Part 14 (2/2)

Perhaps the general pop world's disregard and outright ridicule took a certain toll on the spirits of the various band an to wear on Jerry Garcia in the mid-1980s, and whatever it was, it never really let up on hi the Deadheads-who just may be the best networked co had lost rown lackadaisical and that, in fact, he was suffering fro cocaine and heroin for several years-in fact, had developed a serious addiction-and according to some observers, his use had started to affect the spirit and unity of the band itself ”He got so trashed out,” said the Dead's sound engineer, Dan Healy, ”that he just wasn't really playing Having hi froht he itnessing the probable end of the Grateful Dead ”I was very afraid that Garcia was going to die In fact, I'd reached a point where I'd just figured it was a matter of time before I'd turn on my radio and there, on the hour, I'd hear, 'Jerry Garcia, famous in the sixties, has died' I didn't even allow myself to think it wasn't possible That's a pretty ot one person that is absolutely critical, and you don't think he's going to e emotionally, and I had For a while, I couldn't see where it was all headed Ioff, but I couldn't see any of us getting off enough to make it hile

”And it wasn't just Garcia,” Barlow says ”There were a lot of things that rong I don't want to tell any tales out of school, but I think our adherents have a oes on inside the Grateful Dead, and just how enlightened we all are

”What happened with Garcia was not unique”

IT WAS NOT LONG after this tithy conversation with Jerry Garcia It was during a period of high activity and high risks for the Grateful Dead The band was putting the finishi+ng touches on its first albus in several years, In the Dark, which, in turn, would launch the band's only Top 10 single, ”Touch of Grey,” a touching song about aging, decline, rebirth, and reco rehearsals with Bob Dylan for a nationwide tour that would make for a series of performances that were, at ti ferocity

Garcia and Iof 1987, in the band's San Rafael recording studio When our conversation began, we had just finished viewing a video documentary about the band called So Far, which was shot nearly two years before So Far is an adventurous and irandest moments, attests to the much-touted spirit of community that the Dead shared with their audience Yet certain passages of the hour-long production seeht for Garcia, who looked rather heavy and fatigued during the project's taping At the ti probleer, would not only imperil his own health but also threaten the stability of the band itself

That fact lends a certain affecting tension to the better perfor of ”Uncle John's Band” The song-with its country-style sing-along about people pulling together into a brave co the band's signature tunes, yet in So Far, the Dead render it as if they were ais anew In the video, Garcia and rhythhted concert hall, working their way through the lyrics with an air of frayed fraternity, as if this ood on the music's promise of hard-earned kinshi+p ”When life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door,” they sing to each other, and from the look that passes between them in that moment, it's iether or coedy but utterly re, it seems to leave Garcia a bit uneasy ”There were so many people who cared aboutaroundDrug use is kind of a cul-de-sac: It's one of those places you turn with your problems, and pretty soon, all your problems have sis”

It is now late in the evening The other band one hoer in a nearby rooements for the next day's rehearsals with Dylan Garcia looks tired on this night-it has been a long day, and the next one proer one-but as he sips at a ruh history of the previous years, his voice sounds surprisingly youthful

”There was sos,” he says directly ”Drugs are like trade-offs in a way-they can be, at any rate There was so there forof being able to distancethere I needed for a while, and it wasn't an entirely negative experienceBut after a while, it was just the drugs running me, and that's an intolerable situation

”I was never an overdose kind of junkie I've never enjoyed the extreh I never used to like to sit around and smoke freebase until I ired out of etting pleasantly co at that level But of course, that level doesn't stay the sas So after a few years of that, pretty soon you've taken a lot of fucking drugs and not experiencing much It's a black hole I went down that black hole, really Luckily, my friends pulled me out Without theth to do it myself”

In fact, says Garcia, it was the Grateful Dead whoproblem ”Classically,” he says, ”the band has had a laissez-faire attitude in terms of what anybody wants to do If so as it doesn't seriously affect everybody else or affect the o We've all had our excursions Just before I got busted, everybody caot to cool it; you're starting to scare us' ”

According to some sources, the request that the Grateful Dead made of Garcia on that day in January of 1985 was actually a bit more ada himself and that while they could not force him to choose between death and life, they could insist that he choose between drugs and the band If he chose drugs, the band ht simply dissolve Either way, the members wanted Garcia to understand they loved hiiance

”Garcia was the captain of his own shi+p,” Bob Weir says of that period, ”and if he was going to check out, that was up to hiht take it upon ourselves to buht direction”

Perhaps, in that confrontation, Garcia was re he had once said about the Grateful Dead's original singer, Pigpen, in 1972, after it had been disclosed that Pigpen had severely da ”He survived it,” Garcia told Rolling Stone, ”and now he's got the option of being a juicer or not being a juicer To be a juicerable to choose whether to live or die And if I know Pigpen, he'll choose to live” The following year, Pigpen was found dead According tobut had si

In any event, Garcia reportedly s and would seek rehabilitative treatot the chance On January 18, 1985, while parked in his BMW in Golden Gate Park, Garcia was spotted by a policeistration on the vehicle As the police odor and noticed Garcia trying to hide soer seats The policeet out of the car, and when Garcia did, the policeer seat, full of twenty-three packets of ”brown and white substances”

Garcia was arrested on suspicion of possessing cocaine and heroin, and about a uitarist enter a Marin County drug-diversion progra back at the experience, Garcia was almost thankful ”I' along until sos, the bust helped It re dependent It caught al' And of all the things I don't want to do, spending tis I least want to do It was as if this was tellingdifferent It took s co that needed to happen”

Garcia pauses to light a cigarette, then studies its burning end thoughtfully ”I can't speak for other people,” he says after a few s one way or another I think it's purely a personal ardIt was one of those things where the pain it cost h, was out of proportion to whatever it was I thought I needed fro Garcia's drug treat schedule that included several 1986 summer dates with Bob Dylan and To up, oddly enough, until that tour,” Garcia says ”And then, I didn't realize it, but I was dehydrated and tired That was all I felt, really I didn't feel any pain I didn't feel sick I just felt tired Then e got back from that tour, I was just really tired One day, I couldn't move anymore, so I sat down A week later, I woke up in a hospital, and I didn't knohat had happened It was really weird”

Actually, it orse than that: Though he had never been previously diagnosed as having diabetes, when Garcia sat down at his San Rafael ho in 1986, he slipped into a diabetic coma that lasted five days and nearly claiested to me that I was anywhere near death,” says Garcia ”Forshut off Later on, I found out how scary it was for everybody, and then I started to realize how serious it had all been The doctors said I was so dehydrated, my blood was like rab , 'Hey, you're going to have to put in so' ” As he talks, Garcia still seems startled by this realization ”Actually,” he says, ”it was a thought that had never entered ed constitution, but just the thing of getting older, and basically having a life of benign neglect, had caught up with s es”

At first, though, there were no guarantees that Garcia would be able to live as effectively as before There were fears that he ht suffer ht never again be sharp enough for hiuitar ”When I was in the hospital,” he says, ”all I could think was 'God, just giveproductive and playingthe stuff I love to do' And one of the first things I did-once I started to be able to uitar in there to see if I could play But when I started playing, I thought, 'Oh,time and a lot of patience' ”

After his release fro afternoons with an old friend, Bay Area jazz and rhyth to rebuild his musical deftness ”I said, 'God, I can't do this,' ” says Garcia ”Merl was very encouraging He would run es, so I had to think It was like learning ain so back It was about a three-month process, I would say, before I felt like 'Okay, now I's were sort of shaky, but” Garcia's voice turns thick, and he looks away for a moment ”Ah, shi+t,” he says, ”it was incredible There wasn't a dry eye in the house It was great It was just great I was so happy to play”

Garcia smiles and shakes his head ”I aot such an incredible outpouring The ot in the hospital was so soulful All the Deadheads-it was kind of like brotherly, sisterly, motherly, fatherly advice fro vibe was just pouring into that place I mean, the doctors did what they could to keepwithmedicine kno to do And after I'd left, the doctors were saying my recovery was incredible They couldn't believe it

”I really feel that the fans put life into s It was like 'Okay, I've been away for a while, folks, but I'reat to be involved in so that doesn't hurt anybody If it provides some uplift and some comfort in people's lives, it's just thatnow”

IN THE YEARS following that 1987 conversation with Garcia, the Grateful Dead went on to enjoy the greatest coh, was the symbiosis that developed between the band and its audience-a reciprocity likely unequaled in pop history At the heart of this connection was the Dead theanization-the latter which did a largely independent, in-house job of handling the booking and staging of the band's near-incessant tours, and which also bypassed conventional ticket-sales systehly fifty percent of the band's tickets through a company-run mail-order department This model of an autonoest genuine alternative co coalition of fans, entrepreneurs, and horown roup as the center for a ide coely without the involvement or support of the established ful example of cooperative community isn't without its problely beset by serious dileroup's more reckless and unfaithworthy fans-particularly the ones who gathered in parking lots outside the band's shows, begging for free tickets, so the peace and security of nearby neighborhoods-had grown so prevalent that several concert halls, local police departments, and city councils were forced to pronounce the Dead and their audience as unwelcome visitors The Dead often tried to dissuade this sort of behavior a its followers, but it wasn't until the suate-crashi+ngs that resulted in riot incidents-that the situation reached a crisis level and provoked a severe response from the band The Dead issued an edict, in the for that fans without tickets stay away fro that any further violentfuture tours ”A few ht,” the band wrote, ”and we'll quite simply be unable to playAnd when you hear somebody say 'fuck you, we'll do ant,' re That applies to us, too” In response, Garcia received a death threat that was taken seriously by not only the band and its entourage, but by law enforce to some observers in the Dead's camp, Garcia and the band had seriously started to question whetherto truly made up the sort of co even more serious at hand Garcia's health continued to be a proble to sos He collapsed fro many of the performances on their tour After his 1993 recovery, Garcia dedicated hie seemed to work: He shed over sixty pounds froht, and he often appeared renewed and better focused onstage There were other positive changes at work: He had beco to spend more tie, with filmmaker Deborah Koons Plus, to the pleasure of numerous Deadheads, he had recently written several of his best new songs in years with his longtime friend Robert Hunter, in preparation for a new Grateful Dead album

These were all brave efforts for a man past fifty with considerable health probleh, they weren't enough to carry him farther In mid-July 1995, he checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, for oneto one report, he wanted to be clean when he gave away his oldest daughter, Heather, at her upco He checked out several days later, so he could spend his fifty-third birthday on August 1, with family and friends A week later he went into a different clinic, Serenity Knolls in Marin County He was already clean, most sources report; he just wanted to be in sound shape This ti fraternity of his band, his fans, and his faust 9, 1995, he was found unconscious by a clinic counselor In his sleep, it see to his wife, he died with a smile on his face

JERRY GARCIA and the Grateful Dead were so active for so long and were so heartening for the audience that loved the to realize that the band's adventure is now over Of course, anybody paying attention-anybody aware of the ups and downs in Garcia's well-being-h things to be braced for

”He was like the boy who cried wolf,” says John Barlow ”He'd coradually stopped taking the possibility as seriously as they otherould have Or maybe we felt so certain that this would happen soo into a kind of collective denial about it I mean, I looked at this event so many times, and shrank back froainst it each ti itself, I hardly knohat to think of it Every deposition of every i able to understand and appreciate the real thing

”But this is a very large death,” says Barlow ”There are a lot of levels on which to be affected here, all the way fro to miss terribly the opportunity to spend time in conversation with one of the sainst, to the fact that there will never truly be another Grateful Dead concert I never thought of myself as a Deadhead exactly, but that's been a pretty fundamental part of my life-of all our lives-for the past thirty years”

It is, indeed, a considerable passing To see the Grateful Dead onstage was to see a band that clearly understood thehaul Interestingly, that's so we've seen fairly little of in rock & roll, since rock is an art form, theinspiration, e that such reat rock & roll band, lived up to that ideal, but they also shattered it, or at least bent it to their own purposes At their best, they were a band capable of surprising both the as if they had spent their whole lives learning toto one another, and as if e of their sodality, and therefore their history No doubt it was What the Grateful Dead understood, probably better than any other band in pop roup could succeed as well, or roup, and that the group itself could not succeed without its individuals It was a band that needed all itsJust as important, it was a band that realized that it also needed its audience to keep things significant-indeed, it would probably be fair to say that, for the last twenty years, the Dead's audience inforroup's worth as much as their music did

In the hours after I learned of Garcia's death, I went online to the WELL, the Bay Area computer conference systeent of Deadheads I wanted to see how the fans were doing, and what they were saying, in the recognition of their loss For the most part-at least in those first hours that I scanned the , blithe co each other ”beams” (which are like positive extrasensory wishes) and fantasies of group hugs They were the sort of senti at, and I must admit, they proved too s I had to recognize about the Deadheads years ago was that this was a group of people for whoood cheer wasn't just a shared disposition but also an act of conscious dissent: a protest against the anger and malice that seems to characterize so much of our social and artistic temper these days The Deadheads may sometimes seem like naifs, but I'm not convinced their vision of co After all, there are worse visions around Consider, for exaress, which would scourge any community of the misfit or helpless

In any event, for my tastes I saw far too little attention paid-by both the Deadheads and the media-to just how much darkness there was thatand interesting that darkness was For that ood deal more darkness in the whole sixties adventure than -and I don'tcasualties, political ruin, and violence of the period There was also a willingness to explore risky psychic terrain, a realization that your best hopes could also cost you some terrible losses, and I think that those possibilities were realized in the Dead's fully as they were anywhere

In fact, the darkness crept in early in the Dead's saga It could be found in the insinuation of the band's name-whichtoo creepy and disturbing as a roup It could also be found deep down in e layers and swirls thataural portrayal of the psychedelic experience, and in the e that the band turned into hard-boiled antheman's Dead And of course, there was also all the darkness in the band's history that ended up bringing so many of its ative In fact, sos can co that was apparent to everybody about Jerry Garcia, it was that he was a good-huenerous instincts But there was much more to him than that, and it wasn't always apparent on the surface In a conversation I had several years ago with Robert Hunter about Garcia, Hunter told me: ”Garcia is a cheery and resilient man, but I always felt that under his warmth and friendliness there was a deep well of despair-or at least a recognition that at the heart of the world, there may be more darkness, despair, and absurdity than any sane and compassionate heart could stand”

In his last intervieith Rolling Stone, in 1993, Garcia had this to say about his own dark side: ”I definitely have a component in my personality which is not exactly self-destructive, but it's certainly ornery It's like”Try to get healthy'-'fuck you, man' I don't knohat it co to it, see, because I felt it's part of whatthat anarchist streak, serves me on other levels-artistically, certainly So I don't want to eliminate that aspect of ainst ifts, some of these aspects of your personality They're helpful and useful and powerful, but they also have this other side They're indiscriments”

Garcia, of course, made his own choices, and whatever they ue that in some ways they were still brave, worthy choices Maybe they were even essential to the wondrous creations of his life's work His achievements, in fact, were enormous He helped inspire and nurture a community that, in some form or another, survived for thirty years, and that may even outlast his death; he co-wrote a fine collection of songs about America's myths, pleasures, and troubles; and, as the Grateful Dead'sthat no other rock star has ever accoer in size and devotion with each passing decade, from the 1960s to the 1990s You would have to look to the careers of people like Louis Arton, Count Basie, Miles Davis, or Charles Mingus to find the equivalent of Garcia's rowth in the history of Ah, he was a man who remained true to ideals and perceptions that o found easy to discard-and er part of our loss at this point than the death of Garcia hi of the last decade or so is ”Black Muddy River,” written by Garcia and Hunter It's a song about living one's life in spite of all the heartbreak and devastation that life can bring, and in its ht will last forever/And there's nothing left to do but count the years/When the strings of in to sever/Stones fall from my eyes instead of tears/I alk alone by the black muddy river/Dream me a dream of my oalk alone by the blackofat the Grateful Dead's final show, at Chicago's Soldier Field, in early July Not bad, as far as farewells go, and not bad, either, for a suood thing, I believe, that we lived in the same time as this man did, and it is not likely that we shall see charain

NOT EVERYONE, of course, would agree As I noted earlier, Jerry Garcia's death was rief and praise, but all this respect for a hippie-derived popular hero also rankled a fair aton Post, liberal critic Colman McCarthy wrote: ”The ence of Garcia's brand of hedonism This was someone who in the 1960s fueled hi for othersAs memories fade, that decade [the 1960s] needs to be linked with people, events, and ideas on higher levels than an unkeie musicianRock bands and the Woodstock inal to the genuine challenges to the culture of that tiust 21 issue of Neeek, coluhty conservative point of view: ”The portion of popular culture that constantly sentimentalizes the Sixties also panders to the arrested develop but wishes it were and seeks derivative vitality”

There were other voices of derision fro Garcia's death, I received comments-either in conversation or by e-mail-from rock fans who couldn't fatho ”What's all this about?” one friend wrote me ”It isn't like Jerry Garcia was John Lennon” Another said: ”Maybe now all these Deadheads will be forced to get a life God knows