Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  Going on 38, Jerry Garcia obviously doesn't feel his age. "I try not to lose touch with my more youthful self," he said. "I still basically don't think of myself much differently than I did when I was about 17. I may have a case of extremely protracted adolescence. I still get treated like a kid in certain circumstances." Garcia is. in fact, often in a protective bubble, watched over by band associate Rock Scully, with whom Garcia shares a Marin County house.

  "It's just ...I mean, anybody who's a little off the wall is not a member of that invisible adult class that moves gracefully through every aspect of life-everything from walking into banks, insurance, tax, all that straight shit. I certainly see it, but I don't feel that I'm part of the adult world. Nobody I know's like that. The only other side of that world is the kids. Like walking through an airport, which is as close as I get to the public-apart from walking through the streets-you're thrown in with lots of more or less normal people; if there's a family traveling, it's usually the kid I can relate to, if I have to."

  In Boulder, Garcia didn't hide from people. He often sat in the small lobby of the Holiday Inn, talking with friends. But for every stranger who ventured up to him, there were knots of others, decked out in Dead T-shirts, who grabbed an eyeful, then walked away, affecting nonchalance.

  When Garcia does talk with teenagers, he said, it's "one-on-one." There are exceptions, of course, but he thinks he's no longer a spiritual guru to the counterculture, the gifted rapper known as Captain Trips. "Most people who've gotten at all past a very superficial involvement have read the interviews and stuff and heard me talk my way out of that space," said Garcia, laughing. "So if that space surrounds me somehow, or I'm identified with it, they know it's not something I subscribe to personally. And most people don't come on to me as if that were the case. If they experience anything, it's the normal celebrity fear. I get that myself. I was always afraid to meet the people who awed me." Those, he said, were mostly bluegrass musicians. "I would never have the nerve to introduce myself. I was much too shy for that. But I'd go see them." To Garcia, then, the younger Deadheads "are really the same kind of people we were when we were their age. The thing they like about Grateful Dead music has something to do with what we like about it. It's not a case of mistaken identity. They know who we are."

  "What we stand for, and what we represent to a lot of people, is misfit power," said guitarist Bob Weir. At age 32, Weir retains his preppie good looks. He was idly tuning his Ibanez guitar in the clubhouse of the university's football team, along with Phil Lesh, Brent Mydland, and John Barlow, Weir's old friend and cowriter. Barlow, a rancher in Wyoming who was filling in for Danny Rifkin as road manager on this segment of the tour, piped up: "We're positive miscreants. Weir and I always vied for biggest asshole in our prep school." The two, only a couple of nights before, had attended a reunion at Fountain Valley School, just outside nearby Colorado Springs.

  "I don't wanna talk about that," Weir snapped, but Barlow spoke up again. "We saw a lot of people our age who definitely had a little soul death," he said. This triggered Weir. "Yeah," he said with a sigh, "twenty, thirty years older than me-and chronologically maybe a couple of years younger."

  Weir, who has a nervous, halting style of speaking, suddenly sounded determined. "I refuse to get hammered by age into being an old fart," he said. On the couch, working on a steak and a glass of wine, Phil Lesh jerked his head back and widened his eyes. "I'm not clutching to my youth," Weir said, "but there is a spirit here of, 'We gotta keep things fresh.' I see friends of mine who haven't managed to keep things fresh in their lives, and I find that lamentable. I think we relate more readily to people who haven't had the life kicked out of them. Kids-and older people-who are gonna stay young forever." People such as Michelle, a 36 year-old law school graduate and friend of the Dead family who'd flown in from Northern California to catch the Nassau shows. "I can't talk about it," she said backstage after the first concert. "To describe the indescribable-tata! Basic problem." But she did talk, in a husky, awed voice, about the Dead as "quantum chemists" and about their ability to, if I heard right, "stretch the Tao."

  Tom Davis, a writer and performer for Saturday Night Live, declared himself a Deadhead of ten years' standing. Sitting at our table, he concurred with Michelle. "There are a limited number of bands that are capable of 'stretching the Tao,"' he said. Then, in an officious tone, he added: 'An American band, too, I'm proud to say. Even while our country is hanging its head, at least we have people like the Grateful Dead!"

  A lawyer friend of Michelle's who also made the trip told about a superior court judge in Sonoma County (in the wine country north of San Francisco) who's a Deadhead. "He plays tapes on a deck in his chambers, and he's got a Dead sticker on his blotter." Michelle added: "My husband, Chris, has argued final arguments-to juries!-behind three nights of the Dead. His trip is so charged that he wins."

  Such stories abound among Deadheads. In San Francisco's Bay Area Music Archives, Paul Grushkin, 28-year-old keeper of the books and records, spoke warmly about his twelve-year romance with the Dead. "The Dead are a very personal thing," he said. "I think half the fun of being at a Dead concert is watching the changes you go through. Watching yourself metamorphose...maybe in time with the music."

  Grushkin recalled a high point, a Winterland show in 19 72: "I didn't think I was that stoned-maybe something like hash, or peyote... Anyway, that click, whatever it is that Deadheads say about going into hyperspace, where suddenly everything is quite... different... unnatural, not your normal course of events.. .And I couldn't decide through the next three or four hours whether it was me feeling that way, or if it was because of the band, or the audience, or the drugs."

  In Boulder, Garcia, trying once again to explain his band's appeal, said: "They might like us in the same spirit that people like drugs. I think we're like a drug, in that sense. People turn each other on to us. And there's that personal contact involved with every Deadhead. There are very few Deadheads who are Deadheads in complete isolation."

  "They've helped me to know myself a little better," said Grushkin. "Dead concerts are a marvelous time for introspection and reflection. It's the perfect music for that. At concerts, I see people who just suddenly get the spirit, like you do at a gospel concert. You understand-not for everybody else, but for yourself. And what happens is, you are immediately, totally distant from your wife or loved one, from everyone. There are moments when it is really splendid or scary, and it's for you alone. It goes back to the [Robert] Hunter song, 'That path is for your steps alone.' I think it's 'Ripple."'

  The Dead concert experience has been crystallized in two one-liners. A bumper sticker of unknown origin declares, THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A GRATEFUL DEAD CONCERT. Even better is a remark by Bill Graham, so good he had it painted on the side of Winterland on the occasion of its closing (with a Dead concert, of course): "The Grateful Dead are not only the best at what they do; they are the only ones who do what they do."

  It follows, then, that Deadheads are a unique breed. Some have even been known to steal and fence their way across the country-or, in 1978, to Egypt-to see (and tape record) the Dead. I told Kreutzmann that many Deadheads have little more than their tape decks, backpacks, and thumbs. He straightened up. "I think they're damn lucky!" he shouted. "They're luckier than hell that they don't have to be tied down to a regular old nine-to-five shit job, and get off on traveling with a pack and an Uher. I think that's sweet as hell!"

  David Gans, a Dead tape collector, knows a Bay Area "tapehead" who owns upward of one thousand hours of the Dead in concert. "He's obsessed," said Gans. "He's a 29-year-old virgin, for Chrissakes! I said to him. 'What about women? Marriage? A little sleazy sex now and then?' He said, 'Well, I've gotten by this long without it."' Gans shook his head. "You remember that April Fools' I)ay concert [at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jerseys where they came out playing each other's instruments on 'Promised Land'? That was here, in Oakland, by the third."

  Gans, 26, used to be
a full-tilt Deadhead, but he's begun to pare down his tape collection. "There's always a new generation of Deadheads," he said. "People grow up and out of it." Gans, a musician (whose band does a number of Dead songs) and freelance writer, struggled with having to be defensive about it. "There's a certain level of embarrassment attached to being a Deadhead," he said. "It is so frowned on by the nons. There's jazz heads who go, 'Don't talk to Gans. He's a Deadhead. He doesn't understand McCoy Tyner.' And the truth is, the thing the Dead do is jazz, only in a rock idiom. It's musical conversation, much as the best jazz is."

  Paul Grushkin has no problem being a Deadhead right in the open. "I enjoy spending a weekend getting prepared for a concert, and all of my Deadhead associates do the same thing," he said. "I don't think it's quite like preparing for the Eagles or the Cars. With the Dead, there's an excitement that begins Thursday or Friday and builds. You're really bouncing off the walls, as if you're psychically getting ready to give it your all, and whatever it is, you're gonna be right on top of the mother. In fact, it's been about six months"-Grushkin's eyebrows danced-"and boy. I'm ready for another one. Goddamn!"

  In New York, Bob Weir, speaking for the band, had begged off interviews until Colorado. The Dead, he'd said, were going through some delicate changes and "learning about each other," and they couldn't have an outsider watching, listening, and asking questions. Weir had sounded weary, as if he were talking about a marriage on the rocks.

  Three weeks later, in Boulder, I asked about those changes. It turned out they were musical, and still incomplete. "It's not quite as manifested as I'd expected," he said, "but the old format has just about been played out. We have July and part of August and October off. In that time, I expect a fair amount of new material will be written, and there've been a lot of discussions about rethinking our mode of presentation."

  "The old format," Lesh explained, "is two segments. The first is always songs, and the second is longer stuff, medleys, jams." The idea now, he said, is to "get it tighter." "Make it more succinct," said Weir. "There's got to be a way to get more music in."

  Does this notion symbolize other changes within the band?

  "Well," said Weir, who has a habit of giving that word a Western, Gabby Hayes twist, "I think we're a bit more flexible and musically mobile than we have been for years. We got into sort of a static situation with Keith and Donna, where we were pretty much locked into this old format. Then for the past year or so with Brent, it's been like getting to learn what to expect, and getting him to learn our operation." "Expect the unexpected," Mydland interrupted. Weir continued: "We're just now starting to loosen up to the point where we were, say, back in 19 70, '72, where we can start drifting from key to key, from rhythm to rhythm, and in the jams, some interesting stuff has come up. Once again, we're tending to go to new places every night."

  After seven years with the Dead, pianist Keith Godchaux and vocalist Donna Godchaux were invited to leave the band. "Essentially," said Lesh, "it was 'Don't you guys feel you could profit from being on your own, doing what it is you do best, 'cause you're not doing it with us?"' The reason given was "limitations." The Dead wanted more and different keyboard sounds; Keith stuck to his grand piano.

  Brent Mydland, 27, who in June 1980 celebrated fifteen months with the Dead, had played behind Batdorf and Rodney, and then with his own band, Silver, before touring with the Bob Weir Band. When the Dead met to discuss the Godchaux situation, it was Garcia, whose own band had toured with Weir's band, who suggested Mydland.

  "One of the first few albums I ever bought," said Mydland, "was the first Dead album." Weir and Lesh looked surprised. "I didn't know that," said Lesh.

  "I saw them live at the Fillmore West," Mydland continued. 'And one thing that stood out was `Good Morning Little Schoolgirl."' That song featured the vocals and keyboards of the menacing-looking Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.

  Pigpen died in 19 73, his liver shot through with alcohol. In a group known as the house band for the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, and a band who-even into the mid-seventies-was said to enjoy spiking anything potable, Pigpen never took drugs, except once, when he was dosed.

  Now, Garcia says that the drug image was overblown. "It's always been part true and part false. It's never been anything but something you do in addition to playing music. The fundamental thing we're doing is being a band, not selling or promoting drugs. The fact that we all take drugs isn't even true. Not all of us do take drugs, and none of us takes drugs regularly. I think drugs are just a reality of American life, in one form or another. I mean, hell, they're there."

  Still, there's no arguing that they were more there for the Dead than for most people, especially in the early days. Hart was talking about how the band used to drop acid before virtually every show, and that prompted Kreutzmann to mention a major change in the Dead.

  "In attitudes, how you feel before you go on," he said. "We don't get all wired and crazy." An example: "We really burned hard yesterday [in Boulder 1. It's like you have a bank account of psychic energy, and we used a lot yesterday. So I woke up this morning feeling a little behind and tired, and instead of going out and using stimulants to feel up, I just wait till the music comes around and let it build like that."

  After fifteen years, what's ahead for the Dead? A tighter show? Maybe. Work in other media? Definitely. Mickey Hart got a taste of film work when he scored part of Apocalypse Now, and he wants to do more. Jerry Garcia, who edited most of the Grateful Dead movie and has done musical and sound effects on such films as Phil Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Roger Corman's Big Bad Mania, hopes to direct a movie version of Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, to which he has secured the film rights.

  "Moviemaking," he said, "is something I've always wanted to do. Not all the ideas I've had are music. Making a movie is really solving problems-visual and dramatic problems of various sorts, and I've convinced myself I can do it, and do a good job of it."

  In short, lots of new beginnings. I asked Garcia if he feels lucky to have survived and to be doing just what he wanted.

  "I feel very lucky indeed," he said, laughing again. "I feel we've scored real well on that one. But I also feel that, in terms of being a practical model, we haven't done anything exceptional. That is to say, anybody who can imagine themselves doing something better than what they're doing should just go ahead and do it, and have no fear of failure or success, but just go for it. That's all we've done. And apart from that, it's not as though we're especially gifted. We may have been lucky-even that, I don't know about-but we have been exceptionally determined."

  I was reminded of a remark by a Deadhead. The Dead, he said, were unique for their willingness to take chances.

  Garcia nodded emphatically. `And we'll continue to take them. That's our shot. That's who we are. And we're also an illustration that you can go through life that way and it'll work. It might be bumpy, but it's never boring."

  -August 7, 1980

  Rolling Stone

  Fifteen years after that fifteenth anniversary report, Jerry Garcia died. I wrote about him for two magazines: People, for its special tribute edition, and Rolling Stone, in which I addressed the band's unique relationship with San Francisco. "Sure," I wrote, "the Dead moved out of their Haight-Ashbury digs shortly after that bust of '67, but they were forever tied to San Francisco and the sixties, and they never resisted or disavowed those bonds. It wasn't just that the Dead were born in the city. It was that the city was reborn with the Dead."

  Ilothwij Dangerfield:

  HE WHINES THAT WE MAY LAUGH

  or many years after he'd become the king of late-night talk shows, the question was asked: "What's the real Johnny Carson like?" In reading about Carson's predecessor, I found that, years before, much of the country was asking, "What's Jack Paar really like?"

  Some performers-even those who play pretty much themselves on a public stage five nights a week-manage to put up an invisible shield, so that what you see isn't necessarily who
they are.

  Given Paar's emotional vulnerability and Carson's willingness to turn his personal life into comedy fodder, what were we to make of someone like Rodney Dangerfield?

  Here was a comedian who played a character as narrow as the red tie he wore every time out. He walked out, sweating, and Uzied one-liners at the crowd. Then he sat down and killed Carson with a few more gags and moved over for the next guest.

  I loved it. And when, in 1980, he took his character into the movies, beginning with Caddyshack, with Bill Murray, he was suddenly squarely in Rolling Stone country. Ironically, I no longer was. I'd left the magazine, in part because of the distance between San Francisco and Manhattan; in part because I needed to answer a nagging question: Could I have a life-and a career-outside this magical oasis that was Rolling Stone? It turned out that I could. I found open doors at magazines ranging from Esquire to Parade; from Mother Jones to TV Guide. Early on, though, I maintained ties with Rolling Stone, on a freelance basis. So now, more than ever, it was up to me to come up with story ideas. Rodney-no disrespect intended-was a no-brainer. I suggested the idea in spring and was soon off to New York, to catch him at his club, Dangerfield's. We hit it off, and soon moved from backstage at the club to dinner to a visit to his apartment, where, finally, I began to uncover the life behind the lines.

  RODNEY DANGERFIELD LOOKS as if he needs about ten years' sleep. Sitting at a table in Room 304 of the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood, he's dressed in a blue robe, dark blue sheer stockings and black slippers. His eyes and chest are red, and he's looking forward to a nap before his evening show at the Comedy Store.