Dark Star (50 page)

Hal Kant:
Great father figure. Such a terrible father. He wasn't around enough when his kids were young. I don't know how familiar you are with psychoanalytical theory but the strongest figure, the one that everybody relates to, is the father of the father. To a patient, the analyst of his analyst is the most powerful figure imaginable. In the Grateful Dead family with Jerry, you were looking at someone even more powerful than the father of the father.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
Deborah spoke at the funeral and I don't think I've ever seen a widow be that strong. She spoke for a good ten or twelve minutes and at one point, she said, “I forgive the band.” I think she was talking about the way they had treated her back then and I believe she just needed to get some things said in order to let them know how she felt about it all now. My concern of course was for her. Because there can be such an up and down in such times.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
She didn't acknowledge that Jerry had kids. She mentioned all these things about how Jerry loved her and how she loved him and this great warmth and then she didn't talk about his kids. She didn't acknowledge any of his previous wives. It was really one-sided.

Sue Swanson:
What is the Shakespeare line? “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” Everybody was saying that. Deborah Koons Garcia did not give a eulogy. She gave a me-ology. That was all she talked about. “I was the love of Jerry's life.” With his children sitting right there, it was hard. It was wrong.

Gloria Dibiase:
We sat behind Ken Kesey and Sunshine and Barbara and Sara, who were sitting there holding hands. At one point, Deborah said, “Jerry said I was the love of his life.” Barbara looked at Sara and said, “He said that to me!” And Sara said, “He said that to me!”

Barbara Meier:
Actually, I said it in this Italian gangster's voice. “He said-a dat to me!” and Sara answered me back the exact same way.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
I really loved him. I feel like what we had together was a very special romance and friendship. He'd buy me roses all the time and he was always very affectionate with me and told me how much he loved me all the time. The day he left, he told me he loved me. He was crying the day he left. He was in the chair just weeping and I wondered what was going on.

Sandy Rothman:
I introduced myself to Deborah at the funeral but she was pretty dismissive because behind me at that particular moment, Dylan was paying his respects to Jerry and she was just really fixing on him. He was really trying to get out of there and she stopped him when he walked by. He had his head down. His eyes were really red and when she came to a little momentary pause in what she was saying, he looked at her with those incredible steely ice blue eyes and said, “He was there for me when nobody was.” And he walked around her and split out of there as fast as he could.

Nicki Scully:
That morning, I opened Normandi Ellis's
Awakening Osiris
, her translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and I said, “Give me one for Jerry,” and it fell open to “Becoming the Phoenix.” Like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, these are instructions that are meant to be given to the corpse after passing. At the funeral, I walked up to the front and started reading:

I flew straight out of heaven, a mad bird full of secrets.... I destroy and create myself like the sun that rises burning from the east and dies burning in the west. To know the fire, I become the fire … I wage a battle against darkness, against my own ignorance, my resistance to change, my sentimental love for my own folly. Perfection is a difficult task. I lose and find my way over and over again.... There is no end to the work left to do. That is harsh eternity. There is no end to becoming.... I am the fire that burns you, that burns in you. To live is to die a thousand deaths, but there is only one fire, one eternity
.

Owsley Stanley:
It didn't really hit me till I put on “Stella Blue.” That really blew out the stops and I had a good cry. I gotta admit. I really loved the guy. He was a remarkable individual. He wasn't a godlike figure to me in any way but an infinitely curious, infinitely intelligent, infinitely creative brother and in lots of ways, an inspiration. But it's what happened. As the Pranksters used to say, “Nothing lasts.”

Yen-Wei Choong:
In ancient China, you know which kind of patient is the most difficult to treat? The emperor. If you treat emperor, they get angry. They don't take the herbs, what can you do? If you push enough, Jerry get angry. Nobody dare to push. We try to but difficult to make him healthy and also please him. Oh, very difficult to treat emperor.

John Perry Barlow:
What he was really trying to do, and on a good night doing, was becoming utterly invisible along with the rest of the universe. Just being the song. Just being the music. Being a completely straight pipe. Sometimes, when he was on the natch, it was the same kind of deal in his life.

Jorma Kaukonen:
As a recovering person myself, I'm really sorry I never got to talk with him about that. We never did, so I don't really know where he stood on his problem, whatever those problems were. At the same time, he always had a strange serenity about him. A self-awareness of his own life. Which is almost a contradiction with what was going on in his life, but he really did. There was something in there that worked for him. I don't know what it was.

Gary Gutierrez:
David Gans was on this talk show on KQED radio the next morning and they were fielding calls from people about it and some guy called up raving about, “How can you raise such a bad example and glorify somebody that had such a terrible life?” In a very even tone of voice, David said, “Look, it's kind of beside the point. If you took all the paintings off the walls of the galleries and museums of the world and took all the sheet music off the stands of the orchestras of the world that were written or painted by a person who had a problem with drugs, you'd have a lot of blank walls and silent concert halls.” Jerry had his problems but his music and his art were as much a part of him as the devils that beset him.

Hal Kant:
I think there was a kinship in his approach to life with Byron and Shelley, who were guys who violated every convention of their time and that was what they got off on. But he wasn't malicious. They were horrible people, really horrible, and Jerry was a sweetheart. He absolutely was a unique human and I think that when he was not in a bad state, everybody wanted to bask in his presence.

Peter Rowan:
There's not a night that goes by when I sing “Panama Red” that there isn't a spark of Jerry in that tune. Here was the guy who gave me the sense of what it was to do it on the highest level you could do it. Just a totally professional musician going for it all the time. Part of his legacy will be how the people who played with him live up to his highest musical ideals. That's something I feel very strongly about. I'm not going to play a note of music that doesn't have what Garcia would have put behind it in his best way. He would be the guy to please.

Justin Kreutzmann:
He was like somebody you'll never ever meet or anybody I'll ever meet again. There was no way to barometer what you saw going on in his life with what either he was actually thinking or anything you could gauge by somebody else's life. It was like he had his own little scale.

Barbara Meier:
He was such a paradox on so many levels and one of the paradoxes was that he had this huge mind. He had this vast Buddha mind but he also had these limiting beliefs that created a very restricted identity. He had an incredible investment in being perceived as a nice guy. But he also had a tremendous need to be a bad boy and he somehow pulled it off. He got away with it and that was the outrage. He pulled it off but it was his undoing. Because he was a nice guy. He was “good old Jer.” And he was a
very
bad boy. He could do all of it and he didn't need to choose between them because he had so much power. Keats called it “negative capability”—to be able to hold disparate ideas in your consciousness without the need to choose. He had that. He had that in his life! He had that and he lived it and it ultimately wreaked tremendous havoc and damage, not only for him but for many others who loved him.

John Perry Barlow:
To understand Jerry, you've got to take a look at the real star-making machine. Charisma itself. You know what charisma is? What the original Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas would have called charisma is unwarranted grace. Unearned, undeserved, completely gratuitous grace. Every time we'd try to get Jerry to see that, he would protest by saying it had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

Jon Mcintire:
I remember him telling me once, “When I was in Palo Alto way back then and I was teaching guitar, people would cluster around me and I never understood why. But they would do it. So this kind of onus being on me, this focus being on me, that's been with me all of my life.”

Vince Dibiase:
You'd walk into a room with him and the whole room lit up. When my daughter started baby-sitting for him, she said, “I don't know what it is about Jerry. But when I walk into the room where he is sitting, all of a sudden I feel very calm and very peaceful.” I said, “Well, honey, you're sitting there with a living Buddha. You're right there with this guy who's just emanating all this stuff.”

Sue Swanson:
I was just thankful that he was on his journey and I wished him well. All I kept thinking was, “The loudest music possible must be blasting him through the gates of heaven.” That was what I felt from him. All the way, that was what I carried. He was just blasting through the gates of heaven with the loudest possible music playing.

Justin Kreutzmann:
My dad's line to me was, “If Jerry can be free, I want to be free too.” He doesn't miss the scene. He just misses the music.

Sue Swanson:
The most profound thing for me was “Who am I now? What am I?” I'd always been on this team. I'd always known that if one of my kids got sick or if that I ever really needed anything or that if things were really fucked up, Garcia would take care of me. And he was not there anymore and I didn't feel that way about anyone else on the planet. It hit me on a lot of levels. On a lot of levels. Personal, professional, public, private. I mean, this was a big death.

John Perry Barlow:
I was in Australia a few days before he died. I was doing an interview about all this electronic stuff that I do and the interviewer suddenly said, “So you know Jerry Garcia, right?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “What's it like knowing Jerry Garcia?” and it just threw me and I said, “I don't know what it would be like
not
to. The guy and his manifestations have been so thoroughly embedded in every aspect of my life for so long that I don't know what it would be like
not
to know him.” Now I'm finding out. I haven't even been able to accept the fact that he's gone. Part of the problem is that I thought about this so many times. I said, “It's coming” over and over and over again and every time I experienced it, I developed a little callus against it. The callus is so thick that now that he has finally actually died, I can't experience it because I've developed this incredibly thick defense against it. I want to strip it away but I have not yet shed one tear over Jerry Garcia. Not one.

Robert Greenfield:
At a wake for Jerry held at Alton Baker Park in Eugene, Oregon, after the funeral, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia spoke before about a thousand people. She talked of taking her runes from a bag and finding the second rune, “Partnership,” which says, “‘I am your beloved. You are my true companion. We meet in the circle at the rainbow's center, coming together in wholeness. That is the gift of freedom.'”

David Graham:
I thought the way that his death was covered in the media was for the first time perfectly right because they couldn't say a bad thing about him. That was cool. Nobody played up the heroin thing and nobody tried to take him down and it was powerfully done and it was a good tribute. The fact that he was recognized as being the one person within the rock 'n' roll thing who went beyond the sex and drugs of rock n' roll and actually said something very deep and spiritual in terms that might have been heavy-handed but were right-on.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
If you look at the last picture in
Harrington Street
, which was the last painting he did that Deborah found on his computer, I think you get a sense of his vision of the afterlife or perhaps even where he is now. That bright sun floating at the end of what looks to be the birth canal.

Jon Mcintire:
I think we were in the kitchen of the Grateful Dead office in San Rafael and I was talking about suffering as a fuel for creativity. He got this furrowed brow while his eyes were flashing back and forth and he said, “I know that's the stereotype. I know that's what history teaches us. But I'd really like to know what can be created from joy.” One of the most important parts of Jerry was that he wanted to create joy. Why that didn't win out more often in him, I don't know. I do know that the more intelligent a person is, the more completely he can deceive himself. Jerry was one of the most intelligent people I have ever met. Consequently, his capacity to deceive himself was far far bigger than in most people.

Wavy Gravy:
I wrote “A Haiku on the Day of Jerry's Demise.” It goes like this, “The fat man rocks out/Hinges fall off heaven's door/‘Come on in,' sez Bill.”