Dark Star (39 page)

Dr. Randy Baker:
I really started working with Jerry in the summer of 1991 when I was trying to help him address his drug problem. At that time, he actually did undergo treatment and withdrew from narcotics. I don't know the full story but I think he was being pressured to do so by the band and organization who were once more concerned about his problems. He actually went on his own to a methadone treatment center. He just wanted to be treated like anyone else. He didn't want any special care. Over a period of weeks, he withdrew and I also arranged for him to have some counseling at that time. For a while, he was doing some outpatient counseling to explore the psychological aspects of drug addiction.

David Grisman:
Sometimes, he'd bring it up. Like when we were shooting this video for “The Thrill Is Gone.” Justin Kreutzmann and my daughter, Gillian, produced it and Justin actually got Jerry to put a suit and tie on. We looked like gangsters. The day we were shooting it, Jerry was telling me that he was going every day down to the Tenderloin to a drug rehab clinic and standing in line with these derelicts. He was driving himself down there to get methadone. He was undergoing treatment and he was talking about it. At those times, whenever he brought it up, I would always say to him, “Look, if you ever need any help … if you ever want me to do anything for you.” But I never tried to tell him what to do. I mean, really, what could I have said?

Robert Greenfield:
During a fierce rainstorm on the night of October 25, 1991, Bill Graham was killed when the helicopter in which he was a passenger struck a utility tower. The night before the funeral, the Grateful Dead went on stage to play as scheduled in the Oakland Coliseum. A week later, the Dead performed and then backed up John Fogerty, Neil Young, and others at a huge free concert in Golden Gate Park to honor Bill.

David Graham:
The show in the park was a beautiful day. The irony was that the first show we did without Bill was the biggest show we'd ever done. With my sick sarcastic humor, I was joking and telling everybody, “My dad outdrew Jerry, man.” But it was only because on that day, Jerry drew for Bill. There was a definite vibe. Nobody wanted to pull off the killer solo. Nobody wanted to go nuts. Jerry was certainly taking it seriously.

Bob Barsotti:
There was something in the character of those two guys that was like the positive and the negative of a magnet. They were exactly alike and they repulsed each other but they were totally simpatico. It came down to the story of when Jerry first met Bill at the Trips Festival. Jerry was this guy with a broken guitar and Bill was this guy in a cardigan sweater who was trying to fix it for him and that was what their relationship was always about.

On the Jerry Garcia Band tours, we'd be in these big arenas back east. The way Parish ran those tours, nobody was backstage. It would just be eight or ten people sitting around the dressing room every night and at intermission chatting it up and I would get Jerry to talk about the old days. Jerry said, “Bill got us out of the rut that the scene was in. There was this one guy out of North Beach who booked all the topless places and all the nightclubs and if you wanted to work anywhere in town, you had to pay this guy his twenty-five percent and he'd get you these gigs. They were always these really shitty gigs in really shitty places and nobody gave a shit about you and it was all about this guy.”

All of a sudden, they got a chance to play in places where they had the right size stage and the right kind of lighting and the right kind of power and someone treating them with respect. It gave them the ability to get out of that hole and go more free-form. More than anything else, Bill knew how to take care of people. It wasn't good for Jerry when Bill died. With Bill gone, there was one less person around who could cut through the shit.

 

John Perry Barlow:
I could always tell if he was starting to mess with it. He would definitely quit looking at me in the eye and he'd get real antsy and hostile towards me. Because he felt my judgments and he was always after me about being judgmental and moralistic even though I'm not appreciably more that way than he was. In a funny way, I'd say I'm one of the least judgmental people I know. But he identified me as being a source of major judgment.

Eileen Law:
When this other side of Jerry would pop out, he would become another person. He would stick more by himself. When he was straight, I thought he handled himself much better around all the people and the celebrity. I always felt the times when he wasn't doing too well was when he couldn't handle it. I always thought the cranky side of him came out then. I didn't even know if he was using or he just felt crummy.

Jon Mcintire:
When he was using, he was a jive-ass. It was almost like talking to some stereotypically Hollywood person just throwing out this jive on whatever they thought you wanted to hear.

David Grisman:
The first time Jerry ever came over to my studio in '89, he said his doctor had told him that if he didn't quit smoking, he'd be dead in six months. Sometimes when he'd come over, he didn't look well. But he was always clear. He had an incredible mind and was sharp as a tack through it all. I always looked at him as sort of a big brother. I couldn't bring myself to get judgmental. I didn't feel it was my position. I didn't feel that I had the authority to confront him with something like that.

Justin Kreutzmann:
On the road every night, you pick up the bag before you get in the infamous van home and Jerry would have the bag full with the really healthy stuff and a towel on top and then below, he'd have a steak sandwich and the Cokes. A guy like that, he was going to do whatever he wanted anyway. Whether you really liked it or not. He'd listen to you once but if it was something he really didn't want to do, you'd probably have to stop short of putting a gun to his head to get him to actually do it. He went through phases when he could use drugs in just a maintenance way and then when he would become dependent upon them. He once told me that when it became just you and your drugs, that was an intolerable situation. Why he kept getting to that place, I don't know. He would be the only guy who could really answer that.

John Perry Barlow:
It just depended on what cycle he was in. I watched Garcia's weather cycles breaking my way for years and years. Whether he was in the light or the dark. The sun was coming out—everything was groovy. Now he was down back in there and you could see it coming a long ways off. I think it was one of those millions of pendulum swings back and forth that run through the universe.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
Say I wanted to get him to come and play on a record? I would try to call him up. I'd get through to Steve Parish, who'd say, “What do you want, Marmaduke?” And I'd say, “I want to talk to him.” “What do you want to talk about?” “I want to ask him a question.” “What question you want to ask him?” Along with Sue Stephens, Parish was the keeper of the gate.

Bob Barsotti:
If you think that Steve Parish could control Jerry, you're crazy. Jerry really was his own person and he chose to isolate himself and he chose to put those walls around him. Just about every project that Jerry was involved in happened because someone ran into Jerry at the health food store when he was out on his walk or something like that. They started talking to him and got him hooked to do some gig. Just that amount of contact kept his schedule completely full all the time. He couldn't deal with having to say no to people anymore.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
I saw him in Sacramento and he did something he had hardly ever done. He rarely displayed much emotion. But that day he actually gave me a hug. That maybe had happened twice in our relationship. I said, “I missed you.” He said to me, “Me, too. Speak to Dennis McNally. Dennis will get us together.” I kept calling Dennis [Grateful Dead publicist] and then all this stuff started happening about Jerry's marriage and this, that, and the other thing, and we never got together again.

Vince Dibiase:
Nobody talked to Jerry about everything that was going on. Nobody did. Maybe in the old days, they had. But in the last five years, nobody came up to his house and nobody confronted him with anything.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
Three times I arranged to go to a show and I did not go. I'd acquired a certain amount of dignity as I got older and I found the prospect of going to a show just to see Jerry and not being admitted by Parish or not being able to communicate with Jerry too much to accept. I didn't have his phone number anymore because the only person I ever got it from was him.

Vince Dibiase:
Even the people who got through to his house, Jerry wouldn't answer his messages. I would write them down for him and say, “Jerry, here are your messages, man.” Sometimes, he wouldn't even return phone calls from his own family. He always told me, “Don't ever worry about getting me the information or giving me all the messages. Because by the time it reaches you, it's already come to me from five different sources.” Sidestepping was an art and he was a master at it.

Laird Grant:
Heroin makes you extremely lackadaisical. You don't care because it's a great buffer zone. Which it came to be between Jerry and his kids and everybody else, including me to a certain degree. I fought back and really got into his face about it. He reacted by saying, “You're absolutely right.” He apologized but he said, “Hey, man. You know you're my lifelong buddy but the world has changed. It's gotten mean out there.” I said, “That doesn't mean you have to be that way, though.” Everybody wanted a piece of him. All I ever wanted to do was go back and give him a hug and say, “Hey, man. Kick ass!” It got to the point where it was good for me to show up because when I would, Jerry's whole attitude would change. I was somebody he could talk to. Somebody he knew was not there to take anything from him but to give.

Bob Barsotti:
He was just unable to say no. That was the story on him. He never wanted to say no to anybody on anything. So his solution was, “Oh, I'll just leave. Oh, I'll just stay home. Oh, I'll just hole up, keep these walls around me, and keep everyone away so I don't have to say no to people when they ask me to work on their projects. Because every time I talk to one of my old friends from the music scene, they always ask me to record this record or do this benefit.” So his solution was to just stay home more and more.

Barbara Meier:
In '89, my book of poetry,
The Life You Ordered Has Arrived
, came out. Hunter saw it in a bookstore and he bought a copy for Jerry. According to Dennis McNally, Jerry read the book and said, “Give me a paper and a pen and an envelope right now.” He sat down and wrote this letter to me that said, “I love your poetry. It speaks from the heart. I've always loved you and still do.” I was living in Boulder, Colorado. I was a Buddhist practitioner with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, directing conferences and doing a little teaching while getting my master's degree in fine arts from the Naropa Institute. I had a great gig, I was in a great relationship, and I was happy. I looked at his letter and thought, “Right,” and I tossed it away. I kept it of course but what could I do with it?

Once, when the Dead played in Colorado, Dennis McNally called me and said, “Jerry would like to see you.” I went to the show and then he wouldn't see me because Dennis went back and said, “She's aged quite a bit better than you have, man.” Jerry told me later that he was strung out on heroin and he didn't want me to see him. I stayed and watched him play but I was into the Talking Heads. The Dead weren't really my thing. I could see how the concerts had shifted into a scene. It had become this world where people could take drugs, open up all their shutters, connect deeply with other people, and suddenly find themselves in the back of a VW bus making love with some girl with long hair, and it was the first sense of family or community they'd ever had in their whole lives.

The following year, I went to the Bay Area and did a reading tour with another poet. I arrived at one of the readings and the bookstore manager said, “There's a note here for you from Dennis McNally. Would you please call him?” The note said, “Jerry really wants to see you.” So I said, “All right, am I actually going to see him this time? I don't want to do this again.” Dennis said, “You've got to understand he's with this really intense chick right now, Manasha, and she won't let him see anybody.”

I went backstage at Shoreline Amphitheater in May of '91. I hadn't seen Jerry in almost twenty-eight years. I went back and my heart chakra exploded. Aside from the fact that he was in a different body with white hair and white beard, nothing had changed at all. He was sitting there and he was very nervous and smoking but we entered a timeless space and we were right there where we'd left off.

He said, “I'm so glad to see you. You probably won't believe it but I've thought about you every day since we left each other. I've never forgotten you. I've never let go of you. I've always loved you. I love your poetry. I'm so happy to see that you're writing. You're so wonderful.” He went on and on and he said, “I especially like that first poem in the book”—implying that he assumed it was about him. And I was thinking, “Oh, really? That's interesting.” I had written this poem called “El Gran Coyote” for Trungpa Rinpoche. It has a coda by Charles Resnikoff in the beginning that says, “Not the five feet of water to your chin but the inch above the tip of your nose.” So the poem is: