On January 19, four days after the last JGB show in that series, Garcia was involved in a frightening single-car accident on busy Highway 101 in Marin County. Driving a $32,000 loaner BMW 525i while his own larger BMW was in the shop, Garcia lost control of the car, smashed several times into the center divider on the highway and spun around before coming to a stop facing the opposite direction. He was shaken up but not hurt, and he told police he wasn’t sure how he’d lost control. Vince DiBiase says that Garcia was not high at the time, and though the police at first believed some hand-rolled cigarettes Garcia had in his briefcase might contain marijuana, they turned out to be an especially pungent type of tobacco. (Had Garcia been busted following the accident, who knows how events would have unfolded in 1995?)
Two days later the JGB went into Fantasy Studios in Berkeley to record two songs for the soundtrack of Wayne Wang’s film Smoke, a fine, character-driven art film centered on a Brooklyn smoke shop. Wang, the acclaimed director of Chan Is Missing, had a personal connection to Garcia—he had worked as a roadie for the Garcia Band in the mid-’70s. He had long wanted to use Garcia on one of his soundtracks and Smoke finally seemed like the right vehicle. Wang chose the ’30s Jerome Kern song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” which Kahn and Garcia rearranged with a reggae lilt. It is possible that this was the only time Garcia played a song by the man he was named after. Kahn suggested the JGB’s other tune on the soundtrack, the hazy ballad “Cigarettes and Coffee.” Even though this was the JGB’s first appearance in a recording studio, “The sessions went amazingly fast,” Kahn said. “We did it in a couple of days and had a great time. I kind of wish we’d had the time to do a whole album with that band.”
In some ways, the hectic pace of Garcia’s life in 1995 wasn’t much different than it was in 1971, when he was playing with both the Dead and the New Riders, jamming regularly with Howard Wales at the Matrix and showing up at his friends’ recording sessions around town. Then, as in 1995, he was obsessed with playing music in as many different contexts as possible. He never lost that desire, but the particulars of his life had changed completely over twenty-five years.
The enormity of the Grateful Dead juggernaut had become burdensome for him—it was almost as if he were the de facto CEO of some multimillion-dollar corporation, at once responsible for both the company and the product. The demands on his time were overwhelming. He did only a fraction of the things asked of him, and who knows how many hundreds of other projects and ideas he would have been bombarded with if he hadn’t had a protective wall around him? Some have been intensely critical of the Grateful Dead road crew’s role in supposedly isolating Garcia through the years, but it’s abundantly clear that he was at times desperate to stay away from the frenetic hordes who wanted him to do something with them or for them. The isolation—and heroin—provided him with some measure of peace and relaxation, but took their toll in other ways. By 1995 he had been a junkie for much of the past seventeen years, an experience that had periodically weakened his body and soul. Once the proud possessor of an iron constitution, he was now racked with physical ailments, including chronic bronchitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, recurrent diabetes and, as we later learned, advanced heart disease.
But health be damned, he seemed constitutionally unable to slow down. So he toured with the Dead and JGB, did sessions with Grisman and others, went to Grateful Dead business meetings, sat on the Rex Foundation board and consulted about his art and the J. Garcia clothing line (which was expanded from ties to include scarves, blouses and more). He had a personal financial burden to match his workload, too. Now, in addition to paying $20,800 a month to Mountain Girl, $3,000 a month to Barbara Meier, child support and mortgage payments for Manasha’s and Keelin’s upkeep, he was also spending about $22,000 a month to pay for Deborah Garcia’s rather extravagant lifestyle; this despite her mid-six-figure income from her family trusts.
According to John and Linda Kahn, Garcia was unhappy about Deborah’s apparent obsession with his finances, and he disliked her attempts to regiment his life. “She had him backed into this rigorous schedule of meetings and all these various things, which he ditched all the time—he had a trainer and he’d show up there like eight hours late and be there for fifteen minutes,” John said. “She had him boxed in where he had to be places at certain times. So it ended up the only time I’d see him would be like four in the morning or something; that was the only time he could get away.”
“The last couple of years he was at our house every night he was in town,” Linda says. “He’d come over to our house after he’d leave [Deborah’s] house. . . . He was just real lonely. He thought he was getting married to have a partner to hang out with and it didn’t turn out that way. He came over to our house a lot of times almost in tears. It was real sad. He didn’t understand the way he was being treated.
“He said she didn’t have any faith in him. She wanted money in the bank because she didn’t think he could go out and make it. She didn’t have faith in his ability, and that really hurt him. He’d say, ‘Linda, haven’t my girlfriends always had everything they wanted?’ Which was true. He gave all his money away to his girlfriends, always.”
Annabelle Garcia comments, “Here was another situation where he was looking for that true love that everyone’s looking for and it turned out again that here was someone who wanted to manipulate his life more for their own purposes than he was comfortable with. I think he really wanted someone who would roll over and let him live however he wanted. But he was a tough match. I’m not sure he ever quite got matched properly.
“I think he had a long history of letting the ladies in his life say, ‘C’mon, Jerry, let’s clean you up and get you off drugs, let’s get your life together.’ And he’d say, ‘Sure, sure, sure, you betcha,’ and then he wouldn’t help them, and he’d go off in the middle of the night, get what he needed, not come back for a couple of days. Then he’d kind of make the effort again and drop it when they weren’t looking. He really didn’t want someone making him do something [to clean up], even though that’s what he needed. And he would never do anything on his own. That’s the common thread with all these ladies: ‘Well, he said he wasn’t taking drugs, but he was and then I didn’t know what to do.’ He was extremely stubborn.”
In early February 1995 Jerry and Deborah took a belated honeymoon trip to Bonaire, a Dutch island off the northern coast of Venezuela famous for its many diving spots. When he returned he had planned to play a series of JGB shows at the Warfield to warm up for Dead shows in Salt Lake City and Oakland. The night of the first show, the Warfield was packed as usual with expectant Heads. But as showtime rolled around, Garcia informed Steve Parish and BGP production chief Bob Barsotti that he didn’t think he could play. He said he’d been stung in the hand by a jellyfish while he was scuba diving and later slept on his arm while it was in an awkward position. Now he was having difficulty moving his hand and fingers. Parish also noted that Garcia was experiencing carpal tunnel–related problems that made playing problematic, so it’s hard to say how much of his acute condition was the jellyfish sting and how much was a result of a general health decline. Whatever the cause, Garcia was in no shape to play, so Barsotti told the crowd that Garcia was having trouble with his hand but that he expected to be able to play tomorrow’s concert, and that tickets for the canceled show would be honored two nights later. However, in the end Garcia didn’t recover enough to play any of the shows, so all the tickets had to be refunded.
Between the auto accident and the cancellation of the JGB gigs, Deadheads had a lot of bad Garcia news to deal with in the first weeks of 1995. But with Jerry again able to play, the Dead pressed on with their Salt Lake City concerts in the third week of February, and received generally favorable notices from most Deadheads. Garcia revived two songs he hadn’t played in many years—the perennial crowd-pleaser “Alabama Getaway,” absent from the repertoire since 1989; and Dylan’s haunting and cynical “Visions of Johanna,” which Garcia had sung only
twice in 1986. The latter song became a real powerhouse in this later incarnation. Thanks to the new lyric monitors, Garcia delivered the song’s long, complicated verses and dense swirl of images and shadowy characters with unbridled passion. There was obviously something about the song’s bleak settings and the sense of confusion and foreboding mixed with ennui that Garcia related to personally.
In late February Annabelle came to the Bay Area from Eugene, Oregon, to have a heart-to-heart talk with “the old man,” as she often refers to him, about her future. “I had called him and told him that I’d gotten engaged and I was getting married and he was extremely excited about that. He was really looking forward to the ol’ walking-the-daughter-down-the-aisle. So I took Scott [McLean, her fiancé] down there to meet him, and we met with him over a couple of days and he gave us these big, drawn-out lectures about how to make a marriage work. And it basically boiled down to ‘Don’t live together, don’t see each other. Have separate houses and have somebody to take care of all your stuff.’ I’m like, ‘That’s very realistic, Dad, thanks! You want to lend us twenty million dollars so we can do that?’ But he was totally serious. It was funny but it was also sad that that was what he had learned.
“He was very energetic, but I think he was very nervous as well, because here’s his daughter bringing in some guy who wants to marry her. That’s a big deal. And he was expected to do some fatherly thing, and he was always terrified of that kind of stuff—having to lecture or give opinions or advice. He was very hands-off and this was putting him on the spot a bit. I gave him a big hug and a kiss and I noticed he was really, really skinny—his arms and legs seemed tiny. He was still kind of round around the middle. But he seemed short to me; kind of small. He seemed frailer than I’d ever seen him before, yet his inside stuff was really lit. He was very excited about stuff in general. He was excited about me getting married and he talked about playing with Grisman—that was the one thing that I know made him supremely happy. Whenever I talked to him about that, he’d talk ten times faster, which was a sure sign that he was excited.
“Then the day after we saw him I had a weird dream about this old horse of mine that had passed away, and in the dream I was riding the horse around the field. It seemed like the next day Dad was dead.” Actually, Garcia died months later, but this was the last time Annabelle saw her father alive.
The Grateful Dead’s three-week spring tour took them mainly to Southern destinations, including Charlotte, Atlanta, Memphis (where they hadn’t played since 1970), Birmingham and Tampa. The big news on this tour was that after twenty-three years of fan requests, Phil Lesh finally played “Unbroken Chain” onstage with the Dead. (In the end it wasn’t because of the fans’ pleadings; rather, Phil’s son Graham asked him to and he obliged.) Phil made a point of playing the song once in each city on the tour (except Birmingham), and it was ecstatically greeted each time, particularly by older Deadheads who’d worn out copies of the Mars Hotel album in the era before Dead bootleg tapes became widely available, when records were still the main medium for listening to the Dead. A convoluted composition with numerous dynamics and tempo shifts, “Unbroken Chain” proved quite a challenge for the band. Garcia in particular appeared to have some difficulty negotiating the tune’s many twists and turns, sometimes lagging a little behind the others. It’s one of those songs that probably would have evolved into something quite magnificent after a couple of years of tinkering onstage, but as it was it never developed much beyond the album version. Even so, hearing it was a highlight of the year for many Deadheads.
The band’s fortunes on spring tour went up and down with Garcia’s condition, which remained unpredictable. In Philadelphia he seemed full of energy most of the time, and in Charlotte he was clearly buoyed by the presence of Bruce Hornsby, who played grand piano the whole night. Hornsby, rather than Garcia, was the dominant melodic player at that show, pushing the other bandmembers the way Garcia used to but now seemed nearly incapable of.
Garcia played what turned out to be his final shows with the Garcia Band near the end of April at the Warfield. Once again, his playing seemed painfully uneven—inspired one moment, inept the next—and even John Kahn could see the writing on the wall.
“Our band was all but finished by the end,” he said. “We were working very little; he basically wasn’t allowed to work with us. That’s the impression I got. We were going to do a tour in the fall but it got canceled before it even got booked because Steve [Parish] and all the Dead people didn’t think he should go out with us. Our band was stretched to the limit where we were on the verge of not being a band, and it was starting to sound like it. We had been doing pretty well before that year; I think we’d reached a sort of a peak and were now maybe on the other side of that. I didn’t know what the reason was—if he was sick or what—but I could tell Jerry was sort of falling apart, and our band was falling apart as well. The rest of the people weren’t playing as well, either, which is something that happens.
“It was like he lost interest,” Kahn continued. “That’s what I was talking about with our band—it was headed nowhere. We weren’t rehearsing at all. We weren’t learning any new songs. He stopped caring, or something.” Why? “I think he wanted out. He wanted to change his life around. I don’t exactly know how. But the last conversations I had with him, I don’t think there was going to be a Jerry Garcia Band. We would still find stuff to do, him and me. He had talked about doing Old and in the Way again, which would have been a pretty all-encompassing thing. That’s more than just a little side thing—it involves a lot of work, and it also involves a degree of health. He was saying he wanted to do it after he was healthy again, which never happened. But he was talking seriously about that a couple of weeks before he died.”
On and off the road, Garcia did have one project that seemed to bring him a great deal of pleasure. The book Harrington Street was to be his memoir of growing up in San Francisco in the ’40s and ’50s—a pastiche of recollections accompanied by sketches and paintings illustrating events from his early life and his childhood fantasies. In early 1994 he had signed a six-figure deal with Delacorte Press to produce the book, and he and Deborah spent many hours probing his memory and trying to shape the book. As with many of his later artworks, he scanned his ink drawings into a computer and then manipulated and colored them using a computer “paint” program. This occupied him hour after hour, and it was something he could work on in hotel rooms on tour, whether he was writing in his distinctive, messy calligraphic scrawl, or using a laptop computer. As Deborah wrote in the preface to the book, which was completed by her and published posthumously, “He was a big kid, with a beard. Of all the ways someone might go back and explore childhood, the one Jerry chose suited him ideally: create a marvelous picture book.”
In May the Grateful Dead went back to the Site to work more on their new album, but once again the sessions, which lasted ten days, were disappointing. Garcia seemed unfocused and uninterested much of the time. Vince Welnick recalls, “Jerry was there, but nobody in the band would press upon him to complete his guitar track or to put down a definitive vocal track. Occasionally Jerry would say, ‘I’ll get back to it later,’ or, ‘I’m going to sit it out because I’ve gotta hear what you guys are doing; I haven’t decided what I’m going to play.’ We didn’t get a whole lot done.” Indeed, when Phil Lesh listened to the session tapes after Garcia’s death to see if there was anything salvageable he came up empty-handed.
The band’s Western tour stretched over the second half of May and the beginning of June, and included stops in Las Vegas (where the group’s annual three-show run at the Silver Bowl on the outskirts of town had become a pilgrimage point for Deadheads all over the West), Seattle, Portland and Shoreline Amphitheater. As had been the case on most of their tours in the mid-’90s, the quality of the shows varied widely from night to night, set to set, even song to song. Though almost everyone agreed that Garcia didn’t look very good—his skin had taken on a slightly unreal ye
llow pallor and his complexion appeared waxy—he seemed fairly energetic most of the time; or at least until “drums” in the second set, after which he usually flagged a bit.
* * *
June 2, 3 and 4 at Shoreline Amphitheater turned out to be the last three Dead shows I ever attended, twenty-five years and more than 350 concerts after my first, at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, when I was sixteen. There were plenty of sixteen-year-olds at Shoreline in 1995, as well as babes in arms, ten-year-olds, twenty-five-year-olds, fifty-year-olds (the Dead’s contemporaries), sixty-year-olds and beyond. Like many others, I had gone into the shows feeling some measure of trepidation because Garcia had been so inconsistent at other concerts I’d attended in ’95, and the rumors of his ongoing drug dependency preceded him.
So it was heartening to find Garcia in such a positive mood and playing so well at the first two Shoreline concerts. His song choices on the opening night of the run hit all sorts of stylistic realms. There was a rousing “Alabama Getaway,” with its Chuck Berry riffing (this just a few days after Berry opened for the Dead in Portland); the loping “Candyman,” like something off the stage of the Dodge City Music Hall; “Ramble On Rose,” puttering and backfiring like a Model T Ford; a jazzy, at times dissonant musical flight into the unknown via “Bird Song.” And that was just in the first set. In the second set Garcia served up sparkling, imaginatively played renditions of “New Speedway Boogie”; Paul McCartney’s little half-song “That Would Be Something,” which became a launching pad for a lengthy group jam; a stately but not somber “He’s Gone”; “Standing on the Moon,” sure and emotional; and the feel-good encore of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” complete with the 20,000-voice Shoreline chorale on the choruses.
Garcia: An American Life Page 69