Night Beat (60 page)

Garcia pauses to light a cigarette, then studies its burning end thoughtfully. “I can’t speak for other people,” he says after a few moments, “and I certainly don’t have advice to give about drugs one way or another. I think it’s purely a personal matter. I haven’t changed in that regard. . . . It was one of those things where the pain it cost my friends, the worry that I put people through, was out of proportion to whatever it was I thought I needed from drugs. For me, it became a dead end.”

Following Garcia’s drug treatment, the band resumed a full-time touring schedule that included several 1986 summer dates with Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “I felt better after cleaning up, oddly enough, until that tour,” Garcia says. “And then, I didn’t realize it, but I was dehydrated and tired. That was all I felt, really. I didn’t feel any pain. I didn’t feel sick. I just felt tired. Then when we got back from that tour, I was just
really
tired. One day, I couldn’t move anymore, so I sat down. A week later, I woke up in a hospital, and I didn’t know what had happened. It was really weird.”

Actually, it was worse than that: Though he had never been previously diagnosed as having diabetes, when Garcia sat down at his San Rafael home on that July evening in 1986, he slipped into a diabetic coma that lasted five days and nearly claimed his life. “I must say, my experience never suggested to me that I was anywhere near death,” says Garcia. “For me, it had just been this weird experience of being shut off. Later on, I found out how scary it was for everybody, and then I started to realize how serious it had all been. The doctors said I was so dehydrated, my blood was like mud.

“It was another one of those things to grab my attention. It was like my physical being saying, ’Hey, you’re going to have to put in some time here if you want to keep on living.’ ” As he talks, Garcia still seems startled by this realization. “Actually,” he says, “it was a thought that had never entered my mind. I’d been lucky enough to have an exceptionally rugged constitution, but just the thing of getting older, and basically having a life of benign neglect, had caught up with me. And possibly the experience of quitting drugs may have put my body through a lot of quick changes.”

At first, though, there were no guarantees that Garcia would be able to live as effectively as before. There were fears that he might suffer memory lapses and that his muscular coordination might never again be sharp enough for him to play guitar. “When I was in the hospital,” he says, “all I could think was ’God, just give me a chance to do stuff—give me a chance to go back to being productive and playing music and doing the stuff I love to do.’ And one of the first things I did—once I started to be able to make coherent sentences—was to get a guitar in there to see if I could play. But when I started playing, I thought, ’Oh, man, this is going to take a long time and a lot of patience.’ ”

After his release from the hospital, Garcia began spending afternoons with an old friend, Bay Area jazz and rhythm & blues keyboardist Merl Saunders, trying to rebuild his musical deftness. “I said, ’God, I can’t do this,’ ” says Garcia. “Merl was very encouraging. He would run me through these tunes that had sophisticated harmonic changes, so I had to think. It was like learning music again, in a way. Slowly, I started to gain some confidence, and pretty soon, it all started coming back. It was about a three-month process, I would say, before I felt like ’Okay, now I’m ready to go out and play.’ The first few gigs were sort of shaky, but . . . ” Garcia’s voice turns thick, and he looks away for a moment. “Ah, shit,” he says, “it was incredible. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was great. It was just great. I was so happy to play.”

Garcia smiles and shakes his head. “I am not a believer in the invisible,” he says, “but I got such an incredible outpouring. The mail I got in the hospital was so soulful. All the Deadheads—it was kind of like brotherly, sisterly, motherly, fatherly advice from people. Every conceivable kind of healing vibe was just pouring into that place. I mean, the doctors did what they could to keep me alive, but as far as knowing what was wrong with me and knowing how to fix it—it’s not something medicine knows how to do. And after I’d left, the doctors were saying my recovery was incredible. They couldn’t believe it.

“I really feel that the fans put life into me . . . and that feeling reinforced a lot of things. It was like ’Okay, I’ve been away for a while, folks, but I’m back.’ It’s that kind of thing. It’s just great to be involved in something that doesn’t hurt anybody. If it provides some uplift and some comfort in people’s lives, it’s just that much nicer. So I’m ready for anything now.”

IN THE YEARS following that 1987 conversation with Garcia, the Grateful Dead went on to enjoy the greatest commercial successes of their career. More important, though, was the symbiosis that developed between the band and its audience—a reciprocity likely unequaled in pop history. At the heart of this connection was the Dead themselves and their self-built business organization—the latter which did a largely independent, in-house job of handling the booking and staging of the band’s near-incessant tours, and which also bypassed conventional ticket-sales systems as much as possible, by selling roughly fifty percent of the band’s tickets through a company-run mail-order department. This model of an autonomous cooperative helped spawn what was perhaps the largest genuine alternative communion in all of rock: a sprawling coalition of fans, entrepreneurs, and homegrown media that surrounded the band, and that promoted the group as the center for a worldwide community of idealists—and that community thrived largely without the involvement or support of the established music industry or music press.

But any meaningful example of cooperative community isn’t without its problems, and by the early 1990s, the Deadhead scene was increasingly beset by serious dilemmas. As far back as the mid-1980s, some of the group’s more reckless and unfaithworthy fans—particularly the ones who gathered in parking lots outside the band’s shows, begging for free tickets, sometimes selling various drugs, and often disrupting the peace and security of nearby neighborhoods—had grown so prevalent that several concert halls, local police departments, and city councils were forced to pronounce the Dead and their audience as unwelcome visitors. The Dead often tried to dissuade this sort of behavior among its followers, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1995—following some serious bottle-throwing and gate-crashings that resulted in riot incidents—that the situation reached a crisis level and provoked a severe response from the band. The Dead issued an edict, in the form of fliers, demanding that fans without tickets stay away from the show sites, and advising that any further violent mass actions might result in the band canceling future tours. “A few more scenes like Sunday night,” the band wrote, “and we’ll quite simply be unable to play. . . . And when you hear somebody say ’Fuck you, we’ll do what we want,’ remember something. That applies to us, too.” In response, Garcia received a death threat that was taken seriously by not only the band and its entourage, but by law enforcement officials as well. After events such as these, according to some observers in the Dead’s camp, Garcia and the band had seriously started to question whether many of the people they were playing to truly made up the sort of community they wanted to sustain.

But there was something even more serious at hand. Garcia’s health continued to be a problem in the years after his 1986 coma, and according to some accounts, so did his appetite for drugs. He collapsed from exhaustion in 1992, resulting in the Dead canceling many of the performances on their tour. After his 1993 recovery, Garcia dedicated himself to a regimen of diet and exercise. At first, the pledge seemed to work: He shed over sixty pounds from his former three hundred-pound weight, and he often appeared renewed and better focused onstage. There were other positive changes at work: He had become a father again in recent years and was attempting to spend more time as a parent, and in 1994, he entered into his third marriage, with filmmaker Deborah Koons. Plus, to the pleasure of numerous Deadheads, he had recently written several of his best new songs in years with his longtime friend Robert Hunter, in preparation for a new Grateful Dead album.

These were all brave efforts for a man past fifty with considerable health problems and a troubled drug history. In the end, though, they weren’t enough to carry him farther. In mid-July 1995, he checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, for one more go at overcoming his heroin use. According to one report, he wanted to be clean when he gave away his oldest daughter, Heather, at her upcoming wedding. He checked out several days later, so he could spend his fifty-third birthday on August 1, with family and friends. A week later he went into a different clinic, Serenity Knolls in Marin County. He was already clean, most sources report; he just wanted to be in sound shape. This time, Jerry Garcia did not walk out and return to the loving fraternity of his band, his fans, and his family. At 4 A.M., Wednesday, August 9, 1995, he was found unconscious by a clinic counselor. In his sleep, it seems, he had suffered a fatal heart attack. According to his wife, he died with a smile on his face.

JERRY GARCIA and the Grateful Dead were so active for so long and were so heartening for the audience that loved them, that it seems somewhat astonishing to realize that the band’s adventure is now over. Of course, anybody paying attention—anybody aware of the ups and downs in Garcia’s well-being—might have seen it coming. Still, endings are always tough things to be braced for.

“He was like the boy who cried wolf,” says John Barlow. “He’d come so close so many times that I think people gradually stopped taking the possibility as seriously as they otherwise would have. Or maybe we felt so certain that this would happen someday that we had managed—as a group—to go into a kind of collective denial about it. I mean, I looked at this event so many times, and shrank back from it in fear so many times, that I erected a new callus against it each time I did so. Now that I’m here at the thing itself, I hardly know what to think of it. Every deposition of every imagined version of it is now standing in the way of being able to understand and appreciate the real thing.

“But this is a very large death,” says Barlow. “There are a lot of levels on which to be affected here, all the way from the fact that I’m going to miss terribly the opportunity to spend time in conversation with one of the smartest and most playful minds I’ve ever run up against, to the fact that there will never truly be another Grateful Dead concert. I never thought of myself as a Deadhead exactly, but that’s been a pretty fundamental part of my life—of all our lives—for the past thirty years.”

It is, indeed, a considerable passing. To see the Grateful Dead onstage was to see a band that clearly understood the meaning of playing together from the perspective of the long haul. Interestingly, that’s something we’ve seen fairly little of in rock & roll, since rock is an art form, the most valuable and essential pleasures of which—including inspiration, meaning, and concord—are founded in the knowledge that such moments cannot hold forever. The Grateful Dead, like any great rock & roll band, lived up to that ideal, but they also shattered it, or at least bent it to their own purposes. At their best, they were a band capable of surprising both themselves and their audience, while at the same time playing as if they had spent their whole lives learning to make music as a way of talking to one another, and as if music were the language of their sodality, and therefore their history. No doubt it was. What the Grateful Dead understood, probably better than any other band in pop music history, was that nobody in the group could succeed as well, or mean as much, outside the context of the entire group, and that the group itself could not succeed without its individuals. It was a band that needed all its members playing and thinking together to keep things inspiring. Just as important, it was a band that realized that it also needed its audience to keep things significant—indeed, it would probably be fair to say that, for the last twenty years, the Dead’s audience informed the group’s worth as much as their music did.