by Bill Barich
The New Yorker, 1986
Two: Diversions
Still Truckin’: Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead
Here is Jerry Garcia, the rock star in middle age. He has always been our most improbable pop-culture idol, somebody to whom the playing matters more than the posing. At fifty-one, a halo of gray hair fringing his head and his gray-white beard indifferently trimmed, he resembles the proverbial unmade bed. The merest of filaments divides the man from the performer. His clothing onstage is his clothing offstage—a T-shirt, baggy sweatpants, and a pair of sneakers. The absence of style is a style itself and suggests an inability to abide by anybody else’s rules. He’s the rebellious child grown up, not so much above his youthful audience as insistently a part of it. In refusing to be adored, he inspires a kind of love. Hunched over his guitar and scarcely moving a muscle, he becomes a larger instrument through which the music travels. While the crowd focusses on the notes that drift from his fingers into the air, he does his best to disappear.
In a sense, Garcia is defying gravity. Nobody else in the history of rock and roll has ever watched his popularity advance with each passing year. Until recently, with the repackaging of such geriatric rockers as Aerosmith and Rod Stewart, most performers could be counted on to go down in flames before their fortieth birthday—better to burn out than to rust, as Neil Young once put it. Garcia himself upheld the old tradition by nearly self-destructing a couple of times. When he turned fifty last year, he weighed almost three hundred pounds, smoked three packs a day, survived on junk food, never exercised (he needed a roadie to carry his attaché case), and had a serious drug problem. He appeared to be headed for an early grave, but he had the good luck to collapse instead. Forced to confront his mortality, he changed his ways, adopting a vegetarian diet, cutting down on cigarettes, taking long walks, swallowing vitamins in megadoses, and even hiring a personal trainer to tone a body that had given new meaning to the concept of shapelessness.
I caught up with Garcia shortly after he launched his recovery program. Like most veterans of Haight-Ashbury in its prime, I felt a special kinship with him and wondered how he was weathering his transformation into an American icon. For aeons, his band, the Grateful Dead, have had their headquarters in Marin County, where I live, so I arranged a meeting backstage at the Oakland Coliseum before a concert.
Garcia is a native San Franciscan. He is the second of two sons, and his father, Joe, a musician who had led both a Dixieland band and a forty-piece orchestra, named him in honor of Jerome Kern. Joe Garcia liked to fly-fish, and on a camping trip one spring he was swept to his death by a raging river. Jerry, who was five at the time, witnessed the drowning. In its aftermath, his maternal grandparents, who lived in the blue-collar Excelsior District, took him in. He was a sickly, asthmatic child with a rich fantasy life. Although he was given piano lessons, he did poorly at them and showed no special aptitude for music. He preferred to read, immersing himself in E.C. Comics and the sci-fi novels of Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he also drew and painted in his sketchbooks.
His mother, Ruth, reclaimed him when he was ten. She owned a sailors’ bar and hotel downtown, and Jerry became its mascot. He had already developed a knack for independence, roaming the Excelsior while his grandparents were at their jobs, and he liked to hang around the bar, later describing it as “romantic and totally fun.” School bored him. Homework was a dumb idea, he believed, and he had to repeat the eighth grade, because he wouldn’t do any. In an auspicious conjunction of the planets, the onset of his adolescence coincided with the birth of rock. He was particularly fond of Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly. For his fifteenth birthday, in 1957, he asked his mom for an electric guitar like the ones he’d seen in pawnshop windows. She must have had a nose for trouble, because she gave him an accordion instead.
* * *
Notes from Oakland on a mild December evening: The Coliseum, a cavernous, echoing concrete structure, has the architectural distinction of a bunker. About fifteen thousand Deadheads, a sellout crowd, were waiting behind sawhorse barricades in the parking lot when I arrived. I had assumed that there would be a rousing party going on backstage, but the Dead are so old and have done so much partying that now they hole up in separate dressing rooms and conserve their energy before a show. Roadies were taking orders for dinners, which the band members would eat between sets, and were moving equipment around.
One roadie had the task of caring for Garcia’s custom-built guitar, which is the near-equivalent of a Stradivarius. It’s called the Tiger, because the luthier who made it—Doug Irwin, of Santa Rosa—inlaid a tiger of brass and mother-of-pearl in the guitar’s ebony face. Wherever the Dead go, the Tiger goes, too. They tour three times a year for three to four weeks at a time, and often bring their families. For the last couple of years, they have been the highest-grossing concert act in the business, with last year’s receipts amounting to more than thirty-two million dollars.
Garcia was in his dressing room, sitting on a couch before a picked-over tray of fruit. When I walked in, he rose to greet me. Up close, he was much bigger than I had expected—broad-shouldered, and with an aura of physical power. He looked both fit and alert. Some musicians extend a hand delicately, as if it were a baby bird about to be crushed, but Garcia’s grip was firm and strong. It spoke of his unguardedness. The tip of one finger on his right hand was missing, chopped off by his brother in a woodcutting accident when they were boys.
Garcia’s eyes were merry behind tinted glasses. He sat down again and leaned forward, eager to start. He’s a wonderful talker, in fact, and converses in much the same way that he plays, improvising and letting his thoughts lead where they may. There’s an intensity that comes off him in ripples when he’s enjoying himself, and it doesn’t seem to matter who or what the source of his pleasure is. If he were to formulate a philosophy, it could probably be boiled down to this: If it’s not fun, don’t do it. He had performed thousands of concerts, and yet he was truly looking forward to another one. In an ideal world, he said, he’d be playing somewhere six nights a week—twice with the Dead, twice with the Jerry Garcia Band, a small group meant for more intimate venues, and twice with an acoustic group on his five-string banjo.
Before Garcia turned to rock full time, he fronted a jug band, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. In some respects, he finds acoustic music more challenging to play. He had recently made an acoustic album with the mandolinist David Grisman, and he was pleased that it had been nominated for a Grammy. He and Grisman have been collaborators since they met at a bluegrass festival in 1964. A lot of Garcia’s friends are old friends, people he’s known for twenty or thirty years.
I complimented Garcia on the album, and it seemed to unsettle him a bit; I’d heard that he was his own severest critic.
“That makes me feel good about myself,” he said, with a shrug, as if he were not yet convinced of his talent.
Among the tasty things about the album, I went on, was the variety of its selections—Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair,” lrving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby,” B. B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone.”
Garcia allowed that he liked music of every kind and delighted in experimenting. He mentioned that he had once sat in with Omette Coleman, the jazz master, at a recording session.
“How was that?” I asked.
He laughed. “Like filling in the spaces in a Jackson Pollock painting! Ornette’s such a sweet man, though. He gave me a lot of help.”
The curtain was about to go up, and Garcia needed some time to get ready mentally. He still has bouts of stage-fright. To relieve them, he uses a mental trick that he learned in the nineteen-sixties, when any food or drink around was liable to be dosed with psychedelics. Once, at the Avalon Ballroom, he saw an enticing chocolate cake backstage, but he was sure that somebody had doctored it, so he contented himself with a lick of frosting rather than a slice. The cake’s baker soon turned up and announced that the frosting had seve
n hundred doses of STP in it. Sinking, Garcia went on a very bad trip indeed. He imagined that some Mafia hit men were in the crowd, waiting to kill him. The only way he could survive, he thought, was to be humble and play for mercy—for his life. “And it worked!” he exclaimed, laughing again. “I’m still alive!”
I stayed around for the concert. The atmosphere was festive, with the audience batting balloons back and forth. Oddly, I didn’t smell any marijuana, a scent that, along with the refractory odor of patchouli oil, had characterized the Dead concerts I used to go to at the Fillmore Auditorium. Some people were obviously stoned, but they’d done their smoking in private. The average Deadhead is often portrayed as a glassy-eyed, long-haired wretch in a tie-dyed T-shirt, but I didn’t see many of those types. The fans were mostly middle-class white people in their twenties and thirties. They had the look of young professionals masquerading as hippies for a night, eager to bask in the recollected glow of the sixties.
When the band came out, the Coliseum seemed to levitate for a second or two. The music kicked in, and the Deadheads started dancing. They danced right through both sets, on the floor or by their seats, for three straight hours, as if they’d been drilled. It was pretty strange, really. At the Fillmore, none of us knew what we were doing, and our evenings had often been as amorphous as the pulsating blobs in a light show. The Dead in middle age were a curious sight, too—ordinary guys, graying, and miles removed from any glitter. I could have been watching myself onstage, but that was always part of the band’s appeal for my generation: we were them, and they were us. For the young people around me, the show must have had the texture of a fantasy in which their parents actually listened to them and understood their deepest secrets.
The bond between the Dead and the Deadheads was extraordinary. Garcia would tell me on another occasion that the band aimed for such a target. He felt that it happened at about forty percent of their concerts, but they could never will it into being. Hearing his lovely, bell-clear notes again, I was heartened to think that the Dead were still in search of the miraculous, chasing after those moments when your flesh pops with goose bumps and the hair stands up on your head. What the band created for their fans was a benign environment where a person could be loose, liberated, free from inhibitions, and without any fear—fifteen thousand happy dancers, and no violence anywhere. The band took all the risks.
* * *
How the Dead, once nearly buried, have ascended: Early in their career, Garcia and company endured the usual music-industry scams and rip-offs, and they decided to take control of their destiny. Their first four albums had not sold well, leaving them in debt to their label, Warner Brothers, but they recouped with two straight hits in 1970, “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty,” both primarily acoustic and distinguished by the richness of the songs and the band’s clean, crisp playing. That same year, they acquired a small shingled house on a suburban block in Marin to serve as their offices and began handling their own business affairs. In 1972, they tipped off their fans to their new free-form operation by inserting an apparently harmless message in the liner notes of a live album recorded on tour in Europe. “DEAD FREAKS UNITE!” the message read. “Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.”
With one gesture, the Dead eliminated the barriers between themselves and their audience, and established a direct flow of communication. Although the Dead Freaks turned into numberless Deadheads and came to require elaborate attentions (there are ninety thousand Deadheads on the American mailing list and twenty thousand on the European list), the band’s offices have remained in the same little house. It’s as if the Dead were superstitious about tampering with the magic, so booking agents, publicity people, and accountants are all crammed in like family. The Dead still meet about once a month in a boardroom to discuss their projects. Initially, the meetings were free-for-alls, Garcia says, but somebody dug up a copy of “Robert’s Rules of Order,” and they riffed on it until they had devised their own warped version of parliamentary procedure.
I stopped by the house shortly after the Coliseum show, walking in through the back door, as I’d been instructed, because anyone who uses the front door is presumed to be an unwanted visitor.
The universe that the Dead have evolved, a parallel reality that permits them to function, is built on such fine points. In the old days, it was virtually impossible to apply for a job, but if you were to wander in and start doing something valuable they might hire you. Many staffers have been with them for ages, and they are very well paid. The band even floats them loans to buy homes and cars. The prevailing staff attitude seems to be a hybrid strain of hippie good vibes and nontoxic American capitalism. As Garcia once said to me, the Dead are a rock band that disguises itself as a California corporation.
Garcia arrived at noon, by way of the back door. Fresh from a session with his trainer, he claimed, only half-jokingly, that the unfamiliar oxygen racing through his system had granted him a weird new aerobic high. “Weird” is a favorable adjective with him. He uses it often to describe experiences he has enjoyed. If an experience is really weird, it gets elevated to the status of “fat trip.” A fat trip is anything that pleasantly rearranges the brain cells—say, bumping into Charlie Mingus drinking Martinis from a thermos in a Manhattan park, or landing in the same Amsterdam hotel as William Burroughs, or going up the Nile on a boat after a gig at the Great Pyramid.
We settled into a funky room off the kitchen that could not technically be described as decorated, and I asked Garcia about his accordion.
“Oh, it was a beauty!” he said. In the heat of conversation, his voice rises, and he grins with the relish of a man who’s sinking his teeth into a steak that he shouldn’t be eating. “It was a Neapolitan job. My mother bought it from a sailor at the bar. A little later, I got a Danelectro guitar and a Fender amp. I taught myself to play, and pretty soon I was fluid in a primitive way. I picked up a trick or two from my cousin Danny—he knew some rhythm and blues–but the most important thing I learned was that it was O.K. to improvise. ‘Hey, man, you can make it up as you go along!’ In high school, I fell in with some other musicians—beatnik types, the pot smokers. My only other option was to join the beer drinkers, but they got into fights. I kept getting into trouble anyway, so my mother finally moved us out of the city to Cazadero.”
Cazadero is in the coastal redwoods of Sonoma County. It’s a wicked spot for a teen-age exile, a damp, spooky resort town that is deserted for nine months of the year. “I hated it there,” Garcia went on. “I had to ride a bus thirty miles to Analy High, in Sebastopol. I played my first gig at Analy. We had a five-piece combo—a piano, two saxes, a bass, and my guitar. We won a contest and got to record a song. We did Bill Doggett’s ‘Raunchy,’ but it didn’t turn out very well. Things in Cazadero got so bad that I enlisted in the Army.
“I wound up in a thirty-man company at Fort Winfield Scott, at the Presidio, right back in San Francisco. That company was choice! We did lots of ceremonies, stuff like flag-raising. The guys rotated from the city to Korea and Japan. I started going out at night to see my friends, you know, and I didn’t always make it back in time for work. I was piling up the AWOLs, and the commander was worried that I’d queer the deal for the other guys. So he called me in and asked me, ‘Garcia, how’d you like to be a civilian again?’
“In all, I did about eight months in the service. After that, I went to the Art Institute in San Francisco for a bit, to study painting. I wasn’t playing guitar so much—I’d picked up the five-string banjo in the Army. I listened to records, slowed them down with a finger, and learned the tunings note by note. By then, I was getting pretty serious about music—especially about bluegrass. In the early sixties, a friend of mine and I toured the bluegrass festivals in the Midwest. We had a tape recorder and sometimes got to jam. We met all the greats—Bill Monroe, Reno and Smiley, and the Kentucky Colonels.
“When I got back, we formed our j
ug band. Bobby Weir was in it, and so was Pigpen”—Ron McKernan. “Pig was our front man. He was a natural, an old soul. The rest of us were loose wigs, but Pig had it together. He knew instinctively how to work a crowd. We did gigs around Palo Alto and Stanford University. I made a little money giving lessons, but we were usually broke. For a while, I lived in my car in a vacant lot in East Palo Alto. That’s where I met Hunter.” Robert Hunter, the main lyricist for the Dead, is another of Garcia’s old friends. “He was living in his car, too. He had these cans of pineapple in his trunk—I don’t know where he got them—and I had some boxes of plastic forks, so we’d meet every morning for breakfast and use my forks to eat his pineapple.
“It was an exciting time. I’m a cinephile, and I remember going to see a Richard Lester film one night—‘A Hard Day’s Night’—and being blown away by the Beatles. ‘Hey!’ I said to myself ‘This is gonna be fun!’ The Beatles took rock music into a new realm and raised it to an art form. Dylan, too—he’s a genius. It wasn’t long before the jug band became an electric band, the Warlocks. We recruited Billy Kreutzman as our drummer. He’d been working at the post office. I didn’t think bass guitar was important, but the first guy we had was pretty bad, so we brought in Phil Lesh. Lesh was this wonderful, serious, arrogant youth, a composer of modernist music. He only played the trumpet then, but he had perfect pitch.
“The Warlocks worked the lounge circuit in bars on the Peninsula. We did pop covers, mostly, except for the last set—then we got weird and jammed. Our big break was getting involved with Ken Kesey and his bunch. They invited us out to La Honda. We brought our gear and played for about twenty minutes. Crash! Bang! It was like the war in Grenada, man! We were weirder than can be, and they loved it. When Kesey started putting on the Acid Tests, in 1965, we became their house band, the Grateful Dead. Sometimes we played for hours and were brilliant. Sometimes we had to be dragged onstage and only lasted for three minutes. The really neat thing was that we didn’t have to be responsible.”