Dark Star (34 page)

Len Dell'amico:
Lo and behold, goddamn, it all did come back together. One of the great things we did was go see Los Lobos at New George's in San Rafael. Me and Jerry and Annette Flowers and Sue Stephens. This was his first time out in public and Mountain Girl made me promise to have him back after the early show. It was not long after the hospital and I said I'd have him back. After the first set, we went backstage. Carlos Santana was there. They hadn't seen each other in years. Big reunion hugs. Then he met David Hildago and the band and the same thing happened. Now we were staying for the second set. Off Jerry went. He was dancing with somebody in front of the stage. I was like, “He's drinking! He shouldn't be drinking! He had a drink!” I was like, “He's out of control! I can't stop it!”

In the middle of the second set, they called him up on stage. Now he was up on stage and they were doing “La Bamba” and it was like “He's playing!” He was playing a guitar that he'd never held before and he dropped in this incredible solo and that was it. He was back. In big letters.

Then it was two in the morning and we couldn't find him anywhere. The place was closed and Sue Stephens and I were freaking out, saying, “We lost him! Mountain Girl is going to kill us.” Finally, we walked out into the street and there he was waiting for us, talking to the fans one at a time. As I was driving him home, he turned to me and said, “You know, I haven't talked to these people in years.” It was like he didn't really remember how much they cared for him and had missed him.

Sandy Rothman:
David Nelson told me about Jerry's illness and we said, “We've gotta go see him,” which we hadn't done in a long time together. We went over there and Mountain Girl made us dinner and we brought our instruments. At the time, I think he was still in the process of getting back his guitar playing. That day, he played banjo. I was always trying to encourage Jerry about his banjo playing because for years he had been down on himself for not keeping it up any better than he did. Mainly, we sang a bunch of trios. That was probably what MG found to be the healing part. It'd been a long time since she'd heard him let loose on that kind of stuff. Traditional ballads and stuff. She and Sunshine were sort of standing there rapt because they hadn't seen Jerry feel so good and have such an obviously unfettered good time in a long time. She felt this visit was very useful for Jerry, to have a couple of old friends come by.

Very shortly after that, Jerry called and said, “Why don't you guys come to the Thanksgiving party and bring your instruments?” This was a “company party” that the Grateful Dead family had every year. They'd have a big Thanksgiving party and then Grateful Dead Tickets would host a Christmas party at which Nelson and Hunter and I played for the last three or four years.

David Nelson:
We went to the Log Cabin, which is this neat little log cabin that is an American Legion post in San Anselmo, for the Grateful Dead family's big gala Thanksgiving dinner. After dinner, we got out the banjo and guitars and me and Sandy were just having fun. There was no pressure and we were remembering old tunes and it turned out Jerry remembered more words than we did. It was really incredible. That was a charge for everybody because we were saying, “Oh, good. We're not going to have to be feeling sorry for this guy.”

Sandy Rothman:
We sang just about everything we could remember that we used to do. It was probably only about a third of it but still quite a lot. Jerry was pretty excited. In terms of us going out and playing together again, I remember he said, “We can make us some folding money.”

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Jerry and I actually rented a houseboat on Lake Shasta, goofed around, and swam in warm water for a weekend and that was really pleasant. I had to move down from Oregon. We both went up for a week and I parked him over at Kesey's to be entertained during the day while I was packing out my house to move back in with him. That was what he wanted so I was totally ready to do that. As far as I was concerned, it was a matter of life and death. We really didn't want to lose him and the kids were just thrilled to have another period of Dad, nonstop. Really, we had a great time. He was clean for the first time in how many years? He was there. He was available. He talked. He smiled. He wasn't smoking any cigarettes. He talked a lot about what had happened. He felt like he had a new chance. A new chance to make stuff work for him. He felt like he had transcended the junk and the drugs and that he had an opportunity to go back to work and be his full being and he was excited by that process.

He really wanted to write some tunes but he was so physically exhausted. It took him an awful long time to get that back together. With all that was happening, I didn't have time to consider what it all meant as I was doing it. I was just doing it as fast and hard as I could to get him back on his feet. I remember that period as being one of the very happiest periods that we ever had. There was little conflict. There was a really clear chain of events going on. We were clearly working toward a goal together. It was fun.

 

Dark star crashes Pouring its light into ashes

Reason tatters the forces tear loose from the axis.

—
Robert Hunter, “Dark Star”

He was the focal point. The central catalyst. If you look at it in electrical terms, when you've got a huge field that is reversing polarity, the induction is intense. You get this induction as the field collapses and rebuilds that energizes everything around it. That's the dark star. The neutron star that sucks everything in and blows it out. And sucks it in and blows it out.

—
John Perry Barlow

 

Len Dell'amico:
Nineteen eighty-seven was the big year. Basically, from the fall of '86 all the way through '87 was the year when the Grateful Dead went to the next level. There was so much going on. I worked all day every day that entire year for the band and so did everybody else and it was more fun than anyone should have been allowed to have. It could have been because of Garcia's energy or because of the band's commitment to what they were doing or because they were going to make the album that became
In the Dark
. The album came out in the summer. But the train was rolling way before the album came out.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
We tried being a family again and it worked out for quite some time. It was really really nice. We bought a great house in San Rafael. But nothing lasts and the Grateful Dead had to go back on the road. Seeing Jerry trying to go play, that was so cruel. It was really tough. The Dead did their first show on December 15 and it was way too soon. It was much much too soon but Jerry's ego was not going to let him sit in that chair any longer and he forced himself to go and do those shows, which he did partly sitting down and it was much too soon.

Merl Saunders:
I left town when he played because I wasn't invited. I wasn't even told when he played. I was furious. This was the Grateful Dead and they were always protecting him and they knew I had this connection to the man. Whatever they put up, cement or whatever, I could just put my hand right through it to Jerry. It was something they just didn't understand.

Justin Kreutzmann:
In December '86, right after Jerry came out of the coma, I remember him sitting down backstage in Oakland and saying, “God. I never realized what a great band this is. I haven't been listening for years. Mickey and Bill just played so well and Phil and Bob were just so
on
tonight.” He was like a Deadhead. I wished I'd had a video of it to show him because the next week, it was, “Fuck, man, they played outta time. Jesus Christ!” Just for that one moment, it seemed like he really got off on the music. It was cool to see him like that because they were so critical of themselves. Even if it was in some really boring town in the middle of some tour no one was all that happy about, stuff would happen that would remind Jerry why they were doing it, and those were the moments that they lived for.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Back on the road, Jerry decided that maybe family life was a little bit too limited for him. When they went back out on the road in March was when Manasha showed up. That was a real surprise to me.

Laird Grant:
Jerry had stage fright from day one. He'd be scared shitless, man. He'd be backstage and I'd be talking to him before he'd go on and he'd be a nervous fucking wreck. Then the minute he went up there, it was gone. He'd zero in on somebody in the audience while he was playing. He used to say, “There are people out there with good vibes and people out there whose vibes are bad. If I can lock into one of the good ones with that good energy when I get up on stage, I can work that energy and work that whole audience through that person and we have a good evening. If I lock in on a bad one, it's fucked.”

Sandy Rothman:
Jerry always looked out at the audience. He was quite tuned in to who was out there when he played. That was how he met Manasha. She was a front rower for a long time, I'm told.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
Jerry was on stage playing and we knew each other already. This was at a Dead show at Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I had longer hair then and I cut my hair off in the front row. He looked down and I was cutting my hair. I guess he was laughing. Later, he told me he thought it was funny. I'd had a class back at college in living art. Fluxus, Yoko Ono, John Cage. I did it as that kind of avant garde weirdness.

Justin Kreutzmann:
Jerry or Annabelle told me stories of how Jerry would fall in love with people on the road. If he saw this particular girl in the front row at every show, he would do a great show and he'd play the songs for her. I was laughing because I thought of all those Deadheads out there who have said, “Wow, he's playing for me tonight.” But this one woman, she actually was playing Jerry. Had she known, it probably would have been awe-inspiring.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
In 1986 when Jerry had his near-death experience in the hospital in Marin County, he told me that he promised himself that if he made it, he was going to see me. If he lived, he wanted to get together with me. This was what he told me later. In March '87, he was back on the East Coast at Hartford. I called him and I said, “Jerry, I'd love to see you.” All these years we had almost been getting together but it didn't happen. He was reclusive. We'd talk a lot on the phone. We'd visit backstage but he was always doing something else. He was otherwise occupied with women. In Hartford, he invited me to his room. He said, “Could you please come by? I'd like to see you now.” I said that I had heard that Mountain Girl had moved back and he assured me that it was just a friendship and that they weren't involved. I went and then we got together and hung out and talked a lot and I told him that I really cared a lot about him and that was when he told me that while he was in the hospital he had made a commitment to himself that he was going to see me and wanted to become involved with me. I thought about it and I went on that tour with him. During that tour, I talked with him a lot in detail about his family and the feelings he had about them and I told him I wished that we could be together and have a family. He thought that was a good idea and he told me he thought it was very dear and very sweet. He wanted a child. Because up to then, he had been an absentee father and I think he felt guilty about that.

The last show on that tour was in Chicago and that was where he told me he loved me. I went back to my parents' house and he gave me the phone number in Los Angeles where he would be. He was working on a video project and he asked me to get in touch with him after the tour. So I called him and he said, “Why don't you come out here where I am?” He sent a ticket out to me through the computer at the airline under my name. I met him in Los Angeles and then he asked me to come back up to Marin County. I was at a crossroads. I wasn't sure if I was going to stay back east or if I was coming out here.

Len Dell'amico:
They were going to make
In the Dark
. Simultaneously, we were editing the video retrospective
So Far
, which Garcia and I co-directed.
So Far
was at least as much Garcia's vision as mine but more to the point, it was a vision. It was its own vision. It was not like anybody made it. This was the second or third thing we'd done together and it was a known thing that nobody was in charge. The key to understanding Grateful Dead was that the situation was in charge. This was credited to Steve Parish but it was a truism. If you could understand that and internalize that concept, you could get along with them. If you could be in that flow and wait or have patience or whatever it took until it became clear, then what was supposed to happen would happen. Once you saw it in action and it became a lifestyle, you didn't question it and you didn't need to have words to explain it. It just was. When I saw this translated to stadium tours and ninety thousand fans, eighty-ton cranes and semi-truck trailers, and all of the logistics, I realized it could be done this way.