“Most Grateful Dead music lacks a literal quality,” he continued. “Most of the lyrics don’t go anywhere, exactly. Some of them have really powerful images in them, but rarely do they have specific stuff. I sort of wanted to steer away from being too literal. That got to be a byword in the studio—‘Too literal! Too literal!’”
Ultimately, Garcia and Dell’Amico decided to give each song a different look. “Uncle John’s Band” was mainly just the group performing at the Marin Vets, with a patchwork quilt of photos of frontier America and the Old West gliding across the screen toward the end of the tune. “Playing in the Band” was dominated by film images of dancers from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, edited in time to the music and often altered by high-tech video manipulation—legs multiplied and distorted and split into intricate patterns, taking on new, unrecognizable forms—“kind of like a tantric carpet, pulsing and moving,” Garcia said. “Lady with a Fan” received perhaps the most ambitious visual treatment, with elaborate (for that era) 3-D computer-generated images of tarot cards drifting through a surreal landscape dominated by a chessboard.
“If you’re going to do something, it’s important—for me, at any rate—to shoot high, even if you miss, or even if you’re accused of being pretentious,” Garcia noted. “We were after the idea of electronic mind-altering and consciousness-altering, and I think on that level it’s pretty successful.”
Work on the video continued up until the Grateful Dead went out on their first post-coma Eastern tour the last week of March 1987. Not surprisingly, Garcia’s return was greeted as a veritable Second Coming by his fans. The ovations he and the band received every night of the tour were long and deafening, as if each Deadhead had to show his or her appreciation for the miracle of Garcia’s (and the band’s) survival. The Dead responded by playing a tour filled with high-energy shows that were perhaps a bit short on jamming—the big songs generally weren’t as fully developed, and transitions between tunes in the second set were sometimes a bit awkward and forced—but long on joie de vivre, which was right in keeping with the celebratory mood of the crowds.
One thing the Dead hadn’t counted on when they booked the tour was the thousands of people who showed up outside every venue they played, some hoping to score tickets for the sold-out concerts, but most quite content to hang out in the huge shopper’s bazaar that materialized in the parking lots and surrounding streets in every city on the tour. As late as 1983–84 there had still been only a few merchants who went on tour with the Dead to peddle T-shirts, stickers, incense, handmade jewelry and food items such as premade veggie burritos and chocolate chip cookies. In that era, most of the vendors had been Deadheads who wanted to earn enough money to go on tour and see as many shows as they could. Their success, coupled with the laissez-faire environment in the parking lots, encouraged others to try their hand at selling outside Dead shows, and as the number of vendors increased, so did the number of people hanging out around the bazaar. Then, because the scene was so big and colorful, it attracted the attention of newspapers and television crews in nearly every city the Dead traveled to, and these “news” reports inspired hundreds and sometimes thousands of people, many with no particular interest in the Grateful Dead, to come down and check out what was, at least on the surface, a joyfully anarchic party. It was relatively easy to score drugs there, and you could usually find a few different kinds of bottled beer for a buck.
Even in the Bay Area, where Dead fans were considerably more blasé about their heroes simply because the band played there so often, there were signs at the mid-December ’86 comeback shows, at the New Year’s series and at the Mardi Gras concerts at Kaiser in early March that things were starting to get a little crazy outside the shows. But that was nothing compared with what greeted the Dead on the East Coast. Now there were hundreds of vendors outside every show, and the majority of them were people who had no intention of going inside the arenas to see the band. Whereas in the early ’80s it had been common for solitary vendors to sell their wares out of their backpacks, by 1987 people were setting up large display tables, jewelry cases and even giant metal-framed booths to sell everything from tie-dyes to imported Guatemalan clothing to every variety of drug paraphernalia. Instead of offering a couple of dozen shirts, the larger operations brought in hundreds of pieces of clothing to sell, racks to hang them on, full-length mirrors and even Visa and MasterCard processing equipment. Still, for every one of those big operators, there were probably ten subsistence-level vendors who simply liked living on the road in the Grateful Dead environment.
Almost everywhere the Grateful Dead carnival parked itself there were problems between the crowds attracted to the bazaar and people who lived near the venues, who suddenly found strange people tramping through (or even camping on) their property, using their yards and the streets as bathrooms and having loud parties into the wee hours of the morning. This, naturally, brought more police into the areas where the Dead played, and led police chiefs, mayors and angry city officials to complain to the Dead, who, it should be said, were just trying to do what they had always done: go out on the road and play music to earn a living. The band took the heat, and in what should have been their most glorious moment—sold-out houses! positive vibes rippling through the scene in the wake of Garcia’s recovery!—they found themselves facing the possibility that they would be permanently banned from many cities because of the behavior of a small group of people outside their concerts. In fact, some municipalities did tell the Dead to take their circus elsewhere.
And this was all before the release of what everyone fully expected would be a very successful new album. What would happen if the album was a bona fide hit, bringing in thousands of new fans? “I don’t know,” Garcia told me in an interview that spring. “If this translates to unheard-of record sales or something—some enormous number of records—then we’ll have a serious problem. We’ll have the problem of where are we going to play? We already have that problem to some extent. John Scher says he has to ‘de-promote’ us. We don’t spend any money on advertising anymore. So where do we have to go? At this point, the Deadheads and the Grateful Dead have to get serious. We have to invent where we can go from here, because there is no place. . . . It’s an interesting problem to have—the problem of being too successful. It’s one of those things that completely blows my mind.”
On a personal level the spring ’87 tour was a supremely uplifting one for Garcia. Even though he had been the focus of intense devotion by thousands of people through the years, the spring tour was really almost like a celebration of him, a chance for Deadheads to express their love and appreciation. And though touring again was physically quite taxing for Garcia, his mood was very upbeat and he felt energized by the crowd’s response.
Garcia was the subject of numerous magazine and newspaper profiles during this period, most of them overwhelmingly positive accounts of how he had returned from the brink, left drugs behind and been given a new lease on life. However, if the mainstream media thought that Garcia was suddenly going to become yet another recovery poster boy for Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign, they were mistaken. Not only did he never renounce drugs, he continued to openly sing the praises of psychedelics and pot, and he advocated the legalization of all drugs in order to eliminate the criminal component of consciousness-altering.
The other angle the media just couldn’t resist was Garcia’s ascension to ice cream immortality. In late 1986 the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company of Vermont started producing Cherry Garcia (vanilla ice cream with chocolate-covered chunks of cherry), and it became one of the rising company’s best-selling products. Unfortunately, the ice cream was named and launched without Garcia’s permission. But after a minimum of legal wrangling, Ben & Jerry’s agreed to pay royalties to Garcia. For a while, complimentary shipments of the confection filled the freezer in the fridge at the Dead office, until saner health practices prevailed.
Garcia handled his new megacelebrity with characteristic gra
ce and self-deprecating humor, knowing full well that this moment in the sun would pass and that in a year or two Deadheads would probably be the only ones who cared about him again. Asked in 1987 how he dealt with his near-deification among some extremely fanatical Deadheads, who saw his survival as a mystical Sign from Above, Garcia said with a laugh, “I ignore ’em. I know better, you know? I mean, no matter who you are, you know yourself for the asshole that you are. You know yourself for the person who makes mistakes and is capable of being really stupid. And doing stupid things. On this earth, nobody is perfect, as far as I know. And I’m right there with everybody else. I don’t know who you’d have to be to believe that kind of stuff about yourself; to believe that you’re somehow special. But it wouldn’t work in my house, that’s all I can say. My kids would never let me get away with it. So far it hasn’t been a problem. If I start believing that kind of stuff, everybody’s going to just turn around and walk away from me—‘Come on, Garcia!’ And my friends—nobody would let me get away with it; not for a minute. That’s the strength of having a group.” (Asked in another interview about whether he minded being the religious focus of a segment of Deadheads who dance at Dead shows like the whirling dervishes of the Near East, Garcia quipped, “I’ll put up with it until they come to me with the cross and nails.”)
* * *
Sometime after his coma, Garcia joked to a member of the Dead road crew that if he wasn’t going to get into trouble with drugs, he would probably get into trouble with women, in part because heroin kept his strong libido somewhat in check. It was on the spring East Coast tour, in Hartford, that Garcia hooked up romantically with a twenty-seven-year-old Deadhead from New Jersey named Manasha Matheson, with whom he had had a casual friendship for several years.
Manasha first saw the Dead at Watkins Glen in 1973, when she was just fourteen. “I went with some friends and then we separated at the show and then it was me and my clothes and nothing else,” she recalls. “But I met these wonderful people from Massachusetts and they sort of took me in, which was my first exposure to that level of kindness that you hear about with Deadheads. That was overwhelming for me. I wasn’t really a fan of the Grateful Dead at that time, and I didn’t really connect with the music at that show. But I do remember hearing Jerry’s guitar at one point during the night and it sounded to me like it was alive, like it was a living thing. And I had this kind of primal feeling about it. It was a beautiful sound.”
Five years later, when the Dead came to the Uptown Theater in Chicago in November 1978, Manasha presented a carved pumpkin (with a map showing Terrapin Ridge, Illinois, stuffed inside it) to Garcia as he arrived onstage, and after she retrieved the pumpkin following the show, someone from backstage invited her and her roommate to have lunch with Garcia the following day. So the two of them met Jerry at the White Hall Hotel in Chicago, had a pleasant chat for a couple of hours, and that night, after her roommate had departed, Manasha went to the Uptown show with Jerry.
They kept in touch a bit through the years, mainly by phone and occasional backstage visits. Jerry sometimes provided tickets for her, and they were able to communicate silently whenever she was close enough to the stage that he could see her. As she told Robert Greenfield, at one concert in San Francisco in the mid-’80s she even cut off her long hair during the show, much to Garcia’s amusement. “I’d had a class back at college in living art—Fluxus, Yoko Ono, John Cage. I did it in the spirit of that kind of avant-garde weirdness.”
With her hair shorn, she took to wearing shawls everywhere (she still does) and became a ubiquitous figure at West Coast Dead shows after Garcia’s illness. She was still living with her parents in New Jersey and was studying art, but she spent long periods in Northern California, where she had many friends. The first time she saw Jerry after his coma was when she accompanied her onetime paramour Hamza el-Din to a Petaluma Schools benefit concert featuring Olatunji, Garcia and Carlos Santana in February 1987. “I said, ‘Jerry, do you remember me?’ And he said, ‘Manasha, you’re unforgettable,’ which was so dear, and then he took my hand delicately and held it for a minute, and it was real special,” she says.
It was just a month later that Jerry and Manasha got together in Hartford. She then accompanied him for most of the rest of the tour. According to Manasha, Garcia told her that his relationship with Mountain Girl was platonic; otherwise, she said, she would not have gotten involved with him.
After the Dead finished their spring 1987 tour with three concerts at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater in Orange County, California (where there was a near-riot outside the venue and a successful gate-crashing by a sizable mob during the Saturday night concert), Garcia returned to work on the album and video. He and Len Dell’Amico spent the last two weeks of April in Los Angeles overseeing the postproduction on So Far. While Jerry was in L.A., he flew Manasha into town and put her up at the Park Sheraton hotel, where he was staying. A few weeks later Manasha revealed that she had become pregnant—news that did not sit well with M.G.—but Manasha says she did not want Jerry to leave Annabelle and Trixie, so she elected to keep living alone in San Anselmo, seeing Jerry whenever it was convenient for him. According to Manasha, Jerry had initially suggested that she move in with him, M.G. and the girls—a bizarre notion to say the least. Beginning that summer, however, Manasha openly accompanied him on tour.
In mid-May Bob Dylan flew to Northern California to begin rehearsals with the Grateful Dead for a series of stadium concerts that summer in which the Dead would serve as Dylan’s backup band—as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had in 1986—as well as playing their own sets. Planning for the tour, which Garcia said was a long-held dream of his, had begun around the time of the Dead’s comeback shows in December 1986. Dylan secretly slipped into the Bay Area in March to finalize tour plans and attend the Dead’s Mardi Gras concert at Kaiser Convention Center, where he was photographed with them backstage by Herb Greene. Dylan was spotted in the audience that night swaying to a version of his own song, “Quinn the Eskimo,” which Garcia chose to open the show.
Bootleg tapes of the May ’87 Dylan-Dead rehearsals have been in circulation for many years, but at the time there was a thick veil of secrecy about what was going on at Club Front. Dylan’s paranoia about publicity was legendary: in March he had even threatened to cancel the summer tour after a San Francisco deejay announced some details of it. And though keeping secrets in the Grateful Dead world was always next to impossible (discreetly dispensing privileged information showed how close people were to the band, which translated to assumed power), not much information leaked out about the rehearsals other than the fact that the musicians had played a huge number of different songs, including many unusual cover tunes.
“Dylan was in ecstasy at the abuse he got from the crew,” says Len Dell’Amico. “He’d come in and they’d say, ‘Oh, hi, Bob,’ and then turn away. And he loved that. He just blossomed because they treated him like they treated anyone else. They called him Spike because the Dead already had a Bob. But he got the crew treatment, like ‘Who the fuck are you?’ And he loved it. Because who’s a bigger star than Bob Dylan? And he probably hated it more than anybody. And he just fit in so well with that sense of ‘We’re all just guys hanging around here.’”
The material Dylan and the Dead rehearsed covered an astonishing range, from old folk songs like “Stealin’” and “The Ballad of John Harding” to contemporary songs like Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” and Dylan songs from every era, many of which Dylan had either never performed live or hadn’t played for years. “We’d just try ’em out,” Garcia said. “[Dylan] said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ and we said, ‘Well, we have a small list here of our favorite Dylan tunes.’ And he said yes to just about all of them, so we just started working on them one by one.”
Garcia noted shortly after the rehearsals that playing with Dylan was quite a challenge: “You really have to pay attention to him to avoid making mistakes, insofar as he’s doing what he’s doing and
everybody else is trying to play the song. If you don’t do what he’s doing, you’re doing something wrong,” he laughed. “In that sense, he de facto becomes the leader of the band. . . . I don’t know whether two weeks with us [on the tour] is going to be able to change twenty years of that kind of conditioning.”
It would be a month and a half before the Dead and Dylan would get together again.
The Dead began the summer of 1987 with impressive concert stands in Ventura and at the Greek Theater in Berkeley, then traveled east to Alpine Valley Music Theater in East Troy, Wisconsin, which had become perhaps the most popular venue for the Dead in the Midwest. At each of the three concerts at Alpine Valley, more than 30,000 people packed the facility, and thousands more jammed the campgrounds outside the gates and clogged nearby roads, a pattern that repeated itself at nearly every stop on the Dead’s summer tour.
Around the time the tour hit Alpine Valley, Arista Records released “Touch of Grey” to radio stations, in advance of In the Dark, which was to come out on July 6. “Touch of Grey” was an instant smash on rock radio all across the country, generating countless news stories about Garcia’s comeback and the Dead’s miraculous saga of survival and transformation into the country’s most popular touring band.
Then MTV got into the act. In early May, Gary Gutierrez had shot a video for “Touch of Grey” in which life-sized puppet skeletons of the band “sang” and “played” the song in front of thousands of cheering Deadheads; then, near the tune’s conclusion, the skeletons were magically transformed into the real Grateful Dead. (The video was shot at night after a Dead concert at the Laguna Seca Recreation Area near Monterey, California, using Deadheads who were camping there overnight, and anyone else who was interested, as the crowd.) MTV’s execs loved the video, which was so different from the network’s usual fare—in those days, most seemed to feature scantily clad women being subjugated by male rock stars, lots of fog effects and things breaking in slow motion—and the video was put in heavy rotation. Toward the end of the Dead’s summer tour, MTV put together a daylong marathon called “Day of the Dead,” adding to the hype that had been building since the spring tour. It was the biggest national television exposure the Dead had gotten in many years, and some believe that it mainly served to make the already overpopulated scene outside the shows even more unmanageable.
Garcia: An American Life Page 57