See here how everything lead up to this day and it’s just like any other day that’s ever been Sun goin’ up and then the sun it goin’ down Shine through my window and my friends they come around.
—Robert Hunter, “Black Peter”
Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there.
—Robert Hunter, “Box of Rain”
Dr. Randy Baker: I visited Jerry right after he got back from the summer tour before he went down to the Betty Ford Clinic. I made a house call to check in with him and give him support and encouragement. He looked very clear and he was very positive and he had a great attitude. He really wanted to do this. He was ready.
Len Dell’amico: Normally, Jerry was a guy who really hated to talk on the phone. The phone was just to set up dates. I called wanting to ask him when could we get together but he wanted to talk and we ended up talking for half an hour covering not work but emotional stuff. He told me that he’d really enjoyed working with me and that we were going to be working together again soon and how much fun we’d had. When the conversation was over, I said, “So when are we going to get together?” and he said, “Not soon. I’m going to Betty Ford.” I was struck by that because he had never admitted that others could help him but I was fast on the rebound. “That’s great,” I said. “Go for it. There’s so much we can do and so much in life to look forward to and you’ve got all these possibilities.”
Jon Mcintire: Why would he check into Betty Ford? Let’s say you had a straight line and that was reality. At a certain point with using drugs, you can’t get high anymore. You are below the line of what it was like to just be alive with your old natural feelings. When you clean up, you can start getting high again. There was that reality of the chemical interaction in his body. And then there was the desire to grow and do better—salvation is one word for it—and then there was the desire to trip himself up, the lure of failure. All these things were going on. But if he was not honest with himself, if he was not really looking at what was happening, if he was hiding from his own interior pain and confusion, then he was not going to be able to tell the truth about himself. He was not going to really know why he was going into Betty Ford. Because he just didn’t know himself that well.
Vince Dibiase: One of our friends, a Deadhead, told us that their friends shared a room with him at Betty Ford and he kept on getting sick and they were feeding him phenobarbital, which from what I understand is not the drug of choice when someone’s addicted to heroin. It doesn’t mix with heroin. Randy, or whoever his doctor was, should have been forceful enough to stop him from going there. They knew how Jerry was—Jerry wasn’t going to be locked up anywhere on his birthday. He wasn’t going to let that happen. He was going to go out and party.
Dr. Randy Baker: The Betty Ford Clinic itself was Deborah’s suggestion. She had known people who had gone there and they were very impressed with the program. I really didn’t see Jerry at Betty Ford and I advised against it. I proposed that he try to detoxify himself by using acupuncture, nutritional therapy, homeopathy, and brain wave training, which is a form of biofeedback. Then after detoxifying, he could have gone to Betty Ford for counseling. However, Jerry chose to go there directly after the tour. It is a good program and I supported his decision.
So he went down to Betty Ford, which is normally a four-week program. At the end of a couple weeks, he called Deborah with a request to leave. She asked me what I thought about him leaving and I agreed that it was appropriate. The reason that Jerry wanted to leave after two weeks had very little to do with the drug treatment program they have there. It had everything to do with the fact that now that Jerry was off heroin, he was really in touch with how bad his own physical health was. He was in a lot of difficult discomfort and he was unsatisfied with the medical treatment that he was receiving. He was having aches and pains and just feeling bad and they sent him to the local emergency room and the doctors there gave him prescription drugs that he was wary of. He was actually concerned for his life so he had to get out of there.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I heard Jerry had been in Betty Ford and we were elated. We thought this was wonderful news. It was a very hopeful moment. “Oh, he’s at Betty Ford. Great. Maybe he’s really going to take this thing by the horns now. At Betty Ford, he’s got a chance of winning it.” Then we heard he’d bailed out of there and I was going, “Oh, heck.” It was good of him to try. It really was. But it was too late. His time to go do that was years previous. He waited until he was out of energy.
Chesley Millikin: He was not a disciplined man and Betty Ford is the ultimate in discipline. I spoke to Deborah and she and Parish were going down to see him and he did not like it and he didn’t like the food. It was too hot and humid for him down there and he wanted out. By the time that came about, he was clean. He had been there for two weeks.
Dr. Randy Baker: Steve Parish and Deborah went to get him and I saw him that very night. Once more, I did a house call. I came up and checked him over. Emotionally, he was in a very good space and he had a lot of good things to say about the program and the people that he’d met there. He had done a lot of emotional work and he seemed to be basically happy in general with that aspect of the treatment. But he was not feeling very well physically. Unfortunately, this happened at a bad time for me in that I was scheduled to get married the following weekend and go off on my honeymoon. I said to Jerry, “I want to delay my honeymoon so I can stay and help take care of you and work on your health.” In true character, Jerry insisted, “No no no, don’t postpone your honeymoon on account of me. I’ll be fine.”
Gloria Dibiase: When he came home from the Betty Ford Clinic, a friend of ours saw him in Whole Foods in Mill Valley on Sunday morning. He went straight over to the juice counter. I used to make him fresh carrot juice, fresh apple juice, fresh lemonade with maple syrup rather than regular sugar. So there he was at Whole Foods buying juice. Right next to the juice counter was the bakery counter. My friend said Jerry was very spacey and confused and that’s a symptom of low blood sugar. He was buying baklava and all other kinds of sugared desert treats. My friend said, “Oh, I’m feeling a little spacey and confused myself. So welcome to the club.” He said, “Yeah but I don’t want to be in that club.”
Dr. Randy Baker: I set Jerry up with one of the finest physicians in the entire country who works in San Rafael so he could get good holistic medical care during the time that I was away. I was using nutritional supplements, herbs, and homeopathy on Jerry. I could have given him some medicine for the pain but the problem was that we didn’t want to use narcotics, and many of the other pain medicines might tear up his intestines or stomach.
Chesley Millikin: As soon as he got out of there, he went straight to one of his connections or so-called friends and did it. I can see that because I think that he could say, “I’ve got it whipped now but I’ll do it anyway.”
Dr. Randy Baker: My understanding is that during the next weekend, Jerry did do a little bit of heroin. He used it not because he was jones-ing in the traditional sense but because he was in so much physical pain that he was trying to self-medicate. He was trying to heal his pain. But he wasn’t comfortable with that. He definitely did not want to go back to his addiction. That was why he wanted to go into another treatment program to make sure that he didn’t relapse.
Sue Stephens: He spent a good hour and a half in this office with me the day before he checked into Serenity Knolls. In his own words, he was in the frame of mind that he was “definitely taking a big bite out of this apple this time.” He had come out of the Betty Ford place because he had gotten as much out of there as he felt he could. He had been between the two places for almost a week but he said that he still felt a little shaky and his willpower wasn’t up to par yet. He wasn’t strong enough to be out on his own. So that was why he felt that he needed to go back into some place close.
Dr. Randy Baker: What Deborah told me was that during that weekend, Jerry said to her, “My body’s shot.” I think his body had been shot for a while. He just hadn’t been in touch with it because of his addiction.
Sue Stephens: He looked thinner and a little pale but he wasn’t dragging his feet by any means. He was in real good spirits but he did say that he could tell how his body had aged because I guess that was something you didn’t notice when you were medicated. It was really nice sitting here visiting with him. I had this new Deadbase book that had just come out and he was sitting here leafing through it and coming up with comments like, “Oh, I remember this gig and this and this happened.” He was reminiscing. A couple days before then, he’d called me to get people’s phone numbers. He asked me for Hunter’s number, he asked me for the number up at the new studio because I don’t think he’d ever been there yet, and for John Cutler because he was handling the studio, and for Steve Parish’s home number. Not that he didn’t have it. But he seemed to be busy. He may have been calling people to say goodbye. More or less in a parallel-reality way.
Justin Kreutzmann: I don’t think Jerry felt he was done. Not from what I’ve heard talking to people who were hanging out with him the day before he checked into Serenity Knolls. He didn’t strike me as that kind of guy. If he didn’t hear it when he went into the coma the first time or when he got saved the second time, I don’t see why he’d have been hearing it then. Someone I know talked to Jerry about four days before and he spent an hour and a half on the phone just laughing. Jerry wasn’t ever one of those kind of guys who would say, “I’m going to die tomorrow.” He wasn’t a doom-and-gloom kind of person.
Len Dell’amico: There’s no question in my mind that he called certain people or had long personal face-to-faces with people for the express purpose of saying things that needed to be said. That’s not easy. But it’s not uncommon.
Alan Trist: I was lucky enough to run into Jerry at the Ice Nine Publishing office. Just he and I one-on-one. He was waiting for a Rex Foundation meeting that was going to go on upstairs and we had an hour together. In retrospect, I feel that he was doing the rounds. He really talked to me and I could hardly get a word in edgewise. I got this feeling that he knew what was going on. He was also trying to make connection with Bob Hunter, who had a phone call from him that same day. What he talked to me about was his book. He told me the whole story of Harrington Street. I had brought with me the page proofs of Paul Foster’s book that Hulogosi was publishing. I said, “You want to see some of this?” He said, “No, I haven’t got time for that now.” And it wasn’t a put-down on Paul. And I said, “What are you doing, Jerry?” He said, “I’m writing a book.” And I said, “What’s it about?” And then he launched into this forty-five-minute rave about it. He told me the whole story. It occurs, he said, between the ages of five and eight years old. That is the frame.
Jerry certainly mentioned to me that the fact that he didn’t grow up with a father in his immediate family made him who he was. He definitely pointed to that influence, or noninfluence, as being significant as to how he viewed himself. His grandfather was the male figure substitute in some way but he was not really present and he had this face that was disfigured by cancer. These are heavy images and deep.
While he was talking to me in that hour about Harrington Street, I had a strong feeling that there was something about Jerry that was different. He always did this thing with his hands when he talked but he was like mudra-ing to me, really close up and intense. When I look back at it, and it’s so clear to me even now, the expression in his eyes and the animation in his face and the enthusiasm of his voice, my feeling is that he was trying to get out something before he died, that he knew he didn’t have long. He didn’t have long and he had to do this. There was no sense of regret that he was about to die or of guilt for having created the conditions for his own death. Not at all. It was just, “I’ve got to take care of business now and get this stuff out.”
That was who he was. He was just the same as when we’d sit at Kepler’s and he would be playing the guitar and looking at me and I’d be reading and talking and he would keep playing away, never stopping, just smiling. He was the same person when I saw him last as he was then.
Sue Stephens: Jerry told me he was going to spend twenty-one days at Serenity Knolls. He was going to do the whole thing. He said that he had picked that place out because it was an old Boy Scout camp that they used to crash at in the old days. It was some place that was familiar to him. When he left here that day, he stopped and gave me the biggest bear hug. If you ever got to hug Jerry, it was the best. It was like hugging Santa Claus. That was just how it must feel. He gave me one of those big bear hugs and told me to take good care of myself.
Owsley Stanley: The guy had had a diabetic collapse and obvious heart problems. The fact that he was allowed to check in alone into a place like that one without anyone getting his medical records or doing a complete examination, including a cardiogram, I find that very difficult to understand. It just doesn’t seem right. Everyone in their own mind is immortal, I guess.
Justin Kreutzmann: Apparently he drove himself up there and he checked in and he was only there for a couple hours. They said he was making some really awful breathing sounds but he always talked in his sleep and he had a voracious snore that could, no pun intended, wake up the dead. They have these rooms called the sick rooms where you first check in just to make sure you’re mellow. It’s not a medical facility so it’s not really set up for emergencies. They said he was talking in his sleep and making some horrible breathing sounds. At about one in the morning, he came out and went into the bathroom. The people who were watching him said, “You need anything?” and he said, “No.” He went back in and they didn’t hear anything so they figured he was fine. They found him a couple hours later and he was cuddling an apple like it was a baby with a smile on his face. By then, he’d been dead for a few hours.
Dr. Randy Baker: The cause of death was coronary artery disease, which was greatly worsened by his diabetes. I think that the two things that killed him the most were cigarettes and sugar. Heroin played a role indirectly in that while using heroin I believe he really couldn’t get a handle on controlling the urge to smoke and eat sweets.
Justin Kreutzmann: I’ve seen the autopsy report and he had like eighty-five percent blockage in three of the major arteries and then finally when you check the very last page, they said there were slight traces of heroin in his system. To me, it was the kind of dose you take just so you won’t get sick. He didn’t die of an overdose.
Sandy Rothman: I read very carefully the reports from the staff members there and they are not a medical facility and the staff is not medically trained. I don’t think he heard loud snoring—I think he heard the sound of the apnea. I’m not saying the apnea killed Jerry but it may have been the immediate cause of breathing cessation.
Dr. Randy Baker: Jerry did have some degree of apnea, which once more was strongly related to his weight. When his weight was high, he had more episodes of apnea. When his weight came down, the apnea got better. He died of cardiac arrest. Some people will have warning time. Some will have chest pains for years before they have a heart attack. Others will not.
The most likely way for Jerry to die would have been from something sudden. I think he might have been able to rally and recuperate from anything that was lingering, in part because of the number of people who would pray for him when he was ill. Another thing I want to make clear is that Jerry really was doing his very best to get healthy. He wanted to stay on this planet for many more years. He had a lot of plans and projects and he was finally doing what he thought he needed to do to get healthy.
In retrospect, you could think why didn’t I or other people around him apply more pressure? Why didn’t we coerce him into getting treatment at a sooner time? To me, that just went against everything the man stood for. What he valued most was freedom and the liberty to find his own way. I didn’t feel it was my role to try to coerce him into a treatment program. I didn’t think a treatment program was likely to work until he was ready to do it.
I wanted to repeat all the cardiac testing that summer. The plan was to first have him come off the drugs and then repeat all those tests before the Grateful Dead’s fall tour. Would Jerry have passed those tests with that kind of blockage? Probably not. I might have recommended an angioplasty but it is of limited value in people with widespread blockage. I don’t think he would have gone for it. I don’t think he would have been a good candidate for open heart surgery and I don’t think he would have put himself through that. With his severe lung disease and diabetes, I would not have thought that he would have had a very good chance of making it through that surgery.
Instead, we would have tried to put him on a program aimed at controlling his diabetes. Exercise and following a low-fat diet has been demonstrated to reverse coronary artery disease. Would he have ever been able to tour again? Not for a long time at least.
Sue Stephens: We used to get the news all the time that Jerry had died. Somebody would hear it on the radio somewhere and there would be a flurry of “Oh, God” calls. Once I picked up the phone and called Jerry’s home and he answered. I sort of stammered and I said, “The reason I’m calling is because this news was on the radio.” He said, “No. I’m sorry. Not yet. Don’t want to disappoint anybody. But nah. Sorry.” This happened so many times before the morning when it was true that even Dennis McNally thought it was a rumor from the previous tour. To me it was like, “Oh, here we go. It’s just these silly rumors again.” When I heard that the sheriffs department had confirmed it, that was when I knew.
Vince Dibiase: I called Dennis McNally. I said, “Dennis. What’s up?” He said, “Just L.A. hype. Just L.A. hype.” I said, “Are you sure? Has anyone talked to Jerry this morning?” He said, “Well, no.” Gloria said to me, “Honey, call Jerry up. Call Jerry up.” I called and I got his answering machine. “Jerry, if you need us, we’ll come over....” We were going to go over there so we got in the car. We were getting lots of phone calls but we got in the car because we were in total denial. We got in our car and we started heading over. As I turned on the radio, it came on.
Bob Barsotti: When I got the call about Bill Graham, that was a shock. That was really unbelievable. Whereas the call about Jerry was, “Oh today’s the day.” It didn’t make it any easier. But it made it a little different.
Sue Swanson: Mickey Hart said it best the day that Jerry died. I looked him in the eye and I said, “You all right? How you doing? You okay? I know this is going to be really hard for you, Mickey.” He said, “I don’t have to wait for the call anymore.” My mom died this year and it was one of those things where it was really a blessing. I knew that call was going to come and that call came and then this call came.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: Jerry’s death was tragic but not a shock. It was sad that events turned out the way they did but he could have died in some hotel on tour. Or from heat exhaustion because they always toured the East Coast at the hottest time of the year and it was always harder for Jerry because he was overweight and in bad condition.
Cassidy Law: So many of us were just happy that if it was going to happen this way, at least we didn’t find him in a hotel room. At least it didn’t happen in a plane or in his car.
Sonny Barger: The bad thing about when people die is it leaves everybody else all fucked up. They’re gone and it’s no more a problem to them. It’s just sad for everybody that’s left. There’ll never be another Jerry Garcia.
John Perry Barlow: I’d just come back from New Zealand and I was in Salt Lake City. I was swimming in my mother’s swimming pool and I was totally totally toasted from jet lag. I was floating around like a dead body and for some reason, I suddenly started thinking real strongly about Garcia and the Dead. In this completely mercenary way, I was thinking, “You’re doing well enough now so that it would be sort of okay if the Grateful Dead went away. You would be all right financially.” Then I thought, “Why would the Grateful Dead go away? Because Garcia would die.” That was a whole ’nother issue.
I went over to the cliff and looked off into the abyss again for the kazillionth time and it was different this time. It felt different and I thought, “Never mind the Grateful Dead. Isn’t it going to be a drag not to have those wonderful light conversations? The Inner Galactic Olympics of the Mind you used to have with this guy?” Then I thought, “On the other hand, when was the last time you had one of those? You haven’t had that kind of conversation with him at any point in the last two years and you probably never will again.” Because he was down in there this time.
Rev. Matthew Fox: I heard about his death and I called Deborah that very day. Just to see if I could be of service to her.
John Perry Barlow: It was like something I said to Garcia at one point when he first started using the MIDI system. He did this guitar solo that was so much like Miles Davis, as Miles Davis wanted to be. It was unbelievable and I came up to him afterwards and I said, “Man, you could have been a great fucking trumpet player.” He said, “I am a great fucking trumpet player.” He could honor the music in himself. He saw that as being an independent entity that he was perfectly willing to accept and honor but all of the other large independent entities in him, he wasn’t willing to accept and honor. Like the soul which camps out in the body.
For him, the body was just this thing that had been put on him like an electronic manacle. It was the thing in which he’d been exiled from all the sweetness and the light. For him, it was like being in prison. He always hated his body. It was the thing that he was locked inside and he treated it accordingly. Just like a prisoner, he put graffiti all over the walls. He broke the toilet. He literally set the mattress on fire. It may have been no way to live. But if it weren’t, then there wouldn’t be so many other people doing it that same way. The other side will have its way. If you’re going to manifest a lot of light, you’ve got to pay the bill.
Rev. Matthew Fox: I was upstairs at the Grateful Dead offices with Mickey Hart and other members of the band and it was very chaotic. People were talking about how we would do the funeral and where it would be held when news came that President Clinton and Vice President Gore had eulogized Jerry and everyone was very moved. The band started talking about how it had been when they’d visited the White House. Right then and there, they were already discussing whether or not this might be the end of the band. People were saying, “It’s over” while others were wondering if they could carry on. They talked about Jerry’s father drowning before his eyes when he was a boy and how that had been the absolute transformative experience in his life.
Alan Trist: I went to the office as people were collecting and there were film crews on the corners outside. Inside, there was a lot of hugging and the kind of humor that occurs when people have been in that place of expectancy. It was not black humor but it was close to that. A lot of very funny things were said which were essentially tender loving reminiscences of Jerry.
Rev. Matthew Fox: I supplied them with a list of churches and then band members went out and looked at them. St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Tiburon was the one they felt good about right away in terms of the feeling and the acoustics and it was only then they realized that not only was “St. Stephen” the name of one of their early songs but that they had also either played or recorded there very early in their careers. So the synchronicity was amazing.
John Perry Barlow: In a way, he was already dead. That was what I was getting at back in Hepburn Heights when I told him I wanted him to actually be certifiable so that we could mourn him. Because he was as dead as anybody ever needed to get. But you also saw life. Garcia was alive. There was nobody who was more alive. Nobody.
Rev. Matthew Fox: There was a wake the night before where the body was laid out in a funeral home. It was very small.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: The wake was in a funeral parlor in San Anselmo on Miracle Mile. The casket was open and he looked good. He did look good. I can’t say he died with a terrific smile on his face. But he looked good. The band was there and it was nice. Just immediate family and band members. A lot of people offered me condolences on my loss. It was their loss, too. It was a greater loss for them than it was to me. After the wake, there was a party at Phil’s house. Phil didn’t go to the wake but he had a party. I got to regroup with band members and all the people in their families. It was like a party time for me. Not in terms of having fun but like an activity. I had to be there. I had to go there. I had to go see Mountain Girl to talk to her. She wasn’t invited to the funeral.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia: I didn’t go to the funeral but I went to the church where they had Jerry’s body laid out and it was astonishing. He had a nice little smile on his face. There were no flowers. My feeling about it was that I had no privacy. God, there were so many people around. Flanking the coffin were the four elders of the church. Steve Parish and the pallbearers were there and they all had suits on and I don’t think I’d ever seen them in suits before. They were all looking really serious.
Stacy Kreutzmann: Before the funeral started, it was so eerie. Because for thirty years, we were always saying, “Is Jerry here yet? Is he ready to go?” So I kept looking over my shoulder. “Is the limo here yet? I think we’re running late. Shouldn’t it be starting now?” It felt like everyone was waiting for Jerry to get there. It was so eerie to realize that he was not coming to the show. This wasn’t a gig. That was not what it was about. We were in church.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: I would have liked to have said good-bye to Jerry at the funeral but we weren’t permitted to attend. Jerry wasn’t big on funerals. We went to Bill Graham’s funeral together. He didn’t like a big funeral. He said, “Don’t do this for me.” He asked me not to. And the idea of an open casket was not his idea. I called people in the office to try and stop this but it did no good.
Rev. Matthew Fox: I myself am accustomed to seeing the body at a funeral and therefore I did not think very much about it. It seemed to provide people with a chance to say good-bye to him. There was a line of people who came up to do so before the service and then another line of people once it was over.
Rock Scully: At Pigpen’s funeral, Garcia saw the open casket and he was like, “Don’t let them do that to me.” That was what they did to him, too. Oh, well. At that point, he didn’t care anymore.
Sage Scully: I didn’t like the open casket at all. It didn’t seem to be him and it didn’t seem to be something he would want. I’ve heard Annabelle say that was something he always said he didn’t want.
Sue Swanson: They could have done a little better job with the lips. His lips were a little light. They could have put a little lipstick on them but I guess they didn’t want to do that. His glasses were down on his nose. Steve Parish said that he’d seen him look a lot worse.
David Graham: He looked really confused in the open casket. He just had this look on his face of perplexity. It was weird.
Cassidy Law: He looked so polished. I just wanted to go tousle the hair and move his glasses and it wasn’t him. But at least he looked very peaceful. That was the main thing. He just looked peaceful.
Stacy Kreutzmann: I touched him in the casket. We couldn’t help it. We all had to touch him. I wanted it to go on because when everyone started laughing and telling stories about him, it was like he was there for a moment. It was like, “Can we just hold this forever? Let’s not lose it.”
David Grisman: He had his glasses on and he was dressed like he always was dressed with one of those black jackets on. I put one of my picks in his pocket.
Sue Swanson: He just looked dead. But he looked at peace. I didn’t want to feel him all cold and dead but I patted his chest. I loved him.
Gloria Dibiase: I was raised Sicilian Catholic. I must see the dead body in order to say good-bye. I must put something in the casket. I put this beautiful smoky quartz crystal heart in the casket, I kissed him on the forehead, I touched his hand, and said, “Good-bye, Jerry.”
Sandy Rothman: I put my hand on his heart and on his forehead and I touched his hands a lot and I just felt like I would as soon be where he was. I didn’t want to die but I felt so emptied out. I actually went through a moment of slight hilarity where I thought he was going to sit up because it was Jerry’s kind of humor to think that way. The thought went through my mind, “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him not participate in something.” Actually, one of the times I touched his hand, his arm moved. Not by reflex. It just shifted by my touch.
Gary Gutierrez: When I walked up to Jerry to say good-bye, it was weird. It must be an illusion when you look at someone who you’re used to seeing life in and then you see them so frozen but there was this little blip of a moment, a trick of the eye, where it looked like he was almost going to say something. After the funeral, Mickey Hart came up to me and he said, “The weirdest thing, man, was when I went up to Jerry’s coffin. I looked at him and it looked like he was almost going to speak. Like he was almost going to say something.” I said, “I had exactly the same feeling.”
Bob Barsotti: To be honest, he looked pretty happy. He wasn’t there anymore. That was the thing. He wasn’t there anymore and you went, “Okay, right. He’s gone and there’s his body and we can lay that to rest.”
Sage Scully: The funeral was one irony after the next. The church had these big stained-glass windows on the side. I saw the new Grateful Dead Hundred Year Hall CD and it looked like the same windows on the front cover. Each one of the windows had actual figures in it that were almost Gothic looking. They were like medieval knights. I drank something that Ken Kesey gave me and everything was kind of a little smushed for me. It was like a wedding. That was what I thought.
David Graham: The funny thing is that every time I talk about it, I say “the wedding.” That’s probably the best way really to describe it. It was very similar.
Nicki Scully: Fortunately for me, I ran into Kesey in the parking lot and he gave me something to drink. Was it orange juice? It was nectar. It was nectar befitting of the crossing. It was the most delicious psychedelic syrup I’ve ever sipped.
Rev. Matthew Fox: When I was making preparations for my part of the funeral, I was very much aware that I would have Buddhists there as well as angry Christians as well as nonbelievers and so I talked about Otto Rank, who said that healing can take place through psychology in a one-to-one situation, through the work of the artist, and on a mass level through a prophet. I said that Jerry had confused the issue because he was an artist who had affected the masses like a prophet.
Sue Swanson: Sitting directly behind me was Bob Dylan. The first guy who got up was the priest and he was doing the rote stuff. It was nice but it was rote. Behind me was Bob Dylan and at one point, it was like a Dali painting. Things just kind of started to melt in front of my eyes and I thought to myself, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Mr. Dylan? That when you are lying there that these are the words they’re going to be speaking about you?” I don’t know whether he was thinking it or whether I was thinking it. But it certainly was apropos for him. I had to blink a couple times to focus again.
David Grisman: I played at the funeral. I played at his wedding and at his funeral. Me and my guitarist, Enrique Coria. We played “Shalom Aleichem” and “Amazing Grace.” Deborah asked me to play and that was tough. That was real tough. It was just a hard emotional thing to do. Not the playing itself but how to do the right thing.
Rev. Matthew Fox: Deborah did organize the funeral service itself. We had certain people designated to speak and then we opened it up and let anyone get up there to talk. I think there was a feeling of general release. Steve Parish spoke. And then Hunter, who read a poem he had written at like three in the morning which was very moving.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: They asked me if I wanted to speak and I said, “I don’t know. I may or I may not.” At the time, I really didn’t feel like speaking. For one thing, I had to take a leak real bad and it was like, “Mm, how much longer is this going to take?” We were standing outside for a long time before it started and I was a little nervous so I didn’t. After Hunter did his thing and Weir did his thing, I didn’t want to get into it. It was just too late. If I would have said something right away, it would have been fine but I just thought, “M-yeah, it’s enough.”
Gary Gutierrez: Probably the highlight for me was Steve Parish. He stood up and his manner was strong voiced and direct and it was just a kind of unabashedly masculine way of saying good-bye. To see that coming from such a big guy with such a strong voice was very touching. Because he sort of spoke for the workingman. He said that Jerry really understood and knew the workingman and respected the workingman and that was what had meant a lot to him. He’d felt well treated by him. When he was finished, there was a big ovation.
Alan Trist: I was particularly taken with Steve Parish’s remarks. They were some of the most soulful things I’ve ever heard in my life. For somebody who had been so close to Jerry for so long, the eloquence of Steve’s remarks was just superb. If there was ever a natural-born poet who emerged in response to the occasion, it was Steve Parish at that moment. And then of course there was Hunter. Hunter has got a hell of a voice and he got up there in the nave of this huge resounding place and he brought the muse down. He physically pulled down the muse with his hands and with his voice. It was a bardic performance that put me back a couple of thousand years to when that was commonplace in the courts of kings. He was totally right-on.
Robert Greenfield: Delivering “An Elegy for Jerry,” which was widely disseminated after the funeral, Robert Hunter concluded by saying of his old friend and songwriting partner:
I feel your silent laughter
at sentiments so bold
that dare to step across the line
to tell what must be told,
so I’ll just say I love you
which I’ve never said before
and let it go that old friend
the rest you may ignore.
David Graham: When Steve Parish spoke, that was from the heart. That was beautiful and I thought what Hunter said was beautiful. I was the one who was bold enough to go talk after Hunter because nobody could stand up after his thing. I went up there and said, “This is the way I feel about it.” Because everybody was pretending to be sharing in Jerry’s spirit. My feeling is that the spirit within him just went into his kids who were sitting there. I didn’t want them to be lost in the shuffle. The isolation that I was thrust into after my dad died was something that I knew they were going through.
Rev. Matthew Fox: Jerry’s daughter made the comment about his having been a shitty father. In the context of the funeral, everyone laughed.
Bob Barsotti: Some people gasped and some people laughed. If you knew her, you laughed and if you knew Jerry, you laughed. If you were Jerry’s friend, you’d have laughed at that.
Robert Greenfield: Aside from Robert Hunter’s elegy, perhaps the single most widely reported comment to come out of Jerry Garcia’s funeral was made by his daughter, Annabelle. Of her late father, Annabelle Garcia said, “He may have been a genius but he was a shitty father.” Most of those who were at the funeral that day understood the special relationship that had always existed between the two.
Cassidy Law: Annabelle and Jerry are very much alike. I remember them together at the Warfield in 1980. Annabelle was probably only about eleven years and she and Jerry were hanging out in those little hallways and the dynamic between those two was amazing. They just beamed together. It was like they didn’t even have to say anything to each other. They just knew what was coming next in that real dry humor and wit they both had. Was he a shitty father to her? I don’t think so as far as one-on-one treating her shitty. As far as losing contact or maybe just not being there when he could have and should have, yeah. He was starting to flunk out there. They had their times and then it just kept tapering off and he was going back into his sheltered world again. Which was too bad because I think that was really a huge part of his life that he was missing.
Hal Kant: Great father figure. Such a terrible father. He wasn’t around enough when his kids were young. I don’t know how familiar you are with psychoanalytical theory but the strongest figure, the one that everybody relates to, is the father of the father. To a patient, the analyst of his analyst is the most powerful figure imaginable. In the Grateful Dead family with Jerry, you were looking at someone even more powerful than the father of the father.
Rev. Matthew Fox: Deborah spoke at the funeral and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a widow be that strong. She spoke for a good ten or twelve minutes and at one point, she said, “I forgive the band.” I think she was talking about the way they had treated her back then and I believe she just needed to get some things said in order to let them know how she felt about it all now. My concern of course was for her. Because there can be such an up and down in such times.
Clifford “Tiff” Garcia: She didn’t acknowledge that Jerry had kids. She mentioned all these things about how Jerry loved her and how she loved him and this great warmth and then she didn’t talk about his kids. She didn’t acknowledge any of his previous wives. It was really one-sided.
Sue Swanson: What is the Shakespeare line? “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” Everybody was saying that. Deborah Koons Garcia did not give a eulogy. She gave a me-ology. That was all she talked about. “I was the love of Jerry’s life.” With his children sitting right there, it was hard. It was wrong.
Gloria Dibiase: We sat behind Ken Kesey and Sunshine and Barbara and Sara, who were sitting there holding hands. At one point, Deborah said, “Jerry said I was the love of his life.” Barbara looked at Sara and said, “He said that to me!” And Sara said, “He said that to me!”
Barbara Meier: Actually, I said it in this Italian gangster’s voice. “He said-a dat to me!” and Sara answered me back the exact same way.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: I really loved him. I feel like what we had together was a very special romance and friendship. He’d buy me roses all the time and he was always very affectionate with me and told me how much he loved me all the time. The day he left, he told me he loved me. He was crying the day he left. He was in the chair just weeping and I wondered what was going on.
Sandy Rothman: I introduced myself to Deborah at the funeral but she was pretty dismissive because behind me at that particular moment, Dylan was paying his respects to Jerry and she was just really fixing on him. He was really trying to get out of there and she stopped him when he walked by. He had his head down. His eyes were really red and when she came to a little momentary pause in what she was saying, he looked at her with those incredible steely ice blue eyes and said, “He was there for me when nobody was.” And he walked around her and split out of there as fast as he could.
Nicki Scully: That morning, I opened Normandi Ellis’s Awakening Osiris, her translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and I said, “Give me one for Jerry,” and it fell open to “Becoming the Phoenix.” Like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, these are instructions that are meant to be given to the corpse after passing. At the funeral, I walked up to the front and started reading:
I flew straight out of heaven, a mad bird full of secrets.... I destroy and create myself like the sun that rises burning from the east and dies burning in the west. To know the fire, I become the fire … I wage a battle against darkness, against my own ignorance, my resistance to change, my sentimental love for my own folly. Perfection is a difficult task. I lose and find my way over and over again.... There is no end to the work left to do. That is harsh eternity. There is no end to becoming.... I am the fire that burns you, that burns in you. To live is to die a thousand deaths, but there is only one fire, one eternity.
Owsley Stanley: It didn’t really hit me till I put on “Stella Blue.” That really blew out the stops and I had a good cry. I gotta admit. I really loved the guy. He was a remarkable individual. He wasn’t a godlike figure to me in any way but an infinitely curious, infinitely intelligent, infinitely creative brother and in lots of ways, an inspiration. But it’s what happened. As the Pranksters used to say, “Nothing lasts.”
Yen-Wei Choong: In ancient China, you know which kind of patient is the most difficult to treat? The emperor. If you treat emperor, they get angry. They don’t take the herbs, what can you do? If you push enough, Jerry get angry. Nobody dare to push. We try to but difficult to make him healthy and also please him. Oh, very difficult to treat emperor.
John Perry Barlow: What he was really trying to do, and on a good night doing, was becoming utterly invisible along with the rest of the universe. Just being the song. Just being the music. Being a completely straight pipe. Sometimes, when he was on the natch, it was the same kind of deal in his life.
Jorma Kaukonen: As a recovering person myself, I’m really sorry I never got to talk with him about that. We never did, so I don’t really know where he stood on his problem, whatever those problems were. At the same time, he always had a strange serenity about him. A self-awareness of his own life. Which is almost a contradiction with what was going on in his life, but he really did. There was something in there that worked for him. I don’t know what it was.
Gary Gutierrez: David Gans was on this talk show on KQED radio the next morning and they were fielding calls from people about it and some guy called up raving about, “How can you raise such a bad example and glorify somebody that had such a terrible life?” In a very even tone of voice, David said, “Look, it’s kind of beside the point. If you took all the paintings off the walls of the galleries and museums of the world and took all the sheet music off the stands of the orchestras of the world that were written or painted by a person who had a problem with drugs, you’d have a lot of blank walls and silent concert halls.” Jerry had his problems but his music and his art were as much a part of him as the devils that beset him.
Hal Kant: I think there was a kinship in his approach to life with Byron and Shelley, who were guys who violated every convention of their time and that was what they got off on. But he wasn’t malicious. They were horrible people, really horrible, and Jerry was a sweetheart. He absolutely was a unique human and I think that when he was not in a bad state, everybody wanted to bask in his presence.
Peter Rowan: There’s not a night that goes by when I sing “Panama Red” that there isn’t a spark of Jerry in that tune. Here was the guy who gave me the sense of what it was to do it on the highest level you could do it. Just a totally professional musician going for it all the time. Part of his legacy will be how the people who played with him live up to his highest musical ideals. That’s something I feel very strongly about. I’m not going to play a note of music that doesn’t have what Garcia would have put behind it in his best way. He would be the guy to please.
Justin Kreutzmann: He was like somebody you’ll never ever meet or anybody I’ll ever meet again. There was no way to barometer what you saw going on in his life with what either he was actually thinking or anything you could gauge by somebody else’s life. It was like he had his own little scale.
Barbara Meier: He was such a paradox on so many levels and one of the paradoxes was that he had this huge mind. He had this vast Buddha mind but he also had these limiting beliefs that created a very restricted identity. He had an incredible investment in being perceived as a nice guy. But he also had a tremendous need to be a bad boy and he somehow pulled it off. He got away with it and that was the outrage. He pulled it off but it was his undoing. Because he was a nice guy. He was “good old Jer.” And he was a very bad boy. He could do all of it and he didn’t need to choose between them because he had so much power. Keats called it “negative capability”—to be able to hold disparate ideas in your consciousness without the need to choose. He had that. He had that in his life! He had that and he lived it and it ultimately wreaked tremendous havoc and damage, not only for him but for many others who loved him.
John Perry Barlow: To understand Jerry, you’ve got to take a look at the real star-making machine. Charisma itself. You know what charisma is? What the original Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas would have called charisma is unwarranted grace. Unearned, undeserved, completely gratuitous grace. Every time we’d try to get Jerry to see that, he would protest by saying it had nothing whatsoever to do with him.
Jon Mcintire: I remember him telling me once, “When I was in Palo Alto way back then and I was teaching guitar, people would cluster around me and I never understood why. But they would do it. So this kind of onus being on me, this focus being on me, that’s been with me all of my life.”
Vince Dibiase: You’d walk into a room with him and the whole room lit up. When my daughter started baby-sitting for him, she said, “I don’t know what it is about Jerry. But when I walk into the room where he is sitting, all of a sudden I feel very calm and very peaceful.” I said, “Well, honey, you’re sitting there with a living Buddha. You’re right there with this guy who’s just emanating all this stuff.”
Sue Swanson: I was just thankful that he was on his journey and I wished him well. All I kept thinking was, “The loudest music possible must be blasting him through the gates of heaven.” That was what I felt from him. All the way, that was what I carried. He was just blasting through the gates of heaven with the loudest possible music playing.
Justin Kreutzmann: My dad’s line to me was, “If Jerry can be free, I want to be free too.” He doesn’t miss the scene. He just misses the music.
Sue Swanson: The most profound thing for me was “Who am I now? What am I?” I’d always been on this team. I’d always known that if one of my kids got sick or if that I ever really needed anything or that if things were really fucked up, Garcia would take care of me. And he was not there anymore and I didn’t feel that way about anyone else on the planet. It hit me on a lot of levels. On a lot of levels. Personal, professional, public, private. I mean, this was a big death.
John Perry Barlow: I was in Australia a few days before he died. I was doing an interview about all this electronic stuff that I do and the interviewer suddenly said, “So you know Jerry Garcia, right?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “What’s it like knowing Jerry Garcia?” and it just threw me and I said, “I don’t know what it would be like not to. The guy and his manifestations have been so thoroughly embedded in every aspect of my life for so long that I don’t know what it would be like not to know him.” Now I’m finding out. I haven’t even been able to accept the fact that he’s gone. Part of the problem is that I thought about this so many times. I said, “It’s coming” over and over and over again and every time I experienced it, I developed a little callus against it. The callus is so thick that now that he has finally actually died, I can’t experience it because I’ve developed this incredibly thick defense against it. I want to strip it away but I have not yet shed one tear over Jerry Garcia. Not one.
Robert Greenfield: At a wake for Jerry held at Alton Baker Park in Eugene, Oregon, after the funeral, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia spoke before about a thousand people. She talked of taking her runes from a bag and finding the second rune, “Partnership,” which says, “‘I am your beloved. You are my true companion. We meet in the circle at the rainbow’s center, coming together in wholeness. That is the gift of freedom.’”
David Graham: I thought the way that his death was covered in the media was for the first time perfectly right because they couldn’t say a bad thing about him. That was cool. Nobody played up the heroin thing and nobody tried to take him down and it was powerfully done and it was a good tribute. The fact that he was recognized as being the one person within the rock ’n’ roll thing who went beyond the sex and drugs of rock n’ roll and actually said something very deep and spiritual in terms that might have been heavy-handed but were right-on.
Rev. Matthew Fox: If you look at the last picture in Harrington Street, which was the last painting he did that Deborah found on his computer, I think you get a sense of his vision of the afterlife or perhaps even where he is now. That bright sun floating at the end of what looks to be the birth canal.
Jon Mcintire: I think we were in the kitchen of the Grateful Dead office in San Rafael and I was talking about suffering as a fuel for creativity. He got this furrowed brow while his eyes were flashing back and forth and he said, “I know that’s the stereotype. I know that’s what history teaches us. But I’d really like to know what can be created from joy.” One of the most important parts of Jerry was that he wanted to create joy. Why that didn’t win out more often in him, I don’t know. I do know that the more intelligent a person is, the more completely he can deceive himself. Jerry was one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Consequently, his capacity to deceive himself was far far bigger than in most people.
Wavy Gravy: I wrote “A Haiku on the Day of Jerry’s Demise.” It goes like this, “The fat man rocks out/Hinges fall off heaven’s door/‘Come on in,’ sez Bill.”
Bob Barsotti: The Dead were really an American phenomenon. Could that have been developed in other places? Yeah, but it would have been like taking Wild Bill’s Wild West Show to Japan. I think it was Annabelle who said, “My father was a great American.” That really made a lot of sense to me. He really was a great American and he really loved America. Because as fucked up as it is, it allowed him to be who he was. That’s what America is all about, man. That’s what’s so great about it.
David Grisman: Kesey was crying like a baby at the end. He said some great things. For me, his comments were the most insightful and heartfelt.
Robert Greenfield: On the Internet sometime later, the always redoubtable Ken Kesey weighed in from Oregon with a “Message to Garcia.” The message concluded in part with:
You could be a sharp-tongue popper-of-balloons shit-head when you were so inclined, you know. A real bastard. You were the sworn enemy of hot air and commercials, however righteous the cause or lucrative the product. Nobody ever heard you use that microphone as a pulpit.... And to the very end, Old Timer, you were true to that creed....
I guess that’s what I mean about a loud silence....
It was the false notes you didn’t play that kept the lead line so golden pure. It was the words you didn’t sing. So this is what we are left with,
Jerry: this golden silence. It rings on and on without any hint of let up … on and on, And I expect it will still be ringing years from now.
Because you’re still not playing false. Because you’re still not singing Things Go Better With Coke.
Ever your friend,
Keez.
Celeste Lear: I had this dream. I was on an airplane and I looked next to me and it was Jerry Garcia sitting right next to me on that airplane. I was like, “Woo, Jerry. You’re Jerry Garcia!” He was like, “Yep, I’m Jerry.” He said, “Yeah, I’m on my way to a show,” and I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool,” and we started talking and I told him I played guitar too and he was like, “Oh, you should come play with us tonight.” I was like, “No, no. I’m not good at all. I’d just mess you guys up,” and he was like, “No, you should just come.” Then like a flash we were on stage. All of a sudden, I was on stage with the Grateful Dead and I was like, “No, no. I can’t do this.” The crowd was cheering and they handed me a white guitar. This amazing white guitar. I was freaking out and I was like, “I can’t do this,” and Jerry said, “Just do it.” I was shaking and all of a sudden they started playing and I started playing with them and it flowed. It flowed. In the dream, I remember even shredding Jerry and Jerry was like, “Damn,” and then the guitar disappeared and they handed me a trombone. A trombone. I was like, “I’ve never played this before in my life. What are you doing?” Jerry said, “Just play it,” and I played it and I played it good.
Laird Grant: Jerry never laughed at the Deadheads because he’d been a soulless wanderer out there on the dark highways himself. He knew what that was. He did feel that there should have been some other way for them to get off but again they were caught up in their own drug. The Dead.
Michael Walker: I did Summer Tour ’94. Me and my friend, we hit every single show. Summer Tour ’94, it was like go. It was like it was on and that was what we were doing. Some tickets we mail-ordered. Some we didn’t ’cause I didn’t know how to get a ticket for some show in Deer Creek, Indiana. We’d drive the bus, go to a town, and we’d kick it there.
Manasha Matheson Garcia: The world doesn’t seem like the same place anymore without Jerry and without the Grateful Dead. On a real limited personal level, I experienced the beauty. Before I was with Jerry, when I was a fan in the audience, I’d walk to one section of the crowd and all of a sudden I’d feel this gracefulness come. This beauty. There would be beautiful women and men dancing and it was just amazing. I feel really blessed and honored to have participated in that.
Alan Trist: The Deadhead Diaspora was the way Ken Kesey put it. Because what the Grateful Dead experience was, apart from the music and Jerry as a figurehead and his liquid guitar lines and the band’s driving force and the dancing, and all of that, was a meeting place, a celebration, a ceremony, a ritual, a chautauqua, a gathering. Something timeless and endless and eternal. The thing that human beings do when they’re in their most holy place. What the Deadhead Diaspora means is that now they’re going to do the same thing, only dispersed in smaller units. It’s the going on and the gathering that is the important thing. And the constant statement that there is another way.
Michael Walker: I was shocked the morning Jerry died. I woke up to a knock on the door really really early. It was just a couple of hours after it happened and my friend’s mom told me Jerry died. That was the worst way to be woken up. It was a cold foggy morning and then that news. Jerry was gone. What a way to start the day.
We drove to the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park and we hung out there for a while. Actually, everyone went to Haight Street first. We all gathered at Haight and people were drawing on the sidewalks and everything and cops were everywhere and it was like when the Dead go to a town and Deadheads are everywhere and there are cops. Then everyone walked into the park. Some people walked together and some people kind of did their own thing and walked different ways but we all made it to the park.
When I got there, there was a big circle and flowers and somewhat of a shrine but it was still early on. As the day progressed, they were sticking cameras in everyone’s face who was trying to pay their respects. People were smoking bowls and drinking whiskey. I stayed for a long time and I got interviewed. Just some lady talking. I didn’t even know who she was. She came around with a camera, asked me my name, where I was from, and just basic questions. Lots of people were crying and the media was taking advantage of that. They were sticking cameras in people’s faces who were crying. There was lots of different music and there was a drum circle jamming and people were singing “Won’t Fade Away” for just the longest time to the drum circle. To just the beat. For a long time, people sat there saying that, just crying, and the drums kept going but I think people were trying to make it a good thing. Like pick it up by making the music and trying to keep it together.
People were writing little letters to Jerry and putting them in the shrine. I took off the necklace that I had worn like forever, forever, forever at all my shows and I took that off and I laid that across a little poem I wrote and put it in the shrine and that was it. It was a time for lament but I left there kind of bummed. But I’d paid my respects and I was really glad.
Celeste Lear: I went to a memorial at Griffith Park in L.A. and there were about a thousand people there. It was by the carousel up on the hill and people were holding candles. The whole hillside was lit up with candles and people singing and playing drums and guitar and there were people down by the altar. People were crying and I saw a lot of my friends there and everyone was like, “Can you believe it?” Like, “Oh my God, this is the end.” That day, I played myself. Just in front of my amp. I played for Jerry and I was totally flowing. It was so good.
Bob Barsotti: Everyone was talking about the memorial. On one hand, it was Jerry the icon, the Grateful Dead, all that. On the other hand, the city was also coming from a public safety standpoint. If something didn’t happen, they were afraid these kids were going to camp in Golden Gate Park and not leave for months. Phil Lesh and Cameron Sears and Dennis McNally and I started talking. Phil said, “I hope you realize that none of us will be there. None of us are going to go.” I said, “You know what, Phil? That’s not a prerequisite. You guys don’t have to come.”
In my mind, I was thinking that without them, why bother? But he was having a hard time with it being based on his participation and I knew these guys. If it was all up to them and the whole pressure was on them, they wouldn’t do it. I said, “If you want to just sanction it and not come, then I’ll set up the music and we’ll do something and it will be fine.” He said, “Okay. Under those circumstances, I think it’s a good idea.” I was going on the premise that they were not going to be there so I got everything all set and then I got the call from Mickey Hart’s guy, Howard. “Bob, I think Mickey wants to participate.” I said, “Fantastic.” Then I got the call from Cameron Sears, their manager. “I think they all want to come down.”
I got there about midnight and nothing was working right but it didn’t matter. We were all there. All the people who had been doing this for Jerry for all these years. Tom Howard and his crew started setting up the stage in the middle of the night. There was a gathering of a couple of hundred people over on the other side of the ball field who had been there for a couple of days and they saw what was going on. It was pitch-black. Three o’clock in the morning. Guys climbed up to the top of the scaffolding to get this big picture of Jerry we were using as a drop up there. When they unfurled it, the whole crowd applauded. “Yeah, Jerry!” People were taking flash pictures and the picture of Jerry was popping into light because there was no other light. All the work lights had broken. They’d set this thing up in the dark.
The next morning, people started to arrive slowly. Just before it actually started, the numbers doubled. I think over the course of the day, over a hundred thousand people came through there. Nobody stayed very long. They came, they paid their respects, they left. There was a constant crowd of somewhere around twenty or twenty-five thousand people but it was come and go. It was like a neighborhood memorial or a wake. I told the Dead, “You shouldn’t perform. You should just come and talk. This is your chance to be there with your audience and put the whole thing to bed.”
We had the Grateful Dead Chinese New Year’s dragon, which only comes out of the warehouse on Chinese New Year at Dead shows and it came out and it did the circle behind the mourning procession. Then we got all the drummers together. I got Deborah down there and all the band was there, all their wives, and we all picked up a drum or a cowbell. We were with some of the best drummers in the Bay Area, Michael Shrieve and Armando Peraza and all the Cuban guys and all the Talking Drum guys from Africa. Mickey Hart had arranged for them all to be there. They had their incredible drums with them and we did this procession led by Olatunji. Baba Olatunji led us through the crowd and the crowd parted to let us through.
We got up on the stage and then all the different band members and the family members spoke. Paul Kantner was there. He came up and read a poem. Wavy Gravy spoke. I got Barlow up on the stage. He was standing down in front and he said, “I don’t want to be up there.” I said, “No, you’re going up there. Get up there.” On stage, he said, “They asked me to come up and speak and I’ve only got one word and the word is ‘love.’” And he turned and walked away. It was a pretty emotional moment. Then Annabelle thanked the crowd for putting her and her sisters through college and making it so she didn’t have to work at the Dairy Queen.
We had a line the entire day going up to the altar. People could go and stand in the center spot right in front of the picture of Jerry. The thing that always drew me to this business was the human energy that happened when groups got together focused on one thing in this euphoric state. For years, when I would go up on the Grateful Dead stage and stand behind the drummers, I could feel this focused energy there. It was really strong.
This day in the park when I went to that same spot on the back of the stage behind Jerry’s backdrop, there was nothing there. But when I went to the altar down in front, that was where it was. Every person who wanted to pay their respects to Jerry got to go stand in Jerry’s spot and feel the energy that Jerry had felt for all those years. They would go up and face the altar and it was coming in from behind them. It was like being on the rail in front of Jerry. Getting your last chance to be on the rail. Only this time, the energy wasn’t focused up over your head. It was focused right on you. They’d go up and stand there for a minute and it would just overcome them.
Michael Walker: I went back up to that one too of course and hung out. There was a microphone and they gave people a chance to go up and talk if they wanted to say anything. By turning around and seeing all the people out there gathered for one cause, you could like see what Jerry had seen whenever he played. There was a reason everyone was there. It was to go and pay their respects and show their love for Jerry.
Robert Greenfield: And so it was that after Jerome John Garcia died, both the Volkswagen and Levi Strauss corporations felt compelled to take out full-page ads to note his passing in the Jerry Garcia memorial issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Although Jerry himself had done a folksy little Levi’s 501 radio ad back in the eighties, did the folks at Levi Strauss and Company really consider him a member of their corporate family? As for Volkswagen buses, the man never drove one.
Much like the snowstorm of media coverage after his death (including tabloid headlines like I HAD JERRY GARCIA’S LOVE CHILD and WE SOLD JERRY GARCIA DEADLY DRUG COCKTAIL at which he himself would have roared with laughter), the ads had far more to do with the legend Jerry had become than the person he had always been.
How else could it have been? In Jerry Garcia’s life, the mythological underpinnings were there right from the start. Like one selected by the gods on high to be tested from birth, Jerry was first marked by his own brother. Off came half a digit from a hand Jerry would then use to make himself rich, famous, and powerful. From the grievous yet sacred wound, this guitar hero drew greater strength.
As a child, Jerry then watched his father drown before his eyes. Already marked, Jerry was now entirely cut loose from the strictures of ordinary family life. Hammered by an awful blow which might have permanently crippled someone made of weaker stuff, Jerry suffered and then persevered. In time, Jerry became not only a father to himself but to those who followed him because of the music he played. Seeing in him the transcendent power they did not recognize within themselves, they waited for Jerry to lead them. But he would not do so.
For in actual fact, their hero was crippled. A born leader, he did not want to lead. In truth, he did not even want to be a hero. Jerry was more at home in an entirely different incarnation. The trickster. The shape-shifter who in the course of his long and tangled journey through the mortal plane assumes many physical forms. In his wake, such a being often leaves confusion. None who encountered Jerry understood him fully. Those who knew him best still admit this plainly. At any given moment in time, it was impossible to know what he was really thinking or precisely which earthly goals beyond the playing of his music he wanted to pursue.
Formed by the tragic events of a traumatic childhood or perhaps by the kind of brain chemistry possessed by only a very few in any generation (to which Jerry added lysergic acid, DMT, THC, cocaine, amphetamines, and opiates in copious amounts previously unavailable to any man), his agenda remained always and forever strictly his own. When Jerry passed from this life, those left behind could only try to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together while knowing always that the bigger picture remained somewhat harder to see.
About him, we can safely say the following: As a person, Jerry Garcia sentimentalized the women and children in his life. He loved to love them when he loved them but as soon as the rigors of day-to-day life with them became too tedious, Jerry was out of there and goin’ down the road feelin’ sad. To some, he seemed guiltless. Yet again and again, guilt drove him back the way he had already come. Like many artists plugged more directly into the collective unconscious from which we all gather our dreams, Jerry dramatically embodied the yin and yang of the human condition.
A woman who knew Jerry very well suggested that perhaps at the center of his own particular maze, there was nothing much at all. A vacuum where the heart center was meant to be. More likely, both existed there, nestled side by side as it would seem they never could. With apologies to Kris Kristofferson, Jerry was “a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” The hippie embodiment of good vibes, he was so cynical and sardonic a survivor of the beatnik era that he could refer to the years he spent lost on junk at Hepburn Heights as his “vacation.” Wanting to be left alone, he attracted others to him like a magnet. By bringing people in close, Jerry also kept them at bay. Bright as the Leo sun that was his birth sign, he could be one very dark star indeed.
Like so much else about him, his drug use was extreme. “Is that the biggest line you can whack out, man? Is that the fattest joint you can roll?” Jerry would demand with a grin back in the days when he was still in control of what he was using rather than the other way round. Nearer the end of his life, he disappeared during one sound check only to reemerge on stage forty-five minutes later looking dazed with a disposable plastic hotel shower cap on his head. Sad as it may have been to see him so confused, Jerry was only wearing what had become his standard gear for keeping his hair away from the flame as he lit the pipe and/or chased the dragon on the road.
Extreme behavior? Most certainly so. But then the man always wanted more of everything. No matter what was on the plate, an extra portion was his primary need. For someone with lesser appetites and less ambition, what he already had might have been more than enough. Most likely, that person would have been someone other than Jerry Garcia.
At the end, when his body was shot and the drugs on which he had depended to blot out the pain were no longer those of his own choosing, he may have had the last joke on everyone by driving off by himself to Serenity Knolls (can that name be an accident?), lying himself down to sleep, and passing gently from this earth with a smile on his face, grateful to be dead at last and in a place where no one again could ever ask him for something he was not really certain he was qualified to give.
Perhaps he was smiling when he died because like the true cool beatnik he had always been, Jerry went off in style without having to explain what it was he meant. The act was the statement, man. The meaning was in the mix. Unlike Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, Ezra Pound’s fictional poet who was woefully out of step with his era, Jerry Garcia was in fact precisely “what the age demanded.” For better and worse, he was perfectly made for these times. Satisfying this particular requirement brought him more fame than even he could have ever imagined possible. As always, in his life, that double-edged sword managed to cut deeply in all directions.
So many believed they knew what he wanted that even after his funeral, some went to the trouble of bringing into view his hand with the missing finger so it could be seen before he was cremated. Jerry’s ashes were then scattered not once but twice. With the Grateful Dead having voted their full approval of a plan that came to Bobby Weir in a flash between waking and sleeping and with a film crew present to record the event, Weir and Jerry’s widow scattered about half of Jerry’s earthly remains in the Ganges River. Speaking for the rest of his immediate family, none of whom had been notified beforehand of this plan, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia noted that not only was India a country Jerry himself had never visited but the Ganges was also the most polluted river on the face of the earth.
The second time around, Heather, Annabelle, and Trixie Garcia, Sunshine Kesey, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and his wife, Jill, and Steve Parish were all present as the last of Jerry’s physical remains were scattered beneath the Golden Gate Bridge on the gleaming waters of the San Francisco Bay.
Concerning the screaming fight on the dock beforehand as to who would be permitted to go along on what was, after all was said and done, Jerry’s last trip, the less said the better. So too for Jerry’s grinning image on birthday cards that proclaim, “You’re Having Another Birthday” on the outside and “Be Grateful” inside. Not to mention all the commercial exploitations of his likeness yet to come. Those twin scatterings notwithstanding, now that Jery is dust and ashes, he belongs once more (as he always did in life) to no one but himself.
As Richard Nixon, a President who would never have welcomed Jerry to the White House but instead gave Elvis the FBI badge he wanted so badly, used to say, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear.” It was not LSD or the sixties that made Jerry Garcia who he was. Jerry was always Jerry. Seemingly, he came into this world not only fully formed but, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, “with the diamond hard look of a cobra.” That never changed. In his beginning may have well been his end. Yet both were always cloaked in mystery, perhaps even to him as well.
For those who wonder what all the fuss is about, I’d suggest sitting down again with any good live version of “Dark Star.” Anyone caring to note where the development of the electric guitar happened to be at a certain point in history could do no better than to listen to Jerry get out there on his instrument, pure and free as he could never truly be in life.
Thankfully, my job here is not to analyze, categorize, or summarize the man. To do so would only trivialize the life. Instead, I’d just like to join my voice with all the others who felt the need to send best wishes his way for safe passage on the long and stranger trip on which he may now be embarked. Good-bye, Jerry. Thanks for all the good stuff.