Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  After the tour left the New York area, Olsen flew to London to work with the renowned British arranger Paul Buckmaster on orchestral parts for “Terrapin” and Donna Godchaux’s moving ballad “Sunrise,” which had been inspired by the death of Grateful Dead road manager Rex Jackson in an automobile accident in September 1976. “The orchestrations were written after the vocals were done because I wanted to complement the Dead instead of have the Dead complement some orchestration,” Olsen says. “So I took the tapes and went over to England. Buckmaster, being quite well-to-do for a string player, owned this house [in London] but he had put no furniture in it. So we had a tape deck on one side of the room and a remote control and charts all over the floor, and we were on our hands and knees on the floor writing out this part and that part.”

  The orchestrations proved to be the most controversial element on the album, and Mickey Hart in particular hated Buckmaster’s light and breezy orchestrations on the otherwise furious drum duel known as “Terrapin Flyer.” Olsen says, “I told Garcia and Weir exactly what I planned on doing with the orchestrations and they gave me the go-ahead. I said, ‘Do I have to go through every member of the band?’ They said, ‘No, we’ll take care of it.’ But I don’t think they ever told anybody.”

  The strings, a five-piece recorder consort, a horn section and a choir (for the last section of “Terrapin”) were recorded at three different London studios, and then Olsen brought the tapes back to California and he and Garcia mixed the record in a number of marathon sessions.

  “It was a slightly strange time because almost nobody else was around or allowed in,” Emily Craig says. “The other bandmembers were in and out. Mickey drove off a cliff and was laid up for a while. And Deborah was persona non grata.”

  The relationship between Garcia and Deborah Koons had started to unravel a bit as early as mid-1976, and by the beginning of 1977 Garcia had moved out of his Belvedere home and into a room in Richard Loren’s Mill Valley management office, which was in a nice house on a hill. By most accounts, the breakup was long and messy. Garcia was famously unassertive and nonconfrontational in relationships. He preferred ducking and hiding and allowing others—crew members, friends—to build an impenetrable wall around him to protect him from unpleasantness. It didn’t always work. In one incident, recounted by a witness, Deborah threw a container from a water dispenser through a window at Loren’s office after Garcia and a couple of his cronies repeatedly refused to unlock the door to let her in.

  Rock Scully and others have suggested that the Grateful Dead crew was instrumental in destroying Jerry and Deborah’s relationship. But Richard Loren maintains, “Jerry drove her away as much as the crew drove her away. If Jerry wanted to have her by his side and the crew didn’t want it, she would have been there. So that doesn’t give Jerry credit for having a say in his love life. I think it was much deeper than that. Jerry was such a complex person that no woman was going to be part of all of his life. I think what part of him that she had was precious to her and vice versa.”

  In Deborah’s telling of the relationship’s demise, she broke up with Garcia in November 1977, many months later than others claim. “I had been traveling with Jerry for about three years,” she said, “and I’d moved to California to live with him, and what I realized after those three years is that I felt that I’d lost my identity in Jerry’s life. I felt like I kind of dissolved myself in his life. And I wanted to not have to go everywhere with him and do everything with him—basically live his life. So I told him I didn’t want to travel with him anymore and I wanted to kind of pull back, and he got angry about that and we just reached a rocky place. I think that if we’d been able to be left alone, we could’ve worked it out, but such was the nature of Jerry’s life that there were a lot of people around him and they jumped in and started interfering and kind of taking over.”

  Mountain Girl returned from her self-imposed exile on the Oregon coast to the Stinson Beach house in August 1977. She enrolled Sunshine and Annabelle in a public school in Bolinas, and then a few weeks later “Jerry showed up and said he was moving back in if that was okay with us,” she says. “We all stood there with our mouths hanging open. ‘Oh, okay.’ The bad part was I had come back and put the house on the market because I decided it had too many ghosts for me—I literally sold it the night before he came home. Anyway, he came back and it was a very nice moment for all of us, and we got to stay there for three or four months before the sale went through.”

  Meanwhile, back in the corporate record business world, Arista Records boss Clive Davis directed his company to make a concerted promotional push for Terrapin Station when it was released in the middle of the summer of 1977, and the album did sell more in its first few months than the previous studio album on Grateful Dead Records, Blues for Allah. Still, there weren’t many radio stations willing to take the plunge and play the entire eighteen minutes of the “Terrapin” suite. “Estimated Prophet” garnered much more radio play (and does to this day), but Arista failed to break a hit single from the record. First they considered releasing a remixed version of “Dancing in the Streets,” augmented with horns; then they switched at the last moment and put out “Passenger,” a propulsive rock tune written by Phil Lesh and Peter Monk and sung by Weir and Donna Godchaux. It failed to catch on, however.

  Reaction to Terrapin Station among Deadheads was decidedly mixed. Many were simply unwilling to accept a Grateful Dead slicked up by an L.A. producer using horns and strings. The record was also characterized by an odd sort of perfection—never a Grateful Dead quality. “It actually sounds like a record,” Garcia crowed at the time. “People won’t believe it’s us.”

  The Dead were not exactly considered to be a band on the cutting edge in 1977; quite the contrary. That was the year punk and new wave hit with a vengeance, and with them the beginnings of a serious anti-hippie blacklash in the youth culture. With an amazing array of British acts crossing the Atlantic—the Clash, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker—and a new breed of U.S. groups tearing up the clubs—Blondie, the Ramones, Mink DeVille, Talking Heads—the Dead were suddenly regarded as terribly passé in rock-critic circles. Bands that jammed and played eighteen-minute songs were regarded as bloated, antiquated relics of rock’s past. Better to pogo furiously for the two minutes of the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” than to wiggle in your seat to eleven minutes of “Peggy-O.” (For his part, Garcia professed to liking the Ramones, Elvis Costello and other new wave bands.) Pot was derided as a brain-rotting soporific; psychedelics were considered more ’60s detritus. Speed, cocaine and heroin were the preferred drugs in the punk/new wave world.

  The Dead scene didn’t discriminate against any drugs, and by the end of 1977, cocaine and, to a lesser degree, heroin use were on the rise. When Mountain Girl first heard reports that a form of smokable heroin known simply as “Persian” had entered the scene, “I didn’t believe it. We associated heroin with crummy, dirty junkies on the street; the downward chute, where you’re flat on your back within two weeks. I thought it was totally antithetical to what I felt we were all about. Heroin is just such a dead-end drug. It doesn’t lead you anywhere but down. There’s no special enlightenment to be gained from it. It’s sheer wastage, beyond cocaine. Cocaine at least you get some work done, even if it’s not very good work.”

  Heroin had been on the fringes of the Dead’s world since the ’60s. Some members of the extended Diggers family had been into smack, and it was used by a number of people in San Francisco bands, including Big Brother and Santana. Members of both of the Dead’s Watkins Glen mates—the Band and the Allman Brothers—had had problems with heroin, and the drug even gained a foothold at Mickey Hart’s ranch for a while. In his book, Rock Scully says that French concert promoters on the Dead’s 1974 Europe tour gave the band some potent China White heroin, and Ron Rakow admits that one Christmastime, on a whim, he took it upon himself to score some of the powder for himself and Garcia. But even in a world that embraced drugs the way the Dead did, he
roin was widely regarded as the one true no-no. That is, until Persian came into the scene.

  “When it first came around it was not called heroin; it was known as Persian opium,” says Alan Trist. “Of course it turned out to not really be opium, which is somewhat benign, at all, but a form of processed heroin. At first it was an experience of an energizing drug. Eventually, of course, you sort of fall down or get slopped out on it, but initially it isn’t like that—it’s energizing, particularly if you combine it with cocaine. It was in some respects ideal for the situation that Jerry was in. It allowed him to do a tremendous amount and not be bothered by all the pressures. Eventually, of course, it turns on you and it has the opposite effect, which is perhaps not that recognizable to the user, but is to others.”

  “When you’re a guy like him,” Richard Loren says, “you’re in the center of a maelstrom, a whirlwind. Everybody’s asking questions, everybody wants you to give a decision on things, everybody wants help, everybody needs you just for a second. Plus you’ve got to play good music. Everybody’s dependent on you. You’re one large breast and nipple. So you’ve got all these demands on your time, so you’re taking more coke to be able to do more things and then all of a sudden you’re ‘burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail,’ as Dylan said [in “Shelter from the Storm”]. And when the Persian came in it was like ‘Phew!’ I saw that it relaxed him.”

  Richard Loren adds that because Garcia was wired on cocaine so much of the time, “his body needed the tranquility that heroin offers, without damaging the liver the way alcohol does. It was something that relaxed him. I think he might have died sooner of a heart attack if he hadn’t done heroin. Because on coke you’re racing, racing, racing.”

  For a considerable period, Garcia’s involvement with opiates was relatively light and didn’t seem to be a significant problem. He wasn’t lacking in energy, he was still mostly his genial self, and his creative drive was definitely still intact. So much so that in the second half of 1977 and the winter of 1978 he and the Jerry Garcia Band spent hundreds of hours in the Dead’s Club Front rehearsal space cutting an album of completely original material—Cats Under the Stars.

  “We put so much blood into that record,” John Kahn said. “That was our major try. It was all new material and we did it all ourselves. We spent so many hours in the studio. When we were inside there we didn’t know if it was day or night except for this one little crack in the ceiling that would allow you to see if it was dark or light. I remember one stretch where it changed three times before I left the studio.”

  “I worked real hard at it and was very diligent and almost scientific about it,” Garcia said. “There was a lot of heart in it, you might say.”

  Though a few of the songs were performed on the East and West Coasts in the late fall of 1977, the songs were mostly unknown to Deadheads around the country when the record came out in April 1978. The album accurately captured the gospel vibe of that version of the JGB with Keith and Donna and Ron Tutt, and the songs wore well through the years, developing nicely in concert.

  The opener, “Reuben and Cherise,” was a favorite of both Hunter and Garcia. Musically and lyrically, the song was somewhat reminiscent of parts of the “Terrapin” suite: like “Lady with a Fan,” it was a linear story with mythic overtones dealing in part with true and transcendent love, and laced with symbolism. (Hunter acknowledged that the song was influenced in part by Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus’s 1960 film that retells the Orpheus myth in a Brazilian Carnaval setting.) And like the instrumental track “Terrapin Station,” the jam at the end of “Reuben and Cherise” revolved around a clever melodic figure that changed subtly over the course of many repetitions. Using the envelope filter on his guitar, Garcia elicited a hornlike tone that gave the song an almost regal quality, as if it were being played by some troubadour before a king centuries ago.

  Cherise was brushing her long hair gently down

  It was the afternoon of Carnival

  As she brushes it gently down

  Reuben was strumming the painted mandolin

  It was inlaid with a pretty face in jade

  Played the Carnival Parade

  Cherise was dressing as Pirouette in white

  When a fatal vision gripped her tight

  “Cherise, beware tonight”

  Garcia’s double-tracked acoustic rhythm guitar line propelled the song briskly, and Keith Godchaux contributed some of his boldest playing on this standout tune. One could imagine that “Terrapin” might have sounded something like this had Garcia, rather than Keith Olsen, produced that record.

  From that dense but powerful opening song, the album progressed through a number of different interesting moods. “Love in the Afternoon,” by Hunter and Kahn, was a light, easygoing tune that fell somewhere between reggae and a samba. “Palm Sunday” was one of Garcia’s shortest songs—just a little more than two minutes long—but it’s one of his prettiest. For the first minute of the tune, Dave Burgin plays a lovely line on the chromatic harp while Garcia plays acoustic guitar underneath. Then Garcia and Donna Godchaux sing a beautiful gospel-inflected unison duet on the song’s lone verse:

  The river so white

  The mountain so red

  And with the sunshine

  Over my head

  The honky-tonks are

  All closed and hushed

  It must be Palm Sunday again

  “I really loved that tune,” Donna says wistfully. “Every Palm Sunday after that I would call Jerry and say, ‘Hey Jerry, looks like Palm Sunday again,’” she laughs.

  Both “Cats Under the Stars” and “Rhapsody in Red” allowed Hunter and Garcia to address their mutual love of music itself. In the former, Garcia worked through what sounded like a quirky blend of New Orleans funk and ’30s pop and jazz styles, while Hunter, who said he based the lyrics on a doodle he drew, depicted a world for the musicians in the JGB to jam in:

  Cats on the bandstand

  Give ’em each a big hand

  Anyone who sweats like that

  Must be all right

  “Rhapsody in Red” sounded like a midtempo Chuck Berry song as John Lennon might have rewritten it. Garcia played a piercing electric guitar line through the entire song, and this is one of several tunes on the record that benefited from a sympathetic organ overdub by Garcia’s old compadre Merl Saunders.

  The longest track on the album was “Rain,” a somewhat Beatlesesque tune written and sung by Donna, and with a lush orchestration by John Kahn that featured Keith’s brother Brian and sister-in-law Candy on violins. Kahn’s instrumental “Down Home” had no lyrics at all: It was just Donna singing wordlessly above a nicely arranged backup chorus of stacked “oo-oo” vocals and an acoustic bass line; a serene but slightly melancholy Southern gospel interlude that one could imagine hearing in a film like the black musical Cabin in the Sky. Then, with barely a break, “Down Home” rolls into a lazy shuffle called “Gomorrah,” a Sunday school parable (with a dash of irony delivered by the Reverend Garcia), to end the album.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Garcia said in the early ’90s, “Cats Under the Stars is my most successful record—even though it’s my least successful record! I’ve always really loved it and it just never went anywhere.”

  Garcia admitted he was disappointed that both rock radio and so many of his fans ignored the record. It was a beautifully made album loaded with strong melodies and sure rhythms. In a way it felt like a continuation of the “Terrapin” vibe, though perhaps lacking that work’s deep, heartfelt passion. There was no great revelatory moment—no “inspiration, move me brightly”—where Garcia’s and Hunter’s souls clearly merged in mystical union and sang with one voice. But the album stands as one of the most cohesive and fully realized projects Hunter and Garcia worked on together; and it represents the last great studio collaboration between Garcia and John Kahn.

  By the time Cats Under the Stars came out in April 1978, Ron Tutt had left the group, replaced by
L.A. drummer Buzz Buchanan; and Maria Muldaur, who was John Kahn’s girlfriend, had been added as a second harmony singer. (She appeared on two songs on the album.) The combination of Donna and Maria boosted the JGB’s gospel quotient, but Buchanan, though talented, didn’t have the supple touch that Ron Tutt is so revered for.

  “That version of the group with Maria sounded really good,” Kahn said, “but it didn’t end up being a good idea to have two couples in the band. There would be huge fights. Let’s face it—it’s an abusive lifestyle. It’s not the best way to have a relationship.” Still, Kahn said of the group at the time, “We’ve really become a band. It’s not just something Jerry does in his spare time or that I do in my spare time or anything like that.”

  “Not only is it a band,” Garcia enthused, “but it’s a band that has this thing of consonance. . . . This band represents an amazing agreement. By contrast, the Grateful Dead represents amazing disagreement in terms of everybody having tremendously different ideas about music. But that’s interesting for other reasons. This gets us all off in the same way. When the Grateful Dead gets off, everybody gets off differently.”

  By mid-1978 Garcia, Kahn and Keith were all sliding toward heavier drug dependency, and Keith in particular seemed to be completely wasted much of the time onstage with both the Jerry Garcia Band and the Grateful Dead. His playing, once full of life and overflowing with imaginative ideas, often became blocky and monochromatic during this period, and he wasn’t nearly as responsive to the other musicians.

  “Unfortunately, Keith was determined to do all the bad things that everybody else did,” Mountain Girl observes. “That was one of the goals—to get messed up. He really liked to get trashed, and I think he was also an influence that way. He didn’t really care how rubbery he got, and because he wasn’t right out front in the band he could afford to get more rubbery.