized this was common among people with apnea. Such people catch their sleep when they can because the apnea pattern is that you wake yourself up by your own suffocation. You close off your own glottis. I’d hear him doing this constantly at night while he was trying to sleep. He would wake himself up. Usually, he would turn the light on and read and smoke in bed. All his books had long cigarette burns on them.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Actually, I can blame myself a little bit for that. I was smoking at that time myself. There was some stress. I was smoking Camel Lights or something like that for a couple of years and Jerry filched a couple of cigarettes from me. Actually, I think Willie Legate gave him his first cigarette after he got out of the hospital. Willie came over to visit and sat down and smoked a cigarette and Jerry said, “Gee, man, can I have one of those?” Rather reluctantly, Willie gave him one. I don’t think you could change him. Even with a life-threatening illness, he was going to be who he was. He did it his way.
Sandy Rothman: Jerry had a side to him that he tried really hard to develop: This very honest hardworking guy with a family life. He tried this with Sara and it didn’t work all that well for him. But he was suited for it schedulewise. He liked to get to gigs early but when he was done, he was ready to get out of there, go back home, watch TV. He might paint or get stoned or whatever but he’d go to bed and then Jerry was always up in the morning. I have always been a lifelong late-night person but Jerry was not. If I wanted to catch him over at the Front Street studio, the best time was always about ten or eleven in the morning. He was there. When I was staying at the house, I would often go out with him because I’d get up early too sometimes just to do whatever he was doing. I ran up to George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch studio with him. He wanted to show me around and he was real proud of knowing the whole layout up there. Mostly, I would sleep much later than him. I would get up and he would already be napping in the front room in the big leather recliner with the TV on.
Justin Kreutzmann: He liked Scorsese movies. He loved Apocalypse Now. We had great discussions about Francis Coppola’s Dracula and he’d talk about how the good parts were great because they were the parts in the book that were great. But then when the book gave up on its narrative, that was also when the movie fell flat. Which was neat because when am I ever going to read Dracula?
Sage Scully: We decided to go see the movie Rain Man and it was Trixie, a friend of hers, Jerry, and myself. We got in the car and it was pouring down rain. We drove out there and smoked a joint and I was kind of paranoid about his driving because it was the first time he’d ever driven the car with me in it. It was right when he got that big black BMW that he loved so much. We got there, finally found a parking spot, got in line, and Jerry had forgotten to bring money. Actually, I think he was searching around in his pockets and he pulled out a twenty and the manager let us in for free anyway. There were no seats left inside so we had to walk all the way up to the front row and we sat down and we had people come up to get autographs. The movie started and he fell asleep and started snoring so loud that I lost it and started to laugh hysterically. He snored through the entire Rain Man.
Sandy Rothman: He was an excessive person but he also thought excessively. Jerry couldn’t turn himself off. I’m not a God person but if you want to look at it from the strictly spiritual point of view, why did anybody give him sleep apnea to wake him up every fifteen minutes? It was his brain and at that point, it was also his body. Because he was so heavy, it was hard for him to lie back. A hospital bed would have been small change for him to buy. It would have been a lot easier for him because he could have napped much more comfortably. Instead, he had his recliner in the front room.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: We started taking family vacations together and that was wonderful. During this period of recuperation, we went to Hawaii. Up to this point, we had never taken a vacation. There was always work. They always had a show to go to or a record to work on. For Jerry, playing with all those different bands, there was certainly no time for vacations. We went to Hawaii and we loved it so much. There was a cockroach in our room that scared the hell out of both of us. As soon as we’d turn out the light, this cockroach would start to fly around the room and bang into things. Jerry said, “What’s that? What’s that?” He’d hit at it and turn the light on and the cockroach would immediately dive behind the bed. He’d rip the bed out of the wall and take his briefcase and try to smash it with his briefcase, chasing this cockroach all over the room.
He went out on his first dive and he loved it so much and I couldn’t do it. Literally, I have claustrophobia. I had a panic attack and they went off merrily diving. He took Annabelle and Trixie and they dove down and they saw all sorts of wonderful things and I was absolutely unable to get it together to go down there so they left me behind and I was furious. I think it would have helped if I’d had a different instructor but the instructors were all focused on Jerry.
I was cooking and I was cleaning, same old stuff, and my feet hurt and I was a little bit crabby but I really really really loved it. And he blossomed. He adored it. He went out and got a vicious sunburn and had a great dear time. We shopped for Hawaiian shirts and we did all that silly stuff you were supposed to do. We had drinks with parasols in them, ate great seafood, and met a bunch of really nice Hawaiian guys who were dive people and Jerry just fell in love with diving. For him it was the other world. We went home and we said, “We’re going to go again.” So we did. We turned right around and came back a couple of months later and did it again and went over three or four times.
Laird Grant: Jerry was feeling bad about not coming up to see me at my house so he sent me a ticket to go diving with him in Hawaii. I went over there and Jerry said, “Hey, man. We’ll go to the shop and have the guy take you out and certify you. I’ll cover it.” I said, “God, Jerry. That costs thousands of dollars.” He said, “So what, man? If you want to do it, go do it and then you and I can go down to a hundred feet and fuck around with stuff in the dark.” I said, “Fuck you, Garcia. I ain’t going on no night dive.” He said, “Oh yeah, you are, man. I’m going to pay for your diving so I’m going to get you down there at night.”
Len Dell’amico: Nineteen eighty-seven is a book all by itself. Touring with Bob Dylan. For me, it reached biblical proportions. Ninety thousand people. Daytime shows with screens the size of my house. It literally took an eighty-ton crane to put the show in place. I was at the board meeting at Front Street where they were saying, “Who should we tour with in the summer of ’87?” Dylan’s name was thrown out there. By me actually, and they picked it up and ran with it. I’d always been a Dylan-phile. I noticed that Jerry did Dylan material so as soon as I was a friend of Jerry’s, I started asking him about Dylan and he was a little reticent. He didn’t really want to talk to me about Bob. He said, “We talk on the phone.” I said, “What’s he like?” “He’s a great guy.” I said, “What do you do together?” Jerry said, “We were playing in New York and he called me up at the hotel. He came over in his van and picked me up at the hotel and we drove around the city all night. He showed me places that he thought were cool and we talked all night.”
While Jerry and I were editing one of those Dead video projects in ’81, Dylan was on his Christian tour. On that tour he was abandoned by the press and the media. I wasn’t eager to go see this material. I was at Garcia’s house working on the video when Rock Scully came in and said, “Jerry, I hear that Dylan’s playing at the Warfield and it’s not even a quarter sold out.” Jerry stopped and he said, “Yeah?” Scully went, “Yeah. You don’t want to see it or anything?” Jerry said, “I want to play. I want to go down there and play.” Scully was like, “Oh, okay.” It was very clear to me that Jerry was going to make a statement. There was a little discussion there about, “Do you know what Bob’s into now?” Jerry said, “Aah. Fuck that. I’m there.” He was saying, “I want to be there. I want to help.” That showed me something about solidarity and about stars not being in that world of their own image.
Nicki Scully: Bob Dylan was doing his “You Got to Serve Somebody” tour and he was playing the Warfield and it was not selling well. Bill Graham got this bright idea that if he got Jerry to play with him, he’d fill the house. So he called up and got me on the phone and said, “Will you go down and ask Jerry if he wants to play with Bob Dylan?” I got really excited and I ran down the stairs and I said, “Jerry, do you want to play with Bob Dylan?” And Jerry said, “Who wants to know?” I said, “Bill’s on the phone. He wants to know if …” He said, “Is it Bill or is it Bob who wants me to come play?” I went up and I asked Bill and Bill said, “Bob.” I went down and told Jerry and he said, “Yeah.” Parish showed up with his guitar that night at the show and Dylan’s people were like, “What the hell’s going on?” Jerry showed up and got this whole sort of nothing vibe from Dylan and his people. The show sold out and Jerry played in the background but it was done and it worked. Jerry got home and he said to me, “Dylan didn’t know I was coming.” I went, “Oh, shit.” I felt like the scum of the earth. Like I was going to be on his shit list forever. Then he said to me, “But it was worth it. Because it has always been my dream.”
Len Dell’amico: What I saw in ’87 was that Dylan loved being in the setting. He had a bodyguard but by the time he’d come to the door at Front Street by himself, he was the most ethereal presence I ever experienced. He loved it. He’d come in there and the crew would go, “Hey, Bob” and then turn their backs on him. The Grateful Dead crew was just perfect for that. He was treated just like anybody else and maybe that was where that pedal-to-the-metal thing started because when they were rehearsing, everybody knew something big was coming. When they went out on the road that summer, Dylan had trouble with the Dead because compared to his garage bands, the Dead were like an orchestra and so I think he was very intimidated. When they rehearsed, it was looser but once they got on with the shows, it was probably hard for Dylan to go out in front of seventy and eighty thousand fans who were there for the Dead and then try to fit his thing into this wall of sound.
Justin Kreutzmann: At the end of a show, we’d always rush to the vans because we wanted to beat the audience out. We were out by like six seconds after the encore tune and usually we’d get into two vans and we’d have a police escort, which everyone was really embarrassed about because we never needed it to drive through these little backroads districts. As we’d go through these little towns, Garcia would always laugh with Weir and say, “With the police pulling up and the sirens going off, you can almost hear people flushing their drugs down the toilet.” Then they’d get to the hotel. In the early days. Weir’s room always doubled as the party suite. Sometimes Jerry would come in and be really social. He’d sit on the floor with his shoes off and rap with the girls about stuff and we’d drink some champagne. I remember this one girl sitting there. She must have been sixteen or seventeen from either North or South Carolina and she was pretty. Because to enter the Weir ranks and inner sanctum, you had to be pretty good-looking. Jerry said, “Okay, I’m going to tell you this story. But I’m going to need fifteen minutes to collect my thoughts and then I won’t be able to speak to you for five minutes after I’ve told you the importance of the story.” She was like, “What?” Then he went into this thing and I was thinking, “I wish I had a tape recorder for this.” Because it was just so him and it was so cool and it made so much sense. If you ever detected any cockiness in Jerry, it was always so hidden in humor. Like when he and I would be watching MTV, it’d be funny listening to him comment on those guitar players. This was in the eighties when heavy metal was totally all you saw on MTV and he was like, “I don’t get it. God, it’s just so mindless.”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: And so, the old familiar friends came back to grace or curse him as you will and Jerry started to use again. All his friends were really worried about him but Jerry was very good at hiding what he did.
Sandy Rothman: At that time, I didn’t know about the heroin. I wasn’t aware of it.
David Nelson: Jerry and Sandy Rothman and I and John Kahn had just played together and we were in the back room and we’d done four or five traditional songs, old-timey stuff and some bluegrass. Bill Graham came in and he was raving. “That was great,” he said. “I could see where the roots of your music and the Grateful Dead music come from.” Jerry was going, “That’s right, Bill.” Bill said, “This is such a thing. I’ve got to take this somewhere. I’ve got to put this on somewhere. But I don’t know where. I need an idea.” Jerry went, “Uh, take it to Broadway, Bill.” And we all went, “Yeah. Right.” It was just a joke. And Bill went, “Broadway!” He left the room and the next thing I knew we were booked to do eighteen shows at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. They all sold out as soon as they went on sale. They sold out in a matter of hours.
Bob Barsotti: The Nederlanders took out a full-page in Variety congratulating the Jerry Garcia Band on having the biggest first day of sales in the history of Broadway, a record which was broken about six months later by Phantom of the Opera. Prior to Jerry, it was a record that had been in place for many years.
David Nelson: It was like a drug being on Broadway. I mean, how were you going to say no to that, man?
Sandy Rothman: It was an incredible dream. I will always consider that to be certainly a pinnacle of anything I ever did in music. It was simply incredible. Jerry was in heaven but that tour worked him way too hard. Setting it up the way he did where he was opening for himself was about the hardest thing there is to do.
David Nelson: Those matinee shows were really work for Jerry. We’d have to put him to sleep up there in the upper dressing room which had been Vivien Leigh and then Mary Martin’s dressing room. On those matinee days, he’d have to take a little nap.
Sandy Rothman: He was playing in two bands. The tour’s name was Jerry Garcia, Acoustic and Electric. We’d play acoustic for at least forty-five minutes. Then he’d take a break. Go up, eat, whatever, and then come back with the electric band and play a blockbuster. Jerry was in heaven but in an overarching sense. It was heaven but it was really hard. We also did rehearsals. Oftentimes, there were sound checks every day. In fact, some of those sound checks were better than the shows. Jerry was probably in that theater from one or two in the afternoon till after midnight.
Bob Barsotti: The first night, Jerry was sitting up in the balcony and they were doing some sound checking and lighting checks and he was just sitting up in the balcony doodling. The fire marshal was a young guy. After about two minutes, I realized he was a Deadhead. So I said, “Why don’t we go upstairs and I’ll introduce you to Jerry.” This guy went, “Oh. Jerry’s here?” I took him up to the balcony. “Jerry, I want to introduce you to the fire marshal.” “How’re you doing?” Jerry was shaking his hand and being really friendly and the fire marshal was about ready to fall over. By the time we were done, he’d approved every one of the innovations I’d come up with. “Oh, dancing in the lobby? No problem. Speaker cables across the floor? Just make sure they’re taped down.” All these things that had never happened before in a theater in New York were happening and it was simply because this guy had gotten to meet Jerry. Later that night, I came back to Jerry and I said, “Jerry, you wouldn’t believe what you did for my meeting with that guy.” And he went, “Oh, I could tell.” He absolutely knew what I was doing by introducing him to the guy.
Sandy Rothman: Jerry had so much self-vision that he could sometimes caricature his own caricature. When we were playing those Broadway gigs, Steve Parish would come up to get us ready to go on and say, “Okay, ten minutes.” And Garcia’d say, “Yeah yeah yeah” and we’d all be ready and all tuned up. And there would be Garcia smoking a couple more cigarettes, eating some cheese or something, and it would be time to go on. It would be past time to go on. Parish would come back. Now, in my world of music playing, you don’t do that. When it’s time to go on, you’re out there. But the rock world and the Grateful Dead world is different. Jerry and Parish would play-act this thing and I’m sure it had happened a lot in Dead scenes. Parish would go up to him, “Come on, come on. It’s time to go.” Some days, Jerry would go and be sprightly about it. Then there were a couple of times when he would play-act this thing like he was being led off to a dungeon. Jerry would bow his head down really low and droop his arms down primate-style. Parish would have his guitar and Jerry would just be this limp doll and Parish would be pulling the edge of his coat collar. Garcia would play it to the hilt. He’d say, “Okay, Steve. Yeah, yeah, sure, man. Yeah yeah yeah, I’ll go. I’ll go …” He would have us all in stitches.
Bob Barsotti: There was a set of people who were there every night and then there were people who came in shifts. The great one was standing out in front of the theater and seeing these three young guys come walking up from the subway. They all had gym bags and they all started taking their suits off and stuffing the coats into the gym bags and pulling out their tie-dyed shirts and putting them on. Then they went in with their T-shirts over their slacks and their hard shoes. It was really a trip. Those shows added a dimension to Jerry that hadn’t been there before. He’d done Old and In the Way and he’d done the New Riders but they were all club things. By going on Broadway, he put this certain stamp of class on rock ’n’ roll that had never happened before. He didn’t even have to change what he was doing to do it. He got to be himself and go to Broadway.
Gloria Dibiase: Jerry and MG moved into a big house in the hills of San Rafael where they lived together for a while and then they split up. Jerry bought a house in the Dominican College area of San Rafael where he lived by himself. Around that time, I met Manasha on a bus on my way to a Dead show at the Oakland Coliseum. She was very friendly and pleasant. Weeks later, we met again at the health food store next to the hologram gallery I was managing. When she told me that she was pregnant with Jerry’s baby, I was floored. I almost fainted. It was so mind-boggling to me.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: I found out that I was going to have a baby. Jerry was really thrilled. He was happy that I was going to have the baby. He offered to rent us a house and I didn’t act on it right away because I felt kind of odd about it. So I stayed here and there while I was pregnant and then towards the end of my pregnancy, I finally said, “Yeah. Okay.” Keelin was born in San Anselmo at the end of ’87. Actually, her due date was Christmas. Jerry wanted to move into our house that he was renting for us. I gave it a lot of thought and I thought it might be better if we had a separate place because it was a small place and I thought he needed his privacy somewhat. He seemed to need a lot of solitude. So he didn’t move in. Even though he had maintained that he didn’t have a relationship with Carolyn all through that time, he enjoyed being with his two older children because he hadn’t had the time to do that before. I thought that was good for him and I didn’t really want to disrupt that. So I said, “Why don’t you stay there and see how things work out?”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry never really wanted to marry anyone. He claimed he was not the marrying type. In terms of Manasha, she was somebody for him to go visit, somebody to surprise. Then she had a little girl and I think that was attractive for him. He really enjoyed that little girl. Our kids were older. Annabelle had moved off to Alaska. Trixie had moved into a place in Oakland so she could go to college over in the East Bay. They were each off on their own trip and he just didn’t seem all that interested in what they were doing. For him, the magic was in this relationship with that little girl and there was nothing I could do about those things so I just let go. That was extremely hard to do but it did get done.
Vince Dibiase: At the shows, one night you’d see MG. One night, you’d see Manasha.
Len Dell’amico: In ’87, we were mixing So Far. When we shot the Dead doing “Throwing Stones” in Marin Civic Auditorium for it, one of the drummers did some upchuck thing they’d never done before. Garcia looked up and gave this big grin. They went into this big instrumental and Jerry was grinning and looking all around and Bobby was singing these incredible lyrics and Jerry just screamed out, “Yeah!” into the mike, which was something he never did. The picture was all cut and we were in final mix on it and Jerry went, “Of course we’ve got to take out that ‘Yeah!’” He wanted it out because it was not music. He was a purist and they were all always that way. No artifice. I was crushed. What the fans were dying to see was the expression of real emotion and it was real. Why would you ever want to take it out? I thought he was pulling my leg. I said, “You can’t do this to me.” When Arista showed it in theaters in premieres, they had audiences full of Deadheads. In one theater in L.A. when they showed it, the Deadheads made the person in charge of the tape deck play that section over and over again.
Bob Barsotti: This was in ’87 right after they’d hit it really big. Right at that point in his career, Jerry was healthy and he was clear and he was playing his ass off, doing some of his best music, I think. Really, really challenging stuff and he was getting offers from everybody all over the place. All the great musicians in the world wanted to do stuff with him and he lined up this improvisational tour that he was going to do with Edie Brickell and Bruce Hornsby and Branford Marsalis and a really great drummer and a bass player. They were going to go into theaters and walk out on stage and talk to the audience for a few minutes about subject matter. “Okay, we need some subject matter for the songs tonight and we need some general direction on what you’d like to hear and in which direction we should go.” They would get some feedback from the audience and Edie would write down some subject stuff and then they’d just try playing for a couple of hours and see what happened. All improv. Jerry’s people got all the managers to agree to the deal. Then his girlfriend, Manasha, accused him of wanting to do it because he was having an affair with Edie Brickell. That was why he wanted to do this whole thing and how dare he get into this project and blah de blah de blah and she put all this pressure on Jerry until he bailed. I don’t believe he was having an affair with Edie Brickell. He just loved to play music with her because she was a great improvisational musician. Only she was a singer and she could sing lyrics improvisationally, making them up as she went along. That was the kind of thing that Jerry was all for. But he didn’t have it in him to stand up and say, “This is what I want to do.” Instead, he just escaped further into his trip. I could see that each time one of these great projects slipped away, so would he. It happened over a couple of years and it was sad.
Laird Grant: After you’ve got two pockets full, what the hell do you need any more for? You played for a hundred thousand? Next time they’re giving you two hundred and fifty. You’re playing the same goddamn song but they’re going to give you one and a half times more because that’s how much bigger the interest in you has become. But they did good things with their money. It did not all go into their pocket. I ended up with a four-wheel-drive fire truck from them. The Rex Foundation gave me ten grand and I started my own fire department up here on the mountain. It went back to musicians, it went back to kids, it went back to the rain forest.
Sue Stephens: The post-’87 success made it worse for him. It was just too much. He’d be funny when they were talking about income going up. Garcia’d go, “Oh no. Not more money!” Because the more he had, the more of a problem it became with people wanting to get it from him and him having to deal with it.
John Perry Barlow: I have what I call Barlow’s law of economic insufficiency, which is, “The more you got, the shorter it feels.” The way that applied to the Dead I used to call, “Big hand, big mouth.” There was co-evolution between the monstrosity of the two. In effect, the beast itself was a completely independent being. Completely. It did what it did. Jerry and I had this conversation one time and we were talking about the beast that was the Grateful Dead. Have you ever seen the movie Dragonslayer? They had an especially great dragon in there. It was old and cranky and it had just about had it with everything. It was nothing to mess with. We decided that in its essence, that was what the Grateful Dead looked like. It was that creature. Spitting fire and coughing and an awful lot of smoke.
Bob Barsotti: I think that what happened to Jerry was that he got stuck in this cycle of being the provider and he was provider for the Dead. He could have done so much more but he got stuck. What happened was that the Dead were making so much money and he had this thing about not walking away. Because the day he walked away, all these people would lose their job. The other reality was that he could play in a band that he loved and he had the respect of the world and he could be whoever he wanted to be and it was just fine with everyone. So why not take the path of least resistance? The one thing he knew he could always do was make more money. Somehow, his solution to it all was to just play more shows and not hassle about it.
Justin Kreutzmann: After shows, there were some meetings where they’d sit around and be talking about songs or the way this guy played on that song or that guy played on that song. After all these years, I thought these guys were all supposed to like each other. It wasn’t like they were trying to say, “You know, maybe you could do better.” It was, “Hey, that was shit, man. You know? Why don’t you get back to the music? Why do you keep fucking us up?” It was just merciless. Even guys in the crew were leaving the room. That amazed me. There was still that much spark in what they did.
Len Dell’amico: From my point of view as his friend, I realized that all this was a burden and it got bigger and bigger. After ’87, it was. “Oh, boy! Now we have a hit. Isn’t that great?” Not! It just got harder and harder. Bigger hall, bigger questions. Someone would come in with the news that the DEA was using the Dead as a magnet to bust people. Knowing that there would be certain illegal substances used there, they would target the shows. “How do we want to deal with this? Do we want to go on record with a statement that you shouldn’t do these things?” Then Garcia would say, “Why don’t we not do these stadium shows?” The unspoken response was that because they had this nut to pay. Hello, fifty employees.
Bob Barsotti: The Deadhead scene all of a sudden had people involved in it who really didn’t give a shit about anything. The after In the Dark crowd who got interested because the Grateful Dead had a top ten single. All of a sudden, they became Deadheads. They might be able to tell you the songs on In the Dark and that was about it. They were young kids who saw this incredible party scene. Or guys who had these vast arrays of drugs and vast experience in handling weird parking lot situations who were able to exist on the outer edge right in the middle of society. It fascinated young kids to see this kind of freedom because they’d grown up in the Reagan era with the war on drugs. They equated these ideals with the sixties but actually it was just a big party scene on a Saturday night.
Justin Kreutzmann: Jerry and I were riding up in this elevator and it was one of the times where Deadheads were also staying in the hotel. Jerry got in the elevator and we stood in front and there were three Deadheads behind us. They were staring at him, giving him that polite distance but awestruck and staring. Then this businessman in a suit with a little briefcase got on. He looked back at the Deadheads and looked over at Garcia and me and looked back at the Deadheads and looked over at Jerry and said, “Are you famous or something?” Jerry said, “No, man. I just play guitar in a rock ’n’ roll band.” With perfect timing, the doors opened. Jerry and I walked out and the Deadheads were going crazy. The guy looked around and said, “God, I gotta check my record collection.”
Jerry just wanted to be known as a competent musician. I don’t think the fame was part of it for him. He told me his analogy for fame was that it was like a little dog you took to restaurants. Sometimes you had to excuse it if it crapped on the floor and sometimes you had to pet it and be nice to it. Fame was like a little dog you had to take with you everywhere you were going.
Laird Grant: Jerry said to me, “This scares the shit out of me. Some people at the shows think I’m some kind of a fucking prophet or something. That makes me crazy, man. I’m afraid to say anything because of what people are going to take from it.” He said, “It’s like that Manson thing. You get caught up in that kind of fucking power. I don’t want it.” He said, “God, if I could play my music and not have to deal with any of this, it would be the happiest day of my life.”
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry’s name became a household word and that was really a surprise. We capitalized on it quite nicely but the effort it took to make all that happen was gigantic and all-consuming.
Sue Stephens: With the Cherry Garcia ice cream, they had put that out without even asking us and everybody thought it was a wonderful thing. Jerry certainly didn’t want to have to bust these people. But it was after his diabetic coma and the last thing on his list of eats was ice cream. That was a definite no-no. So the poor guy couldn’t even taste any of it himself. But we had to go after them on a licensing level. It was his right to publicity and we had to get the lawyers involved. We gave them the opportunity to either stop making it or pay him a small percentage and they immediately said, “We’ll just stop making it then.” Twenty minutes later when they realized it was their number-one seller, they called right back. He did get a very small percentage of that money and it turned out to be a good paycheck for him every time it came in as well. His basic take on it was that he was thrilled to have been paid tribute that way. He said he was glad it wasn’t motor oil that they’d named after him.
Laird Grant: When you’re making that much money, if you don’t spend a whole bunch of it, then Uncle Sam takes it away and makes a nuclear trigger out of it. Jerry could have been in a ’63 Corvair that smoked like the one he used to have. Eventually, the totally buffered comfort and lifestyle of the rich and famous was around him. He was surrounded by it.
Justin Kreutzmann: Being on the road with Jerry always had more to do with what was going on in his head and musically than the actual rigors of being on the road. By the time I started hanging out with him a lot, their life on the road was pretty comfortable. They had made it as easy and as comfortable as it could be.
John Perry Barlow: I used to put out sort of a semi-annual little newsletter about what was going on in my life. Right after In the Dark suddenly got big, I wrote an article about the irony of the anti-materialist Grateful Dead suddenly being incapable of staying anyplace but the Four Seasons hotels. It was the closest I ever saw Garcia come to wanting to hit me. He was so angry. I came into Front Street and he said, “If it isn’t the author of the celebrated Barlowgram who thinks he can sit in the seat of judgment.” I said, “Well, it is funny, isn’t it?” And he said, “Maybe you think it’s fucking funny. But I think it’s betrayal.” I said, “I try to call them as I see them.” He said, “You know, if you want to stay around here, maybe you should call them as they are.” I said, “None so vigorous in their own defense as the justly accused.” That made it worse. Part of what Garcia was saying was, “You’re not that great a lyricist and look how much money you’re making. So you’re biting the hand that feeds you.” I said, “I would be biting the hand that feeds me not to tell the truth. That’s my job. That’s what I’m here for.” He was saying that I was not permitted to tell that truth. The thing I was most grateful to the Grateful Dead for was putting me in a position where I could make a living and say what I thought. Of course, I didn’t mind staying in the Four Seasons, either. Mostly, I was just abusing the paradox. But I was being accused of hypocrisy. That was not what I was saying. I’d never heard any complaints about it from the Deadheads. I turned and walked out and wrote him a long letter about how I wasn’t going to be intimidated. Then silence fell on the scene and nothing went on for a long time and then I saw him again and it was as though nothing had ever happened.
Robert Greenfleld: In June 1988, I spent the better part of a day at the Grateful Dead warehouse on Front Street in San Rafael interviewing Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, and Bob Weir for the book that the late Bill Graham and I were doing about his life. For an obvious outsider, the atmosphere at Front Street was not nearly so warm as the weather. Garcia himself however was a revelation. Before I could ask him a single question, Jerry grinned with glee and said, “Oh, boy! I get to talk about Bill, right? And he’s not here? What a score!” Then he began laughing like a joyous child. When I leaned over to clip my tiny lavalier microphone to his shirt, Jerry took it from my hand and began to do the job himself. I said, “Only the real media guys clip themselves. The veterans.” Picking right up on the riff, Jerry said, “Vets. Battle scarred. Word worn.” With no further prompting, he began to talk about Bill.
At some point in the proceedings, Jerry determined that not only was it time for lunch but that we would order out. He asked me what I’d like to eat. Having been on tour with the Rolling Stones, a group of individuals for whom no menu was ever good enough, I let him do the ordering. I said, “Whatever you’re having will be fine with me.” What Jerry Garcia was having for lunch that day was the largest, coldest, greasiest slab of dead red meat masquerading as a steak in the history of western takeout. The sandwich wasn’t just not good. It was not edible. I did not even come close to finishing mine. Jerry devoured his with great relish. As I reached for the can of Pepsi that had come with the sandwich, it occurred to me that the Grateful Dead had dosed Bill Graham with LSD just this way. Trying to make a joke, I said, “I can drink this, right? I mean, I’ve got to watch the Laker game tonight.” “Go right ahead,” Jerry said, grinning as though the can contained far more than Pepsi. “You’ll enjoy it.”
After we were done talking, there was no doubt in my mind that, much like Pete Townshend of the Who, Jerry Garcia would have been famous even if rock ’n’ roll had never been invented. His basic decency and great good humor were extraordinary. To be sure, it was a good time in his life. Jerry was clean and the band was making money. In terms of our interview, it seemed to make him happy to be able to talk for a change about someone other than himself. Still, I was impressed. In every way, the man was definitely a mensch. No way I would ever let him order lunch for me again, though.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: At that time, I had Jerry’s ear as much as anybody and probably more than many other people. I proposed to him that we do a benefit for the rain forests and I was the coordinator of that benefit at Madison Square Garden. It took me a long time to sell Grateful Dead management on charging fifty dollars per seat and two hundred fifty dollars a seat for sponsors. Jerry and Bobby were for it so we persuaded them. We sold 1,000 two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar seats and we sold out the entire show, no problem. We had a press conference at the UN. This rain forest thing was the first time Jerry actually spoke out on an issue at a press conference. I also organized a party after the show. That was harder to organize than the benefit. I persuaded Jerry to come to the party and that was my mistake. I told him he could relax and hang out with people. I thought New Yorkers were sophisticated but he spent the whole party signing autographs, which pissed him off. It wasn’t fun.
Merl Saunders: For the Blues from the Rainforest album, the music came to me in a dream. To do it in the studio, I had to get musicians who understood me. I didn’t have to say nothing to him but, “Here it is, Jerry. I need a melody to go out there. But at the end, I need a hook.” He played it. I said, “That’s exactly what I want.” But Jerry got very paranoid about doing Blues from the Rainforest. When I told him what I wanted to do, he said, “Do it, Merl. Do it. Don’t tell nobody.” I said, “Whatever you want, Jerry.” When Blues from the Rainforest came out, no one knew. They was shocked! We did the whole thing in my house. We cut it there. We rehearsed there. My house was his escape. For about four or five years, he came there. Drove himself over, came in, laid on the couch. I’d come down and see him there. He knew I’d always leave the door unlocked.
David Grisman: In five years, Jerry did over forty sessions in the studio in the basement of my house. He would come over at noon or one or two. When he was with Manasha, six o’clock prompt, she’d start calling. She really had him. I never saw anything like it. At six, he’d say, “Oh, I got to get out of here.” Jerry had a lot of different lives and he kept them all separate. He wasn’t a guy you would go socialize with. But he’d drive himself over here. He didn’t have a limo. He didn’t have a scene. He didn’t have an entourage. He was just here. I knew that he was overburdened with too many things. I think it was the pressure of keeping all those people supported. I guess he was trapped.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: He wanted to be home. He loved Keelin and he told me that it was the first time in his life where he felt like he had a family. He said he had a difficult time growing up and he told me that our relationship actually helped him resolve some feelings with his mom. That made me feel real good.
Vince Dibiase: Manasha was in control but he liked her unpredictability. He told me that in Europe. We were about to go out looking for apple juice for Keelin in Paris. As we were heading out to find some, Jerry said, “That’s what I love about Manasha. She’s so unpredictable. I’d be bored to death otherwise.” Bruce Hornsby was sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper. As we passed him, Jerry went, “Hey Hornsby, you speak a little French, don’t you? Come on, we’ve got to find some apple juice.” Hornsby said, “Oh yeah, man. That’s cool.” We went out cruising Paris for apple juice and we couldn’t find any that wasn’t alcohol-based. Then we found this one quasi-futuristic health food store and they had some. We bought up all the apple juice in the place, maybe five or six quarts.
Stacy Kreutzmann: Jerry met my husband about three days before we got married. We were in the office and he came in and I said, “Jerry, I’m getting married on Saturday. This is Mike. We’re getting married.” Jerry shook his hand and said, “That’s totally cool, man. Everyone should try marriage once or twice in his life.” I never forgot that because it was so cynical. Like, “It ain’t going to work. But have a good time.”
Robert Greenfield: On July 26, 1990, Brent Mydland, the Grateful Dead’s keyboard player, was found dead in his home in Lafayette, California. Mydland, thirty-seven years old at the time, died of an overdose of cocaine and morphine, commonly known on the street as a “speedball.” Joining Pigpen and Keith Godchaux, he became the third keyboard player that the Grateful Dead had lost.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I was on vacation up in Oregon when Brent Mydland died. That was really sad. But we all knew Brent was extremely volatile. I was scared for Jerry but I also knew that Brent was a far more volatile person than Jerry. He was extremely emotional and prone to doing really crazy stuff like driving his motorcycle the wrong way down the freeway. Jerry never did stuff like that. He was physically cautious and he had somebody drive him. He didn’t take those kinds of risks. He was sensible.
John Perry Barlow: I remember after Brent Mydland died. It was such an incredibly hard time for everybody but the way in which it was dealt with inside the family of the Grateful Dead still makes me angry to think about. We just shook it off like, “Hey, shit happens. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” That primitive kind of response. When one reindeer gets crippled, the rest of the herd doesn’t stop and try to take care of it. They just keep moving because winter’s coming on. It’s a very simple straight-ahead form of self-preservation. The people inside the organism that was the Grateful Dead were all pretty evolved individually but the thing itself was a beast. A cranky, hard, crusty old dragon that knew how to survive.
Justin Kreutzmann: In the funeral parlor, there was this little side room and the five guys in the band were sitting there and there were different models of caskets you could get. Jerry saw this little one filled with black stuff and he said, “Is that for black people?” I said, “I don’t know.” They were all sitting around and finally they were like, “What the hell are we doing sitting here?” Then they took the coffin and the five guys in the band walked it down to what they call the interment or whatever, and Weir was pretending he was dropping the thing and I was just going, “Oh, God. These guys are never going to be serious.” Then again, they wouldn’t have been doing that if it was Pigpen.
John Perry Barlow: I was one of the pallbearers along with the five still living members of the Grateful Dead and we were off in this room together. It was like halftime at a basketball game and our team was winning. There was a lot of very lighthearted juvenile grab-ass and I was really stricken by it. I rode to the grave with Garcia in his limousine. It was just the two of us. I said, “You know, I’ve been watching this thing get darker on our side and lighter out front. I’m the only one at liberty to cycle back and forth here and I’m starting to think that I can’t do that anymore.” And he said, “You may be right. It may be a deal where you’ve got to be on stage or off stage.” I said, “If it comes down to that, I guess I’ll just go out front.” He said, “I would, man. If I could.” He wanted to be in the audience. He wanted to be with the Deadheads. He said, “It looks a lot safer out there. But how would I know?” When they were running in a pack, he was like everybody else in the band. As soon as he was off by himself, then he was Jerry and he was really sorry. He was really stricken.
Robert Greenfield: The Dead themselves had come off the road only three days before Brent Mydland died. Enlisting Bruce Hornsby as their temporary piano player and Vince Welnick, late of the Tubes and Todd Rundgren’s band, to play synthesizer, the band regrouped yet again. Six weeks later, the Grateful Dead were on the road again.
Justin Kreutzmann: I had a drug intervention in 1990 and Jerry and Phil came to it. That’d blow your mind. I sat down with all these people and there was Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh at my drug intervention. Like, “Holy shit, I must have really fucked up now.” I found out later that before it happened, Jerry really challenged the lady running it. He was like, “Why are you lying to somebody to get him some place to try to help himself? Why not be honest with him about what’s going on? Why are you lying to him to get him here?” She told him, “Okay, you can sit here but you can’t say anything.” He got up to leave and it was like, “No no no no, you have to stay. You have to stay.” Because Jerry thought it was a crock of shit, they totally changed the way the intervention was run. Because my dad was away at the time, Jerry was like playing the father guy.
Stacy Kreutzmann: As my husband often said about Jerry and the guys, everyone really bowed to him like he was a god or something. Nobody in the room would say anything to Jerry because he was Jerry. Before the intervention started, Jerry’s exact words to my husband Michael were, “These things always feel like a lynching to me. If a good friend wants to come to my house and die on drugs, that’s okay.” Michael said, “The bottom line is that is not okay. You’re helping him die. Don’t you see this, Jerry?” Everyone was like, “Oh, my God. I can’t believe that this nobody, Stacy’s husband, is fighting with Jerry Garcia.” But Jerry heard something because they talked for about five or ten minutes about this. Michael started to cry and said, “I have a brother who’s a drug addict and an alcoholic and I don’t want him to die and I don’t want Justin to die.” At the end of the intervention, Jerry said what he did as if he knew Justin needed to get some help. He was very choked up.
Justin Kreutzmann: For those people who don’t know about interventions, they go around in a circle and everyone explains what they think you’re not seeing in your life which is making it so fucked up through your use of chemicals and alcohol. Jerry was the last person to speak and he looked around the room and said, “Do you really need to hear anything else except that I love you? Just remember that.” And I was like, “How cool!” And he had tears coming down his eyes.
Stacy Kreutzmann: You know why my father wasn’t there? He was in rehab up in St. Helena at the time. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was going back and forth between family days at the two rehabs. Life in rock ’n’ roll, man. This is the fun side of rock ’n’ roll.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: In 1990, I gave up. I just let go. By 1990, I realized that it wasn’t going to work out any further and that all Jerry’s energy was going elsewhere. Basically, I would say that he was bored with us. But that wasn’t the right word. I just think that his creative energy was taking him way out. Far from where I was at. For me, it was time to stop doing it again because it was wearing me out. I was worn out. I said, “Listen, you’ve got to go find your own scene. I can’t keep supporting you in this way. I just can’t.” And he very graciously got up and left. He went and found his own place and the whole scenario kept evolving from there. He had two or three different girlfriends, some of whom I liked and some of whom I didn’t like.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: We moved into a larger place in ’89 and then in August ’90, he moved into our place. He was spending most of his days with us and he brought Keelin and I on tour. From the time of my pregnancy in ’87 until the beginning of 1993, I was pretty much on every tour with him and also living with him from 1990 to the end of ’92. I loved Jerry’s music and I realized that was his way of worshiping. I felt it was his way to God and I told him that. He liked that about me because he didn’t think that I had a problem with him playing music. He said that some of the other women he’d been with had some problems with the Grateful Dead and with the music. I am now friends with both Mountain Girl and Sara and I have much respect for both of them. I had a problem with the Grateful Dead apparatus working him too hard and I felt there was a conflict between him being over-worked and my being concerned about his health. At one point, he wanted to be concerned about his health and lessen his load but he just had to continue.
Justin Kreutzmann: Cocaine and heroin are not two drugs that you usually get a large roomful of people to sit around and do. On the road, you had your camps. You had the people doing coke and you had people on pills and downers and the drinkers and so everybody had their little clique of people. They’d get together to be the Grateful Dead but even then Jerry had another dressing room for a while. Not out of any star weirdness trip. Just because he needed a place to get high. When he would be sober, he wouldn’t want to be near that room. When he wasn’t strung out, he would never leave the stage because he wouldn’t ever have to go get some privacy. That became sort of a giveaway. Because he’d leave the stage for breaks. Otherwise he would go up there hours before a show, sit down, and he wouldn’t leave until he’d left the hall. That was how you could always tell. At least how I could always tell.
Vince Dibiase: The thing is that he would nod out. But his blood was thicker than molasses anyway. The guy was never getting enough oxygen to his pistons and there were times when he was clean when he would nod out because of the lack of oxygen in his system. At that point in time, he was hiding it. Manasha claimed she didn’t know about it and I don’t think she did.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: I thought he had some lingering health problems from the coma. I said, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you always falling asleep?” He said, “Ever since that coma, I don’t have the stamina I used to have.” I believed him and I remember he’d fall asleep in the chair and drop cigarettes and burn the floor around the chairs. It made me nervous. Later I figured out he was doing it in the bathroom because there were some plumbing problems. Every time he’d come over, I’d have a stopped-up plumbing problem. I’d call Roto-Rooter and they would fish out a plastic bag and that was when I started really being concerned. But that wasn’t until he moved in with us, which was in ’90. I kept questioning him. I said, “What’s going on with you? This doesn’t seem right to me, Jerry.”
Vince Dibiase: This was right after Brent died. At the end of a tour, I think it was in Denver, I was told that the band tried to do an intervention with Jerry. But he was stronger than everybody put together. Basically, he told them to leave him alone.
Gloria Dibiase: I think he said that because he didn’t like to tell people, his kids included, what to do and he didn’t want anyone to tell him what to do. Soon after the big confrontation, he did the cleanup.
Vince Dibiase: He came home and he did do an outpatient program. Leon, his driver, or I drove him there every day. The clinic was in San Francisco one block off Van Ness. We went first thing in the morning. He’d go inside and get his treatment and he’d come out. He was doing it his way but Manasha was also in the middle of it.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: Jerry told me he was going to go into the Cleveland program to help him stop smoking. He told me the band had held an intervention with him and he was going to get his health together and he was going to stop smoking. I thought, “That’s odd. He needs to go to the Cleveland Clinic to stop smoking? Okay.” When I came back to California, I talked to the doctor, Randy Baker. Randy had a conversation with Jerry and asked Jerry if it was all right if he told me what his problems were and so he did. Jerry didn’t go to the Cleveland Clinic. He was going to the methadone clinic in San Francisco. It worked for a while, I think.
Dr. Randy Baker: I really started working with Jerry in the summer of 1991 when I was trying to help him address his drug problem. At that time, he actually did undergo treatment and withdrew from narcotics. I don’t know the full story but I think he was being pressured to do so by the band and organization who were once more concerned about his problems. He actually went on his own to a methadone treatment center. He just wanted to be treated like anyone else. He didn’t want any special care. Over a period of weeks, he withdrew and I also arranged for him to have some counseling at that time. For a while, he was doing some outpatient counseling to explore the psychological aspects of drug addiction.
David Grisman: Sometimes, he’d bring it up. Like when we were shooting this video for “The Thrill Is Gone.” Justin Kreutzmann and my daughter, Gillian, produced it and Justin actually got Jerry to put a suit and tie on. We looked like gangsters. The day we were shooting it, Jerry was telling me that he was going every day down to the Tenderloin to a drug rehab clinic and standing in line with these derelicts. He was driving himself down there to get methadone. He was undergoing treatment and he was talking about it. At those times, whenever he brought it up, I would always say to him, “Look, if you ever need any help … if you ever want me to do anything for you.” But I never tried to tell him what to do. I mean, really, what could I have said?
Robert Greenfield: During a fierce rainstorm on the night of October 25, 1991, Bill Graham was killed when the helicopter in which he was a passenger struck a utility tower. The night before the funeral, the Grateful Dead went on stage to play as scheduled in the Oakland Coliseum. A week later, the Dead performed and then backed up John Fogerty, Neil Young, and others at a huge free concert in Golden Gate Park to honor Bill.
David Graham: The show in the park was a beautiful day. The irony was that the first show we did without Bill was the biggest show we’d ever done. With my sick sarcastic humor, I was joking and telling everybody, “My dad outdrew Jerry, man.” But it was only because on that day, Jerry drew for Bill. There was a definite vibe. Nobody wanted to pull off the killer solo. Nobody wanted to go nuts. Jerry was certainly taking it seriously.
Bob Barsotti: There was something in the character of those two guys that was like the positive and the negative of a magnet. They were exactly alike and they repulsed each other but they were totally simpatico. It came down to the story of when Jerry first met Bill at the Trips Festival. Jerry was this guy with a broken guitar and Bill was this guy in a cardigan sweater who was trying to fix it for him and that was what their relationship was always about.
On the Jerry Garcia Band tours, we’d be in these big arenas back east. The way Parish ran those tours, nobody was backstage. It would just be eight or ten people sitting around the dressing room every night and at intermission chatting it up and I would get Jerry to talk about the old days. Jerry said, “Bill got us out of the rut that the scene was in. There was this one guy out of North Beach who booked all the topless places and all the nightclubs and if you wanted to work anywhere in town, you had to pay this guy his twenty-five percent and he’d get you these gigs. They were always these really shitty gigs in really shitty places and nobody gave a shit about you and it was all about this guy.”
All of a sudden, they got a chance to play in places where they had the right size stage and the right kind of lighting and the right kind of power and someone treating them with respect. It gave them the ability to get out of that hole and go more free-form. More than anything else, Bill knew how to take care of people. It wasn’t good for Jerry when Bill died. With Bill gone, there was one less person around who could cut through the shit.
John Perry Barlow: I could always tell if he was starting to mess with it. He would definitely quit looking at me in the eye and he’d get real antsy and hostile towards me. Because he felt my judgments and he was always after me about being judgmental and moralistic even though I’m not appreciably more that way than he was. In a funny way, I’d say I’m one of the least judgmental people I know. But he identified me as being a source of major judgment.
Eileen Law: When this other side of Jerry would pop out, he would become another person. He would stick more by himself. When he was straight, I thought he handled himself much better around all the people and the celebrity. I always felt the times when he wasn’t doing too well was when he couldn’t handle it. I always thought the cranky side of him came out then. I didn’t even know if he was using or he just felt crummy.
Jon Mcintire: When he was using, he was a jive-ass. It was almost like talking to some stereotypically Hollywood person just throwing out this jive on whatever they thought you wanted to hear.
David Grisman: The first time Jerry ever came over to my studio in ’89, he said his doctor had told him that if he didn’t quit smoking, he’d be dead in six months. Sometimes when he’d come over, he didn’t look well. But he was always clear. He had an incredible mind and was sharp as a tack through it all. I always looked at him as sort of a big brother. I couldn’t bring myself to get judgmental. I didn’t feel it was my position. I didn’t feel that I had the authority to confront him with something like that.
Justin Kreutzmann: On the road every night, you pick up the bag before you get in the infamous van home and Jerry would have the bag full with the really healthy stuff and a towel on top and then below, he’d have a steak sandwich and the Cokes. A guy like that, he was going to do whatever he wanted anyway. Whether you really liked it or not. He’d listen to you once but if it was something he really didn’t want to do, you’d probably have to stop short of putting a gun to his head to get him to actually do it. He went through phases when he could use drugs in just a maintenance way and then when he would become dependent upon them. He once told me that when it became just you and your drugs, that was an intolerable situation. Why he kept getting to that place, I don’t know. He would be the only guy who could really answer that.
John Perry Barlow: It just depended on what cycle he was in. I watched Garcia’s weather cycles breaking my way for years and years. Whether he was in the light or the dark. The sun was coming out—everything was groovy. Now he was down back in there and you could see it coming a long ways off. I think it was one of those millions of pendulum swings back and forth that run through the universe.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Say I wanted to get him to come and play on a record? I would try to call him up. I’d get through to Steve Parish, who’d say, “What do you want, Marmaduke?” And I’d say, “I want to talk to him.” “What do you want to talk about?” “I want to ask him a question.” “What question you want to ask him?” Along with Sue Stephens, Parish was the keeper of the gate.
Bob Barsotti: If you think that Steve Parish could control Jerry, you’re crazy. Jerry really was his own person and he chose to isolate himself and he chose to put those walls around him. Just about every project that Jerry was involved in happened because someone ran into Jerry at the health food store when he was out on his walk or something like that. They started talking to him and got him hooked to do some gig. Just that amount of contact kept his schedule completely full all the time. He couldn’t deal with having to say no to people anymore.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: I saw him in Sacramento and he did something he had hardly ever done. He rarely displayed much emotion. But that day he actually gave me a hug. That maybe had happened twice in our relationship. I said, “I missed you.” He said to me, “Me, too. Speak to Dennis McNally. Dennis will get us together.” I kept calling Dennis [Grateful Dead publicist] and then all this stuff started happening about Jerry’s marriage and this, that, and the other thing, and we never got together again.
Vince Dibiase: Nobody talked to Jerry about everything that was going on. Nobody did. Maybe in the old days, they had. But in the last five years, nobody came up to his house and nobody confronted him with anything.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: Three times I arranged to go to a show and I did not go. I’d acquired a certain amount of dignity as I got older and I found the prospect of going to a show just to see Jerry and not being admitted by Parish or not being able to communicate with Jerry too much to accept. I didn’t have his phone number anymore because the only person I ever got it from was him.
Vince Dibiase: Even the people who got through to his house, Jerry wouldn’t answer his messages. I would write them down for him and say, “Jerry, here are your messages, man.” Sometimes, he wouldn’t even return phone calls from his own family. He always told me, “Don’t ever worry about getting me the information or giving me all the messages. Because by the time it reaches you, it’s already come to me from five different sources.” Sidestepping was an art and he was a master at it.
Laird Grant: Heroin makes you extremely lackadaisical. You don’t care because it’s a great buffer zone. Which it came to be between Jerry and his kids and everybody else, including me to a certain degree. I fought back and really got into his face about it. He reacted by saying, “You’re absolutely right.” He apologized but he said, “Hey, man. You know you’re my lifelong buddy but the world has changed. It’s gotten mean out there.” I said, “That doesn’t mean you have to be that way, though.” Everybody wanted a piece of him. All I ever wanted to do was go back and give him a hug and say, “Hey, man. Kick ass!” It got to the point where it was good for me to show up because when I would, Jerry’s whole attitude would change. I was somebody he could talk to. Somebody he knew was not there to take anything from him but to give.
Bob Barsotti: He was just unable to say no. That was the story on him. He never wanted to say no to anybody on anything. So his solution was, “Oh, I’ll just leave. Oh, I’ll just stay home. Oh, I’ll just hole up, keep these walls around me, and keep everyone away so I don’t have to say no to people when they ask me to work on their projects. Because every time I talk to one of my old friends from the music scene, they always ask me to record this record or do this benefit.” So his solution was to just stay home more and more.
Barbara Meier: In ’89, my book of poetry, The Life You Ordered Has Arrived, came out. Hunter saw it in a bookstore and he bought a copy for Jerry. According to Dennis McNally, Jerry read the book and said, “Give me a paper and a pen and an envelope right now.” He sat down and wrote this letter to me that said, “I love your poetry. It speaks from the heart. I’ve always loved you and still do.” I was living in Boulder, Colorado. I was a Buddhist practitioner with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, directing conferences and doing a little teaching while getting my master’s degree in fine arts from the Naropa Institute. I had a great gig, I was in a great relationship, and I was happy. I looked at his letter and thought, “Right,” and I tossed it away. I kept it of course but what could I do with it?
Once, when the Dead played in Colorado, Dennis McNally called me and said, “Jerry would like to see you.” I went to the show and then he wouldn’t see me because Dennis went back and said, “She’s aged quite a bit better than you have, man.” Jerry told me later that he was strung out on heroin and he didn’t want me to see him. I stayed and watched him play but I was into the Talking Heads. The Dead weren’t really my thing. I could see how the concerts had shifted into a scene. It had become this world where people could take drugs, open up all their shutters, connect deeply with other people, and suddenly find themselves in the back of a VW bus making love with some girl with long hair, and it was the first sense of family or community they’d ever had in their whole lives.
The following year, I went to the Bay Area and did a reading tour with another poet. I arrived at one of the readings and the bookstore manager said, “There’s a note here for you from Dennis McNally. Would you please call him?” The note said, “Jerry really wants to see you.” So I said, “All right, am I actually going to see him this time? I don’t want to do this again.” Dennis said, “You’ve got to understand he’s with this really intense chick right now, Manasha, and she won’t let him see anybody.”
I went backstage at Shoreline Amphitheater in May of ’91. I hadn’t seen Jerry in almost twenty-eight years. I went back and my heart chakra exploded. Aside from the fact that he was in a different body with white hair and white beard, nothing had changed at all. He was sitting there and he was very nervous and smoking but we entered a timeless space and we were right there where we’d left off.
He said, “I’m so glad to see you. You probably won’t believe it but I’ve thought about you every day since we left each other. I’ve never forgotten you. I’ve never let go of you. I’ve always loved you. I love your poetry. I’m so happy to see that you’re writing. You’re so wonderful.” He went on and on and he said, “I especially like that first poem in the book”—implying that he assumed it was about him. And I was thinking, “Oh, really? That’s interesting.” I had written this poem called “El Gran Coyote” for Trungpa Rinpoche. It has a coda by Charles Resnikoff in the beginning that says, “Not the five feet of water to your chin but the inch above the tip of your nose.” So the poem is:
Winking
he bit me on
my cheek
Turning up
the amp
he pushed me
off a cliff
“Good luck,
sweetheart—
Ms. Shy & Confused …”
The wizard
left me
swimming
in gasoline;
his ironies
rogueries
rearranged
my molecules
In all my
human lifetimes,
I can never
thank him
enough
Although it was originally for my Buddhist teacher, it fit him. And I feel it is about Jerry as well, absolutely. So we sat for about half an hour together, holding hands, raving. We talked quite a bit about our respective journeys and consciousness, which was what I loved about him so much. He was infinitely inquisitive and curious about the nature of consciousness. He called it his hobby. He loved the interface between what is this hardware brain that we have and then this field of information that we call consciousness that we are all of but separate from and swimming in and participating with?
This was between sets. Let me tell you what an incredible set he played afterward. Not because of me but what he had allowed himself to open up to in terms of what he perceived that I represented to him. I never for a minute thought it was me. I always knew that it was something that he allowed himself to open up to within himself. The Dead were coming to Denver in a month and he said we’d get together then. I went and met him at his hotel and we had some time together, which we had to frame as an interview so Manasha wouldn’t freak out. I went ahead and taped it. Just recently, I sent a copy of the cassette to Hunter and Hunter said, “There’s not one sad note in the whole thing. It’s all there.” Jerry and I were ecstatic and Hunter wrote to me that it was hilarious listening to the two of us “pitching guarded woo.”
After that, my life just started unraveling at quite a clip and I started creating every opportunity I could to go to the Bay Area where we’d go out to lunch or just hang. It was just so obvious that he was in a stressful scene with Manasha. Everyone was saying to him, “You’ve got to get out of this relationship. You have to get out of it.” We once hung out over at Hunter’s with Bob and Maureen and Jerry and I were feeling, “This is the way it was supposed to be.” It was just a question of how we were going to pull it off Because this was the way it was supposed to be—for everyone. Creative connected family. Not just him. Not just me. But the entire scene.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I think that creatively Jerry felt a little bit stifled. The Grateful Dead were creative up to a point but they could be formulaic as well. My feeling was that his creativity was so strong that he needed other outlets until the artwork became an outlet. He worked really hard on some of his artwork.
Vince Dibiase: After one tour, Jerry said, “I want to talk to you for a minute. Let’s go outside on the porch.” He said, “I’m making some changes in my life. I need somebody that I like and I trust to manage this property I’ve got in San Rafael and also I need someone other than Nora to do the art.” He made me a very generous offer. I said, “Wait a minute, man. Thanks but no thanks. Because this is all you. I’m honored to be part of this and of course I need to make some money but I don’t need that much.” He said, “Hey, man. Luckily, I’ve already got a job. I just want to see how far the art business can take me as a legitimate artist. So if you can do that, you deserve to get that much.” He was really like, “I don’t care about the money.”
When I first took the art business over, which was in the summer of ’92, Jerry was going on tour and he said, “I’ll leave you a bunch of my sketchbooks.” I went over there and there was a pile. He did most of his work in small sketchbooks. He’d open up a book and he might start in the middle. The next page might be ten pages back or he might have gone ahead. He would turn it upside down. You’d never know. But it was up to me to determine what to show the public. He said, “I don’t want that responsibility.” But if he didn’t want something to be shown, he would say so. I would physically cut out of the art book what I wanted to use and then I’d compile everything and number everything on the back and then I’d give it to him. We’d sit down when he had time, which might be months later, and I would give him one piece at a time and he would look at it, title it, and sign it. Or he might say no.
Then he really got into sketching, scanning, and finishing his artwork on the computer. He was into cutting out these friskets and then air-brushing them. He’d take a piece of clear plastic, cut out a shape, and use it as a stencil. In the early days, he would do that physically. He was good at making them but not at cleaning up the mess. What he could do with his computer was use a Mac software program called Fractal Painter. It had friskets so he could do that all with his computer and he loved it. Plus, he could experiment.
Owsley Stanley: I never thought the artwork that was offered up for sale was his best work. It was done after the heroin and they were all kind of sloppy and loose. Although they had weird ideas in them, they didn’t have this dimensionality and this intricate exact perfection of detail about something most of us could see inside our heads when we were high but wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to put out once we came back down.
Vince Dibiase: Nora would go out there with his artwork and blaze a trail and do whatever she wanted to do. Originally, the Ambassador Gallery in New York City set her up with Stonehenge ties. Jerry did not want to do the ties. I brought the proposal to him. Nora thought it was a great idea and Jerry said, “Ties? Do you know what I think of ties? This is what I think of ties.” And he pulled an invisible tie up over his head like a hangman’s noose. I said, “Okay. I’ll never mention it to you again.” Then Nora got a lawyer to call him in Hawaii on his vacation and Jerry didn’t say no. He didn’t say yes but he didn’t say no. I told them all, “He doesn’t want to do it.” But they ignored me. It was a big embarrassment to him. He didn’t want that done.
Sue Stephens: The tie thing was something that more or less got away from him. He certainly didn’t go out seeking to design neckties. The tie people approached the person who had his artwork to license. They took little pieces of a piece of art and duplicated the design and then added their own colors. Jerry said he wouldn’t even recognize his own art on those ties.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: Half of those pictures were what Jerry saw in his brain when he was on DMT. DMT makes thousands of pinpoint images go through your brain at the same time. DMT is like Alan Shepard’s first ride into space. Up and down, fifteen minutes, that’s it.
Gloria Dibiase: Are you asking whether or not he had any hand in designing the ties or choosing the images and stuff like that? No. After they were done, he saw them. They took his signature for the label from his signed prints. We all laughed when Jerry had trouble recognizing his own images or knowing which paintings they were from but I think some of the ties themselves are lovely.
John “Marmaduke” Dawson: It was clip art to the tie manufacturer. They said, “What section of this painting do we want to use for the tie? Let’s see. I think it should go about right here.”
Vince Dibiase: Number-one-selling tie in America. The President, the Vice President, and half of Congress were wearing them. I also turned down a five-million-dollar deal for boxer shorts. I didn’t even tell him about it because I said to myself, “I don’t need the money that bad.” To them, I said, “I don’t want people sitting on Jerry’s art.” There were other big deals like that. Remember the last Olympics with the Lithuanian basketball team wearing those great tie-dyed shirts? We had a deal with Hanes going for this Olympics but that just got hindered and it never happened.
Sue Stephens: There could have been a special line of Jerry Garcia VW vans. But he was not in the capitalist world where he would run out shopping himself around. Like Jerry said, he was not opposed to selling out. He just wanted to know who was buying. The integrity had to be there. What happened was that the mainstream joined him. People wanted to be close to him and get some piece of him somehow, so he could have put his name on it and sold anything. Just about.
Vince Dibiase: We had big book deals with Hyperion Books and Ten Speed Press/Celestial Arts. We were going to do three books. A postcard book with tear-out postcards with his art that could have retailed for ten bucks or so. We were going to do another art book similar to the one that he did with Nora at Ten Speed. Just his artwork and a little text. Then we were going to do a third book with him that would be all computer generated. Jerry said yes up until the last minute and then he said no. Lucy Kroll, who was his literary agent in New York, was talking to Hyperion about a book and all of a sudden, this offer came in from Hal Kant from Dell. At that point, Jerry could have probably generated enough income from his artwork alone for him to live without ever having to leave his house.
Hal Kant: Jerry turned down doing his autobiography any number of times. A friend of mine who runs Dell called and said, “Will Garcia do an autobiography?” and I said, “No chance.” Then I said, “I have an idea. Let me go talk to him and if I can sell him on it, I’ll get back to you.” The idea was to do what he did, which was to have a book with one page of drawing or painting and the other page saying something about it. It was to be a nonlinear autobiography. He wouldn’t have to go from year one.
Vince Dibiase: He would come to do his signings of the art book and we had to scope the place out to see how to get him back out. We had to check for a back door. When we ushered him out of the place, I had to stand in front of him and push people away. It was not what I liked to do. But it was what I had to do to protect the guy.
Bob Barsotti: I used to get really mad about what was going on with him but I was the guy who booked all his Jerry Garcia Band shows so I was as guilty as anybody for keeping the guy working. But he wanted to work.
Laird Grant: As long as Jerry had some Tang to drink in the morning, as opposed to fresh-squeezed orange juice, he was happy. He drank Tang every day. There would be fresh orange juice in the refrigerator and he’d get out the bottle of Tang and some tap water and stir it up and drink it. He grew up on hot dog stands in the Mission District. He grew up eating wino sandwiches down on First and Third streets and a chocolate milk. Hot dogs, french fries, ice cream. If there was a decent meal put before him, he’d eat it but it could just as well have been a greasy cold burger with some beans on it. Same with his cigarettes. He went through packs and packs and packs a day but if you looked at his guitar strings, there were always dead butts stuck on them. He’d leave them there and they’d burn out and the ashes would fall all over the place. He’d get maybe a couple of hits off each smoke. He smoked a whole bunch but he never really had time to seriously smoke a cigarette. A cigarette was one of the things he used to fill his hands up when he wasn’t doing something else with them.
Gloria Diabiase: My son Christopher and I were on the road with Jerry down in southern California on his fiftieth birthday. In fact, we actually celebrated his fiftieth birthday with him in his hotel room with Manasha and Keelin. We were listening to a Jimi Hendrix CD and Jerry said he was feeling weird. As though someone had dosed him with acid.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: We were in San Diego and he was perspiring heavily and I was concerned about him. I was concerned that he was losing too much potassium. I had some tea that had a lot of potassium in it and I kept giving him that throughout the show. I didn’t want him to do that tour because I thought the summer tours were too hard on him. This was right after the Grateful Dead summer tour. He’d done the summer tour and instead of taking a rest and doing something to rejuvenate himself, he went and did one more tour with the Jerry Garcia Band.
Vince Dibase: While they were gone, I was in the process of moving them to this house in Nicasio. The movers left around ten P.M. and at midnight, Jerry, Manasha, and Keelin all walked into the new house. The next day, everything seemed to be okay. We were at our house. They were enjoying their new home. Tuesday morning, Jerry came downstairs. Manasha said his lips were black and he was really pale. His shins were all black. Like they were black-and-blue. It looked like a circulation problem. He was slipping in and out of a coma and she got Yen-Wei right up there.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: We came back to Marin and he was in bad shape. We had moved into this larger house and it was moving day. Someone else had brought all of our stuff over but then we moved into the new house and I thought, “Oh, gosh. Jerry’s getting sick on our first day in the new house.” It gave me real bad feelings about the house. Jerry was out of it. I would have to wake him up. I’d say, “Jerry, wake up. Don’t leave.” I felt he was drifting. At times, he was unconscious so I would shake him and say, “Come on. Come back. You can’t leave. We love you. Stay.” I didn’t know what was happening. I called Yen-Wei and Yen-Wei came over and did emergency acupuncture on him and I’ve never seen anything like it. He brought him back a hundredfold. Jerry was animated and talking but still very weak. At one point, I actually asked Jerry if he didn’t want to go to the hospital. “No. No.” So I sent for Yen-Wei and Yen-Wei did it.
Yen-Wei Choong: From Chinese medicine viewpoint, it was heart exhaustion. Heart chi. When I went there, he was really sick. I noticed he had a big sweat and that sweat was different from regular sweat. The sweat was like big drop and like oily sweat which was not healthy from Chinese medicine viewpoint. His pulse was extremely rapid. I did count. It was one hundred thirty per minute, very weak, very rapid. That meant the heart lung was collapsing. Not a good sign and actually that was very critical. He had swollen legs, swollen cold feet, cold hands. The lips very pale and purple. That was a very critical sign. And the tongue was very very white.
Very rare I see a case almost bad enough as emergency and it was my honor to be the first practitioner to be sent to work on him. I called my office immediately and asked my ex-wife to prepare herbs. I did some acupuncture. I burned some moxa stick. Chinese incense. Long, shaped like a cigar. I burned that around his belly, a chakra point, to enhance, to tonify the chi, to avoid the chi collapse. When Dave, the chauffeur, came back with herbs from my office about a half an hour later, I rushed in the kitchen to cook the tea for him. He drank the tea. Since the sweat was reduced a little bit, he was a little bit better. I came back the same night.
Vince Dibiase: Manasha called us and said she was calling Yen-Wei back up because Jerry was not doing too well and that Randy Baker was coming up later on in the evening. Even though it was the second time in the day he was there, we brought Yen-Wei up and then we stayed. Jerry was out. He was comatose. I don’t know if I said we should call an ambulance but I was certainly alarmed because I could see the man was suffering. I was not a medical doctor. I didn’t know how to determine what he was going through.
Dr. Randy Baker: I got a call from Manasha saying that Jerry was sick but he didn’t want to go to the hospital. I lived in Santa Cruz, a couple hours away. I told her I would arrive as soon as I could. I drove up and did a house call and Jerry was definitely sick enough to deserve hospitalization but he didn’t want to go into the hospital so we did very intensive treatment based in his home over the next several weeks. I semi-lived in his house for a period of a few weeks closely supervising his treatment.
Yen-Wei Choong: The second time I went to his house, I did something similar. The needle, moxa, and I cooked some herbs. He was a little bit better, sweat less. Both feet were swollen and Manasha was saying Randy was on the way there. Randy give him some shots which also I believed would be helpful. Maybe two days later, Manasha called me and I was there again but the situation was a little more controllable. More stable, sweat less. The face was not so pale, the lips looked better. He was slowly getting better. One week later, the swollen legs were better. Randy give him some drugs, maybe vitamins, I don’t know. So Randy and I both work on him. A few days later he feel much, much better. Maybe two weeks later, the swollen legs were completely gone and there was no sweat.
Vince Dibiase: Randy didn’t get there until later but Yen-Wei had already revived him with his acupuncture. Yen-Wei was the one who revived him.
Dr. Randy Baker: This collapse was primarily due to congestive heart failure. In left-sided congestive heart failure, the lungs fill with water. But he had right-sided congestive heart failure. With right-sided congestive heart failure, the backup of fluid is more in the extremities and in the abdomen, which was fortunate for him because he had emphysema and his lungs couldn’t have tolerated filling up with very much water. His right-sided congestive heart failure was primarily caused by his significant emphysema related to years and years of smoking. The right side of the heart pumps blood to the lungs and it met with increased resistance because of his lung disease. So the right side of the heart enlarged because it was having difficulty pumping blood through his lungs and this eventually led to his congestive heart failure.
Vince Dibiase: Everybody around the Dead was starting to freak out because nobody knew what was going on and they didn’t trust Manasha. They were very nervous but at the same time they couldn’t do anything about it. They felt comfortable with Gloria and me because we would report to them daily about what was going on with Jerry. As long as they knew he was okay, they didn’t want to call up there and bother him. They were uneasy but they were okay with it. What could they do?
Dr. Randy Baker: During this time, he demonstrated truly amazing healing abilities. Seeing the extreme need, he totally stopped drug use and cut down on cigarette smoking. He went on a strict low-fat vegan diet and over the next three months, he lost over sixty pounds. He started a program of exercise and made a remarkable recovery. He also had developed a recurrence of his diabetes.
What was interesting about his diabetes was that he’d had this diabetic coma in 1986 but when he left the hospital, he had virtually no signs of being diabetic, which was fairly unheard of. His diabetes was highly related to his weight. When he weighed in excess of two hundred and eighty pounds, he was diabetic. When his weight came down to two hundred and twenty pounds, he no longer was diabetic. I did treatments on him with Western medicine but I also worked with nutritional supplements and herbs and he received a lot of acupuncture as well as homeopathic medications.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: Jerry was very frightened and now he was finally real receptive to changes in his diet. He got the message. He didn’t stop smoking. But he lost seventy pounds and looked very healthy. Caring for him became a full-time job. I was like a nurse. I set the stage for all the health practitioners. I made sure people came and went and made sure he kept his appointments. He would often say to me, “I need you to stay alive.” He wanted me to watch his health.
Yen-Wei Choong: Manasha concerned about his health so much, she asked me to treat him very regularly, intense like three times a week. So I did. Went to the house, back and forth. I always brought some herbs and at that time, he was very good. He completely accept acupuncture nerve stick all the time. Three times a week until the end of ’92.
Gloria Dibiase: Manasha took charge of Jerry’s alternative healing program. A lot of people didn’t understand what she was trying to do. She was only trying to help Jerry in the way she believed was right. And the program worked beautifully. Jerry lost sixty pounds. They had to readjust the mike on stage because he was standing up taller. He looked so handsome. He had a wonderful glow about him. He was recovering his health through alternative natural methods.
Dr. Randy Baker: During this time, I took him to the best cardiologist I could find. You don’t have to be a genius to see that someone who was an overweight smoker with a history of diabetes who ate a lot of meat was at risk for heart disease. I had tried to arrange for that in the summer of 1991 but jerry hadn’t followed through. But in the summer of ’92, we did do some cardiac testing. He did a treadmill stress test including a stress echo cardiogram, which confirmed his right-sided heart failure but showed absolutely no evidence of blockage of his arteries which totally amazed me.
No medical test is foolproof but this test will detect significant coronary artery disease about ninety percent of the time. The very best test would have been a scan where you inject a radioactive dye and then put someone on the treadmill but Jerry chose not to do this test. I spent a lot of time trying to explain that the risk of getting harmed from this small amount of radioactivity was minuscule to the risk of his dropping dead tomorrow from a heart attack but that was all to no avail.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: We went to the hospital and did a bunch of tests. Jerry didn’t want to do the test with radioactive dye. He told me he didn’t really care to.
Dr. Randy Baker: So we did the next best test and it was a pretty good test. But once more, no test is perfect. The thing was that you could have fifty or sixty percent blockage and it might not show up on that test. That test was going to show more extreme blockage. I’m sure that he had some blockage at that time but it wasn’t enough to significantly interfere with blood flow to his heart. From that point on, he was following a really excellent diet and losing a lot of weight, cutting back significantly on his smoking, and starting an exercise program, all of which should have lowered his risk of heart disease.
Vince Dibiase: For a month, no one would even come up to see him. Cameron Sears, who was managing the Dead, called and I talked to Phil a lot. I talked to a lot of people from the Grateful Dead family. Randy wasn’t talking to anyone at the time and I had to take Randy aside and say, “Randy, you’ve got credentials, okay? You are his doctor. You are his primary physician. You’ve got to let these guys know that. You need to meet with the band and all these guys and let them know you went to the University of Michigan and Stanford Medical School, okay?” So he had a meeting with them, which reassured them about his capabilities.
Dr. Randy Baker: In the summer of 1992, I met with the band and management several times regarding Jerry’s health. We had a dilemma because I knew that touring was very stressful but at the same time that was also what Jerry lived for and that was his life. Which was another tricky area. I recommended that the tour schedule be made less rigorous. I wanted them to play more shows in the Bay Area and less shows traveling around the country. I also thought it would be an excellent idea if I traveled with the band on tour to supervise and to keep an eye on Jerry’s health. There was also obviously some self-interest in this for me. Being paid to be on tour with the Grateful Dead. Jerry had told me that he would like to see me become the so-called tour doctor but said the band would have to approve it. I proposed this but my proposal was turned down. I wasn’t given any reasons.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: There was an upcoming Grateful Dead tour. He was very ill in August and the tour was scheduled to begin in September and people in the Grateful Dead establishment were pushing this other doctor on us who Jerry didn’t care for. She wanted to do a quick patch-up repair job so Jerry would get back on the road again and I said absolutely not. Jerry didn’t want this. He wanted to get well. He wanted to focus in on his health. He told me he wanted to take the time off and I supported him in that. It wasn’t that he was never going to play music again. He wanted to get back on the road in December but in September, he wanted to take some time off. He wanted the tour to be canceled and I think I became out of favor at that point with the organization because they believed that I canceled the tour.
Dr. Randy Baker: Certainly, Jerry himself could have hired me to go out on the road with him but he did not do this. Jerry definitely ran his own life and he didn’t like people telling him what to do. In terms of falling into old habits on the road, Jerry had stage fright. He was very frank about the fact that he felt very nervous before he’d go on stage. Once they’d start playing, he was okay but I think that his stage fright was one of the reasons why he would turn to both cigarettes and drugs, to try to cope with that. I think the rigor of the road for him was having to go out and perform in front of fifteen to fifty thousand people who were expecting to have the time of their life. He might feel bad but he had to go out there. Basically, his health remained in pretty good shape in 1993.
Mannasha Matheson Garcia: Actually, Randy did come with us when the Dead were on tour in December in Denver. So they did bring him there. But then something odd happened. Jerry and I were planning to go to Hawaii with Keelin in January. Other people, I’m not going to mention anyone’s name, organizational people, organized Barbara to come in. She came in and Jerry thought he was going to rekindle his first romance and he left. The day he left, he told me he loved me.
Barbara Meier: We danced around the edges for another nine months. The Dead came to Denver again in December of ’92 and I went to see him and I said, “You tell me what’s going to happen. Are we going to do this or not? Because if we’re not, I’m going to leave the country. I want you or I’m going to Latin America.” And he said, “Let’s go for it.” We threw the I Ching and came up with the “Joyous” hexagram with no changing lines. It was December and he said, “I can’t do this. I can’t leave before Christmas.” He just went into a panic. But the entire scene mobilized like a military operation and for a month, all these people called me every day and said, “It’s going to happen. Come out here.”
I flew out to San Francisco the day before New Year’s Eve. Jerry came over to Hunter’s house. He literally went out for a pack of cigarettes and didn’t go back. We were at Hunter’s and Jerry was freaking out. “I can’t do this to Keelin and I can’t do this to Manasha. I have to do it. Oh, God.” He was looking at me and saying, “I can’t do this to her. It will kill her. Not only that, she’ll kill me. I’m afraid that she’s going to kill me.” I said, “Jerry, you say, ‘Manasha, I’m in love with another woman.’” He said, “Oh, I can’t do that.” So he just left. He didn’t say anything to her. That should have been a red flag for me but of course I ignored it.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: Jerry said he was going out to do some work and he just never came back. The month before, I had given him an ultimatum because I saw that he was going downhill. I didn’t mean to but I had a five-year-old and I wasn’t taking any drugs and I saw that something was changing with him and I was beginning to wonder if he was doing drugs again. So I said, “Look, you either get help and stay with us or else you’re going to have to pursue the drugs.” I got emphatic about it. About a week to ten days later, he was gone. I never saw him again. That was it. Then I heard that he was on the road with Barbara and that they had gone to Hawaii with these other people. I was real hurt because all these other people had come to our Christmas party and they were well aware then of what was going on.
Vince Dibiase: I had to deliver the “Dear John” letter. Manasha knew something was up because Jerry had left in the morning and was due home at five or six o’clock and it was now seven-thirty or eight at night and she had been trying to track him down. Jerry called me so I went up to Hunter’s house. Phil and Jill Lesh were there and Maureen and Bob Hunter and Jerry and Barbara. Jerry had written a very short little note. He said, “I just can’t do it.” Then he asked me if I’d deliver it. I said, “Sure.” Barbara said, “Good thing it’s today because if it was the good old days, you know what they did with the messengers.”
Barbara Meier: They walked up to Jerry and handed him plane tickets and said, “You have reservations in Hawaii. Get on the plane.” Leon was there with the limo and he took us to the airport. We spent the night at the airport, got on the plane, and we were gone. We went to Maui for three weeks and then we went to the Big Island.
Vince Dibiase: I had to go up to Nicasio, which was a long lonely ride. Manasha wasn’t home when I got there. One of her friends was there. He let me in and I waited. She came by within half an hour, furious and frantic, and I said, “Manasha, if there’s anything I can do, I want to help.” And I handed her this letter. She left very upset and I stayed for a few minutes and then I left. I’d done my job. It was very hard for her. Gloria and I stayed in the middle of things with her. She held it against me for doing that but she also told me a couple of months ago that she forgave me for it because she knew I was doing my job. But Gloria and I stayed friendly and supportive with her because we wanted to be helpful to Jerry and we wanted to be nice to her.
Barbara Meier: We had this idyllic month together scuba diving, lolling around, and it was just exquisite. People who didn’t know him, people who had no idea who he was, like old Hawaiian men, would stop us on the street and say, “My God, I have never seen a man and woman so in love together.” It was like an extended Ecstasy trip. A week later, the Hunters came over. Bob and Jerry wrote six songs together. They hadn’t written for years and I believe they didn’t write any songs afterwards. They wrote six songs in three weeks and the energy was incredible.
Jerry and I wrote a collaborative poem together called “Gaspar’s Parrot.” Gaspar De Lago is his alter ego’s name and it was a fabulous sestina, absolutely hilarious. We were having so much fun that we were literally peeing in our pants. He was not using at all and everyone said this was the longest time he was off drugs. It was great and he asked me to marry him. I said yes. At the time, he was still married to MG. Actually, I was still married to someone, too. It was like, “As soon as we get our divorces, we’ll get married.” There was this wonderful scene of diving and raving and hanging out and we were watching movies and writing poetry and I was painting the whole time and bonding with Maureen Hunter and Jerry was writing all these songs and composing.
Gloria Dibiase: The day before Jerry and Barbara were coming back, Jerry gave me twenty-four-hour notice to find him a temporary rental. He said, “Get us a place with a nice view in Sausalito or Tiburon. We’ll only be there for a month.” Famous last words. He ended up living there for a year.
Barbara Meier: Because he had nowhere to go back to, they got us this furnished condo in Tiburon. Immediately, everybody just jumped on the scene and said, “Oh, this is so great. Now he’s with you, he can quit smoking.”
Dr. Randy Baker: There was even a period in early ’93 when Jerry totally stopped smoking cigarettes for a while. However, then he went into the Grateful Dead spring tour and he eventually started smoking again.
Barbara Meier: We started walking an hour together every day. We would go to the chiropractor one day, the acupuncturist the next. He was working with a hypnotherapist and a personal trainer three times a week. We were drinking carrot juice, we were doing Chinese herbs. His snoring was so appalling that the first three nights we were together, I didn’t sleep. Then I just said, “Okay. I am going to learn to sleep through this.” I said, “I’m definitely going to sleep with my husband” and I did. I managed to do it. I’m very proud of that. It was something I created very deliberately with my intention.
Gloria Dibiase: We were so optimistic for Jerry when he got together with Barbara because we thought it was romantic for him to be reunited with his first love. Jerry and Bob Hunter started writing music again. Jerry was looking good. He was healthy. He was strong. He was happy.
Barbara Meier: Then I made a huge mistake. I didn’t realize it at the time but I felt I needed to go back to Boulder and bring back some stuff. I just had the suitcase I’d used to go to Hawaii and I needed a house sitter. I needed to check on Esme, my daughter, and I was gone literally four days. I called him several times every day. I came back. He hadn’t slept in the bed. He had slept on the couch when he’d slept and there was this huge ring of cigarette ashes around where he had been and open food containers. This man was absolutely and totally incapable of being on his own. Completely incapable. He’d been freaked out about me leaving and I’d kept saying, “Oh sweetie, don’t worry. I’ll be right back.” I was so naive. I had no idea that he would lose it so badly.
A week or so after I got back, he said, “I ran into this woman I used to be with. Deborah.” This was someone that he’d told me about when we were in Hawaii. I was still thinking that Manasha was a problem. Meanwhile, here was this other woman coming in the room and I wasn’t paying any attention. I wasn’t relating to her presence seriously. So I just said, “Oh, sweetheart. No problem. We’re solid. Don’t worry about it. Baby, we can work anything out. We’re together. That’s all that matters and we’ll work anything out.” I believed it. I totally believed it.
Gloria Dibiase: Jerry was always hopelessly in love with whatever woman he was with at the time. But when a woman wants a man, she can get him. Think about it. When a woman wants a man, she can get him.
Barbara Meier: In the interim, I had met Sara, MG, Heather, Annabelle, and Trixie, and totally, totally fallen in love with all of these people. Jerry was saying, “We’re a family now. It doesn’t matter. Your kid, my kids. We’re all one family and this is it. We’re here together for the rest of our lives and this is all I’ve ever wanted and this is it. This is perfect.” And I believed him. We were a family. I totally fell in love with these people and I wanted them in my life. I did everything I could to get them to come over to the house or for us all to get together. All the boundaries were down. Everything was open.
Vince Dibiase: Jerry played a chess game in life that kept everybody scratching their heads. He took pleasure in that. Everybody was always trying to figure out what Jerry was talking about and doing and nobody could ever do it and that was part of his game in life because he was bored with everything else.
Barbara Meier: One of the most fun things we did was to play games with the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary. We would find words that we’d never heard of and then we’d start incorporating them into our conversations and then we’d mix them up together and it was constant running hilarity. But then some creaky stuff started to happen. I had my own music and I was into some fairly avant garde stuff and he hated it. Another thing that started to be a problem was that I had a lot of men friends and he started getting extremely upset about that. I was very close with my ex-husband and Jerry had a hard time with the phone ringing all the time and he would say, “It’s another one of your bozos.” It was very unlike him. But it was a part of him in the sense that he had a very jealous and possessive streak.
As far as I could tell, everything was wide open and happening. He was writing with Hunter, he was doing his work with Grisman, he was doing work with Heather and the Redwood City Symphony. We were ecstatically happy together. He was getting healthier. He had quit smoking. What I didn’t realize was that he had started using again. I didn’t know that. I was so stupid, I had no clue. He was being a bastard and I thought that was just because he was quitting smoking. I thought he was just being a bear. Oh, he was vile. He was cold and he was withholding.
By then, the shows had started and I don’t want to name names but there were certain people in that world who used and they thought a little chipping here and a little chipping there was no problem. I thought that Jerry was nodding off during dinner because he hadn’t slept well the night before. I thought he was shooting the nasal dilation thing up his nose because he had a cold. I thought the sweat on his forehead was because maybe he was coming down with a fever. I was an idiot. I’d never been around hard drugs before so I never had a clue.
The kicker was that I had created this very interesting lifestyle for myself before I left to be with him. He’d asked me to drop all that because it was in Colorado and New Mexico and I said, “Okay. But I’ve made a commitment to teach one last course here in the Bay Area.” It turned out to be a ten-day course and I was gone from nine in the morning until seven at night. He hated it. He despised the whole premise of it. He would sit and rant at me about it and challenge me and I would just lovingly tease him.
Because the basic premise of this belief management course was that you create the world that you live in by the beliefs that you hold. If you hold the belief that you’re unlovable, you will constantly create situations that will confirm that. He’d say, “Take this scene. No way did I create this.” And I said, “Who did?” “Oh, man. Shit just happens.” “Oh, really?” What was so odd was that he could completely and one hundred percent take total responsibility in the realm of his music. He would get to the sound check at two in the afternoon and be there until the show started working out the bugs. But that was the only realm in which he would do that—take responsibility. In every other realm, he just let everything skid.
He’d been seeing a hypnotherapist to help him stop smoking. One night he came back and said, “She said I need to tell you that I’m having thoughts about Deborah and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m very scared. I love you. I want to be with you but I feel like she has a hold on me.” I said, “I guess you’re going to have to choose ’cause if you’re with her then you won’t be with me and if you’re with me, then you won’t be with her. You need to decide what you want to do.” He said, “I love you and I want to be with you.” I said, “Then that’s your decision and there’s no problem.”
The Grateful Dead tour started in March ’93. We went on tour and he was cold and withdrawn. He was being a real bastard and it was awful. We were in Chicago, which was really cold, and this went on for three days. I was in tears the entire time, feeling shut out and wondering why. The last night, I was wondering what the hell I was doing there. I was sitting alone backstage at the show on the black equipment boxes and I was writing the whole time, trying to take notes.
Randy Baker came up to me and he said, “Barbara, is Jerry using?” I said, “No.” He said, “What makes you think so?” I said, “He says he’s not.” He said, “Do you know what the symptoms are?” I said, “Like what?” Then he started enumerating the symptoms and they all started vectoring. I went, “Oh shit. Oh shit.” I thought that he was just quitting smoking. And then immediately this other part of me kicked in and said, “Oh God, that’s what it is. Thank God that’s what it is.” Because I have the belief that you can work with anything. I believe that anything is workable. That was one thing I learned from Trungpa Rinpoche. You never give up on anybody.
That was during the break. I went up to Steve Parish and I said, “Listen, man, you tell me the truth ’cause I’m losing it. I’m in real pain here. You have to tell me if this is true or not.” He said, “The first thing you need to know about Jerry is that he can handle it, okay? Yes, it’s true. We didn’t want to tell you ’cause we didn’t want you to be freaked out. We didn’t want you to leave. Everything is coming together now that you’re here and this is the best he’s ever been and the time you’ve been together is the longest he’s ever been off it. As soon as he quits smoking, he’ll be able to do this and it’s all going to work out. Just hang in there with it. We don’t want to lose you. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened.” I said, “I’m not going to leave but you can’t leave me out.”
He said, “Yeah, he was chipping and he got hooked and he’s been on these pills. He’s been off it for the last three days, that’s why he’s such a bastard but he’s got these pills from the doctor and so he’s kicking but he can do this. He can do this. He can go and kick.” He said, “The main thing is just act like you don’t know about it and hang in there with it ’cause it’s all going to be fine. I promise you. It’s all going to be fine. We’re going to be fine. Hang in there for a week. Don’t worry about it.”
Then he went back to whatever he was doing and I was sitting on this black box thinking, “I’ve just been told that the man I love is using heroin. I’ve been asked to go into denial about that and pretend that I don’t know and enable him.” I thought about Trungpa at that moment and realized I was having a profound Vajrayana experience. I had gone from the god-realm of being with Jerry in Hawaii to being on the black box backstage in this cold hall in Chicago and now I was in a hell-realm. I couldn’t believe it but there it was.
So we went back to the hotel room that night and ordered some hot chocolate and he was actually very sweet. I said, “Jerry. I’ve got to tell you something. I want you to know that I love you. I’ll always love you. I’ll never leave you. I want you to know that you can do whatever you want. You can do whatever you want and I’ll be here with you but you can’t exclude me and you can’t keep secrets from me. I need for you to know that I know that you’re using and that’s okay. I love you. Just don’t hide it from me ’cause I’ll go crazy. I grew up with alcoholics. I can’t do that.”
He said, “What the fuck are you talking about. Who told you that? Did Randy tell you that shit? Fucking Randy.” He was up and pacing and freaking out and this corrugated steel door, a psychic door, came down between us. He said, “I think you’d better leave now.” I said, “What do you mean? I’ll never leave.” He said, “No. I think it’s time for you to leave.” I said, “I thought we were getting married?” He said, “Yeah, well. I meant it at the time.” I said, “You have to talk to me. Do you know who I am? Do you know what I’m made of? It’s not going to work like that. I’m Barbara. I’m not a groupie.”
We stayed up all night, until six in the morning. I kept saying, “Is this about Deborah?” “No. It has nothing to do with Deborah. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.” Finally, he looked at me and he said, “All right. I’m in love with another woman.” I said, “Deborah?” and he said, “Yeah. I can’t shake her.” Part of me was remembering that this was what I’d wanted him to say to Manasha! But here he was saying it to me and I was thinking to myself, “No, no!” But I was also thinking, “Yes. Fantastic!” He’d finally taken a fucking stand. He’d made a decision. I was devastated and I was on his team all at once. It was really quite a multi-dimensional experience.
I said, “Okay, man. If you’ve got more love with her than you’ve got with me, then I want you to have it. If that’s what you’ve got, then go for it.” The bottom line was that I said, “Okay. I’ll go but we’ve got twenty-four hours to be together and I want them to be as exquisite as they can be and I want to use this time for as much psychic reclamation and closure as we can do.”
We spent another day and evening together and slept together and made love. He said, “I never thought anything would happen to blow the best thing that ever happened to me out of the water. You saved my ass. No one else could have done it.” Meaning, “You got me out of the thing with Manasha.” He said, “I really want to help you. I’d like to help you put your daughter through college and I’d like to help you with your art.” I said, “Okay. That would work for me ’cause that’s what I’m going to need to do now.” He said, “Let’s figure out what that’s going to be and set it up and we’ll do that.” I said, “I’d like to do this three-year program.” Two weeks later in New York, he said, “What do you need?” I gave him an amount and he said, “How ’bout twice that?” I said, “That’s great,” and that was it. That was April ’93. I never saw him again.
Barbara Meier: I played it all wrong. My way was to just appreciate and love him unconditionally and give him unconditional space. I realize now that the nature of his wound was that he needed to be in a situation with very strict boundaries. Even though he despised them, he couldn’t live without them, and the way it worked was that he couldn’t do that for himself. He had to be with a woman who played out his shadow for him. He had to be with someone so he could say to people, “Oh I can’t do that. Manasha won’t let me. Oh I can’t do that. Deborah won’t let me. I can’t do that.” I now feel tremendous empathy for Manasha, and for that matter Deborah, or any woman who ever loved Jerry.
Vince Dibiase: Barbara came back and packed up and split. Jerry came back from that tour and he lived in that Tiburon apartment for about a year.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: I got a notice in the mail from Jerry’s attorney saying that we had to leave the house in thirty days. That broke my heart. Years prior to this in ’90 when he moved in, he’d asked me to marry him and I’d said yes. We were supposed to be married on Easter when he was free. I called him up Palm Sunday and he asked me if we could all get together, Keelin, Jerry and me, and I said, “I’m really disappointed in you and I’m disappointed in the way you left and I feel really bad and I have made other plans for Easter so I don’t know if that’s appropriate right now.” I said, “Maybe sometime in the future. Maybe in May.” He said, “I want to keep trying so whenever we can get together, let’s get together.”
I put him off at that point and then the next time I called him, the woman he was with answered the phone and she said, “Don’t ever call here again. You’re not to call here ever again.” Those were her exact words and then I let it go. But in the meantime I was real worried about Jerry so I called Cameron Sears and I asked him to hire Randy Baker for the Grateful Dead. I felt like Jerry loved us. He seemed to suffer a lot after he left us. He seemed to have suffered from a broken heart.
Cassidy Law: We went to the White House in 1993. Bill Clinton wasn’t there that day so we went and saw Al Gore. I think Al knew a little bit about us but Tipper was definitely into it. Actually, we hung out with her the most. It was so funny walking into the White House. All of a sudden, we heard, “There’s Jerry Garcia! There’s Jerry Garcia!” People were flying out of their offices and flocking to him. That guy had so many photos taken that day, it was incredible.
I was really feeling out of place and Jerry picked up on that right away. He said, “Don’t you worry about that. You’re with me today.” Any time someone went to introduce us, he was right there with me and I thought, “What a gentleman.” That night, I went with Jerry and all the band members and their wives to Al Gore’s house for dinner.
It was a private intimate dinner so we were being the nicest that we could be. Al and Tipper were running around shooting the breeze with everyone. I was also there in Washington a year later when Strom Thurmond came running up and said, “Jerry Garcia!” The whole place fell silent. Jerry loved it. That was his kind of humor. Very absurd.
Chesley Millikin: Jerry called me up and he said, “I’m going to Ireland and I don’t want to go without you. Can you come along?” So we flew to Shannon in July ’93 and we did all kinds of things like tourists. Deborah set it up and it couldn’t have been done any better. We had a great time. Matt Malloy, who’s one of the Chieftains, we went to his pub in the County Mayo. Then we went to a pub up in Donegal where there was a bluegrass band playing whom Jerry had seen, I believe he said, in 1974 at a festival in Philadelphia.
The girls would stop off at all these old places where there were buried monuments to death. Jerry wasn’t interested in any of that but one time we pulled up at the base of this famous mountain in Ireland and he was sitting there. The girls had gone off to look at one of these tombs. The tinkers, who are the Gypsies, a traveling people, had made a camp across the road so there was a horse tied up to this lightpost. The horse was going apeshit and all of a sudden, Jerry took out his banjo and he started playing. These very stern tall German women were walking by and they looked into the van and of course they had no idea who the hell it was. He was playing and the horse settled down. It was like the horse understood.
We also went as far west in Ireland as you can get before you step in the ocean. We were driving around in this van and we drove down this very narrow road only wide enough for the van and a bike. Out of nowhere, a little motor scooter flew past us. Jerry turned around and said, “There’s a leprechaun!” So he saw a leprechaun in Ireland.
When we were in Ireland, he asked me if I knew a good jewelry store and I told him which one. He was going to take Deborah and himself there and I said, “Jewelry store?” He said, “Yes,” and I looked at Deborah and she said, “Jerry likes to spend money.” No matter where he went, he tipped fifty percent and that was because he felt that he had come by it so easily and these people were just making a living.
He didn’t really know much about his Irish ancestors but he loved Ireland. He felt very peaceful, very quiet. Also what was great to him was that nobody bothered him. Most of the people didn’t even know who the hell he was. Any that did stood their distance. We ate well and we traveled well and he had a great time and he really loved it. I don’t believe he was too happy about going back. The only thing that he had been looking forward to was that he was going to Japan.
Vince Dibiase: We were in Hawaii on our way to Tokyo for his art shows. We’d had high-ranking government officials working for us to help set this up. We’d had people in the State Department over here getting his working visa. The head Buddhist monk in all Japan was going to be with us. Kitaro, the great Japanese New Age musician, was to be our personal host. He was the one setting up this spiritual quest with Jerry Garcia from the West, the head monk from the East, and himself. In the equivalent of The New York Times in Tokyo, there was a full-page ad on the back of the front section. Part of Jerry’s face with the words, “Your Great Uncle Jerry Is Coming.”
He was on national TV ten times a day. They’d sent a film crew over from Japan and he’d done an interview and they’d cut it into fifteen and thirty second spots. They aired them nationally ten times a day starting October I and the art exhibition was scheduled to open on the twentieth of October. Three weeks of seven days a week on national TV. Billboards in downtown Tokyo. “You Know Your Great Uncle Jerry Is Coming.” This huge conglomerate over there sponsored the whole thing. They were inventing Jerry fever over there.
Two days before we were to land in Tokyo, Jerry canceled. It was like, “You don’t do that to Japanese. They don’t understand that.” He was afraid on a lot of different levels and he wasn’t doing all that well physically. He was really tired and I didn’t think going would have been the right thing to do. I saw millions of dollars go right out the window plus a potential huge lawsuit because they’d spent a lot of money hyping him over there.
But the minute he said that he didn’t think he could carry Japan, I said, “Okay. Let’s not go there.” I didn’t hesitate because what was important to me was him surviving. A day and a half after we were due back on the mainland, he was going off on this sixteen-city tour with the Garcia Band. If he was tired before he went to Tokyo, he was going to be exhausted when he got back and then a day and a half later, he was going to go on this tour.
The shows of his art went on but without Jerry. My family over there was literally disgraced. But it gave me a chance to sit down with Jerry friend-to-friend and talk about my life and his life. At one point, he looked at me and said, “Man, I love you.” He got up and gave me this bear hug. In the big picture, it was more important for him not to go.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: When Jerry came out of the hospital after the coma, his hair had gone pretty white and he was really gimping around. He had trouble making it up stairs for a long time after that and so he really had the appearance of an old man. But he did come back. He got into diving and he was walking on the treadmill and doing the McDougal diet and all these things that were so uncharacteristic for him but actually, they were life-oriented activities. At the end of ’93, I felt he was really doing well and then it all fell apart for him again.
Gloria Dibiase: Jerry didn’t go to bed like most people did. For the last two and a half years of his life, it was like one long day where the sun would rise and it would be light and then the sun would go down and it would be dark again. He didn’t take off his clothes, get into pajamas, and get underneath the covers. He slept on top of his bed in his clothing.
Vince Dibiase: He’d doze. It was not like he’d go to bed at two in the morning and get up at six. He would work through the night and he would doze. This was twenty-four hours a day. He was absolutely on his own time.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: It would have been nice if Jerry had walked around the block now and then and gotten some normal exercise without putting himself in a machine. He had all this equipment in his place. Never used it. He loved to be that way. He would always explain to me how healthy he was. “I’m in good shape,” he’d say. “I’m getting muscles.” And I’d be thinking, “Wonderful.” I’d look down and he’d have a cigarette in his hand. But he was doing good. He had a good creative period with lots of things going on and then all of a sudden, it started to get flat again. I could see him coming down again. He was losing interest.
Gloria Dibiase: Jerry still loved Keelin very much. She was the apple of his eye. He would send me out to buy Christmas and birthday presents for her. He just didn’t have physical contact with her. But she was always in his thoughts and in his heart.
Vince Dibiase: He’d really tried to be a good daddy to Keelin. I’d go in the house when he and Manasha were still together and he’d have Keelin on his lap at the computer with some kid’s programs, teaching her things. Or they would play the piano together. Go out feeding the goats and watching the sunset. Gloria used to dress Keelin up in her belly dance costume and Keelin would dance and Gloria would sing and Jerry would play for them on the guitar.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: Jerry got us another house as an alternative because he wanted to get us a place to live. I tried to set up a lot of meetings between him and Keelin where I wouldn’t be there but it never happened. It just never happened.
Dexter Johnson: I went backstage to see Jerry and David Grisman at the Warfield in January ’94. There were problems at this gig because both Jerry’s and David’s sound crews had come and neither of them wanted to bow out. Jerry just wanted to play and have a good time. After the first set, he was so pissed that he tore off his headphones. Then he walked straight off stage. Didn’t look at the band or the audience or anyone standing backstage.
Downstairs, Jerry was walking back and forth and everybody was giving him room and he was literally steaming but nobody did anything. Finally, I went up and put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Jerry, what is it?” He said, “I can’t hear anything. They pay good money for these shows and I can’t fucking hear the guitar. Nobody can hear right. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.” I said, “If you think it’s the pickup, maybe I can help.” I’m a guitar maker and he was like, “Yeah. Get the guitar to Dexter. This is lucky! We got Dexter.” He was happy.
So they were told to go get the guitar. Jerry went off to sit in the back room with David and I started waiting. After ten minutes, there was no guitar. I went up the stairs to the stage and there was one of his roadies with the guitar in his lap and a cigarette going and he’d put three new strings on it. I could have easily strung the guitar in moments. I said, “Oh, hey. I was going to work on the guitar for Jerry.” He said, “We got it covered, man.” And he just waved me away.
I went downstairs and I said, “David, they won’t give me the guitar.” He said, “Did you tell Jerry?” I said, “I don’t want to upset him again.” David turned around and went in the back and yelled, “Your fucking roadies! I’ve had it with them.” Jerry stood up. But he’d mellowed out somehow. He said, “Forget it. We’ll just do the rest of the show and it’ll be fine.” We told some stories and visited and laughed and he went out there and finished the show and played a great second half.
Later on, I was told that when I went up and put my hand on Jerry’s shoulder and said, “What is it, man?” one of the big bodyguards who were at every door lunged towards me and said, “That guy shouldn’t be talking to Jerry.” All these guys in the back room were playing cards during the show. They didn’t even listen to the show. They were talking about meeting some broads later and playing cards. The whole thing saddened me. To me, it didn’t seem like a fun place to be.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: Jerry went off and he filed for divorce at the end of ’93 and he remarried about three weeks after our divorce was final. He had been making the rounds of his old girlfriends and I had never met Barbara before but I really liked her and enjoyed her. She seemed to be okay. But when he got together with Deborah, that was it for me. I said, “Oh, I can’t do any more here.”
Rev. Matthew Fox: It was Deborah who called me and she said that she and Jerry had read my book Original Blessing and were very turned on by it. I had to tell them that the pope was not too happy with what I was doing and they said, “Oh, great. An outlaw priest for an outlaw marriage.” I sat with them before the wedding. Jerry came late and he seemed very joyous, very happy. I was not a Deadhead but I was certainly charmed by him. He and Deborah were cooing and very loving together. I don’t do windows and I don’t do weddings but I was pleased to do this for them and in fact, I did get seats for a Dead show after the wedding. I very much liked the ritual aspect of it but would have liked to see it more organized.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: Jerry married her because she had this business sense. He was starting to like that in women and she was trying to do movies and he liked that artistic ability, too. They lived separately.
Gloria Dibiase: After Jerry married, he continued to live by himself in his own house. That’s the way he wanted it to be.
Rev. Matthew Fox: I’d played them a twelfth-century version of “Ave Maria” that they’d liked very much and with all the talented people they knew, a friend of Jerry’s, David Grisman, played it on the mandolin for the ceremony. When they came to me, I was a Dominican father but by the time I married them, I had become an Episcopalian. Not an Episcopalian priest so I had to have an Episcopalian priest assist me in the ceremony. Jerry was half an hour late for the wedding and very upset. His limo driver had not come and so he was a little frantic there for a while but once Steve Parish calmed him down, he was joyful again. I believe he was wearing a tux.
Vince Dibiase: I had acute pancreatitis and I got snowed in in New York and Jerry wanted me to get him his wedding shoes. He said, “Vince, I want a pair of glove-leather soft shoes. No seams. Black.” There I was in eighteen inches of snow with acute pancreatitis but I finally found them and shipped them to him. They arrived on his wedding day. Those were the pair he wore. He had four other pairs of shoes that people had gotten him. Not even close. But I found them.
Rev. Matthew Fox: The marriage was done in a small Episcopal chapel. Because it was to be kept secret from the press, it was a small, intimate ceremony, not very grand at all. After the ceremony, I actually did do a sermon in which I talked about the postmodern marriage. When it was all over, there was a reception at a club in Marin County.
Gloria Dibiase: The reception was in Sausalito at a yacht club. All the details were kept secret until the day of the wedding and then we were told where to go. The whole band was there. David Grisman was there. Jerry seemed happy.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: After that, I didn’t see him much except at Rex Foundation board meetings.
Hal Kant: The structure of the Rex Foundation was my idea because for a lot of corporate and tax reasons, it was not appropriate for the Grateful Dead to give large sums of money directly to charity. The idea of the foundation was a mechanical concept. The idea of giving money was their idea. The band itself was always a minority on the board. They’d all have a lot of fun at those meetings because as I am the designated conservative in the Grateful Dead family, I was always questioning what they wanted and they were resisting what I wanted. Oddly enough, at the last meeting Jerry attended, we joined with each other on almost every item against everybody else. Trying to be more practical and I would say from his standpoint, a lot more conservative.
Rev. Matthew Fox: I remember going to dinner with Deborah and Jerry after the wedding and he was just like a child. He had gotten a new telescope and he was so pleased to be setting it up and showing it to me. Like a four-year-old with a new toy. Then he took me over to his computer and showed me how to paint on it. I had never worked with anything like that before and he was delighted when I started getting into it. Really, the joyous childlike side of him was remarkable. Especially considering how much else was obviously at work in his life. I’m fifty-five. The childlike joy that he had at fifty-three was remarkable. We discussed many things at dinner, theology beyond Catholicism, and I realized that this man was a philosopher.
Gloria Dibiase: Jerry needed a bigger place to live. He wanted four bedrooms and we looked at all these different places for five or six thousand dollars a month rent. They were beautiful places but we wanted to be a little bit more economical. This friend of mine, a real estate agent, said, “I want you to look at one more place.” It turned out to be this incredible house on Audrey Court in Tiburon. High on a hill. Beautiful view. You could see part of the Bay Bridge, San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tam. He was the king of the hill.
Vince Dibiase: He said, “Take it and I’ll look at it next week.” He did stuff like that all the time. We weren’t buying the house. It was a rental but still, he did that all the time. He did that to me in the art business. I’d go and proof his art and do press checks and everything. He wouldn’t come and do it so I would go up and do it for him. Then I would have to sit there holding my breath as he looked at it to let me know if he was going to accept the job or not. Usually, he did accept it.
Gloria Dibiase: Jerry loved the house. He wanted to buy it later on. According to Jerry, Jerry and Deborah were going to move in together at some point, which they never did. She kept her house in Mill Valley. Then he wanted to buy this place because he loved it very much but he couldn’t.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: By this time, I think he wanted to be straight but he was traveling around with all these heavy suppliers and it was hard. When he’d been with Barbara, Barbara was glued, man. They were together all the time. Every time I saw her, they were together.
Bob Barsotti: We were doing a Jerry Garcia Band date in Phoenix in May ’94 and he was looking really really bad. It was our last date in this little swing of dates and he played the first set. He came off after about forty-five minutes and he went into his dressing room and he collapsed. Steve Parish went in and saw him and he said Jerry looked like he had when he went into his coma. The same look on his face and the pale skin. Steve said, “Bob, he has to go.” I said, “Let’s send him to the hospital.” “No, he wants to fly home.” “Why don’t you just take him to a hospital?” “No, no, no. He wants to fly home.” Steve had the pilot call every town on the way to make sure there was an ambulance number or a doctor on call there. They had a private jet so they flew him home and then it took a good day or two before he actually went to the doctor. He wouldn’t go.
Vince Dibiase: Gloria was at Jerry’s house in Tiburon when he came home after walking off stage in Phoenix when he got sick. Gloria called me and said, “Vince, Jerry doesn’t look good.” I remember going over there and he was wheezing badly while he was trying to breathe. We got Randy on the phone.
Dr. Randy Baker: In the spring of 1994, he started developing problems again. He had a recurrence of his diabetes. And so I worked with him a lot in 1994 trying to help him handle his diabetes, working with medication and herbs and diet and lifestyle. I even created visualizations to help him with the diabetes.
Vince Dibiase: The following day, he was supposed to go to Ireland with Deborah. She hadn’t seen Jerry yet because she had not gone on that Jerry Garcia Band tour. I think she stayed to go to George Lucas’s fiftieth birthday party, which really upset Jerry a lot because he wanted her on the tour with him. I said to him, “You’re going to Europe tomorrow? How can you go to Europe tomorrow?” I said, “You’re going to come home in a box if you go, man. Look at you.” He said, “No. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I just can’t do it.”
Deborah went off to Ireland. We moved in with him in Tiburon and we stayed there for at least four weeks, just Gloria and I. He wanted us there to monitor him, which worried the hell out of me because normally he never complained. He wouldn’t say things like that so I knew he was sicker than anyone let on.
Gloria’s a night owl. She and Jerry would often cross paths in the wee hours of the morning. One time she was in the middle of a project in the kitchen and Jerry walked in and said, “What are you doing up?” Gloria said, “What are you doing up!” It was like, “Wait a minute. You’re the sick one, Jerry. We’re supposed to be monitoring you.” He couldn’t shut off. I think the use of drugs helped him shut it off. Because the creativity was there round the clock. It just kept on coming through him. It was almost a curse. And a blessing.
Bob Barsotti: We had to cut back on Jerry Garcia Band shows because he wasn’t capable of doing it anymore. We had to keep canceling shows and stopping tours because physically he wasn’t able to do it. That was why he used to play twenty times a year at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco. The only place he could get it together physically to play with the Jerry Garcia Band was by getting in his car and driving for a half an hour to the Warfield. If he could do that, then he could play. But if it was any more than that, even like a San Jose gig or Santa Cruz, he couldn’t deal with it. He didn’t want to do it.
Yen-Wei Choong: For almost one full year, he didn’t get a treatment. I think in the fall, September ’94, he was sick for some reason. Then Vince, his personal secretary, called me and asked me to go there to treat Jerry at the house. So I been treating them almost every week. Until February ’95, that was last visit. For the whole winter, I’ve been treating them regular. Sometimes at Garcia’s house, Tiburon. Sometimes at Deborah’s house in Mill Valley. It varied.
Vince Dibiase: Jerry had told me six months earlier that he’d met Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and that he’d agreed to do something with him. The idea of doing a Jerry Garcia-designed T-shirt for the Hudson River-keeper Project came down and Jerry was on tour. It came to deadline and I was getting a lot of trouble from other people around him who didn’t want the project to happen. It came down to me actually giving them the okay to do it without Jerry’s approval because we couldn’t get through to him on the road. But if I didn’t say yes on this one particular day, they were going to cancel the project and push it back at least two years. So I gave them an okay. Two days later when I finally got through to Jerry, he said, “I told you it was a done deal, didn’t I?” There were people associated with his art business who were trying to stop this from happening in order to get me out of his art business. It was amazing because there was enough to go around. But they didn’t see it that way.
Dr. Randy Baker: We got to early 1995 and the diabetes was becoming progressively worse. Diabetes greatly accelerates the process of coronary artery disease. The single most important thing that a diabetic can do is avoid eating sweets and I was getting reports from people surrounding Jerry that he was eating lots of sweets. Now, insulin is a great drug but it’s very powerful and potentially dangerous. If someone’s using insulin, they need to carefully monitor their blood sugar and if they take too much insulin, it can kill you from insulin shock creating low blood sugar.
I talked with Jerry about using insulin. He wasn’t particularly interested and I really didn’t think he was a good candidate for insulin because he wasn’t taking much responsibility for his health. The potential danger of his taking too much and dying was fairly high because he didn’t want to monitor his blood sugar regularly. Frankly, I also didn’t want him to become too comfortable with syringes. At the tune, his drug use was primarily through smoking and I thought that was less dangerous.
Vince Dibiase: Randy had no control over him. Randy was a Deadhead. When Randy got near Jerry, he was a Deadhead, not a doctor. Because he couldn’t persuade Jerry to do what he wanted him to do.
Gloria Dibiase: Randy wasn’t persuasive or forceful enough to get Jerry to change his ways. But then nobody was. Jerry was bored, frustrated, and unhappy and he didn’t want to try.
Yen-Wei Choong: If you use cocaine or heroin, that can cause the toxic dampness and heat inside. Particularly the liver and the lungs. He had a great deal of dampness and heat. Acupuncture can reduce somewhat but more important is the herbs. I did send a lot of herbs for his heart, for his diabetes, but unfortunately, he didn’t take. That was really frustrating, to be honest. I know he does not like the taste of the tea. I tried to order extremely concentrated herbal powder in the capsules. I told him many times, “You better take this.” I left them there. I know he didn’t take because when I come back three days later, it’s still the same amount. Sometimes, I leave the herbs in both his Tiburon house and Mill Valley, which is Deborah’s house. I did try my best because many many fans encourage me but he didn’t take. I’m absolutely sure that can work but the patient must be very cooperative.
Vince Dibiase: The Chinese herbs were helping him when we could get him to take them but it was very difficult because he was a very difficult patient. An incredibly difficult patient but Yen-Wei would stick with him.
Bob Barsotti: In February ’95, we had to cancel a Jerry Garcia Band show at the Warfield. Jerry had been on vacation diving and something had happened to his hand. I think what had happened was he had fallen asleep on it. He basically let it get to the point where the entire house was in, we’d all eaten dinner, the sound was in, everything was in for the show. It was five minutes to eight o’clock and this hand had been bothering him for two weeks and he knew it didn’t work well.
Finally, Jerry went, “Hey, you know what? I don’t think I can play.” Steve Parish said, “Hey, Bob. Come here. Jerry doesn’t think he can play.” I said, “Come on.” We went into the dressing and Jerry said, “Bob, something’s wrong with my hand. I just don’t think I can play.” I said, “What happened?” “I don’t know. I got stung by a lot of jellyfish and I woke up funny on it one morning.” I said, “So what do you want me to say? It was jellyfish?” He said, “No, no. I don’t want you to say that. It just isn’t working. I’m not feeling up to it, you know?”
We went round and round and I said, “You know what, Jerry? We sold the show as ‘An Evening with the Jerry Garcia Band.’ So why don’t I just take a couple of couches, put them up on the stage, and we’ll go up and sit down and shoot the shit like we do down here.” He said, “Wow, that’s a great idea. That would be really wild.” I had no intention of doing this but I wanted to see what this was all about. I said, “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea because then you might get asked questions you don’t want to answer,” and he said, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.”
I said, “Do you think you’ll be able to play tomorrow night?” He said, “Yeah, I think my hand will be better tomorrow night.” We had Monday free. I said, “So why don’t I just say that we’ll take the Friday show and we’ll switch it to Monday, and if you can’t do it, they’ll get a refund and I won’t kick everybody out right away. I’ll let them hang out.” He said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” I said, “But I’m not going to do this until you leave.” He said, “I’ll just wait here.” I said, “No, you got to get out of here now. It’s ten after eight now. Let’s not make these people wait too long before they know they’re not going to get anything.”
A long time ago, Bill Graham taught me something. When talking to an audience from the stage, use the star. Jerry was the star. So I went out and I said, “Jerry asked me to come out and tell you something. He went on vacation recently, he was doing a lot of diving, he injured his hand. It wasn’t feeling right and he thought it was getting better. He’s been working on it the last week exercising it and he really thought he was going to be able to play tonight. He came here and he tried to sound-check and it got to the point where he didn’t feel like he could give as good a performance as he wants to give you. So he’s asking if you can all come back on Monday night.” Everyone went, “Oh, yeah. No problem.”
I don’t think his hand ever really came all the way back after that. The first few shows he did with the Garcia Band, it was kind of embarrassing. He couldn’t play the notes. He was simplifying every solo way way down to the bare bones. Where there had been ten notes, there would be two.
Justin Kreutzmann: I talked to Jerry when we played Utah in February ’95. I was with my girlfriend and we were at a sound check and I heard this, “JUSTIN!” And I was like, “What?” I looked around and it was booming through the PA. The Dead had this new headphone system where they could talk to each other on stage but they had the speakers on. Jerry was talking to me from the stage but he was talking into his mike and he was like, “How did you let that Quentin Tarantino guy get ahead of you? He reminds me of a used car salesman.” Booming over everything. Everybody was looking at me and I was just totally abashed. Jerry hated Pulp Fiction. I did, too. I thought it was a piece of shit. I couldn’t get behind that movie at all.
Dr. Randy Baker: As we got into the spring of 1995, I was acutely concerned about his health and I told him straight out that I didn’t think he would be on the planet for very much longer if he didn’t make radical changes in his lifestyle. One of the difficult things about working with Jerry was that he wanted to please me. I would say, “You need to do this” and he’d say, “Oh, yes. Sure. No problem,” and then he wouldn’t do it.
It was sort of my dream job. I wanted nothing more than to keep Jerry alive. It was also one of the most difficult jobs in the world. It was a supreme challenge. I would go to Dead shows and instead of enjoying the music, I would be thinking, “How can I get through to Jerry?” I would be worrying about his blood sugar. It became clear that it was essential for Jerry to stop eating sweets and to stop smoking and I felt that it was impossible for him to control those urges while he was using heroin.
Harry Popick: It was a strain seeing Jerry look the way he did. There were times when I’d be doing the monitors over by him and I’d just look away and close my eyes and say, “Oh, my God.” I was waiting for him to fall to his knees. He could finish playing the first set, go back into his room there, and start snoring. He would conk right out. The fans knew. It troubled us all deeply. Everyone was shaking their head like, “My God. My God, what are we going to do? What’s happening here?”
Bob Barsotti: He was just shriveling in front of our eyes. You could see it. He aged so much in the last few years and I kept going to these guys and they all kept saying, “We’re doing the best we can.” Maybe if Bill Graham had been here, he could have talked to him. Over the phone, I talked to David Crosby. I said, “You know, David, now is a really good time for Jerry’s friends to try to get close to him ’cause he’s in trouble.” He went, “Oh, yeah?” I went, “Yeah. He’s in really bad shape. He really needs his friends to say something to him because the people that are around him are too tied up in the whole deal and it’s hard for them to really articulate to him and have him listen.”
David said something to me that really helped me get through my time. He said, “I went through all that too and every one of my friends came and talked to me. Then they came and yelled at me. Then they came and hit me over the head. Then they came and dragged me away to fucking institutes and you know what? I didn’t listen to anyone until I was ready to listen to them. He won’t, either. It has to be his decision. He has to come to that realization and I don’t really want to talk to him before that because it’s too sad. But, boy, I sure would love to be there when he comes out because I would love to help him.”
Bill Graham was actually at one of Crosby’s interventions. They got Crosby into the place for treatment and then he tied sheets together and escaped out the window.
Vince Dibiase: The last five years of his life, he didn’t really hang out with anybody. He didn’t like being bothered or going out. He was very reclusive. But he was being bothered by people, one in particular, and he did not even want to answer the phone but he would have to. He would have to return certain calls because some people were relentless with him. “Hello, hello, hello, hello. Are you there? Are you there?” “Yeah, I’m fucking here!” It was interfering with his train of thought. It was interfering with Harrington Street. It was the first time he’d tried writing in his life. It was something new for him and he started getting off on it. He’d found a groove. He had to do it by hand because the computer keyboard was much too linear for him. Just to get his password in took forever. He’d take pains typing it out with one finger and then he’d realize it had to be in capital letters.
One day, he sat me down and he stuck a big paintbrush in my hand and said, “Hold that.” As he was sketching my hand, he started talking about when he was a kid. He and Tiff would play with fire and they’d set fires in the hills. He said that one day they got into throwing rocks and breaking windows. He was about five. Tiff might have been eight or so. He said, “Yeah, we broke a whole bunch of windows.” I figured he meant three or four windows. He said, “We were standing there for at least half an hour breaking windows.” “How many windows did you break?” “Sixty or seventy windows.” I said, “You’re kidding me. Was it an old warehouse?” He said, “It turned out to be the back of a police station.” The cops finally came out, picked both guys up, threw them over their shoulder, and took them home. Kicking and biting and screaming.
John Perry Barlow: The last interaction I had with Jerry was interesting. I was teaching Weir how to Rollerblade. We were staying at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York. Having gone through the great neofascist marble hallways of the New York Four Seasons on roller blades, Weir and I went through the lobby and came out the door and Jerry Garcia was standing there in the sunlight.
It was the first time I’d seen him in the sunlight in I don’t know how long. He was totally white. White as death itself. He was like a Fellini vision or something out of Ingmar Bergman. This incandescent paleness. I don’t think this is a retrospective overlay because it really was apparent at the time. The frailty and the whiteness of him. He looked up at us and he snorted and he said, “If you guys get killed out there, I’m not going to your funeral.” I said, “I don’t know. I’ve been to funerals with you where we were there for less.” He said, “But I won’t go to yours.” And I said, “Jerry, I’ll go to yours.” He said, “Fine. Do that.” Off we went to the park where we had a truly psychedelic kind of experience.
Vince Dibiase: Before the spring tour in ’95, Jerry was in bad shape. The morning he went on spring tour, his blood sugar level was five hundred.
Gloria Dibiase: We were talking to his doctors. We were talking to band members about Jerry’s deteriorating health. Jerry didn’t like us talking behind his back. Like a child, he didn’t want us to tell on him.
Vince Dibiase: He considered people alarmists if they talked about his health to others. The thing was that I didn’t want to walk into that house and find him sprawled out on the bathroom floor dead. I’d rather have been out on the street with my family without a job and have him alive and recovering than have him dead. Once they were out on the road, I told Randy. I said, “Randy, does anybody know?” He said, “No.” I said, “Don’t you think you better tell somebody because I’m not a doctor.” Randy FedExed to Jerry and I don’t know what the response was. They continued with the tour and Jerry seemed to get better while he was on the road but he still wasn’t doing well.
Eileen Law: The kids at the shows would say, “Yeah, I got a feeling he’s slipping again.” It was scary to me because there would be that small percentage at the shows who I was sure would say, “He does it. So it must be cool.” And we were starting to have some ODs out there on the road. Jerry would come into the office and because I knew things weren’t good, instead of going up to him, I would almost run to my room. I read this wonderful article where in 1969 this one kid had yelled up to Jerry, “Hey, Garcia! Get your ass in gear!” I almost wish someone had yelled it in the last three years.
Vince Dibiase: Jerry suddenly began making life very hard for me. He would give me impossible tasks to do at the computer. He was pressuring me a lot. My feeling is that he was being pressured to get rid of us. Before the spring tour, he got rid of Yen-Wei, who was his lifeline. Yen-Wei had revived him those two times back in ’92 and ’94. But Jerry was getting really intense, real snappish. His blood sugar level was running wild. He said to me once, “You know, you make a fucking lot of money. You make a lot of money for a pretty good job. You got a great job. What do you do?” I said to myself, “This is not him speaking.” He was paraphrasing what someone else said to him. I knew that. Because he never talked to me that way, ever.
Gloria Dibiase: We loved Jerry. We worked for him around the clock. We were on call. Whenever he needed us, he’d call us up at all different times of the day and night. If we weren’t there in the house, we’d rush right over to see him. We dedicated ourselves to him. We were with Jerry almost full-time. We stayed at his house from early in the morning until late in the evening until he told us, “Okay, you can go home.” Two or three days a week, we’d sleep at the house because he wanted us to stay there. He didn’t want us to go home. He liked having us there.
Vince Dibiase: We watched him go downhill. You know it when you see somebody every day. He aged so rapidly. He got grayer. He was not remembering. His face looked terrible. He was stooping more. He was tired more. He was really frustrated and so he was eating a lot more junk food and fatty food. He was smoking a lot. He was doing everything to excess. Extremely excessive.
Gloria Dibiase: We started with him with Manasha taking care of Keelin. Taking care of the Palm Avenue house, odd jobs, errands, personal stuff for Jerry, the art business, and then we were doing everything for him in his home after Barbara left. He would tell us that he loved us and he appreciated all that we did for him and thank us. When I wasn’t there to take care of Jerry because I had to go to New York to visit my family, my daughters would go up to his house and do what I did. Cook his food, make his juice, his salad, his grains, clean up the house, shop for his clothing, and do his laundry.
Vince and I were fired on Cinco de Mayo, ’95. I was devastated because I loved Jerry very much and it hurt. I felt like I was his mother. He was like my son. My family life was suffering because I was putting a lot of time and attention into Jerry’s life. So when we were fired, I cried and cried. We went to his lawyer’s office. We were sitting there and he told us we were fired and then he handed us a piece of paper to sign. We would get severance pay, we didn’t know how much, if we didn’t talk about anything. If we never wrote a book and we handed over everything we had relating to Jerry.
Vince Dibiase: No interviews. No talking about Jerry. Return every picture, every tape, every anything you have of Jerry’s, and it was not a nondisclosure agreement. It was a confidentiality statement they wanted from us. It was not as though we had signed anything like that going in. This was taking our freedom of speech away.
Gloria Dibiase: I tore mine up and threw it on his desk.
Dr. Randy Baker: One of the problems in working with Jerry during this time was that I would come see him with the latest set of blood tests I had done and the tests would look awful. His blood sugar was really high and his cholesterol was high. He had all sorts of things out of balance and the average person who had those labs would be feeling awful. But Jerry would insist to me time and time again that he felt perfectly fine. I think he did feel fine. But I think it was because of his use of heroin. It numbed him and made him not in touch with his body.
One of the things that motivated him to finally address his health was that he started to have some tingling and numbness in his fingers that was interfering with his ability to play the guitar. I think that was directly related to his diabetes. His body was finally speaking to him in a language that he understood. “If you don’t improve your health, you’re not going to be able to play.” In the spring of ’95, other people and I finally got through to Jerry. He really got the message then. It was decided that after the Grateful Dead’s summer tour, he would do an intensive program to get off drugs and stop smoking and clean up his diet.
Sue Stephens: Jerry would complain about having to play these big places where the kids were getting busted and he said that he didn’t want to go out there and be a shill for the cops. It upset him. He would have preferred that they didn’t have to go and play these same places over and over again. He did voice his concern that it had no dignity for him anymore. These places like Nassau Coliseum that were famous for busting people. Garcia would say, “God, you guys. Why do we have to go back there again? Are we broke?”
When he came back from a tour, he’d still be walking around with his shoulders up in that stance. “Waiting for the next thing to hit him,” as he would put it. In that sense, he would have to medicate himself. He was working. He was trapped in the routine of going from the gig to the hotel and it was not great. When he was up on the stage playing, he was safe. But he always did say that he wanted to work. He’d say, “I need to work.”
Bob Barsotti: Everything was not cool in Grateful Dead land and I spent quite a bit of time talking to their manager about how tough it was going to be out on the road this summer. Things were going to be different in your parking lots this year than they were last year. Radically different. It was a cumulative effect of their success and the fact that there was so much money in the scene outside their gigs.
Because the segment of society who came to see them was pretty broad, you had a lot of people and made a lot of money. It was also vacation time. You go on vacation, you take a thousand dollars with you to spend. That’s what people do when they’re on vacation. These people were taking their vacations around these gigs. They were spending all of their disposable income in the parking lots. It became this economy and there was so much money involved. It was real easy to exist out there on nothing and it was real easy to take advantage of people and through that door came these masses of our society.
Part of the reason that the parking lot scene got so big was that the Dead worked often enough that in between shows, the hard-core Deadheads could survive until the next gig. The other thing was that the Dead would play three or four gigs in one town and then take a couple of days off and then do three or four gigs in another town. So it was real easy to follow them.
I’d talk to all these dreadlocked kids out in the parking lot and most of them had grown up in suburbia. Their parents were never home and they’d been neglected their whole lives and there was nothing to their suburban lives. They wanted to eschew all materialism and go on the road with their brothers and sisters and stay high all the time and fuck whenever they wanted and not worry about AIDS because Jah would provide. Over the years, I spent a lot of time in the parking lot. But in the last few years, it got to where I couldn’t go out there anymore. It was such a low-life kind of scene that it made me too sad to be out there.
Robert Greenfield: In June 1995, those on their way into the Bob Dylan/Grateful Dead show in Highgate, Vermont, had to make their way past unconscious fans sprawled in the dirt around tanks of nitrous gas. As Bob Dylan played before the Dead took the stage, ten thousand fans without tickets stormed the fences and tore them down, turning the concert into a “free event.” Five Porta-Johns actually in use at the time were knocked over. Many people were injured. Many more were drunk. Inside the venue, even as the Grateful Dead played, hundreds of people who had gotten too high to hear any form of music but their own lay passed out in the dirt.
Cassidy Law: I hate labeling but on the summer tour, I definitely saw the difference between the people my age, which is twenty-five, and the younger ones, who just really didn’t care about anyone or anything. They were not Deadheads. They just wanted to be there for the scene. They didn’t care about going inside. They wanted a free ticket. Everybody that was high was trying to crash the gates to try to get in free.
Bob Barsotti: I saw it coming. So I did double fences everywhere we went. I spent ungodly sums of money on police and security.
Gloria Dibiase: It was a tour from hell. I called it the “hell-in-the-bucket tour.” So many bad things were happening all over. The last three months were really bad.
Bob Barsotti: Jerry must have known about the scene outside the halls. He had to. He drove through it every night. But Jerry was a leader who refused to be a leader and that was a problem.
Chesley Millikin: Going out with the Grateful Dead wasn’t a lot of fun to Jerry anymore. He admitted that to me and it was less so on this last tour, “the tour from hell” as they referred to it. I think that really disturbed him. He was a very mellow man. He was strictly pacifistic. So for any kind of unruliness like that to come out, I can see him saying, “Fuck it.”
Robert Greenfield: In their thirtieth year on the road, the Dead ran into more problems on July 2 in Noblesville, Indiana, at Deer Creek Amphitheater at what was meant to be a benefit concert for the Rex Foundation. Before the first of two scheduled shows began, a threat was made on Jerry’s life. Security guards were moved from the perimeter of the venue to protect the stage. This left a large section of fence unguarded. In order to make it easier to protect Jerry, the house lights also remained on during the Dead’s second set. This enabled one and all to clearly witness the unscheduled mayhem which then occurred.
Vince Dibiase: We heard about the threat on Jerry’s life. Supposedly, two guys were packing guns. The call came into the police department in Deer Creek. One guy called up and said, “Look, I can’t live with this anymore. I know that these two guys are coming to the show with guns and they’re looking for Jerry and they’re going to shoot him.” The cops took it as a real threat. They did the gig with all the lights on. The front row was all undercover agents with their tie-dyes and bullet-proof vests on.
Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa: Many years earlier, Jerry told me that he felt like people wanted to kill him because he didn’t deserve to be doing what he was doing. He said he felt he was playing for his life and he said he felt that way for many years afterwards.
Vince Dibiase: Jerry used to like to play games like people were chasing him or going to kill him. He had to play really good or else. He’d play games like that in his head. He liked to be scared. Because nobody could scare him in his whole circle. But he was really scared that night.
Cassidy Law: Deer Creek has this parklike setting all around so it was really appealing for everyone to come and hang out. When we drove up there that night, we knew. We went, “Oh, boy. Fourth of July weekend.” People were definitely drinking and they had that really rowdy feeling about them. We were starting the show and all of a sudden, I looked over and there they were. Masses of them. Just masses of them rushing the doors and they broke through. They were tearing the gates off in the back. It was frightening. I was in this little tiny trailer right in the middle of it all and I went, “Okay, I’m gonna have faith here.” Everyone was going, “Lock down! Lock down! Don’t leave.”
The band could actually see what was going on from the stage. They could see the dogs that the police around the facility used for security being let loose on people. You could hear the dogs barking and the whole thing was pretty scary. The kids who had broken in kept it up and kept it up. They kept fighting with the police. People were hurt because all of a sudden, they were crammed in front of the stage. We had to cancel the next show on the tour. We knew it had come to a point where something had to be said. We’d done lots of leaflets that we’d handed out before saying, “Hey, don’t tread on us anymore.” In this one, we just really pinpointed it at them by saying, “This has gotta stop.” It went out a couple of days later.
Robert Greenfield: Signed by Billy Kreutzmann, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bobby Weir, and Vince Welnick, the letter sent out by the band read in part:
Don’t you get it?
Over the past thirty years we’ve come up with the fewest possible rules to make the difficult act of bringing tons of people together work well....We’ve never had to cancel a show before because of you.
Want to end the touring life of the Grateful Dead? Allow bottle-throwing gate crashers to keep on thinking they’re cool anarchists instead of the creeps they are....
… The spirit of the Grateful Dead is at stake and we’ll do what we have to do to protect it. And when you hear somebody say, “Fuck you, we’ll do what we want,” remember something:
That applies to us too.
Three nights after Deer Creek, the Dead played at Riverport Amphitheater outside St. Louis. Grateful Dead fans without tickets trying to escape a rainstorm sought shelter on the second story of a pavilion at a nearby campground. When the structure collapsed, a hundred and fifty of them were injured, some critically. As the news media reported the story nationwide, St. Louis became yet another fire-scorched pit stop on the tour from hell. The Dead moved on to do the final shows of the tour in Chicago’s Soldier Field, a concrete mausoleum far more suited for the Chicago Bears, the city’s very own Monsters of the Midway.
Cassidy Law: We were in Soldier Field and I think that place holds about fifty or sixty thousand. We’d sold it out and it was packed. Besides the band playing, the light show definitely helped make it easier to get into being at a stadium. But it was a concrete jail. After the show on the last night, I was in the van with Jerry and he was happy as could be. He was saying, “Hey, this is great. Let’s keep going. Let’s go for it.” He knew it was the last show of the tour but he was saying what a great time he’d had at those two shows. We were watching the fireworks we did over the lake after the show and that just topped it for him. He was like, “All right. This is perfect.” He was in a very good mood that night.
Bob Barsotti: We had a big Jerry Garcia Band tour scheduled for November ’95. It was this perfectly routed tour of all the big buildings in the Midwest. It was going to be a huge tour and I did it early enough so I got all the right dates lined up. I kept telling all the promoters, “You’ve got to hold the date.” They kept asking, “Is it confirmed?” “No. It’s not confirmed but you’ve got to hold it.” Finally, they were all saying, “Look, man, I moved hockey and basketball teams off these dates,” and I leveled with them. “You saw Jerry on the last tour, right? After the summer tour, if he’s in the shape to do it, we’re going to have it and if not, we’re not and I can’t give you anything more than that.” Every place said, “No problem. We’ll wait.” Because they all wanted Jerry, they held off everybody to hang on to those dates. Then as we got about halfway through the summer tour, Steve Parish said, “No, you got to cancel the dates. He can’t do it.” That was when Steve finally said we couldn’t be taking him away anywhere.
Robert Greenfield: On January 19, 1995, Jerry Garcia lost control of the red BMW loaner he was driving while his own BMW was in the shop being serviced. After slamming several times into a retaining wall alongside the northbound lanes of Highway 101 between the affluent suburban towns of Mill Valley and Corte Madera in Marin County, the car spun around and finally came to a stop facing oncoming traffic. Although no one was injured and the accident itself received only minimal coverage in the press, it was not a good sign. Those who knew what was going on in Jerry Garcia’s life could only wonder what would happen next.
Cassidy Law: The accident Jerry was in on Highway 101 really put a scare into everyone. He smashed his car into the divider. He was very lucky. It had come to the point with him where so many little things kept happening that we got numb and irritated and kind of went, “Ah, man. What next?” Then all of a sudden you realize, “God, that’s horrible. Is this how we feel about him now?” It had more to do with that we loved him so much that we didn’t know what to do anymore.