Asked by interviewer Brian Connors (a friend of Phil’s) if there was anything that Deadheads could do to help the band, Lesh replied, “Well, when we get back on the road, it would be very helpful if Deadheads wouldn’t bring drugs around anymore. We’d kind of like to ask everyone to look at themselves, and look at their use of hard drugs, and kind of reconsider it, because it’s not a very good trip. We’ve all discovered that. . . . Personally, and that’s all I can really talk about, I’m down on it. I’m through with it—forever!”
No member of the Grateful Dead had ever made such a public pronouncement against drugs before, and in fact there were many Deadheads who curtailed or even eliminated their use of hard drugs around this time, at least in part to show their solidarity with Garcia, who had kicked drugs before his collapse and had told friends he intended to stay clean. It’s hard to say to what degree Garcia’s previous use of cocaine and heroin might have influenced some of his fans to experiment with those substances, but it can definitely be said there was a connection between his quitting drugs and many others following suit. Coke and heroin (the latter never widely popular among rank-and-file Deadheads) became branded as “bad” drugs in some circles, as opposed to pot and psychedelics, which were still regarded by their adherents as useful consciousness-expanding agents historically rooted to the social context that spawned the primal Grateful Dead experience. And quite a few Deadheads stopped using drugs altogether.
* * *
By mid-September Garcia was itching to get back to playing in front of people, so he had John Kahn call rehearsals for the JGB, and two shows were scheduled for October 4 and 5 at the Stone, an 700-seat club on Broadway in North Beach that had become a sort of home base for the band in the early ’80s (as the Keystone Berkeley, which had the same owners, had been in the ’70s). “When he first told me he wanted to play some shows, I nearly fell out of my chair,” Kahn said, “because I wasn’t sure he was strong enough to do it at that point. But we had about a week of rehearsals, and he seemed to be doing pretty good, and he was real excited to be back playing with the group. We even learned a few new songs, which we hadn’t done for a while.”
“I hated that he played those shows at the Stone,” Mountain Girl says. “Those shows never should have been played. Jerry was still in terrible shape. It was completely crazy. What happened was we completely ran out of money at that point. There was no money at all. Jerry owed the band a whole bunch of money and he was overdrawn. But frankly, if I wasn’t around to handle the money, he was always overdrawn.”
As soon as the shows were announced on the one San Francisco radio station that played Grateful Dead songs from time to time—KFOG—there was a mad scramble for tickets. All 1,600 tickets—each one trumpeting THE TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF JERRY GARCIA!—were snapped up in less than an hour, so ducats for a second set of shows about two weeks later were also put on sale. Outside the Stone the afternoon before the first show, hundreds of ticketless Deadheads clogged the area looking for some miracle ticket to appear from a kind stranger with an extra. Inside the hot, low-ceilinged club that evening, the atmosphere was giddy and electric, but tinged with apprehension. Could Garcia still play well? Was he really healthy? No one in the crowd knew for sure.
At about eight-fifteen the curtain rose slowly and there was Garcia, looking considerably thinner than he had before the coma, a big smile on his face, easing into the funky groove of Allen Toussaint’s “Get Out of My Life, Woman,” as the packed house exploded in cheers. And as he ripped into his first solo of the evening, the apprehension in the air turned to pure elation. Garcia’s playing was surprisingly strong and confident, and his singing was markedly better, no doubt in part because he had quit smoking (for the time being). The second song of the night was a new addition to the repertoire, a gospel-flavored arrangement of Dylan’s “Forever Young,” which Garcia delivered with a mixture of heartfelt sincerity and a dash of irony, given his own circumstances. By the time that song had run its course, there was barely a dry eye in the house, but then Garcia took the heavy moment and transformed it to joy with a rocking version of the old Motown nugget that had been something of a theme song for Garcia’s solo groups dating back to the early ’70s. “How sweet it is to be loved by you!” he sang with a broad smile on his face that was returned by every person in the room.
Garcia introduced two more new cover songs at these shows, both slow ballads given strong gospel treatments—Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” and “Lucky Old Sun,” popularized by Frankie Laine in the ’40s and Ray Charles in the early ’60s. “I got it from the Ray Charles version,” John Kahn said in 1996. “He had that thing where he was able to play a song really, really slow—I understand it drove some of his musicians crazy—but they would be incredibly powerful. Jerry and I loved to play ballads more than anything. If we didn’t push ourselves consciously to play fast songs, I think we would’ve ended up doing all ballads. Every time we’d find another song we wanted to do it was like, ‘Oh, no, we have to find a fast song instead!’”
Later that fall the group did introduce an uptempo (almost frenetic) tune, Los Lobos’ “Evangeline,” as well as two midtempo numbers from Van Morrison’s classic Moondance album, “And It Stoned Me” and “Crazy Love.” In fact, Van’s soulful early-’70s groups had certainly been a model for the JGB, deftly mixing R&B and gospel grooves.
So much of the new material Garcia and Kahn brought into the band that fall had spiritual overtones that some Deadheads wondered if Garcia had experienced some sort of religious awakening following his near-death experience. Kahn said later, “He definitely went through something, though I don’t think it was specifically Christian or anything. We talked about it a little. I think he was mainly just happy to be alive and appreciative that he could still play and that people wanted to see him. It was a good time for the group.”
“I think there’s a more spiritual focus to what we’re doing now,” Melvin Seals commented about the mood in the band after Garcia’s return. “Any time you come close to death it makes you think about things differently and it does something to you inside. I can’t speak for Jerry, but I think the band has gotten deeper in feeling each other and expressing it through the music. We’re all more serious about what we’re doing.”
By mid-October the Grateful Dead had confirmed that they were planning to return to the stage in mid-December, with three shows at the Oakland Coliseum. Even so, on October 15 there was a second “Night of the Living Deadheads” event at Wolfgang’s, and this time the hundreds of Deadheads on hand were treated to a videotaped interview with Garcia—his first since the coma—done by the head of the Dead’s ticketing operation, Steve Marcus. Garcia revealed that he had been working on a couple of new songs and that the group would begin recording their long-awaited album in January.
“Our plan is essentially this,” he said. “We’re going into the Marin Vets [Marin Veterans Auditorium] again in January with no audience and use it as a studio [as they had for the video sessions]. It turns out to be an incredibly nice room to record in. There’s something about the formal atmosphere in there that makes us work. When we set up at Front Street to work, a lot of times we just sort of dissolve into hanging out.”
Toward the end of the interview Garcia spoke a bit about his illness and recovery, and when asked the same question that had been put to Phil during his interview a month earlier—“Is there anything you feel Deadheads can do to help out the Grateful Dead when you start touring?”—his answer was quite different from Lesh’s anti-drug plea:
“Well sure, there’s all kinds of things, probably, but it’s not my position to tell anybody what they should do, to modify their behavior in some direction or other to benefit anybody. That’s not what I’m about, y’know—I’m the antithesis of that, hopefully. Everybody does what they want, and I’ll try to stay out of the way if I get in the way.
“That’s in the nature of a personal decision, and I have no business talking about that shit. I’m
not a cop. I’m not into tellin’ people what to do, ever—man!” and he burst into a throaty laugh.
The Jerry Garcia Band played the Stone a few more times in November and early December and then, on December 15, the Grateful Dead made their triumphant return at the Oakland Coliseum. The group’s entrance onto the stage was greeted by near-pandemonium—after all, every person in the arena knew how close they had come to losing Garcia and, with him, the Grateful Dead. And when the first chords of “Touch of Grey” rose reassuringly out of the darkness on the stage, the roar from the crowd shook the building. There were tears of joy streaming down the faces of many in the crowd by the time Garcia got to the end of the first chorus and practically shouted, “I WILL SURVIVE!” That was all the 14,000 deliriously dancing people needed to hear. The doubts and fears dissolved. Smiles and hugs all around. Garcia was back.
CHAPTER 19
Dawn Is Breaking Everywhere
y the end of the first of the three December ’86 Grateful Dead comeback shows, it was clear that Phil Lesh’s speculation that the band was going to shake up the format of their concerts wasn’t going to happen immediately, if at all. The old songs were in the same slots they had occupied before Garcia’s coma, but no one was complaining—the format almost felt new just because the band played with so much verve and spunk. Garcia in particular seemed like a new man onstage. He smiled often, gestured and emphasized lyrics with his picking hand, swayed and bopped the most he had since the late ’70s. And he seemed to go out of his way to make eye contact with the other bandmembers, who appeared to be nearly as amazed by their comrade’s demeanor as the Deadheads pressed up against the front of the stage.
Certain lyrics suddenly took on new meanings in light of Garcia’s fall and resurrection. In “Althea,” a huge ovation went up when Garcia came to the line “There are things you can replace, and others you cannot / The time has come to weigh those things / This space is getting hot.” He delivered “Candyman” with such gusto there was no question that when he sang the lyric “Won’t you tell everybody you meet that the Candyman’s in town,” he was singing about himself. The bridge of “Wharf Rat,” which had sometimes seemed eerily ironic during Garcia’s worst junkie days, now sounded hopeful and sincere:
But I’ll get back
On my feet some day
The good Lord willing
If He says I may
I know that this life I’m living’s no good
I’ll get a new start
Live the life I should
I’ll get up up and fly away . . .
Garcia imbued ballads like “Stella Blue” and “Ship of Fools” with rare passion, and the life-and-death mysteries at the core of “Terrapin Station” felt richer and more personal. And “Black Peter” now seemed strikingly autobiographical:
Fever rolled up to a hundred and five
Roll on up, gonna roll back down
One more day I find myself alive
Tomorrow maybe go beneath the ground
For the rest of Garcia’s career, “Black Peter,” so often dirgelike in the early ’80s, would be one of his most powerful tunes, no doubt because it now had a special resonance for him. This was an obvious example of a phenomenon both the bandmembers and Deadheads experienced often through the years: a lyric coming into sharp focus as it became associated with a specific personal event. In the case of lyrics that seemed to address Garcia’s illness and recovery, Garcia and the audience got to experience cathartic epiphanies together, which served to further strengthen the bond between him and his fans. Raised on a steady diet of heavy songs about mortality, Deadheads had faced the metaphorical End many, many times at Dead shows; but now these songs were addressing something that was an undeniable part of their collective reality.
At the first of the three Oakland shows, too, Garcia introduced a pretty but mournful new Robert Hunter ballad of existential loneliness called “Black Muddy River”:
When the last rose of summer pricks my finger
And the hot sun chills me to the bone
When I can’t hear the song for the singer
And I can’t tell my pillow from a stone
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And sing me a song of my own
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And sing me a song of my own
Hunter explained, “The black muddy river is a dream I’ve had maybe three or four times over my life, and it is one of the most chilling experiences that I’ve had. It’s enough to turn you religious. I’ve burrowed under this incredible mansion, gone down into the cellars, and I find myself down at this black, lusterless, slow-flowing stygian river. There are marble columns around, and cobwebs. It’s vast and it’s hopeless. It’s death. It’s death with the absence of the soul. It’s my horror vision, and when I come out of that dream I do anything I can to counter it.”
Yet, typical of Hunter’s writing, the composition is not all dark. By the last verse the singer not only takes solace in being able to “sing me a song of my own,” but also to “dream me a dream of my own.”
“‘Black Muddy River’ is about the perspective of age and making a decision about the necessity of living in spite of a rough time and the ravages of anything else that’s going to come at you,” Hunter said. “When I wrote it, I was writing about how I felt about being forty-five years old and what I’ve been through. And then, when I was done with it, obviously it was for the Dead.”
The other new song Garcia unveiled at the comeback shows was much lighter. Musically, “When Push Comes to Shove” was in the same loping tradition of “Ramble On Rose” and “Tennessee Jed”; musically, it was not one of Garcia’s more original pieces. But lyrically, it was a hoot, a song about being afraid of everything, including and especially love. Evidently something about the song didn’t ring true for Garcia after a while, because he never sang it after the summer of 1989. Two and a half years was a very short lifetime for a Garcia song.
Almost immediately after the Dead’s year-end concerts at Kaiser Convention Center Garcia plunged into two projects that had been in limbo for a while—the long-form video, So Far, and, finally, the Dead’s new studio album, In the Dark.
Actually, it was some of the early work on the video that suggested the approach for recording the new album: they returned to the stage of the Marin Veterans Auditorium and cut the basic tracks for the LP there live (i.e., all playing together at once), with no audience, as they had for the video shoot. Then, vocal and instrumental fixes and overdubs would be recorded at Club Front.
For the first time since Blues for Allah in 1975, the album’s production was handled in-house—Garcia and engineer John Cutler co-produced, with plenty of input from the other bandmembers. Though Garcia said at the time that he normally didn’t like being forced into “the cop role” on Grateful Dead projects, his leadership and well-known attention to sonic detail was needed to bring the album to fruition. As he noted, if others were willing to defer to him, he was not afraid to make decisions.
“It’s one of the things I’m good at,” he said without a hint of boastfulness, “because first of all, I have some sense of what the Grateful Dead’s point of view is. The next part is that I won’t let things go past unless I’m sure everyone in the band sees them or hears them. So I know enough about what the potential for political nightmares are. You want everybody to like it, and you want everybody partcipating in it fully, and that means everyone has to believe in the project.
“But you have to be able to say, ‘This is it. This is the way it’s going to be.’ I’m flexible about what it’s going to be, but once all the news is in—in other words, once everyone’s put in an opinion—I take it into account and make changes and then I can say, ‘Okay, this is it.’ Nobody minds talking to me about it, and I don’t mind hearing about it from anybody, so that’s part of why it’s fallen into my hands.”
Over the course of three weeks in January, the band cut basic trac
ks on ten of their unrecorded songs: Hunter and Garcia’s “Touch of Grey,” “West L.A. Fadeaway,” “When Push Comes to Shove” and “Black Muddy River”; Weir and Barlow’s “Hell in a Bucket,” “Throwing Stones” and “My Brother Esau” (which only made it onto the cassette versions of the LP); and Brent’s rollicking train anthem, “Tons of Steel.”
Meanwhile, Garcia and Len Dell’Amico had resumed work on So Far. By the time Garcia fell ill in the summer of ’86, the duo and John Cutler had put together a seamless fifty-five-minute soundtrack that moved gracefully from “Uncle John’s Band” into “Playing in the Band” into “Lady with a Fan” (from the “Terrapin” suite), followed by a segment of “drums” and “space,” and closing with Weir’s anti-political rant “Throwing Stones” into “Not Fade Away.” The audio track consisted of material recorded at Marin Vets in 1985 with some live material from the Dead’s 1985 New Year’s Eve telecast. With that musical foundation in place, Garcia and Dell’Amico then began to explore various visual approaches to the soundtrack.
“We did a lot of brainstorming, just thinking, ‘What kind of images do Grateful Dead songs conjure?’” Garcia said. “Well—nature, powerful forces of various sorts, volcanoes erupting, tornados, lightning, strong winds, the ocean and other archetypal things like fire and that sort of stuff. Then we got into [collecting footage of] human endeavors—everything that people do. And then we went off in a completely abstract space—okay, the music may not directly suggest these things, but these things are suggested by things that are suggested. So then we got into things like architecture, stained-glass windows, tanks, that sort of stuff. It was really a sort of free-associative thing that took place over several months, just collecting lists and lists [of images].
Garcia: An American Life Page 56