A Long Strange Trip (67 page)

Ultimately, the film would cost more than $600,000, at a time when, because of the hiatus, the band had no extra money. As Kant put it, “We had to find every way in the world to get money for that film, which got us into big problems with banks . . . we screwed a bank out of a lot of money.” Actually, Hal got the Bank of Boston to settle for one-third on the dollar for what they’d fronted the Dead’s record and film companies. Making the movie was, Garcia said, more than “two years of incredible doubt, crisis after crisis, as [it] was endlessly eating bucks. Every time I thought about something, my mind would come back to the film and I’d get depressed.” Meantime, other band members—Phil in particular— thought of it as “Jerry’s jerkoff,” and pondered the fact that the band as a whole was financing one man’s obsessive vision.

After the shows, Garcia had sat down in a house in Mill Valley they called Round Reels with 125 hours of raw footage, which he and assistants would watch, match to the sound track, and catalog. “I wanted elegantly framed, seamless photography,” he told an interviewer. “And I wanted a sort of roughness to the general quality of everything else. That was the only original conception.” Originally, he’d thought of the film as a canned concert, but as he watched film, he began to see a real movie. Garcia had the type of photography he wanted, and his years of movie-watching had given him the gift of seeing rhythm and flow in film. What he did not anticipate was the sheer tedium of the filmmaking process at that time, before videotape and computers. Early on, someone came up with the idea of using Dead posters as the background for the titles, and then of animating some of that. Susan Crutcher, one of the editors, knew an animator named Gary Gutierrez, with whom she’d worked on the children’s television program
The Electric Company,
and he joined them. Since the bicentennial was fast approaching, they chose “U.S. Blues” as the music for the animation sequence and budgeted $8,000 for it. Guided by what Gutierrez would come to realize was the most encouraging boss he’d ever know, Gary’s ideas for the animation flourished, and the budget grew, eventually reaching $25,000. Gary worked away, manipulating images under a camera in real time, eighty times for eighty frames, which was a mere three seconds of film. The artistic results were glorious. To the accountants, band management, and other band members, the animation was a black hole that inhaled dollars.

By late 1976 Garcia was purchasing books of airline commuter tickets to fly daily to Burbank Studios to mix the sound track. Now his partner in crime became Dan Healy, who would be an essential part of transferring the aural part of the vision to film. Together they invented new technologies like “phase panning,” so that the sound on the film would subtly follow the camera. Though they’d gone in with negative expectations, the freedom they gave the union filmmakers at Burbank paid off. “Our willingness to be totally crazy,” thought Garcia, “inspired them.” They earned one of his favorite compliments: “They were game.” So game, the studio used
The Grateful Dead Movie
to demonstrate dubbing room techniques during the 1977 Oscar week festivities. Ironically, the film that followed them into Burbank Studios, and would open just a few weeks before them, was
Star Wars,
economically the precise opposite of Garcia’s “little movie.” Made for about $10 million, it grossed more than $300 million, and with its sequels and succeeding merchandising would, over the next two decades, generate more than $4 billion in business. George Lucas and the Dead would cross paths regularly, the Dead working at his Skywalker Ranch, both sharing an interest in and a relationship with Joseph Campbell.

By spring 1977, Garcia and company were nearing completion. In the meantime, something very sad had happened: Jerry Garcia had discovered heroin. There were any number of reasons why he reached for a psychic painkiller. Rakow, his comrade-in-conspiracy, had betrayed him, and although Garcia would never permit a bad word to be said about Ron, the pain Rakow had caused him was evident. (Contrarily, Richard Loren would argue that the loss of the record company mattered relatively little. “They were musicians, not record company people. They could still make music, so, so what?”) The grinding stress of film editing was a considerable shock to Garcia. He’d long daydreamed about his cinephile talents, but this tedious reality was not fun. Rex Jackson’s death was painful.

The adulation of being “Jerry Garcia” with a capital
J
and
G,
combined with the required role of being a leader who didn’t want to lead, clearly contributed. Fame, thought his old friend Bob Seidemann, had turned him into a “Flying Dutchman” of loneliness, condemned to wander without intimacy. In particular, intimacy with a lover had always been a problem for him, dating back to his shattered and never-healed relationship with his mother. Later, Garcia would say of women that “I like ’em weird, the weirder the better,” which suggested, among other things, a certain lack of self-esteem. For that, he was in the right company. None of the band members had showed to this point in time any gift for enduring intimacy with women, and their day-to-day relationships with each other took place in the Dead world, where the permitted range of emotion, said John Barlow, “ran the gamut from irony to spite.” The only place things really worked was in what John called the “sacred space” of playing. As Kreutzmann put it, “Words would make us enemies, but music makes us lovers.”

All of the realities of Garcia’s life added up to extreme external pressures on his personal sphere. And that personal realm was being shredded by the messy end of his relationship with Deborah Koons. Late in 1976 Sue Stephens, Richard Loren’s assistant, was at work at their Mill Valley office when a breathless Garcia burst in, ran upstairs to the loft, and said, “Hide me, hide me.” Locked out, Deborah stood outside shouting, then picked up a full Alhambra water bottle and heaved it through the kitchen window. Climbing in over the shards, she was met by a couple of visiting crew members, who dragged her back out. She literally left “claw marks on the wooden paneling down both sides of the hallway walls,” said Stephens.

It had been a tumultuous relationship for a very long time, as Deborah apparently had an inclination for physical violence, at least as directed against glass and furniture. Weir later recalled coming home and finding Garcia on his couch. “What’s up?” “Deborah broke up the house.” “Oh, your old lady mad at you?” “Well, yeah, but it’s more than that. She broke up everything—I mean everything—in the house.” Deborah’s cook would recall a more or less permanent sign in the kitchen that read, “Be careful of broken glass.” The incident at the office marked the end of the relationship, and various friends speculated that one of the subconsciously desired results of Garcia’s heroin use was a decrease of sexual desire. With heroin, all you need is heroin—and maybe cigarettes. In any case, around this time a man showed up at the Dead office with what was called Persian Opium, though it was actually a smokable brown heroin. Jerry and Richard Loren sampled it. After all the cocaine, the “first taste of heroin,” Loren said, “was so ecstatic—a balm for frazzled nerves.” Garcia took to it with sad enthusiasm. In the long run, it would have predictably horrific effects, including the destruction of his unquestioned moral authority within the band, but in the short term, his pain went away, his doubts were stilled, and he was able to finish the movie.

On June 1,
The Grateful Dead Movie
made its debut at New York City’s Ziegfeld Theater. It was a Monarch/Noteworthy Release, which told a tale. Hal Kant had wanted to take the film to a normal distributor and get an advance that would cover the costs. Garcia, however, wanted to treat it as a concert experience, and so at a meeting at Hal’s home in the spring he brought out John Scher and told him in front of Kant, “You’re going to distribute the film.” John sputtered, “Excuse me? The only thing I know about movies is that I go to them. I don’t know anything about the movie business.” Garcia replied, “That may be true, but you know more about promoting the Grateful Dead than anybody. And this is the Grateful Dead.” As a result, John (Monarch) and Richard Loren (Noteworthy) were given the assignment of “four-walling” the movie, which meant renting the movie theaters from scratch. There being only ten prints, they chose the nicest old movie houses in the biggest Dead Head cities, brought in the best possible sound system, and tried to involve the local promoter. They did not make the band’s money back.

Critical opinion varied. The
New York Times
pronounced, “Aural excitement is pitted against visual monotony. Monotony wins.” At home, the
Chronicle
’s John Wasserman acclaimed the opening animation “which, as a short, would merit an Academy Award,” and announced that no rock and roll film “has ever as faithfully represented the feeling, the vibes, the essence of the relationship between a band, its music and its audience.” In the
Village Voice,
Robert Christgau wrote that the film “justifies itself visually by catching the hesitations and second thoughts that go into Jerry Garcia’s improvisation.” And in classic criticspeak, he noted how the ordinary faces of the audience were such a significant part of the movie. “Jerry no doubt considers each beautiful in its own way. Such soft-headedness is his fatal flaw, and such equanimity is the secret of his magic.”

With the movie now off their collective back, the Dead resumed the road on June 4, with a show in Los Angeles and then three brilliant nights at Winterland. They were gearing up for the release of
Terrapin
and a busy summer when a giant monkey wrench came swirling out of the cosmos. Some weeks before, Bear had given Mickey Hart a damaru, a Tibetan drum made of a human skull. It did not produce a great tone, and Mickey put it away. In the weeks after, he found himself out of sorts, getting sick, bumping into things, injuring himself in minor ways. Finally, he remembered the drum and decided to get rid of it. At length, Phil Lesh suggested, “Why don’t we give it back to the Tibetans?” A lama named Tarthang Tulku was in Berkeley, and they went to visit him. He accepted the drum and said, “I hope you have been most careful, Mickey Hart. This is a drum of great, great power. It wakes the dead, you know.” Maybe Mickey hadn’t been so careful. On June 20, he was returning from a Norton Buffalo gig at the Miramar Beach Inn to his friend Valerie Hawes’s nearby ranch in Half Moon Bay, some thirty-odd miles south of San Francisco on the coast. Somewhat the worse for wear from drink, he rolled the car over the edge of the road and down about twenty feet, where it caught in the branches of a conveniently located tree. The next stop was three hundred feet down. His passenger, Rhonda Jensen, had been helping Mickey since the ranch’s earliest days, and she saved him again, crawling out of the car to get help. He needed it. He had a broken arm, a broken collarbone, several cracked ribs, and a punctured lung, and his left ear was nearly ripped off his head. His Hell’s Angels friends moved into the hospital and kept an eye on him during his early convalescence, which made smoking pot at the hospital somewhat easier. It was instantly clear that his full recovery would take some months, and so the other band members looked for something to occupy them for the summer.

His peculiar sense of humor working overtime, Weir consciously decided to “go L.A.” and work again with Keith Olsen to create a truly slick solo album. McIntire booked studio time, the date approached, and Weir and Barlow looked at each other and wondered where the songs were going to come from. Shortly before they were due to start at the studio, their work was interrupted by John Barlow’s wedding to Elaine Parker, a celebration that very nearly cost them Weir. Around 4:30 A.M. of the wedding day, after a party where they decided that Wild Turkey was kid stuff and Everclear was the drink of choice, Weir decided a little sleep was in order, and headed for his bunk in the refurbished chicken coop.

“Now this was in a period in my life,” Barlow recalled, “when I felt like the best way to make a certain kind of point was to shoot a gun off indoors. It will get everyone’s attention, even if they’re sort of used to it . . . So I ask around, everyone says Weir went to bed. ‘He did
what?’
This is not permissible. So I went out to the bunkhouse to reinvigorate him, and I figured I could whang off a round into the floor and get his attention . . . what I didn’t realize was that it would ricochet off the concrete floor, unlike every other domicile that I inhabited, so this .357 slug turned into shrapnel and sprayed the wall behind him. It was a miracle that I didn’t kill him.”

Somewhat disconcerted, Barlow departed the ranch on his motorcycle. The gathered guests dug the fragment out of Weir’s shoulder and then entertained the question of following Barlow. The first question seemed to be “Is he still armed?” On further consideration, it became much easier to go to bed. Somehow the wedding itself went off fairly smoothly, and conventional thinking called for a honeymoon. So Barlow went to Los Angeles with Weir to work on the record.

They actually began to make progress when they moved to L’Hermitage, a suitably L.A. hotel, where they wrote “Heaven Help the Fool,” “Bombs Away,” and “Shade of Grey.” At length, they moved on to the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City, where they stayed up for two or three days and very nearly finished the songwriting for the record. They had one song left to do, and after a long night of cocaine and Jack Daniel’s, they decided to catch some fresh air and strolled across the square to listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Barlow was a jack (lapsed) Mormon, but even he had never entered the Tabernacle stinkin’ drunk. They wobbled back to the hotel and wrote a song about Salt Lake City that, Weir claimed, “was meant to be as laudatory as [possible].” Of course, Weir’s sense of humor is by no means standard issue, especially for Utah. Weir went into a studio with the cream of L.A.’s session players and made an album for himself. The material on
Heaven Help the Fool
was uneven but frequently good, though true to its L.A. origins, it was considerably overproduced.

Unsurprisingly, Garcia took a different tack. Poking through an old trunk, he’d come across a fragment of Hunter’s lyrics on an old piece of yellow paper from 1969 or so, a scrap of paper so dry, the lyrics so “sparse,” that he cracked up. They became the song “Gomorrah,” and generated a theme for the album, which would be called
Cats Under the Stars:
don’t look back. Perhaps as a consequence of his sojourn with Healy in Burbank,
Cats
was possibly the best-sounding album of his career, even though it was recorded at Front Street, a warehouse that didn’t even have a control room. Working with John Kahn, Keith and Donna, Ron Tutt, and Merl Saunders, Garcia went into his soul for the album, at one point mixing for fifty hours straight until he could no longer see the mixing board for hallucinations. “Rubin & Cherise” was something he’d been working on for seven or eight years, a retelling of the legend of Orpheus, who went to hell to recover his love Eurydice, a tale told by Homer, Virgil, Dante, and now Hunter. “Rubin was playing his painted mandolin / when Ruby froze and turned to stone / for the strings played all alone / The voice of Cherise / from the face of the mandolin / singing Rubin, Rubin tell me true / for I have no one but you.” It was a magnificent, utterly noncommercial piece of work, and Garcia was deservedly proud.