Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Eventually Jerry and Deborah moved into a duplex in Tiburon, an upscale Marin community spread along a peninsula that juts into San Francisco Bay near Mill Valley, and Mountain Girl was left to fend for herself and the three girls in Stinson. Steve Brown, who helped move some rented furniture into the Tiburon house, says that Garcia and Deborah seemed to be very happy together. “I think the reason it seemed to work was that Deborah stayed away from the Grateful Dead scene pretty much. I liked Deborah. She was very nice to me and was a very pleasant person to be around. There was definitely that kind of puppy love thing of when people are first together; they were a cute couple and there was a lot of affectionate goo-goo eyeing and stuff. They were into a lot of the same things; some of the same writers and science fiction and film, of course. But she was pretty smart and stayed out of any real obvious situations that would cross any of the other old camp of Mountain Girl family people; women particularly. She kept a pretty low profile.”

  “She was a strange bird,” comments Donna (Godchaux) MacKay. “There was kind of a seductive mystery about her, but it was really no mystery—she was just very inward. Everything that was in Jerry that was secretly very inward was attracted to that. He might have been very outgoing, but that’s when he wanted to be. When he didn’t want to be, we all know, Jerry could be very . . . ‘I don’t want you to be in my world and don’t you dare try to get in!’ He wouldn’t say that, of course, but he’d get that look on his face. He could slam that door absolutely shut. That’s just the way it was. And I think that was part of his attraction to her. So much of his world was the other [outgoing side] that she was a ‘safe place’ to be inward with.” Donna, too, remembers that the couple “kept to themselves most of the time.”

  However, as M.G. notes, “There were a number of confrontations. We had a scene in Weir’s studio on Jerry’s birthday [in August 1975]. Annabelle wanted to give Jerry a birthday present, so I pulled myself together and went over there with Annabelle and Trixie either on his birthday or the next day. I’d been pretty freaked out for a while. So I showed up and I was talking to Jerry, and Deborah came into the room and sat down and smiled at me, and I just lost it. There was something about her that really made me upset. The stakes just seemed so high all of a sudden and I grabbed her and threw her out of there and broke the door off the hinges in the process. I created a huge hysterical scene.”

  The Grateful Dead made two more appearances in 1975. On August 13 they played a private, invitation-only party at the 650-seat Great American Music Hall to celebrate the release of Blues for Allah. This was the smallest show the Dead had played since the late ’60s. The concert was broadcast nationally a couple of weeks later over the Metromedia radio network, so the Dead got some excellent publicity for their new record. The new songs were different from any the band had written before, yet they still sounded completely natural surrounded by other Dead tunes like “Eyes of the World,” “Sugaree,” “The Other One” and “U.S. Blues.” The evolutionary path was clear.

  A month and a half later, on September 28, the Dead and the Jefferson Starship got together and put on a free concert, announced the day of the show, that drew 25,000 people to Golden Gate Park’s Lindley Meadows on a cold and foggy Sunday afternoon. The Dead played one long set that day, mostly showcasing their new material, but also revving up the crowd with favorites like “Truckin’,” “Not Fade Away” and “One More Saturday Night.” Four appearances during their first year away from touring? It was ample indication that this band was not about to retire. On the contrary, they seemed more energized at each successive appearance. There was still no indication that the hiatus would end anytime soon, but most Deadheads believed it was only a matter of time before the Dead would succumb to the lure of the stage again.

  The lack of touring certainly had an adverse affect on the Dead’s financial situation. After all, that had always been their main source of income. Yes, there was the $300,000 Rakow had managed to snag from Atlantic Records for the Dead’s foreign distribution rights, but by mid-1975 that money was long gone. Grateful Dead Records turned a tidy profit with each Dead album, but the Round Records projects were not nearly as successful, particularly Seastones and Keith and Donna. Moreover, manufacturing costs had soared on the last few record projects because of a vinyl shortage caused by political turmoil in the Middle East’s oil-producing nations. But the real money drain was the movie, which ate up hundreds of thousands of dollars. That was Garcia’s baby, and the rest of the band recognized that the movie had the potential to be a tremendous artistic statement by and about the band. They trusted Garcia’s vision of the project and the postproduction crew’s regimen, which turned out to be slow and methodical. Garcia had hoped that the movie would be in theaters by Christmas of 1975; as it turned out, work on the film continued all the way into early 1977.

  “What we really need is a subsidy,” Garcia joked in 1975. “The government should subsidize us and we should be like a national resource.”

  In mid-1975 Rakow and the band agreed that it was time to end the great independent record company experiment, so they signed a distribution deal with United Artists Records—not exactly an industry giant—to handle Grateful Dead albums and the solo discs on Round Records. The Dead organization got a much-needed infusion of cash to keep the various recording and film ventures going (the Hell’s Angels Forever movie project was still eating up money, too), and for the first time in a couple of years, Garcia, Rakow and company didn’t have to worry about the endless minutiae of record manufacturing and distribution.

  “The independence we had with Grateful Dead Records really isn’t that important,” Garcia said a year later. “I felt as though it was something we tried to do, but the time it happened was just the worst possible time to do it. It was the time when there were incredible vinyl shortages and all that stuff, and here we were, starting our little record company in the midst of ‘the collapse of the record industry.’ It was like swimming upstream.

  “But it doesn’t bother me if some plan doesn’t work. They have lives of their own after a while. If they work, they deserve to. If they don’t, the heck with it. No sense worrying about it.”

  Garcia gigged with Keith and Donna’s group, which also included Kreutzmann and three other players, for about four weeks in August and September 1975. The band played a combination of songs from the Keith and Donna album, Memphis soul tunes like “Knock on Wood” and “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” and even a few Garcia-sung covers. When he returned from the Keith and Donna tour, Garcia abruptly kicked Merl Saunders and Martin Fierro out of the Legion of Mary and hired British rock ’n’ roll piano wizard Nicky Hopkins—who’d played with everyone from the Rolling Stones to Quicksilver—for the newly named Jerry Garcia Band (which also included John Kahn and Ron Tutt).

  John Kahn said the decision to go in a different direction with the group was made for purely musical considerations: “It didn’t seem to be headed anywhere for us. It was stuck in a bag. Without putting anybody down, it was just a period of nongrowth musically, I thought, and Jerry thought so, too. We dealt with it like Jerry dealt with a lot of things—we just sort of ditched it. We hid and just didn’t have any gigs for a long time, and then we started another band. It wasn’t very well done. Since then I’ve been more careful making sure that sort of stuff was done properly. Jerry was supposed to do that one himself, because I’d been the guy who fired Kreutzmann to get Tutt. So it was his turn, but of course he wouldn’t do it.”

  Whatever the grisly details, the change in the fall of 1975 did represent a new direction for Garcia’s band. Hopkins was an amazing technician on the piano, equally capable of providing florid ornamentation, spare melodic filigrees and deft rhythmic pounding. The music lost some of its jazzy flavor when Saunders and Fierro left and took on more of a rock ’n’ roll personality. A raft of fine new songs came into the repertoire around this time, too, including “Catfish John,” a contemporary country tune that Old and in the Way had perform
ed bluegrass-style; several numbers written by Hopkins, such as “Lady Sleeps” and “Edward, the Mad Shirt Grinder,” which he’d originally recorded with Quicksilver on their Shady Grove album; “I’ll Take a Melody,” a little-known song by New Orleans songwriter-producer Allen Toussaint; three tunes from the Grateful Dead’s songbook—“Sugaree,” “They Love Each Other” and “Friend of the Devil”; and a new Hunter-Garcia composition called “Mission in the Rain,” which Garcia described as “a song that might be about me. It’s my life; it’s like a little piece of my life. Hunter writes me once in a while.”

  Not that any real information about Garcia is imparted in the song. But the setting—San Francisco’s Mission district—is from the attic of his life. And Hunter’s as well—when he first moved to San Francisco during the Summer of Love he lived at 17th and Mission Streets, “and that [song] was very much a portrait of that time—looking backwards at ten years,” Hunter said.

  Ten years ago I walked this street

  My dreams were riding tall

  Tonight I would be thankful

  Lord for any dream at all

  Some folks would be happy

  Just to have one dream come true

  But everything you gather

  Is just more than you can lose

  Come again

  Walking along in the Mission

  In the rain . . .

  The Jerry Garcia Band (henceforth the JGB) toured quite a lot in October and November of 1975, and also found time to record a few songs for the Garcia solo album that became Reflections. “That album was supposed to be a Jerry Garcia Band album but it sort of fell apart in the middle, so it ended up being half that band and half Grateful Dead,” John Kahn said.

  The problem, alas, was Hopkins, who besides being a major cokehead—not an issue where Garcia and Kahn were concerned—also had a severe drinking problem. This is why he occasionally rambled on incessantly between songs onstage, muttering incomprehensibly in his thick British accent, and why by year’s end he was out of the group.

  “He was an incredible player,” Kahn said, “like the Chopin of rock ’n’ roll. He was bluesy but he also had this beautiful tone and touch that complemented Jerry’s playing really well. That was the idea, and then Tutt and I would lay down this really fat, well-defined bottom sound. But it didn’t work out. That wasn’t Hopkins’s best period. Frankly, he didn’t even remember any of the gigs. Later, he asked me if we ever had any fun. I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Then it must’ve been all right.’ Tutt really didn’t like Hopkins, and after a while he blew Jerry out, too, because he was just too over the edge; he was too fucked up to play music. That’s the line where you’ve gone too far. At this Winterland show [in December 1975] he was on another planet, playing in the wrong key, and you just couldn’t get to him. He sort of wrecked that whole gig. Tutt was really mad.”

  Hopkins’s last gig with the band was a New Year’s Eve show at the Keystone Berkeley. Shortly after that the JGB debuted another new lineup at the Keystone Berkeley, and this one stuck for a while: Garcia, Kahn, Tutt and Keith and Donna Godchaux. “Keith was an interesting player,” Kahn said. “He didn’t have the same background as the rest of us. Like, he wasn’t well rooted in blues, but he picked stuff up real fast. He was an amazingly quick study. We’d teach him about some style one day and he’d have it down the next. He picked up the New Orleans stuff real fast. That was a real good band for a long time; definitely one of my favorites.”

  Not surprisingly, bringing in Keith and Donna added a gospel feeling to much of the material the band played, and they even tackled some straight gospel numbers, such as the traditional “Who Was John,” the Sensational Nightingales’ “My Sisters and Brothers” and the Mighty Clouds of Joy’s “Ride Mighty High,” as well as gospel-influenced songs like Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and the reggae classic “Stop That Train.”

  Garcia’s solo album Reflections came out in February 1976, and offered quite a potpourri of musical styles. Four songs featured the JGB (with Hopkins) augmented by Mickey Hart on percussion, and keyboardist Larry Knechtel (who had also played on Garcia’s second solo record): “Mission in the Rain,” which also had an effective synthesizer line by Kahn; “I’ll Take a Melody”; Hank Ballard’s driving “Tore Up Over You”; and “Catfish John.” And on two of the four, Donna and Bob Weir sang background vocals.

  The other four songs on Reflections were performed by the Grateful Dead, including Mickey Hart, who was formally back on board. “It was a continuation of what we were doing with Blues for Allah,” Garcia said. “We were having fun in the studio is what it boils down to, and that’s pretty rare for us. The energy was there, and I thought, ‘I’ve got a solo album coming up. Let’s cut these tracks with the Grateful Dead. I’ve already taught them the tunes.’”

  Three songs were ones the Dead had played for a while but never recorded: “Comes a Time,” “It Must Have Been the Roses” and “They Love Each Other.” The fourth was an exuberant new Hunter-Garcia rocker called “Might As Well,” about the Festival Express train trip across Canada in 1970.

  Sometime in early 1976 Garcia moved into an old Victorian house in Belvedere, a posh, old-money enclave on a small island off Tiburon. “I went and visited him and Deborah there a couple of times,” John Kahn said. “It was a really nice place.”

  Around the same time, Mountain Girl says, “Jerry said he was going to cut me loose, so I was cut loose.” Garcia agreed to give her a thousand dollars a month plus the house in Stinson Beach. “I stayed in Stinson until mid-1976, but I was very unhappy. It was like a bomb had gone off. The kids were unhappy.

  “So I went up to Oregon for a year,” she continues. “I bought a place out on the coast, in Port Orford, with money I’d made from my book [a popular guide to cultivating marijuana], and I kind of went up there and hid. I was really lonely. I got tired of Port Orford in a hot second. I lasted there about fourteen or sixteen months. The kids did a year of school there that was just hell. It was really boring.”

  Another change occurred in the scene during this period: the arrival of freebase cocaine, which instead of being snorted was smoked and thus was introduced into the bloodstream much quicker and with a more dramatic—some say nearly orgasmic—head and body “rush.” This technique used up cocaine faster and it was much more psychologically addictive. Years before crack cocaine laid waste to thousands of inner-city adults and kids, freebase ravaged the Grateful Dead’s world.

  “The weaker ones really fell by the wayside with that drug,” Steve Brown observes. “People who had more to lose started to really go downhill when that started happening. That one sucked a lot of people under, and some people never really got out of it. A lot of them eventually went from freebasing to also smoking heroin—it was a marriage made in hell.”

  Ironically, “Garcia was totally healthy-looking back then,” Brown continues. “He was lucid. He was funny. Most of the time you could never tell with him. And that lasted all the way up to the late ’70s. He just had a very high tolerance, I guess.”

  John Kahn agreed. “He never got so fucked up he couldn’t play or carry on a normal conversation. We played some of our best shows during that period.” And like many drug users, Garcia went through relatively clean periods followed by periods in which he binged.

  By the late winter of 1976 the Dead had decided to begin touring again, but on a much more scaled-down level than before. “We’re horny to play,” Garcia declared. “We all miss Grateful Dead music. We want to be the Grateful Dead some more.”

  The Wall of Sound had been taken apart and dispersed: “There are probably twenty-five little bands running around that got outfitted by that system,” Dan Healy said in the mid-’80s. “So when we went back on the road we decided no more albatrosses. We had a year to miss touring, and we had time to reflect on what a truly valuable, precious thing we had. And we wanted to keep it economical so we’d survive.”

  The road crew was winnowe
d down from twenty to just six—“The core nucleus stayed,” Healy said. “It was the same people who were there originally, no more, no less”—and Healy went back to renting equipment, which was then configured in ways that were consistent with some of the audio principles that had emerged from the Wall of Sound experiment.

  During the time the band was off the road, all sorts of different ideas about how to make the Grateful Dead concert experience more manageable for both the band and crowd had been explored—from looking into the feasibility of televising concerts to having Buckminster Fuller work up plans for a permanent, customized geodesic-domed performance venue in the Bay Area, where the group could stay put and concertize most of the year. In the end there simply wasn’t enough money for anything so grandiose. But in a noble attempt to reestablish some sense of scale to their operation, the band played in theaters rather than arenas and stadiums on their first tour after the hiatus, with the first crack at tickets going to the 45,000 people on the Dead Heads mailing list.

  “Basically, us returning to performing is a compromise,” Garcia said in March 1976, two months before the tour. “It isn’t a totally satisfactory move. The way we’re gonna do it is gonna be different from the way we’ve done it. But it’s retrograde rather than moving on with the idea. We’re actually backing up because there are literally no alternatives. We’re trying to bluff an alternative into existence. But that doesn’t mean there is one. We haven’t succeeded on that level yet.”

  Still, Garcia said that his year and a half in the Deadless wilderness had left him feeling that “the thing I’m most into is the survival of the Grateful Dead. I think that’s my main trip now. . . . I feel like I’ve had both trips now—I’ve been with the Grateful Dead for ten or twelve years, and I’ve also been out of it, in the sense of going out in the world and traveling and doing things under my own hook. And really, I’m not that taken with my own ideas. I don’t really have that much to say, and I’m more interested in being involved in something that’s larger than me. . . . So, sometime in the last year I decided, yeah, that’s it—that’s definitely the farthest-out thing I’ve ever been involved in, and it’s the thing that makes me feel the best. And it seems to have the most ability to sort of neutrally put something good into the mainstream. It’s also fascinating in the sense of the progression. The year-to-year changes are fascinating.”