Dark Star (29 page)

After the show, a studio drummer came from backstage and said, “Would you like to meet Jerry Garcia?” and I thought to myself, “Well, sure.” I thought, “Wow, why me?” He told me a time the following day where Jerry would be and I went with my friend. Jerry was there and he let us in and it was like an adventure. We went in and talked to Jerry and Jerry invited me to stay for the show. So I went to the show that night and Jerry invited me back to the hotel afterwards for the gathering. They were having a party and I went back to the hotel and visited for a while. Then I actually slept on the floor. I took the bedsheet from his bed and I slept on the floor of his room. I had never been in that world before and I think Jerry assumed things were going to happen that weren't going to happen and I told him they weren't going to happen. He was a little bit put off by that but we stayed in touch after that for many years.

I started connecting with the music and I would get backstage passes periodically from friends and sometimes from Jerry and I'd be backstage and we'd visit. We just were friends and I'd call him and tell him that I was concerned about his health. He told me later that he thought that was very dear and very sweet.

Bill Graham:
The night the Grateful Dead closed Winterland, New Year's, 1978, was a great night. Before the show, I wrote a letter to the Dead. Basically, I asked them to rehearse for this gig. I told them there were certain songs that they had not played in a long time. That night, I put a billboard outside Winterland. It said, “They're not the best at what they do. They're the only ones at what they do.” Which was something I had said about them in an interview. Right underneath the billboard on the night of the show, some kid was standing with a sign that said,
ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE DAYS SINCE LAST SF “DARK STAR.”
So I wasn't wrong about the crowd wanting to hear certain songs. For whatever reason, the Dead invited too many bikers backstage. To some extent, that rained on my parade. Two days later, Herb Caen wrote something about how coke was being snorted backstage. The Dead played for six hours.

Bob Barsotti:
There were Hell's Angels there and it got to the point where no one was really in control of what was going on. But the Grateful Dead and the Blues Brothers were a real fitting ending to that place.

Donna Godchaux Mckay:
By 1979, the really hard drugs had started to come in. There were so many fights. It was just a fight after every gig. As a couple, Keith and I were fighting like crazy. We half killed each other on the road. One night, I rammed my BMW into Keith's BMW. Three times. Then I drove my BMW into a telephone pole and took a taxi home. We were wasted spirit, soul, and body. It had come to a point where we were discussing how in the world were we going to quit and we thought, “We're not quitters.” There was a meeting at our house and the band came over and they said, “We think it's time for you guys to move on,” and we said, “We know it's time for us to move on.” It was a very mutual decision.

Robert Greenfield:
A year and a half after being asked to leave the band, Keith Godchaux was killed in an automobile accident, thereby becoming the second Grateful Dead keyboardist to die. The Grateful Dead had already hired a third. Brent Mydland joined the band in April 1979. On stage, he and Jerry had a very close and intuitive musical relationship.

Tom Davis:
After they did
Saturday Night Live
the second time in 1980 and played “Sugar Magnolia,” they were a lot more comfortable. Everyone went to the Blues Bar afterwards to hang out. Was it a competition to see who could do the most drugs? That was what those years were called.

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius:
I remember when Rex Jackson, who was our road manager at the time decided that limousines were too high-profile. So we went from the hotels to the gigs and the airports in Winnebagos. Actually, it was a lot of fun. But people were running after the Winnebagos and jumping on the ladders and crawling on top of them. I remember some guy jumping in front of our Winnebago and saying, “Run over my arm, Jerry. Jerry! Run over me, please.” Like it would be a great honor to be run over by Jerry's Winnebago. Jerry just went,
“Euuuuuh!”

Len Dell'amico:
Many times I'd sit at the kitchen table at the Grateful Dead office on Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael. Front Street was the macho scene and then there were “the girls,” as they called themselves, in the office. Front Street was where the serious doobies would go down. The office was girls, sugar, and caffeine. Many times I saw Jerry sit there. He would just come in to bullshit. As soon as people knew he was there, he'd get a stream of people coming with business. Always, there would be, “This arrived for you. Here's the book you wanted. Here's the tapes. Here's the …”

After an hour, he'd have this pile in front of him. Without fail, he'd say, “I gotta go.” He'd thank everybody for the stuff and then just get up and leave and leave the stuff. One time, he left an ounce of some really expensive pot in a vacuum seal bag. Hawaiian or something. I could see the orange fibers. He left without it. What was I going to do? Just leave it there? It was illegal. I ran after him with it and I said, “Don't you want this?” He said, “Ah, okay, whatever.” It was like he never kept anything. It was the black T-shirt and the pants and the keys to his car and the cigarettes and that was it.

At that time, he was renting a house at number twelve Hepburn Heights in San Rafael. Rock Scully had the upstairs and Jerry had the downstairs. I was surprised that this guy was basically living in the basement of this place.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Jerry moved from our house in Inverness to Hepburn Heights. We'd go over there to visit him but he was not really in any kind of shape to visit by this time and I'm not sure how the band kept playing. Their income level was really low. I went to live in Berkeley and I was waiting for Jerry to pick up the phone and say, “Let's get it back together here. Let's get a place. I'm going to straighten myself out.” But that phone call never came. Every time I tried to call him, the connection didn't get made. After about a year of waiting around, I gave up on it.

Nicki Scully:
This was a house that I found in '79 and moved into and then Jerry moved into it. There was definitely more interaction between us and Jerry in the beginning but there was never a lot. There was no interior stairway between our level and his so I had to go outside to bring him food or he would come up. We were kind of his surrogate family but he would not go out of his way to come up and be familial. That was not his way. The kind of wall that Jerry built was nothing that required any words. It was never articulated. He never yelled “Leave me alone” at anybody. There was just a palpable wall around him that grew larger and thicker and deeper and more consistent, depending on the deepness of the habit.

Alan Trist:
In the early eighties, I remember Jerry and I had discussions about what he was doing to himself. I said, “Is it the exposure to the public?” Immediately, he said, “Yes, that's part of it.” Couple that with Jerry's well-known dislike of being put in the place of being the leader. He had a real dilemma there. All of this goes to the business of experiencing life to its fullness as well as dealing with the uncomfortable aspects of life. Those contradictions were all present in Jerry.

Nicki Scully:
In the fall of 1980, the Dead celebrated their fifteenth anniversary with shows at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco and then at Halloween at Radio City Music Hall in New York. That run was fraught with difficulties. Rockefeller Center had to close down because there were so many kids camped out waiting for tickets to go on sale that people couldn't get into the buildings to go to work. After the first bunch of people bought tickets, there were none left. They had all been pre-scalped. This was what precipitated the Dead doing their own tickets.

There were also forged backstage passes. Rock had asked me to give this guy a pass. I think I knew this was a squirrelly thing and this guy was their connection. But Rock made it very clear that he didn't want this person backstage. He could go to the show but he had to stay away from backstage. I got to the hall and they gave me my stack of backstage passes and told me to sign them. I went and found the guy and I told him not to come near backstage. But they were re-routing everybody with backstage passes through a backstage entrance so they could monitor who was using the passes.

When two of the roadies saw this guy, they pulled him out, took him into an elevator shaft, beat him up, and tossed him out because he was Jerry's connection. Then they came and found me. They put me up against the wall and said, “Did you give this guy a pass? Did Rock tell you to?” I said, “What the hell's going on here?” I was infuriated and I refused to answer their questions. I refused to lay it on Rock. There was a lot finger pointing and very little understanding and no real communication. They were acting to protect Jerry, who never knew anything about it.

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius:
One New Year's Eve, my son, who was thirteen at the time, and one of the older kids saw a vial drop out of a guy's bag in a dressing room. Nobody noticed it but the kids. There was a “C” scratched on the top of this vial and they thought that meant “cocaine.” When the band came back off after their first encore, the kids were drooling, foaming at the mouth, couldn't speak. My son was screaming, “I'm dead! I'm dead! I'm dead!” Wavy Gravy was going, “You're not dead, man. Here, look at this mirror. There's fog on it.” He was saying, “It must be LSD. I've seen this loop before.”

Because they had immediately started feeling weird and nauseous, they had tossed the vial in a trash can. Rock Scully searched all the trash cans. It took all night. Rock dumped out every trash can. Finally, he found the vial. It was crystal LSD and they'd whacked out a couple big lines for themselves. Those kids didn't come down for days. The band did not go back on that night. It was one of the only New Year's Eves where they only did one encore.

Garcia's comment at the time was that he said he realized it was time for us not to tell the kids what not to do but to tell them what to do. They had seen us taking these things rather casually and he said, “This is a real important lesson for us right now because these kids are gettin' to that age where we don't have much control of them anymore. They're like young adults now and we need to help them understand how to make these choices.”

Justin Krentzmann:
It was cool because when I was a kid, Jerry would tell me all about Buddy Holly and about all the people who'd turned him onto rock 'n' roll and all I had to do was trade him for my Marvel Comic Books. There was this one great Superman versus Muhammad Ali and he saw it. I was holding it in the elevator on the way up and I never saw the magazine again. I didn't even make it to my room and Garcia had already swiped it up and read it right in a second.

Jerry in particular was somebody that if you just looked at his side of a conversation, you wouldn't ever know that he was talking to an eight-year-old at all. He never underestimated you and he'd start going off and I'd stop him and say, “Jerry, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.” And it was like, “Oh, you should read this book, this book, and this book.” I was fourteen by then but I couldn't even pronounce those authors' names.

If I happened to be sitting next to Phil on a plane, stewardesses would ask him what I wanted and he'd go, “Why are you asking me? Ask him.” When you were a little kid, you'd think, “Yes!” They never really kept anything like drugs from us. They always gave us the parental thing of, “You know, you shouldn't do this. It's bad for you,” but they weren't hypocritical. It was pretty hard to hide what was going on back then but they didn't make an effort to try to pretend it wasn't happening. They didn't want us doing it but it was not something that was hidden.

Stacy Kreutzmann:
Along with Sunshine and Heather, I was one of the first generation of Dead kids. I think most of us felt closer to the families of other band members than our own biological parents. It was sort of like a musical kibbutz. Like, “Hey, my dad's playing. Jerry will give me some candy.” For me, Jerry's voice was a focal point. It was the sweetest lullaby I'd ever known. Because as a child, I would fall asleep at the shows. I would literally fall asleep on the stage. Jerry was always soft towards me because I reminded him a lot of Heather. I remember him saying to me, “You're a lot like my daughter who I never see.” People would be surprised at his tenderness towards me. Whenever I'd hear Jerry singing or a loud guitar, I'd get incredibly sleepy. I found nothing more relaxing than listening to that. It just took me right back to being a little kid when if Jerry was singing, everything was right with the world.

David Graham:
For Creek Hart, Justin, Annabelle, the Scully girls, Winterland was our home. Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium was our home. Those were our homes. Behind the Kaiser, there was this whole other theater that was our kingdom and our domain. There was no child care. We would play football in the foyer. We used to do things like slide tickets through the door and give them to fans.

Sage Scully:
At Hepburn Heights was when I was closest friends with Jerry. At that time, it wasn't a very nice living situation for him. Jerry wasn't healthy. Rock wasn't healthy. I remember one time we were coming back from the New Year's show and it was me and Trixie and one of her friends and we were all sitting in the back of the car sleeping. Jerry woke up and he looked up at me out of the corner of his eye and he went, “Am I crowding you?” That was the sweetest thing ever. I was eight years old and I said, “Jerry, please. Go back to sleep.” What happened to me was that you lose what you think a normal parent should be to you to the band and the drugs and the schedule. You begin to take a backseat and I think I felt it and Annabelle must have felt it like I did in my life. It was hard to understand that this was how it was.