Dark Star (25 page)

Rock Scully:
As far as Jerry was concerned, he was living in this box and all he really had was his guitar and a joint. I think what led to the cocaine was a couple of things. One was the show business aspect of the recreational quality of the drug. In the early days, it was very pure and fun. Later on, when we were working seventeen days in a row, it became a tool. Because we were not going to bed until four
A.M.
and we had to be up at eight to get in the limos or the rent-a-cars to get our asses out to the airport and get on a plane. It was a get-go thing. To a man when we'd get home, cocaine was a done deal. It was a road drug. We'd get home and nobody would care about it. All we wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and be with our families and see our kids grow up for a week or two before we went out again.

Laird Grant:
He was using cocaine to keep himself pumped. The coke was to keep him running. But he was doing a lot. If you ask me, he was doing too much.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I literally couldn't stand the scene at that point. It had become different. It had become chatty without being friendly. It was unfriendly chat and it had become social in a way. I didn't want to spend too much time trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I just wanted to go find someplace else to be. And we had become the establishment. For all the rebellion and all the craziness that we'd done, suddenly now it was the record deal. It was this. It was that. It was the appearances. We were the establishment and the Grateful Dead was setting higher and higher ticket prices. I could feel it changing and it was a disappointing time for me. I was far more invested in my relationship with him than I was with the group. He had to take care of the band. “We've got to play here, Jerry. We've got to go there.” I too would come when called and they called me when they needed me for something. I'd be right there. But I discovered that I could go home and be quiet and nobody would care.

Owsley Stanley:
In '74, they decided they wanted to play these big outdoor shows. That was what they wanted to do. Garcia mostly went along with stuff but it was the others who decided they wanted to play big shows and that was what they ended up doing.

Jon Mcintire:
One time I was driving him home over the hill because I lived in Bolinas. We were going up to his pad and he said, “It's kind of neat having the most impressive pad in town.” He had the biggest house in Stinson and he had Deborah Koons in a different house over in Bolinas. It was just the next town. That was awfully close by.

Steve Brown:
I think it was Jerry's decision to get out from the living situation and the relationship he was in at the time. In that sense, I don't think that Deborah came in as the other woman. I think Jerry had already made up his own mind about being his own guy in his own space. It may have had something to do with the extra energy that comes from having young children around and wanting more space. It's hard to speculate on what the actual reasons were. Mountain Girl is a pretty strong person and it may have just been a wearing-out point. I know relationships get that way sometimes.

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius:
Mountain Girl was pregnant with Theresa. I don't exactly know how long Jerry had been running around with Deborah behind MG's back but there was a real famous scene that went down at Weir's house when MG picked Deborah up and threw her through the studio doors. Deborah was just sitting there in the studio. MG came in and gave her the bum's rush. MG was pregnant at the time.

Jon Mcintire:
At one time, evidently he and one of the women in the office had a sexual tryst and he was on the road with the band and she was too. He came off the stage and she looked at him and I happened to be standing right there and she said, “You don't play music. You just play games.” I thought, “Wait a minute. We're off the deep end here.” After the gig, I got in the car with ferry because I had to figure out what to do. I didn't let anybody else get in the car because I wanted to have this private talk with him. I said, “Okay, tell me what's going on and tell me what to do about this.” And he said, “Don't worry, man. It's just my fucked scene with chicks. It's always been this way.”

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius:
Jerry was always such a wimp about dealing with these things. Donna Jean [Godchaux McKay] told me that one time Jerry made her pack up all the clothes of the woman he was living with at the time and take her to the airport and he wouldn't even talk to her. He just backed into a corner and freaked and sent her packing. That was his thing with a lot of problems. Throw money at it. Get Steve Parish or somebody else to deal with it. He did that whenever it was too hard for him to face up to things.

Jon Mcintire:
I remember one time MG and Hunter and I were together and MG was talking about how generous Jerry was. Hunter looked up and said, “Generous? Generous with what? Generous with money? Stuff? He doesn't give a shit about money or stuff. That's not generous!” Absolutely so. Jerry's time and emotion went into the music.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
One day he just left and I never knew what had happened to him. But he had left once before. He had gone off for a couple of weeks. I was busy. My responsibility level was up. I didn't really have time to go chasing after him.

Sue Swanson:
I stood in for Jerry at the birth of both their kids. One time he was in New York, one time he was in Paris. He thanked me profusely both times. I don't know. Maybe he didn't think he was adequate. But I stood in for him for both of his children with Mountain Girl.

Steve Brown:
When Jerry left Mountain Girl, he went to live in a rented house in Tiburon for a while where he also shared some time with Deborah Koons, who was then his girlfriend. Either by coincidence as a filmmaker or by her own plan, she got involved when we shot the Grateful Dead movie in October of '74. Then she helped in the editing.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
It was around the time Theresa was born that it really started to get to be a problem. He had wandered off and found somebody else to spend time with and then he would come back and that went on like Ping-Pong, back and forth for a while until I realized that I was losing sleep, losing weight, losing energy, worrying a lot, and it wasn't good for me. I started to put my foot down and deliver ultimatums. That was absolutely the wrong thing to do and we had one good solid argument and he stomped off and I didn't see him for a week. I realize now that was an unfair thing for him to do. But at the time I took it the other way. My feelings were hurt and it was a tough time. There was a lot of misunderstanding going on that we weren't working very hard to clear up.

By 1975, it was really getting severe. He disappeared again and I said, “Ah, the hell with it. I can't handle this.” I tried to fight it out with him a little bit but he was enjoying himself. I got really upset and went on a physical fitness program and lost some weight and really tried to pull my act together to win him back and I succeeded. Off and on. But he definitely didn't seem to think that home life was enough for him. He wanted more and I couldn't handle it and finally I moved up to Oregon for a year and a half and I bought a little place out on the coast with the money I made from my book because I didn't have any money. He wasn't giving me any.

The first six months, I called Jerry several times trying to get some support money. I kept asking him to come up and visit us but he never did. Meanwhile, I was trying to track him a little bit through our network of friends to find out what he was up to and the news was not good. So I decided to play my hand independently of the group. The news was not good. And now I really was away.

 

The wheel is turning and you can't slow down You can't let go and you can't hold on You can't go back and you can't stand still If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will.

—Robert Hunter, “The Wheel”

For me, drugs are just like the softest most comfortable possible thing you can do. In a way, it's the thing of being removed from desire. It's a high state of being and you can get there all the time. Every time you do it, you get off. Except for things like forgetting to eat and all the other little things in life. All that shit slips right past you. That's why people die.

—
Jerry Garcia, interview with author, 1988

 

Justin Kreutzmann:
From the late seventies through to the mid-eighties was a really dark time. It was weird. Even if the sun was shining on the Grateful Dead world, it was always a cloudy day. They were playing the same songs and they cared and the audience really cared. But if you saw the way the band was acting, you had to wonder, “How can those kids really get off on this?”

Alan Trist:
In the early seventies, the band was growing up and becoming a bigger deal. It required more to look after it and to protect it from the outside world. Still, the desire was to have people who were cool and part of that family scene. The new paradigm we were all talking about in Palo Alto was still operative in Jerry's mind and he wanted it to be that way. He wanted to have people around who were both friends and business associates to take care of what needed to be taken care of and interface with the outside world. For a while, it worked. It was really working. Maybe it worked up until the end, and goes on working.

Chesley Millikin:
I went to visit the Dead at the offices and Rock was there and the New Riders and the Dead were about to go to Europe. Jerry said, “You take care of the New Riders.” So I took them on the first half of their world tour. As everything. Cook, slut, butler, baby-sitter, the whole bloody works.

Richard Loren:
We did Europe in '74 and Jon McIntire got fired from the Grateful Dead. Kreutzmann fired him. God knows the reason. I can't remember why.

Chesley Millikin:
Why? Oh, who knows why? Too much of this and too much of that.

Jon Mcintire:
I had been in Paris advancing the gig and I came back and I was dressed up. As the band came off stage, this beautiful woman came running at me and threw her arms around me and I put my arms around her and I happened to hit Kreutzmann in the face as I did it. As he was coming off stage. That moment personified something to him. Here I was looking kind of spiffy with this beautiful woman around my neck and I hit him. Also, there were a lot of drugs going down. At three or four in the morning, I got called by Kreutzmann and asked to come to his room. In front of several people, no band members included, Kreutzmann proceeded to vent all over me. He said, “I realize you could get the band and buck me on this but I want you out of here.”

The next morning, I got a call from Richard Loren who said, “I've been hearing weird stuff. What's happening?” I told him and he said, “We gotta talk to Garcia.” So we went into Jerry's room and I told Jerry what had happened and he said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I'm leaving. I'm out of here. I can't do this anymore.” He said, “I don't blame you. If I were in your shoes, I'd do the same thing. I'd say, ‘Fuck the Grateful Dead.'” Then Richard said, “Jerry, if they've attacked McIntire, I'm next and I'm going, too.”

So Richard and I rented a car and drove to Paris. The way Hunter put it later to some interviewer was, “It was a matter of difference in style. McIntire would show up with a ballerina on each arm and no one else in the Grateful Dead could understand that kind of stuff.”

Chesley Millikin:
One day on the Europe tour, I came down and Hal Kant, the lawyer friend of mine, was there. I said, “What are you looking so glum about?” He said, “Didn't you hear?” I said no. He said, “The band fired Jon McIntire, Richard Loren, Rock, and I don't know who else. They fired them all.” I said, “Who's the new manager?” He said, “You are.” I said, “What? These guys?”

Jon Mcintire:
Jerry and I actually talked about this because I was trying to figure out just what it was that I was doing there. In between the times I was manager, we'd have long heart-to-heart talks. I was trying to follow. Trying to create consensus, trying to soothe the pain, and also trying to be in the background as much as possible. It was never my band. Hunter did not write “Uncle John's Band” about me. He wrote it for Jerome John Garcia. But even Hunter after some years called me Uncle John so everyone assumed it was me.