Dark Star (40 page)

Although it was originally for my Buddhist teacher, it fit him. And I feel it is about Jerry as well, absolutely. So we sat for about half an hour together, holding hands, raving. We talked quite a bit about our respective journeys and consciousness, which was what I loved about him so much. He was infinitely inquisitive and curious about the nature of consciousness. He called it his hobby. He loved the interface between what is this hardware brain that we have and then this field of information that we call consciousness that we are all of but separate from and swimming in and participating with?

This was between sets. Let me tell you what an incredible set he played afterward. Not because of me but what he had allowed himself to open up to in terms of what he perceived that I represented to him. I never for a minute thought it was me. I always knew that it was something that he allowed himself to open up to within himself. The Dead were coming to Denver in a month and he said we'd get together then. I went and met him at his hotel and we had some time together, which we had to frame as an interview so Manasha wouldn't freak out. I went ahead and taped it. Just recently, I sent a copy of the cassette to Hunter and Hunter said, “There's not one sad note in the whole thing. It's all there.” Jerry and I were ecstatic and Hunter wrote to me that it was hilarious listening to the two of us “pitching guarded woo.”

After that, my life just started unraveling at quite a clip and I started creating every opportunity I could to go to the Bay Area where we'd go out to lunch or just hang. It was just so obvious that he was in a stressful scene with Manasha. Everyone was saying to him, “You've got to get out of this relationship. You have to get out of it.” We once hung out over at Hunter's with Bob and Maureen and Jerry and I were feeling, “This is the way it was supposed to be.” It was just a question of how we were going to pull it off Because this was the way it was supposed to be—for everyone. Creative connected family. Not just him. Not just me. But the entire scene.

 

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I think that creatively Jerry felt a little bit stifled. The Grateful Dead were creative up to a point but they could be formulaic as well. My feeling was that his creativity was so strong that he needed other outlets until the artwork became an outlet. He worked really hard on some of his artwork.

Vince Dibiase:
After one tour, Jerry said, “I want to talk to you for a minute. Let's go outside on the porch.” He said, “I'm making some changes in my life. I need somebody that I like and I trust to manage this property I've got in San Rafael and also I need someone other than Nora to do the art.” He made me a very generous offer. I said, “Wait a minute, man. Thanks but no thanks. Because this is all you. I'm honored to be part of this and of course I need to make some money but I don't need that much.” He said, “Hey, man. Luckily, I've already got a job. I just want to see how far the art business can take me as a legitimate artist. So if you can do that, you deserve to get that much.” He was really like, “I don't care about the money.”

When I first took the art business over, which was in the summer of '92, Jerry was going on tour and he said, “I'll leave you a bunch of my sketchbooks.” I went over there and there was a pile. He did most of his work in small sketchbooks. He'd open up a book and he might start in the middle. The next page might be ten pages back or he might have gone ahead. He would turn it upside down. You'd never know. But it was up to me to determine what to show the public. He said, “I don't want that responsibility.” But if he didn't want something to be shown, he would say so. I would physically cut out of the art book what I wanted to use and then I'd compile everything and number everything on the back and then I'd give it to him. We'd sit down when he had time, which might be months later, and I would give him one piece at a time and he would look at it, title it, and sign it. Or he might say no.

Then he really got into sketching, scanning, and finishing his artwork on the computer. He was into cutting out these friskets and then air-brushing them. He'd take a piece of clear plastic, cut out a shape, and use it as a stencil. In the early days, he would do that physically. He was good at making them but not at cleaning up the mess. What he could do with his computer was use a Mac software program called
Fractal Painter
. It had friskets so he could do that all with his computer and he loved it. Plus, he could experiment.

Owsley Stanley:
I never thought the artwork that was offered up for sale was his best work. It was done after the heroin and they were all kind of sloppy and loose. Although they had weird ideas in them, they didn't have this dimensionality and this intricate exact perfection of detail about something most of us could see inside our heads when we were high but wouldn't have the slightest clue how to put out once we came back down.

Vince Dibiase:
Nora would go out there with his artwork and blaze a trail and do whatever she wanted to do. Originally, the Ambassador Gallery in New York City set her up with Stonehenge ties. Jerry did not want to do the ties. I brought the proposal to him. Nora thought it was a great idea and Jerry said, “Ties? Do you know what I think of ties? This is what I think of ties.” And he pulled an invisible tie up over his head like a hangman's noose. I said, “Okay. I'll never mention it to you again.” Then Nora got a lawyer to call him in Hawaii on his vacation and Jerry didn't say no. He didn't say yes but he didn't say no. I told them all, “He doesn't want to do it.” But they ignored me. It was a big embarrassment to him. He didn't want that done.

Sue Stephens:
The tie thing was something that more or less got away from him. He certainly didn't go out seeking to design neckties. The tie people approached the person who had his artwork to license. They took little pieces of a piece of art and duplicated the design and then added their own colors. Jerry said he wouldn't even recognize his own art on those ties.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
Half of those pictures were what Jerry saw in his brain when he was on DMT. DMT makes thousands of pinpoint images go through your brain at the same time. DMT is like Alan Shepard's first ride into space. Up and down, fifteen minutes, that's it.

Gloria Dibiase:
Are you asking whether or not he had any hand in designing the ties or choosing the images and stuff like that? No. After they were done, he saw them. They took his signature for the label from his signed prints. We all laughed when Jerry had trouble recognizing his own images or knowing which paintings they were from but I think some of the ties themselves are lovely.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
It was clip art to the tie manufacturer. They said, “What section of this painting do we want to use for the tie? Let's see. I think it should go about right here.”

Vince Dibiase:
Number-one-selling tie in America. The President, the Vice President, and half of Congress were wearing them. I also turned down a five-million-dollar deal for boxer shorts. I didn't even tell him about it because I said to myself, “I don't need the money that bad.” To them, I said, “I don't want people sitting on Jerry's art.” There were other big deals like that. Remember the last Olympics with the Lithuanian basketball team wearing those great tie-dyed shirts? We had a deal with Hanes going for this Olympics but that just got hindered and it never happened.

Sue Stephens:
There could have been a special line of Jerry Garcia VW vans. But he was not in the capitalist world where he would run out shopping himself around. Like Jerry said, he was not opposed to selling out. He just wanted to know who was buying. The integrity had to be there. What happened was that the mainstream joined him. People wanted to be close to him and get some piece of him somehow, so he could have put his name on it and sold anything. Just about.

Vince Dibiase:
We had big book deals with Hyperion Books and Ten Speed Press/Celestial Arts. We were going to do three books. A postcard book with tear-out postcards with his art that could have retailed for ten bucks or so. We were going to do another art book similar to the one that he did with Nora at Ten Speed. Just his artwork and a little text. Then we were going to do a third book with him that would be all computer generated. Jerry said yes up until the last minute and then he said no. Lucy Kroll, who was his literary agent in New York, was talking to Hyperion about a book and all of a sudden, this offer came in from Hal Kant from Dell. At that point, Jerry could have probably generated enough income from his artwork alone for him to live without ever having to leave his house.

Hal Kant:
Jerry turned down doing his autobiography any number of times. A friend of mine who runs Dell called and said, “Will Garcia do an autobiography?” and I said, “No chance.” Then I said, “I have an idea. Let me go talk to him and if I can sell him on it, I'll get back to you.” The idea was to do what he did, which was to have a book with one page of drawing or painting and the other page saying something about it. It was to be a nonlinear autobiography. He wouldn't have to go from year one.

Vince Dibiase:
He would come to do his signings of the art book and we had to scope the place out to see how to get him back out. We had to check for a back door. When we ushered him out of the place, I had to stand in front of him and push people away. It was not what I liked to do. But it was what I had to do to protect the guy.

 

Bob Barsotti:
I used to get really mad about what was going on with him but I was the guy who booked all his Jerry Garcia Band shows so I was as guilty as anybody for keeping the guy working. But he wanted to work.

Laird Grant:
As long as Jerry had some Tang to drink in the morning, as opposed to fresh-squeezed orange juice, he was happy. He drank Tang every day. There would be fresh orange juice in the refrigerator and he'd get out the bottle of Tang and some tap water and stir it up and drink it. He grew up on hot dog stands in the Mission District. He grew up eating wino sandwiches down on First and Third streets and a chocolate milk. Hot dogs, french fries, ice cream. If there was a decent meal put before him, he'd eat it but it could just as well have been a greasy cold burger with some beans on it. Same with his cigarettes. He went through packs and packs and packs a day but if you looked at his guitar strings, there were always dead butts stuck on them. He'd leave them there and they'd burn out and the ashes would fall all over the place. He'd get maybe a couple of hits off each smoke. He smoked a whole bunch but he never really had time to seriously smoke a cigarette. A cigarette was one of the things he used to fill his hands up when he wasn't doing something else with them.

Gloria Diabiase:
My son Christopher and I were on the road with Jerry down in southern California on his fiftieth birthday. In fact, we actually celebrated his fiftieth birthday with him in his hotel room with Manasha and Keelin. We were listening to a Jimi Hendrix CD and Jerry said he was feeling weird. As though someone had dosed him with acid.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
We were in San Diego and he was perspiring heavily and I was concerned about him. I was concerned that he was losing too much potassium. I had some tea that had a lot of potassium in it and I kept giving him that throughout the show. I didn't want him to do that tour because I thought the summer tours were too hard on him. This was right after the Grateful Dead summer tour. He'd done the summer tour and instead of taking a rest and doing something to rejuvenate himself, he went and did one more tour with the Jerry Garcia Band.

Vince Dibase:
While they were gone, I was in the process of moving them to this house in Nicasio. The movers left around ten
P.M.
and at midnight, Jerry, Manasha, and Keelin all walked into the new house. The next day, everything seemed to be okay. We were at our house. They were enjoying their new home. Tuesday morning, Jerry came downstairs. Manasha said his lips were black and he was really pale. His shins were all black. Like they were black-and-blue. It looked like a circulation problem. He was slipping in and out of a coma and she got Yen-Wei right up there.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
We came back to Marin and he was in bad shape. We had moved into this larger house and it was moving day. Someone else had brought all of our stuff over but then we moved into the new house and I thought, “Oh, gosh. Jerry's getting sick on our first day in the new house.” It gave me real bad feelings about the house. Jerry was out of it. I would have to wake him up. I'd say, “Jerry, wake up. Don't leave.” I felt he was drifting. At times, he was unconscious so I would shake him and say, “Come on. Come back. You can't leave. We love you. Stay.” I didn't know what was happening. I called Yen-Wei and Yen-Wei came over and did emergency acupuncture on him and I've never seen anything like it. He brought him back a hundredfold. Jerry was animated and talking but still very weak. At one point, I actually asked Jerry if he didn't want to go to the hospital. “No. No.” So I sent for Yen-Wei and Yen-Wei did it.