by Joel Selvin
“This is not my favorite case, to say the least,” Gordon told the Marin County probate judge he was appearing before. “It has made my life miserable from time to time, being involved in this estate.”
Everybody in the Dead camp felt the same way. They wished it would go away quietly, but, of course, it would not. One of the prime principles of the band had been to never publicly air private beefs. It was written in the code of the Dead. Mountain Girl squaring off in court with Deborah Koons Garcia in an unseemly battle over filthy lucre violated every aspect of that long-held code. It was a classic Grateful Dead catastrophe. This kind of public exposure added more trauma to an already severely injured group.
To make matters more ridiculous, the entire proceedings were selected for daily broadcast by the surging cable TV outlet Court TV, one year after splashing the O. J. Simpson trial across cable TV franchises over the country—a nightmare for the Dead. The Simpson media circus was a pivotal event in the culture, and the Court TV broadcast had established the new channel as a certified phenomenon of cable television, treating actual trials like sports events complete with play-by-play announcers, color commentators, and halftime interviews. Court TV decided Garcia vs. Garcia would be perfect fare for their audience.
On December 11, 1996, at the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Marin County Courthouse, the show got under way. Mountain Girl, who didn’t know the proceedings were going to be broadcast until she walked into court that first morning, sat next to her lawyers directly opposite the camera, which was positioned above the defense table. Deborah sat beneath the camera and rarely appeared in the shot. She invariably looked composed in black pantsuit and a single strand of pearls. Gray-haired, wearing no makeup, MG sat glumly and stiffly in the camera’s glare, never fully comfortable. On the stand, she cried reading a love letter from Jerry, only to have that emotional moment undermined later, when, under cross-examination, she was forced to admit the letter was written many years before she had indicated.
Garcia had met Mountain Girl when she was the nineteen-year-old mother of Ken Kesey’s daughter Sunshine (Kesey, the best-selling author and LSD evangelist, had other children with his wife Faye—it was the sixties). She moved in with Garcia at the band’s Haight-Ashbury headquarters in 1966. She and Garcia lived together on and off through the seventies and had two daughters of their own, Annabelle and Trixie. By the time they were married by a Buddhist minister between sets backstage at a Dead concert on New Year’s Eve in 1981, they were living apart. The marriage served to formalize their family relationship. In 1986, when Garcia awoke from a diabetic coma that nearly killed him, MG was by his bedside, and he moved back in with her and the girls for his yearlong convalescence. Despite the unconventional nature of their relationship and his many other women, nobody in Dead circles doubted the central role Mountain Girl played in his life.
At issue was a homemade, thirteen-line divorce settlement agreement Garcia signed in 1993 that promised to pay Mountain Girl the sum of $5 million over the course of twenty years. He had made eighteen monthly payments before he died and the widow stopped the checks.
The defense position was that the marriage was a scam to avoid taxes, not a real marriage, and the divorce agreement was not even a proper contract. Attorneys for the estate painted Garcia as drug-addled and nonconfrontational by nature, an easy target for manipulation by Mountain Girl and her lawyer. In her turn on the stand, Koons Garcia admitted that not only did she and Garcia maintain separate residences during their marriage, but, after first insisting she took no money from her husband, she also eventually acknowledged she extracted a monthly payment from him marginally larger than the one he paid his ex-wife.
Such tawdry personal details of the lives of the Grateful Dead had never been aired in public before. The Dead always saw themselves as an outlaw bunch. They identified with motorcycle gangs, Native American tribes, cowboys riding the range in the Wild West. Living in the spirit of sixties communalism, the Dead managed to stand by the creed of the counterculture long after that phase had passed from most of the rest of society.
While other members of the Woodstock Nation had quickly been transformed by the so-called Me Decade of the seventies into responsible, taxpaying, semi-upright citizens, the Dead had negotiated their own terms to a surprising degree. They continued to live the hippie dream, and even though band members now earned millions of dollars, owned their own homes, and were raising families, they stayed true to their original code. They distrusted businessmen. Most of their managers had been either visionaries or con men and most of their money had disappeared in the process. They met Cameron Sears, who had handled their affairs as much as anyone since 1987, when he was their guide on a white-water river boating expedition. They weren’t looking for expertise, they were looking for heart. As long as they could sell out football stadiums and baseball parks, there was enough cash flow to support the illusion.
The economic impact of Garcia’s death had already been made abundantly obvious to the band members, but now the strain on the philosophic underpinnings of the Dead would also begin to show, many years after the exigencies of real life had imposed similar compromises with reality on San Francisco hippie-rock compatriots such as Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Those bubbles had burst long ago.
The defense went right after the Dead’s code of silence, beginning with Phil Lesh, who took the witness stand wearing sneakers, jeans, a canvas jacket, and a smirk. Lesh played it like the cocky kid in the principal’s office. A reluctant witness—from his choice of dress to his cavalier attitude on the stand to his wry answers to questioning—he was still adhering to the Grateful Dead playbook. He gave the proceedings the absolute minimum amount of seriousness required.
Lesh said that he didn’t remember seeing Mountain Girl on tour with the band during the eighties, despite her testimony to the contrary (“I went as much as I could,” she had said). He also allowed his memory might not be the best. “Those were hazy years,” he said. He was asked about Jerry Garcia.
“He was a cool dude,” Lesh said with a grin.
Asked to elaborate, Lesh said, “How much time do you have?”
He testified that Garcia failed to mention getting married to MG. “Jerry and I never really talked about his private life,” Lesh said. “It was none of my business.”
The attorney asked if Lesh considered Mountain Girl to be a bully. “I am familiar with that component of her personality,” he said. “None of Jerry’s women had exactly been shrinking violets.”
Under cross-examination, when Lesh was questioned again about his recollections from the eighties, he repeated that his memory wasn’t clear. “From this period?” asked the attorney.
“Any period,” said Lesh. “The last thirty years are one smoky haze.” The courtroom broke into laughter.
In contrast, Steve Parish took his role seriously as Falstaff to the Grateful Dead. Parish showed up in protest, dressed in a dark blue blazer, charcoal gray slacks, and tie. He was openly antagonistic at the prospect of testifying. Nobody believed in the code more than Parish. He had been plucked off the sidewalk outside the Fillmore West and added to the band’s road crew in 1969. He stood guard at Garcia’s dressing room door for thirty years. His fierce loyalty went unquestioned. The large, genial ex–New Yorker was as hard driving a rock-and-roll cowboy as the West ever saw. He knew the Grateful Dead had their own rules and he lived by them. He looked ill at ease, but he was not slyly sarcastic like Lesh. Parish was openly combative.
He had gone to Koons Garcia personally and begged her not to have him testify. He had never so much as given an interview, never helped anyone writing a book. He had not once violated the sanctity of his unspoken oath. The defense had taken Parish’s deposition, but they were not prepared for his testimony in court. “I told you to leave me alone—I want nothing to do with this unseemly affair,” he snapped at the defense attorney. “Is that so difficult to understand?”
“Did you say if I put you on the stand you would hurt my case?” the estate attorney asked. The judge cut off this line of questioning before Parish could reply and stipulated that Parish was “a reluctant witness.”
The attorney next asked Parish whom he had discussed the case with. “My wife,” said Parish. “A girl named Linda… A guy named Billy, a guy named Dick. This is big. Everyone in the Grateful Dead is talking about this.”
Agitated, Parish tried to explain the unconventional nature of Garcia’s relationship with Mountain Girl. He understood they weren’t Ozzie and Harriet. “We didn’t play by the marriage game,” Parish said. “At that time, it wasn’t a priority for us. We were pretty much an artistic bunch. We weren’t living by normal rules.”
Another one of the key points of the estate’s case—that Garcia’s lawyer was more Mountain Girl’s lawyer than his—Parish swatted down like a fly. When the defense attorney contended that Parish had said that, Parish exploded. “Why would I say that?” Parish said. “Sir, I would never say that. It’s absurd.”
Then Parish undermined the defense’s entire case by recalling under direct examination a conversation with Garcia the night he married Mountain Girl.
“I asked him what he had been doing backstage and he told me he was getting married,” Parish said. “I asked him why would he want to do something like that. He said ‘I love Mountain Girl and I’ve got to square up my taxes,’” Parish told the court.
On cross-examination, Parish threw further wrenches in the Koons Garcia case by testifying he wouldn’t be surprised if Phil Lesh never saw Carolyn Garcia at concerts because Lesh always came late and didn’t mingle with the guests. Parish shifted awkwardly in his seat, no more comfortable under cross-examination than he was under direct, but the damage had been done.
After a fourteen-day trial, the judge returned his decision January 14, 1997, on behalf of Carolyn Adams Garcia, ordering the Garcia estate, managed by his widow, to pay her the rest of the five million as well as her legal fees and court costs. She eventually settled for $1.2 million. It was a victory for Mountain Girl and her daughters, but in many important ways, the verdict was beside the point. The caustic side effects of such a public airing of laundry were both immediate and long-term. The painful trial caused Trixie Garcia, one of the guitarist’s four daughters, to vow never to marry a rock star. “It’s better to play it safe, and low key, and have a good quality of life, than to amass a large fortune and a lot of fame,” she said.
But the real fallout from the trial was to the code the Grateful Dead had lived by for thirty years. The one tenet they all knew and followed, like musketeers, all for one and one for all, turned out to be one of the first things to go. In a fit of ancient resentments and greed, in one major fell swoop, it had been destroyed.
5
Furthur ll
RATDOG CONSUMED Bob Weir. After more than fifty shows with Johnnie Johnson on piano, Weir began to chafe at the restrictions. Johnson was strictly a blues and boogie player—one of the greats—but he couldn’t get his head around the more exotic chordings in some of the Dead material. In December 1996, Weir brought on board a second keyboard player named Mookie Siegel, while finally starting to sprinkle RatDog sets with old Dead staples. He added “Sugar Magnolia” and a couple of other judicious entries to the RatDog songbook, but not without trepidation and careful consideration. In December, feeling the need of an additional soloist, he brought twenty-nine-year-old saxophonist Dave Ellis into the band. A lead guitarist was still out of the question.
Weir and Wasserman first heard Ellis play when they went to watch RatDog drummer Jay Lane perform with the Charlie Hunter Trio, a group of strictly jazz musicians twenty years younger. Guitarist Hunter had been discovered and recorded by Les Claypool, the electric bassist and bandleader of Primus, the iconoclastic funk/punk/metal hybrid rock trio with whom Jay Lane had been working prior to joining RatDog. Claypool released the Hunter Trio’s debut recording on his own Prawn Song label in 1993. Hunter was an immediate sensation on the progressive jazz scene, using his custom-made eight-string guitar, simultaneously playing bass lines and guitar parts. Weir and Wasserman were taken with both Ellis and Hunter.
Ellis was a different kind of musician for the Dead crowd. Not only did he graduate from Berklee School of Music in Boston, but Ellis was also a product of the same multiracial Berkeley High School jazz department that had produced upstart jazz red-hots such as Joshua Redman, Benny Green, and Peter Apfelbaum. In high school, Ellis held a jazz snob’s contempt for the music of the Grateful Dead and knew nothing about it. His entire career had been acted out in the relatively provincial world of the Bay Area jazz scene and, once he hit the road as a member of RatDog, he felt like a rookie at the Super Bowl.
With RatDog about to mark the band’s hundredth show in less than two years and despite his initial reluctance, Weir was consciously evolving his relationship with the audience, clearly trying to make the music more appealing to the Deadheads. He enthused about expanding the repertoire on a freewheeling radio interview with broadcaster David Gans on his KPFA show, Dead to the World, in May 1997.
“There are a number of those tunes that I am not altogether prepared to live the rest of my life without playing,” he said. “There’ll be a few more of ’em; in fact, there’ll be a bunch more of ’em. Also there’ll be a bunch of new material as well.”
Weir made the radio appearance in part to promote an upcoming May 28 benefit at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, where he planned to be joined by slide guitarist Bonnie Raitt and harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite. The show would be the final appearance by seventy-three-year-old Johnson, who would be departing for at least the duration of the summer tour. His bad back was not going to hold up for sixty days on a bus. The benefit would also be the first appearance in the Dead world by a keyboardist who would replace Mookie Siegel and find an enduring role for himself in the Dead’s music, another young jazz musician recommended by Dave Ellis named Jeff Chimenti.
Also for the first time, Weir brought a lead guitarist—a forty-four-year-old black man with dreads from Berkeley named Stan Franks.
Franks first turned up at Weir’s house with saxophonist David Murray, who had been recruited to work on Weir’s Satchel Paige project several years before. Weir had put a lot of time and money in the enterprise, and the American Musical Theater Festival in Philadelphia had commissioned Satchel, the planned musical about the outrageous star baseball pitcher of the Negro Leagues in the thirties, and expected the debut to take place next year.
The whole thing started on a Mexican vacation a few years before when Weir fell into a conversation in a bar with a screenwriter. Weir had just read a newspaper article about Paige, a legendary black baseball player and showman who spent the most productive years of his fabled career playing in the segregated leagues before Jackie Robinson. The screenwriter convinced Weir to write about Paige and he returned home to start working with Marin County music business associate Michael Nash on a song titled “The Ballad of Satchel Paige.” Weir soon decided Paige was more than a song and began to envision the project as a stage musical. He dispatched Nash across the country to videotape interviews with surviving Negro League veterans and assemble a research library on the topic. He brought in bluesman Taj Mahal to work on the songs in sessions at Weir’s home studio.
It was Taj who brought along jazzman David Murray, another Berkeley jazz prodigy who had gone on to become a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet and a mainstay of the downtown avant-garde New York jazz scene in the eighties, playing with far-out musicians such as Anthony Braxton, James “Blood” Ulmer, and Henry Threadgill. Weir brought Murray onstage to play a set with the Dead at Madison Square Garden in 1993 and, the following year, the band’s philanthropic arm, the Rex Foundation, gave Murray their $10,000 annual Ralph J. Gleason Award. Weir made a guest appearance on Murray’s 1996 album of Grateful Dead material, Dark Star, and both Lesh and Weir joined Murray on the
title track of his album when his band played the Fillmore Auditorium in March 1997. Murray had known Stan Franks since he brought down the house in fifth grade playing guitar at the school assembly and took him over to Weir’s to play on some of the Satchel songs. Weir thought Franks was fun to play with.
That summer’s second Furthur Festival, while not exactly a disaster, could have hardly been encouraging. With RatDog and Mickey Hart’s Planet Drum—the Mystery Box band minus the singing sisters from Jamaica, the Mint Juleps—returning, the Deadcentric program would be preserved, along with their sometime bandmate Bruce Hornsby. The Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen was back from the previous summer, this time without bassist Jack Casady and their Hot Tuna unit. A representative of the new generation of jam bands emerging on the scene called moe. and a young black female fiddler named Sherry Jackson opened the seven-hour shows. Arlo Guthrie of “Alice’s Restaurant” acted as a kind of host in between acts and did a set of his own.
RatDog did a regulation rock band set and Weir and Wasserman took the stage for a nightly acoustic jam. The Black Crowes, a Southern jam band that may have been more influenced by the Rolling Stones than the Grateful Dead, were the titular headliners, a bewildering selection that made even less sense as the tour wore on. Even with the Otis Redding song “Hard to Handle” in both bands’ repertoires, the Crowes were musically, chemically, and spiritually remote from the Dead scene. Their willingness to jam seemed to be the major common ground. As with the previous Furthur Festival, members of all the bands made guest appearances on each other’s sets throughout the program and came back together at the end of the Crowes’ anticlimactic set for a half-hour jam.
These shows were not greeted with the same enthusiasm as the previous summer. Deadheads were still grumbling about RatDog’s un-Dead set from the first tour, and nobody cared about seeing the Black Crowes. Some of the early dates on the East Coast were especially lightly attended, but sales picked up as word spread. The Deadheads who did show up were still grieving, at loose ends. There was an awkward atmosphere, a slightly forced sense of these people wanting to come together, wanting to continue the annual migration, but not sure entirely how to proceed. The musicians and crew were also still in something of a state of shock, rolling in a fog through their grueling concert schedule, modest circumstances, and uncertain futures. Although word had yet to filter out through the jungle tom-toms, Weir was now playing almost entire sets of material from the Dead with RatDog, and he and Wasserman were further exploring the catalog during their half-hour acoustic performance, where they were invariably joined by other cast members. Still, amphitheaters more than half full were rare.