Garcia: An American Life

by Blair Jackson

  Deborah had her share of supporters, too, mostly among people who had known her in the ’70s. “I think it was as much destiny as anything else that brought them back together,” says Richard Loren, “and you know what—I don’t think the circle was complete with them when they broke up. Sometimes in your life something gets interrupted and it’s left a semicircle, and I think with them it was a case where it wasn’t finished.”

  Emily Craig, who maintained a close relationship with Deborah through the years, says, “I think that in the ’70s and again in the ’90s Deborah had a lot to do with with Jerry getting in touch with his authentic self. I know she was a good influence on him. Because he was so happy with her he didn’t need everybody else as much, and that made her a threat in some people’s eyes.”

  “Deborah is a really special person,” comments Thayer Craw, who had been in or on the periphery of the Dead family since 1969. “I’ve never seen Jerry happier than he was with Deborah, either go-around. I’m not really clear what happened the first time when she was no longer around. It was too bad because they seemed to have something really special then. In my opinion she couldn’t have been a better match for him; they really set each other off well. You could tell he was head over heels in love with her.”

  Despite the turmoil in his personal life, Garcia played well on the spring tour. His new songs garnered mainly favorable reviews from Deadheads, particularly “Days Between,” which had such a different feel from Garcia’s other heavy second-set ballads; it truly felt new. On that tour Garcia introduced two new cover songs, which he slotted as encores. The Beatles’ 1967 psychedelic classic “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” immediately became a sing-along favorite among Deadheads. But the Bobby Fuller Four’s oft-covered “I Fought the Law” was derided by some fans for its brevity. It contained no solo and usually clocked in at under three minutes, making it the shortest song in the Dead’s live repertoire.

  An offstage highlight of the spring tour for Garcia was his visit to the White House during the Dead’s series at the Capitol Centre. Garcia, M.G., Phil and Jill Lesh, Mickey and his wife, Caryl, and a few others were even escorted into the Oval Office (alas, the president was elsewhere). Then they had a private meeting with Vice President Gore, followed by more than an hour chatting with the veep’s wife, Tipper. “They were both really, really nice,” M.G. reports. That members of the Grateful Dead—the acid band, fathers of the counterculture—would be invited to the White House with nary a ripple of protest after the fact showed how much respect the band commanded by the mid-’90s. Jack Ford, the son of President Gerald Ford, had been a Dead fan, but it was unimaginable in the late ’70s that the group would be allowed anywhere near the White House. Garcia liked Gore because the vice president was a strong environmentalist, but in keeping with Jerry’s lifelong distrust of government and those who seek power, he didn’t vote in the 1992 election. The Dead were approached about playing at one of the Clinton-Gore inaugural balls in January ’93, but the band politely declined. Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman did play at an event called the Reunion on the Mall, and Garcia noted with a laugh, “If Clinton doesn’t fuck up too bad in the next four years, maybe we can go back and play his second inauguration!”

  Two weeks after the end of spring tour, Garcia took part in another uniquely American ritual. He, Weir and Welnick sang an a cappella version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Candlestick Park in San Francisco to celebrate the opening of the San Francisco Giants’ 1993 baseball season. It’s difficult to estimate how many Deadheads attended the game mostly to see Jerry, Bob and Vince, but the singers received a loud and long ovation for their efforts. Though Garcia was understandably a little nervous before he went out to sing, he seemed to thoroughly enjoy the Opening Day spectacle, and he was thrilled to meet the man who served as their “opening act” at the stadium—Tony Bennett, who crooned “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” to the adoring throng. The sight of members of the Grateful Dead singing the national anthem was incongruous enough that the event received coverage from media all over the country.

  In July 1993 Jerry, Deborah and a couple of friends vacationed in Ireland, which Jerry had been keen on visiting for many years, as he had strong roots there on his mother’s side. By all accounts he fell in love with the land and its people, and it was refreshing for him to be able to travel unmolested—very few people recognized him, and the few who did didn’t bother him. Garcia relished these moments when he could be like everyone else; they brought home just how weird his day-to-day life was under the microscope in America. To her credit, Deborah always tried to get Jerry away from the pressures and celebrity of his Grateful Dead life. Whenever he did make the time for real rest and relaxation, whether it was in Hawaii or on other travels, he thrived, but finding those windows of opportunity for vacations was difficult because he allowed himself to be pulled in so many different directions by his myriad musical loyalties.

  By the summer of 1993 the Dead had more than enough unrecorded original songs to fill a CD, but the group didn’t seem to be in any rush to make an album, even though it had been nearly four years since Built to Last had come out. Garcia’s excuse was that he wanted to have even more material for the group to choose from. “I’d like to spit out another five or six tunes this year, and hopefully it’ll happen,” he said in the summer of ’93. “Really, it’s pretty easy: all Hunter and I have to do is get together. I find it hard to write without being in his presence, but when we’re together, it starts snapping. But it’s also the hardest thing to do, because writing music is probably my least favorite thing in the world. I mean, I’d rather throw cards in a hat. Anything is more interesting than the idea of writing.” (This was a theme Garcia returned to often in his later interviews: “Writing is one of those things . . . I’d rather fill in all the ‘O’s in the phone book,” he said with a laugh to one writer. He told another he’d rather feed the cat than work on a new song; quite a change from the Garcia who could barely keep up with the new songs that spilled out of him in the early and mid-’70s.)

  With the Dead album still on the back burner, Garcia continued to record sporadically with David Grisman at the mandolinist’s casual home studio. Initially it appeared that the follow-up to their successful first album might be another eclectic mélange, but then Grisman zeroed in on a completely different approach: “Me and David are working on a children’s album right now,” Garcia said that summer. “It’s something I never would have thought to do.”

  The material they ultimately chose for the CD Not for Kids Only was a far cry from what was on most of the kid-oriented albums coming out at that time. Many of the tunes were old folk songs that had been rediscovered and recorded by the New Lost City Ramblers in the late ’50s and early ’60s; others, such as Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” and the folk standard “Shenandoah,” were well-worn numbers plucked from the folk music ether. There was a splendid version of “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” and the infinitely weird “A Horse Named Bill.” On the duo’s first album, Garcia had handled nearly all the vocals, but on Not for Kids Only Grisman harmonized with Garcia on most tracks. And on a few—such as “Jenny Jenkins,” “There Ain’t No Bugs on Me,” “Hot Corn, Cold Corn”—the two dexterously engaged in some nifty wordplay that practically begged to be sung along to.

  In interviews promoting the album, Garcia said he thought it was important to make a children’s album with some edge to it. He believed too many kids’ records and videos had been “made to be as inoffensive as they could possibly be. . . . Kids like weird shit in there. They like crazy stuff lurking around, things with teeth, crazy people. They’re realistic. They know the world is full of weird stuff and kids sort of prefer weird stuff; they rejoice in it. It’s no big thing, but it’s nice to be able to throw some music back in there that’s originally from that world; bring some of the weirdness back, take a chance a little. I mean, it’s sort of trusting the kids, that they can handle something more than terminal niceness,” he added,
laughing.

  After Garcia and Grisman had recorded enough tunes for the album, Jerry went on the road with the Dead for a couple of tours, so Grisman finished up the record without him, bringing in all sorts of other players to complete the arrangements. Their version of “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” for instance, was fleshed out with another guitar, bass and a Dixieland-style trumpet-trombone-clarinet trio. A few songs featured sawing fiddles; others had twanging jew’s harps. The lovely, intentionally soporific “Shenandoah Lullaby” (got to get those kiddies to sleep) was augmented by piano, oboe and a small string section that included Garcia’s daughter Heather. And Grisman added all sorts of sound effects that perked up this music for wee ones—buzzing flies and mosquitoes, birds, even the chugging locomotive for “Freight Train” (courtesy of Joe Craven’s percussion and mouth).

  It was all a very low-key affair that was meant mainly for a young audience and their parents; it certainly wasn’t designed to show off Garcia’s and Grisman’s instrumental prowess. When it was released in September 1993, it received overwhelmingly favorable reviews—including ones in such unlikely sources as Parenting and Family Life magazines—and it sold very well. It’s also worth noting that the cover illustration by Garcia, which depicts him and Grisman picking and singing for an audience of eight distracted rug rats, is Jerry’s only published self-portrait. A limited edition of five hundred lithographs of the cover illustration was sold through the album to raise money for the Carousel Fund and the Nordhoff Robbins Music Therapy Clinic.

  It was an up-and-down summer and fall for the Grateful Dead. On the plus side, crowds on the summer tour were large but well-behaved. At first, many Deadheads wondered if having Sting, the jazzy popster with new wave roots, as the opener for the stadium shows would be an odd match, but it proved to be a good fit. As always, Sting had a great, tight band that could also jam, and he mixed up his set lists from show to show so the touring Deadheads wouldn’t be bored with the same set all the time. Garcia, who dubbed Sting “an A-list guy,” jammed with Sting’s group at a few stops on the tour, and sounded surprisingly at home on Sting tunes like “Tea in the Sahara,” “Walking on the Moon” and “Consider Me Gone.”

  Bruce Hornsby brought his accordion down to the Dead’s two dates at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., and Garcia obviously enjoyed having his old mate beside him again. At Autzen Stadium in Eugene, Oregon, Huey Lewis blew harp on a few tunes one day, raising the energy level of the set a couple of notches. On the September East Coast tour, Edie Brickell turned up onstage at Madison Square Garden one night during “space” for some some vocal improv noodling. And at the last Garden show, the progressive young jazz sax player David Murray added some wonderfully inventive squeaks, squalls and bleats to “Bird Song,” “Estimated Prophet,” “Dark Star,” “Wharf Rat” and a few other tunes. (Later that autumn Murray also played an entire show at the Garden with the Garcia Band.)

  But there were also stretches of Grateful Dead music in the fall that sounded listless and uninspired, and in the crowd there was considerable antipathy for some of the band’s new material, particularly Phil’s “Wave to the Wind,” Vince’s “Way to Go Home” (which was the most-played Dead song that year) and Weir’s cumbersome “Easy Answers.” Garcia’s singing and playing was fitfully uneven. He had been historically guilty of lyric lapses, but these increased on the fall tour to the point where he rarely made it through a song without a flub. Instrumental errors by him became more common as well, leading many in the crowd to suspect that he had fallen back into some of his bad habits. Reports of Garcia’s sloppy performances also followed him on the JGB’s three-week tour of East Coast arenas that November.

  Nevertheless, friends said he seemed to be happy at year’s end. The Dead’s shows in Los Angeles and San Diego in early December had many good moments, with Deadheads especially buzzing about appearances by Ornette Coleman and Branford Marsalis on consecutive nights at the L.A. Sports Arena.

  The end of 1993 might have been an ideal time for the Dead to take the break from performing they’d talked about a year earlier, but it was impossible to slow down the momentum of the organization. Arenas and stadiums had to be reserved nearly a year in advance, and anyway there didn’t seem to be much support within the Dead to take a break. Garcia was notorious for being out of touch with his own health needs, and he also now had a new set of financial realities that no doubt played into his own desire to keep working. He was paying nearly $21,000 a month to M.G. as part of their divorce settlement; he’d agreed to give $3,000 a month to Barbara Meier for three years; plus he was responsible for child support for Keelin and a huge mortgage for Manasha and Keelin’s new house in northern San Rafael.

  In January 1994 the Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. This was actually their second year of eligibility for the honor, which is bestowed annually by a panel of rock critics and music biz veterans, but incredibly enough, they were beaten out the first time by the likes of the short-lived (but highly influential) band Cream, Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers and Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Dead had long been ignored by the country’s hip critics, who believed the group was a quaint and irrelevant anachronism playing for an army of drugged-out zombies, so the slight was not surprising; just myopic. All of the bandmembers except Garcia attended the black-tie induction ceremony at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel ballroom. At an accompanying press conference, Garcia was represented by a life-sized cardboard-cutout photograph. The media were told that Garcia didn’t attend because he had a cold. He may well have been under the weather, but it was also common knowledge in the Dead scene weeks before the awards that Garcia was planning to skip the event. Generally speaking, Garcia disliked awards and was embarrassed by such public recognition.

  Healthy or not, this was a good period for Garcia’s relationship with Deborah Koons. They went diving in Hawaii and Deborah occasionally accompanied Jerry on tour (though he always insisted on having his own room to retreat to). Sometimes when she would be on the side of the stage during Dead shows, Jerry would play to her and smile, and more than a few Deadheads observed them cuddling and smooching behind the band’s equipment between sets. They undoubtedly had chemistry.

  Even so, many people in the Dead family were surprised when Jerry and Deborah decided to get married on Valentine’s Day in 1994. The twice-married Garcia had told each of his two previous girlfriends—Manasha and Barbara—that he wanted to marry them, so he was definitely the marrying kind, so to speak. But Jerry and Deborah had only been a couple for a year at that point, and he wasn’t in very good health in early 1994. Some members of the crew and in the Dead office expressed considerable concern about him, and the Deadhead rumor mill was filled with supposedly reliable reports that Garcia’s opiate use was on the rise. (For her part, Deborah claimed to have no knowledge of Garcia’s drug use until much later.)

  The site of the wedding was kept secret until the morning of the event. Then, the invited elite—about seventy family, bandmates, crew and office folks, and a few of Deborah’s friends from Ohio and the East Coast—called a number and were instructed to convene at Christ Episcopal Church in Sausalito, a cozy, beautiful, brown-shingle redwood church high in the hills above San Francisco Bay. The Reverend Matthew Fox, a former Catholic priest who had become well-known in New Age circles, presided over the ceremony. David Grisman and his guitarist bandmate Enrique Coria played “Ave Maria,” and JGB singer Gloria Jones sang Stevie Wonder’s “You and I” for the couple.

  Garcia wore a dark suit but no tie; Deborah was dressed in a traditional, flowing wedding gown. A friend of Deborah’s named Jamie O’Meara told the Cincinnati Post that Jerry “took one look at [Deborah] walking down the aisle and he couldn’t keep his hands off her all during the ceremony. It was cute.”

  For the reception at the casually tony Corinthian Yacht Club in upscale Tiburon, “We popped in our limos they had rented for everyone, and had a dinner of ten vegetarian dishes,” O’Meara
said. “I’d never seen so much champagne in my life. There was no wild partying. Deborah rarely touches alcohol and I didn’t see [Jerry] drinking.” Jerry, Deborah and the other happy revelers danced the night away to an Irish band, and the festivities went on until about 11 P.M.

  “It was a thrill to see them so happy and dancing at the wedding,” Thayer Craw says. “They were doing all the traditional stuff; it could have been any couple in the world. Jerry was way into it—you could tell it wasn’t just Deborah putting on the kind of wedding she wanted. He was a full participant. It couldn’t have been sweeter.”

  There was no time for an extended honeymoon—Grateful Dead shows at the Oakland Coliseum the last week of February had been booked for some time; then, as always, the Dead’s schedule was paramount. After the wedding, Jerry and Deborah continued to maintain separate residences, she in Mill Valley, he on Red Hill Circle in Tiburon. A few months later Garcia moved to more spacious digs just up the hill from Red Hill Circle, on Audrey Court. This rented contemporary house had an even more spectacular view of Richardson Bay, San Francisco Bay, San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge and Mount Tamalpais. The mother of actor Paul Newman was one of his neighbors in the decidedly upscale but unpretentious neighborhood.

  When he was home alone, Jerry’s house was like a multisensory playground for him. “The TVs were on in his house almost all the time,” says Vince DiBiase, his personal assistant and art liaison during this period. “At Audrey Court he had a TV in his living room, his bedroom, his exercise room, in the den and in the little bedroom—five televisions, and a lot of times all five of them would be going and on different channels. He had two satellite dishes. I think he had every English-speaking channel in the world.” Vince says that Jerry was particularly fond of watching movies from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.