Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead

by Bill Kreutzmann

  I didn’t know he did that—he never handed me his room number on a piece of paper—but after the show, I stopped by his room for a drink. We used to hang out a lot during downtime on tours. He was one of my road dogs and we would run around together and get all rowdy and hopefully get into trouble and whatnot. Anyway, there was a knock at the door and, one by one, girls started showing up. Pretty soon there were fifteen, maybe twenty girls in the room. It was a typical suite, with two double beds. Healy was posted up on a chair on the other side, playing guitar and entertaining all of us. Everyone was watching him play and digging it and just enjoying the mellow scene.

  Before long, a particular blond chick started making eyes with me. Or did I start making eyes at her? Who’s to say. She sat down next to me and we started getting into some of this, and then some of that, together. It didn’t take but moments before we took what we started and ran all the way with it. That’s called a home run, for those keeping score. Right in the room with everyone else there. Healy was in the middle of playing some song, and more than a dozen girls were all about. Instead of clearing the room like a Baby Ruth in a swimming pool, our moans and groans just kick-started it—before all was said and done, Healy and I made love to just about every one of those girls. I kept count and made it all the way to thirteen. Sometimes the girls were piled a few deep at a time. Sometimes it was like musical chairs. After we were done with them, the girls left just like they came—one at a time—and everything was casual. It was all unspoken and easy. After the last girl left, Healy and I continued to hang out and talk and then eventually I went back to my room to pass out. To this day, thirteen is still my lucky number.

  Going to Healy’s room that night was a good decision. But I made my share of bad ones, too, of course. One night, when we weren’t on tour, I met up with John Perry Barlow in a bar in Lagunitas, just down the road from the Girl Scout camp where we lived, communally, back in 1966. I drove home drunk that night—or, tried to, anyway. Barlow rode shotgun. There’s only one way home when you’re anywhere in the western part of Marin County, and it’s by taking one of the curvy, narrow back roads that crisscross Marin’s back forty like a couple fallen strands of spaghetti on a kitchen floor. Mountainous terrain, often under a redwood canopy. I was in my Alfa Romeo, but for the last time. I was driving with mismatched tires, which was my first mistake. We were drunk and snorting cocaine, which was my second and third. I pushed it into fifth gear up a hill and around a corner, but I wasn’t going to make the turn, so I cheated and swerved into the other lane. Right on cue, a red Mustang came careening down from the other direction, heading right toward us. We had less than two seconds until impact. I made fast with the wheel and steered us into the other direction to avoid the collision. It worked. Except that gravity lifted the car on its side and we slid across the road a few feet, sideways, until the road curved. We didn’t curve with it. At that point, we landed upside down in the woods.

  We were suspended upside down, in the car, but there was no blood. We were still in our seats, with our seat belts on. So what did I do? I slowly reached for the cocaine and carefully took it out and let gravity do the rest—I barely even needed to snort. The cocaine sobered me up a little but, when the CHP finally did show up, my real saving grace was the fact that we were on a hill. During the sobriety test, I leaned against the hill to keep my balance and stay straight. Both the protagonist and the antagonist in this particular story are gravity.

  I told the cops that I swerved to avoid a deer and they couldn’t disprove it—there were no skid marks on the road because the car immediately flipped on its side, and then tumbled down into the woods. Without skid marks, they didn’t have a case.

  Don’t think I’m downplaying the fact that I was drunk. I was and there was no good reason why I should’ve been behind the wheel. Not that time. For legal reasons, I don’t recommend trying any of the stuff in this book at home, but with this one especially. Seriously. Don’t do it. Driving drunk is probably the dumbest thing a person could do. It’s even worse than shooting heroin. It cost me my Alfa Romeo … but I was lucky in that it could’ve cost me a life. Mine or an innocent.

  I destroyed another car once, but that one was on purpose. It was an abandoned vehicle that I found right near the place in Novato, where and when I lived with Susila. Kidd Candelario and I wrapped detonation cord—which, by the way, is not a common thing to have (and certainly not street legal)—around the headliner of the car and rigged it with a three-minute fuse. I remembered my dad’s rocketry lessons, but this was a little more advanced than a wood swing and a pipe bomb. I lit the fuse and had three minutes to take cover. Three minutes—but I decided to be cautious and only rely on two. The third minute was spent biting my nails in suspense and anticipation. And then, suddenly—boom! The dynamite went off. So did the roof of the car. There were sparks and thunder, all right, but the loudest noise of all came from Susila, who was so pissed that I’m surprised I didn’t end up sleeping on the sofa that night. The shock wave rattled everything in the house and knocked dishes onto the floor. Of course, if you’ve read this book chronologically, you’ll recognize that nothing in that particular scene was entirely unfamiliar to me. My life has had its share of dynamite, explosions, and pissed-off women.

  Sprinkled throughout my life, these explosive exploits all came from wild and carefree days. But, back in the land of the Dead, the wild and carefree days were about to end.

  21

  Remember that elementary school music teacher who told me that I “couldn’t keep a beat”? Well, maybe she was right … but on January 18, 1994, I got dressed up in a tuxedo and stood behind a podium with most of my bandmates, at a very fancy and formal hotel ballroom, to accept the Grateful Dead’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bruce Hornsby had the honor of inducting us and he gave us a fantastic introduction. Bobby, Phil, Mickey, Vince—even Tom Constanten—all approached the podium. I spoke first.

  “In Grateful Dead tradition…” I took out a prepared speech, ripped it in half, and tossed it over my shoulder. Then I improvised, speaking from the heart, addressing all the people in formal attire who sat around tables, wedding style, in the stately (in other words, sterile) ballroom.

  “I’m really doing this tonight because I like to play music,” I started. “That’s where I come from.” I made a few jokes, then recognized our fallen keyboard players—Pigpen, Keith, and Brent. Some of the others said some words too. Mickey brought out a life-sized cardboard cutout of Jerry, in his absence. With that, the band was inducted into the Hall of Fame. (If you don’t believe me, you can YouTube it.)

  So … I’m now a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Okay. But what does that mean? What did I get out of it? Well, I now have a little trophy on my bookshelf that makes a halfway-decent bookend. It’s not too bad as a paperweight either. But beyond that, it’s just another dust collector. I stood up on that podium with (most of) my bandmates and we accepted the trophies and, suddenly, the Grateful Dead belonged to an institution. We were institutionalized.

  Maybe that’s why Jerry skipped out on the ceremony. While musicians aren’t known for being on time, very few artists have been no-shows at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Of the ones that were, some of them claimed that they had other obligations they needed to honor that night, while others couldn’t bring themselves to put aside differences with ex-bandmates long enough to stand beside them on the podium. But the Grateful Dead aren’t Guns N’ Roses. So what gives?

  Jerry didn’t mean to make any grand statement by not attending. When he found out about it, he just mumbled something like, “Nah, man. It ain’t for me.” When he said he didn’t care about awards or recognition, he meant that he didn’t care about awards or recognition. The more prestigious and exclusive, in his view, the worse.

  I wasn’t at all disappointed that he didn’t attend. It was a part of who he was. It had to do with something central to his personality and his beliefs, and I resp
ected that all the way. Every time. Years earlier, Jerry told me that music was such a joy to play, and that it meant so much to people to hear it, that it should be given away for free. “Let them have music!” He really meant that and I think that it became a bigger and bigger conflict for him, the bigger and bigger that we got. I enjoyed the fame and I enjoyed the money and I didn’t see those things as taking anything away from the purity of the art that was our music. But Jerry saw those things—money and fame—as a burden. I think he was confused by the fame and felt that the money came attached to an ever-growing list of obligations that formed some kind of algorithm which transformed music into business. And none of us ever wanted to become businessmen. At least, certainly not Jerry. And certainly not me, either.

  I think Jerry may have also had some kind of fear that the minute you make it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you’re done. It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. But if you’re old enough to be inducted into an institution that takes itself too seriously, then you’re too old to be playing a young person’s game. Luckily for us, the music we made has proved timeless and as we’ve aged, so have the Deadheads. We’ve grown old together. We’ve also managed to somehow attract younger generations too, and while I could speculate on how something in the music that we made hints at some kind of timeless truth, and perhaps even captures the underlying eternal spirit of the American people, no matter how bad the present situation is … the truth is, nobody knows how or why we’ve had the staying power. Somehow we’ve remained relevant and if you look at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you’ll see that we’re really an exception to all these rules. But the fuck if I could tell you why, with any real authority. It’s all just words on paper, thoughts and ideas, speculation and philosophy—strictly academic. Hence, Jerry chose to be absent at our Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Fair enough.

  Maybe Jerry was also a little bit embarrassed that we weren’t exactly in peak form at the time they inducted us. When the Grateful Dead peaked, exactly, is up for debate. It’s a complicated calculation because we didn’t just have one peak—we had many. But they were all in the rearview mirror by 1993. There were some nights when Jerry would be so doped up that he would start to nod off, on stage. I’d hit my crash cymbals as hard as I could, just to wake him up. “Hey, Jerry, you’re on stage!” “Thanks, Bill.” That actually happened. More than once, I’m sure. (But the time I’m thinking of took place at Soldier’s Field in Chicago, at the end of our Summer 1995 tour … the end of the road).

  Incredibly, even during those kinds of moments, his guitar playing still had that unreal quality to it that made it the stuff of legend. Notes turned into daggers as Jerry took stabs at every bleeding heart within earshot. They may not have been his best solos, but they still had his magic handiwork, nonetheless. His guitar was a magic wand and he could cast spells with it in his sleep. He wouldn’t always remember what song he was in and he would mumble sounds instead of lyrics, but I’ll be damned if his fingers didn’t find all the right notes … effortlessly. Maybe Jerry was lost in the music, after all.

  Sometimes, it was almost like watching a pothead double over from laughing at a joke they couldn’t retell because they already forgot the punch line. Not that Jerry’s ailing health and debilitating habits were any laughing matter. Everyone loved Jerry and none more than me. We didn’t know what to do. For the short term, we got teleprompters to help with the lyrical lapses during the concerts.

  Off stage, we weren’t really talking to each other much. I’ve been much more open in this book than I ever was between my bandmates, and that might just be a sign of the generation that we come from. It’s not like today where kids advertise their inner feelings on social media or text each other deep emotions.

  We started off as a band of brothers—by music and by experience if not by blood. But toward the end of it, a lot of the time we didn’t want to see each other, much less have to interact on any real level. It was a separation without divorce. A hiatus without a lapse in shows, simply because shows were business and business was good. And, besides, everyone needed jobs. We had our jobs and so many other jobs relied on us just showing up to work. The “group mind” was no longer something we even thought about. I didn’t want to be in any of their heads any more than they wanted to be in mine. Everybody was caught up in their own little world, in their own proprietary scene.

  Our manager, Cameron Sears, would call each of us individually to tell us where to be and when. I wasn’t exactly calling Phil and saying, “Hey, man, did you see we’re playing Miami next week? In the mood for stone crabs? I’ll get us a table at Joe’s.” There was none of that. There was no unity. No camaraderie. I know for sure Jerry wasn’t happy about the state of our union. None of us were really happy about it, per se.

  Perhaps the most regrettable thing, in terms of the band at this time, is that we had a new batch of songs that had the potential to evolve into some of our best material yet: “So Many Roads,” “Eternity,” “Days Between,” “Lazy River Road.” One song, “Liberty,” had a New Orleans feel to it that I really loved. There were some works in progress in the mix—like Weir’s “Corinna”—and some hopeless flops (“Wave to the Wind,” “Way to Go Home”). But we had enough material to cut an album and enough potential hits to load it with future favorites. While it may be cheating to say this from the safety of time and distance, I really believe we had our best studio album still in us, and I have to imagine that this one could’ve been the masterpiece we had been chasing for all those years. If you thought In the Dark was good, you would’ve seriously flipped for … ah, well, speculation. It’s the lost Grateful Dead album.

  In 1994, we booked some studio time at a mythical little place called the Site, conveniently located on Lucas Valley Road in San Rafael. A road with some serious GD history. Nothing really came of those sessions. We spent most of our time there just waiting around for Jerry to arrive. Even when he did show up, he was still absent. We didn’t know how to handle it, so we just played through.

  Our home lives had become disparate as well. I divorced Shelley and I let her live at the ranch while I got a little house out on the coast near the actual town of Mendocino. I spent as much time as I could surfing and I started dating a girl named Pamela Lloyd. Meanwhile, Phil became increasingly distant with band life as he withdrew into family life. I don’t really know what Bobby, Mickey, or Vince was doing at this time; I didn’t really pay attention. I saw them on stage and, other than that, I was usually in the water out in Mendocino. Surfing or fishing or something of the sort.

  As for Jerry, well, he left Manasha and played the field for a bit before reuniting with the notorious Deborah Koons. They slept in different houses. As I already mentioned, when Deborah went on tour with Jerry, they would stay in lavish two-bedroom hotel suites—and Jerry always made sure that his bedroom had a lock on it. I don’t know of any other marriage like that. It was uncomfortable to watch, but we all respected Jerry so much that we didn’t offer our opinion on the matter. And, besides, interpersonal communication was never a Grateful Dead strong suit.

  When Jerry and Deborah got married, the wedding was as awkward and staid as their relationship. I didn’t go to the church to see them exchange vows but I went to the reception afterward. It was held on the harbor in Tiburon, at the San Francisco Yacht Club. Very fancy. Very formal. Not very “Jerry-like.” There was something tense about the proceedings. A band played, people looked like they were having fun, but it didn’t feel like anybody was actually having fun. It was as if it was all for show, as if being there was a commitment rather than a celebration. Of course, some of our most loyal fans could’ve said that about some of our concerts at that time. Still, I do remember watching Jerry sit there with Deborah and he seemed like he was having a good enough time with her and so that was that. Whatever makes you happy …

  What makes me happy is being out in the water. It holds the same place for me that I fill with music when I’m on land. The reason
I was late for Jerry’s wedding and could only make it to the reception was because I was still en route back from the Galapagos. I was down there filming a scientific expedition that was part of a larger documentary I was working on called Ocean Spirit. I got some really great footage of sperm whales, up close, personal—I filmed many of those scenes myself and was on such a natural high from being immersed in the water, surrounded by such beautiful and benign creatures. After flying home from something like that, slamming into such a staid wedding was a bit of a crash landing. It was almost embarrassing.

  As 1994 crossed into 1995, the Grateful Dead crossed the three-decade mark. We had been a band for thirty years. Thirty years! To give you some perspective, the Beatles were together for thirteen years. Led Zeppelin, less than that. The Band was only a band for nine years. We reached thirty without having ever broken up and, although we tried, we never even took a full year off. We only had one real hiatus. Maybe we should’ve had more of them.

  The Big Three-Zero meant that 1995 should’ve been a big year for us. A chance to celebrate everything that we had done, while getting stoked on what was still to come. Instead, the year was a nightmare. I’ll say right now that 1995 was the worst year of my life. All 365 days that I had to suffer through it. There was more than one tragedy, more than one death, and darkness everywhere. It was the worst year of my life.

  The spring tour had a few nights where it felt like we had gotten sucked into a black hole, but it was the Summer of ’95 tour that plunged us deep into total blackness. Almost every show was catastrophic.

  After playing a memorable show to 60,000 fans in a field in Highgate, Vermont, during our 1994 Summer Tour, we returned on June 15, 1995. It was the first night of the tour. Bob Dylan opened. An estimated 100,000 fans showed up—tens of thousands without tickets—and we had to revert back to crowd control tactics from decades earlier; we were forced to open the gates and make it a free show.