So Many Roads (49 page)

Finally, in 1984, over a dozen people—including the band, Mountain Girl, and Hunter—crashed Garcia's home for just such a discussion, and Garcia promised he'd go into treatment. To prove it, he and Lesh drove to a clinic in Oakland, where Garcia signed up and said he'd return later. But back home afterward he hardly seemed to take it seriously: he didn't say anything and acted as if their words of support had barely penetrated him.

The next day Garcia declared he was ready for change. On the way to a clinic he parked his BMW in Golden Gate Park. (According to a source, the car was only his in theory because it had been given to him by a fan and the paperwork hadn't been completed.) Noticing that the car's registration had expired the previous September, a cop approached Garcia, asking for identification; Garcia responded by “looking down at his hands in which he held a piece of tin foil paper that had a brown sticky-appearing substance on it,” as the police report read. Clearly
nervous and unsure what to do, Garcia tried hiding the foil on the right side of the driver's seat. When asked for his license and registration, he said he didn't have the former but did produce the latter. “I recognized his name, and he confirmed he was from the Grateful Dead band,” the officer reported later. On the front passenger seat police found an open briefcase with more tin foil with brown residue, a glass cooker, seven cigarette lighters, eleven paper bindles with brown residue, and a plastic baggie with a yellow-legal-pad bindle with white powder (which, almost comically, was labeled “1/2 Gram”). Some speculated Garcia was simply in search of one last high before he committed himself to treatment; if so, it was ironic that a lapsed registration sticker undid his plans. (Decades later some would still wonder what became of that briefcase, which also contained music and lyrics of new songs.)

Garcia was arrested and booked, but afterward, back at home, he barely mentioned the incident and acted as if the bust wasn't cause for major concern. At his hearing a few Deadheads who appeared in court offered to spend time in jail on his behalf, but it wasn't necessary: Garcia, who didn't at the time think he had any sort of problem and rejected therapy, asserted he would seek treatment.

In spite of Garcia's health issues the Dead machine hardly slowed down. After a rehearsal at Front Street in December 1985, the band gathered in the front lobby to chill. Gradually talk turned to touring plans for the following summer—and how the Dead had no choice but to make the switch from amphitheaters and indoor arenas to vast outdoor stadiums. “Yeah, man, you're right,” Garcia said with little enthusiasm, and everyone agreed, with varying degrees of reluctance. “The tone was resignation as much as anything,” says McNally, who'd been hired as the band's publicist (Rock Scully's former job) in 1984 and attended the meeting. “Jerry did not want to play stadiums, but it was necessary. He said to me repeatedly, ‘It cartoonizes the playing.'” (Fans sometimes agreed: as early as 1973 Deadheads wrote to the
band arguing against playing stadiums like Kezar, saying they were too big and the sound systems were awful.) With that topic settled—the thought of bigger paychecks didn't hurt—conversation turned to the best possible coheadliner, Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton. Over the next decade the stadium decision would have enormous consequences, good and bad, but at the moment it was simply about making room for the unrelenting increase in fans. Even without a new album to promote, ticket sales rose each year.

Starting with first-rate shows the band performed in the summer of 1985, Garcia battled back, and by the time the Dead started a short tour with Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers the following summer, Garcia seemed in better shape than he'd been in some time. He gradually kicked drugs, and his interest in art and sketches returned. But the shows with Dylan and Petty proved to be his undoing. As straight as Garcia tried to stay, mysterious brown packets would still be handed to him in elevators, sometimes by strangers, and his mood grew less than pleasant. Taken to a dentist in one city for an infection, he was given codeine, which didn't help his drug jones, and he seemed to be urinating more than usual. During shows Weir would run around the stage like a bronco, partly as a way to compensate for Garcia's increasingly sedentary stage presence. At a hellishly hot July show at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, Shelley Kreutzmann saw Garcia's condition for herself. “We were all in an elevator together, with a friend of mine who's a nurse,” she recalls, “and she said, ‘He doesn't look too good.'”

Back home on Hepburn Heights all Garcia seemed to want to do was drink beverages, preferably Orange Julius, and urinate, and soon enough, he'd collapsed. At Marin General the days and weeks that followed were unlike anything the Dead community had confronted before. “We watched all the tubes running in and out of his body,” says his brother, Tiff, “and he was passing all this shit you don't want
to know.” Garcia's heart momentarily stopped after it was determined he was allergic to a type of valium, and his kidneys shut down for over a week. Dead employees were told his blood sugar level was off the charts and that Garcia was one of the sickest people they'd ever seen admitted to the hospital. He was in a coma—brought on by adult-onset diabetes, a new condition for him—for almost a week. (Scully says that right before Garcia's bust in 1985, he'd brought in a doctor who told him Garcia was on the verge of catastrophic diabetes, but the issue, perhaps due to disarray in the band's organization at that point, wasn't addressed.) In his hospital room with Tiff, Garcia watched the movie
Elephant Parts
at such a high volume that Tiff was worried they would irritate the other patients.

In scenes that recalled Vito Corleone's hospitalization in
The Godfather
, the Dead operation went into protective action. Told to report to the hospital and protect Garcia, the crew found Deadheads in the parking lot, some building makeshift altars in front of the emergency room, phoning the hospital relentlessly, and overwhelming the staff. Additional security, including some Hells Angels, was called in to stand guard at the hospital's front entrance to ensure Deadheads didn't enter the building. “They were crafty,” says Candelario. “We'd find them in the stairwells. We weren't physical, but we had to say, ‘This is not the time.'” Employees of the ticket office, including Steve Marcus, were stationed in the waiting room as extra backup and routinely went outside to ask fans to quiet down. When Marcus saw an unconscious Garcia himself one night, the sight was both disconcerting and encouraging: the tubes were there, but his complexion was healthy pink. “He was still in a coma,” Marcus recalls, “but it was the healthiest he'd ever been.”

People from Garcia's life, past and present, flashed before him: not just Mountain Girl, who flew down from Oregon, but also old Palo Alto friend Laird Grant and Garcia's first wife, Sara, and their daughter,
Heather. One early morning, around 3 a.m., Hunter showed up, telling Marcus, “I don't know why, but something told me I should be here.” At that moment, Marcus recalls, a nurse emerged to tell them Garcia had just woken up and wanted to see a friendly face, and Hunter went in and spent time with Garcia. Still, Garcia could be an incorrigible patient: He would ask visiting friends and employees to bring him egg sandwiches or pork rinds from a nearby Chinese food store.

Popping into the hospital to visit his boss, Garcia's limo driver, Leon Day, looked down the hall and saw a slew of Angels. Day was shocked but not surprised by Garcia's health problems. A few months before, he'd gone to the house to pick up Garcia to drive him to a show, something Day had been doing since the early eighties. He knocked and knocked and rang the doorbell but received no response. Using his own set of keys, Day went inside and found Garcia lying in bed, looking comatose. “His mouth was wide open and he wasn't breathing,” Day recalls. “The minute I got near him, he jerked himself out of it. He said, ‘Glad you let yourself in.'”

The business of the Dead ground to a halt for the first time since the band had formed. Hart and Lesh called McNally into the conference room and laid him off. Fall concerts were canceled. Executives at Arista stayed away, hoping for upbeat reports from anyone in the Dead home office. Discharged in August 1986, Garcia returned to Hepburn Heights, now with his former family of Mountain Girl, Trixie, and Annabelle in tow. Trixie, a teenager very much a child of the eighties, down to dressing like Michael Jackson for a spell, had been in summer camp in Oregon when she'd been pulled aside by a counselor and told about her father. Until that point the Dead's massive popularity hadn't fully hit her. She'd regularly tease Garcia (whom she called “Jerry,” not “Dad”) about being a rock star who wore dirty T-shirts, and based on the band's name alone, most of her high school friends thought the Dead was a death-metal band to be avoided at all costs. (“Only the kids
who'd grown up backstage could master the arena thing,” she says. “I lost a couple of friends trying to bring them to Dead shows. So after a while I stopped trying.”) At Trixie's summer camp in Oregon, though, Garcia's coma was major news. One day she found the entire camp, counselors and campers alike, standing together, holding hands, and saying a prayer for her father. “I thought, ‘Wait, everybody cares? This is a big deal?'” she recalls.

Upon visiting the basement apartment in Hepburn Heights for the first time in her life Trixie saw what she calls “dirty little pieces of tin foil and straws” all around—good news of a sort because it meant her father wasn't shooting up. The refrigerator was filled with little but Tang, the fruit-flavored beverage powder, and the armrests in his favorite chair were covered with cigarette burns. Before Garcia returned, Mountain Girl and Grant went to work cleaning up the apartment. Grant hunted for leftover stash wherever he thought his friend may have hidden it. He found nothing inside album covers, but bits of heroin were taped to the bottoms of cereal boxes in the kitchen cabinets.

Garcia may have been back home, but rehabilitation was a dicier matter. With the help of Saunders, he slowly began playing the guitar again, but his progress was glacial. “Slowly he started to get his strength back,” Merl Saunders told writer Blair Jackson, “but it sometimes took an hour or two for him to get even a simple chord down.” One day Saunders brought by Bralove; the two keyboard players had collaborated before, and Bralove had worked on mixes for a new theme the Dead had cut for an updated version of
The Twilight Zone
series. Although hardly a newcomer to the pop world, Bralove was startled by what he saw—a bloated man smoking cigarettes nonstop and watching cartoons on a large-screen TV in a basement. “My reaction, was, ‘
This
is the guy?'” he recalls. “Jerry was vulnerable then. I couldn't quite understand it.” Garcia seemed wary—he didn't seem to grasp whether
Bralove was a fan or a fellow musician—but he didn't turn grumpy and dismissive, which was a positive sign.

Just after 7 p.m. that May night at Leguna Seca the fog rolled in, the temperatures began to fall, and the Dead returned to the stage to begin filming their first music video. The men who filed back onstage after playing a full show were middle-aged rock warriors, yet collectively they looked about as scrubbed, healthy, and camera-ready as imaginable. Garcia's hair wasn't as untamed as it had been during the worst days of his heroin addiction, and Mydland now sported a shag, replacing the shoulder-length mane from his earliest days in the band.

As the musicians took their places behind their instruments, Gutierrez noticed the first signs of the trauma the Dead had endured almost a year before: Garcia was wearing special padded sneakers for his swollen ankles, largely due to his diabetes. The director arranged a seat by the side of the stage so Garcia would be able to rest during breaks in the shooting.

The song that would be the basis for the video was “Touch of Grey.” After hearing it and zeroing in on its “I will survive” refrain, Gutierrez had pitched the band on a clever idea for the video: depicting the Dead as rocking skeletons who'd morph into the actual musicians onstage. “It just seemed to fit with the song,” Gutierrez says. “I don't know if the song is all about aging, but it's about the wisdom that comes with age.” Garcia—who first asked the director to listen to the whole album they'd just finished and pick what he thought would be the single—instantly took to the idea, and the rest of the band went along with it. (If Garcia was happy, everyone else was too.) Plans were made to film it at one of the two shows at Laguna Seca, and Arista allotted a $150,000 budget to drag the Dead into the MTV age. Gutierrez's company bought anatomically correct skeletons from a medical supply company, asked
the band members for their correct heights, and, with puppeteers Chris and Mark Walas (who'd done similar duties on the film
Gremlins
), got to work. The band was so game that Lesh donated one of his tie-dyed shirts for a puppet, Hart his Celtics jacket.