Dark Star (24 page)

Steve Brown:
At this point in his life, Jerry was just a dedicated guitarist who really wanted to only play guitar. His guitar was pretty much sewn to his body for all those years of the seventies as I remember. He would be on the road playing his guitar while he was in the car being driven somewhere. He would take it to the hotel room with him. He had a little Mesa Boogie amp or before that other little amps that he'd play through everywhere he went. Even when he came to the record company office, he would sit in the kitchen and play guitar. He carried it in the back of his car most of the time so he'd have it with him. His dedication was to that and to coming up with songs and being able to play more.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
It was my favorite period. Old and In the Way rehearsed a lot in the living room and the kids all grew up listening to that music. It was as sweet as it could possibly be because it wasn't amplified. It didn't require the infrastructure of people and equipment and gear and preparation and you could just pick it up and do it. So it had a spontaneous quality that was pretty special. Jerry was also playing pedal steel at this time and somehow it served him to be playing in three bands at once. If I say I didn't see very much of him during those times, it was because he was really really busy and that was one of the reasons I didn't worry about him too much. Because I knew what his workload was and I also knew that the less interference, the better. Because he had so much he had to get done and there were only twenty-four hours in a day. Plus he was commuting back and forth from Stinson Beach. He'd get home around one-thirty in the morning and be hungry. I'd have to get up and feed him something and he'd often sleep until eleven or so in the morning. Then there would have to be quiet in the morning. We watched a lot of
Sesame Street
. “Daddy is sleeping. Don't touch the guitars.” Still it was warm and a good friendly scene.

Peter Rowan:
Old and In the Way broke up. Dave wanted to do some other kinds of music. Somewhere along the line, we had worked together too long under too much pressure and too many drugs. I know that David had enough and I certainly wasn't evincing great care and love about Old and In the Way. I was probably being very cavalier. When things get weird in a band, you're talking about smoke screens and levels of ignoring each other that make you want to kill yourself. It was awful.

David Grisman:
We made a studio album and I remember listening to it with Jerry at my house and we decided it wasn't good enough to release and that was the end of the band. Perhaps there were musical differences between me and Peter Rowan but we never discussed them. We were young and didn't see the value of keeping it going. Now I see that one real value would have been for Jerry to have this outlet.

Peter Rowan:
Jerry was like, “Hey, if these guys can't keep it together, I'm not going to keep it together.” I'll tell you what Jerry told me personally at the very end. He said, “David doesn't want to do it anymore but I do.” Did I say, “Cool. I know this guy named Ricky Skaggs. Let's call him up”? No. I didn't say that because Old and In the Way was a group. If one of the members of the group didn't want to do it, it was like honor among thieves. We could all agree not to get together anymore because one guy didn't want to. Which was stupid. Because it needed to keep going. It just needed to. It wasn't a throwaway thing for Jerry.

David Grisman:
Shortly after, I started playing with Richard Greene in this loose acoustic aggregation called the Great American String Band. Jerry played some gigs with us. Old and In the Way got left behind. Like it was not official enough for anybody to start or end.

Peter Rowan:
We should have had more responsibility about keeping the thing going from Jerry's point of view. As something he needed. But we never thought of that. The terrible thing about show business is that aura of stardom. We always thought, “What a star this guy is. We wouldn't exist without Jerry.” With Old and In the Way, people finally got to feel, “If we are beholden to Jerry who is actually beholden to the Dead, then where's our own sense of what we can do?”

 

Rock Scully:
When I first saw them, the Grateful Dead was pretty much Pigpen's show. Everybody followed him. That was basically what the early Grateful Dead was all about. They were comping rhythm and backing up Pig doing “Love Light” and “Running down the road, feeling bad,” and all those old blues things that they did so well.

Jon Mcintire:
There was a band meeting in the middle of one of the recording sessions and they were attacking Pig. I think Jerry was furious at him about the music. They were saying, “You drink all the time. You just hang out. You're zonking out in front of the television all the time. You don't do anything.” And on and on. With this beatific smile, Pigpen would nod and say, “Yup, that's who I am. That's who I am.” Here they were saying what to me sounded like the most devastating things about someone that anyone could say. I hadn't really ever heard anybody handle their frailties like that before.

Rock Scully:
Garcia really loved him and respected him, even if they had their falling-outs. They had their tough moments. He tried to have me fire Pigpen one time and Bob Weir too for that matter. He said, “Scully, you go fire them. I can't work with them anymore.” He wouldn't do it. He had me do it. He said, “Bobby's not playing electric guitar and if I'm going to get good at my instrument and play the way everybody wants me to play and the way I want to play, I need a solid, electric rhythm behind me.” Which was weird because what happened was that Garcia developed his style from having to comp a lot of rhythm. He became sort of a lead rhythm player, which I think made him so brilliant and popular. I went to Weir and I said, “You're out of here.” I went to Pigpen and I said, “You're out of here.”

Jon Mcintire:
I wasn't there but I do know that Bobby was fired. Although the band at one point said he wasn't, Bobby said, “I most definitely was.” He left the room where he was fired and hitched a ride because he didn't have a car and it had been raining and then the ride let him out and he stepped out and fell facedown into a ditch in the mud. Musically, Bobby hadn't yet taken the bull by the horns. Pigpen's timing and pitch were off because of his drinking but Bobby just hadn't matured yet as a player. I would also like to add that it was totally in character that Garcia would ask Rock to do it rather than doing it himself. More properly speaking, Garcia should have done that himself.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
Jerry was enormously frustrated with Bobby. Bobby would get spaced out. My experience back then was that when they would be all stoned together and really go out there, I would see Bobby standing on the stage not playing. Jerry would be taking off on his new thing and Bobby would be standing there, holding his guitar.

Owsley Stanley:
Garcia had a background in acoustic music but when it came to electric music, their thing was “Turn it up to eleven and go for it.” That produced a monotone on stage. While I was in the joint, they took singing lessons and they became competent as singers. Whereas before, it was hopeless. I would tell them, “Please don't sing. At least not all of you at once anyway. One at a time, that's okay.” I tried for years to get them to put headphones on. They wouldn't.

Rock Scully:
Garcia knew what he was doing. He was just scaring their asses. Rattling their cages. They took a couple of weeks off. Weir went and got some more electric guitar training. Pigpen had just moved to a Hammond organ so he got some help from friends and learned how to play the foot pedals and how to expand his knowledge. Between the two of them, we were just getting a lot of fill. We were getting a lot of mid-range mush. Phil Lesh had taken his instrument into a lead bass-playing thing and there was no bottom end. It was totally up to the drummers.

Owsley Stanley:
When you get up on stage, your ego gets amplified. Pigpen was the front man. He was a rooster. He loved to strut his stuff. He was a very powerful little guy but he was also very shy and he had to drink a lot just to get up on the stage. The fact was that the Grateful Dead never considered themselves Garcia and band or Pigpen and band or Lesh and band. They were always the band. And the bottom line was that they liked to play and they spent money as fast as they got it and they had to keep doing it. Nobody bought their albums much so they had to go out on the road and keep doing it.

Jon Mcintire:
Garcia came into my office one day and said, “Look, we're going to lose Pigpen. I know you know a lot about medicine. Just do some research and find out what can we do. We'll do anything. We'll send him anywhere.” So I started doing research and I found out about Sheila Sherlock's clinic in London. Then my doctor said there was a guy at the UC Medical Center in San Francisco who would be as good. We put Pig with that guy but it was already too late.

Owsley Stanley:
Pigpen had been rather sickly. He had ulcers that were a lot worse than anyone knew about. It wasn't his liver that was the problem. It was under control at the time. He'd pretty much given up drinking. He actually asked me for a few joints and I'd given him a couple a few days before he died. But he had a perforated duodenal ulcer and he bled to death. That was what killed him.

Rock Scully:
When Pig died, Jerry said, “That's it. That's it for the Grateful Dead.” He said, “The Grateful Dead just died, not just Pigpen.” That was how he really felt. This was a heartbreaking thing for Garcia. He loved Pig. As far as Jerry knew the Grateful Dead, that was it. Two weeks later, they reinvented themselves.

Jorma Kaukonen:
When Pig died, a lot of my interest in the band changed. A lot of music that I really loved was personified by Pig and that's not a criticism of them. It was just that I was really rocking with Pig. In terms of Jerry becoming the focus of the band, I don't think there was much of a choice really. In the old days, he was definitely the leader of the Palo Alto scene. Pig was an important color on the palette but the Dead have always been, sorry guys, Jerry's band.

Owsley Stanley:
Garcia always played with his head down and went up to the microphone somewhat reluctantly to sing in this soft voice. The only other one really happy belting them out was Weir. When Pigpen died, everyone wondered, “What the fuck are we going to do now?” It was traumatic.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Pigpen being so sick and then passing away was terrible. And then they took that long hiatus. They quit work for a long time after Pigpen died and went in the studio and poked around and did this and did that and didn't do much.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
Pigpen was the other person that they couldn't replace. And they never really did replace him.

 

Sue Swanson:
As soon as coke came in, things got different. That was when I took like a fifteen-year hiatus. I couldn't deal with that drug. We had this office in San Rafael. Jerry came into my little office and he sat down and he said, “So why are you leaving?” He was pissed. “Why are you leaving?” I got defensive. I said, “I'm going home to take care of my kids, man.” Before we could have a conversation, these two people came in. I didn't know who they were. They sat down at his feet facing him and he gave them his attention. I got up and left. I said, “You wonder why I'm leaving? There's your answer.” Maybe that was why he wasn't a good father. He gave it to everyone else. I didn't even want to try to understand that one.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
He'd put up with all these hippies who would come in and lay their trips on him. Every fuckin' hippie in the world wanted to talk to Jerry. They all had some cosmic thing that they had to get him to explain to them or they had to explain to him. Everybody had to talk to Garcia, man.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
We used to go to Winterland for the New Year's run, which was four or five or six or seven shows around Christmastime, and it would be freezing in there. You'd get in there at three in the afternoon for the sound check and it was like forty-five degrees and so cold and it wouldn't warm up until the audience came in. They would finish the run and we'd all go home and have the flu for ten days. Everybody would just get sick as a dog. A lot of people wouldn't even make it to the end of the run. They'd be sick by the time we were halfway through it. Going and doing all those shows was hard work.

Rock Scully:
It was funky. You were living out of the sunlight in these back rooms in these basements. Walking down cement hallways, cinder block rooms, insurance lighting, bankers and union guys and everybody working in this really cold harsh environment until the lights went down and the crowd was there and the band would go on. Then it would turn into this magical wonderful land.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I decided I couldn't live with going through all those changes all the time. All the emotional worry and obsession. I copped out. That's not quite the right phrase. I went into this state of “I'm not going to think about this. I'm going to cook breakfast and I'm going to cook dinner when he gets home and I'm going to be as nice as I possibly can be, do the laundry, make sure he's got clean T-shirts, and roll ten joints so he can go to work.” I was growing pot and I was writing my book on growing and I was doing some painting and reading a tremendous amount. It was really a time that I took for myself.