It was this dedication to live performance, and a penchant for near-incessant touring, that formed the groundwork for the Grateful Dead’s extraordinary success for a period of more than twenty years. Even a costly failed attempt at starting the band’s own autonomous recording label in the early 1970s, plus the deaths of three consecutive keyboardists—Pigpen McKernan, of alcohol-induced cirrhosis of the liver, in 1973; Keith Godcheaux, in a fatal car accident in 1980, a year after leaving the band; and Brent Mydland, of a morphine and cocaine overdose in 1990—never really deterred the Dead’s momentum as a live act. By the summer of 1987, when the group enjoyed its first and only Top 10 single (“Touch of Grey”) and album (In the Dark), the commercial breakthrough was almost beside-the-fact in any objective assessment of the band’s stature. The Grateful Dead had been the top concert draw in America for several years, and they rarely played to less than near-full capacities. In some years during the 1980s, in fact, the band often played to collective nationwide audiences of more than a million (sometimes twice that amount), and while it would be difficult to calculate with any absolute certainty, there is a good likelihood that the Grateful Dead played before more people over the years than any other performing act in history. But the nature of the band’s success went well beyond big numbers and high finances: From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, the Grateful Dead enjoyed a union with its audience that was unrivaled and unshakable. Indeed, the Dead and its followers formed the only self-sustained, ongoing fellowship that pop music has ever produced—a commonwealth that lasted more than a quarter-century.
At the same time, Jerry Garcia and the other members of the Grateful Dead paid a considerable price for their singular accomplishment. By largely forswearing studio recordings after the 1970s (the band released only two collections of all new music in the period from 1980 to 1995), and by never returning to the sort of songwriting impetus that made works like Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty so notable, the Dead lost the interest of much of the mainstream and cutting-edge pop audiences of the last two decades. To the band’s fans, the Dead’s magic lay in their live extravaganzas, where the group’s improvisational bents melded with their audience’s willful devotion, to achieve the sort of bouts of musical-communal ecstasy that few other rock & roll performers ever managed to equal. As a result, for many years, the Dead tended to play out their career, and make their meanings, almost entirely in the live moment, in the process attracting a mass-cult audience for whom the group functioned as the only ongoing force to keep faith with the dreams of collective utopia popularized in the 1960s. To the group’s detractors, though, the Grateful Dead often appeared as little more than a 1960s relic, a band frozen in the sensibility of exhausted ideals, playing to a gullible cult audience that, like the group itself, was out of touch with the changing temper of the times. Or as one critic put it, the Grateful Dead was a group of “nostalgia mongerers . . . offering facile reminiscences to an audience with no memory of its own.”
Garcia and the other members of the Dead heard this sort of criticism plenty over the years, and it had to have cut deep into their pride. “It’s mortifying to think of yourself as a ’nostalgia’ act when you’ve never quit playing,” said Robert Hunter. “For years and years we drew an audience of nineteen- or twenty-year-old kids. Can you have a nostalgia for a time you didn’t live in? I think some of our music appeals to some sort of idealism in people, and hopefully it’s universal enough to make those songs continue to exist over the years.”
Perhaps the general pop world’s disregard and outright ridicule took a certain toll on the spirits of the various band members. In any event, something began to wear on Jerry Garcia in the mid-1980s, and whatever it was, it never really let up on him. By 1984, rumors were making the rounds among the Deadheads—who just may be the best networked community on the planet—that Garcia’s guitar playing had lost much of its wit and edge, that his singing had grown lackadaisical and that, in fact, he was suffering from drug problems. The rumors proved true. Garcia had been using cocaine and heroin for several years—in fact, had developed a serious addiction—and according to some observers, his use had started to affect the spirit and unity of the band itself. “He got so trashed out,” said the Dead’s sound engineer, Dan Healy, “that he just wasn’t really playing. Having him not give a shit—that was devastating.”
Watching from his home in Wyoming, Garcia’s friend John Barlow thought he was witnessing the probable end of the Grateful Dead. “I was very afraid that Garcia was going to die. In fact, I’d reached a point where I’d just figured it was a matter of time before I’d turn on my radio and there, on the hour, I’d hear, ’Jerry Garcia, famous in the sixties, has died.’ I didn’t even allow myself to think it wasn’t possible. That’s a pretty morbid way to look at something. When you’ve got one person that is absolutely critical, and you don’t think he’s going to make it, then you start to disengage emotionally, and I had. For a while, I couldn’t see where it was all headed. I mean, I could see the people in the audience getting off, but I couldn’t see any of us getting off enough to make it worthwhile.
“And it wasn’t just Garcia,” Barlow says. “There were a lot of things that were wrong. I don’t want to tell any tales out of school, but I think our adherents have a more than slightly idealistic notion of what goes on inside the Grateful Dead, and just how enlightened we all are.
“What happened with Garcia was not unique.”
IT WAS NOT LONG after this time that I had my only lengthy conversation with Jerry Garcia. It was during a period of high activity and high risks for the Grateful Dead. The band was putting the finishing touches on its first album of new songs in several years, In the Dark, which, in turn, would launch the band’s only Top 10 single, “Touch of Grey,” a touching song about aging, decline, rebirth, and recommitment. At the same time, the Dead were beginning rehearsals with Bob Dylan for a nationwide tour that would make for a series of performances that were, at times, disorderly at best, and other times, full of surprising ferocity.
Garcia and I met on an uncommonly warm evening in the spring of 1987, in the band’s San Rafael recording studio. When our conversation began, we had just finished viewing a video documentary about the band called So Far, which was shot nearly two years before. So Far is an adventurous and impressive work that, in its grandest moments, attests to the much-touted spirit of community that the Dead shared with their audience. Yet certain passages of the hour-long production seemed to be rough viewing on this night for Garcia, who looked rather heavy and fatigued during the project’s taping. At the time So Far was made, Garcia was deeply entangled in the drug problem that, before much longer, would not only imperil his own health but also threaten the stability of the band itself.
That fact lends a certain affecting tension to the better performances in So Far—in particular, the group’s doleful reading of “Uncle John’s Band.” The song—with its country-style sing-along about people pulling together into a brave community in frightening times—had long been among the band’s signature tunes, yet in So Far, the Dead render it as if they were aiming to test its meanings anew. In the video, Garcia and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir face off in a dimly lighted concert hall, working their way through the lyrics with an air of frayed fraternity, as if this might be their last chance to make good on the music’s promise of hard-earned kinship. “When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door,” they sing to each other, and from the look that passes between them in that moment, it’s impossible to tell whether they are about to pull together or come apart.
It is a raggedy but utterly remarkable performance, and on the occasion of our meeting, it seems to leave Garcia a bit uneasy. “There were so many people who cared about me,” he tells me, “and I was just fucking around. . . . Drug use is kind of a cul-de-sac: It’s one of those places you turn with your problems, and pretty soon, all your problems have simply become that one problem. Then it’s just you and drugs.”
It is now late in the evening. The other band members have all gone home, and only a couple of assistants linger in a nearby room, making arrangements for the next day’s rehearsals with Dylan. Garcia looks tired on this night—it has been a long day, and the next one promises to be a longer one—but as he sips at a rum and Coke and begins to talk about the rough history of the previous years, his voice sounds surprisingly youthful.
“There was something I needed or thought I needed from drugs,” he says directly. “Drugs are like trade-offs in a way—they can be, at any rate. There was something there for me. I don’t know what it was exactly. Maybe it was the thing of being able to distance myself a little from the world. But there was something there I needed for a while, and it wasn’t an entirely negative experience. . . . But after a while, it was just the drugs running me, and that’s an intolerable situation.
“I was never an overdose kind of junkie. I’ve never enjoyed the extremes of getting high. I never used to like to sit around and smoke freebase until I was wired out of my mind, know what I mean? For me, it was the thing of just getting pleasantly comfortable and grooving at that level. But of course, that level doesn’t stay the same. It requires larger and larger amounts of drugs. So after a few years of that, pretty soon you’ve taken a lot of fucking drugs and not experiencing much. It’s a black hole. I went down that black hole, really. Luckily, my friends pulled me out. Without them, I don’t think I ever would have had the strength to do it myself.”
In fact, says Garcia, it was the Grateful Dead who made the first move to resolve his drug problem. “Classically,” he says, “the band has had a laissez-faire attitude in terms of what anybody wants to do. If somebody wants to drink or take drugs, as long as it doesn’t seriously affect everybody else or affect the music, we can sort of let it go. We’ve all had our excursions. Just before I got busted, everybody came over to my house and said, ’Hey, Garcia, you got to cool it; you’re starting to scare us.’ ”
According to some sources, the request that the Grateful Dead made of Garcia on that day in January of 1985 was actually a bit more adamant. The band reportedly told Garcia that he was killing himself and that while they could not force him to choose between death and life, they could insist that he choose between drugs and the band. If he chose drugs, the band might try to continue without him, or it might simply dissolve. Either way, the members wanted Garcia to understand they loved him, but they also wanted him to choose his allegiance.
“Garcia was the captain of his own ship,” Bob Weir says of that period, “and if he was going to check out, that was up to him. But you know, if somebody looks real off course, we might take it upon ourselves to bump up against him and try to push him a little more in a right direction.”
Perhaps, in that confrontation, Garcia was reminded of something he had once said about the Grateful Dead’s original singer, Pigpen, in 1972, after it had been disclosed that Pigpen had severely damaged his liver from drinking. “He survived it,” Garcia told Rolling Stone, “and now he’s got the option of being a juicer or not being a juicer. To be a juicer means to die, so now he’s being able to choose whether to live or die. And if I know Pigpen, he’ll choose to live.” The following year, Pigpen was found dead. According to most reports, he had never really returned to drinking but had simply suffered too much damage to continue living.
In any event, Garcia reportedly made a decision: He promised the band he would quit drugs and would seek rehabilitative treatment within a few days. As it developed, he never got the chance. On January 18, 1985, while parked in his BMW in Golden Gate Park, Garcia was spotted by a policeman who noticed the lapsed registration on the vehicle. As the policeman approached the car, he reportedly smelled a strong burning odor and noticed Garcia trying to hide something between the driver and passenger seats. The policeman asked Garcia to get out of the car, and when Garcia did, the policeman saw an open briefcase on the passenger seat, full of twenty-three packets of “brown and white substances.”
Garcia was arrested on suspicion of possessing cocaine and heroin, and about a month later, a municipal-court judge agreed to let the guitarist enter a Marin County drug-diversion program.
Looking back at the experience, Garcia was almost thankful. “I’m the sort of person,” he says, “that will just keep going along until something stops me. For me and drugs, the bust helped. It reminded me how vulnerable you are when you’re drug dependent. It caught my attention. It was like ’Oh, right: illegal.’ And of all the things I don’t want to do, spending time in jail is one of those things I least want to do. It was as if this was telling me it was time to start doing something different. It took me about a year to finally get off drugs completely after the bust, but it was something that needed to happen.”
Garcia pauses to light a cigarette, then studies its burning end thoughtfully. “I can’t speak for other people,” he says after a few moments, “and I certainly don’t have advice to give about drugs one way or another. I think it’s purely a personal matter. I haven’t changed in that regard. . . . It was one of those things where the pain it cost my friends, the worry that I put people through, was out of proportion to whatever it was I thought I needed from drugs. For me, it became a dead end.”
Following Garcia’s drug treatment, the band resumed a full-time touring schedule that included several 1986 summer dates with Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “I felt better after cleaning up, oddly enough, until that tour,” Garcia says. “And then, I didn’t realize it, but I was dehydrated and tired. That was all I felt, really. I didn’t feel any pain. I didn’t feel sick. I just felt tired. Then when we got back from that tour, I was just really tired. One day, I couldn’t move anymore, so I sat down. A week later, I woke up in a hospital, and I didn’t know what had happened. It was really weird.”
Actually, it was worse than that: Though he had never been previously diagnosed as having diabetes, when Garcia sat down at his San Rafael home on that July evening in 1986, he slipped into a diabetic coma that lasted five days and nearly claimed his life. “I must say, my experience never suggested to me that I was anywhere near death,” says Garcia. “For me, it had just been this weird experience of being shut off. Later on, I found out how scary it was for everybody, and then I started to realize how serious it had all been. The doctors said I was so dehydrated, my blood was like mud.
“It was another one of those things to grab my attention. It was like my physical being saying, ’Hey, you’re going to have to put in some time here if you want to keep on living.’ ” As he talks, Garcia still seems startled by this realization. “Actually,” he says, “it was a thought that had never entered my mind. I’d been lucky enough to have an exceptionally rugged constitution, but just the thing of getting older, and basically having a life of benign neglect, had caught up with me. And possibly the experience of quitting drugs may have put my body through a lot of quick changes.”
At first, though, there were no guarantees that Garcia would be able to live as effectively as before. There were fears that he might suffer memory lapses and that his muscular coordination might never again be sharp enough for him to play guitar. “When I was in the hospital,” he says, “all I could think was ’God, just give me a chance to do stuff—give me a chance to go back to being productive and playing music and doing the stuff I love to do.’ And one of the first things I did—once I started to be able to make coherent sentences—was to get a guitar in there to see if I could play. But when I started playing, I thought, ’Oh, man, this is going to take a long time and a lot of patience.’ ”
After his release from the hospital, Garcia began spending afternoons with an old friend, Bay Area jazz and rhythm & blues keyboardist Merl Saunders, trying to rebuild his musical deftness. “I said, ’God, I can’t do this,’ ” says Garcia. “Merl was very encouraging. He would run me through these tunes that had sophisticated harmonic changes, so I had to think. It was like learning music again, in a way. Slowly, I started to gain som
e confidence, and pretty soon, it all started coming back. It was about a three-month process, I would say, before I felt like ’Okay, now I’m ready to go out and play.’ The first few gigs were sort of shaky, but . . . ” Garcia’s voice turns thick, and he looks away for a moment. “Ah, shit,” he says, “it was incredible. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was great. It was just great. I was so happy to play.”
Garcia smiles and shakes his head. “I am not a believer in the invisible,” he says, “but I got such an incredible outpouring. The mail I got in the hospital was so soulful. All the Deadheads—it was kind of like brotherly, sisterly, motherly, fatherly advice from people. Every conceivable kind of healing vibe was just pouring into that place. I mean, the doctors did what they could to keep me alive, but as far as knowing what was wrong with me and knowing how to fix it—it’s not something medicine knows how to do. And after I’d left, the doctors were saying my recovery was incredible. They couldn’t believe it.
“I really feel that the fans put life into me . . . and that feeling reinforced a lot of things. It was like ’Okay, I’ve been away for a while, folks, but I’m back.’ It’s that kind of thing. It’s just great to be involved in something that doesn’t hurt anybody. If it provides some uplift and some comfort in people’s lives, it’s just that much nicer. So I’m ready for anything now.”
IN THE YEARS following that 1987 conversation with Garcia, the Grateful Dead went on to enjoy the greatest commercial successes of their career. More important, though, was the symbiosis that developed between the band and its audience—a reciprocity likely unequaled in pop history. At the heart of this connection was the Dead themselves and their self-built business organization—the latter which did a largely independent, in-house job of handling the booking and staging of the band’s near-incessant tours, and which also bypassed conventional ticket-sales systems as much as possible, by selling roughly fifty percent of the band’s tickets through a company-run mail-order department. This model of an autonomous cooperative helped spawn what was perhaps the largest genuine alternative communion in all of rock: a sprawling coalition of fans, entrepreneurs, and homegrown media that surrounded the band, and that promoted the group as the center for a worldwide community of idealists—and that community thrived largely without the involvement or support of the established music industry or music press.
Night Beat Page 48