So Many Roads (54 page)

By now the backstage area was also filled with a few new family members. In his limo one day in the middle of 1987 Garcia broke some news to driver Leon Day. “He said, ‘I guess I'm fathering a child,'” Day recalls. “I said, ‘You
guess
you are? You don't know? What are you doing about it?' He said, ‘Well, it would be nice to know the kid's okay.'”

That night Day met the mother, Manasha Matheson, a Deadhead who, by coincidence, had grown up in Englishtown, New Jersey, the site of the Dead's mammoth 1977 show. As a child Matheson had played in the same field where the show was held and even attended the concert herself as a teenager. (Even before the Raceway Park show her first Dead experience was at the 1973 Watkins Glen extravaganza, where she says she was struck by the “sound and clarity” of Garcia's guitar.) Matheson had met Garcia in a roundabout way. While she was studying abroad at Oxford, by way of her own Chicago school, Shimer College, a friend attended a Dead show in Illinois in 1977 and brought Garcia a pumpkin with a playful note inside that read, “Manasha says hi.”

The following year Matheson was back in the States at Shimer and preparing to see the Dead at the Uptown Theatre in Chicago. Before the show she'd been listening to
Terrapin Station
while working on figure-drawing sketches when a friend visited, holding a topographic map of Illinois. “I noticed an area called Terrapin Ridge,” she says. “As serendipity would have it, Jerry's voice came through the stereo speaker at that moment singing, ‘The compass always points to Terrapin.'” Matheson tucked the map and some red roses into a carved-out pumpkin she'd bought from a farmer, took it to the Uptown, and,
walking up to the stage just as the show was beginning, presented it to Garcia. “It made him smile,” she says. “He thanked me and gently put the pumpkin on his amp.” By way of a pal of Hart's, she and a friend met Garcia the next day at his hotel. After talking about Catholicism, among other topics, Matheson said to him, “I think you are a saint.” Garcia chuckled and replied, “How are you defining ‘saint'?” Despite their nearly twenty-year age differences, the two had certain things in common: Matheson's father was a clarinetist, like Garcia's dad, and thanks to her parents, Matheson was interested in visual arts in much the way Garcia was.

By the mid-eighties Matheson was living in California and working at a health food store in Fairfax in Marin County. When she heard about Garcia's coma, she hitchhiked to the hospital; there she met Hunter, who, she says, told her Garcia was “drifting in and out” and that she shouldn't see him in that condition. When Garcia woke up from his coma she heard he'd evoked her name. During his recovery Garcia called her at her parents' house in New Jersey and asked her to come back to California, sending her a plane ticket so she could visit him in Los Angeles (where he was working on the
So Far
long-form video). Although he and Mountain Girl were living together at his apartment on Hepburn Heights in San Rafael, Matheson and Garcia went to the Dead's Easter weekend shows in Irvine before returning to Marin. By the Dead's summer tour the two were a couple.

Garcia insisted to Matheson that his relationship with Mountain Girl was platonic, but when Manasha became pregnant Sue Swanson saw the hurt look on Mountain Girl's face. (To writer Robert Greenfield, Mountain Girl would add, of the baby, “He really enjoyed that little girl. . . . For him, the magic was in this relationship with that little girl, and there was nothing I could do about those things so I just let go. That was extremely hard to do but it did get done.”) Friends had nothing but praise for the way Mountain Girl had helped Garcia through his recovery after his coma. “MG kept people away from him,” says Linda Kahn.
“She was able to protect him. I'm not sure how much he appreciated that after a while, but for the time, he did.” But as Parish would later note, Garcia had a habit of ending one relationship by diving into another; unpleasant confrontations were to be avoided as much as possible.

Other additions backstage were more musically oriented. After Bruce Springsteen temporarily dissolved the E Street Band, Clarence Clemons relocated to the Bay Area in search of new opportunities. Given how much he loved music, sitting in with bands, dropping into clubs, and partying, it was inevitable that he and some of the Dead would intersect, and they did, running into each other at clubs like Sweetwater in Mill Valley. It wasn't long before Clemons was backstage at Dead shows. At the Oakland Coliseum a bag of mushrooms was passed around backstage. Seeing the container on a table, Clemons exclaimed, “I wanna get high with the Grateful Dead!” Handing him the bowl, Garcia cracked, “Well, here you go!” Big and gregarious, Clemons dropped to his knees between Weir and Garcia, reached into the batch of mushrooms with his large hands, grabbed a handful, and tossed them down. Clemons seemed fine—until he sat in with the band and, halfway into the set a large, confused smile overtook his face.

Clemons responded both to the band's musicianship and especially their blues and R&B covers, and according to Weir, the saxman would have loved to have joined the Dead full time. Weir and Garcia were actually amenable to the idea, but not everyone else in the Dead was. “A couple of our guys hate the saxophone,” Weir has said. “So not everyone else would have gone for it. In the Dead back then anyone in the band had the power of veto.” Sensing the objections, Weir didn't push too hard for Clemons to join. Still, Clemons sat in with the Dead and the Jerry Garcia Band a handful of times in 1989, and even stranger, he floated an unusual idea to Weir and Garcia. Clemons suggested the three of them move in together for what Weir says would have been “a bachelor pad.” As odd as the idea sounded, Weir has said he and Garcia gave it serious consideration, at least for a while; after all, all three loved
a good party. “It would've been a lot of fun,” Weir has said. “But I don't think anyone would have survived. That would've been a toxic environment.” In the end, they passed on the idea—yet another example of the surprises that could await them backstage.

Shortly before they hit the road again they needed to record new material for their all-important—at least to Arista—follow-up to
In the Dark
.

“Can we do it a few more times?” Weir asked about a new song, “Shit Happens.”

It had been another long night at Club Front, and as Justin Kreutzmann watched, one of the Dead cast a withering glance at his band mate. “I will play that song twice,” he said, “and if I play it a third time, it will curdle my blood.”

The growing, sometimes unruly crowds at their shows were one thing, but even in the studio the Dead universe seemed to be off its axis compared to the preceding two years. The first hurdle was obvious: they hadn't road-tested the fresh songs as much as they had the material on
In the Dark
—a lovely Hunter-Garcia song, “Standing on the Moon,” had made its stage debut only in February. But they had to maintain the momentum of a hit album, and Arista convinced the band and management that an October 1989 release date would be ideal, if only in terms of marketing. (Halloween! Dead!)

At Club Front and George Lucas's nearby Skywalker Studios they again tried to play the songs live as a band. But something wasn't clicking, and they opted to painstakingly overdub each of their parts onto basic rhythm tracks. Anyone stopping by Club Front would have encountered the unusual sight of Garcia, headphones clamped down onto his silvery mane, sitting by himself and adding leads, or Weir doing the same, with no one else around. John Cutler was back, assisted this time by Bob Bralove, who'd graduated from helping them with electronics
on stage (he was practically an unofficial seventh member of the band) to taking an associate producer role on the album. Onstage Bralove continued to stand near the drummers and help with MIDI and other sonic enhancements to make the Dead sound more high-tech than they had before.

Bralove had grown accustomed to the Dead's unpredictability and sonic adventurousness. On his first tour with the band, during their summer 1987 shows with Dylan, Bralove watched, stunned, as Hart began smashing pedals with a metal pipe during one Drums segment. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God!'” he recalls. “Everything was in the red and distorted. I went, ‘Oh, there's a different reality in performance for these guys.' I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This was education by fire.”

In theory the new recording plan could have worked. Dating back to
Anthem of the Sun
, the Dead had used the studio as a large instrument, and technology had vastly improved since 1968; with Bralove's help, they could use digital recording, MIDI, drum loops, and other effects far more effortlessly. “It was, ‘Maybe we should try this—who knows? We've never done it that way!'” Bralove recalls. “That was all part of it. I saw it as a desire to experiment. For a band that comes off as so casual about so much, the desire to improve sound quality and production techniques was huge.”

For their part the Dead were trying their best to stay on a relatively even keel and be good boys. Yet tempers, frustrations, and old habits intruded as the band attempted the arduous task of piecing together an album practically note by note. Garcia was looking haggard again, and that newly darkened mood cast a pall over the sessions. “The camaraderie was still there,” recalls Shelley Kreutzmann, “but it was all contingent on how well Jerry was doing and if he was chasing the dragon. The healthier he was, the better everyone got along.” Worn down after repeatedly playing to a click track that would keep him on the beat,
Bill Kreutzmann snapped, “I'm done playing this—I'm going home.” (And, according to his son Justin, he did.)

For his central contribution, Weir brought with him “Victim or the Crime,” lyrics courtesy of Gerrit Graham, an actor who had come into the Dead world by way of a mutual friend, Andy Leonard. The song was melodically complex to start with; for all the teasing he endured, Weir was now the one pushing the band into the most unexplored song-structure territory. But according to Graham, at least half the band were unhappy with the use of the word “junkie” in the song; Graham assumed it had to do with band members afraid of using it in Garcia's presence. “We were all supposed to understand automatically what the problem was and why Jerry must be protected from this unthinkable offense,” Graham later wrote. “Words like ‘inappropriate' and ‘unsuitable' were getting heavy workouts.”

The ensuing storm made Weir want to stick with the song even more, which only made the sessions tenser. “They wanted to use the studio as an instrument, but it wasn't as much fun,” recalls Justin Kreutzmann, again hired as an assistant. “It was very un-Dead-like, and people lost patience. I remember days and days of ‘Victim or the Crime'—days and days of that chord progression. You start to shake after a while.” Hart was spending enormous amounts of time at his home studio piecing together percussion parts. Lesh would later dub the making of what came to be called
Built to Last
“a nightmarish briar patch of egotistical contention.” That was especially the case with “Shit Happens,” a mediocre Weir-Hunter collaboration; the band took two stabs at cutting it and then canned it altogether. It was never completed nor included on any Dead album.

It fell to Mydland—and his recurring lyricist partner, John Perry Barlow—to write the bulk of the new material, especially with a deadline looming closer than the band was accustomed to. “Nobody was writing songs,” Barlow says, “and we had a commitment.” An
instinctively creative musician, Mydland could pump out a melody in as little as a half-hour, and before long he and Barlow had finished a handful of songs. How his songs fit in with the Dead would be open to debate: comparisons to pop-soul singers like Michael McDonald were apt. Yet Mydland's creativity on keyboards clearly enhanced their music; during the sessions for the new album his parts on “Picasso Moon” and “Foolish Heart” made the songs three-dimensional.

At the same time, Mydland was also showing signs of distress. Just before the album was mastered he turned up at the studio in no shape to work but desperate to remix “I Will Take You Home,” the touching ballad he'd written for his daughters. (By now Mydland and girlfriend Lisa had wed.) Even though Bralove had to leave for Los Angeles with the master tapes the next morning, somehow they got it done despite Mydland's condition. His troubles were hardly a secret to the Dead, but few knew how bad they would get in the months to come.