The Grateful Dead ended the year with four shows between Christmas and New Year’s, sans Bruce Hornsby. And though the band played reasonably well, the New Year’s Eve concert felt strange without Bill Graham presiding over the reverie (and making a spectacular midnight entrance dressed as Father Time as he had in years past). For several years, members of the Dead had been saying they were tired of playing New Year’s Eve; that they wished they could have a normal holiday season like most people. But Graham always managed to persuade the group to play the year-end shows. It was his favorite tradition. New Year’s 1991–92 showed how important Graham was to the spectacle. His death loomed large over the show, and to no one’s surprise, the Dead never played on New Year’s again.
It doesn’t appear that the Dead ever seriously considered taking the six-month sabbatical Garcia had alluded to in Rolling Stone. By the time January 1992 rolled around, the band’s touring schedule for the year was largely plotted and it looked an awful lot like the previous year (and the one before that), right down to the summer stadium shows in New Jersey, D.C. and Chicago. Did something specific happen to change Garcia’s mind? Or had his frustrated outbursts the previous summer just receded over time? Garcia had talked about wanting to work up some new songs as a precondition to carrying on with the Dead, and in February, when the Dead (again, without Bruce) reconvened for the first time since New Year’s, he got his wish. The band learned four new songs: “Corrina,” written by Hart, Hunter and Weir; Hunter and Lesh’s “Wave to the Wind”; Vince’s maiden songwriting effort for the Dead, “Way to Go Home,” with lyrics by Hunter; and Hunter and Garcia’s “So Many Roads.”
“So Many Roads” sounded as if it had been penned by (or for) some weary troubadour in the autumn of his life. It was essentially an electrified folk song—an appropriate description given Hunter’s lyrics, which refer to various old folk blues: “Call me a whinin’ boy if you will” (as in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Whinin’ Boy Blues”); “Thought I heard that K.C. whistle moanin’ sweet and low” (after “K.C. Moan” by the Memphis Jug Band). One verse works neatly as autobiography for either Hunter or Garcia:
Thought I heard a jug band playing
“If you don’t—who else will?”
From over on the far side of the hill
All I know the sun don’t shine,
The rain refuse to fall
And you don’t seem to hear me when I call
Garcia ended the song with a big vocal buildup similar to ones he’d written for “Believe It or Not” and “Standing on the Moon,” and it never failed to ignite the crowd. It would start with him quietly singing “So many roads to ease my soul,” and then the music would swell and Garcia would play with different phrasings of the line, à la Van Morrison. For the first year after he introduced “So Many Roads,” Garcia often had trouble remembering the words, mitigating some the song’s power, but during the last two years of his life it was one of his most consistently powerful tunes, and obviously one that spoke to him personally.
The Dead’s 1992 spring tour turned out to be Bruce Hornsby’s last with the group. At the end of January his wife gave birth to twin boys and he wanted to spend as much time as he could with them. And, truth be told, he was somewhat discouraged by Garcia’s ongoing drug problems and by what he saw as a disturbing complacency and stasis within the band. Bruce hadn’t been in California when the band learned the new songs, and he seemed to have some difficulty finding a place for himself in the arrangements. These tunes sounded tentative for most of the spring tour, and the shows were only intermittently brilliant.
“That spring tour was not great,” Bruce says, “but beyond that I got the sense that Vince was starting to feel more comfortable and I heard from the guys that there were a few shows there that I didn’t make that were great nights. So I thought, ‘Okay, I just had twin boys. I don’t want to be an absentee father. And I do want to return the focus to my own stuff. Something needs to change here.’ I think they had gotten to a point where they felt comfortable with Vince, and he was comfortable and really contributing well. So I thought it was time for me to go.
“About the last week of the tour, I said something about leaving to Cameron, maybe Mickey and a couple of guys, and it was a drag because I wanted to tell Garcia myself, but this news spread quickly through the tour ranks. And I remember sitting at my piano during a soundcheck and Garcia yelling from his tent, ‘Bruce! come over here, man!’ So I went in there and he was very jovial and he basically just said, ‘Hey, I hear you’re takin’ off! It’s been great. Good luck.’ He was very gracious about it and so was everyone else. These people are great people.
“And I told them then that I’d still play with them from time to time when it worked out, and I did. I played with them at RFK on the very next tour and it was great—they even played ‘Casey Jones’ for the first time in a while [since 1984]; I loved it!”
Hornsby’s high opinion of Garcia’s guitar playing never wavered, and today he remembers his former bandmate as “one of the most distinctive and original players ever. To me, what he did as a soloist that was really unique in rock was his use of chromaticism. He used the five notes in the chromatic scale that aren’t in the standard scale more often and more creatively, and he made more sense with them, than just about anyone. Some of it probably came from his interest in jazz, I guess, and in atonalism. Wherever it came from, he had a clearer vision of playing chromatically than any guitarist in the rock world that I know. Even on a simple song like ‘Iko’ he would play some shit that was like, ‘Man, I wish I thought that way!’
“To me, though, one of the best parts about his playing was his sound; purely his tone,” Hornsby continues. “He could play just one note and the sound moved me so much. There was a very emotional, soulful quality to his tone that to me is very important when you talk about Garcia as a musician. It was very expressive. Great phrasing and articulation. It was nothing contrived. It was a very natural-sounding electric guitar.”
By the middle of 1992 Garcia was receiving almost as much attention in the mainstream press for his artwork as his guitar playing. Galleries around the country (and one in Japan) were exhibiting his paintings, drawings and lithographs, and in the cities where Garcia would show up for an opening, there was always copious press coverage. He now had two people representing his artwork to galleries and the public—Nora Sage, who handled the art Jerry made through the middle of 1991, and Vince DiBiase, who was his rep from 1991 to 1995. Sales of Garcia’s art were brisk, and a book devoted entirely to his work, entitled J. Garcia: Paintings, Drawings and Sketches, was a popular item among Deadheads in the fall of 1992. The book collected seventy-two different works, from intricate color airbrush paintings to graceful watercolors obviously inspired by Japanese art to simple pen-and-ink doodles, some whimsical, some serious.
Garcia seemed bemused and slightly embarrassed by all the attention his art received. As he noted, “I never saved them. It’s only in the last five years that somebody said, ‘People might like these things.’ I thought, ‘Gee, you think so?’ It never occurred to me. I’ve never done them for any purpose. I only do them because they sort of spill out of me. I never intended for people to see them.”
“He was very shy about showing the work at the beginning,” says Roberta Weir (no relation to Bob), an art dealer who put on several shows of Garcia’s artwork. Though Weir believes that more thought could have been put into deciding which of Jerry’s pieces were good enough to exhibit, she notes, “I think he was an incredibly brilliant and talented man who, had he pursued art more deeply, would have developed a very strong personal style. My hope was that he would do that and cross over from being just a celebrity artist to being taken seriously as an artist, because he certainly had the potential for that.”
Weir says she saw a connection between the way Garcia approached music and the way he executed some of his ink drawings: “Many of the drawings show that same mental state of improvisation that you fi
nd in the music. It’s like, ‘I’m just wandering with my pen line; I wonder where it will go.’ Looking at them that way, they’re not necessarily logical. Sometimes you can even turn the paper upside down and find another picture. So there’s that kind of wandering, serendipitous experience of the music in the drawings.”
In the summer of 1992 Garcia’s artwork entered a strange new dimension when Stonehenge Ltd. introduced a line of twenty-eight-dollar silk neckties with colorful pattern designs extracted from Jerry’s paintings and drawings. TIE-DYE GURU TURNS NECKTIE DESIGNER, shouted one newspaper headline reporting on this highly unlikely turn of events. After all, except in the Garcia-Grisman video, when had Garcia ever been seen wearing a tie? Garcia and the Grateful Dead represented a culture that was vehemently anti-tie. When he was first approached by Stonehenge in 1991, Garcia was adamantly opposed to the idea, but as was often the case with him, eventually he was convinced that the tie business would be handled tastefully and he relented. However, he refused to get involved in the promotion of the ties, and Nora Sage, who was his liaison with Stonehenge, said at the time, “We did ask him about wearing one for an ad, but he said, ‘It’s bad enough you want me to design them, now you want me to wear them?’” (Later, Garcia did reluctantly pose in his ties—he looked good, too.) Until his dying day, however, “Jerry hated being referred to as a tie designer,” Roberta Weir says. “That used to really upset him.”
Incongruous or not, the tie line was an instant success—more than 150,000 were sold in the first few months after the ties appeared in Bloomingdale’s and other upscale stores. The main buyers were white-collar Deadheads who, far from feeling that Garcia had sold out his hippie values, enjoyed the ties for their subversive nature: if you had to wear a tie in your job, you could at least wear one designed by someone far removed from Fortune 500 culture. Aside from appearing in corporate boardrooms, law offices and wherever cravats were required, J. Garcia ties started turning up on all sorts of prominent people, including basketball analyst Bill Walton, Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson, Al Franken (who wore one during his coverage of the 1992 Democratic Convention) and even Vice President Al Gore, who was photographed wearing one in a New York Times Magazine article. (Gore, his wife, Tipper, and one of their daughters attended the Dead’s June ’92 show at RFK Stadium, a mere eighteen days before he was selected to be Bill Clinton’s running mate. In a newspaper story around this time, Tipper noted that she’d recently purchased Europe ’72 on CD and that she and Al were longtime fans of the group.)
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The Dead’s summer ’92 tour was considerably stronger than their spring tour, in part because they played their new songs with more confidence, but also because Vince was able to assert himself more now that he was the sole keyboardist. He abandoned a few of his tackier synth textures in favor of more piano sounds, and he was also responsible for the season’s most interesting new cover tunes: the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” which he shouted with appropriate Roger Daltreyesque gusto, and the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the trippy classic from Revolver. That pairing of tunes, played as the encore, was a huge hit at several of the summer stadium shows. Spicing up a few of the Dead’s second sets, too, was Steve Miller, whose band opened all of the stadium shows. Miller jammed with the Dead at seven different concerts, tearing confidently through versions of “The Other One,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “Not Fade Away” and other rockers, and also providing silky contrapuntal lines to more delicate tunes such as “Morning Dew” and “Standing on the Moon.” And at Soldier Field in Chicago, Miller invited blues harmonica great James Cotton to jam with him and the Dead on outstanding versions of “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” “Love Light” and “Gloria.”
Outwardly, Garcia seemed to enjoy himself for the most part on the summer tour, but unbeknownst to him or anyone else, his body was beginning to rebel against him again. By the time the tour was over he appeared tired and pale. But rather than taking the rest of the summer off to relax and recharge, three weeks later he went on a six-show California amphitheater tour with the Jerry Garcia Band. Fans at the first couple of shows noticed that Garcia didn’t look good and that his energy seemed to come and go at random during the concerts. People who were concerned about Garcia’s drug use would always be doubly worried when he would go out on the road with the JGB because of his history with John Kahn, and on this tour the rumors flew more than usual.
On Garcia’s fiftieth birthday, which he celebrated with a show at Orange County’s Irvine Meadows, he admitted to Manasha and others that he was feeling strange, almost as if he’d been dosed with LSD. He still managed to finish the tour with a reasonably strong performance at Southwestern College, outside of San Diego, but something was clearly wrong with him physically.
As soon as Jerry and Manasha got back to the Bay Area they moved into a spacious house in rural Nicasio, in western Marin County. This was easily the most luxurious home Garcia had ever lived in. The 7,500-square-foot pink stucco Spanish-style house was situated on a ten-and-a-half-acre plot overlooking miles of beautiful rolling hills dotted with live oaks and other trees. It was accessible only by driving up a long, twisting, single-lane private road through dense forest, yet it was still only about twenty minutes from the Dead’s San Rafael headquarters. Vince DiBiase says, “It had a black-bottom pool with a circular hot tub built into it, and a fiber-optic colorwheel that changed colors around the perimeter. Jerry loved swimming in that pool. In the living room there was a ten-foot TV screen that automatically lowered down from the ceiling when the TV projection system was turned on. It was like being in your own private movie theater. Jerry also had art, music and computer studios at the Nicasio house.”
Within twenty-four hours of moving into this palatial showplace, Garcia became extremely ill, exhibiting many of the same signs that he had before his diabetic coma in 1986. Garcia was later diagnosed as having an enlarged heart and chronic lung disease, and his other vital organs weren’t functioning very well, either: he had little energy, in part because his system was overloaded with toxins again.
“He nearly died,” Manasha says. “I had to do some quick thinking, because he didn’t want to go to the hospital because his last experience there was so unpleasant for him. He was pleading for me not to call the ambulance. So I called Yen-wei Choong, the acupuncturist, and it was almost miraculous what happened—Yen-wei gave him some Chinese remedies in tea, which Jerry drank through a straw, and gave him an acupuncture treatment. And then I called the doctor, Randy Baker, down [in Santa Cruz] and he came up for a few days. He set up a vitamin drip IV and we also brought in some other doctors—Dr. McDougal for diet, Jonathan Shore for homeopathy. And I tried to keep them all coordinated. It was quite a scene!”
“He had massage therapists, personal trainers and, a little later, hypnotists to help him stop smoking,” says Vince DiBiase, who, with his wife, Gloria, moved into the Nicasio house for six weeks to aid in Garcia’s recovery. “During this time he was happy, looking good and feeling good, and his attitude was optimistic.”
Adds Gloria DiBiase, “Manasha worked hard to coordinate this health program and to keep Jerry on it. He was taking Chinese and American herbs and vitamins and eating organically grown foods. They were buying lots of top-quality stuff from the health food stores.” All in all it was quite a change for such a notoriously sedentary consumer of junk food.
This was also a particularly good time for Jerry’s relationship with Keelin, who was nearly five. “I have memories of them at the Nicasio house with her on his lap at the computer and they’d be drawing something on the computer together,” Vince DiBiase recalls. “Or they’d be outside watching the sunset together; or feeding the goats that roamed the property. It was just a wonderful time.”
“Keelin loved dressing up in my belly-dancing scarves, veils and finger cymbals,” says Gloria, who had studied belly dancing for nineteen years. “One time Keelin danced while Jerry played guitar and I sang.”
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sp; The Dead canceled their late-summer and early-autumn shows, and the JGB scrapped an unannounced tour planned for November, so Garcia could take more time to get himself healthy. And he did precisely that, losing sixty pounds in five months. By the time he returned to performing, at a JGB show on Halloween 1992 at the Oakland Coliseum (with Vince Welnick’s deliciously trashy but short-lived psychedelic cover band, the Affordables, opening), almost everyone agreed that Garcia looked the best he had since the late ’70s. Once again, the change was plainly visible in his body language. He stood more erect, rocked on his Reeboks instead of standing stock-still, and with his new, thinner frame he could bend over easily to adjust his sea of guitar effects pedals—something he did not do when he was heavy and out of shape.
Comeback II continued in early December, when the Grateful Dead went back on the road for a short tour that took them to Colorado and Arizona for two shows each, and then returned to the Oakland Coliseum for five midmonth shows in place of the group’s usual year-end stand. There were two new additions to the repertoire: the Beatles’ “Rain,” sung and played virtually note for note, down to the song’s famous backwards vocal line, which Weir, as the designated dyslexic in the Dead, handled nicely; and “Here Comes Sunshine,” which returned to the band’s rotation for the first time since 1974, though in considerably different form. The impetus for the new version had come from Vince’s arrangement of the tune for the Affordables, which opened nearly a cappella, eliminated the lilting singsong guitar riff and sped the song up to a chugging midtempo rhythm. “It’s better than our old arrangement,” Garcia enthused. “The original feel of it was a little bit dated. I prefer the stronger, rock ’n’ roll feel of the new arrangement.” Most veteran Deadheads disagreed, preferring the spacier, more open-ended mid-’70s arrangement, but nearly everyone was happy to hear the song in any form again. It was a bright, optimistic number that in many ways symbolized Garcia’s latest renaissance. The energetic and well-played Oakland concerts had Deadheads buzzing once more about the “new” Garcia.
Garcia: An American Life Page 65