Reading Notes: McNally 2002

McNally, Dennis. 2002. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. New York: Broadway Books.

What a book. This, and Jackson's Garcia: An American Life have set a bar that I can only see from far below.

Yes, my original copy is in six pieces, so well-loved has it been.

But you also see that I bought a second copy just to make sure. You're welcome, Dennis!

Obviously, Dennis's focus was the GD, while Blair's was to provide a biography of Garcia, while mine is even narrower, to account for his musical life beyond the GD. One of the things that this will allow me to address is the dramatic historical imbalance in many of the existing sources. Dennis, for example, clocks in at 479 pages up to the hiatus (a decade in GD life), 131 for the remaing 20+ years. This is not a criticism. The early stuff is interesting. It's important. It's when things were fluid and still taking shape. Once things become institutionalized (regularized, routinized, etc.), there's clearly less of interest to say (unless one's interest is precisely in institutionalization, heh heh). But I do hope to provide a balanced look at the whole arc of Garcia's musical life 1965-1995, because I think there's a lot that's of interest in the later years as we try to understand the arc of a man's time on Earth, the nature of "the good life" (and the tradeoffs involved in trying to live it), the different rhythms of young vs old.

As you might imagine, given the painstaking nature of my methodology with a book like Long Strange Trip, part of me has been resisting sitting down and executing this task. But it's obviously essential, and I have done it. I am tackling Jackson next. And what I know the exercise shows with respect to McNally, and what I know it will show with respect to Jackson, is that some huge percentage of what we know about all of this stuff comes from these guys, either originally or in codified / interpreted form. They faced different opportunities and challenges of course. Dennis had the benefit of inside access, and did amazing work in nevertheless giving an honest assessment of the thing, warts and all. Blair was able to strike a little more distance, but had less access to materials. And both are simply marvelous, incredible scholars in putting together what they did in a mostly pre-internet era. I may have the opposite problem - there is so much material now, and my OCD is so exacting, that I face the challenge of how to honor the embarassment of empirical riches while still writing a narrative that reads.

We shall see how I do. We know how Dennis did, and it gets five stars, my highest recommendation.

So, lots and lots and lots of reading notes - below the fold.

before random 80s GD show, "Mydland gulps glycerin to coat his vocal cords and gets the usual reaction; the final backstage signal of an oncoming Dead concert is the sound of retching" (5)

"Near the end of World War I, [SF] welcomed Manuel Garcia, an electrician from La Coruña, Spain, who bought a home in the outer Mission District and settled there with his wife and four children. In 1935 his second son—baptized Jose, but commonly called Joe—a swing-band leader and reedman, married for the second time, to Ruth Marie "Bobbie" Clifford, a nurse" (6)

Kern was Bobbie's favorite composer (7)

Joe and Bobbie's "house on Amazon Street was filled w music" (7)

"At the age of four or five, Jerry dug into a box in the attic of his maternal grandparents' country place and discovered a windup Victrola phonograph, some steel needles, and the first recorded music he would be able to recall, a handful of dusty, one-sided old records of folk songs like "Sweet Betsy from Pike." No one showed him how, but he played them over and over, "a compulsion almost," as he later put it" (7)

"Jerry later claimed to have witnessed his father's death, though it seems more likely that this was a memory formed from repeated tellings" (7)

"In the absence of his father, Jerry naturally depended on his mother for support. But Bobbie had never been a particularly domestic woman. Artistic and a student of opera, she was also a follower of Velikovsky, astrology, and palm reading. More pressingly, she had a living to earn, and as she came to spend the bulk of her time down at Joe Garcia's at 1st and Harrison, the care of her children fell more and more to her parents, Tillie and Bill Clifford, "Nan" and "Pop." Jerry in particular felt deprived and deserted, especially when he and Tiff moved in with Nan and Pop at 87 Harrington Street, in the Excelsior neighborhood of the outer Mission District, while Bobbie lived in a cottage across the street. In later years he would relate a specific traumatic memory of being left behind on the street one day by his mother, of frantically searching for her until he was finally found by his grandmother. He was bereft, and he would always carry a feeling that he was not loved or cared for, that he was not worthy. These scars would never fade" (7)

#women "Jerry's relationship with his mother would sour further when Bobbie, as Tiff put it, "started getting married a lot." There was a brief marriage to one Ben Brown in 1949, seemingly because Ben was a construction foreman whose labors Bobbie employed to improve her cottage. The extended Garcia family did not approve of the marriage, and any support they might have given the boys fell away. Years later, as a teenager, Jerry even made nasty remarks about his mother's morals. Fair or not, the damage was done. His self-esteem and capacity for trust in women had been permanently damaged." (7-8)

"Despite their Latin last name and Tillie's own Swedish heritage, the Garcia boys thought of their ethnicity as deriving largely from Pop and saw themselves as Mission (District) Irish, a standard San Francisco ethnic classification. Around the corner on Alemany was Corpus Christi Church, which they attended regularly. The Church's theater of hell served as usual to tinge Jerry's later sexuality with guilt, but even more important, he realized later, it gave him a sense of the mysterious spiritual world beyond the material one" (8)

"Tillie Clifford was a fascinating and formidable woman. A founder and the secretary/treasurer of the local Laundry Workers' Union, she was an expert politician who always dressed well and seemingly knew everyone in San Francisco. She was not to be trifled with" (8) … "Jerry would recall her as a beautiful woman with a spiritual quality, an authentic socialist who was either "a fabulous liar or she just genuinely loved everybody." She was also a second-generation San Franciscan, independent of conventional mores as she openly attended out-of-town union meetings with her extramarital boyfriend" (9)

childhood art (comic books), movies (horror flicks)

first novel was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (9) analogize to GD as with the documentary Long Strange Trip

"In 1953 Bobbie remarried, the boys moved back in with her, and for Jerry, life went straight to hell. Wally Matusiewicz was a stocky blond sailor, a hardworking man who expected his stepsons to work alongside him on home projects; but physical labor was never going to be Jerry's idea of a good time. His relationship with Wally went swiftly downhill, for a variety of deeply emotional reasons. In a confused, never-understood way, Jerry had never entirely forgiven his mother for the death of his father, nor for remarrying. Now hormones swept over him in the usual tidal wave, crashing into the retaining wall of his Roman Catholicism and creating a jumbled mess. As an adult he would concede that sex and women were never his primary concern, "except for when it really runs you around crazy, when you're around fourteen or so." Add to puberty his alienation from his mother and you had a recipe for torment. Twenty years later he would read an underground comic book called Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and grasp profoundly that it described exactly the hell of his early teens, as captured in the rays of light, lust, guilt, that emanated from Binky's crotch, up toward the Virgin, down to hell, and out toward the entire world. Coping with sexuality is tough; dealing with the guilt of the Roman Catholic Church regarding sex is tougher; doing both when confused by an absent father and a mother perceived as disloyal—this for Jerry was impossible. He would love and be loved, but he would stay painfully confused about himself and women for all his days" (10)

#musics #race "rhythm and blues station KWBR, to which Tiff introduced him. An obscure street-corner tune by the Crows called "Gee" set him to listening to the cream of American popular music, and Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, and Muddy Waters kept him company all day and half the night long. Initially a solo acoustic form from the Mississippi Delta, the blues evolved through boogie-woogie piano and Kansas City big-band vocal shouting to Chicago, where Muddy Waters found acoustic guitar inaudible in forties clubs. His transition to electric guitar defined a new urban blues, which evolved yet again into the R&B of the late forties and the fifties. Each mode contained a high realism that knew life as a solitary confinement sometimes comforted by sexuality or even love but inevitably succeeded by a death sentence. In all of American popular music, only the blues spoke truthfully of love and death. Enthralled, Jerry absorbed not only chords and rhythms but a certain vision. It was not the psychopathology of Norman Mailer's "White Negro" that he acquired, but hipness, the authentic wisdom eternally found at the edges and bottom of the social pyramid" (11)

JG had had "years of piano lessons" before the 1953 move to Menlo Park

early electric guitar influences Eddie Cochran, Jimmy Reed, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, and, as always, Chuck Berry (13)

art teacher Wally Hedrick. "It was he who had asked poet Michael McClure to organize the 1955 Six Gallery reading that introduced Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" to the world" (14). Hedrick hipped him to Kerouac's "On the Road, a book that changed his life forever. Kerouac's hymn to the world as an explorational odyssey, an adventure outside conventional boundaries, would serve as a blueprint for the rest of Garcia's life. And it plugged him consciously into a continuous line of alternative American culture going back to Thoreau and Walt Whitman and up through the current eminence of Bay Area bohemia, Kenneth Rexroth" (15).

probably played "Misty" with his Analy band The Chords (16) "The band even won a contest and got to record a song, Bill Doggett's [sic: Justis's] "Raunchy." (16)

Hunter born "Robert Burns" 6/23/41 near SLO (26).

JG in '61: "Man, all I wanna do is live my weird little life my weird little way—all I wanna do is play." (33)

#why: "the central drive of his entirely musical career": "to play with other people" (41).

the banjo "consumed him, and as with nothing in his life to that point, he enslaved himself to his practice. His model was Earl Scruggs, and Garcia treated Scruggs's fingering as though it was the master lock, studying it by playing back his records at slow speeds, trying to crack the combination. His devotion to music would be central to his life, and it came at a price" (44) – end of relationship w Brigid. She had gotten tired of "playing second fiddle to a banjo" (48)

"the banjo and Scruggs led Jerry inexorably from old-time music to bluegrass, a very different thing. Bluegrass was not folk music. It had been created in the 1940s by superbly gifted professionals, starting with Bill Monroe, and it required considerable skill to play" (44)

"Garcia was jealous of Baez, both emotionally in connection to Sara and professionally as a competing musician" (48)

"Shortly before the wedding, they went to see Bobbie Garcia, Jerry's first visit with his mother in years. She was very sweet to her daughter-in-law-to-be, taking her to her heart. In a fox fur collar and high heels, she seemed "a real sport" to Sara, a woman who "liked a good drink" and wasn't terribly maternal" (49)

"Jerry and Sara were married on April 27, 1963, at the Palo Alto Unitarian Church, with a reception following at Rickey's Hyatt House that included the music of the Wildwood Boys." (49)

summer of '63 JG played bass in Troy Weidenheimer's rock and roll band, the Zodiacs (51)

Elves, Gnomes, Leprochauns (sic) and Little People's Chowder and Marching Society Volunteer Fire Brigade and Ladies Auxiliary String Band (52)

Early in April [1965] in Palo Alto, Jerry Garcia and David Nelson were helping their friend and former jug band mate David Parker and his girlfriend, Bonnie, move. One of their banjo buddies, Rick Shubb, had scored a bottle full of LSD and had shown up that day with Butch Waller, Herb Pedersen, and Eric Thompson. When the move was over, Jerry grabbed two doses, ran home, and gave one to Sara. The day turned magical. "Mostly it was that wonderful feeling you get of 'suspicions confirmed,' " said Garcia. "Haha hahahahaha. A perfectly wonderful time, that soft psychedelia, sweet, great fun . . . tremendous affirmation and reassurance." (80)

"LSD's impact on all of them would be positive and liberating, Garcia most of all. Bluegrass banjo was a massive exercise in precision and control, and the combination of LSD and electricity would set him free." (80)

"rock music with intellectual content. In February, Bob Dylan had played on The Les Crane Show, singing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," and Garcia had thought it beautiful. His folkie prejudices against Dylan started to melt. Then Dylan began to talk with Crane, "and just rapped insanely. Beautiful mad stuff. And that like turned us all on," Garcia told a friend. "We couldn't believe it. Here was this guy, it was almost like being in the South and seeing a spade on television." A few days after the acid trip, Garcia dropped by Eric Thompson's house and heard Dylan's new album, Bringing It All Back Home, for the first time, playing it over and over" (80)

"The word "weird" derives from wyrd, "controlled by fate,"" (90)

"influences. One that Garcia would cite was a Junior Walker instrumental called "Cleo's Back." "There was something about the way the instruments entered into it in a kind of free-for-all way, and there were little holes and these neat details in it—we studied that motherfucker." (92)

#women "during the Dead's 1966 sojourn in Los Angeles, when he and his lover, Florence, Garcia and his lover, Diane Zellman" (105)

Bear: "a man who combined brilliance and charisma with social dysfunction" (117)

early '66 "One of the odder touches of the early Grateful Dead was their tendency to appear at places in a Cadillac convertible, which many would incorrectly recall as a limousine. The car was owned by a friend of Rifkin and Scully's named Cadillac Ron Rakow, a former stock trader who'd been brought West to advise a woman named Natalie Morman on financial matters. Late in 1965 he arrived in San Francisco with his wife and two children, checking into the Hilton Hotel. Within a few days he'd encountered rock and roll and an attractive friend of Natalie's named Lydia d'Fonsecca, which caused him to run out on his wife, children, and the hotel bill. Rakow was a stereotypical hustler, always looking for an interesting financial proposition, even as LSD brought him into a rather different culture" (135).

"Chet Helms was a prophet, not a businessman" (149)

710 in late September '66

ca. 1/30/67 "By the time the band went to L.A. to record, [MG] and Jerry had become lovers and moved in together" (183)

crew represents "an extreme in male bonding" (213)

JG: "If you're looking for comfort, join a club or something. The Grateful Dead is not where you're going to find comfort. In fact, if anything, you'll catch a lot of shit." (214)

"M.G. and Garcia had left 710 shortly after the bust, moving to an apartment near the ocean in the Richmond District" (252)

"Under Rakow's leadership, they formed Triad, which was an essentially fictitious partnership of the Dead, the Airplane, and Quicksilver, to run the Carousel Ballroom. Under it, each band was to play for free and receive 10 percent of the profits." (252)

"The Carousel was not Rakow's only operation at this time. Just for practice, or perhaps as a display of his talents, Rakow created the All Our Own Equipment Company, which purchased thirteen Ford Cortinas for the band members and associates, using as collateral what various people at various times claimed to be a very rubbery check for $5,000, or future music publishing rights. Or something. After a number of tries, Rakow found dupes at S&C Ford and the United California Bank on Haight Street. Using a check signed by Rock Scully from the fictitious Headstone Productions, their friend Jon McIntire walked in all blond charm, signed loan papers, and walked out owning thirteen cars. By the time the bank foreclosed on the individual owners, the vehicles were sufficiently dispersed to prove a major challenge to even the very best repo men. Rakow gave his to the Hell's Angels (or was it the Black Panthers?), then told the bank where to find it. (253)

#carousel "The lease guaranteed that the Carousel could not succeed for long as a business." (254)

bad business, "But as a sanctuary and an experiment in community, the Carousel was a roaring success, Olompali in the city, a clubhouse for the city's freak community" (254)

"With himself as the booker and chief manager and with his lover, Lydia d'Fonsecca, as chief bookkeeper and secretary, Rakow went about creating a team to run the Carousel. The previous year he had met a man named Jonathan Riester, who was then building a laboratory for some chemists near Cloverdale, north of San Francisco. Born in Indiana, a horseman and handy guy, Riester was a member of the Psychedelic Rangers of Big Sur, one link in the LSD distribution network. Rock and Rakow went down to Big Sur, found Riester, and drafted him to help with the renovation and running of the Carousel." (254)

"Lydia's brother Johnny, a superb carpenter, took care of the rebuilding of the stage. In the crowd of Alameda kids that tagged after Johnny and Lydia was a boy named Bill Candelario, who hung around doing odd jobs and gradually came to be a fixture. What really happened at the Carousel was a latter-day revival of the early Haight, in which people who cared about each other and loved what they were doing came together. The staff practically lived in the place, hanging out night and day. Generally speaking, such pay as there was came to living expenses, which meant rent money on good days, Annie's cooking, and all the dope you could smoke. Their labors paid off, and they created a warm and comfortable environment. Bert was especially proud of the dance floor, which he kept in a state of high gloss with powdered dance wax." (256)

#carousel "the venue was dark the second weekend and lost momentum" (256)

Once, "Garcia recalled, someone paid with a piece of butchered sheep, the bloody stump sticking out of the cash register, covered by a bunch of dollar bills gummed together with lamb's blood" (256) #carousel

Ustad Allarakha would say of Mickey, "What a strange boy. He liked the difficult things" (258)

"Against a backdrop of social and political chaos and crisis, the Dead played on, in a fifty-fifty balance of benefits, paid gigs, and … other" (261)

#carousel 5/1/68 "When the Diggers put their philosophy into action at the Carousel, all hell broke loose. At one point someone started a fire in a giant seashell, and Rakow demonstrated his objections to the idea by pissing on it. … (263)

"On May 15 the Hell's Angels presented, as the poster read, "In Tear-Ass Sound and Color," Big Brother and the Holding Company, which left so much beer on the floor that it shorted out the lights of the car dealer below" (263)

"As the Carousel teetered, so did the equilibrium of the Dead, who were experiencing great internal dissension" (263-264)

"The Carousel had become a community center as much as a ballroom—the Black Panthers had a room, the Chicanos had an office—and so, inevitably, there was a community meeting" (265)

"One of Bill Graham's favorite stories for many years would recount his flight to Ireland, complete with a planeful of nuns, to meet with Bill Fuller, the owner of the Carousel, and arrange a deal to take it over. However, one of the people who worked with him claimed that he never left San Francisco" (265-266)

#carousel marquee on June 25: "Nothing Lasts" (266).

"Scher was the reliable, trusted friend who took care of business" (270)

"the firing" (276-278)

9/2/68 "the festival's closing jam, which featured Big Mama Thornton, James Cotton, and, at various times, Mickey Hart, Pigpen, Kreutzmann, and Garcia" (278)

#hartbeats "in early October the band discovered, probably unconsciously, how they would be able to fire Weir and Pigpen—and it would not involve firing. Instead, they would start an additional band, in which the other four musicians, plus occasional guests, would play free-form, instrumental-only music. On October 8, Mickey Hart and the Hartbeats—Hart, Kreutzmann, Garcia, and Lesh—began a three-night run at the Matrix. The audience was tiny, and those few brave souls were about to get a shock. The stage at the Matrix was in the middle of a narrow, not terribly long room, so that the distance from amplifiers to brick wall was less than twenty feet. "We were just scalping them," Hart said. "We were giving them a lobotomy, and they couldn't believe it. They couldn't get up, and they thought they'd die." On the third night the Hartbeats were joined by Jack Casady and Elvin "Pigboy" Bishop, who played the blues in the middle of musical madness. It was satisfying, and Hartbeats gigs would continue to alternate with Grateful Dead shows throughout the fall of 1968, but it was musically inchoate and never did find a center" (279)

Late 1968 "London Run" (282-283)

"The year 1969 was about to arrive with a harsh momentum. The ugliness of the year would drive the Dead ever more inward" (283)

"as late as December [1968] there was talk of David Nelson replacing Weir" (284)

"Early in April they held another band meeting, and Mickey made a suggestion. The one businessman he knew of was his father, Lenny … Lenny had become a self-ordained fundamentalist minister, which lent a gloss to the persuasive persona he'd always had. Mickey called him, and he came to meet with the band" (305-306)

McIntire, Graham, Jonathan Riester distrusted Lenny right away (306)

Mickey's Ranch: "The ranch—it never did acquire a name—consisted of thirty-two acres off Novato Boulevard, and Mickey was officially a caretaker for the owner, the City of Novato. The rent was $250 a month, and the spread included a house, a barn, and various sheds. Many people lived there over the next few years, but the first wave included Mickey, Riester, and Mickey's informally adopted "daughters," the Jensen girls, Rhonda, Sherry, and Vickie. The Jensens had been living at Olompali, part of Don McCoy's child-based commune. Their mother was Opa Willy, a pot smuggler, and when she failed to return from a business trip to Mexico, Mickey became a substitute parent." (307-308)

"The ranch attracted a wide range of souls. In addition to the Dead family, Mickey was particularly close to Sweet William and other Hell's Angels, who were frequently around. In fact, Angelo, the Richmond Chapter president, would marry Sherry Jensen. Mickey had by now taken up with Cookie Eisenberg, the New York travel agency owner, and through Cookie the Dead had met a new circle of people, extremely wealthy New Yorkers like Roger Lewis, who owned a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and Marina Maguire, the heir to the Thompson submachine gun fortune. Marina owned an apartment in Manhattan so large that she used a small golf cart to get around. She was a hard-core devotee of what can only be described as decadence, and the parties at her place following New York shows were nothing short of drug orgies. The New York scene also introduced them to Loose Bruce Baxter, a Texas heir who would live at the ranch for some time. Periodically, Hart recalled, they'd clean him up and send him to a meeting with his mother so that he could continue getting his $10,000 monthly allowance. On the more sober side, Lydia's brother Johnny d'Fonsecca, who had been the carpenter at the Carousel, moved himself and his family to the ranch" (307-308)

"And there was Rolling Thunder, a Native American from Nevada also known as John Pope, who had come to San Francisco in 1967 guided by a vision that colorfully dressed young white people might prove to be allies to Indians. Rolling Thunder was an authentic healer and a fascinating character, whose flagrant lechery made him all the more interesting" (309)

Garcia to Lydon on good and evil: "They exist together in their little game, each with its special place and special humors. I dig 'em both. What is life but being conscious? And good and evil are manifestations of consciousness. If you reject one, you're not getting the whole thing that's there to be had" (311)

"One night, Scrib stood behind Garcia's amp during a Garcia Band sound check. Parish was fussing with John Kahn's amp, and a relaxed Garcia began to noodle on "If I Only Had a Heart," from The Wizard of Oz. It was a perfect jewel, tossed off for his ears and his fingers and no audience at all. Scrib listened raptly. At length, Garcia looked up and caught his eyes, smiled, chirped, "Great song, man," and continued. It was a perfect moment" (313)

"For a few Wednesday nights beginning in mid-May, Garcia began to drive his midget school bus down to a tiny coffeehouse in Menlo Park called the Underground. There he'd back up Marmaduke, more commonly called McDuke, on such tunes as "Wildwood Flower," "Six Days on the Road," "Lay Lady Lay," "Long Black Veil," "Tiger by the Tail," and McDuke's own "Last Lonely Eagle." It was fun" (318) #NRPS

 

country turn: "They had gone far, far out on an edge, and the pendulum was swinging back" (319)

Rock, about country turn: "After all these years of mind-gumming psychedelics we are all actually beginning to crave the normal. We need something to ground us—our hair is talking to us, our shoes have just presented a set of demands, the walls are alive with the sound of intergalactic static" (319).

"On July 20, most of the Dead gathered at Garcia's house, because he had a TV, and watched the most amazing television program of their lives, the first human steps on the moon" (322)

LAG "Whether Jerry Abrams knew it or not, he had a perfect victim in Garcia. His grandmother Tillie was alive, and although she was quite senile, she would have come across the park like a tornado if her grandson had crossed a picket line, and Garcia couldn't" (324)

BG's Common rant (324-325), "Gaskin immediately recognized the line "Don't get peaceful with me" as being from the play The Connection and responded, "I saw the play, it was better." Exit Bill Graham." (325)

Dennis, post collapse of WWF: "The San Francisco music community lay in ruins" (325)

Lenny re-upped the WB deal fall '69, took the money, never let anyone know that Clive had bid for the GD (338)

"On February 1 [1970, MG] called the hotel to tell Jerry that she was going into labor with their first child, who would be born the next day and be named Annabelle. The hotel operator was extremely kind and sympathetic as she informed M.G. that her husband was down in the city jail at the moment, but promised that he'd call as soon as possible" (355) So JG was in jail for Annabelle, and in Europe for Trixie

#women "Asked once about his personal highest take on women, Garcia remarked that "it's a kind of angelic archetype. Those girls always have sort of a golden, giving aura, which is representative of safety and nurturing. Not a Mother Earth type of thing. It's like inspiration to an artist" (358)

"As the Dead had been busted in New Orleans, [Lenny had] been in the process of moving their office from Novato to the Family Dog on the Great Highway (FDGH), with Lenny to become manager of the FDGH as well as the Dead" (360-361)

"Earlier in the year Garcia had worked on the sound track of a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point, and the check for his contribution was due—in fact, overdue. M.G., as Gail Turner would put it, was 'beside herself' waiting for it, because the Garcias' much-loved home in Madrone Canyon was up for sale, and they hoped to buy it and avoid being forced to move. Every day she would call Gail, and finally in mid-March there came the day when Gail replied that yes, it had arrived. But when M.G. got to the office, Lenny said there was no check" (361)

"Lenny's treason mostly affected Mickey, who was completely devastated. "Everything turned black for me. It was more than I could bear. I was almost suicidal."" (361).

Lenny stole $155,000 (362)

ca. March 1970 "with the help of cocaine, then just entering the band's life, they worked very hard indeed. Loose Bruce Baxter, their wealthy friend, had showed up with a large baggie full of the powder. At first it seemed a benign stimulant, a luxurious assistant that provoked conversation or the energy for hard work. As the years went by, it would prove to have other, less pleasant facets, and they would experience all of them" (362).

"Sam Cutler would prove to be a superb road manager, but he was divisive. There was a wheeler-dealer bad-boy feeling to him that appealed to Garcia in much the same way that Rakow had" (363)

4/1/70 5^th and Lincoln (364)

"Janis Joplin had chosen young Marmaduke Dawson as her companion for the ride, and late of an evening, her pre-orgasmic yowl of 'Daddy, daddy, daddy' would ring through the train" (372)

"Late in August Jerry's mother, Bobbie, put her little dog in her car and set off from her home on Twin Peaks, the mountain at the center of the city, to take it for a walk. On the way it became entangled between the gas and brake pedals, causing the car to go off the road and down the nearly vertical hillside, where it finally impaled itself on a cypress tree" (377)

"Jerry was no more emotionally open at twenty-eight than he had been as a teen, and the fact that he had never properly reconciled with her would gnaw at him for the rest of his life. Because of Bobbie's remarriages, the Garcias would not permit her to be buried with Jose. Jerry hadn't liked Wally Matusiewicz in life, and he didn't like seeing his mother next to him in death. There would be no peace or closure for him when Bobbie died, only a change in his pain" (377)

2/71: "Mickey Hart had been in a pit of mortal anguish since Lenny's departure. Self-medication had not helped, … and by the time the band arrived in Port Chester, he was a complete wreck, plagued by suicidal thoughts and essentially in the middle of a breakdown. … At length, Mickey took some medication that would drop an elephant in its tracks and slept for the better part of three days. When he awoke, he went back to the ranch, where he would essentially take root for the next three years" (392)

2/71 #drugs "Cocaine had become an essential part of the Grateful Dead's scene. What had once been an occasional lark was now pretty much a daily requirement, and the problem with cocaine is that there is no such thing as "enough," at least until one has ingested far, far too much. The noted connoisseur of drugs William Burroughs theorized that cocaine acted directly upon the pleasure centers of the brain; whatever its mechanism, its effect on the Dead would be generally negative. Cocaine would erode the band and crew's senses of humor and good judgment for many years" (393)

In the course of the week in Port Chester, Rex Jackson, as Barlow put it, "a fundamentally good man, held me upside down and shook me by my boot heels, to try to see if any cocaine would fall out . . . Kreutzmann told me he was going to kill me if I didn't quit fucking their groupies." Crew member Sonny Heard dubbed him "Bum Barlow," which seemed to John to put him as low as he could possibly get. At one point during that week, Barlow and others, said Barlow, went "bopping around shooting cocaine and hanging out at Vassar, the weirdest thing we could think to do . . . Darkness, darkness." So dark an era, in fact, that six weeks later Marina Maguire, their decadent queen of darkness, the heiress and hostess to so many postshow parties, died in jail in Porterville, California, under mysterious circumstances. She had been arrested, ostensibly because her credit card had expired and the motel she was staying at was suspicious, but more likely because in the process of demanding payment, a motel employee saw a syringe in her possession. Once in jail, she died, supposedly of a ruptured gallbladder incurred during a paroxysm generated by barbiturate withdrawal. Whether her injuries were accidental or deliberately inflicted by the police, Marina died as a consequence of her drug abuse" (393-394)

"the spring of 1971 would mostly be recalled as the sad period in which both of Weir's parents died—within weeks of each other, and each on the other's birthday" (395) – Frederick Utter Weir d. 3/28/71, Eleanor Cramer Weir d. 3/4/71

Garcia liked that 4/71 tour was by bus, which felt "more like travel and less like matter transmission" (396). I love that! I feel the same way, Jer.

4/71 "was still a time in which most of the band and crew consumed LSD each night, and they saw themselves as part of a group mind" (396)

With the Dead finally organized by Sam, making money, there was free time, and, jamming with Wales, Garcia "effectively began a career outside the Grateful Dead" (398)

"Wales was a midwesterner who had played piano since the age of four, and in the sixties he had gone from playing in Mafia joints on Chicago's Rush Street, to backing Jerry's old hero Freddie King, to a band that dyed its hair green and wore space suits, to the band Sugarloaf, which had a big hit with 'Green-Eyed Lady'" (398).

"Merl Washington (Saunders was an adopted stage name) was a San Franciscan raised in the fifties just four blocks from 710 at the corner of Ashbury and Page. A classmate of Johnny Mathis at Polytechnic High School, he had grown up listening to Erroll Garner and Jimmy Smith, and after serving in the army from 1953 to 1957" (399)

"Having explored music from Wales's completely "outside" perspective, Garcia now began to learn standards and structure from Merl" (399)

For club gigs, "Parish's original salary was five dollars per show, plus pot" (399)

"fall of 1970 the Hieronymous bunch moved out to the Bay Area" (405)

Zabriskie: "The experience of sitting alone on a soundstage at MGM where Gene Kelly had danced and The Wizard of Oz had been shot gave him the shivers (405-406)

Anti-commerce: "Garcia's work pleased almost everyone but Rock Scully, who had to sell the album. As Scully pointed out, the most radio-friendly cuts, like "The Wheel" and "To Lay Me Down," were surrounded by what he called "Insect Fear craziness" like "Eep Hour," bizarro musique concrète sound collages that the average citizen was not going to grasp, with razor-thin gaps in between, breaks so thin that a disc jockey in a hurry couldn't cue up the song, which meant he wouldn't play it. Garcia didn't care about sales, so Rock could only groan" (407)

GD recovered $55k from Lenny arrested 7/26/71 (407)

9/17/71 Pig went into the hospital with a perforated ulcer and hepatitis (410)

DM has DJ buttonholing JG in early September 1971 at KK (411) First rehearsal at warehouse off Francisco Blvd was on a Sunday – just JG, KG, BK. Then the band came in on Monday, and Keith was on the payroll by that night (411)

KG "He was born in 1948 and grew up in suburban Concord, California. He had classical training and played in a country club band, then cocktail jazz in piano bar trios. He was small, gentle, spaced-out, depressive, and extremely vulnerable. Given some stimulation, he was happy to stay up all night discussing Heidegger, Nietzsche, and dualism, but he read little, and his personal presence was so modest that Lesh would think of him as a 'cipher'" (411-412)

Garcia leaving NRPS gets half a sentence (413), part of why we need Fate Music

"Shady Management office on Union Street" around 1969 – look it up (419)

"The hidden ace of Grateful Dead management was a man few outside the business had ever heard of, the band's attorney from 1971 on, Hal Kant. A world champion poker player—he won with $1 million on the table for the last hand—a collector of Joseph Conrad first editions, a Ring Cycle enthusiast, a painter, and a former clinical psychologist, Kant was a complex, gifted, and highly civilized man" (421-422)

"The Dead's last contract with Arista, in 1988, earned them a higher royalty rate than Madonna or Michael Jackson" (423)

Re Cherry Garcia, "Kant … told Garcia, 'They will name a motor oil after you if you don't confront this, Jerry. You'll have no control over your name at all'" (423). DM says he tipped Hal off. Sue says she initiated all of that.

"Mickey had gotten a three-record deal from Joe Smith, and Rolling Thunder gave him the means to improve the barn's equipment" (438)

Hart's "His next album, Fire on the Mountain, began with the song of that name, and then moved into Hartian (as in Martian) percussion/electronica space. One piece, "Marshmallow Road," was written by Mickey and Barry Melton in Hart's mother's home in Sunrise City, Florida. Their means of inspiration was to take lots of acid and lock themselves in a room with eight or ten cartons of marshmallows. After two days the LSD, the Florida heat, and the marshmallows combined into a nasty goo, and they fled the room and jumped into the nearest swimming pool. In Joe Smith's opinion the album was as gooey as the Marshmallow Road, and he rejected it" (438)

"Mickey responded by making a soundtrack to a martial arts film script called The Silent Flute, written by, among others, Bruce Lee. Martial arts was a Hartian [pronounced like Martian!] specialty and brought out his greatest intensity. For two weeks he did not change his clothing and had his food left at the barn door. Since he did not even have a copy of the script, he relied solely on his memory of one reading. 'Piano. Low frequencies. It was my best work.' This, too, was rejected. 'They actually walked out on me while I was playing it for them'" (438)

"Late in 1972 they'd met with Clive Davis, the head of Columbia Records, who had tried to sign them" (444)

"Early in March they were rehearsing at the Stinson Beach Community Center when an old friend, photographer Bob Seidemann, stopped by with Pigpen. Pig was extremely sick with a damaged liver, and he had asked Bob for a ride so that he could have his picture taken with the band. In Seidemann's view, 'They coldly put him down, turned him away. They pecked him and pecked him and pecked him' … and Pig went on home" (446)

"The loss left Garcia despondent … in his heart, the Grateful Dead would never be quite the same again" (448)

JG could chill w OAITW "His obsessive need to be great on banjo had diminished with the satisfaction derived from other music forms, so he could enjoy playing bluegrass once again" (449)

"Rowan was erratic, thought Grisman, as when he 'tends to forget that he's a rhythm guitar player in becoming the Mick Jagger of bluegrass,' but he contributed plenty" (449)

Spring 73 "Garcia was approaching musical saturation—which for him was merely full satisfaction. In one week he could play with the Dead, with Merl Saunders, and with OAIW. Bluegrass was especially fine, because there was no pressure at all. They'd begin by warming up for three or four hours, play three hours onstage, and very possibly cool down for another two. Life was good" (449-450)

"One of his favorite bands was the then-unknown group from Ireland, the Chieftains. Hearing that they were in San Francisco on a promotional tour, he arranged for them to open for Old and in the Way, set up an interview for them at KSAN, got them a limo, and then went with Chieftains front man Paddy Moloney to the station, where he joined Tom Donahue as co-interviewer. Never having heard of the Grateful Dead, Moloney was at first bemused by Jerry's enthusiasm, though he found him utterly charming and knowledgeable. 'A few jars [drinks]' later, said Paddy, they were pals, and would stay that way for life" (450)

Bust 3/27/73 "Hunter called Sam Cutler, who called John Scher. Later, Scher would muse that if Cutler had been a little more cognizant of American geography, he'd have called the Philadelphia promoter, who was many miles closer. But as it was, New Jersey meant Scher. John raided his safe at the Capitol Theater in Passaic for the $1,000 bail, got to Mount Holly, and rescued Garcia. Ten minutes out of town, Garcia relaxed, and for the next couple of hours he and Scher would rave and bond on the ride to New York City. The primary result of Garcia's misadventure—in the end, he received probation, and briefly had to visit a psychiatrist—would be the close relationship he'd enjoy with Scher for the rest of his career" (450)

"Rakow fulfilled Garcia's need to travel the dark side, where lived the hustlers and weasels. Through him, Garcia could vicariously enjoy a con game. Intellectually, Garcia really was an outlaw. If they could somehow subvert the entire American music industry, terrific. Rakow's machinations with the All Our Own car company and his inept management of the Carousel had damaged no one whom Garcia knew, and generated a huge amount of good trips, high times, and a marvelous challenge to the status quo. It seemed that it could happen again, shaking the Dead out of the torpor of their success. 'Jerry was my ally in this,' said Rakow. 'Every morning I would go to Jerry's house in Stinson Beach. He liked my desire to have a lot of random events going on'" (451)

"Later, Rakow would create a second company to produce side projects called Round Records, which was co-owned by him and Garcia. This Kant took seriously, pointing out that it was a major conflict of interest, since it commingled the band's finances with a side project. Garcia blew up, telling Hal that he represented the band, not the record company, and replaced him at the record company with a San Rafael attorney named David Hellman, who also represented Rakow personally. This conflict of interest escaped criticism at the time, but it would have major long-term side effects. A week later, Hal recalled, Garcia apologized to him for his outburst. 'Ron is such a weak guy,' Garcia said. 'If we confronted him with this, he'd fall apart. I knew you could handle it but I didn't think he could.' 'Garcia,' Kant said, 'just wanted people who would do what he wanted them to do, but frequently he had trouble deciding what that was.' And in fact, when it came time for the ultimate meeting to decide on the project, Donna Jean would remember that Garcia was a no-show, since he didn't really want to deal with business anyway" (452). Lesh "thought it was worth trying" (452)

"The Grateful Dead was now a megabusiness" (452)

Out of Town Tours (453), Fly-by-Night (453), Kumquat Mae (454)

June '73 OAITW tour, Kahn thought the bluegrass festival scene was lame, tacky, like Hee-Haw. "During Old and in the Way, we always played. Every second. We'd get up in the morning and go in somebody's room and start playing" (454)

600,000 at Watkins Glen (455-458)

1/74 Cutler is fired. "Jerry was nonconfrontational and wouldn't stand up for him" (468)

1/74 Cutler firing "Sam, on the other hand, pointed at Rakow and the record company, which he said he opposed. 'I thought it was a dumb move, a Rakow scam. And I said so. It was a fantasy that wasn't worth pursuing.' Rakow and Loren, whom Lesh would call the 'Stinson Beach Mafia,' had moved to West Marin, and there were dark suspicions as to their influence" (468)

1/14/74 "Came January 14, and Cutler knew what was about to happen; he was to be the sacrificial lamb, and he pointed the finger at the reluctant leader, Garcia. 'If I'd had a gun,' he wrote, 'I would have shot the miserable sod and put him out of his misery then and there! I said ONE word, 'okay' and left . . . To have that spineless and easily influenced man tell me what he told me (in public!) when I was effectively 'fired' was the most humiliating thing that has EVER happened to me in my life, and I said not a word in reply. BUT, I never forgave him, and I never will. It was the act of a moral coward'" (469)

Compliments was "Motivated largely because Grateful Dead Records needed product in the pipeline" (469)

"Lesh had been working with Ned Lagin on what would eventually be called Seastones, an entirely abstract album of electronic music that combined white or pink noise with bleepborp sounds. Lagin had degrees in both molecular biology and music from MIT, and they intimidated Lesh. Their collaboration had almost nothing to do with music, but rather the physiological effects of sound" (474)

"On the band's return home [post 8/6/74], there was yet another company meeting. Rifkin stood up and said, 'I'm not having any fun anymore. I'm thinking I'd like to take some time off and give it a rest, and see what it feels like.' As Weir saw it, their main problems at this point were (a) cocaine and (b) the crew, which seemed to him to be 'drowning in mountains of blow.' 'We had a crew that was being paid like executives for doing blue-collar work, and they were abusing our generosity.' The crew chimed in with Rifkin, and the band made plans to take time off. To Weir, the hiatus was never meant to be permanent, but the decision was phrased so that certain crew members would be forced to find other jobs and not hang around waiting for work" (475) #hiatus

E74 Ally Pally Rock wanted to work with the promoter who had the drugs (475)

9/74 "Kreutzmann was at this time part of what John Barlow called the 'neo-cocaine cowboy aesthetic' that characterized one chunk of the crew" (476). JGMF tie in to why BK would be done with Garcia's side bands for 7+ years after this?

#movie: "Garcia's secret dream was to be an auteur filmmaker, and he was going to get his chance, although it would exact a terrible price" (478)

Club Front "looked on the rear windows of the town's magnificently sleazy Bermuda Palms Motel" (480)

#women "While he had never been the most faithful of husbands, Garcia was patently drifting away from Mountain Girl by 1974, first with a young woman named Deborah Jahnke, but primarily with a young woman from Ohio named Deborah Koons" (481)

"Weir was in the process of building a studio, Ace's, over the garage of his Mill Valley home. Having the Dead help him finance construction appealed to him" (481-482) – what an odd tone to that last little phrase!

"Round Records paid David Grisman $1,000 to assemble the album, and despite significant sales, he never saw another dime. Garcia was aware of the sloppiness of the business, but hid rather than confront the situation. As a result, although Jerry and David would play a number of gigs in 1974 and 1975 with a varying cast of people, including Taj Mahal and Richard Greene (the Great American String Band), their relationship lapsed into nothingness after a final jam session at David's house, and they did not speak for the next fifteen years" (486)

"Seastones would also have a depressing economic history. Lesh would call it 'a horrible bummer for Ned both aesthetically and financially—it was a rip-off. It was the lowest priority project for Round Records'" (486)

"Friends speculated that part of Garcia's motivation in recruiting Keith was as a therapeutic gesture for the troubled pianist. But Godchaux was a game player who could follow Garcia up—or down—any musical avenue, and their rehearsals were as much fun as shows. What they called the Front Street Sheiks might spend a day doing all Dylan tunes or all Beatles tunes, most of which were never performed. They spent weeks on gospel material, or piano jazz, the Swan Silvertones or Art Tatum, drenching themselves in music for no reason other than personal pleasure" (488)

"As spring wore on, the shaky economics of the record company, exacerbated by the financial drain of the movie, ran up against reality. It had been financed by a line of credit from the Bank of Boston, and from all accounts one of the reasons for the bank's interest was the Dead Headedness of the chairman's daughter" (489)

Hmmmm "in November 1975 he had signed away the Stinson Beach house to M.G. in settlement of their separation" (489)

"Rakow later claimed that he'd gone to United Artists and demanded another million dollars to finish the movie, in return for delivering four Dead albums and solo albums from Garcia and Weir. Since UA already had a contract for the Dead albums, they inquired as to their motivation. Rakow responded that if they didn't come up with the money, he would deliberately bankrupt the Grateful Dead and then make a deal with Warner Bros., since bankruptcy trustees would nullify existing contracts. Rakow recalled Garcia's response as "he fucking loved it. He was jumping up and down." Perhaps, for Rakow's benefit, that was so. But while Garcia cared nothing for his own finances, he had respect for his brothers and the Grateful Dead as a separate entity. As Rakow was fond of saying, 'I was the family barracuda. You don't ever want to fuck with your barracuda because the barracuda will do what barracudas do. He will fucking eat you. What happened was that the Grateful Dead became convinced that it was in their best interests to fuck me. Garcia and I had a meeting on it and Garcia looked me right in the eye and said, 'It's clear that this is going to happen.' Because I went across a really entrenched interest in the Grateful Dead and that was Hal Kant.' True, Kant was an entrenched interest socially, but not economically—he was a retained attorney giving legal advice, but he had no financial interest. Bob Seidemann's thought was that Rakow 'would drive this economic train into the wall just to watch the parts fly all over the room'" (489-490)

"At the same time, Mickey Hart was in the throes of mixing Diga. Rakow was on Mickey's back demanding the album, and in fact, he would blame Hart's endless remixing and delays for crippling the company. Hart had finally gone to work at Wally Heider's studio, sharing time with Maria Muldaur. He only had five or six days available, and it took his crew a full day to set up his highly elaborate gear. As he left on the first night, he warned everyone to leave his stuff alone, but when he returned, the cables had been disconnected to make way for another job. And so unto the second day. On the third day he melted down. "We are taking this studio in the name of the people," he announced, and called (a) Rakow and (b) Sweet William, his old Hell's Angel buddy. Rakow wouldn't respond to the call, which was a demand for defense. Sweet William, carrying a sword cane and with some compatriots, soon arrived and took up a position at the top of the stairs in front of the door. Grace Slick was recording downstairs and became confused when she had to ask permission to come in. She asked her old friend Mickey what was happening. "What's going on," Mickey replied, "is that we're trying to make a record. It's okay—you're the safest now you've ever been." When Heider threatened to cut off some equipment from outside the room, Hart counterthreatened, "For every missing line, I'll throw a piece of equipment out the window." Heider decided not to call the police, Maria Muldaur took some time off, and Mickey and his engineer, who was by now demanding $500 an hour hazardous duty pay—Hart agreed, then reneged—settled down to work. About four days later they stumbled out, tapes in hand, and Heider and his employees shook Mickey's hand in tribute to genuine rock and roll madness" (490-491)

"A couple of weeks later, in Los Angeles in June, Mickey saw Rakow for the first time and began to berate him for desertion. When Rakow responded by telling him to wait in the car, Mickey jumped up and choked him. "He wouldn't say uncle," recalled Hart, "so I put him out. He walked with a cane for a year behind that." A day or two later Rakow got a call from the Grateful Dead Record Company attorney, David Hellman, who told him that he'd been fired. He considered the possibility of just going away, but that wasn't his style. "Or do I make sure everyone feels as fucked as I do?" He wrote himself checks for $225,000, effectively disemboweling Grateful Dead Records. He went to visit his ex-wife, Lydia, then living in Bolinas, and told her that "he had done something with the Grateful Dead, that they were going to be looking for him, and I should beware or something." He also told Lydia that the real reason he wanted to fuck the Dead was that he'd been subjected to racist jokes about being a "New York Jew." He had a final meeting with Lesh and Garcia, where he said, "I'm cutting out. I already cut the check. So, fuck you." Lesh got up and walked out, "because I wanted to strangle Jerry," since Rakow had always been Garcia's protégé within the Dead.

Rakow, and a few others, argued that the money was due him based on separate negotiations, although taking it at that time was clearly a vindictive act. It was Hal Kant's professional opinion that the $225,000 was out-and-out embezzlement, but that Garcia did not want Rakow prosecuted. In the end they negotiated a settlement in which he kept the money but retained no interest in the record company. Steve Brown and others tried to keep the company going, but without Rakow's tap dance— and the money he'd taken—their efforts were futile. As the summer came in, the company folded" (491)

"Early in September, Rex Jackson was in the grip of a cocaine-fueled bender, and after several days of being tended by Mickey at the ranch, he'd worn out the drummer, who turned him over to Bear. On September 5, 1976, Rex was driving back to his home in Mill Valley from West Marin when his car went over the edge of the road, killing him in the crash" (494)

77 GD Movie finally done: "It came at an extreme cost, both for Garcia personally and for the Dead as a whole" (498)

"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" (499)

Animation sequence: "The artistic results were glorious. To the accountants, band management, and other band members, the animation was a black hole that inhaled dollars" (499)

"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'" (500).

"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… .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" (500)

"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'" (500-501) #men #women

#DK "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." (501)

#women "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" (501) #drugs

"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" (504)

"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" (504)

In "November Garcia had seen Close Encounters 'about six times'" (506)

"Cats Under the Stars was released in March and disappeared without a trace, perhaps permanently destroying any desire in Garcia to ever work in a studio again" (506-507).

Fall 78 "Garcia's drug abuse was only marginally worse than that of the rest of the band members, but because everyone depended on him to be the emotional center, it got more attention. Studio technician John Cutler had even tried to protest Garcia's condition by organizing a strike that would prevent them from performing on Saturday Night Live. By now, Jerry had moved to the downstairs in-law unit of Rock Scully's home on Hepburn Heights" (523)

"Nora Sage, a fan who'd been incessantly sending mail and gifts to Garcia since 1976. One day Nicki asked Jerry's assistant Sue Stephens who the new gardener was. Sue was confused, then replied, 'Is she short, and does she wear a string of pearls? Oh-ohhhh.' Sue told Nicki that she felt that Nora was bad news, because at least once she'd been bodily removed from a Garcia Band show at Jerry's and John Kahn's request. By now, Rock's main function, as perceived by the rest of the band, was as Garcia's partner in drugdom, and it was Sue's belief that Rock used Nora as a diversion in this pursuit. Soon Nora was the housekeeper at Hepburn Heights, bringing receipts to Sue for reimbursement, and she managed to entrench herself" (524).

Keith late 78: "Keith was a once-brilliant player with terribly low self-esteem and a great deal of emotional pain, and the worst possible environment for him was one with lots of stress and myriad opportunities for self-medication. Cocaine had damaged his sense of time in playing, which had always been his weakness, and by now he was drowning in whatever he could find, ranging from prescription drugs to heroin" (524)

1/79 "With two days remaining in the tour, Donna Jean flew home. 'When Keith got home, we talked and I said, "How do we get out of this?" And he said, "I don't know, but it's going to kill us. It's a monster, and it's malignant"'" (527) DJG: "the Grateful Dead is not benign" (527)

"The previous October Garcia had played some Garcia Band shows with the Bob Weir Band, and he'd listened carefully to Weir's keyboard player, Brent Mydland. As Keith sank deeper into the abyss, Garcia suggested to Weir that he send Dead tapes to Brent to study as a potential replacement" (527)

"Oakland Auditorium (later renamed Henry Kaiser Auditorium), a venerable hall that had over the years housed Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, a Jack Dempsey fight, and an Elvis Presley performance. It was worn, funky, and comfortable, and would be a good home to the band for a number of years" (529)

"On December 8, Garcia was at Front Street working on Dead Set when he got a call that told him of the assassination of John Lennon. Work was impossible. He sat down at Keith Godchaux's old Steinway (more pain: Keith had died in a car accident that summer) and noodled for many hours, lost in thought. After all, he and Lennon had more than a little in common. Both had emerged from childhoods damaged by deeply flawed relationships with their mothers, and through their losses had found a stunning creativity that had put them in the prison of celebrity. Lennon, of course, had experienced Beatlemania, which made the enthusiasm of Dead Heads look quite demure. And in Marin County Garcia had a home where his celebritydom had a minimal impact; elsewhere, Dead Heads treated him as family, "Uncle Jerry," and (usually) not as God. Still, Garcia felt it" (541).

"Three days later in Barcelona, after the last show of the tour [10/19/81], Lesh wrote out a note for Garcia and made the rest of the band sign it. Though arch in tone, it was a deadly serious attempt to confront Garcia, their emotional anchor. 'Dear sir and brother: You have been accused of certain high crimes and misdemeanors against the art of music. To wit: Playing in your own band; Never playing with any dynamics; Never listening to what anybody else plays . . .' The long party was taking its toll on all of them, but especially on the leader who wouldn't lead" (544)

12/31/82 Etta "A few days later, Scrib would remark to Garcia that he seemed just as happy as a sideman as he did as a leader. "Y'know," Garcia replied, "I coulda spent my life playin' blues in a Mission Street dump and been just as happy. All my life, man, all my life" (546-547)

"Shortly before the first official Rex shows, in February 1984, the band made noises about recording a new album and went into Fantasy Records' Studio D in Berkeley. The sessions were a farcical waste of time" (548)

"In March 1984, Garcia's loyal assistant and bookkeeper, Sue Stephens, had had enough. "I finally threw my hands up and said, 'it's Rock or me.' " Given Rock's inability to cope with schedules, the Garcia band would tend to miss flights, so that Rock would have to buy a new set of tickets. But, Sue pointed out to Jerry, at the end of the tour the unused tickets would have been cashed in. In addition, Rock would "duck out on paying the hotel bill, for God's sakes," said Sue, "which he would have been allowed cash for from the settlement [the night's pay] . . . So at the end of the tour I'd end up with all these airfares I still had to pay, all these hotel bills I still had to pay—that the money had been allotted for and doled out to Rock out on the road . . . And it was blatant, too. He'd apologize and be laughing, too. So we went and told Jerry we couldn't deal with [Rock]. And he just said okay," and agreed to fire Rock. "He was almost gleeful," recalled Sue. "And he thanked us. 'I depend on you guys to deal with this shit because I can't deal with too much of it.' " (550)

"As 1984 wore on, Garcia set to work with his old friend Tom Davis on creating a script for a film of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. Davis had come to Hepburn Heights to begin, and was greeted with, "Come in, sit down, and get high, we'll talk about it tomorrow." Both of them were fans of Bob and Ray, and many of their earliest sessions had more to do with laughter and television than work. Jerry and Tom eventually produced a script, based on their mutual understanding of the book as a definition of love, said Davis, "in Kurt Vonnegut's stark, minimalist way—romance with no romance, just kernels of love." Davis managed to arrange a meeting that included the Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz and SNL star Bill Murray, but nothing came of it, and the script languished" (551)

"A large part of the reason McIntire had returned as manager was to catalyze the band's concern for Garcia's drug use, and in mid-January he arranged a confrontation. This was neither the first nor the last intervention for Garcia, and as usual, he promised to seek help. He almost made it. He planned to enter a facility in Oakland, and on January 18, 1985, he set out for it. Halfway there he stopped in Golden Gate Park, where he sat in his car meditating on his life, and, not coincidentally, finishing off his drug supply. Unfortunately, his BMW, a gift from a disreputable source, was not registered. A passing police officer took notice of the car and ran the plates. When he approached the car, he saw Garcia trying futilely to conceal things. The legal results of the bust were minimal, and a good attorney named Chris Andrian quite properly got Garcia into a diversion program, where he attended counseling meetings with Grace Slick, among others. The sessions had no significant impact on his habit, but something else did. Early in the summer the consequences of almost total physical passivity caught up with him, and he began to experience massive edema, a swelling in his ankles and lower legs that was so bad his trousers needed to be cut. The appearance of his legs was so shocking that Garcia finally had undeniable proof of the damage. Bit by bit, as the year 1985 passed, he began to clean up and exercise at least a little" (552)

After the Wagner in 6/85, "The sound of the "Ride of the Valkyries," as played by Lesh, began to crop up in the rehearsals the band was conducting at the Marin Civic Center" (553)

"On the tenth, his housekeeper, Nora, frantically called Weir to say, "Jerry's in the bathroom, and he's not making a lot of sense." "Call 911," said Weir. She did, and it saved his life" (556)

"In a deep coma of initially unknown origin, he resisted the doctors' efforts to give him a CAT scan, so they injected him with liquid Valium. Unfortunately, he was allergic to it, and his heart stopped. The doctors zapped him back to life in a Code Blue response, and placed him on a respirator for forty-eight hours before he was able to breathe on his own" (556)

"As he came awake, one of his first visitors was M.G. First he wrote a note that read, 'Be tactful. She chuckled through her tears of anxiety and appreciated it. Then he muttered, 'I'm not Beethoven'" (556)

Post-coma recovery "Mickey stopped by to drag him out for walks, and once brought Carlos Santana by for some guitar talk and good company" (558)

"Early in January, Bob Dylan had come to Front Street to hang and play for two days, just to see how things went. Among other things, they played the Beatles' "Nowhere Man" together and discovered a unique chemistry, neither Dylan nor Dead. A month later, he called and said he thought a dual tour might work. Early in March, the Dead played in Oakland for Mardi Gras, and Dylan came by for a photo session to promote the tour. Shortly thereafter, the Foxboro, Massachusetts, selectmen publicly approved a license for a concert, breaking the story of the tour. Dylan and the Dead spent three weeks in May at Front Street, rehearsing upwards of one hundred songs" (563)

Broadway "matinees and evenings. In between, he would nap in a dressing room that had been used by Mary Martin and Vivien Leigh" (567)

1/88 begins scuba diving, gets certification (568)

'88 "The year ended with Dead Heads in an uproar over the use of "Eep Hour," a piece of music from Garcia's first solo album, on a television advertisement for Cher's Uninhibited perfume. Drawing an often-overlooked distinction between his own and the Grateful Dead's music, Garcia snorted, 'Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. I can sell anything, even my ass, if I want'" (571)

1990 "Early in the year the Rex Foundation made a grant to David "Dawg" Grisman. When David discovered that Garcia was responsible, he called him to say thanks. Because of Grisman's legitimate anger at his treatment by Grateful Dead Records and Garcia's inability to deal with his own embarrassment, they had not spoken for many years after Old and in the Way had ceased playing. Now Grisman invited him to come by and play. Garcia showed up, sat down, and said, "What we should do is make a record, 'cause that'll give us something to focus on." They had their first tune, "Louis Collins," in the can before Dawg's recording engineer, Decibel Dave Dennison, could arrive. Over the next few years, Garcia would visit Grisman's tiny basement studio dozens of times and make a tremendous amount of wonderful music. The material Garcia laid down with David in the nineties was the best acoustic playing of his life, with Grisman's gifted and creative discipline influencing Garcia for the best. There was a tremendous purity to their music making. Garcia would arrive at one, they'd smoke a fat joint, and sit in a tiny basement room playing. It was a quiet, almost meditative approach" (580-581)

"Many members of the Dead scene viewed this with dark suspicion, not only because Grisman was amassing hours of valuable tape, but also because—well, just because. There had always been a generalized suspicion of people with access to Garcia, and by now these misgivings were accentuated by the ongoing anguish occasioned by his resumption of opiate use. His drug habits were like the weather; everyone talked about them, but no one felt the slightest ability to do anything about it. "[Garcia] just goes over there because he can do what he wants and nobody busts him," grumbled John Cutler. Of course, nobody really busted Garcia at Front Street, either. Periodically, Cutler would tearfully harangue Garcia—it was a measure of Jerry's love for John that he tolerated even that much intrusion on his life—and every once in a while the band would stage an intervention, but Garcia mixed a large ego and grand intelligence with his weakness. Challenging him on a personal matter was, as he put it, a 'generally futile pursuit'" (581)

Brent's "death devastated the band" (583)

"The Grateful Dead monster had claimed another victim, and Garcia could feel it" (583).

w/in GD, "Authentic communication had shut down, leached by time, by the encompassing pressure of audience demand, by the responsibilities of too many people's livelihoods. There was still a phenomenal joy in the playing, but only in the playing" (583)

"David Kemper was the Garcia Band's drummer for ten years, and one day without warning, and for no particular reason other than a desire for change, he was dismissed" (584)

"In the wake of Brent's death, Garcia and Lesh went to see Bruce at a Bay Area concert" (584) – check dates

"Nordine had been blessed with a silken basso profundo" (586)

"The summer tour ended in Denver, where the band sat down with Garcia in a major intervention, and he responded positively. He spent August driving himself to a methadone clinic every morning, standing in line with everyone else to receive his allocation, seemingly committed to getting healthy. He made other changes in his private life. For the first time since Stinson Beach, he purchased a home, on Palm Court in San Rafael" (588) #drugs #houses

Hornsby 9/91: "'I resent you coming to the gig and being there but not being there. You're not bringing what you can to the show every night.' Not used to being challenged, Garcia replied, 'Well, you don't understand twenty-five years of burnout, man'." (589)

"More pain. On October 25, Bill Graham …" (590)

1992 :"On his return to Marin from the summer tour, he and Manasha had moved into a grand new house, this time a ten-acre, 7,500-square-foot mansion near George Lucas's Skywalker ranch, with marble fireplaces, a media room, and a pool. Late in July Garcia had gone to Southern California for a quick run of Garcia Band shows, and on his birthday, August 1, he remarked that he felt weird, as though he'd been dosed. He returned home that day, and the next day he lay comatose, his lips blue and his legs swollen. His heart was enlarged, his lungs were diseased, and he had borderline diabetes. Compounding everyone's distress, Manasha initially refused to let anyone from the band—or any conventional doctor—near him, preferring her acupuncturist Yen Wei and a Santa Cruz hippie, Dr. Randy Davis, whose general air of Dead Head deference to Garcia inspired no faith in the Dead office scene. Garcia's collapse had been easy to anticipate. His weight had ballooned, and he had no energy; on tour he would ask people to carry his rather light briefcase up the stage stairs for him" (592)

"Brigid had settled in Boulder, Colorado, and in the mid-eighties she'd been contacted by Scrib, acting as the band's biographer. She'd come to a Red Rocks concert and naturally wanted to say hello to Garcia afterward, but riven with guilt over his drugged state, he'd begged off. In mid-1992 Garcia had met with her to do an interview for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, and the old attraction was clearly there. Still an extraordinarily beautiful woman, she looked not terribly different from the nineteen-year-old model of thirty years before. In December their conversation resumed" (600) not quite right on the chronology, I don't think

Brigid stunningly beautiful – commercials for Oral B toothbrush

"Came six o'clock at a Grisman session, and [Manasha would] be on the phone wanting to know where he was" (601)

"In the time since Jerry and Brigid had first reconnected in the summer, they'd maintained an increasingly close relationship by telephone. Now, in a carefully concealed backstage room, Brigid challenged Garcia's personal passivity with an ultimatum: she was ready to make a life change, and she would either go off with Garcia or travel outside the country. They threw the I Ching and found the "Joyous" hexagram, with no changes. Garcia agreed, but said that he could not make the break with Manasha until after Christmas. n December 30 Brigid flew to San Francisco. … Garcia "told Manasha he was going out for cigarettes and went to Robert Hunter's home, where he'd been spending time songwriting of late, to meet Brigid. Coincidentally, the Leshes were there for dinner. Garcia got cold feet, and revealed his doubts to his friends; their response seemed to him somewhat in the nature of a drug intervention, as they made clear their concerns over the suffocating nature of his relationship with Manasha. He came to agree. His emotional cowardice surfaced when he decided to have Vince Di Biase tell Manasha that the relationship was over. The women there convinced him to at least write a personal note. Jerry and Brigid went off to Hawaii, and on their return in January, moved to a condo in Marin" (601)

Barich was late January 1993

"Garcia's romance with Brigid was not meant to be. Early in March he ran into Deborah Koons, his lover from the seventies, at a health food store in Mill Valley, and was summarily enchanted. Brigid was a sensitive soul, and knew immediately that something was not altogether kosher. The band left for Chicago to begin the spring tour, and on the last night there she confronted Garcia, who came clean and conceded that their relationship was at an end. The next day was to be an off-day in Chicago, but an incoming blizzard made it necessary to gather up everyone early. On the plane Garcia was relieved, listening to the old rock tune "I Fought the Law" on his Discman and chortling about how good a song it was. Though he spent much time on the phone with Deborah for the rest of the tour, he was presumably alone for the first time in years. That didn't last, either. For much of the tour he would involve himself in a seemingly archetypal May–December romance with a young woman named Shannon Jeske. He would also spend an hour or two after every show of that tour in the hotel bar, which produced the predictable crush of Dead Heads" (603)

"Deborah Koons was a filmmaker, then finishing a fine romantic film, Poco Loco, and she wanted to research a new movie that would be set in Ireland. That summer, after an excellent stadium tour that included Sting as the opening act, Garcia set off for Ireland with Deborah, her cinematographer, and her costumier. Wanting balance, Garcia called his old friend Chesley Millikin and invited him along" (605)

Ireland, at one stop "Garcia pulled out the banjo Chesley had inveigled him into bringing, and a crowd collected to listen, no one having any idea who he was. Perhaps it was memories of his grandfather Pop Clifford, but there was something about Ireland that gave Garcia a continuing string of déjà vu feelings, and he raved about Galway, Connemara, Sligo, and the Burren upon his return" (605)

"Unfortunately, the trip ended with a grim reminder of the boundaries of his life. While in Ireland he'd spoken frequently about how much he was anticipating an upcoming trip to Japan, his first. He'd been offered $1 million to make appearances there on behalf of his art. On his return to San Francisco, the band and its staff pointed out to him the risks of the journey—the lack of time before an upcoming tour, the danger to his health—and he canceled. Aside from feeling guilty about what this put his art manager, Vince Di Biase, through, he felt weighted down by all of his responsibilities. The more the Dead made, and by now they were extremely prosperous, the more they needed him" (605).

"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."" (607)

Summer 94 "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" (609)

2/95 hand problem from diving in the Caribbean (609)

"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'" (610)

"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" (610)

"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" (611). NB Scher didn't confirm this.

A couple of days after he got home, on Thursday, July 13, Garcia called David Grisman and said, "What's happening in your studio? I got this recording session for you, I gotta record a Jimmie Rodgers song. You'll get paid. Can you do it today?" "No, how about Sunday the sixteenth?" "Okay, I'm leaving Monday." Bob Dylan had been working on a tribute album to Rodgers, "the singing brakeman" and one of the creators of country music, and Garcia wanted to participate. He added, "John Kahn's got a percussionist, can you get that chick dobro player [Sally Van Meter]?" He confirmed on Sunday, but added that they needed a drummer, and Grisman got George Marsh. By 11 A.M. they'd gathered at Dawg's studio. "[Garcia] didn't look that good," Grisman thought, although he was "upbeat and into it." Over the next few hours they recorded Rodgers's "Blue Yodel #9." Decibel Dave, the engineer, slated take one and they began, but Garcia stopped them, saying that the tempo was too fast. "Down from the bottom, brother," he said. "Say way down from Dixie now. That's it, that's the feel. Nothing is moving on the river." Garcia's playing was fair, but his vocals, especially the yodels, were weak, as though he lacked enough breath. 'Talk to me, David,' he said. 'You should talk to me a little bit in my solo.' 'Hi, Jerry. Nice solo you're playing.'" (612)

"Upstairs, Deborah told Grisman's wife, Pam, where Jerry was going on Monday, which was the Betty Ford Clinic in Southern California. Of course, what Garcia's reluctance to deal with doctors had long concealed was that his drug use not only medicated depression and anxiety but masked major physical illnesses, including raging diabetes, a congested heart, and lungs destroyed by thirty-five years of cigarettes and fifteen years of smoked hard drugs. He did not appear to have received any treatment for them. As they left Grisman's studio, Garcia turned to Grisman and said, 'Can you finish this up?' Grisman would learn only later that Garcia had already signed a contract identifying Kahn and Grisman as coproducers" (613)

"Garcia's stay at the Betty Ford Clinic was painful and hot, and after two weeks he sent for Deborah and Parish to bring him home. Just after his return, he had a long, sweet phone conversation with Bruce Hornsby, regaling him with stories about meeting an old associate of Django Reinhart's there, as well as plenty of ideas and plans for the future. Garcia was clean and clear, and once back in Marin County, cheerful. He went to some AA meetings, met with a recovery psychiatrist, worked on his visual memoir Harrington Street, and decided to check into a local substance-abuse clinic, Serenity Knolls, at least in part because he mistakenly thought it was on the site of Camp Lagunitas, where he had spent part of the magical summer of 1966. Close enough; it was perhaps half a mile down the road. The day before he was to check in, he went by Sue Stephens's office at the annex across the street from 5th and Lincoln. He spent an hour and a half there, reminiscing, and telling her that he felt "shaky, and his willpower wasn't up to par, and he could tell how much his body had aged now that he was more or less straight." Still, he intended to "take a big bite out of the apple this time." There were other calls, including an unusually affectionate one to Hunter. He also visited a Wendy's fast-food restaurant for what was doubtless an orgy of cholesterol before settling in at Serenity Knolls on August 8" (613)

Maureen Hunter, Weir had dreams/visions of Jerry that night (613-614). Merl claims he had one, too.

Annabelle: "he was a shitty father, but a great man" (614)

Garcia Band crew members David Faust and Corky Varra