Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  The music cars were going twenty-four hours a day for nearly the entire trip, with everyone playing with everyone else—dozens of combinations of pickers and singers and tambourine shakers tackling any song that came up. It was musician heaven, with no one to please but themselves.

  “The train trip wasn’t a dream, it was a stone boss reality,” Pigpen said right after the journey. “I’m still on that train. I just turn on the switch, and the fan’s on and the train’s still moving.” A few months after it was over, Garcia was still beaming about the experience, too: “It was great. That was the best time I’ve had in rock ’n’ roll. It was our train—it was the musicians’ train. There were no straight people. There wasn’t any showbiz bullshit. There weren’t any fans. . . . It was like a musicians’ convention with no public allowed.”

  The flood of inspired new tunes coming from Hunter and Garcia continued unabated during the spring and summer of 1970. In May the Dead introduced a beautifully ethereal ballad called “Attics of My Life,” featuring heavenly three-part harmonies that were stacked in an almost choral arrangement, soaring over a spare instrumental bed. With its lovely, arching melismatic turns, “Attics of My Life” is perhaps the most successfully realized vocal piece Hunter and Garcia ever wrote together, a love song—to a woman? a man? Hunter’s muse?—with deep spiritual overtones. The musical context is almost hymnlike, but the lyrics have the graceful simplicity of a Japanese ink drawing:

  In the attics of my life

  Full of cloudy dreams unreal

  Full of tastes no tongue can know

  And lights no eye can see

  When there was no ear to hear

  You sang to me

  I have spent my life

  Seeking all that’s still unsung

  Bent my ear to hear the tune

  And closed my eyes to see

  When there were no strings to play

  You played to me

  Many of the songs Hunter and Garcia wrote together during this period are plainspoken but eloquent; economical in construction yet emotionally expansive. Hunter’s subject was the interior human landscape, but his imagery was drawn almost entirely from nature—his simple, elegant word paintings are filled with birds, clouds, rivers and trees. There’s a quietude to some of these songs, as if they were suspended in a specific time, yet they are also eternal. “Brokedown Palace,” which the Dead introduced in mid-August 1970, is so timeless and nonspecific that it could easily be mistaken for a nineteenth-century tune by Stephen Foster or a Hoagy Carmichael song three-quarters of a century later. The pace is languorous, like a muddy stream. The mood is one of weary resignation and sadness, but also, ultimately, acceptance:

  River gonna take me

  Sing me sweet and sleepy

  Sing me sweet and sleepy

  All the way back home

  It’s a far-gone lullaby

  Sung many years ago

  Mama, mama many worlds I’ve come

  Since I first left home

  Going home, going home

  By the waterside I will rest my bones

  Listen to the river sing sweet songs

  To rock my soul

  Not necessarily the sentiments one might expect from a twenty-eight-year-old rock ’n’ roller. But as Garcia once noted of Hunter, “You don’t have to be old to be wise. I always thought he was pretty wise. That’s the reason I got together with him in the first place.”

  Hunter recalled, “I wrote ‘Ripple,’ ‘Brokedown Palace’ and ‘To Lay Me Down’ all in about a two-hour period the first day I ever went to England [in May 1970, for the Hollywood Festival]. I sat there with a case of retsina and I opened up a bottle of that stuff, and the sun was shining. I was in England, which I’d always wanted to visit, and for some reason this creative energy started racing through me and I could do no wrong—write, write, write, write!”

  “To Lay Me Down,” which entered the Dead’s repertoire during an acoustic set at the Matrix near the end of July, was another haunting country-flavored love ballad tinged with sadness and longing:

  To be with you

  Once more

  To be with you

  With our bodies close together

  Let the world go by

  Like clouds a-streaming

  To lay me down

  One last time

  To lay me down

  “Ripple” is easily one of Hunter and Garcia’s best-loved works, though they rarely performed it outside of the acoustic sets the group played in 1970 and 1980. “We were on the trans-Canadian train trip,” Hunter said. “Jerry woke up one morning, sat out on the railroad tracks somewhere near Saskatoon and put it to music.” “It just seemed to happen automatically,” Garcia noted modestly. “Ripple” is another timeless song, a series of gentle aphorisms and, in the case of the chorus, a perfect seventeen-syllable haiku. It sounds as if it might have been drawn from Taoist philosophy:

  If my words did glow

  With the gold of sunshine

  And my tunes were played

  On the harp unstrung

  Would you hear my voice

  Come through the music

  Would you hold it near

  As it were your own?

  It’s a hand-me-down

  The thoughts are broken

  Perhaps they’re better left unsung

  I don’t know

  Don’t really care

  Let there be songs to fill the air

  Ripple in still water

  When there is no pebble tossed

  Nor wind to blow

  In “Ripple,” as in “Uncle John’s Band,” there is a sense of Hunter speaking through Garcia directly to the listeners, confirming that their situation is our own. One of Hunter’s greatest strengths was this rare ability to close the gap between the performer and audience by including the audience in what was, in the end, a sort of three-way conversation about life, love, sorrow, joy, mortality and transcendence. The songs represented wisdom, experience and dreams freely and lovingly shared—scattered ideas and images lifted into the air through song, like the wind blowing the hand-scrawled invocations off of a Tibetan prayer flag so the spirits can “hear” them.

  In mid-August 1970, shortly after Garcia’s twenty-eighth birthday, the group went into Wally Heider’s to begin work on the follow-up to Workingman’s Dead. This was slightly unusual for two reasons: first, Workingman’s Dead was still rising up the charts, which bands usually use as an excuse to put off making a new record; and second, the entire Grateful Dead sound crew, including their co-producer/engineer on Workingman’s Dead, Bob Matthews, was out on the road with a strange tour called the Medicine Ball Caravan, which traveled the country in buses like a hippie circus but was sponsored by Warner Bros. Records. The Dead were originally supposed to be one of the main attractions but, dissatisfied by the logistical arrangements and fearing another bust, they dropped out a day before the first show. Their sound crew had already been hired to do the tour, however, so they went ahead while the Dead stayed in the Bay Area. The band had so many new songs they wanted to get down on tape that they simply booked time at Heider’s and used staff engineer Steve Barncard instead of Bob Matthews—a move that irks Matthews to this day.

  “Generally speaking, American Beauty was a very, very live record,” Barncard says. “Frankly, I had heard bad stories about engineers’ interactions with the Dead and about how they always had a thousand people in the control room and hippies camping out in the studio and massive acid parties. But what I found were a bunch of hardworking guys, a great, tight band who had woodshedded everything, who knew exactly what they wanted to lay down and where they wanted to go with it. The vocals were all ready. There was not a whole lot of experimentation. They had sat around in a circle and rehearsed this record with acoustic guitars, and played most of the songs live, too, I believe, so they were ready to go.”

  The group recorded the basic tracks on a passel of recent Hunter and Garcia songs, including �
��Friend of the Devil,” “Candyman,” “Ripple,” “Brokedown Palace” and “Till the Morning Comes.” Pigpen had a fine new tune that fit in perfectly with the folk-country direction of much of the rest of the album—“Operator.” Weir and Hunter co-wrote a bubbling rocker with country overtones called “Sugar Magnolia,” which quickly became one of the Dead’s best-loved songs and most exciting live numbers. Weir also handled lead vocals on “Truckin’,” a catchy shuffle that was a musical collaboration between Garcia, Weir and Lesh, with words by Hunter. The song gave fans a glimpse of life on the road for this singular rock ’n’ roll band—and even included a verse that was explicitly about the Dead’s New Orleans bust, which still weighed heavily on them in the summer of 1970:

  Sitting and staring out of the hotel window

  Got a tip they’re gonna kick the door in again

  I like to get some sleep before I travel

  But if you got a warrant I guess you’re gonna come in

  Busted—down on Bourbon Street

  Set up—like a bowling pin

  Knocked down—it gets to wearing thin

  They just won’t let you be, oh no

  “Truckin’” also contained an exhilarating bridge section that instantly made the song the group’s anthem in the eyes of many fans, and which remains to this day Hunter’s most-quoted lyric:

  Sometimes the light’s all shining on me

  Other times I can barely see

  Lately it occurs to me

  What a long, strange trip it’s been

  The tenth song on the album was the first on any Dead record to feature Phil as lead singer, and it is one of the strongest Hunter ever wrote, “Box of Rain.” “Phil Lesh wanted a song to sing to his dying father and had composed a piece complete with every vocal nuance but the words,” Hunter said. “If ever a lyric ‘wrote itself,’ this did—as fast as the pen would pull.”

  Look out of any window

  Any morning, any evening, any day

  Maybe the sun is shining

  Birds are winging or

  Rain is falling from a heavy sky—

  What do you want me to do,

  To do for you to see you through?

  For this is all a dream we dreamed

  One afternoon long ago

  Though written with Phil and his father in mind, “Box of Rain” took on an extra dimension for Garcia during the recording of American Beauty. In the early afternoon of September 8, 1970, Garcia’s mother, Ruth, was gravely injured in an automobile accident.

  Tiff Garcia recalls the tragedy: “She had a house up in Diamond Heights [in San Francisco] and she had this German shepherd puppy that we’d given her from our litter. She worked the evening shift [as a nurse] at San Francisco General and every day before she’d go to work she’d take the dog up to Twin Peaks and let him run around in the hills up there. It was this gangly little thing, about six months old. The details are still a little sketchy—we tried to get the police reports and all—but what ultimately happened is that when she went to stop the car, the dog got all excited, she didn’t set the parking brake and the dog got between the gas pedal and the brake pedal. The car went over a cliff and landed on top of a cypress tree. It just mangled my mom. She had broken bones all over her body and internal injuries. She wasn’t in a coma but she was in traction and she was in intensive care at San Francisco General for nearly a month. She knew all the nurses and doctors, and here they were showing her her charts, and she knew what was going on. She was nodding her head. She couldn’t talk. She had to write things. It was hard for her to breathe, hard for her to talk, plus there was no air-conditioning in the damn hospital. I was really pissed at the whole system. Jerry and I were always talking about, ‘How can we get her out of this fucking place?’ But it was the best place for her, of course.”

  Jerry hadn’t seen his mother much since leaving home and joining the army at seventeen, but their relationship was always at least cordial. Ruth hadn’t met Mountain Girl until Garcia brought her to the hospital, and Ruth never saw baby Annabelle, seven months old at the time of the accident—Jerry brought a photo of his daughter to the hospital one day and taped it to Ruth’s bed so she could see it.

  By investing her money wisely, Ruth had managed to live quite comfortably through the years, and in the late ’60s she bought a spacious house on Miguel Street in San Francisco that offered a spectacular view of the city and the bay. She cut a slightly eccentric figure in her later years, with her pointy, pastel-colored, rhinestone-studded glasses, fox furs in winter and omnipresent ciggy in a black plastic holder dangling from her lips. She tooled around town in a Mustang, a sporty choice for a sixty-year-old. Friends and relatives agreed she was always a terrible driver: “She wrecked every car she ever owned,” Tiff says, “but this was one of those freak accidents.” Though she rarely saw Jerry, she socialized with Tiff and his wife, Gayle, and she also stayed close to her nieces and nephews—the Clifford clan—in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

  Although Sara Ruppenthal had remarried, she and Jerry’s daughter Heather had remained close to Ruth, who was a doting grandmother. Sara dutifully visited Ruth in the hospital every afternoon, and Tiff and Jerry also made a point of going over often, though Jerry was also busy working on American Beauty at Heider’s, and in mid-September he had to leave town for about a week for a series of concerts at the Fillmore East. Needless to say, it was a very stressful time for everyone in the Garcia and Clifford families.

  “I was living at my grandmother’s house [on Harrington Street] and Jerry was in Larkspur,” Tiff remembers, “and he’d pick me up every day and we’d go over to see her. She was conscious but you could sort of feel her fading away. Imagine seeing your mom in intensive care every day. To see one of your parents in that kind of condition makes you feel so powerless. You have tears in your eyes when you get in the elevator before you get there; then when you leave, shit, you’re emotionally broken. I’m surprised Jerry got any recording done at that time. But maybe he needed to keep busy. I know I felt that way. But there was nothing we could do. It was awful. I think I lost about fifteen pounds. Jerry lost a bunch of weight, too.”

  At 2 P.M. on September 29, Ruth Clifford Garcia Matusiewicz passed away quietly. As Sara remembers, “I would always call in before driving up from East Palo Alto. One day when I called the doctor told me, ‘She’s dying,’ and by the time I got there she had died. They let me sit with her for a while and I kind of intuitively meditated with the energy there, saying, ‘It’s okay. You’re okay. Go and be well.’ I felt like what I was doing was helping her through that transition. Then I called Jerry and asked him to come and be with her and he said, ‘What’s the point?—she’s dead.’

  “Tiff and his wife and I did the funeral,” Sara says. “It was too emotionally powerful for Jerry to deal with it, so we handled all the papers and found a priest and got the burial together. I remember going to the funeral home and picking out the coffin. Jerry and Mountain Girl came to the funeral at the cemetery in Colma. She had refused last rites in the hospital and did not want a Mass said, so we had to have the funeral at the cemetery rather than in church. After we put the coffin in the ground, I put in a photo of Heather and a rose from our garden and then we drove around in somebody’s car smoking a joint, driving around the cemetery and sort of processing this event as best we could.”

  A few years after his mother died, Garcia reflected on his loss: “I was never really very close to my mother so I felt that, well, there’s something I was never able to complete. I never was able to say to her, ‘I think you did okay.’ I was never able to finish that idea. But I don’t feel as though our relationship is gone forever. . . . She always respected what I did and liked the fact that I was a musician and she never judged me even through things like involvement with drugs and stuff like that; she was always pretty good. So I don’t feel too badly about [her death]. But it’s a shock, as things like that always are. But on another level, of course, it’s in
teresting how once your parents are gone, they’re gone; that’s it. On some levels it’s liberating and on other levels it’s very sad.”

  Mountain Girl says that Jerry was upset about his mother’s passing for quite a while afterward, though, typically, he didn’t talk about it very much. Instead he threw himself even more deeply into completing American Beauty, although he acknowledged later, “It was raining down hard on us while that record was going on.” Perhaps he found some measure of solace in a box of rain:

  It’s just a box of rain

  I don’t know who put it there

  Believe it if you need it

  Or leave it if you dare

  But it’s just a box of rain

  Or a ribbon for your hair

  Such a long, long time to be gone

  And a short time to be there.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Wheel Is Turning

  n the night of October 4, 1970, less than a week after Garcia’s mother died, five of the top groups in San Francisco got together at Winterland for a special concert that was broadcast live in quadraphonic sound on two Bay Area FM stations, and was also shown on the local public television station, KQED. It was the most extensive rock ’n’ roll simulcast that had ever been aired. The lineup consisted of a set apiece by the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, the New Riders and Hot Tuna (Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady’s blues spin-off from the Airplane). Everything was going along swimmingly until some disturbing information began to circulate backstage during the Dead’s set: Janis Joplin had died of an accidental heroin overdose in Hollywood. The news strongly affected both Janis’s musician peers and her fans—she was truly beloved, as much for her spirit, pluck and raucous good energy as for her formidable talent. And it was the first major death in the San Francisco music scene. The link between the Dead and Janis was particularly close: they’d gotten to know each other during the Palo Alto folk days; the Dead and Big Brother had spent a lot of time together in Lagunitas in the summer of 1966; they were neighbors in the Haight and then in Marin; and in the summer of 1970 they’d spent that glorious week on the train together.