by Joel Selvin
As the shows settled into their groove, interplay between the acts grew to be part of the daylong event—John Wesley Harding singing with Hot Tuna, Hart and Weir sitting in with Hornsby, Weir and Hornsby joining Hart’s set, everybody piling on at the end of RatDog, often with Hornsby vocalist Debra Henry leading the ensemble in a spirited version of “White Rabbit.” Everybody quickly learned to build Grateful Dead material into their acts. Los Lobos closed their sets with “Bertha,” a rollicking version the band first recorded for a Dead tribute album. Hornsby invariably trotted out “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” to great response and sometimes brought Weir to do “Jack Straw.” Even the juggling Karamazov Brothers got into the act, bringing out folkie Wes Harding to sing “Uncle John’s Band.”
The only two acts not trading on the Dead songbook, ironically, were the ones featuring the former Dead members. Hart’s Mystery Box was a radical departure from the Dead world with the Europop dance beat, no guitar, and supple polyrhythmic undercurrents. Hart stuck to performing material from his new album, ending his set with a sort of rapping vocal on “Fire on the Mountain,” the only song from his Dead days he played, often with Weir joining for the number. RatDog only knew two Dead songs—“Cassidy” and “Throwin’ Stones”—although the band sometimes performed old blues associated with the Dead such as “I Know You Rider” sung by Matt Kelly, not Weir. Like Hart, Weir also consciously avoided having a lead guitar in his band. To Weir, RatDog was kind of the anti-Dead, but that concept was largely lost on the audience.
There were tense hours backstage at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington State when the news of the bombing at the Atlanta Olympic Games hit. The explosion happened directly beneath the sound tower operated by the Grateful Dead’s old sound company and many of the road crew and production staff were in Atlanta working the Olympics. Several anxious hours passed before all hands were reported safe. Warren Zevon joined the bill for a few dates, which meant adding “Werewolves of London” to the closing ensemble jam session. Every so often, guitarist David Hidalgo of Los Lobos would slip his fiery version of Hendrix’s “Little Wing” into the encores.
At Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, forty minutes south of San Francisco, in what passed for the hometown stop on the tour, Hart brought out a couple of surprise guests during his set; his “retired” bandmate Phil Lesh and Hart’s new best friend, Sammy Hagar. Only a month before, flying to Hawaii on a rare family vacation, Hart met Hagar in the first-class cabin. At first, he thought the shaggy rock star was only another friendly Deadhead, but Hagar was headed to his Hawaiian home after just having been fired from Van Halen. Hart showed up at his house every day he was on the islands to cheer his new pal. The Shoreline faithful may not have been particularly surprised to see Lesh join the band for “Fire on the Mountain,” but there was no way they were expecting Sammy Hagar. He was nonetheless welcomed back at the end of the RatDog set to join Weir, Hart, Lesh, Hornsby, and Hot Tuna’s Jorma Kaukonen for “Truckin’” and “The Other One” jams.
At the end of the day, the Deadheads went home slightly confounded. They could cling to the half-hour repertory close to the concert as a slender slice of Dead musical anarchy and take some comfort in having been able to come together once again around, at least, the spirit of the Grateful Dead. But Hart’s Mystery Box proved controversial with fans—some loved it, others hated it—and Weir’s RatDog, with his devotion to blues and ballads, a kind of Bob Weir lounge act with Rob Wasserman’s chamber music bass playing, was frustrating to all the Deadheads. Not only did he refuse to have a lead guitar in his band, he wouldn’t even play rock music, let alone Dead songs. Weir was determined to do what he wanted and refused to adapt to audience expectations despite pleas from tour producers. Weir was doing this to save his life, not theirs.
In June, Rick Abelson submitted his “red book” version of the Terrapin Station business plan, a forty-four-page, oversized spiral-bound handbook stuffed full of photographs and drawings of the proposed project, now outlined in detail. Plans called for two theaters, six themed rooms, a café, and merchandise store. The cost including real estate was estimated at $40–45 million and the opening date was targeted for spring 1999.
Along with ERA analysts, Abelson and the team looked at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis; and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville for comparisons and projected more than a million visitors the first year for Terrapin Station that would stabilize down to 875,000 a year. The plan forecast an operating budget around $5 million a year and net income of more than $11 million a year, which would pay off the entire investment in four to five years.
Abelson’s Deadland vision as outlined in the document called for visitors to enter through a lobby dominated by a replica of the Wall of Sound, the historic gargantuan sound system the band used briefly in the seventies, leading to a dimly lit re-creation of backstage with the show about to begin. The adjacent Jerry Garcia Theater would be the location for a multimedia orientation and a second theater, The Wheel, would feature holographic imagery of the band playing in a 360-degree setting.
The experience would revolve around six specific rooms. Eyes of the World would be a room devoted to the visual arts—concert posters and artwork from fans. The Music Never Stopped room would house the band’s concert recordings, more than three thousand performances, otherwise known as the Vault. The Rhythm Devils room would contain an interactive percussion display to include “The Beast,” the massive contraption built for Dead drummers Hart and Kreutzmann, and the “Thunder Machine” from the Merry Pranksters. Space and Place would be dedicated to the venues the band had played around the world. The Truckin’ room would feature a timeline of the band’s career illustrated with memorabilia such as Pigpen’s organ or Garcia’s Uncle Sam hat. The Other One, the final themed room, would reflect the colorful parking lot scene of Dead concerts.
Plans called for a building with fifty thousand square feet, the size of a large supermarket, and the average visitor experience was reckoned to last three hours.
Imagine giving young music fans, as well as long-time Deadheads, the opportunity to “touch the Grateful Dead,” to pass through the rich history of the music and its tangents by presenting a fascinating and incisive panorama of the Grateful Dead with the use of authentic memorabilia and state-of-the-art media.
It will be a mystical place to invigorate the senses. Something to capture the tried and true, as well as the curious imagination. Terrapin Station will be the most unique educational and spiritual music attraction ever assemble [sic] in America.
Abelson made the prospect look possible, even relatively routine, and eminently doable. He estimated planning and construction could be completed in under thirty-six months. There was talk of a reunion concert at the place on New Year’s Eve 1999.
4
Widows
THE FESTERING war between the widows first broke out into the open on the pier of Schoonmaker Marina in Sausalito. It was a blustery gray April day with high seas and rain. Garcia had requested that his ashes be scattered under the Golden Gate Bridge, and now everyone, including Garcia’s ex-wife, Carolyn Adams Garcia—known as Mountain Girl or MG—were on the dock waiting to get on the boat, the Argosy Venture, owned by Dead music business associate Bill Belmont. But the widow, Deborah Koons Garcia, was in control and was having none of Mountain Girl. The widow ordered that Mountain Girl not be allowed on the boat. Six-foot swells tossed the large, expensive yacht like a toy against the pier as Koons Garcia crouched down in the bridge of the boat and Mountain Girl screamed on the dock to be let on board.
“Can we get out of here?” Koons Garcia said to Belmont.
“Deborah,” yelled Mountain Girl. “This is family.”
Garcia and Mountain Girl’s three daughters were already on the boat, stricken that their mother was not allowed to participate in this last tribute to their father. Belmont tried to talk Koons Garcia into changing her mind,
without success.
The women had been at war for many years, since Mountain Girl first confronted the young Koons over her affair with MG’s then-husband in 1973. At that time, she presented the twenty-three-year-old Koons, who had met Garcia at a New York concert, with a one-way plane ticket home. A chance encounter in a Marin health food store more than twenty years later, long after his marriage to MG, renewed Koons’s romance with the Dead guitarist. They had only been married eighteen months when Garcia died, but widow Koons Garcia quickly took charge. Mountain Girl had already infuriated her at the wake when she snapped a Polaroid of herself with Garcia in his coffin, and she had decided then that MG would not be allowed at the funeral. But this latest screaming match was being played out in full view of her daughters and his horrified closest friends, who had all known Mountain Girl a lot longer than the widow.
In the middle of this tense scene, the perennially tardy Bob Weir and his girlfriend Natascha Muenter finally sauntered down the pier. Belmont and his two-man crew prepared to shove off. As Weir started to climb aboard, MG got his attention.
“Bobby, they won’t let me come,” she screamed over the weather.
One leg on the dock, one leg on the rising boat, a surprised Weir was literally trapped in the middle and immediately indignant on MG’s behalf while the deck heaved precariously beneath him. He paused, but was pulled on board and Phil Lesh prevailed on Weir to settle down. They had spoken to Mickey Hart on the phone, who was still at home in Sebastopol, an hour away, under the impression the boat trip would be postponed due to bad weather. They also gave up on Robert Hunter, who didn’t like boats. They pulled away and motored out over the choppy swells, leaving Mountain Girl behind standing alone on the dock, sobbing hysterically.
Things had already started to go weird two weeks before when Bob Weir and Koons Garcia took a portion of Garcia’s ashes to India and scattered them on the Ganges River. No one understood the mysterious action at the time, least of all Garcia’s daughters, who were not informed beforehand. It was only much later that it was revealed this had been one of Weir’s strange ideas, which had come to him in a dream. Although he sought and received the approval of his bandmates, he neglected to inform any of Garcia’s daughters or their mother about his plans. They read about it in the newspaper. “There was no reason on Earth to take Jerry’s ashes to India,” an outraged Mountain Girl told the San Francisco Chronicle, “a country he’d never been to, and dump them into the most polluted river on the face of the Earth.”
Weir had wakened from a dream with a vision. While sitting in Garcia’s onstage tent during concerts, he and Garcia used to talk of going down to the river with the geese. Weir felt it was a sort of shared sanctuary of the imagination, mostly Garcia’s, which would take him to a place of peace during a show. They would return to the image over and over and Weir never knew if the river was real or mythical. The image came to him in a dream after his friend’s death and it was finally revealed to him—the river was real and it was the Ganges.
Weir, believing in the power of dreams and that his old friend had contacted him with instructions, presented his idea to the other bandmates and he received their straight-faced unanimous approval. It only remained to convince the widow that it was a good idea, since she was the keeper of the cremains. He knew this would not be easy, as Koons Garcia had been contentious since Garcia died and showed no signs of being anything else. Summoning all the requisite diplomacy, deftly allowing the widow to take a certain proprietary interest in the idea, he hoped she might feel as if she thought of it herself. The plan worked and Weir convinced her to take the trip.
On March 25, 1996, they waded into the peaceful, crystalline span of the Ganges, a rare pristine place in the river where the waters roared out of the mountains into calm, scenic national forest outside Rishikesh, India. As a pair of filmmakers hired by Deborah to record the event followed them, Weir and the widow rolled up their pants and splashed into midstream where they tossed handfuls of Jerry’s ashes and a few flowers. Like a fresh breeze blowing through his mind, Weir felt overcome with a serene elation, a deep sense of duty fulfilled, a moment of true peace he traveled halfway around the world to find. He felt Garcia approved.
Of course, that was short-lived. He returned home to newspaper headlines and angry quotes from Jerry’s daughters and their mother. The scattering of the remainder of Garcia’s ashes in the San Francisco Bay with his family was quickly scheduled. Mountain Girl showed up at the Sausalito marina that gray day with flowers and a box of Bozo noses and Groucho glasses, which she managed to sneak on board before the widow showed up. As different as these women were—the raucous, voluble hippie earth mother and the grim and proper East Coast trust funder—they were both formidable. Mountain Girl could scream and kick all she wanted, but Koons Garcia was not going to let her get on that boat.
The mood was subdued as they rode the bumpy waves out toward the edge of the Pacific Ocean under the Golden Gate Bridge. Although the rain had let up while the boat was docked, the squalls picked up again as they headed out. Steve Parish, Garcia’s loyal Sancho Panza, withheld the package of Garcia’s ashes under his jacket and gruffly ordered everyone to get along. Koons Garcia sat in the salon with Belmont, while Garcia’s daughters, his brother Tiff, bandmates Lesh and Weir, and the few others left her alone. Nobody knew what to do and nobody stepped forward to take charge. They simply bounced on the foaming sea, waiting. With the vast, angry open ocean growing ever closer ahead at Point Bonita, Belmont’s wife Janice, who was at the helm, shouted that they needed to start spreading those ashes or she was heading out to Hawaii.
They reached into the Ziploc bag and leaned over the gunwale with their handfuls, only to have the gusting wind blast the ashes back wet against the side of the boat while the dust went everywhere in the storm. If he weren’t already dead, Jerry would have died laughing. His windblown remains could not be contained. He belonged to the breezes now. They threw some gardenias in after, but the flowers were anticlimactic. Everybody wanted to be done. This had been some miserable business. Janice Belmont struggled at the wheel to keep the boat moving, while her husband hovered over the party on deck to make sure nobody went overboard. Weir was concerned about the unceremonious send-off. “You’ve got to get it all in the water,” he said.
As one of Belmont’s crew held his belt, Weir leaned far over the rail in the heavy seas, wielding a hose, and washed his friend’s remains off the boat. The ride back was quiet, but once they docked at Schoonmaker, Parish broke out a bottle of Wild Turkey and some food was served. Mountain Girl was long gone. Koons Garcia didn’t stay and Lesh and his wife left quickly, but the rest hung around downing the booze and eating the food in the rain.
That Deborah Koons Garcia had so immediately taken total control of Garcia’s estate after her husband’s death set off alarms throughout the Dead world. Not only was she a relatively recent addition to the extended family, but women in Dead circles tended to be kept in the background. Girlfriends and wives were not allowed to cause problems. Mountain Girl had earned her unique status through many long, difficult years. As soon as Garcia died, Deborah started making people uncomfortable with her demands. She closely scrutinized the plans and the guest list for the funeral and, days later, stopped paying everybody.
It was probably true that people in the band around Garcia may not have treated her with what she considered adequate regard while her husband was alive. She was an outsider amidst an especially clannish bunch. She not only failed to develop any close personal alliances in the group, she saw no reason to trust management and crew now that Garcia was dead. She could be imperious and haughty and didn’t bother to make anything easy for the organization. Indeed, it appeared that Koons Garcia went out of her way to make everything more difficult, but she was effectively limited in her sphere of influence from the start.
Although she was in firm control of the Garcia estate, Hal Kant had long before crafted a “Last Man Standing” clause to the band�
�s partnership agreement, which allowed the surviving members to buy the partnership percentage back from any deceased member for an advantageous “book” value (Garcia was the fourth member of the band to die). With this clause, Koons Garcia was quickly paid off and eliminated from any Grateful Dead business dealings.
But she took full charge of the estate. The widow immediately stopped the monthly payments of $20,000-plus Garcia had been making to Mountain Girl under the terms of a $5 million divorce agreement. She also cut out monthly child support payments of $8,000 to Manasha Matheson, the mother of Garcia’s nine-year-old daughter, Keelin. She also stopped paying another $3,000 monthly to yet another ex-girlfriend, Barbara Meier of Taos, New Mexico, to whom Garcia proposed marriage in December 1992, before changing his mind three months later. She even stopped making payments on a car owned by twenty-one-year-old Theresa (Trixie) Garcia, a high school graduation present from her father.
In all, the estate was hit with more than $35 million worth of claims in the first ninety days. The most pressing—and personal—single demand came from Mountain Girl, who wanted the rest of her $5 million settlement. The widow hired additional legal help from attorney Robert Gordon, who also handled the Janis Joplin estate.