So Many Roads (63 page)

Garcia had appeared tired and increasingly disoriented during shows in 1994, but as the band entered its thirtieth year in 1995, his descent became more obvious. Visiting her father at his home in Tiburon during the early months of the year (he and Deborah Koons maintained separate residences), Trixie let herself in and found Garcia lying face down on the bed. When she playfully tickled his feet to wake him up, he leapt up, startled. “He was passed out in the middle of the day on his bed, and he was probably high,” she says, “but I didn't put it together.” Around the same time, Garcia agreed to be interviewed for a history project,
Silicon Valley: 100 Year Renaissance
, produced and directed by John McLaughlin, the Palo Alto native who'd taken drum lessons from Kreutzmann long before. Garcia was friendly and chatty, but with his creased, sagging face, he looked at least twenty years older than he was, and every fifteen to twenty minutes he'd ask for a break to go into the pantry to, as he put it, look for his car keys. Given the rumors around Garcia and his past issues, it was easy enough for the film crew to assume he was taking one substance or another during those breaks. Lesh grew deeply concerned when, right before the summer 1995 tour, Koons fired Garcia's assistants, Vince and Gloria Di Biase, who saw to his day-to-day needs; the last thing anyone in the Dead world wanted was Garcia left to his own devices.

Meanwhile band and family grappled with what was ailing Garcia. He clearly wasn't healthy and was coping with lung and heart issues. Was he happy? Was his live-for-the-moment fatalism coming into play? What could anyone do about it? Kreutzmann would later admit that Garcia had been worn down by the Dead's predictable touring
regimen. “Jerry had gotten kind of bored with the Grateful Dead, and it was sort of like a marriage that had maybe gone on too long,” Kreutzmann told
Rolling Stone
in 2012. “I think a lot of it, I hate to say, was really a financial obligation. He needed to earn the money for some things.” To Allan Arkush, Garcia referred to touring as “homework, a chore—it was like doing a term paper every night.” (Speaking of his 1992 setback, Manasha says, “I personally think what was being demanded from Jerry in terms of working, touring, et cetera, contributed to his need to self-medicate.”)

The perks of the job continued unabated: large homes, BMWs, home studios. On tour the Dead sometimes flew in a private Gulfstream III plane complete with a bar and made-to-order food. But to some friends or intimates Garcia would make his wishes known. Before his breakup with Meier he told her about a $125,000 payment he'd received from Ben & Jerry's for use of the Cherry Garcia name. (Garcia hadn't objected to the usage at first, done without his permission, but attorney Hal Kant convinced him to ask for a percentage of the sales.) Garcia mentioned how he'd love to quit the Dead and live off the ice-cream money; when she asked him why he didn't pursue that option, he mentioned all his employees. (When she wondered why he didn't simply get rid of the deadwood, he didn't respond.) Garcia told Candelario he wanted to move to Italy, sign up for art classes, and only play with the Dead on weekends. “We were so excited,” says Candelario. “That was his dream. He wanted to put the Dead on sabbatical. There was plenty of money to be able to do that.”

The time had come to address not just the machinery of it all, but everything that had built up over the last three decades: the sometimes-overwhelming intensity (and devotion) of their fan base, the live-and-let-live philosophy within the band, and, equally important, the way it was affecting the music. At band meetings the thought of shuttering the unwieldy Dead operation and allowing Garcia to regain his health
would be brought up. (Garcia canceled the second half of a Garcia Band show in Phoenix in the spring of 1994 after he felt sick backstage.) According to Lesh, a three-point plan was laid out after Garcia's breakdown in 1992. If the Dead played only Bay Area shows for the rest of that year, they would cut back on salaries and equipment and “hopefully go back to full salaries in January,” according to an internal report. If the concerts didn't resume at all until December, salaries would be cut in half in November, rather than by one-third (as in the first plan), before eventually returning to normal pay levels. In the third proposal, which assumed the band wouldn't play at all for the rest of the year, salaries would still be cut, but expenses would be reined in by “laying off everyone except for those necessary to maintain office and operations until we regroup in 1993.”

That outline was the closest the Dead came to mapping out a specific plan of action. Otherwise, band and management would meet in the Dead's conference room and grapple with if, when, and how to leave the road, at least temporarily. Garcia's inconsistency onstage—weak performances followed almost immediately by strong ones—also confused matters. (At a show in Albany, New York, shortly before Deer Creek, his guitar had moments of ageless beauty even if Garcia himself—looking drawn and frail, his long white hair drooping forlornly to his shoulders—seemed prematurely aged.) “They talked about it, but they never made a decision to do it and figure out exactly how to do it,” says Mallonee. “Jerry felt he was on some kind of assembly line and needed more time at home, and the band knew it was hard on him. But they were stuck in this pattern. They'd laid people off in the seventies, but [the machine] wasn't nearly as big then.” Recalling similar discussions, Scher says, “There were a couple of times—and, believe me, they were not serious confrontations—if the band said, ‘We're not going out until you get yourself together,' he just would have gone out with the Garcia Band. He said, ‘John, I play guitar every single day. I
might as well get paid for it.'” Indeed, the JGB, still anchored by Garcia and Kahn but also by now featuring keyboardist Melvin Seals, was still a going concern up through the early months of 1995.

Ironically, one of the non-Garcia-related problems the band was increasingly facing—outsiders who crashed the shows and made the road less enticing—could have been their salvation. According to Weir in
Rolling Stone
in 2013, “The last year or two, we were actually faced with more than just the possibility that we'd have to knock off for a while and let things cool down. There was a lot of trouble we had to deal with, the crowd-control problems.” Far more so than the crowds in Pittsburgh and at other troubled cities in 1989, this new breed of concertgoer seemed less interested in the music and more attuned to the party—and more eager than ever to crash that party without paying. But again, canceling entire tours would, in their minds, be more difficult than coping with bad shows. Garcia would wonder aloud whether some of their employees, given how long they'd worked for the band without any other experience, would even be able to find work anywhere else.

Swanson saw the hugeness of the operation when she returned to their fold in the late eighties to work in the merchandise office. She'd never seen so many limos before, and the Dead office in San Rafael was now packed with employees. Swanson also noticed the band's mixed feelings toward their success. “They could have called it at any time, but none of them did,” she says. “They could say it was all about the machine, and all of that was true. But fame is a sort of seductress, and they were seduced—staying in really nice places in New York City and taking limos back and forth. It was hard to walk away from that, and they treated everybody well. Once you do that, you can't go back.”

In the meantime road work beckoned, as it always did. When driver Leon Day picked up Garcia for a soundcheck at the Silver Stadium in Vegas in May of 1995, he had to throw pebbles at his boss's window to
get his attention. Finally Garcia came down, looking bedraggled and tired. “Oh, come on, you'll outlive us all,” Day joked. Garcia replied, “I won't see the end of the year.”

The next group who clambered over the fence at Deer Creek didn't simply want in; they wanted destruction. Instead of jumping over and heading toward the music, they settled atop the fence and began shaking the wood slats back and forth. As Clair and a friend watched in astonishment, the barricade began breaking down, splinters of wood flying through the air. “They were like monkeys, hollering,” Clair says. “You could hear people inside the stadium yelling, ‘Get off the fence!' But the majority of the people outside were cheering them on, like, ‘Go, go!'” Although Clair heard security radioing for backup, it seemed shockingly clear that no one had a plan if the fence was attacked.

Suddenly but inevitably, a huge chunk of the barrier crashed down completely, and with it, the people in the parking lot transformed into a stampede, running up the hill and into the venue. Clair had no interest in jumping a fence, but now that all gate-crashing hell had broken loose, what was the harm in following everyone else in and catching the show? “I'm not proud of it,” he says. “I thought, ‘These kids who just came for the drugs and the scene got into
my
show in
my
hometown. That's not fair. I should be in there too.'” Clair and his girlfriend looked at each other, didn't say a word, and made a run for it.

Sergeant Scott Kirby of the Noblesville police department was among the first to arrive at Deer Creek. On the police radio he'd heard a few dozen cops at the venue desperately calling in for help: from what he could gather, they'd never seen any part of the fence dismantled before, and police were now outnumbered. When Kirby drove into the venue on a side road he saw the situation for himself and was stunned. He'd worked security at previous Dead shows and knew the
community welcomed Deadheads, if only for the extra revenue they pumped into the economy. But tonight thousands of people were walking on the road, barely moving out of the way of his squad car. “It was like running a gauntlet,” he says. “They were everywhere. I had never seen that many people there before.” Kirby managed to reach a command post on one side of the venue, but even there rocks and bottles began bouncing off the police cars.

Kirby realized two different groups—the Deadheads who rarely caused problems and what he calls “the party group” looking for trouble—were vying for control, and the latter were winning. Every so often someone would burst out of the crowd and taunt the cops; when police advanced, the kid would run back into the crowd to cheers. Realizing they were hugely outnumbered—fifty to thousands—the police made a decision: they wouldn't fight the mob. “It was, ‘We've lost the venue and we're not going to get it back,'” Kirby says. “We needed to take another tack.” Hearing the Dead, Kirby and the other police hoped they'd stop playing, giving the people less impetus to cross the road that separated the crowd from the cops. But the band thought otherwise and continued; Lesh later said the band thought the rioting would only worsen if the music ended.

Clair had almost reached the top of the hill when the tear gas canisters and pepper spray hit him. By then other police had arrived and begun following the mob up the embankment from the parking area. Clair had been running alongside his girlfriend, but now he grabbed her, did an about-face, and began scurrying back down, holding his breath the whole time. With the air thick with tear gas, he felt as if he were driving with a fogged-up windshield. Back down at the bottom the smoke wasn't as thick, and Clair and his girlfriend could see people screaming, vomiting, and holding twisted ankles all around the hill. To Clair it felt like a war zone.

The band had just started into Bob Dylan's “Desolation Row” when a very different wall of sound hit them. Because the crowd was still lit up by the lights, due to the death threat, the Dead could see what was happening in the distance, and the sight of thousands of fans smashing through a fence and rushing in their direction astonished even the most hardened road warriors among them. “I looked up, and they were
pouring
over the fence,” says Bralove. “Bodies were flying. And you realized that all precautions were gone. All this stuff based on trust between the band and the audience had this energy of paranoia at that moment. Now it's like, ‘These are the people who could be bringing the guns.' It was very freaky.” Lesh had a look of disgust, Weir of shock, and the song momentarily stopped. The band said nothing to the crowd and eventually resumed playing, a noticeable snarl heard in Weir's delivery.