by Bill Barich
* * *
Deadheads are everywhere at present. For the band, they are a blessing and a curse. Their fealty translates into huge profits, but they also imply an unwanted responsibility. Sometimes they make a prisoner of Garcia. He can’t wander about in Marin County or anywhere else the way he once did. When the Deadhead phenomenon began to snowball, five or six years ago, he was concerned about its cultlike implications and tried to sabotage it by being nonresponsive and pretending that it didn’t exist, but since then he has seen that it’s too directionless to amount to a serious threat. He accepts it as a logical consequence of the Dead’s tribal impulse. Besides, Deadheads are quick to be critical, he says, whenever the band is lazy, sloppy, dull, or just plain bad. Still, he isn’t entirely comfortable with them, and never speaks a word from the stage, because he’s afraid of how it might be interpreted.
Garcia puzzles over the Deadheads. He is trapped inside their obsession and can only probe at it from the inside. He thinks that the band affords its followers “a tear in reality”—a brief vacation from the mundane. The Dead design their shows and their music to be ambiguous and open-ended, he says; they intend an evening to be both reactive and interactive. A Deadhead joins in on an experiment that may or may not be going anywhere in particular, and such an opportunity is rare in American life. The Deadhead world is multireferential and feeds on itself. A fan’s capital is measured by his or her involvement with the band over time, by the number of shows attended and the amount of trivia digested.
And there’s a lot of trivia. For example, a computer whiz kid in New Hampshire publishes an annual journal called DeadBase that attempts to quantify the entire experience of being a Deadhead. According to a survey in DeadBase ’91, the average Deadhead had attended seventy-five Dead concerts in his or her lifetime and had spent $1,571.40 on band-related activities such as travel, lodging, and blank tapes during the past year. DeadBase ’91 catalogued every song that the band had played on tour, clocking each different version. “Picasso Moon” had lasted for six minutes and seventeen seconds in Orlando, but it had gone on for seven minutes and three seconds in Sacramento.
In a section called “Feedback,” the Deadheads rated such items as the security force and the concessions at each concert venue. The worst security was in St. Louis, they maintained, while the best venders were in Essen, Germany. They voted on the most improved song (“Picasso Moon”) and on the song they’d heard quite enough of (“Throwing Stones”), and they offered some suggestions for locales for future shows—the Grand Ole Opry, Easter Island, and Intercourse, Pennsylvania.
Nostalgia is built into the Deadhead system. A new convert has always missed the golden age and can only sample its essence by listening to a veteran’s tales and tapes. Deadheads also swap war stories. As Garcia puts it, “They sit around and tell how they went to a show once and got stranded in Bumfuck, Idaho.” Some Deadheads—a minority—include hallucinogens in the formula, even though the band discourages drug use at concerts. Garcia savored his sixties incarnation as Captain Trips, but he would never suggest that anybody imitate him. (His last transcendental acid trip was in the sixties, at Olompali Ranch, in Novato. He developed three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision, died a few thousand times, and saw the word “All” float into the sky before he turned into a field of wheat and heard “Bringing In the Sheaves” as a coda. “I think I unravelled every strand of DNA in my body,” he says. “I felt both full and empty. I hardly spoke a word for two months, but it was worth it.”)
According to a story in USA Today, undercover agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration have lately been infiltrating Deadhead throngs and busting people who are selling LSD, and as many as two thousand Deadheads—most of them young, white, and male—are currently serving severe prison terms of up to forty years. Here lies the unwanted responsibility. It’s as if by virtue of having been around when the LSD genie escaped from its bottle, Garcia and the Dead were somehow expected to coax it back in.
* * *
Away from the spotlight, Garcia leads a simple life. If he has any taste for possessions, he keeps it hidden. He has been a creature of the road for so long that he’s never had much of a home. After the recent breakup of his second marriage, his house in San Rafael went on the marker—it made the newspapers when a real-estate agent fell into the swimming pool—and he now rents a furnished condo in Tiburon, in Marin. It’s an unfancy place, but he likes it for the view of San Francisco Bay, and also because his four daughters live nearby and he hopes to stay in closer touch with them than he used to. The eldest, Heather, is twenty-nine and plays first violin in the Redwood Symphony Orchestra, and the youngest, Keelin—her name is Irish—is just five.
“They’ve been very generous to me,” he told me, with true appreciation. “I’ve been mostly an absentee parent, after all.”
Garcia has had to grow up in public, and he can be troubled by what he regards as his personal failings. The guilt comes from his upbringing as a Roman Catholic, he thinks. He talks readily about his early religious training, and how the Church, with its mysticism and its hierarchical structure, influenced his view of the world. There is a story he tells about how he fudged his First Communion. He had no sins to confess, so he made some up and lied to a priest. Then the lie became a sin, and existence took on complications: he wasn’t in a state of grace anymore. Catholicism planted a dissonance in him, he believes, by rubbing against his grain. “Maybe it’s good to have something big that’s beyond you,” he says. “All that magic and mojo power. Sin becomes ever so much more juicy!”
It can take Garcia all day to get out of his apartment. Always the last to bed, he is slow to get going in the morning and can spend hours puttering. He may start by listening to some music, anything from Haydn string quartets to the Butthole Surfers. He has always been an avid reader, and currently champions the books of Terence McKenna, an amateur anthropologist and a psychedelic explorer. He may decide to fiddle with his Macintosh and generate some computer art, or open a sketch pad and begin to draw.
It’s surprising what a good draftsman Garcia is. The best of his drawings are witty, spare, and whimsical. They’re very different from his guitar playing—not so rigorous or so practiced. As a guitarist, he labors to make his playing look easy. He never gets caught being showy or calling attention to his technical mastery. What you hear sometimes in a trademark Garcia solo is a plangent kind of longing, a striving after an unattainable perfection.
One evening, I went over to his apartment for dinner. We had some Chinese food cooked without any oil and, to prevent an overdose of health, some good champagne. After eating, we watched Naked Lunch on a laser disk. Garcia is a big fan of Burroughs; he considers the writer a paragon of weirdness. Midway through the film, a loud snoring noise interrupted the clacking mandibles on the soundtrack. I looked over, and Garcia was dozing, even though we’d been chatting a few seconds before. He kept sawing logs for about five minutes and then woke abruptly, as bright and as cheery as ever.
Failing asleep like that was a habit of his, he said. He could—and frequently did—take a catnap anywhere, in public or in private. There was something revealing about the sudden sleep. He put out so much energy all the time that he was bound to run low every now and then. It seemed that for him the existential dilemma would always be the same: How could you get to the edge of things without going over the edge?
* * *
The last time I saw Garcia, the Dead were reluctantly in rehearsal—they hate to rehearse—for a summer tour. Garcia’s mood was still jolly. He was sticking to his fitness program and was eager for more oxygen, not less. He and Robert Hunter had written a couple of new songs that were as good, he said, as anything else they’d composed in a long time. (In DeadBase ’91 the fans had strongly agreed that “the Dead should write more new material.”) The future was opening up before him, and he had the optimistic manner of somebody who has started dreaming again in middle age.
In the end, it seemed to m
e, the Dead’s success isn’t really so mysterious. They work hard and enjoy what they are doing. They never underestimate their fans, and give them full value for the dollar. People are delighted to go to a concert and return home knowing that they got more than their money’s worth. The Dead are responding to the need for joy, celebration, and ritual, and they have struck a nerve.
The next major bit of fun in store for Garcia was a scuba-diving trip. He dashes off to Hawaii whenever he has a few free days in his busy schedule. “Diving takes up a lot of the space that drugs used to,” he told me. “It’s an active, physical form of meditation. I could never do a sitting meditation, like the Buddhists—I’m way too restless. In the water, you’re weightless. It’s so silent—you’re like a thought. When I begin to relax, the songs start happening in my head.” A descent into the ocean, he went on, was similar to a dive through the layers of human consciousness: “You see the obvious stuff first, like the beautifully colored fish. Then maybe you notice a peculiar lichen on some coral, and then you notice something else. You learn reflexively, always taking in information. Once I get going, I might fin around for a couple of miles. It’s an ecstatic experience, really. I love it almost as much as I love the music.”
The New Yorker, 1993
On Luck and David Milch: A Screenwriter’s Education
On December 26, 2008—St. Stephen’s Day in Dublin, a celebratory occasion—in the midst of a festive meal, I received the sort of phone call—life enhancing, potentially debt reducing—most writers dream about. On the line was David Milch, the acclaimed creator of Deadwood, inviting me to L.A. to collaborate on a series about horse racing he hoped to develop for HBO. The call came as a surprise. Milch had hired me to write the pilot script for such a show three years earlier, but it languished in limbo, and I’d given up on the project.
That was a mistake, I learned. David trusts to instinct and impulse, only acting when the spirit moves him. In an industry that thrives on conformity, he’s an original. He has a genuine literary pedigree, having studied with Robert Penn Warren at Yale and taught there for a dozen years, and he also holds an MA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he operated an LSD lab on the side that eventually forced him to swap Iowa City for Cuernavaca to stay one step ahead of the law. His character, it might be said, is built on such polarities.
I first met Milch in the mid-1990s during NYPD Blue’s stellar run. A writer on his staff, knowing David admired Laughing in the Hills, my book about the track, arranged an introduction. Maybe the idea for a racing series was already percolating, because he couldn’t have been more gracious, eager to include me in his orbit. He asked if I’d like to write an NYPD Blue episode, and I jumped at the chance, failing to mention that I’d never read a script, much less written one.
To get up to speed, I hung around the 20th Century Fox lot and soaked up the atmosphere. Often I felt like Tod Hackett in The Day of the Locust, marveling at the actors passing by in costume. Milch tried to steal some time for a private chat, but he was far too busy and suggested I stay at his house for a night, where he’d be less distracted. A problem on the set delayed him, though, and his wife, Rita, greeted me instead, then took off for a school play with her kids, leaving me alone with six dogs, a bowl of instant ramen, and a Lakers’ game on the tube.
Around ten o’clock, David arrived at last. He apologized for being so late, excused himself to go upstairs, and came down in his pajamas. To my credit, I didn’t bat an eye. The talk soon turned to racing. Milch owned a string of quality Thoroughbreds—including Gilded Time, who won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Sprint in 1992—and showed me some of his trophies. He had a few horses stabled at Golden Gate Fields across the bay from Marin County, my home back then, and wondered if I’d look in on them. If so, he’d gladly pay me. And—by the way—was I doing okay, financially speaking? If I needed any “walking around” money, he’d be happy to provide it.
I’d heard about Milch’s legendary generosity toward writers. He’d kept Richard Yates and Terry Southern afloat when their energies and bankrolls flagged in old age, and they were just two of many. Though tempted, I hovered slightly above the flat-broke meridian and thought it would be churlish to accept his offer. But I’d laid out a fair bit of cash for motels, meals, and gas, and asked David if he reimbursed visitors for their travel expenses.
“Sure,” he replied. “What’d it cost you? About a grand?”
I did the math. “More like six hundred.”
Milch dashed upstairs again and returned with six crisp hundred-dollar bills. “Never ask for less,” he advised. That was my first Hollywood lesson.
I went home and cranked out the script in a couple of weeks. What could be easier? Writing for TV was a breeze compared to the infantry slog through knee-deep mud that a long prose work demanded. Fox paid me a princely sum, too, but David never expressed an opinion. Should I give him a call? I decided against it. If he hated the script, he might ask for the money back. Better to carry on with my own work, I figured, only to be shocked when, months later, someone in Milch’s office alerted me to the fact that “my episode” was about to air.
“You might not recognize it,” he warned. “David does a lot of rewriting.”
I admit to a brief burst of pride when my name flashed on the screen, but it was all downhill from there. Only three or four lines of the dialogue I’d written had survived. The rest of the script, 95 percent, belonged to Milch and his staff. He’d turned the story into a darker, richer, and more soulful vehicle than I’d been capable of imagining. The experience was humbling. My effort looked threadbare, and the credit I got, along with the residuals it would bring, seemed undeserved, another instance of David’s generosity.
Fortunately, he forgave or forgot my amateurish performance. Or—equally plausible—others before me had fallen short of his exacting standards, so perhaps he’d expected no better. Whatever the case, I was relieved he wanted to see me again when our paths next crossed in 2005. I’d moved to Dublin by then and had flown to California for a writers’ conference in Squaw Valley, then headed south to visit friends in Santa Monica, where Redboard, Milch’s production company, is located.
David asked me to stop by for lunch. That summer he was shooting Deadwood, often hailed as his masterpiece. Never had his gift for language been so lavishly displayed—worthy of Shakespeare, the critics raved. For the first time, too, he was running a show by himself, casting the actors and directing the directors. As a certified Hollywood bad boy, now reformed, he’d always been stuck with a minder in the past—often Steven Bochco—but he’d earned his freedom, and it suited him. He had the look of a contented man.
He collected an entourage around noon, maybe a dozen guests in all—staffers, interns, strays—and escorted us to L.A. Farm, a pricey restaurant down the hall, where he picked up the tab for everyone. It must’ve cost five hundred bucks or so, yet he did this almost every weekday, taking evident delight in playing the host. The same spirit of largesse led him to charter a plane to fly his friends to Gulfstream Park in Florida for Gilded Time’s big race in ’92. If the horse hadn’t won a two-million-dollar purse, Milch couldn’t have afforded to pay for the flight home.
Over coffee, he leaned toward me and whispered, “Have I got a series for you.” It involved horse racing, he went on, and a real estate deal with the governor of Kentucky, where we’d film the show at Churchill Downs—if the governor, currently under indictment, made good on his promises. “The guy assures me it’ll be fine,” David said, somewhat halfheartedly. He—Milch—couldn’t go anywhere near the set for fear of contracting gambling fever, so I’d be the one in charge—a job for which I was spectacularly unqualified, although I kept my mouth shut once again.
After lunch, we returned to David’s office to talk further. The room was large and airy, and it lacked any hint of formality or pretension. The mismatched couches and chairs might have been on loan from a fraternity house. Though Rita’s colorful paintings hung on the walls, along w
ith some eye-catching photographs—a Cartier-Bresson, Sugar Ray Robinson at the wheel of a Caddy convertible, the great heavyweight champ Jack Johnson flexing for the camera—Milch seemed oblivious of the decor and had imposed instead a willful disorder.
Pages torn from scripts and notes in the maestro’s tiny southpaw scrawl littered the floor, as if to demonstrate his writing took precedence over any concerns about material things. “Here’s how I work,” he could’ve been saying, “and if it makes you uncomfortable, too fucking bad.” He treated his sleek black Mercedes with the same indifference. Getting into the car could be a challenge, what with the empty CD cases and old Daily Racing Forms strewn about. Anything could turn up inside—a shoe maybe, or the Louisville Slugger I once unearthed from the debris.
I sat on a couch, while Milch stretched out on the carpet to ease the pressure on some painful ruptured discs. An aide entered and set a tape recorder on the floor next to him. Tape recorders can be found in every Redboard office, because David does some of his best thinking in the moment, riffing on plot twists and flights of fancy, inventing characters out of whole cloth, and serving up a steady stream of fleeting inspirations that would otherwise be lost. He improvises as freely as a jazz virtuoso, with the same dreamy intensity.
He elaborated on the show for me. In part, the plot referenced the tragic downfall of Calumet Farm, once Kentucky’s pride. There’d be a villain based on J. T. Lundy, who ran the farm into the ground. A great stallion would die as Alydar had, possibly a victim of foul play. Milch added some fictional elements to the mix—an old trainer who owns an extraordinarily talented colt, a mobster who covets the colt, and a fiery woman jockey determined to make it in a man’s world.