Dark Star (38 page)

David Grisman:
In five years, Jerry did over forty sessions in the studio in the basement of my house. He would come over at noon or one or two. When he was with Manasha, six o'clock prompt, she'd start calling. She really had him. I never saw anything like it. At six, he'd say, “Oh, I got to get out of here.” Jerry had a lot of different lives and he kept them all separate. He wasn't a guy you would go socialize with. But he'd drive himself over here. He didn't have a limo. He didn't have a scene. He didn't have an entourage. He was just here. I knew that he was overburdened with too many things. I think it was the pressure of keeping all those people supported. I guess he was trapped.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
He wanted to be home. He loved Keelin and he told me that it was the first time in his life where he felt like he had a family. He said he had a difficult time growing up and he told me that our relationship actually helped him resolve some feelings with his mom. That made me feel real good.

Vince Dibiase:
Manasha was in control but he liked her unpredictability. He told me that in Europe. We were about to go out looking for apple juice for Keelin in Paris. As we were heading out to find some, Jerry said, “That's what I love about Manasha. She's so unpredictable. I'd be bored to death otherwise.” Bruce Hornsby was sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper. As we passed him, Jerry went, “Hey Hornsby, you speak a little French, don't you? Come on, we've got to find some apple juice.” Hornsby said, “Oh yeah, man. That's cool.” We went out cruising Paris for apple juice and we couldn't find any that wasn't alcohol-based. Then we found this one quasi-futuristic health food store and they had some. We bought up all the apple juice in the place, maybe five or six quarts.

Stacy Kreutzmann:
Jerry met my husband about three days before we got married. We were in the office and he came in and I said, “Jerry, I'm getting married on Saturday. This is Mike. We're getting married.” Jerry shook his hand and said, “That's totally cool, man. Everyone should try marriage once or twice in his life.” I never forgot that because it was so cynical. Like, “It ain't going to work. But have a good time.”

 

Robert Greenfield:
On July 26, 1990, Brent Mydland, the Grateful Dead's keyboard player, was found dead in his home in Lafayette, California. Mydland, thirty-seven years old at the time, died of an overdose of cocaine and morphine, commonly known on the street as a “speedball.” Joining Pigpen and Keith Godchaux, he became the third keyboard player that the Grateful Dead had lost.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I was on vacation up in Oregon when Brent Mydland died. That was really sad. But we all knew Brent was extremely volatile. I was scared for Jerry but I also knew that Brent was a far more volatile person than Jerry. He was extremely emotional and prone to doing really crazy stuff like driving his motorcycle the wrong way down the freeway. Jerry never did stuff like that. He was physically cautious and he had somebody drive him. He didn't take those kinds of risks. He was sensible.

John Perry Barlow:
I remember after Brent Mydland died. It was such an incredibly hard time for everybody but the way in which it was dealt with inside the family of the Grateful Dead still makes me angry to think about. We just shook it off like, “Hey, shit happens. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.” That primitive kind of response. When one reindeer gets crippled, the rest of the herd doesn't stop and try to take care of it. They just keep moving because winter's coming on. It's a very simple straight-ahead form of self-preservation. The people inside the organism that was the Grateful Dead were all pretty evolved individually but the thing itself was a beast. A cranky, hard, crusty old dragon that knew how to survive.

Justin Kreutzmann:
In the funeral parlor, there was this little side room and the five guys in the band were sitting there and there were different models of caskets you could get. Jerry saw this little one filled with black stuff and he said, “Is that for black people?” I said, “I don't know.” They were all sitting around and finally they were like, “What the hell are we doing sitting here?” Then they took the coffin and the five guys in the band walked it down to what they call the interment or whatever, and Weir was pretending he was dropping the thing and I was just going, “Oh, God. These guys are never going to be serious.” Then again, they wouldn't have been doing that if it was Pigpen.

John Perry Barlow:
I was one of the pallbearers along with the five still living members of the Grateful Dead and we were off in this room together. It was like halftime at a basketball game and our team was winning. There was a lot of very lighthearted juvenile grab-ass and I was really stricken by it. I rode to the grave with Garcia in his limousine. It was just the two of us. I said, “You know, I've been watching this thing get darker on our side and lighter out front. I'm the only one at liberty to cycle back and forth here and I'm starting to think that I can't do that anymore.” And he said, “You may be right. It may be a deal where you've got to be on stage or off stage.” I said, “If it comes down to that, I guess I'll just go out front.” He said, “I would, man. If I could.” He wanted to be in the audience. He wanted to be with the Deadheads. He said, “It looks a lot safer out there. But how would I know?” When they were running in a pack, he was like everybody else in the band. As soon as he was off by himself, then he was Jerry and he was really sorry. He was really stricken.

Robert Greenfield:
The Dead themselves had come off the road only three days before Brent Mydland died. Enlisting Bruce Hornsby as their temporary piano player and Vince Welnick, late of the Tubes and Todd Rundgren's band, to play synthesizer, the band regrouped yet again. Six weeks later, the Grateful Dead were on the road again.

Justin Kreutzmann:
I had a drug intervention in 1990 and Jerry and Phil came to it. That'd blow your mind. I sat down with all these people and there was Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh at my drug intervention. Like, “Holy shit, I must have
really
fucked up now.” I found out later that before it happened, Jerry really challenged the lady running it. He was like, “Why are you lying to somebody to get him some place to try to help himself? Why not be honest with him about what's going on? Why are you lying to him to get him here?” She told him, “Okay, you can sit here but you can't say anything.” He got up to leave and it was like, “No no no no, you have to stay. You have to stay.” Because Jerry thought it was a crock of shit, they totally changed the way the intervention was run. Because my dad was away at the time, Jerry was like playing the father guy.

Stacy Kreutzmann:
As my husband often said about Jerry and the guys, everyone really bowed to him like he was a god or something. Nobody in the room would say anything to Jerry because he was Jerry. Before the intervention started, Jerry's exact words to my husband Michael were, “These things always feel like a lynching to me. If a good friend wants to come to my house and die on drugs, that's okay.” Michael said, “The bottom line is that is not okay. You're helping him die. Don't you see this, Jerry?” Everyone was like, “Oh, my God. I can't believe that this nobody, Stacy's husband, is fighting with Jerry Garcia.” But Jerry heard something because they talked for about five or ten minutes about this. Michael started to cry and said, “I have a brother who's a drug addict and an alcoholic and I don't want him to die and I don't want Justin to die.” At the end of the intervention, Jerry said what he did as if he knew Justin needed to get some help. He was very choked up.

Justin Kreutzmann:
For those people who don't know about interventions, they go around in a circle and everyone explains what they think you're not seeing in your life which is making it so fucked up through your use of chemicals and alcohol. Jerry was the last person to speak and he looked around the room and said, “Do you really need to hear anything else except that I love you? Just remember that.” And I was like, “How cool!” And he had tears coming down his eyes.

Stacy Kreutzmann:
You know why my father wasn't there? He was in rehab up in St. Helena at the time. I thought I was going to lose my mind. I was going back and forth between family days at the two rehabs. Life in rock 'n' roll, man. This is the fun side of rock 'n' roll.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
In 1990, I gave up. I just let go. By 1990, I realized that it wasn't going to work out any further and that all Jerry's energy was going elsewhere. Basically, I would say that he was bored with us. But that wasn't the right word. I just think that his creative energy was taking him way out. Far from where I was at. For me, it was time to stop doing it again because it was wearing me out. I was worn out. I said, “Listen, you've got to go find your own scene. I can't keep supporting you in this way. I just can't.” And he very graciously got up and left. He went and found his own place and the whole scenario kept evolving from there. He had two or three different girlfriends, some of whom I liked and some of whom I didn't like.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
We moved into a larger place in '89 and then in August '90, he moved into our place. He was spending most of his days with us and he brought Keelin and I on tour. From the time of my pregnancy in '87 until the beginning of 1993, I was pretty much on every tour with him and also living with him from 1990 to the end of '92. I loved Jerry's music and I realized that was his way of worshiping. I felt it was his way to God and I told him that. He liked that about me because he didn't think that I had a problem with him playing music. He said that some of the other women he'd been with had some problems with the Grateful Dead and with the music. I am now friends with both Mountain Girl and Sara and I have much respect for both of them. I had a problem with the Grateful Dead apparatus working him too hard and I felt there was a conflict between him being over-worked and my being concerned about his health. At one point, he wanted to be concerned about his health and lessen his load but he just had to continue.

Justin Kreutzmann:
Cocaine and heroin are not two drugs that you usually get a large roomful of people to sit around and do. On the road, you had your camps. You had the people doing coke and you had people on pills and downers and the drinkers and so everybody had their little clique of people. They'd get together to be the Grateful Dead but even then Jerry had another dressing room for a while. Not out of any star weirdness trip. Just because he needed a place to get high. When he would be sober, he wouldn't want to be near that room. When he wasn't strung out, he would never leave the stage because he wouldn't ever have to go get some privacy. That became sort of a giveaway. Because he'd leave the stage for breaks. Otherwise he would go up there hours before a show, sit down, and he wouldn't leave until he'd left the hall. That was how you could always tell. At least how I could always tell.

Vince Dibiase:
The thing is that he would nod out. But his blood was thicker than molasses anyway. The guy was never getting enough oxygen to his pistons and there were times when he was clean when he would nod out because of the lack of oxygen in his system. At that point in time, he was hiding it. Manasha claimed she didn't know about it and I don't think she did.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
I thought he had some lingering health problems from the coma. I said, “What's wrong with you? Why are you always falling asleep?” He said, “Ever since that coma, I don't have the stamina I used to have.” I believed him and I remember he'd fall asleep in the chair and drop cigarettes and burn the floor around the chairs. It made me nervous. Later I figured out he was doing it in the bathroom because there were some plumbing problems. Every time he'd come over, I'd have a stopped-up plumbing problem. I'd call Roto-Rooter and they would fish out a plastic bag and that was when I started really being concerned. But that wasn't until he moved in with us, which was in '90. I kept questioning him. I said, “What's going on with you? This doesn't seem right to me, Jerry.”

Vince Dibiase:
This was right after Brent died. At the end of a tour, I think it was in Denver, I was told that the band tried to do an intervention with Jerry. But he was stronger than everybody put together. Basically, he told them to leave him alone.

Gloria Dibiase:
I think he said that because he didn't like to tell people, his kids included, what to do and he didn't want anyone to tell him what to do. Soon after the big confrontation, he did the cleanup.

Vince Dibiase:
He came home and he did do an outpatient program. Leon, his driver, or I drove him there every day. The clinic was in San Francisco one block off Van Ness. We went first thing in the morning. He'd go inside and get his treatment and he'd come out. He was doing it his way but Manasha was also in the middle of it.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
Jerry told me he was going to go into the Cleveland program to help him stop smoking. He told me the band had held an intervention with him and he was going to get his health together and he was going to stop smoking. I thought, “That's odd. He needs to go to the Cleveland Clinic to stop smoking? Okay.” When I came back to California, I talked to the doctor, Randy Baker. Randy had a conversation with Jerry and asked Jerry if it was all right if he told me what his problems were and so he did. Jerry didn't go to the Cleveland Clinic. He was going to the methadone clinic in San Francisco. It worked for a while, I think.