So Many Roads (57 page)

During the shoot Gutierrez saw how much Garcia had aged in the two years since “Touch of Grey”: his hair was now completely white—striking for someone only in his late forties—and he was still wearing specially prepared shoes to help his swollen limbs. The director wanted to do a close-up of Garcia's hand playing the guitar solo, a challenge in
itself. “He was struggling to remember what he had done in that solo so it could match up in the close-up,” Gutierrez says. “He was struggling, but he was laughing too.” As it always had, the chance of redemption still hung in the air.

On a late July morning in 1990 Hornsby was in Seattle, preparing for a radio interview to promote his latest album, when his production manager, who knew the Dead, broke the news: Brent Mydland had died. After the interview Hornsby was walking down the street when someone approached him and said, “Hey, Bruce, are you gonna join the boys?” Hornsby was taken aback: Was the rumor mill already spinning, just a few hours after the news?

In the decade leading up to that day Mydland had not only grown into his role as a member of the Dead; to the new generation of Deadheads who'd discovered them in the eighties, before or after “Touch of Grey,” Mydland had also become a centerpiece of the band. He was closer in age to those fans than the other members were, and his voice was stronger and more commercial sounding than Garcia's or Weir's (a vital consideration for music fans who'd grown up hearing more polished rock and pop). To newcomers Mydland's songs, especially those that dwelled on romantic turmoil, were the most relatable. Mydland was the voice and face of the new Dead, and his onstage animation and energy made him a beloved figure. Within the Dead community he especially endeared himself to Justin Kreutzmann, then a teenager dealing with family issues. “My dad and I would have father-son dramas,” says Justin, “and Brent came to me and said, ‘Your dad loves you.' Brent was the craziest guy I've ever met in my life, but he was sweet and loving.”

Yet to the consternation of those in the Dead world, little of that love and recognition seemed to sooth Mydland's increasingly troubled soul. By 1990 he'd been on a slow-motion downward slide for several years. During his time with Cantor she would notice how he was riddled with
self-doubt, afraid that Deadheads were relentlessly comparing him to his predecessor. “Brent always felt like, ‘The fans hate me—they want Keith,'” she recalls. “I would say, ‘Bullshit—these guys are
loving
you.' But Brent had a big fear about being the replacement guy. I kept trying to reassure him: ‘Your playing is marvelous—you rock the organ!' Jerry would say, ‘Oh, we finally have a singer in the band!' But Brent was very insecure.” Barlow felt the songs he wrote with Mydland weren't well recorded—perhaps, in Barlow's mind, because other members were threatened by Mydland's output. “They weren't great songs necessarily,” Barlow says, “and they didn't get done in a way that made them as good as they were. There was a certain reluctance to let Brent step forward.”

Unfortunately Mydland's shaky self-esteem led him to into increasingly difficult behavior backstage. In 1986, at the Berkeley Community Theatre, boards were set up backstage for fans to leave hand-written comments for each band member. Mydland's comments totaled almost two hundred, of which only two were negative. (“Who asked you to sing?” read one.) Glancing over the list of comments, Lesh asked Steve Marcus of the Dead's ticket office to transcribe them all and give a copy to Mydland so he could see how popular he was with the fans. When Mydland saw the comments, he ignored all of the encouraging ones and zeroed in on the two negative remarks and began screaming and ripping up the board. For a number of years crew member Kidd Candelario attended to both Mydland and Lesh onstage, but the job was growing even more demanding now that Mydland's demons were flailing away. When Mydland would demand a drink onstage, Candelario knew after a while to fill it mostly with orange juice and a shot on top; Candelario thought Mydland would take a few sips of the watered-down drink and resume playing. But Mydland instantly knew what he was drinking and would hurl the cup back at Candelario. More than once Mydland would take his pricey synthesizer programming books and throw them into the audience.

Mydland's wavering sense of self-worth wasn't helped by reviews of
Built to Last
, like the
Washington Post
write-up that claimed “his efforts range from barely tolerable to downright intolerable” and said his songs had “a rinky-dink blandness.” That review also called “I Will Take You Home,” Mydland's ballad to his daughters, “the most embarrassing thing ever to appear on a Grateful Dead album.” And yet soon after the album's release one of his contributions, “Just a Little Light,” was chosen as a single—a milestone for Mydland—and in late 1989 the band assembled at a Marin soundstage to make a video for it. As they had with “Touch of Grey,” the Dead again endured hours—five, in this case—of lip-synching. Mydland seemed happy and comfortable as the star of the video, and Gutierrez interpreted the single and video as the band's way of affirming his vital role in the band. “Doing that song was the band's way of telling Brent he was an important member of the band,” says Gutierrez. “It was a way of bringing him in.” (To others in the organization it was simply the most radio-friendly song on the album.)

The song itself, its lyrics cowritten by Mydland and Barlow, addressed dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled, the downside of fame, and trampled-underfoot love; the chorus had a heavy-hearted hook. The director interpreted the song as a depiction of the battle between light and dark in Mydland's own soul. “He told his story in that song,” Gutierrez says. “It was about what was going on with him.” To match the lyric Mydland was surrounded by hundreds of candles. At the end of the video, for dramatic effect, the candles were blown out.

In December 1989, around the same time as the “Just a Little Light” video was shot, Hornsby returned to his home in Virginia to find a message from Garcia on his answering machine: “Hey, man, it's Garcia—give me a call. I want to talk to you about something.” Hornsby phoned back, but no one answered at Garcia's home. Months later Garcia flew
down to Los Angeles to film a video for a song on Hornsby's album
A Night on the Town
, on which Garcia had guested. During a break Hornsby had the chance to ask Parish about the mysterious call and heard the explanation: Mydland hadn't been doing well, and the band had wanted to hire Hornsby to replace him. Hornsby was stunned, but he was also told the storm had passed, at least for now. “The desire to replace Brent obviously didn't continue,” Hornsby says. “Parish said something like, ‘Yeah it's okay—Brent's doing better.' I didn't pursue it at all.” Hornsby never brought up the conversation to Garcia, who didn't mention it during the video shoot.

The call to Hornsby hadn't come completely out of the blue. That same month manager Cameron Sears received the news he'd been dreading: Mydland was in jail, having overdosed at home. Hurriedly Sears managed to pull together enough cash for bail and rushed to the jail in San Rafael, where he and publicist McNally found Mydland milling about in the lobby, angry that he'd been arrested. (The paramedic, realizing Mydland had drugs in his system, had alerted the police.) Sears and McNally drove Mydland back home, where they refrained from scolding the keyboardist for his habits; in the Dead world no one told anyone else not to indulge. But they at least wanted him to admit he had a problem, which Mydland resisted. Because he and his wife, Lisa, had separated and she had left their home with their children, Mydland would be alone for the rest of the night; fearing he could ingest more of whatever he'd already taken, Sears and McNally stayed with Mydland until he fell asleep and crashed at the house themselves.

The time had come for a long-overdue band meeting to confront Mydland's downward spiral. Band and management gathered around a nineteen-foot-long solid-oak table—complete with wood-carved chairs, one for each band member, skulls carved into the end of each arm—and read him the Dead's version of the riot act. Mydland wasn't fired or threatened with such action, but he was firmly told he had to get himself under control. Contrite and embarrassed, Mydland said
he'd rein in his excesses and pull his life together, but no one was fully convinced. The crew began monitoring backstage visitors, especially anyone who even remotely resembled a dealer.

At one of the Dead's first shows after Mydland's overdose and arrest, at the Oakland Coliseum, Kreutzmann's limo pulled up right behind Mydland's. (At this point Mydland had had so many DWIs that he could no longer drive.) The drummer jumped out, grabbed Mydland around the neck, and said, “If you die, I'm gonna kill you!” The two men had bonded many times before on the road, partaking in antics and practical jokes. But this moment felt different. Because neither the Dead nor the generally private Kreutzmann were known for touchy-feely exhibitions, the drummer's comment to Mydland, as gruff as it was, felt like an expression of genuine concern.

When the Dead inevitably resumed their road work just before the official start of spring in 1990, Mydland's wrist-slapping appeared to have paid off: his keyboard work—fanciful piano on “High Time,” B3 organ fills on “Estimated Prophet” and “Cold Rain and Snow”—and singing remained robust, even if the huskiness in his voice now had a ravaged edge. (In that regard he really did seem like a true member of the Dead now, no longer the long-haired newbie who'd joined up eleven years before.) In what many would agree was the band's last first-rate tour, the Dead sounded revitalized, ready to shake off the crowd-control and business hassles that had built up around them over the previous few years. Even Garcia's voice, heard in renditions of “High Time” and “Crazy Fingers” at various stops on the tour, rediscovered its sweet spot. At a March 1990 show at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis sat in with the band—at Lesh's invitation—and pushed the band to new improvisational highs, as he also would during later sit-in jams with them.

Still, Mydland looked as if he were barely holding himself together during most of his time onstage. To Deadhead Dan Ross, who attended
every one of those shows and felt a particular kinship with Mydland, the concerts were unsettling. “Brent looked horrible,” he says. “You knew about his separation. You're looking at this person who was falling apart.” By their last show, in Tinley Park, Illinois, on July 23, Mydland appeared puffy, his trademark stare even more startling than usual. During an encore they played a relatively recent addition to their repertoire, the Band's “The Weight.” Garcia, Lesh, Weir, and Mydland each sang a verse, and Mydland's included the line, “I gotta go, but my friends can stick around.” The show was ten years to the day after Keith Godchaux's death.

On the plane ride home the next day Bralove, sitting next to Mydland, had to stomach Mydland's alcohol odor for several hours. Bralove was fond of Mydland but was saddened by the state he was in, and like everyone in the organization, he didn't quite know how to help. “He was in rough shape,” Bralove recalls. “He had his demons, and they didn't rage all the time, but they were raging during that tour.” Bralove had noticed that during that summer run Mydland had been getting heavily into video games, and that worried him too. “It was isolating him more,” he says. “It felt bad to see him playing a little golf game or whatever he was playing.”

On the morning of July 26 an ambulance was already at the house in Lafayette, a suburb just west of Berkeley, when two police officers responded to a report of a possible fatality. Walking into the bedroom, they found a man dressed in slacks, wearing a long-sleeve blue shirt and sneakers with white shocks. He was lying on the floor in between the TV and the bedroom; the TV was still on and set to a Nintendo game. The controller for the game was lying nearby. Friends at the house admitted to police that Mydland had a heroin habit and had overdosed before and that they hadn't heard from him since he'd arrived back home from the tour on July 24. Police also spoke to a couple who lived in the house but hadn't been there in a few days.