A Long Strange Trip (82 page)

On January 19, 1994, the Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Bob Marley, John Lennon (as an individual), Rod Stewart, the Band, and the Animals. Having always subscribed to the (Groucho) Marxist dictum “I would never be a member of a club that would have me,” Garcia chose not to attend the gathering at the Waldorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom. Instead, the rest of the band brought along a life-size cardboard cutout of him. When asked why Garcia was a no-show, Mickey Hart said, “I thought he was out looking for his sense of humor.” Kreutzmann approached the podium, notes in hand, and remarked, “In Grateful Dead tradition I’m gonna read this.” After tearing his notes in half, he noted the changes in hair color, but said that he still felt good. “Looking good, Bill,” chimed in Lesh. “I’m really doing this tonight ’cause I like to play music,” said Bill. “Anyway, I want to say one thing very important to me. I miss Pig Pen, Keith, and Brent . . . [Pig] was our first lead player. He, before Garcia had all the spotlights at him, Ron was our boy, he did it all. So thanks a lot.” Lesh added, “It’s been long, it’s been strange, it’s definitely been a trip . . . Also, I’d like to say to the thousands of Heads who are currently serving maximum sentences that there’s still hope for a miracle in America. And so keep the faith, keep the change, and keep watching the skies.”

At least one thing on Garcia’s mind was his impending marriage to Deborah Koons, on Valentine’s Day, in a lovely Episcopal church in Sausalito. Garcia was quite dapper in a dark suit, black shirt and vest, and looked a bit like a riverboat gambler. Married or not, though, he and Deborah lived apart, and never seemed to spend the night together. Late as it might get, Garcia would either drift off to John Kahn’s place in San Francisco—Kahn shared his seemingly permanent taste for opiates—or return home to his funky new house at Audrey Court, high up on the Tiburon ridge. Surrounded by five TVs, one in almost every room, feeding off two satellite dishes with all of the English-language channels in the world, he spent most of his time playing CD-ROM computer games like Myst, Hellcab, and Journeyman, or working on his art. Between the Dead, the Garcia Band, and his art, he had what he thought were far too many responsibilities, but he seemed unable to cut them down to size. When old friends asked for his time on recording projects, he would always say yes, and then turn to his personal manager, Steve Parish, and say, “Get me out of this.” There was a sign above his computer, and it read, “Nothing You Know Is True, but It’s Exactly the Way Things Are.”

After some early March shows in Phoenix, the band met and decided to fire Dan Healy. Since Healy had spent at least a couple of years muttering, “When are they gonna fire me?” it did not come as a total surprise. To some band employees, he appeared bored with the band’s music, and a good deal of his efforts with the sound system seemed mostly for his own amusement. Healy was irascible and at times terribly difficult. But he was also heart and soul a brother, and to be fired with a phone call from the manager after so many years was a profound statement of the band’s emotional cowardice. His departure did little good. His replacement, John Cutler, got more bass to work with from Lesh, and in general went for a less radically stereo sound that probably served the audience’s interests better, but Cutler’s studio orientation and stubborn refusal to sacrifice his hearing led to audience chants of “Turn It Up.” It did not help John that Garcia spent the tour with his head slumped in opiated relaxation, and was the victim of radical diabetes-induced mood swings offstage.

On May 11, Phil Lesh guest-conducted the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra in a fund-raiser for music in Berkeley schools, and both Garcia and Weir attended in support. Afterward Garcia called Phil and told him that he’d done some sketches while at the show, a personal gesture that touched Phil and pleased everyone. Contrarily, during the spring tour the band had been forced to cancel a show when Kreutzmann returned to California for a day to say good-bye to his gravely ill father. Though there seemed to be no lack of support for his decision, only Weir bothered to speak to Kreutzmann about it. Aside from their emotional deep-freeze, none of them were all that healthy. Late in April, Weir had fallen into a profound state of exhausted depression in New Orleans, and although he rebounded quickly, he did not confront whatever demons had led to the crack-up. During the spring tour, everyone in the band underwent physical examinations for an insurance policy connected to the mortgage on a new Club Front, the first building the band would ever own. Weir and Vince had throat nodes, Kreutzmann had high cholesterol readings, Phil had gout and hepatitis C, Mickey had something, and Jerry had everything. Every one of them failed the physical. Then in late May Garcia was unable to return to the stage to finish a Garcia Band show in Phoenix. By now, those on the tour were simply waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The World Cup of soccer had taken over many of the band’s regular stadium venues for the month of June, so the summer tour began late. It was 120 degrees in the shade on the floor of the Silver Bowl in Las Vegas, and it was a miracle of BGP logistics and Dead Head common sense— “It’s too hot to get high!”—that no one died. They returned home to play at Shoreline Amphitheatre, where Weir’s ancient complaints about the drummers rushing the tempo reached a new peak when he refused to play an encore. The next day, Saturday, he wrote up a manifesto that said playing out of time was torture to him, argued with Garcia, and got nowhere.

The East Coast summer tour began in Highgate, Vermont, so far north that the border patrol’s offices were next door to the backstage area. Flying under the Dead Head radar, the show was a success because not too many of the ticketless came. It foretold the whole summer, which passed quietly.

Two surreal moments would stay with the participants. In Washington, Senators Patrick Leahy and Barbara Boxer invited the band to lunch at the Senate Dining Room. As the group entered and sat at a table near the door, everyone noted the presence of the 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat candidate for president, South Carolina’s very senior senator Strom Thurmond. He, of course, noted Senator Leahy’s party, and as he passed the table on his way out, turned to Garcia with the remark “I undahstand you’re the leadah of this heah organization.” Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart shaking hands with Strom Thurmond was something the wildest acid trip could never have included. Garcia’s birthday came on a gig night in Detroit, where Deborah threw a birthday party for him, inviting the crew, staff, and band, which everyone was now calling the “world’s most dysfunctional family.” Those who came were stiff and Garcia seemed embarrassed. He waved a towel at the candles to put them out, and left within five minutes. The tour ended a few days later, and twelve limousines were lined up on the tarmac in San Francisco when the band’s charter plane landed.

Despite the increasingly frozen emotional landscape, the band was still capable of playing brilliantly. And by now there was more than sufficient new material for a good CD. In November, they went into a studio called the Site, near Skywalker Ranch, but the sessions came to nothing; Garcia sat in a corner grumbling about whatever caught his attention, but never really settled down to work.

When three Garcia Band shows in San Francisco were canceled in February 1995, the first after the audience had already entered, Dead Heads feared the worst. For a change, it wasn’t all that bad, merely a hand injury. Ever since his 1961 car accident, Garcia had had occasional problems with a pinched nerve and numbness in his hand, and thirty years of hanging a heavy guitar off one shoulder hadn’t helped. While on a diving vacation in the Caribbean, he’d exacerbated the problem, but it healed swiftly. He was actually in a pretty pleasant mood.

Later that week, in a van in Salt Lake City going back to the hotel after the first Dead shows of 1995, Scrib remarked that their promoter had once managed the Osmond Brothers, and Garcia affably entered into a thoughtful discourse on the nature of family singing acts, from the bluegrass Stanley Brothers and the pop Mills Brothers to the Boswell Sisters. It had been a good night. Much to the concern of Dead Heads, the band had introduced TelePrompTers, which the musicians generally ignored, but in Salt Lake City Garcia used his to deliver a tremendous, heart-wrenching performance of Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” that was very possibly the musical high point of the year for him. And for sheer charm, it was hard to top the reception the band got once back at the hotel. They’d been sharing the place for three days with the University of Michigan women’s gymnastic team, whose big competition was that night. Both groups converged in the lobby, with the gymnasts ecstatic over their standings, and even the oft-grumpy Garcia was pleased to pose for pictures with the fifteen delightful young women.

The spring tour was so-so musically but logistically tolerable because it avoided the Northeast and hit some new places, like Memphis. As they prepared for the summer 1995 tour, it was clear that Garcia’s physical and emotional health was at an alarmingly low level. Toward the end of the spring tour, in Birmingham, he had become extremely agitated when he discovered that his room could not be locked. A puzzled hotel maintenance man, unable to understand why a man needed to lock a room only his wife had access to, installed one, even as Garcia tried to minimize the oddness of his needs. Unfortunately, he had begun the spring tour with his blood sugar at truly astronomical levels, and then early in May had lost his helpers, Vince and Gloria Di Biase, when they were fired by Deborah, who was gradually attempting to impose order on Garcia’s chaotic financial affairs. Order was Garcia’s enemy, even when the source was his wife. Clearly the process was distressing to him. And even when he made plans, he imposed limits. He and his old pal Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains had been talking about recording one of Paddy’s songs, “Jerry’s Tune,” to which Paddy had set as lyrics the Yeats love poem “Crazy Jane on God.” Jerry was willing, but told him to get someone else to play. “I just want to sing.”

The summer 1995 tour began in Vermont, and the decision to go twice to the well was revealed as a bad one. Though management had begged the town of Highgate to ban camping and vending in the area near the show site, the itch to make a profit on the visit led to a circus. With a place to stay, and all the nitrous and beer they could buy, at least twenty thousand people without tickets showed up, and the gates were opened so that no one would get hurt. A week later, on June 21, in Albany, Garcia could not start the second set without Weir telling him what to play, sitting zombielike in a total meltdown, blaming whatever was wrong on Parish, on his guitar, on anything but his confused mental state. Four days later, in Washington, D.C., three Dead Heads in the parking lot were hit by lightning, and the first whispers of a “cursed tour” went up. It wasn’t just logistics or Garcia. Kidd Candelario had taken umbrage with Candace Brightman, and was refusing to turn on the sensor attached to Lesh’s belt that ran the new automated follow spotlights. Two young women with a crew member’s laminate had been accused of pistol-whipping someone on the Mall in Washington, and the police were backstage at the next show looking for them. Parish learned that John Scher had violated protocol by speaking to Dylan and Garcia about a possible joint acoustic tour without first talking to him, and was frothing at the mouth.

The tour moved on to Detroit, and with Deborah temporarily absent, it was almost impossible to get Garcia out of his room. Even the optimistic Parish now spoke of Garcia needing a rehab or hospital stay after the tour. Three Rivers Stadium, Pittsburgh: in the middle of a pouring rainstorm, the band played the Beatles’ “Rain,” “Box of Rain,” “Samba in the Rain,” and “Looks Like Rain,” and it all felt goofily good for a moment. Then the band moved on to Deer Creek, in Indiana, and hit the wall. The first show was scheduled for Sunday, July 2, and as the band arrived that afternoon, Ken Viola took them aside to play them a phone message left with the local police that promised an attempt on Garcia’s life. Jerry shrugged, and told Viola not to be ridiculous. “My wife isn’t going to like this,” said Lesh, but he planned to play. Weir made a speech about standing up to terrorists. There were metal detectors at the gates and trained plainclothes officers in the area in front of the stage, and the house lights stayed up.

Unfortunately, given the holiday weekend and the dearth of excitement in central Indiana, there were twenty thousand people without tickets outside, and around five thousand of them decided to break into the show. Audience members assisted them by kicking giant holes in the fence, and as the intruders poured over and through the fence, a good part of the audience cheered. The band was stunned. More than a little worried, Sears sent the band’s guests out in vans before the end of the show, with band and crew to leave in one of the production buses. Slowly pushing through the parking lot, trying not to hit the dozens of kids who pounded on the side of the bus or played some sort of stoned game of chicken with it, the bus finally reached the narrow web of back roads around the facility, where in peace and quiet a mile or two down the road, it got stuck on an impossible turn. Ram Rod, Billy Grillo, and a local farmer with a minitractor tried but failed to dig it out, and during the wait for a tow truck, the laughs came out. The next morning the police informed management that they would not endanger themselves a second time; they would direct traffic, but not work inside the facility. And so the show was canceled, the first such decision caused by the audience in thirty years.

The first show in the next city, St. Louis, went well, but later in the evening, about twenty miles away at a campground, more than a hundred Dead Heads crowded onto the veranda of a lodge to escape a gully-washing downpour, and the porch roof caved in. One hundred and eight people went to the hospital, most with bruises, but one man was paralyzed. By noon of the next day, all three TV networks had sent crews to St. Louis. Nothing happened in St. Louis, but the media were on a “deathwatch.” The tour moved on to its final stop, Chicago’s Soldier Field, and eleven TV crews asked to cover the shows. It was futile to point out that trouble happened outside shows and that it would take the 101st Airborne to break into Soldier Field. The media came, and nothing happened, and the tour ended, to nearly universal relief, on July 9. As had become traditional, the show ended with a spectacular Soldier Field fireworks display. Candace Brightman figured that the Dead got a better deal for their pathetic $10,000 than the city got on the Fourth of July for eight times as much. As the rockets boomed, Weir went over to give an end-of-tour hug to Garcia, who chirped, “Always a hoot, man. Always a hoot.” And they went their separate ways.