Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  In June 1985 the Dead officially celebrated their twentieth anniversary with three shows at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, which after four years of great Dead concerts there had become many Deadheads’ favorite place to see the band—a mecca worth traveling to; ground zero. This momentous occasion did not escape the notice of the mainstream media, either. Beginning with the Dead’s spring tour, newspapers and magazines around the country had started to take note of the impending anniversary, with one perplexed reporter after another sent to wade into the tie-dyed throngs in the parking lots outside Dead shows to explore and then try to explain the mystery of the Dead’s allure. Hippies, in 1985? So the intrepid scribes would find a flaxen-haired young hippie girl named something outlandish like Rainbow Starcloud, selling veggie burritos, and a grizzled, gray-bearded Haight-Ashbury acid casualty sitting by a dilapidated VW van, and those two people would be used to represent all Deadheads. This same type of story, with minor variations in the cast of characters, was written hundreds of times in cities big and small. The American press loved writing about the Dead from the mid-’80s on, mostly because the bandmembers were perceived as leaders of a strange hippie cult dedicated to keeping the supposedly outmoded ideals of the ’60s alive. In 1985 the Dead and the Deadheads were the antithesis of what was considered hip. At best, writers treated them as colorful anachronisms; more often the tone of the writing about both was condescending or downright insulting. There was rarely much intelligent writing about the band’s music, and the rock press, including the once-friendly Rolling Stone, largely ignored the Dead altogether.

  But the twentieth anniversary perked up a lot of people’s interest. Twenty years was an achievement in the world of rock ’n’ roll bands. Who else could boast such longevity? The Rolling Stones, but they survived only because they had gone through long periods when they didn’t tour or even see each other. The Dead had toured solidly for twenty years, even gigging during their hiatus. The Beach Boys? By 1985 they had been strictly an oldies act for ten years, cranking out the same twenty hits every night. No, in the mid-’80s the Dead could rightfully claim to be the most successful touring rock band in history, and though they had not put out a record of new material in five years, their following continued to grow across the country, particularly in the South and the Northeast, where they could now sell out more than one show at a time in sports arenas in several different cities.

  “The years are starting to pay off,” Garcia commented to one writer that spring when asked about the band’s durability. “It’s like the Budapest String Quartet or the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which had the same horn section for more than twenty years. It matters. Those horn blends are legendary.

  “We’re not family,” he went on. “We’re far closer than family could ever be. No matter what we do, the Grateful Dead will always be something we’re involved with. At this point, it’s reflexive.”

  The anniversary concerts themselves had an unusually festive air about them. Behind the stage hung a giant banner designed by Rick Griffin depicting a skeleton minuteman holding Garcia’s guitar instead of a musket and standing in front of an American flag. Under the Dead’s name it read TWENTY YEARS SO FAR in ornate Griffinesque lettering. T-shirts bearing Griffin’s design were top sellers throughout the summer and fall Dead tours.

  As the band came onstage on the first night of the three-show series, Dan Healy cranked up the opening of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” through the PA: “It was twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play / They’ve been goin’ in and out of style, but they’re guaranteed to raise a smile. . . .” The Dead kicked off the show with a tune from their early days, “Dancing in the Streets,” and the Greek was a blur of color, motion and white, toothy grins in the late-afternoon sun. Three songs into the set, though, there was a malfunction in the sound system and the band had to leave the stage for a time while it was fixed. How very Grateful Dead for something to screw up on their big day!

  Once the gremlins had been chased away, however, the Dead responded by playing three excellent shows packed with neat surprises, including Derek and the Dominos’ “Keep On Growing,” sung by Phil and Brent, remarkably apt for the occasion; the first version of the “Cryptical Envelopment” section of “That’s It for the Other One” in fifteen years; and the return after five years of “Comes a Time.” Garcia’s singing on that last tune was particularly emotive and affecting, no doubt because the words mirrored his own experience of the previous few years so well:

  Day to day just lettin’ it ride

  You get so far away from how it feels inside

  You can’t let go, ’cause you’re afraid to fall

  But the day may come when you can’t feel at all

  Comes a time when the blind man takes your hand

  Says ‘Don’t you see?’ . . .

  The Dead’s tours that summer and autumn were unusually strong, with especially varied set lists, crisp and purposeful jamming and a higher level of energy onstage than anyone had seen in quite a while. From outward appearances, Garcia was a different person than he’d been a year earlier, and his more open and ebullient stage personality clearly affected the other bandmembers—particularly Phil, who was now happily married and the most sober he’d been in years. The Deadheads, in turn, could see the obvious shift in the onstage dynamic, and that contributed to a more upbeat environment in the audience, as the widespread concern for Garcia’s well-being in the wake of the January ’85 bust was slowly replaced by an almost giddy optimism. “We will survive,” indeed.

  The downside of the Dead’s renaissance is that on many tour dates, especially on the East Coast, the shows started to attract large crowds of people who didn’t have tickets for the sold-out concerts and who were content to hang around outside the venues, trying to score spare tickets (or spare change), partying with each other and occasionally trying to storm the doors to get in free. In Richmond, Virginia (very strong Dead Country), in early November, gate-crashers ran up against mounted police outside the Coliseum, resulting in a number of arrests and minor injuries. A week later, outside the Brendan Byrne Arena in northern New Jersey, ticketless hordes, aided by drunken, rowdy New York Giants fans who’d attended a football game next door at Giants Stadium, broke through a tight security cordon and clashed with the arena’s security forces. These sorts of crowd-control problems would dog the Dead intermittently for the rest of their days.

  Still, this hopeful and regenerative year ended on an up note, as the Dead played their traditional New Year’s Eve concert for one of their largest audiences ever. The second set (the “midnight set”) of the concert from the 14,000-seat Oakland Coliseum Arena was broadcast live nationwide over the fledgling USA cable television network. For East Coast Deadheads, the telecast began at 2:30 in the morning, but it offered them a rare chance to witness one of the sacred rituals of Grateful Dead culture since the late ’60s—a New Year’s Eve show.

  Because Garcia was so heavily involved in Grateful Dead–related activities for much of 1985, the Jerry Garcia Band didn’t play as often as they had in ’83 and ’84, when they had undertaken several tours outside of California. Still, the JGB definitely benefited from Garcia’s improved health and disposition. The core lineup of Garcia, John Kahn (who was still living drug-free in Los Angeles during most of 1985), organist Melvin Seals, drummer David Kemper (also a successful L.A. session player) and singers Gloria Jones and Jaclyn LaBranch slowly developed into a formidable unit that carried forward the tradition established by Garcia’s best late-’70s groups, but with even stronger gospel underpinnings. Melvin was more than just a gospel foil for Garcia, however. He had strong rock, R&B and blues chops from playing in Jon Hendricks’s long-running musical Evolution of the Blues, and as a member of Elvin Bishop’s rockin’ boogie band for six years.

  “Jerry was so happy when we got to that lineup with Melvin, Jackie and Gloria,” Kahn said in 1996. “They were so easygoing and always in a good
mood and they were up for anything. We’d try all these weird songs in rehearsal, every style you can imagine—Beatle songs, Dylan songs, old R&B—and they’d be right on it, even though most of them were songs they didn’t know.”

  By April 1986 Garcia had stopped using heroin and cocaine altogether—suffering through a rough withdrawal immediately after kicking—and his transformation back to the ebullient “old Jerry” was complete, much to the delight of his fellow bandmembers, friends and everyone in the crowd, who couldn’t help noticing the change. That said, the Dead’s shows in the first half of 1986 were more erratic than they had been in the second half of 1985. The concerts were full of spirit, to be sure, but there didn’t seem to be as much thought put into the transitions between songs in the second set as there had been six months earlier, and there was not as much jamming in general; it’s not clear why that would be true of this period, and one didn’t hear many complaints—it was enough to watch the happy Garcia.

  “By April of ’86 he was straight,” says Len Dell’Amico, “and the ripple effect that this had in their tribe was amazing to see. Think about how hard that must have been for him—being addicted to those substances on that level, and gradually stepping away from them; and the sense of sacrifice to achieve that and how strong, leonine and leaderlike and positive that was. So this flowering was taking place and there was a very uplifting sense of possibilities in the scene.”

  When he wasn’t on the road playing with the Dead, Garcia spent much of his time with Dell’Amico choosing songs from the Marin Vets video sessions to be included in their forthcoming long-form video and working on edits of the performances. By the spring of 1986 they had it whittled down to two hours, but another hour would be eliminated before the video was completed in the spring of 1987.

  The Dead’s summer tour that year generated more interest than usual outside of Deadhead circles, because five of the shows—all in football stadiums—paired the Dead on a bill with Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who also acted as Dylan’s backup band. Garcia had attended a Dylan-Petty show at the Greek Theater that spring and had spent considerable time chatting with Dylan backstage; though Garcia had played with Dylan at the Warfield Theater in 1980, it was this night at the Greek and on the following summer tour that cemented their close personal relationship. They were mutual admirers who shared similar roots in American folk and blues. And they had both carried heavy loads since the ’60s—Dylan as the de facto poet laureate of American music; Garcia as the embodiment of the libertine Haight-Ashbury ethos—and had attracted more than their share of fanatics and devoted followers who placed them on uncomfortable pedestals. Garcia had more Dylan tunes in his repertoire than did any other major American singer: Just in 1985 and 1986, between the Dead and the JGB, Garcia sang “She Belongs to Me,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Visions of Johanna,” “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Simple Twist of Fate.”

  Expectations for the tour ran high, with most Deadheads hoping that Dylan and the Dead would find a way to play together. At the first concert in Minneapolis, they didn’t join forces. But at the Rubber Bowl in Akron a week later (after the Dead had played several shows alone in the Midwest), Dylan joined them during their first set and played some typically odd, off-time rhythm guitar on a version of the blues standard “Little Red Rooster,” and then led the band through stumbling versions of his own “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” This was a period when Dylan’s singing was particularly nasal and unmelodic, and the Dead had a difficult time following his unpredictable phrasing. Still, there were hints that the partnership could produce something interesting.

  Unbeknownst to the rest of the band, Garcia began smoking heroin and cocaine again on the tour, using old contacts to secretly score drugs for him—and there was never a shortage of people wanting to get Garcia high, even in the middle of the night, usually in exchange for a backstage pass for the next show or some such perquisite. Why did Garcia slip back to his old ways on the tour after having worked so long and courageously to get clean? Nora Sage, who was on the tour and suddenly found herself frozen out of Garcia’s life—perhaps because he knew she would not approve of his drug use—suggests that he felt a lot of pressure because he was unaccustomed to playing in stadiums, and being on the same bill with Dylan added a layer of weirdness to the proposition. And there was his physical discomfort: In Ohio he was bothered so much by an infected tooth that he had to go to a dentist, who prescribed large dosages of codeine, a narcotic itself.

  Two days later, on Independence Day, the tour reached Rich Stadium in Buffalo, and Garcia wasn’t feeling well. The codeine had laid him low; he bowed out of a planned dinner at Len Dell’Amico’s mother’s house and stayed in his motel instead, feeling groggy. He was having kidney problems as well. In the record heat and humidity that had followed the entire Midwest swing of the tour, Garcia had suffered from dehydration, while at the same time he kept feeling the need to urinate, a very uncomfortable sensation he couldn’t shake for days.

  Still, Garcia managed to gather enough strength to play an excellent show in Buffalo, including a half-hour segment of the second set that was telecast live across the country as part of Farm Aid, a benefit concert country music superstar Willie Nelson had put together to raise money for financially strapped farmers. During the Dead’s televised portion, Garcia sang fine versions of “The Wheel” and “Uncle John’s Band” and successfully concealed his physical distress. The Farm Aid broadcast also showed a portion of the Dylan-Petty set; Dylan and the Dead didn’t play together at this show.

  The Dead-Dylan-Heartbreakers minitour ended with two concerts played in steambath conditions at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., site of the famous Dead–Allman Brothers concerts more than a decade earlier. At the second of those two shows, July 7, Dylan once again ambled onstage during the Dead’s first set and joined the group for tentative versions of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Desolation Row” (which Weir seemed to know much better than Dylan).

  “I found myself in the weird position of teaching Dylan his own songs,” Garcia said with a chortle. “It’s just really strange! It was funny. He was great. He was so good about all this stuff. Weir wanted to do ‘Desolation Row’ with him, y’know, and it’s got a million words. So Weir says, ‘Are you sure you’ll remember all the words?’ And Dylan says, ‘I’ll remember the important ones!’”

  Though outwardly Garcia’s demeanor at the concert was upbeat, it was clear that something was not right with him physically. On a couple of occasions between songs he left the stage—including during the jam on “Playing in the Band” in the second set. Both sets were much shorter than usual, not surprising since the temperature was in the high nineties even late in the evening.

  An exhausted Garcia flew back to California the next day, happy to be heading back to Marin County’s more temperate climate. On the afternoon of his second day back, July 10—a day before the band was set to go down the coast to Ventura for their annual shows at the beachside County Fairgrounds—Garcia became delirious, and eventually passed out in the bathroom of his house, where Nora Sage discovered him. She immediately called an ambulance, but by the time he reached Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, Garcia was in a deep coma with a perilously high temperature. The doctors put him on a bed of ice to bring his temperature down, and Nora spent the night rubbing his feet, trying to keep his circulation going. Though he was basically comatose, at one point Garcia came to long enough to yank the tubes from his nose and throat, so nurses shot him up with Demerol to sedate him.

  “I felt better after cleaning up, oddly enough, until that tour,” Garcia said a year later. “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 the to
ur, I was just really tired. One day, I couldn’t move anymore, so I sat down. A week later I woke up in the hospital, and I didn’t know what had happened. It was really weird.”

  What had happened, according to the Dead’s own statement at the time, was that Garcia had slipped into a coma as a result of “the sudden onset of diabetes and a general systemic infection as a result of an abscessed tooth and exhaustion following a road tour.” Although he had no history of diabetes, his notoriously poor eating habits—lots of ice cream and other junk food—coupled with his chain-smoking of cigarettes, his years of serious drug abuse and the process of weaning himself of his heroin addiction contributed to his precipitous decline. He was teetering near the brink of death when he arrived at the hospital, and for the next five days his fortunes went up and down.

  “It was adrenal exhaustion which led to a diabetic episode,” says Mountain Girl. “It was really, really hot on that tour; a sweatbath. It was a hundred and four, a hundred and seven; just wretchedly hot. If any medical people had been looking at him they would have caught it. But nobody was there for him. He got into peeing and peeing and peeing and you just start wasting away and dehydrating. But nobody got him to the doctor and nobody called the doctor to say, ‘Gee, Jerry’s having to stop the music and pee every twenty minutes.’ It was driving him nuts. He didn’t know what was happening to him. And that was the beginning of the breakdown. He came home and fell apart.”

  M.G. was home in Oregon when she got the news about Jerry’s collapse. “I jumped on a plane at six-thirty the next morning and took the airporter up to the hospital and I got there and the doctor was saying, ‘We’re not sure he’s going to live through the hour.’ They were saying, ‘We’re readying him for a tracheotomy to help his breathing.’ I said, ‘A what? No, you’re not!’ I told them I thought that was a really bad idea. Obviously if it was absolutely necessary as a last resort to save his life that would be one thing, but . . .