So Many Roads (59 page)

Yet Hornsby was a natural fit for the band's music. His playing was luminous and animated, and his sparkling acoustic piano runs recalled not just Godchaux's finest work with the Dead but also Chuck Leavell's vibrant playing with the Allmans in the seventies. With Hornsby on piano and sometimes accordion (and Welnick on synthesizer alongside him, augmented by Bralove's sonic embellishments), the band felt as reborn as it could after enduring yet another internal tragedy. “Suddenly there was Hornsby, who from a talent point of view was Garcia's equal,” says Scher, “and Jerry recognized that immediately.” Hornsby's crystalline piano revitalized everything from “Franklin's Tower” to “Let It Grow.”

Unlike Mydland—or Godchaux or Pigpen, for that matter—Hornsby was extremely self-assured and could give as much as he could take. He quickly keyed into the crew's snarky, sarcastic tendencies. Whenever Hornsby's regular-folks friends from Virginia attended a show, the crew would invariably refer to them as “Bruce's geeks.” That crack amused Hornsby, but he was less than tickled when a crew member barked “Get the fuck out of here!” when one of Hornsby's friends was standing in the wrong spot. Hornsby admonished the employee and received an apology.

Beyond the music—including many songs he'd never played before—Hornsby also had to adjust to the fact that by 1991 there seemed to be two Jerry Garcias in the house. Garcia's drug use and health issues had continued, on and off, since 1989. At one of the ticket office's Christmas parties he'd walked in and began scoping around the office, clearly searching for something. “Are you looking for nitrous?” an office employee asked him. “Yeah,” Garcia replied. For his part Hornsby had few dealings with addicts, but during some of the band's shows the summer of 1991 he noticed certain signs: Garcia immobile onstage, hunched over his guitar and staring at the floor, barely playing. When he switched to accordion, Hornsby was able to walk over to Garcia and yell, “Sounds great!” to boost his energy or pump him up.

What Hornsby didn't know at the time was that at the end of their summer 1991 tour the band had conducted yet another intervention with Garcia, resulting in a stint at a methadone clinic. (The confrontation, held at Front Street, had finally allowed Lesh to air his grievances toward Garcia, even if his longtime friend and band mate clearly didn't want to hear them.) One day that fall, over drinks in a bar after a gig, Weir sat down with Hornsby and Welnick and gave them the news: Garcia was using again. To Hornsby, Weir seemed more resigned than angry. “He just told us, ‘This is what's happening, Jerry's having a problem again,' and I went, ‘Okay,'” Hornsby says. “He was matter of
fact. He was very even toned.” (Bralove noticed changes too: one time, as the band was preparing for a show, Garcia walked onstage and began intently talking to Bralove, and as Bralove says, “He seemed very lit.”) Although Hornsby also sensed Garcia was doing drugs again, he felt, as a “good friend but a new friend,” that it wasn't his place to take him to task for it. At another band meeting Garcia retaliated, saying it was no longer fun to play with them and that they'd been “running on inertia,” as he later told
Rolling Stone
.

For all those warning signs and offstage debates, Hornsby still admired Garcia's musicality, and onstage Hornsby and Garcia would exchange runs and, frequently, smiles. Hornsby remained drawn to Garcia's personal warmth, which he saw firsthand when, during a later stint with the band, he brought along his baby boys, Keith and Russell. Backstage the infants were greeted with an array of musicians who would make most classic-rock fans drool: the Dead, Hornsby's friend Don Henley, and Sting, who was opening the show. Each time the babies broke out into anguished screams—until they encountered Garcia. For once, the kids quieted down. “He was the only one who they let hold them,” Hornsby says. “Those little babies just had a vibe.”

One of Hornsby's most cherished memories would be the time he flew into Marin for a Dead rehearsal and stayed at Garcia's house. Giving Hornsby a tour of the digs, Garcia brought him into a room with the least likely of sights: a treadmill. “Let me show you how to use it, man,” Garcia said. In his black sweat pants, black sneakers, and black T-shirt, Garcia was dressed for a workout, even if he didn't look especially healthy. Climbing onto the machine, he “walked” a few casual minutes and then stopped: “There you have it—that's how to do it,” he shrugged to Hornsby. It was, Hornsby would later recall, “a vision you never thought you'd see.” Yet the bigger question—whether the healthy or the unhealthy Garcia would win out—remained unanswered.

As McNally saw, Garcia could still revel in the music, even if they weren't the ones playing it. On a flight with the band a few months before the Boston Garden run, McNally walked over to Garcia's seat with a Walkman; he'd just listened to something completely out there that Garcia had to hear. Putting on headphones, Garcia listened, and soon a big grin overtook his face. “That's a trip!” he said. And it was: a cover of “Ripple” by, of all bands, Jane's Addiction, the kings of sleazy Los Angeles punk-metal. Nor was it a standard cover: lead singer Perry Farrell sang Hunter's words while beneath and around him the band played a whirlwind version of “The Other One.” Farrell himself had chosen “Ripple.” “The melody of that song makes you feel better, and the lyrics are beautiful,” Farrell says. “It was a song I zoned in on.”

Next to Garcia on the plane was Manasha Matheson Garcia. In the summer of 1990 Garcia had nervously asked her, “Honey, would you come with me for a drive?” As she recalls, “At sunset we drove west toward the ocean over Mount Tamalpais. When we reached the Pacific he took my hand and proposed to me.” Garcia suggested Easter 1991 as a wedding date, but Matheson preferred, she says, “to marry free of legal convention. I was a hippie.” Garcia went along with the idea, and on August 17, 1990, the two were wed in what Matheson called “a private spiritual ceremony” at their home in San Anselmo, with Garcia in a black T-shirt.

On tour with Manasha, Garcia seemed to revel in family life: visiting the Art Institute of Chicago with her, taking a boat ride on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and going on carriage rides in New York. With their daughter, Keelin, born in December 1987, the family saw the Radio City Rockettes show one Christmas. When the Dead toured Europe in 1990 Matheson referred to it as their “little honeymoon,” and she says she and Garcia discussed opening a “bookstore-theater coffee shop” in San Anselmo. People in the Dead world would often scratch their heads over the relationship, but Garcia seemed, at least for now, happy.

In April 1991 the Jane's Addiction version of “Ripple” was unveiled as part of the first-ever Dead tribute album. Overseen by producer Ralph Sall,
Deadicated
featured covers by an impossibly eclectic lineup, ranging from the expected (Los Lobos, Dwight Yoakam) to the left field (Jane's Addiction, Elvis Costello). The Dead had little to do with the album but were tickled by it: when Hunter heard Jane's re-invention of “Ripple,” his jaw dropped and his mind was blown, and it became one of his favorite covers of a Dead song.

Deadicated
wasn't simply a lark that allowed closet Deadheads like Costello to finally revel in their fandom. (Despite his punky early days, Costello had been a fan as far back as 1972, when he sat in the mud at the Bickershaw Festival show on the 1972 European tour, and he, Garcia, and Weir had shared a stage or two in the previous decade.) The album also had a specific nonmusical purpose: a way to counter the bad press the band had been receiving. “The success had caused everyone to focus on the parking lots and the death at Giants Stadium and all this negativity,” says Arista's Roy Lott, who approved
Deadicated
once Sall had pitched the idea. “And I wanted people to remember that it all started with great songwriting and artistry.” As an added public relations bonus, the royalties would be sent to the Rainforest Action Network. (In 1988 the Dead had given a press conference about the foundation at the United Nations, another sign of how legit they'd become in the aftermath of
In the Dark
.) The album received kind reviews, and for once, the press talked up the band's music rather than horrid incidents taking place near their shows.

The album also served to inject some Dead-related product into the market. By the time
Deadicated
had arrived it had been almost two years since
Built to Last
had been released, and there were few signs that an all-new Dead album was on the way. An executive at Arista floated the idea of the band playing an acoustic set for MTV's then in-vogue
Unplugged
series. But the project, a missed opportunity if there ever was one, never got off the ground.

The first set in Boston hadn't gone well—and, to Hornsby's mind, neither had most of the previous nights at New York's Madison Square Garden. To him the Dead, especially Garcia, seemed lackluster; the sparkle and interaction evident in his earlier sets with them had dimmed considerably. With a year under his belt, Hornsby had learned it was often best to lay back and wait for space to open up before he played, a particularly crucial point because the band now had two keyboard players for the first time in two decades. But in Boston he was forced to change tactics; to him the band felt so lackadaisical that he pounded forcefully, as many notes as possible, to jack up the faltering energy.

Stepping offstage, Hornsby was steamed, and the time to vent had come. He knew Garcia could have an occasional off night, like every other musician, but this was one time too many. “I thought, ‘Okay, well,
fuck
it—I need to do something here, for my own sanity,'” Hornsby recalls. By the time he stepped into Garcia's backstage tent he had worked himself up into righteous anger. “Hornsby's a perfectionist,” says Scher. “He wanted to be great every time he was out there. And you can't do that by yourself.”

Many times Hornsby had witnessed a version of Garcia in his tent, including the time Owsley Stanley—who remained in touch with some of them, especially Lesh—had stopped by. For reasons Hornsby didn't understand, Garcia snapped at their old friend. Tonight, though, Garcia was good-natured and effusive, telling Hornsby how much he loved the more forceful, aggressive style the keyboardist had adopted in the first set. “Man, I love the way you're playing tonight,” he told Hornsby. “It's the best.”

Rather than softening Hornsby up, though, the remarks set him off. Hornsby retorted in a way he'd never done before to Garcia, and others rarely did. “Motherfucker, I
hate
the way I'm playing,” Hornsby snapped. “I'm playing too much.”

Garcia seemed puzzled: “What do you mean?”

Hornsby didn't let up, telling Garcia he was only playing that way—“triple forte at all times”—to inject some life into the set. “You're just phoning it in,” he said to Garcia. “You're not there. You're not really delivering.”

With that Garcia's friendly façade faded, and he muttered the phrase that would haunt Hornsby for decades afterward: “You don't understand twenty-five years of burnout, man.”

Even so, Hornsby didn't let up. He told Garcia how busy he was, with only six days off that year, and that he was “fried half the time” from shuttling between studios and road work. Despite that pace, Hornsby said he still tried to play at a high level, and Garcia didn't seem like he was even trying—and that Garcia was letting the fans down. Steve Parish, who popped in and out of the tent during the exchange and caught moments of it, was a bit surprised someone would challenge Garcia like that. Everyone knew Garcia struggled at times, but, Parish says, “It's something that was never said but was under the surface.” The conversation settled down, and the topic didn't come up again, at least not with Hornsby.