“The reason that Jerry and I made an agreement outside of the legal system was because we were afraid of just this kind of stuff,” M.G. said after the trial. “Neither of us wanted to go to court; we didn’t want to submit ourselves to the scrutiny.”
Court TV had a slew of legal analysts covering the proceedings, dissecting the minutiae of the testimony the way they had for the O. J. Simpson murder trial a year earlier, and day after day the “experts” came up with the same conclusion: that the one-paragraph divorce agreement, drawn up by Carolyn Garcia at Jerry’s request and signed in the presence of a lawyer, was valid. In the end, Judge Dufficy came to the same conclusion and let the divorce settlement stand.
Deborah appealed the judgment and the ruling seemed to be heading for years of expensive appeals when, in the summer of 1998, M.G. decided to end the court battles by settling with the estate for $1.25 million. Since that bruising trial, Deborah has settled several of the other claims against the estate as well.
Ultimately the trial and all the mudslinging in the press had little effect on most Deadheads, who—like Jerry himself—have always been more interested in music and celebration than digging through the dirty laundry of their heroes. And to the fans’ delight, in 1997 all of the former members of the group were active musically, making their way through uncertain times by finding new creative ventures.
Bill Kreutzmann, now living on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, joined a local trio called Backbone, which played bars there and a few gigs in Northern California to mixed reviews.
Vince Welnick came out of his funk with a strong, eclectic group called Missing Man Formation, which played a mixture of Grateful Dead tunes (including “Saint Stephen,” “Cosmic Charlie,” “The Wheel” and others), unusual cover songs from the ’60s and ’70s (Led Zeppelin, the Stones, et al.) and a handful of originals, including three that addressed Jerry’s death and its aftermath. “I plan to carry on in the tradition of the Dead as much as I can,” Vince says, “but respectfully and without trying to steal the thunder. I want to be with those people [Deadheads] and to serve the music, just like Jerry did. That’s my goal.”
Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bruce Hornsby took their groups out on the second Furthur Festival in the summer of 1997. Ratdog added a young sax player named Dave Ellis, who brought the band a powerful melodic voice, and a new keyboardist, Jeff Chimenti. The group’s songbook also underwent a much-needed transformation: this time out, Ratdog’s Furthur sets consisted mostly of Grateful Dead material, including crowd-pleasers such as “Saint of Circumstance,” “Truckin’,” “Sugar Magnolia” and “Cassidy,” and even a few Garcia tunes—“Touch of Grey,” “West L.A. Fadeaway,” “Loose Lucy.” Mickey’s band, Planet Drum, featured the same top-notch percussionists as Mystery Box, but not the Mint Juleps, so most of their material was new and not so vocally oriented. Instead, Planet Drum fell into a sort of organic techno-ambient groove space—modern dance music with a tribal feeling. Hornsby’s sound and repertoire changed little between the 1996 and 1997 tours. Robert Hunter, who that spring returned to the stage after a seven-year absence, also performed at a number of Furthur dates, to a rapturous reception.
Financially, Furthur ’97 was a bust, particularly on the East Coast, before the tour’s uniformly strong word of mouth had a chance to work. The tour undoubtedly suffered from the bad rap that Ratdog received in 1996, but also, many Deadheads were turned off by the ’97 headliner, the hard-rocking Georgia band the Black Crowes.
Phil Lesh strapped on his bass in public only a few times in 1997. He jammed with Weir, Hart and Hornsby at the Furthur show at Shoreline Amphitheater; he joined David Crosby for a few songs at a pair of Bay Area gigs; and he sat in twice with David Gans’s occasional band, the Broken Angels, gleefully playing on a wide selection of Dead tunes, from “Scarlet Begonias” to “The Other One,” and singing a few himself—“Broken Arrow,” “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Box of Rain.”
During the first few months of 1998 Phil stepped out even more, playing monthly gigs at the Fillmore and Warfield with a variety of different musicians, billed as Phil and Friends. (All the shows were benefits for a philanthropic group Phil and his wife, Jill, started called the Unbroken Chain Foundation.) The first couple of shows featured the Broken Angels as the core band, augmented by players ranging from Vince Welnick to pedal steel player Joe Goldmark. Bob Weir showed up at the late February Fillmore show, rocking and jamming through two generous sets of mostly classic Dead material. The format was loose as could be, and Phil was clearly up for anything, whether it was long-neglected songs from the Dead’s past, such as “Saint Stephen” and “Alligator,” or numbers like Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and the Stones’ “Wild Horses.” Anything was fair game; Phil even took a stab at singing “Days Between.”
By spring, rumors that had been swirling through the Dead scene since December 1997 were confirmed: Lesh, Weir, Bruce Hornsby and Mickey Hart had agreed to put together a band for the summer 1998 Furthur tour. John Molo, from Hornsby’s band, was brought in as a second drummer. Ratdog sax man Dave Ellis was also invited to be part of the group. They even had a clever and fitting new name: the Other Ones.
Not surprisingly, the toughest position to fill was the lead guitarist slot. For a while, a young player from David Murray’s jazz group named Stan Franks appeared to have the inside track—he played at several Phil and Friends shows, and Weir in particular seemed to favor him. But when rehearsals for the Other Ones’ tour began in earnest in May it was decided that Franks was not such a good fit after all. With time running short, the group settled on a versatile journeyman guitarist named Mark Karan. Originally from Marin County, but more recently living in L.A., Karan was already familiar with the Dead’s music and, unlike Franks, was comfortable anchoring Dead-style melodic jams.
Just a few days before the tour began, however, the Other Ones added a second guitarist—Steve Kimock, who played in Zero and had been a member of Missing Man Formation through most of 1997. Months earlier, Kimock had been passed over by the Other Ones, in part because Weir felt his style was too close to Garcia’s. But he also had his advocates in the Dead camp, and when he went back to the Dead’s Novato studio to see how he would mesh with Karan and the rest of the group, the chemistry was clearly there.
“I happened to swing by the studio the day they were auditioning Steve Kimock,” M.G. relates. “I swung by and it was lunch hour and they weren’t really rehearsing yet; they were just warming up. But I’ll tell you—when I heard the sound of Phil’s bass and those guitars and the drums all coming together it was so exciting I nearly passed out! It sounded like the real thing. When I hear that sound my whole being goes into some fugue state of anticipation and ecstasy. I’m just wired up that way, and think of how many thousands of other people are, too. There’s nothing else like that sound. And this was that sound.”
It was that sound, only different, of course. The Other Ones had a bigger, fuller, denser sound than the Dead ever did—not surprising given that Garcia was “replaced” by two guitarists and a saxophonist, and that Weir, Lesh, Hornsby and Hart all viewed themselves as leaders of the octet to a degree. Although the repertoire was dominated by Grateful Dead songs, the musicians took great pains to get away from some of the Dead’s ingrained habits. Instead of playing two sets, they played one two-and-a-half- to three-hour set each night. They abandoned the Dead’s tired formula of playing short songs at the beginning and extended pieces toward the end, making sets very unpredictable. They also changed the arrangements of many Dead tunes. “Friend of the Devil,” sung by Weir, went back to its original fast clip; “Uncle John’s Band” was transformed into a brisk, lilting tune with African and West Indian shading. Hunter-Garcia tunes dominated, with Weir singing songs such as “China Cat,” “Touch of Grey,” “Loose Lucy” and “Bird Song”; Lesh trying “U.S. Blues,” “China Doll” and “Mississippi Half-Step,” among others; and Hornsby leading the band through “Scarlet Begonias,” �
��Wharf Rat,” “Tennessee Jed” and “Ramble On Rose.” The group also fearlessly tackled a few songs that Garcia either rarely played in his later days, or hadn’t attempted for years, including “Saint Stephen,” “The Eleven,” “Dark Star” and “Mountains of the Moon.”
“It was illuminating and refreshing going back to some of those musical places,” Mickey says. “Things were organic in a way they were for years and years in the Grateful Dead, with different guys suggesting approaches. Somewhere along the line the Dead stopped doing that; we lost that fire. So we reclaimed some of that spirit, and like the Dead, the Other Ones were able to turn spirit into form.
“Backstage one day on the tour someone asked me, ‘What would you say to Jerry if he walked into this room right now?’ I’d say, ‘Hey man, we could really use you. You wanna join the band?’ And you know what? I bet he’d join this band. Because in some ways it’s better than the Grateful Dead was when we stopped. It’s more enthusiastic, more poised. And I know Jerry would want to be part of something this good. He’d get off on it,” he adds, a trace of sadness behind his smile.
Sometimes there were clashing soloists, way too much going on in the music, and it was hard not to yearn for the delicacy, simplicity and directness Garcia brought to his playing (and singing). But the flip side of that is that the Other Ones were capable of building sonic tidal waves. They were serious about jamming and serious about taking the Grateful Dead songbook to some new spaces. This wasn’t meant to be nostalgia; it was a new thing. And the fact that both the musicians and the large, jubilant crowds that turned up at every tour stop seemed to enjoy themselves so much is proof that it worked.
“When we got out there onstage the first night of the tour it felt like we’d only been gone for three days, not three years,” Mickey says. “The heat coming from the audience was tremendous. They were hungry and we were hungry and we all sat down together for a big feast. We were all desperate for that Grateful Dead feeling. It was mutual, and it all seemed quite soulful and real.”
* * *
“I think it’s great that Deadheads are still getting together and the musicians are still out there making music and trying new things,” says Dick Latvala, who has stayed busy turning out a steady stream of live shows from the vault—the Dick’s Picks CD releases—as well as spinning tapes at occasional dance parties. “But let’s face it: There ain’t ever gonna be another Grateful Dead. They belonged to that time and they can’t be replaced, because Jerry’s role was central to the essence of everything. People might say I’m crazy, but I really believe that the Grateful Dead was one of the most awesome things to ever happen in the universe, because they succeeded at getting people together in ways that they never had before, and they were about peace and love and all that corny stuff, which is obviously what we need to survive into the future.
“It was totally magical at the same time it was real,” he continues. “Talk to Deadheads, man. Every one has a great story—or a million of ’em! But I’ve always felt that at the core there was a commonly shared perception and all people were the same when we were in there at the shows. We were all spirits and it didn’t matter what age you were; we were all receiving the same information and sharing in the joy of celebrating it together and that’s what was so compelling about being at a show. The band and the audience produced this effect together and it was something that existed uniquely in that space at that time. That’s why Deadheads wanted to go to every show. That’s what they’ll be trying to explain in the future—why did these people go to every show? Why did this guy have six hundred tapes of this band? They’ll be forever answering that question. And one answer is that it was as high as you can get in a group, and people like to be together. But beyond that it’s like trying to explain sex to someone who’s never had it.”
“One of the things I think the Dead teaches us about spirituality is that commonality of experience—that we’re more alike than we realize,” notes Peter Toluzzi. “There are so many commonly recognizable truths, if I may use that scary term, embodied in the experiences described in the lyrics, and there is whatever is the musical equivalent of truth—the perfect segue, the perfect chord, the perfect arpeggio. And some of the magic lies in our simultaneous appreciation of these truths—one of art’s most powerful aspects is the ability to allow us to experience powerful emotions together and feel a sense of unity. I think the Dead were very, very good at what they did, and we were ready to have those buttons pushed because that’s a basic part of the human spirit.”
“People need celebration in their life,” Garcia said. “It’s part of what it means to be human. We need magic and bliss and power, myth and celebration in our lives. And music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.”
If the Grateful Dead and the Deadheads constituted a modern mobile tribe, then Garcia would have to be considered the principal shaman of the tribe—magician, conjurer, healer and holy man. Of course he would say he was just a guy who played the guitar and sang, but everyone who loved his music and every musician who played with him knows better.
“In the tribal culture, the shaman isn’t in society—he lives in the tent outside,” comments Len Dell’Amico. “He’s usually considered crazy, and he lives in poverty and he’s happy. But a shaman in America today becomes a multimillionaire, because what he is doing is in such incredible demand.
“Jerry was a shaman who was put in a certain position to perform a certain task, and I think he carried a heavy burden as well as he could for as long as he could, and that was it. And it was a long time, and it was a heavy fucking burden for somebody who was the most happy-go-lucky person I’ve ever known—who would be happy living in a car; who would’ve been happy as long as he had a guitar and someone to play with.”
He never aspired to guruhood; in fact, he ran away from it at every opportunity—“I don’t want to be a leader,” he once said, “because I don’t want to be a misleader.” But everyone viewed him as a leader anyway, because he was smart and articulate and had lots of great ideas.
When Barbara Meier interviewed Jerry for the Buddhist journal Tricycle in 1991, the first question she asked was whether he considered himself a bodhisattva. Naturally, Garcia demurred, but when I asked Barbara if she considered Jerry one, she was emphatic: “Yes. He was phenomenally generous on many, many levels. And then, something would snap and he’d become phenomenally closed. But when he was in the generous mode, you felt listened to, embraced, acknowledged, included, grokked. He was generous with his attention. He was generous with his energy, his money, everything. He created a lot of light.”
“He had an enormous compassionate streak that was a huge part of him,” M.G. says. “He deeply believed in the sameness of souls. He didn’t believe in people’s egos. And for better or worse he was drawn to people who were fucked up, pathetic, sad, downtrodden. He thought homeless drunks were sort of saints of the streets. I don’t know whether it was from his early experiences in San Francisco or just some inner thing, but he always had this link with people who were down and out. He would radiate this compassionate heart for those kinds of people.
“He brought that attitude to the Grateful Dead’s business, too. Whenever there was a discussion about ticket prices, he was always the one who wanted to keep prices down. From the beginning to the end he always wanted the music to be available to people. He didn’t want the funky people shut out. He hated people being shut out because of money, status or class.”
“One thing I loved about him is he found nearly everything funny,” Barbara Meier notes. “He found the slightest thing hilarious. He could bring tremendous levity to almost any situation. But of course you know the other side of it—where the blackest, darkest cloud would come over him. It was very hard to make plans for what kind of mood he was going to be in.”
Steve Brown concurs: “My relationship with Jerry was mostly just laughing and having fun, and you’ll probably find a lot of people who will say the same thing. I’ve only known a coup
le of people in my life who were always ready for a joke, always ready to be ‘Oh wowed,’ always ready to be turned on to something cool, always ready to be just giggling or catching something that was weird. He was that guy. He really liked to be able to enjoy something that way, discover new trips. You could even pull him out of a crotchety thing with something funny oftentimes. And if you didn’t, you better leave the room, ’cause he’d really be in a bad way!” he adds with a chuckle.
“As far as I can tell, the battle cry ‘Louder and funnier!’ summed up Jerry’s attitude better than anything else ever solemnly pondered and enunciated,” says Willy Legate, who knew him for thirty-five years. “To a question about how he could stand in front of a loudspeaker like that, he said, ‘It’s like a dog riding in a car—he likes to stick his head out the window.’”
Someone could probably fill an entire book about Garcia with fuzzy anecdotes about his humor and great spirit. And they could just as easily fill a volume with stories that detailed his foibles. He had extremely complex relationships with most of the people he was close to, and in his later years he kept many of his older friends at arm’s length and chose isolation over deep friendships.
“He knew he was a fire,” says Len Dell’Amico, “and he knew he would burn people near him; he knew he had a history of that and I think after a while he developed a protective mechanism: ‘I don’t want to let people get too close because I’ll disappoint them. They’ll get hurt when I do X or Y or Z.’ He had experiences of people getting close to him and then he didn’t want to see them anymore for whatever reason, and they seemed overly broken. Well, that’s disturbing. If you’re a raging ego, you just say, ‘Fuck ’em, I don’t care.’ But he was more of a regular, amiable, warm guy and he didn’t like seeing people hurt that way.”
Garcia: An American Life Page 74