Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Unfortunately, Jerry Garcia loved cocaine.

  “At first it seemed like this neat shit, man,” John Dawson says. “It cost a whole lot of money and it was really subtle. It was one of those things where you didn’t particularly notice it until you’d had too much of it, and then it was like having a hand grab you at the back of the neck. In the beginning it was a treat when it was there and it wasn’t a big deal when it wasn’t there—‘Oh man, you’ve got some cocaine? Far out! Wow, thanks!’ You’d snort it and go on your merry way.”

  “I first noticed it in ’69 or ’70,” Mountain Girl says. “It was shown to me with considerable excitement: ‘This stuff is really great!’ I tried it and it didn’t do a thing for me at all. It made me so grouchy I couldn’t stand myself. I really got unfriendly. It’s bad enough being me without that. I’m already rude and sharp-tongued enough without having to get into actively disliking everyone! Compared to LSD or pot, it just had no life for me.

  “But Jerry and Hunter liked it, and the crew guys liked it, and it pretty much fell on gender lines for a long time. The guys were sneaking off and snorting coke and the gals were home. The guys had always pretty much been in charge of the procurement, so it also bypassed me.

  “Of course in those days we didn’t know as much about it as we do now,” she continues. “Medical professionals said it wasn’t so bad, and various Indians do it every day and live to be ninety-five years old and have legs like gazelles, so they rhapsodized about it that way.”

  “Cocaine definitely did change things in the scene,” comments Richard Loren. “If you’re a greedy person, it’s only going to make you more greedy. It’s like Robin Williams said: ‘Cocaine is God’s way of telling you you’re making too much money.’ What happened during that period is a lot of money went to cocaine, and some decisions had to be made based solely on money that wouldn’t normally have been made if a lot of money wasn’t needed. A lot of money went out and it needed to be replaced. How is that money replaced? Play bigger gigs, put more stress on the managers to make more money. ‘Why do you need more money? Five years ago things were good: Okay, you had a broken-down car, but you got high, the sun was shining; it was wonderful.’ That’s not to say that cocaine was all bad. It kept people awake a lot longer. It got people’s minds thinking. I think at first it was a genuinely communicative drug. But it was a double-edged sword.”

  “Cocaine really subverted a lot of good people and fucked up the ’60s in a major way by creating a lot of chaos and sickness,” Mountain Girl says. “I hated it! It really ruined our lives. If anything ruined our lives it was cocaine. Jerry and I had fights about it. Coke makes you think you know it all and it makes you shoot your mouth off and it makes you hate everybody the next day. It was the end of the open heart. Instead, everybody went into the bathroom [to snort it]. People got greedy about it and it never had that warm, social thing that pot had. It was so subtle at first but it got to be so pervasive; it was everywhere.”

  Bandmembers, managers, crew, girlfriends—everyone was touched by cocaine to some degree. Some people handled it okay, others were pitched into a downward spiral because of it. It’s difficult to assess how cocaine affected the Dead’s music in the early ’70s, because there wasn’t a time in that era when most of the band didn’t use it. Did they play faster? Did it give them the energy they needed to play four-hour shows? Did it affect the direction of the songwriting at all? We’ll never know. Garcia always maintained that none of the drugs he took after his early LSD days had much of an effect on his music.

  If we’re to believe Rock Scully’s fascinating but factually dubious memoir, Living with the Dead, the cocaine issue came to a head when the Grateful Dead went to Europe in September 1974. According to Scully’s lively account, when they got to England a few days before the first concert at the historic Alexandra Palace, they were offered mounds of cocaine by their wealthy British hosts, which, on top of the LSD that was also going around, made things a little crazy. Finally, Scully writes, Rex Jackson, one of the Dead’s senior roadies, who’d been with the band since 1968, laid it on the line backstage at a sound check before the first London show. He challenged everyone to give up cocaine and to dump out their stash in a pile right there. The band and crew grumbled but agreed, and eventually they burned the snowy mountain.

  To what degree this colorful tale is accurate is hard to say without corroborating eyewitness accounts (we’ll have to wait for the crew memoirs). But Steve Brown, who was on the tour working for Grateful Dead Records, says, “A lot of that stuff in Rock’s book is true. There was a very heavy scene that went down when we got over there initially. We sent a lot of marijuana over there in the speakers; it was made available to us for both use and trade for whatever else we might want. Then, when we got over there, people were being pulled on right away to go out and party and to hang out with certain crowds. Right away it was like, ‘The Grateful Dead from San Francisco are here: Let’s party!’ But there was also a thing of various people being uptight and strung out with their own drug habits at that point. And the cocaine was definitely a problem.

  “I think what they went through,” Brown continues, “is something that had to happen at some point, whether it was the sacrificial bonfire or the massive flushing of the toilets, getting rid of stuff that way—I remember hearing people in the rooms shouting, ‘Flush it! Flush it!’ It was like an early intervention on themselves brought on by their own paranoid delusions or whatever. It was a strange little moment in time. And this was the beginning of the tour. This isn’t the end when you’ve had enough and you’re ready to go home. This is when you’re just getting started.”

  In any case, the Dead played three outstanding shows at the Alexandra Palace, as documented on Dick’s Picks Volume Seven, a three-CD set released in 1997. The rest of the tour, which consisted of just one show in Germany and three in France, was considerably calmer than those first days in London. Some people were still doing coke (it was hard to stay away from those dealers who wanted to give it to them), but it was curtailed considerably. Because they were carting the thirty-eight-ton Wall of Sound around, the band played larger venues than on the 1972 tour, but the tour didn’t draw huge crowds, so it ended up costing the Dead quite a bit—and of course this time Warner Bros. wasn’t there helping to foot the bill. (This time, too, the Dead left the family at home. That may be another reason things spun out of control—too many unsupervised guys on the prowl.)

  The Dead’s original plan for 1974 called for them to tour through the autumn and into the first weeks of 1975, but at some point they decided they’d had enough. The cost of keeping the Wall of Sound on the road was prohibitive, the venues the band was forced to play to sustain their scene were getting bigger and bigger, people were feeling burned out from ten years of nearly constant touring and too many people had attached themselves to the humongous Grateful Dead touring machine—“the Grateful Dead tit,” as John Kahn referred to it. So they made a decision: they would stop performing for an indefinite period, take some time to work on individual projects, make a record without the pressure of having to go out on the road every few weeks, and assess where they’d been and where they were going to see if they could bring the beast under control—get away from “the mega-gig, the huge stadium,” as Garcia later put it.

  “That represented the end of the line, developmentally, of what’s there in America,” he said. “You can’t go anywhere else; you can’t get any bigger. So what we would like to do is improve the quality of the experience both on the level of what we’re doing amongst ourselves and how we interact with the audience, and what the audience experiences when we’re there. In that sense we’re the Don Quixotes of rock ’n’ roll. We’re doing something nobody else cares to do, which is trying to figure out how to make the experience we value and which our audience values something that’s more in line with what it feels like, which is a sort of positive outpouring of good energy. That’s the reason we stopped—to think about it.”


  In another interview he said, “Fame and success are human-eaters. They’d like for you to go for it. They love it when you go to Hollywood and get yourself a comfortable pad and a swimming pool and get into the pleasure palace trip. And either you go for it or you say, ‘No, I don’t want that.’”

  Plans for a late fall/winter tour were abruptly scrapped, and instead the Dead booked five consecutive nights at Winterland, October 16–20. Tickets for the final show of the series were ominously stamped with the words THE LAST ONE, and while optimistic Deadheads fully believed the break from performing was a hiatus rather than a retirement, no one knew for sure whether the Dead would ever come back.

  Because the future was unclear, the Dead decided they should document the shows somehow, so they turned to a New York filmmaker named Leon Gast to assist them. Gast, who won an Oscar in 1997 for When We Were Kings, his documentary about the 1974 Muhammad Ali–George Foreman heavyweight championship match in Zaire, first contacted Garcia and Ron Rakow in early 1973 to see if they would help finance a documentary he’d been working on about the Hell’s Angels. Sandy Alexander, president of the New York chapter of the motorcycle club, introduced Gast to Garcia and Rakow, “and we hit it off,” Gast says. “Jerry came by one day, all alone, to look at what we had. I showed him maybe an hour of material and he loved it. Rakow loved it, too, and he said, ‘Well, what do we do?’ We shook hands and that night we made a deal and they agreed to provide the financing to complete the film, which I believe was about $300,000.” Garcia also agreed to appear in the film, speaking on camera about the Angels and playing with the Saunders-Garcia band during a September ’73 Hell’s Angels “Pirate Party” aboard the ferryboat SS Bay Belle circling around Manhattan—it was that band’s first appearance outside of the Bay Area.

  When Rakow and Garcia originally approached Gast about shooting the October ’74 Winterland shows, “They were talking about doing a video shoot,” Gast says. “They wanted to document these shows, because, as I understood it, they were breaking up. But I said, ‘Why do a video? Let’s do a film thing.’ So I showed them some James Brown footage that I’d just shot in Africa [which ended up in When We Were Kings] and they were impressed. So we went from doing a $40,000 video to a $1.2 million film. Film shooting was budgeted for $250,000 and it came in right there.”

  Gast assembled a crew of nine cameramen to cover every aspect of the shows, from people waiting in line outside to Deadheads dancing in the hallways or buying snacks during the show to family, friends and crew members hanging around backstage. There were a couple of fixed cameras in the audience shooting the action onstage, one mounted on a crane on one side of the stage, and also cameramen dressed head to toe in black wandering around the edges of the stage to capture close-ups of the bandmembers.

  “Jerry’s big thing was that he wanted the cameras to be as unobtrusive as possible,” says Emily Craig, who was married to Rakow and who worked on the postproduction of the film. “He didn’t want the film to get in the way of people having a good time and feeling like they were at a regular Dead show, and I think that if you look at the movie, what’s there is like a regular Dead show.” (That said, many who attended the shows did find the cameras and lights on the audience rather invasive.)

  Predictably, the Dead made no real concessions to the presence of the film crew. They just went out and played five strong shows so there would be lots of good material to put into the film. And for their part, the Dead’s stage crew made a point of giving the cameramen a taste of Grateful Dead craziness: “I think almost everybody got dosed [with LSD] every single night,” Gast says with a laugh. “I spoke to the Dead and said, ‘I don’t know who’s going to be able to handle it and who won’t, but you’re paying a lot of money to do this, so don’t fuck around.’ Okay, night number one it was very easy to determine when people got dosed, because it was in the coffee urns and the punch bowl. There was a little army of dosers going around. Second night they took the paper cups out of the coffee machine and put a little drop in each one and put them back. Another night they put it in oranges and bananas with hypodermic needles. The last night they had big buckets backstage filled with Coca-Cola and beer, and supposedly there was acid in the bottom of the barrels so you’d get dosed when you put your arm down into it. The last night, too, [roadie] Steve Parish had the ‘L’ and you had to lick a drop to get onstage. I remember being on the headset and calling for Don [Lenzer, one of the onstage cameramen], ‘Oh Don! Don, can you . . .’ and I looked up and Don was just sitting on the stage with his camera in his lap, listening to the music. It was quite an experience, but everybody did a great job considering.”

  The final night was a three-set extravaganza in which virtually every member of the Dead family—including the band—and a large segment of the audience took acid; after all, that was an essential part of the Dead’s roots. And for old time’s sake Mickey Hart rejoined the band for part of the show and smashed away at his kit as if he’d never left. Sometime after two in the morning, the band assembled onstage to sing a final a cappella version of the old Bahamian spiritual “We Bid You Goodnight,” and then it was over. A shower of roses were flung onto the stage and thousands of Deadheads began to file out of Winterland, while hundreds more stuck around as long as they were allowed to, soaking up the vibe of the Dead at Winterland as long as they could, and watching the road crew begin to dismantle the Wall of Sound for what might be the last time.

  CHAPTER 14

  Beneath the Sweet Calm Face of the Sea

  erry and Mountain Girl’s second baby girl, Theresa (aka Trixie), was born in September 1974 while the Grateful Dead were on tour in Europe. This should have been a cause for grand celebration, but by the fall of 1974, the pair’s relationship had deteriorated considerably and Jerry was spending more and more time out of the house, mostly working on one musical project after another. M.G. knew that Jerry had been unfaithful to her at different times during the previous couple of years—“catting around,” she calls it—but she chalked that up partly to the vicissitudes of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. And most of Garcia’s romantic conquests weren’t relationships per se.

  Still, M.G. says, “He was sleeping and eating and changing his clothes at home; hanging out for a few hours during the day. That was his routine. It was comfortable and easy. I didn’t expect him to take out the garbage. And he was great with the kids. He would hang out with them. He used to sing to them. I remember he worked out ‘Russian Lullaby’ in front of them.”

  Around the time of the Europe tour, however, “I knew something was wrong because he started being brief with me,” M.G. says, “and then he’d come home and say some of the weirdest shit—anti-family things like, ‘Having a family is probably going to ruin my artistic career.’ He didn’t mean it; he was just trying it out. He’d make these weird statements and then he’d watch me to see what I said. So I’d either refute it or be so startled by it I’d be undone by it.”

  What M.G. didn’t know was that Jerry was falling in love with another woman, an aspiring filmmaker named Deborah Koons. She was a few years younger than Jerry, the daughter of wealthy Cincinnati professionals—John Fletcher Koons III was a successful businessman and his wife, Patricia Boyle, was a lawyer. Deborah’s grandfather, John Koons Jr., had made his fortune heading the local Burger Brewing Company and a Pepsi bottling concern, and he was also active in various civic affairs. In 1949 the Koons family was listed in Cincinnati’s Blue Book social register for the first time. Deborah, her brother, John, and sister, Christina, were brought up in one of the city’s toniest neighborhoods. She attended private schools, and after graduating from Hillsdale prep school she went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1967 to 1971, majoring in radio-TV-film. Early on she had set her sights on a career in filmmaking.

  She first saw the Dead in the late ’60s and didn’t like them. But in March 1973 she attended a concert at the Nassau Coliseum and, after that show, “someone suggested that I
ride back to Manhattan with the band and crew on their bus, and so I got on and sat next to Jerry and we had a conversation and struck up kind of a friendship. I mentioned that I was leaving in a few days to go to Europe for a year and when we parted he gave me his address [actually, the Dead’s post office box] and asked me to write him.”

  She says the two exchanged half a dozen letters while Deborah was in Europe, and when she moved back to the United States around the middle of 1974, settling in New York, she contacted Jerry again, and shortly after that the two began a clandestine relationship. Deborah then moved to California and the pair started seeing each other regularly, though Jerry was still nominally living at the Stinson address. She traveled with Garcia during part of the September 1974 European tour, and the guitarist made sure that when postproduction on the Grateful Dead movie began, Deborah had a role to play—she’s listed in the credits under “Script Assistance.”

  Almost immediately following the Dead’s October ’74 series at Winterland, Leon Gast had begun to wade through the hundreds of hours of film that had been shot by his nine cameramen. However, when it became clear to him that the Dead, and Garcia in particular, wanted control over editing the film, Gast bowed out of the project and the job of editing fell to Susan Crutcher, who had originally been hired as an assistant editor on the project.

  While the long, tedious job of synching the film to audio was going on at a rented Mill Valley house that served as headquarters for the movie’s postproduction (the film company was dubbed Round Reels), the Dead began work on their next album at Bob Weir’s new home studio. Previous Dead studio records were dominated by songs that had already been played live. For this album—eventually entitled Blues for Allah—the band took a new approach: it was built up from nothing in the studio. “We kind of made a ground rule for that record: ‘Let’s make a record where we get together every day and we don’t bring anything in [in advance],’” Garcia said years later. “The whole idea was to get back to that band thing, where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material. So we’d go into the studio, we’d jam for a while, and then if something nice turned up we’d say, ‘Well, let’s preserve this little hunk and work with it, see if we can’t do something with it.’ And that’s how we did most of that album.”