“Jerry knocked a chink out of the wall and let the light shine through, and it’s up to us to keep that light shining through, or someday we are going to have to answer to him.”
But perhaps the most moving and eloquent tribute of all came from a man unaccustomed to public pronouncements—Bob Dylan: “There’s no way to measure his greatness as a person or as a player. I don’t think eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great—much more than a superb musician with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal.
“To me he wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know. There are a lot of spaces between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, hypnotic and subtle. There’s no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep.”
The surviving members of the Grateful Dead made no official comment at first. The three who were in the Bay Area at the time—Mickey, Phil and Vince—got together briefly and shared their grief with others in the Dead organization. Bill Kreutzmann was out of town on vacation when he got the news, and Bob Weir was in New Hampshire with his side band, Ratdog. Weir went on with his scheduled performance that night at the Casino Ballroom in Hampton Beach, telling the shell-shocked crowd, “If our dear, departed friend proved anything to us, he proved that great music can make sad times better.”
The funeral service for Garcia took place at St. Stephen’s (no irony intended) Episcopal Church in Belvedere, in Marin County, on August 11. The location of the ceremony was a closely guarded secret to keep away curious fans, but members of the press found out and showed up in force to gape at the mourners as they entered and left the church. About two hours before the funeral, a retinue of Hell’s Angels roared up on their Harleys, went inside for a few minutes, then came out dressed in black suits to help with security. The guest list of about 250 was controlled by Deborah Garcia and included all the current and former bandmates, Grateful Dead staff, Jerry’s three grown daughters, his ex-wife Sara, Barbara Meier and assorted friends and colleagues ranging from Kesey to Dylan to Bill Walton. Among those pointedly left off the list were Mountain Girl, Manasha and John Kahn, mean-spirited exclusions that were roundly criticized later by many in the Dead community. M.G. had the opportunity to see Garcia in repose, dressed in a black T-shirt and sweatpants, at a wake the night before. In Living with the Dead Rock Scully recounts a conversation in which Garcia supposedly said he didn’t want his body to be on display after he died, and art dealer Roberta Weir recalls a remark Jerry made to her in early 1994:
“I told him that I’d always been sort of death-obsessed, that it was in my own [art] work a lot. And he said he thought it was too bad that death had been mystified for people, because dead bodies were taken away and people didn’t get a chance to see them. He said, ‘If society wasn’t hiding the bodies all the time people would realize that the body is just a hunk of meat.’ I said, ‘Well, what do think about practices that delay burial so that people can talk to the body?’ Like in Buddhism there’s the idea that the confused soul lingers around the body. And he looked down at himself, he pulled his shirt out from his belly and he said, ‘Hang around for this? You’ve got to be kidding. When I’m dead, I’m outta here!’”
“It was weird seeing him like that at the funeral,” said John Kahn, who showed up with his wife, Linda, anyway and stood in the back. “I crashed the funeral, because I wasn’t invited. I just said, ‘Fuck it,’ and went anyway. It was so ridiculous. I went late after everybody was in and just walked in the back door. They could have stopped me, probably. I went there with the attitude, ‘This is the last I’m going to see any of these people, because I’d just as soon not see them anymore.’ I was kind of pissed off at them about Jerry. The Grateful Dead was really hassling Jerry at the end—all those people, his wife, the Grateful Dead. He wasn’t very happy there at the end and it pissed me off.”
The Reverend Matthew Fox (who had presided over Jerry and Deborah’s wedding) conducted the service, which lasted about an hour and a half and featured a number of speeches, many of them laced with humor, from friends and family. It was an open-casket funeral and several attendees later noted—with affection and not a trace of disrespect—that they’d seen Jerry look much worse. Reverend Fox called Jerry “a wounded healer” and sprinkled quotes from Heidegger, Jung and St. Thomas Aquinas in his remarks. “Jerry is in a place where the ancestors gather, his musical ancestors,” he said, “and one can only imagine the jamming going on there.”
Kesey praised Garcia as a warrior, and Steve Parish spoke movingly about his friend who had treated him and others so well through the years. David Grisman and Enrique Coria played “Amazing Grace” and the ancient Hebrew melody “Shalom Aleichem.” Gloria Jones and Jackie LaBranch of the JGB sang a spiritual called “My Living Shall Not Be in Vain” backed by Melvin Seals on piano. Annabelle Garcia, beaming a pranksterish grin, noted that Jerry “may have been a genius, but he was a shitty father.” This widely reported remark was viewed by people who don’t know her mischievous sense of humor—so much like both her father’s and mother’s—to be out of place at the funeral, but everyone in attendance knew what she meant and took it in the spirit she intended.
Toward the end of the service Robert Hunter stood in front of the mourners and with shaking hands but a strong voice read a poem he’d written for the occasion. As usual, his eloquence struck the perfect chord for the event. It read, in part:
Jerry, my friend,
you’ve done it again,
even in your silence
the familiar pressure
comes to bear, demanding
I pull words from the air
with only this morning
and part of the afternoon
to compose an ode worthy
of one so particular
about every turn of phrase,
demanding it hit home
in a thousand ways
before making it his own,
and this I can’t do alone.
Now that the singer has gone,
where shall I go for the song? . . .
. . . May she bear thee to thy rest,
the ancient bower of flowers
beyond the solitude of days,
the tyranny of hours—
the wreath of shining laurel lie
upon your shaggy head,
bestowing power to play the lyre
to legions of the dead.
If some part of that music
is heard in deepest dream,
or on some breeze of Summer
a snatch of golden theme,
we’ll know you live inside us
with love that never parts
our good old Jack of Diamonds
become the King of Hearts.
I feel your silent laughter
at sentiments so bold
that dare to step across the line
to tell what must be told,
so I’ll just say I love you
which I never said before
and let it go at that my friend,
the rest you may ignore.
At the end of the service Reverend Fox asked the mourners to give Garcia one last standing ovation, and they obliged, tears flowing from most eyes. As they left the church, many filed by the open casket, pausing for a moment to say good-bye one more time.
After the funeral some of the crowd repaired to a gathering at Bill Graham’s former hilltop mansion in Mill Valley, known as Masada, while others, including M.G., went to Robert and Maureen Hunter’s house. Sara Ruppenthal says, “We had a wonderful time at Hunter’s. And for that whole week there was this extensive sort of house party going on, with Hunter taking care of people who needed to come and connect with each other. It was ext
raordinarily nurturing.”
Two days after the funeral, at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park, there was an official public celebration of Garcia’s life. The day broke sunny and warm, and by 8 A.M. thousands of Deadheads from all over the Bay Area, and scores more who had flown in or driven long distances to be part of the event, had congregated on the field in the bright morning sunshine. Bill Graham Presents had set up loudspeakers and erected a small platform with a rostrum and a single microphone surrounded by enormous sprays of flowers. Multicolored triangular banners flanked the stage, and an arch of purple and green balloons blew silently above the stage in the early morning breeze. From outward appearances, it could almost have been a stage set from a latter-day Dead show except for the main element in the scene: a striking thirty-foot painted cloth portrait of a smiling Garcia, guitar in hands. In front of the stage there was a makeshift shrine which over the course of the day became filled with thousands of personal mementos from Deadheads—photos, old Dead T-shirts, poems, flowers, stuffed animals, ticket stubs, messages to Jerry—all sorts of big and little items.
At 10 A.M. a Mardi Gras–style funeral parade passed slowly around the edge of the field, led by a Dixieland band playing from the back of a flatbed truck. Among those in the procession were a dozen or so people carrying Grateful Dead and Tibetan prayer flags, and the Hog Farm’s Chinese New Year dragon, Flash, who’d been part of so many Grateful Dead shows. By late morning there were about 25,000 people on the field—about the same number that attended the Human Be-In there. Clusters of Deadheads who’d been to untold numbers of shows together assembled on blankets and bedspreads as if they were at a show. Children chased each other and blew bubbles. There were hugs, more than a few tears, but mostly smiling faces.
The great Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, dressed in a flowing white African robe, was the first to speak before the crowd. He offered words of consolation, urged those gathered to celebrate Garcia’s spirit and led everyone in call-and-response chanting that echoed across the giant field.
Then Olatunji introduced Deborah Garcia, who lifted the crowd’s mood when she came to the microphone and said, “What a great guy Jerry was! He would have loved this; he is loving it! He was a big-hearted, generous, wonderful, hardworking man. I want everyone to know that he died in his sleep with a smile on his face. He was working hard to purify himself, and we thought it was going to be for a good long life, but it was for another journey. And he loved his life. He loved all of you. And what I learned from Jerry was to open my heart and live fully in the moment. And for that, and for everything else, and for all the beauty in his life, I want to say thank you, Jerry, I love you.”
Annabelle Garcia lauded her father as “one of the greatest Americans ever born” and urged Deadheads “to respect each other and love each other. And think to yourself when something’s wrong: What would Jerry do? And keep it up, you know? You gotta keep together, and be grateful.”
Fighting back tears, his voice breaking with emotion, Bob Weir thanked Jerry for “showing me how to live with joy and mischief. And so, what I want is to give some of that back to him now, make him complete, make him whole.” With his arms outstretched, his hands open toward the sun, he asked the crowd to “Take your heart, take your faith, and reflect back some of that joy he gave you. He filled this world full of clouds of joy. Just take a little bit of that and reflect it back up to him, or wherever he is, just shine it back to him.”
Steve Parish, a private man with a tough exterior, said simply, “You’ve seen us up here scurrying around all these years. I wanna just tell you we did it because we love you, too; all of you, you were great! You’re the best people there are!”
Then the other members of the band spoke.
Mickey Hart told the crowd that the Grateful Dead had empowered them and that now, “You have the groove, you have the feeling. We’ve been working on it for thirty years now. So what are you going to do with it? That’s the question. . . . This means a lot to all of us, and you kept us going; you were the fuel. You were a part of it; a big part of it. . . . We all love you for that!”
Phil Lesh called Jerry “my brother. He was a wounded warrior. And now he’s done with becoming. Now he is being Jerry, God bless you. Go with God. I love you.”
Bill Kreutzmann noted that “the highest moment of my life was when the band was playing and cooking . . . with Jerry and these guys behind me. That’s the best.”
And Vince Welnick said, “The first time I ever laid eyes on Jerry I believed in Santa Claus. He could be ornery at times, but that was his body talking, not his soul. Because I never met a kinder man in the whole world. Everybody’s asking the big question, and love is the answer. And I’ll always believe in Santa Claus.”
The last speaker was John Barlow: “They asked me to come up here and speak a word, and rarely in my life have I had so few of them. And so I’ll just speak one: Love.”
For the entire afternoon, David Gans and Dick Latvala played Grateful Dead tapes over the huge sound system, and thousands of Deadheads danced, swayed, sang along and cheered as if it were “the boys” themselves up there, beneath the smiling Jerry portrait, cranking out rock ’n’ roll and space music and heartrending ballads. The crowd whooped during “Scarlet Begonias” and “Sugar Magnolia,” seemed scattered and confused during a long, painfully loud psychedelic jam from a ’68 tape, and looked appropriately somber during “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.”
As the shadows from the towering cypress trees that ring the Polo Fields grew long in the late afternoon, an unmistakable air of sadness floated over the field. The last few songs brought back tears once more: the gentle strains of “Box of Rain” from American Beauty; the band, circa 1968, struggling to keep their harmonies together on “We Bid You Goodnight,” the lovely a cappella spiritual the band closed so many shows with in the late ’60s; and finally, the soothing orchestral version of “Greensleeves” that Bill Graham loved to use to gently usher people back out into the real world after shows at the Fillmores and Winterland. The day had been a celebration and a wake; a perfect day with only one thing missing: Jerry Garcia.
EPILOGUE
Sleep in the Stars
he mainstream press reaction to Garcia’s death in the weeks following August 9 was remarkable. He was on the cover of Newsweek, People and Rolling Stone. People and Entertainment Weekly each put out special commemorative issues devoted entirely to him. Most of what was written about Garcia after his death was filled with genuine respect and affection. Jerry’s iconic persona was that of a laid-back, good-natured hippie—People dubbed him “rock’s happy warrior” on their August 21 cover. To the non–Deadhead world, he was the grizzled, grinning embodiment of the acid-soaked Summer of Love, a pied piper to young and old hippies; “Thirty years and still truckin’!” He was free concerts in the park and “Touch of Grey.” He was even forgiven his love of drugs: LSD was far in the past; stoned Deadheads were practically cultural icons themselves, funny to people the same way beatniks were in the ’50s; and because Garcia died in a drug treatment facility, the public perception was that he was finally trying to beat his addiction. If he had died of a drug overdose backstage at a show, the spin of most of the stories would have been quite different. But America loves recovery, because nearly everyone can relate to some form of excess.
As a media story, Garcia’s death faded from view within a month. Many newspapers and magazines didn’t even bother to report the autopsy findings, which confirmed what everyone had suspected: Garcia had died of a heart attack. The coroner’s investigator, Gary Erickson, observed that Garcia had advanced heart disease and that two of the three arteries leading into Jerry’s heart had been reduced to “a pinpoint,” with 85 percent blockage. “He was a fifty-three-year-old man with hardening of the arteries,” he said. “This was a mechanical process.” A coronary bypass operation at the end of summer tour might have saved Garcia, but he went into drug rehab, not a hospital, so the facility he checked in to was look
ing primarily at his addiction, not his overall health. After Jerry’s death several of his friends remarked that the strain of going through detox, then taking more drugs, and subsequently trying to clean up again was probably more than his weakened body could take.
“Everyone should note that the worst thing he ever did for his health was the cigarettes—the two and three packs a day for years and years and years,” Len Dell’Amico says. “That over the long haul, obesity and smoking cigarettes are two of the main indicators for a heart attack. That’s why the doctors said [after Garcia’s 1992 collapse], ‘If you don’t quit this you’ve probably got two years.’ And he never really quit smoking.”
This may be true, but it must also be said that heroin had the extremely deleterious effect of making him not care about what he ate, whether he slept or if he got any exercise. And though heroin is widely considered the great dark force of this saga, because it turned him inward and away from people, the prodigious amounts of cocaine Garcia took through the years also must have taken a toll on his body—prolonged use of the drug has been shown to cause heart damage.
If the media mourning of Garcia was largely finished a month after his death, in the Grateful Dead community—the Dead family and all the Deadheads—the enormity of the loss was just beginning to sink in. The shock was wearing off, denial was no longer an option and hundreds of thousands of people—from bandmembers to roadies to that twenty-year-old hippie girl from Santa Cruz selling veggie burritos outside Dead shows to earn enough scratch to make it to the next concert—were now confronted with the frightening and incomprehensible prospect of a world without the Grateful Dead. This was the Big One, a reckoning if there ever was one. Can You Pass This Acid Test?
One can only imagine what the band—with their unfathomably rich shared history and their psychic (and psychedelic) bonds as strong as any blood ties—must have experienced in the first months after Jerry’s death. Steeled though they may have been from years of secretly expecting Garcia’s imminent demise, no one could foresee the emotional ramifications of the event when it finally happened. There was sadness, rage, confusion, emptiness—many of the same feelings Deadheads went through.
Garcia: An American Life Page 72