So Many Roads (61 page)

Feeling Welnick could handle the parts by himself and wanting to spend more time with his twin sons, born January 30, 1992, Hornsby found a nonconfrontational way to quit his part-time job with the Dead. By way of management Garcia found out before Hornsby had a chance to tell him, but Hornsby was still able to have an amicable conversation about it with Garcia. “I said, ‘I think Vince has it—you don't need me anymore,'” Hornsby recalls. “I felt my role was to be the transitional figure between Brent's death and the time Vince got comfortable. But I also felt there were too many nights it didn't have that spark. I didn't tell that to Jerry, but it was definitely a reason for me.”

Garcia took the news well, but Scher, still the band's principal promoter and a trusted adviser, was taken aback. He knew Hornsby had little tolerance for sloppiness or lack of rehearsal and would practice piano several hours every day. Hornsby had been complaining to Scher for some time, but Scher never expected the keyboardist to pull the trigger and leave. “It was a big disappointment to me and a great lost opportunity,” Scher says. “They were a better band with Hornsby in it. Bruce loved Jerry, and he liked most of the guys in the band. But at that stage in their career, when they were being sloppy and weren't playing well often enough, he got disillusioned.”

Lesh would later write that the band's less-than-polished approach to playing Hornsby's own songs was an issue, and Hornsby generally agrees. “They wanted to play some of my songs, so I arranged them for the Dead shuffle style,” he says. But unless the songs were rigorously rehearsed and played repeatedly, Hornsby realized the band would often forget the arrangements. “By the seventh time playing
‘The Valley Road,' it was really rough,” he says, “and I went to them and said, ‘Hey, come on, guys—unless we rehearse it, let's not do it anymore. It's nice that you want to play my songs, but I've got this other forum, so it's okay.' And they said, ‘Oh, no, we'll rehearse.' But we never really did.” After his last official shows with the band, at the Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in late March 1992 Hornsby was gone as a full-time member, although he would join them for select performances in the future, easily gliding back into his role.

With the Dead back to a single-keyboard lineup, Welnick did a capable job playing and adding harmonies. (He even led the band on arguably its least likely cover ever, the Who's “Baba O'Riley,” starting the summer of 1992.) But because the Dead world would never be entirely settled, other troubles sprang up soon enough. Still in a relationship with Manasha as of the middle of 1992, Garcia had moved with her and their daughter, Keelin, into a luxurious ten-acre home in Nicasio. (In a sign of how economically far the Dead had come, this was the same town where the ragged, woodsy Rukka Rukka Ranch had once been home to Weir, crew members, and anyone else who needed someplace to crash.) At that house in August Garcia crumbled from exhaustion soon after returning home from a Garcia Band tour, which had followed a short run of Dead performances. “It was too much for him,” says Manasha. “He had a hard time saying no and just went along with the program until he collapsed.” At Garcia's request, Manasha called the Dead office and told them he wanted to cancel the band's planned fall tour.

As it had six years before, after Garcia's diabetic coma, the brakes were suddenly slammed on the Dead organization. This time no one in their office was laid off, but concerns mounted as never before. According to Nancy Mallonee, staffers were worried either about Garcia dying or the band giving up touring or winding down altogether: “People would ask, ‘How long do you think it's going to be?'”

With a small crew of healers—two holistic physicians, an acupuncturist, a dietician, and an alternative-medicine homeopath—the hospital-wary Garcia began to physically improve at home. He drank fresh organic juices prepared daily by Manasha, avoided fats in his diet, became a vegan, and lost about sixty pounds. In an even more hopeful sign, he announced he wanted to give up smoking, his longtime passion, and was soon down to only a few cigarettes a day, according to Manasha. He granted Manasha durable power of attorney for his heath decisions and, to keep himself busy during recovery, invited Bralove to their house to help him score black-and-white films and print out his computer artwork. Garcia's dark sense of humor remained untouched: watching
Nosferatu
and
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
, still-creepy 1920s horror films about the undead, he looked at Bralove and said, “This is too close!”

But Garcia's most restorative retreat from his workaday world was Hawaii, where he'd been introduced to diving by Vicki Jensen; the former Dead family member (and Hart ranch worker and resident) was now living on the Big Island, where she'd become a dive master. On his first dive Garcia had to take it slow; Jensen noticed his legs were nearly purple from lack of circulation, and he primarily stayed in one spot in the water and did 360 turns. He was so overweight that, on that and later dives, he had to be weighed down with thirty-two pounds (more than usual) to make sure he stayed below the surface. (In diving, weight makes people more buoyant.)

But in stark contrast to his increasingly sloth-like stage presence, both with the Dead and the Garcia Band, Garcia seemed to come alive in the water. “It was so wonderful to see him dive and see that sparkle again,” says Jensen. “It was, ‘Oh my God, he's back.' He was roly-poly, but his face glowed. The grapevine was saying the diving's going to kill him. But I thought, ‘No, he might be around
longer
.'”

Garcia immersed himself in diving with the same intensity as when he was learning banjo or guitar decades before; in effect, it became
his new addiction. He took dive classes, bought a diving suit, and had prescription lenses put into his mask in order to clearly see underwater. Within time he lost enough weight to need only an additional eighteen pounds attached to his gear, and over the years he went on over five hundred dives. “He could be the Jerry he used to be,” says Candelario, who accompanied Garcia on numerous trips to Hawaii. “To see Jerry in Kona was a totally different guy. He was happy and not on drugs and not having people hit on him. On that dive boat nobody bothered him.” When Manasha and Keelin joined him, he'd bring them seashells and return from dive trips with stories of seeing sea turtles and whales. Even then Garcia remained a risk taker. During one night-time dive Jensen saw him trying to befriend an eel, even though she'd warned him to be careful around them and not stick out his fingers. “I thought, ‘God, I don't want to be responsible for him losing
another
finger!'” Jensen says. “But the thing accepted him.”

By the early nineties the members of the Dead weren't seeing much of each other off the road; they were business partners but rarely socialized. “When they got home they shut each other out a little bit after so many years of working together,” says Trixie Garcia, who stayed in the Bay Area and went to community college after Garcia and Mountain Girl split up again post-Manasha (Mountain Girl returned to Oregon). “Typically Jerry would be pretty exhausted for a week after a tour. Almost catatonic. He wanted a simple existence. He didn't want to go anywhere or have visitors. Very shuttered.” Hawaii helped to change that dynamic for the better; on various trips Garcia invited along Weir, Hunter, Hart, Kreutzmann, and crew members like Candelario and Parish. (Noticeably absent from pre-1990 trips was Mydland; no one ever recalls seeing him scuba dive with the band.)

After he'd left Manasha, an old romance renewed and new songs being crafted with his longtime friend and creative cohort, Garcia struck Meier as relatively happy, and his devotion to his new hobby was
more than evident. Settling into the water as if it were his second home, he showed her how to slow down her breathing and not waste oxygen in the tank. Underwater, away from the pressures of the Dead, the two held hands and watched giant sea turtles swim by, and he told her not to be scared when sharks passed them. “Jerry was very Buddha-like in that underwater world,” she says. “He was buoyant, free of his body. It was as if he belonged there.”

The tickets for Deer Creek announced a 7 p.m. start time, but as always, the devoted—and those who simply wanted to have a good time—began arriving early for parties outside the venue. Those who'd been to Deer Creek before and didn't have tickets knew that one of the best spots to hear the band was at the bottom of a hill outside the venue, and several thousand people and their cars began congregating there.

From his car Chris Clair, wearing a tie-dye shirt and sporting a curly Afro, could see the prohibitive wooden-slat fence that separated them from the Dead and the inside of the Deer Creek Music Center. He could see the security guards driving around in golf carts keeping an eye on anyone who might want to run up the incline and into the venue. He could smell the pot in the air and hear Dead tapes blasting from sound systems in the thousands of cars parked in a semicircle around him.

Having gone to his first Dead show in 1989 when he was nineteen, Clair, then attending college at Indiana State, was part of the post-“Touch of Grey” wave of Deadheads. He loved Hunter's lyrics, the sound of Garcia's guitar, the sight and sound of two drummers, and, especially, Mydland's voice and energy; he actually preferred Mydland's singing to that of Garcia and Weir. Yet he was starting to feel that Dead concerts hadn't been the same since Mydland's death. At twenty-six, a veteran of roughly fifty shows, Clair now felt like a grizzled veteran compared to the nitrous-inhaling teenagers around him. “I was looking
at the young kids and feeling they were ruining the party,” he says. “They were coming for the drugs and didn't know much about the music. They were raining on the parade.” The music was straining his loyalty as well: the sound of Garcia's weakened voice made him sad, as did the sight of Garcia not remembering lyrics. To Clair, Welnick was no Mydland. Clair began growing nostalgic for an earlier era: “I used to talk about the eighties,” he says, “the way other people talked about the sixties.”

Clair wasn't the only one to notice that a younger, rowdier, or more inclined-to-excess crowd was starting to take over Dead shows as the nineties dragged on. In 1992 Steve Marcus started joining the band on the road; counterfeiting had become such a problem that Marcus set up “Ticket Verification” tables to differentiate the genuine stubs from the ones supposedly forged by the mob in New Jersey. At Rich Stadium in the Buffalo suburbs that June he was confronted with an equally worrisome problem. As he examined tickets outside the venue Marcus saw a large group heading in his direction “like a pack of wild animals,” he says. After running around the parking lot, they made straight for one of the entry gates, smashing it open. Grabbing his walkie-talkie, Marcus reported to security inside and heard the chilling response: “Get your table and get the hell inside.”

Moments like that were still largely the exception: more common was the amusing sight at a show in Maine, where a state trooper holding a police manual was hurriedly flipping through it to learn whether or not he should arrest a fan for having nitrous. But the aggressive tactics of 1989 made a comeback at the start of the Dead's summer 1995 tour at the Franklin Valley Field in Highgate, Vermont. A show at the same venue the previous year had gone off without problems, but tonight promoter Jim Koplik heard kids were trying to pull down the chain-link fence around the venue. Grabbing a few security guards, Koplik raced to the scene and saw tens of thousands of kids on the other
side of the metal links, pushing to get in. “It shocked us,” he says. “It was definitely not Deadheads.” He'd thought he and his crew could hold on to the fence and keep it in place, but realizing they were overwhelmed, Koplik ran in the other direction. To avoid the riot and spare the fences, organizers had no choice but to open the gates and allow thirty thousand crashers—about twice the number who could fit into a typical indoor arena—in for free. As they rushed in, Gary Lambert, then working for the Dead's merchandising office, saw portable toilets knocked over with people still inside.

For now, at Deek Creek in Indiana, the calm held. When “Dire Wolf” finished, the Dead dove into a cover of Bobby Womack's “It's All Over Now,” followed by Robbie Robertson's exquisite “Broken Arrow,” sung by Lesh. Then, as Clair and his friends at his car watched, a handful of people in the parking area suddenly ran up the steep hill. Two of them stopped, cupped their hands together, and hoisted the other three up over the fence. “Wow, they got over the fence,” Clair heard one of his friends say. Another group followed, hoisting the remaining two who'd been left behind. And then another group of ten, and another group of twenty after that. Five or six waves of fans jumped over, all without damaging the fence. Security guards began shouting, “Get off the hill!” But for now there wasn't much more they could do.