“We discussed that a lot and I wish everyone had heeded his warnings,” Manasha says. “But he went along with the organization’s agenda. People’s survival was tied up in his level of output.”
Did he feel burdened by that? “Yes,” she says. “I don’t think he expressed it to that many people, but he expressed it to me. He definitely loved the Grateful Dead, but it was very tiring for him. He was hoping to do something small with his own band for a while. He also loved that band and that collection of people and for some reason that wasn’t tiring to him.”
“He wanted to take a break; it was very clear,” said another Dead family member who asked not to be identified. “There were some very forceful statements made in board meetings that I heard. There was one meeting where they were talking about the stadium tour of ’91 and he stopped everybody and said, ‘Am I the only one who thinks that stadium shows suck? I don’t ever want to play in another stadium. Does anybody else feel the way I feel?’ And nobody said anything. But they were trapped: big overhead, big family, dates are reserved. Who’s gonna say, ‘Yeah, you’re right. Let’s cancel the stadium tour’?”
The 1991 summer tour turned out to be one of the Dead’s best in the post-Brent era, with one adventurously played show after another. Hornsby was a provocative musical prankster the entire tour, dropping musical quotes from “Dark Star” into the middle of all sorts of Dead tunes and engaging Garcia at every opportunity. There were jams at Giants Stadium, Soldier Field in Chicago and Sandstone Amphitheater in Kansas that ranked with the best moments of the first Madison Square Garden series with Bruce. And in general the band was taking chances—placing songs in unusual spots (for instance, opening a first set with “Eyes of the World,” opening a second set with “Jack Straw”) and steering the jams into some different directions. Later that summer, three songs from one of the Giants Stadium shows were shown on the late-night ABC-TV music series In Concert, so a huge national audience got to see the new Grateful Dead in full swing; quite an impressive sight.
But there was a big problem with that tour. Garcia was strung out on heroin again. There are a number of different views about the nature and degree of Garcia’s drug use in the late ’80s and early ’90s. A few suggest that from the middle of 1987 on, Garcia dabbled with Persian on and off, mostly during tours, taking just enough to relax him a little and maybe escape some of the pressures associated with being an integral part of the accelerating Dead machine and his own manic schedule. Others, some of whom spent long stretches alone with him, swear that Garcia wasn’t using at all in the late ’80s. Some people observed Jerry’s penchant for falling asleep at odd times and wondered if he was nodding out from drugs. But he’d had bizarre sleep habits for years, and all through 1987–90 he was usually so lucid, funny and engaging that his behavior didn’t fit his mid-’80s profile as an occasionally surly, antisocial drug abuser. Whether he did or didn’t take hard drugs during those years, Garcia was extremely productive and played some of the best music of his life.
Mountain Girl says, “I only learned fairly recently that during that period Jerry was taking all these pills for his teeth. After he recuperated and got back out on the road and they did ‘Touch of Grey’ and all that, he started to experience quite a lot of dental problems and he went in and got some implants. I think it was excruciatingly painful, so he would get these mega-prescriptions for painkillers from his dentist. So he was taking those. I couldn’t figure it out. He kept falling asleep, yet I could never find his stash [of heroin] and he always denied that he was taking anything.
“Then, when he would go out on the road, someone would ring up a dentist or oral surgeon and get this pain prescription for Jerry. So I guess they had multiple dentists that they went to. So basically he went legal with his drug use, but I think ultimately it was at a pretty bad price, because he was kind of dopey some of the time. That’s a word you don’t hear much anymore for someone who’s just a little bit off their game and not quite all there.”
“When I got in the band,” Vince Welnick says, “nobody in the band came out and said it, but I was under the impression that the whole band was clean, and they knew I was clean—I don’t count herb as a drug—and I assumed no one was on drugs. I just thought Jerry was fragile, healthwise. He could really hold up his end when he was up onstage, and he could run through a hotel lobby faster than anybody. I’d heard stories about his health problems and the heroin thing, but I thought it was pretty much behind everybody. Particularly after the way Brent died, I’m sure the last thing they wanted was to have another drug scene.”
This much seems to be clear, however: sometime after Brent’s death Garcia secretly started using Persian again with increasing regularity, and by the summer ’91 tour it was a matter of considerable concern within the band. His playing might still have been crisp and inventive for the most part, but he began to revert to his old junkie posture onstage—not moving as much, smiling less and not interacting with the other bandmembers to the same degree.
Offstage, various members of the band and the Dead organization approached Garcia about getting treatment after the tour, but Garcia reacted angrily to what he believed was an unfair intrusion into his personal life. He also was mortified that if he sought treatment Manasha would learn that he had been lying to her about his drug use. Nevertheless, once the tour was over, Garcia enrolled in an outpatient methadone program in San Francisco. Seven days a week for three weeks, either Jerry’s regular driver, Leon Day, or Vince DiBiase, who became Garcia’s personal manager around this time, picked up Garcia at his house at 8 A.M. and drove him in his BMW to the edge of the gritty Tenderloin district to get methadone. According to his doctor at that time, Randy Baker, Jerry also underwent some counseling “to explore the psychological aspects of drug addiction.”
Embittered by the latest intervention attempt, Garcia reportedly lashed out at his fellow bandmembers at a meeting sometime after the summer tour, essentially saying that playing with the Dead wasn’t fun for him anymore.
Asked in September 1991 about the meeting by James Henke of Rolling Stone, Garcia explained, “We’ve been running on inertia for quite a long time. I mean, insofar as we have a huge overhead, and we have a lot of people that we’re responsible for, who work for us and so forth, we’re reluctant to do anything to disturb that. We don’t want to take people’s livelihoods away. But it’s us out there, you know. And in order to keep doing it, it has to be fun. And in order for it to be fun, it has to keep changing. And that’s nothing new. But it is a setback when you’ve been going in a certain direction and, all of a sudden—boom!—a key guy disappears.
“Brent dying was a serious setback—and not just in the sense of losing a friend and all that. But now we’ve got a whole new band, which we haven’t exploited and we haven’t adjusted to yet. The music is going to have to take some turns. And we’re going to have to construct new enthusiasm for ourselves because we’re getting a little burned out. We’re a little crisp around the edges. So we have to figure out how we are going to make this fun for ourselves. That’s our challenge for the moment, and to me the answer is this: Let’s write a whole bunch of new stuff, and let’s thin out the stuff we’ve been doing. We need a little bit of time to fall back and collect ourselves and rehearse with the new band and come up with some new material that has this band in mind.
“We’re actually aiming for six months off the road. I think that would be helpful. I don’t know when that will happen, but the point is that we’re all talking about it. So something’s going to happen. We’re going to get down and do some serious writing, some serious rehearsing or something. We all know that we pretty much don’t want to trash the Grateful Dead. But we also know we need to make some changes.”
Garcia’s playing on the first part of the Dead’s September Northeast tour was much more erratic than it had been during the summer, an indication to those close to him that the methadone regimen didn’t stick. Bruce Hornsby notes, “Truthfully, I did
n’t really notice Jerry having problems until the fall of ’91. Or maybe I noticed it, but it didn’t start pissing me off until the fall.”
He continues, “I remember we played nine nights at Madison Square Garden and I thought except for a couple of really great nights, to me it was really a dogshit run. Garcia was in this place I couldn’t understand. He was starting to get to that place a lot the last two or three years when I’d watch them—he’d put his head straight down and look at the floor the whole time; hunch over and not communicate with anyone. And that wasn’t like him, at least as far as I was concerned. We’d always had a lot of eye contact and interplay, really a lot of good feelings onstage. But it wasn’t just that. He sort of wasn’t listening and starting to run roughshod over people’s solos—certainly mine—and I thought at times the music just seemed strangely lifeless. I asked Bobby about it and he explained it to me. I’d heard about it, but had never experienced it firsthand. There were nights when I wanted to push the eject button. What I would have done in my band is try to play in a different way that maybe would have jacked everybody up, tried to take a little more charge of the thing. But in this band I didn’t feel it was my place. So I was caught. I felt, ‘Damn, this music is not happening; the music is not going anywhere.’
“Then we got to Boston Garden and I was pretty bummed. We played this first set and it wasn’t happening again, so I just said, ‘Oh fuck it!’ and I started playing this stuff that was very unmusical. I was playing hard and pounding and basically driving it up their ass. And sure enough, the gig got jacked up. There was a lot of energy in the set and it was a pretty good set. But I thought I was playing like crap. I was playing a way I didn’t want to play.
“At the end of the set I went into Garcia’s tent and he says, ‘Man, I love the way you’re playing tonight!’ And I said, ‘Garcia, I’m playing bullshit tonight. I’m playing crap, but it’s all I can do because there’s nothin’ happening here and I really resent your coming to this gig and not putting anything into it,’ or words to that effect. And he said, ‘Well, man, you don’t understand twenty-five years of burnout!’ I said, ‘Garcia, I may not understand twenty-five years of burnout, but you know what my schedule is like . . .’ because in that time period I was doing stuff with my own band, playing on records all over the place—Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Seger, Robbie Robertson—working on Ron Howard’s movie, basically getting a lot of nice calls. The year 1990 I spent 18 days at home—I was gone 347 days of the year. The next year I spent 30 days at home, 335 days on the road. I said, ‘You know, there are lots of nights I don’t feel like playing because I’ve been playing for the last 28, but I feel it’s my responsibility to get it up.’ So we had it out about this. We had a good discussion, and from then on, man, the shit was happening! To me it was a great run, and I’m not trying to say that this is the reason; I’m saying that was my experience.”
Indeed, the September 1991 six-show series at the Boston Garden is widely considered one of the latter-day Dead’s best runs; some even consider it the group’s last unarguably great run. On the sixth night, the band opened the second set with “Dark Star,” segued smoothly into Weir’s “Saint of Circumstance” (“This must be heaven, tonight I crossed the line . . .”) and then settled into the fat groove of “Eyes of the World” before “drums.” Out of “space” the group rolled into “The Other One,” which went back into “Dark Star,” then fell into “Attics of My Life,” followed by “Good Lovin.’” The double encore paired “Brokedown Palace” with the Dead’s final version of “We Bid You Goodnight.” Garcia, Hornsby, everyone played their hearts out, and by the time the band left town the Deadhead grapevine was buzzing with excitement again.
On the night of October 25, a month after the tour was over, and just two days before the Dead were to begin a four-concert stand at the Oakland Coliseum, Bill Graham was killed in a helicopter crash, along with his girlfriend, Melissa Gold, and his pilot, Steve “Killer” Kahn. Graham was flying from a gig at the Concord Pavilion in the East Bay back to Marin County in a driving rainstorm when the helicopter struck some power lines and plummeted to earth, instantly killing all three occupants.
For a moment there was some question about whether the Dead would proceed with their scheduled shows, which were being produced by Graham’s company. But carry on they did, and the next four nights became the Dead’s memorial to their longtime friend. An hour before the first concert, Garcia, Weir, Hart, Wavy Gravy and Graham’s grown son, David, staged a news conference for local television and newspaper reporters to fondly reminisce about the promoter.
“He’s a large part of us,” Garcia said. “And on a lot of different levels. We’re carrying along some piece of him into the world and the future as we go along. So there’s a certain part of his energy that’s a part of us; it’s integral. And we’re pretty determined to hang in there and cover for him.
“The thing about Bill is his relationship to us is on a lot of levels like our relationship to each other. It was intimate. There’s a certain kind of friendship that you have when there’s somebody who understands you, and Bill was there from day one just about. We miss the personal thing—the guy who understands us. That’s what hurts.”
Onstage that night, the Dead opened with one of Graham’s favorite songs, “Sugar Magnolia,” and during the middle of the second set the band was joined by two other members of the first generation of San Francisco rock bands, Carlos Santana and Quicksilver guitarist Gary Duncan. Garcia sang and played brilliantly all evening, and the encore, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” couldn’t have been more poignant.
At the final show of the series, Ken Kesey, dressed in a somber black suit, strode onto the stage in the middle of “Dark Star” and in a booming, urgent voice began talking about Graham, about his own son Jed, who had died in an accident in the mid-’80s, and about how the Dead’s music “reaches across the distance” to talk about heavy life-and-death issues. The music behind Kesey was driving and dissonant, with Lesh thundering above Garcia’s and Weir’s sonic squall. Kesey closed by reciting—actually, roaring—poet e. e. cummings’s “Buffalo Bill,” which concludes with the chilling question: “how do you like your blue-eyed boy now, mr. death?” Then he left the stage as the band reached a noisy crescendo that seemed to express the rage so many felt about Graham’s senseless death.
A few days later the Dead took part in the city’s official memorial observance for Graham—a star-studded Sunday afternoon free concert in sun-kissed Golden Gate Park that drew 300,000 people; ironically, the biggest crowd ever for a BGP production in Northern California.
Two days after the Graham memorial, Garcia went back out on the road for a two-and-a-half-week East and Midwest arena tour with the Jerry Garcia Band. This did not sit well with some people in the Dead organization, given Garcia’s public statements about wanting to take a break from touring. Garcia clearly felt the same sense of obligation to support the livelihoods of the people connected to that group as he did to the Dead. But at the same time he never viewed playing with the JGB as “work,” exactly.
“I think our band was a refuge for him,” John Kahn said. “The Grateful Dead was so big and took so much of his energy, I think he enjoyed having a place where maybe not so much was demanded of him and he could relax a little but still play music he loved. I think he was a little disillusioned with how big the Dead became, but it’s hard to turn that kind of situation around. I mean, how do you become less popular?”
“The problem with the Garcia Band is that’s where his [drug] connection was,” Tiff Garcia says. “It wasn’t with the Grateful Dead—they were pretty clean. John Kahn was the problem. Compare John Kahn and, say, John Cutler [who, in addition to recording the Dead’s albums, was the JGB’s live sound engineer]. It’s black and white. Cutler would do everything he could to keep Jerry away from drugs. Kahn, on the other hand, made sure Jerry would be provided with, so he could be provided with, because he’s the one who had the problem. J
erry definitely liked John a lot, no question, but Jerry was also the type who would feel sorry for somebody and take them under his wing. Everyone needs at least one person in their life that they think needs them, and John was that person for Jerry; he fit in that.”
Actually, Garcia didn’t have any problem contacting drug connections on the road with the Dead, either. Dealers always managed to find their way to him, even if it meant going to the luxury hotels where the band stayed in the ’90s, or sending drugs to him through overnight package couriers.
If Garcia was either tired or strung out on that fall JGB tour, he didn’t show it—the band sounded as fresh and vital as they had on their last national outing in 1989. This was at least partly due to a much-needed infusion of new material during 1991: uptempo numbers like Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road” and Norton Buffalo’s charming “Ain’t No Bread in the Breadbox.” Plus he added Eric Clapton’s mellow “Lay Down Sally,” Hoagy Carmichael’s “Lazy Bones,” “What a Wonderful World,” a tune popularized by Louis Armstrong that Garcia sang as his encore most nights on the tour, and the consistent showstopper—the Manhattans’ “Shining Star,” a sappy but heartfelt ballad that let Jerry play the soul crooner to the hilt, even with his scratchy voice.
In early December the Garcia-Grisman group got together to do some recording and to play three shows at the Warfield Theater, and Garcia seemed happy and relaxed throughout the run. That group’s repertoire had expanded since their last gigs, too: new songs included the traditional folk tunes “Shady Grove” (popularized by Doc Watson), “Louis Collins” (Mississippi John Hurt) and “The Wind and Rain” (from Jody Stecher, recorded and performed previously by the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band); Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting in Limbo”; and the seasonally appropriate “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” played as a jazzy instrumental with a long jam in the middle.
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