So Many Roads (60 page)

Outside the dressing room Manasha Garcia was prepping a soothing honey-ginger drink for her partner. After Hornsby left, Garcia told her about the conversation. According to her, Garcia had a flu-related respiratory issue that night. “He wasn't feeling well at all,” she says. “He was also a bit exhausted from playing the nine-night run of concerts at [Madison Square] Garden.” Yet, she says, “I can understand how Bruce may have missed that Jerry was not feeling well that evening. Jerry rarely complained publicly about his health and always preferred to continue on with the show.”

Hornsby knew Garcia didn't like to be confronted about his lifestyle and its impact on his playing. In the short term, at least, the exchange may have helped. During the second set at the Boston Garden “Fire on the Mountain” in particular felt spunkier, and on subsequent nights
at the venue the Dead and Hornsby played ferocious versions of “Hell in a Bucket” and “New Minglewood Blues.” Later some Deadheads would refer to the six nights in Boston (which alone grossed just over $2 million) as the band's last first-rate string of shows anywhere. A day that had promised so little wound up delivering more than intended.

Yet the night would signify the beginning of the end for a potentially promising new era for the Dead. “Jerry didn't think, ‘This is gonna change my life that Bruce Hornsby is giving me this lecture,'” says Parish. “But Jerry felt bad about it, and he knew Bruce felt that way. After a year of playing with them, Bruce realized there were some days when people were having problems. After that time he tried to distance himself from the Dead.” Within a few months Hornsby would no longer have the same role in the band.

The gathering darkness: Fans overtaking the fence at the last show at Deer Creek.

© JEREMY HOGAN

CHAPTER 15

NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA, JULY 2, 1995

Three songs into the show, the house lights still on, the time had come for “Dire Wolf,” but with a perverse twist no one had anticipated. Twenty-five years had passed since the Dead had recorded that song at Pacific High studio. They'd played it innumerable times since, occasionally slowing it down a half step. But tonight, in the middle of Indiana, they again injected it with the crisp, merry gait of the recorded version, and even the song's refrain harked back to its original impending-death inspiration. “Please, don't murder me,” Garcia sang again, now in a voice weathered by age and abuse, as cops pivoted their heads, hoping to catch sight of the man who'd vowed to kill Garcia before the night was over.

Along with the likes of Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin, the Deer Creek Music Center had become a destination spot, a revered haven, for the Dead and their fans alike. Springing up amid cornfields and cow pastures a half-hour north of Indianapolis, the amphitheater was, like the band, an enclave unto itself. Out there the straight world never felt so distant. Although the Dead had played Deer Creek six
times before without major incident, tonight began on a sour note. On their way from their hotel (north of Indianapolis) to the venue word filtered down to band and its management: a death threat had been called into Deer Creek's box office. Similar calls and warnings had arrived before, but this one felt creepier. An anonymous person had called local police claiming to have overheard the distraught father of a young female Deadhead. The information was unclear, but the implication was that the girl couldn't be found and had run off on the road with them, and that the father was planning to attend the show and shoot Garcia.

Huddling backstage with Ken Viola, Scher's head of security, the band grappled with what to do. Verifying the threat was difficult, but Lesh, the most immediately concerned because his family was there, made the case for canceling the show and heading out. “I was not going to stand up there and be a target,” he recalls. But Garcia brushed it off, saying he'd dealt with crazies before and wouldn't let this one stop him. “Would you sacrifice yourself for the music?” Hart recalls of that night. “All those things run around in your brain. But I remember joking, ‘Jerry, could you move over six inches onstage? At least
I'll
make it!' We were screaming laughing. The decision was made and everyone came around. We were worried, of course, but we didn't want some lunatic to shut us down.” Indiana state police made their way into the crowd and the stage pit; there they were joined by other Dead employees, including publicist Dennis McNally and Steve Marcus of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales, all nervously glancing around for . . .
something
. No one knew what the supposed shooter looked or dressed like, and no one even knew for sure whether the threat was real. But they weren't about to take any chances.

Ironically, the show opened with “Here Comes Sunshine,” the twinkling kaleidoscope of a song that was dropped from the repertoire after 1974 but had returned starting in 1992. With Welnick playing synthesizer, the song was rearranged, sounding tighter and firmer but still
evanescent. After Robert Johnson's “Walkin' Blues,” Garcia swung into the honky-tonk intro notes of “Dire Wolf.” At one point in the show a piece of electronics gear began misbehaving, and Bob Bralove, who usually stood behind the keyboards or drum riser, was forced to walk to the front of the stage to fix it. He'd performed the task dozens if not hundreds of times before, but never before had he felt as if a bull's eye was plastered on his chest. “You could
feel
it,” he says. “This was normally the place that was always safe and you felt the love from the audience. But all of a sudden I'm realizing I'm standing next to the guy they said they wanted to kill. It was very, very intense.” After tending to the repair Bralove quickly retreated back to the darkened part of the stage.

For years they'd defied the odds; so many times they'd been written off creatively, physically, or economically, only to return, sometimes as vital as before. But the last few months had made even those closest and most loyal to the Dead wonder whether they, Garcia especially, would be able to pull back from the darkness. During a set break Garcia called his loyal driver, Leon Day. “I had a threat on my life,” he told him. Day joked back: “I got your back—you got mine?”

Still, Garcia sounded unnerved. “He'd gotten threats before,” Day says, “but for some reason this one seemed to hit home.” The driver made plans to pick up Garcia at the airport when the tour finished in a few more days. Then, as Garcia was beginning to tell members of his inner circle, he would finally consider rest, recuperation, maybe even a serious stint in rehab. Thirty years after the Warlocks had played Magoo's pizza parlor, they all needed to reassess what everything had come to.

Just over two years before, the past had circled back to Garcia in a far more intoxicating way. The day before New Year's Eve 1993 he'd jumped on a plane to Hawaii, where he'd been scuba diving and
escaping the Dead world regularly since 1988. Joining him were two companions from the comparatively carefree early days in the Peninsula, two reminders of the time before relentless touring, deaths in the Dead family, and other complications and tragedies.

First was Barbara Meier, Garcia's long-ago girlfriend from the Chateau era three decades before. Then living in Colorado, where she was painting, writing, and working with the Naropa Institute, the Buddhist-inspired college in Colorado, Meier had built a completely new and separate life since she and Garcia had broken up. (She loved
American Beauty
but hadn't kept up with most of the band's other music.) When she published a collection of poetry Hunter came across a copy in a bookstore and passed it along to Garcia, who sent a letter to her, by way of her publisher, that read in part, “I've always loved you and still do.” The two connected backstage at the Shoreline Amphitheater in May 1991. The last time Meier had seen her old boyfriend he'd had black hair and a black goatee and was trim; now the man facing her reminded her of Santa Claus. He told her he felt they'd lived parallel lives and that she was always part of his “psychic future.” In what seemed like a heartbeat, they'd reconnected; Garcia went onstage to do the second set, and Meier sat weeping in her seat, overcome by the reunion and its possibilities.

Although she was in the midst of working toward a graduate degree, Meier took the Garcia plunge again. As an excuse to see him again, she interviewed him for
Tricycle
:
The Buddhist Review
magazine and began visiting Marin. Driving with director Len Dell'Amico in his BMW one day, Garcia unexpectedly announced he was in love with, he said, “Barbara, this girl I knew a long time ago. She's like the sun.” Hearing comments like those, the Dead community geared up to re-insert Meier into Garcia's life.

When Meier arrived at Hunter's house on December 30, 1992, according to Lesh's account, she found not only Garcia and Robert and
his wife, Maureen, but also Phil and Jill Lesh. Garcia had left home that morning without telling Manasha anything about his plans to leave her for Meier, but he had to say
something
about what he'd done, so his friends helped him write a note, then had it hand-delivered to Manasha by Garcia's assistant, Vince Di Biase. “I immediately sensed it was not written in Jerry's voice,” Manasha says, but there was little she could do. The next day Dead crew members whisked Garcia and Meier to a Holiday Inn near the airport to spend the night before being flown to Hawaii. “They had all the logistics lined up like a military operation,” Meier says. On the flight out the couple chuckled when the pilot walked back to first class and told Garcia, “Usually, I'm at
your
gig on New Year's Eve.”

Along with the Hunters and the Leshes, Garcia and Meier settled into a condo complex in Maui, and the heady, creative rush of almost thirty years earlier appeared to breeze back in. Garcia and Meier took strolls on the beach and went scuba diving together. After a mini-studio was set up in his room, with recording gear and a keyboard, Garcia and Hunter sat down to pen new material. The two had written together only sporadically since the early eighties, but the stress-free atmosphere, removed from Marin and the Dead community, seemed to inspire them. Soon enough they'd finished “Lazy River Road,” a lively stroll inspired by Garcia and Meier's reunion. “The more beautiful world tapped us on the shoulder again, so we thought we'd have a second chance,” Meier says. “And we all felt it. It felt like, ‘This is right.'”

The sense of renewal couldn't have arrived at a better time for Garcia and the Dead. In the months after confronting Garcia backstage in Boston, Bruce Hornsby had continued playing with the band, but his enthusiasm seemed to wane with each show. “Let's be honest here,” he says. “Jerry was in and out of his problems. There were times when he was all there, but other times he wasn't. Jerry was my main reason for doing it.” As the
New York Times
noted of a 1991 show, the
two-keyboard setup could result in overbaked arrangements: “The band is clearly still trying to figure out what to do” with Hornsby and Welnick onstage together, wrote critic Peter Watrous, adding, “With four chordal instruments onstage, the sound at times became clotted and busy.”