Dark Star (27 page)

Steve Brown:
We had this horrible
Steal Your Face
sound track which was recorded badly because a few of the tracks were fucked up by a guy who happened to have a cocaine problem. When Ron Rakow left, Jerry was angry and depressed. I think he felt he'd let down everybody else by having his guy rip us off. Here was Jerry being slapped publicly as it were within the organization by Rakow in front of everybody. I think he was humiliated by it.

Ron Rakow:
I went to a bank on Santa Monica and La Brea and I deposited the two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars into a temporary account I had set up for the Grateful Dead. I wrote a check for ten grand to a secretary I had hired away from United Artists and could not now employ. I wrote a check so this Hell's Angels movie we had made a commitment to could get finished. I wrote a check to Rolling Thunder, the Shoshone medicine man who had taken an option on some land so Native Americans could move back to it. And I wrote a check for my services for two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars which I cashed. I had 30 seventy-five-hundred-dollar cashier checks and this big amplifier box filled with Grateful Dead bills I was going to pay. I taped up the box and wrote on it in big marker pen, “Shove Up Ass,” and I sent it to the person at the Dead office who had called my attorney to say the meeting had been canceled.

Richard Loren:
They had almost finished the Grateful Dead movie. In addition to all those other things I was doing, I now became the new executive producer of the Grateful Dead movie. They needed forty thousand dollars to finish it. Where were we going to get the money from? Bill Graham lent us forty thousand dollars. At the time, it was a lot of money. Like what four hundred thousand would be now. Bill was not going to give us anything without a hook somewhere. But he never let the band know that. The band were the ones he'd always have his arm around. “There's nothing like you guys.” Jerry knew but I had to tell the other guys, “Bill's your friend on one level and on the next, he's not.” What I was talking about was money.

Steve Brown:
Jerry was pretty depressed by the situation but no more so than any other fine mess they'd gotten themselves into. It seemed to be their own weird karma of doing business the way they wanted to do business. As an outlaw business entity. They really never wanted to play the game the real way. They wanted to do it their way and this was the price they paid.

Ron Rakow:
For years, the game for me was “Brothers” and I was good at it. I fucked with anybody who fucked with my brothers. Then the game turned to “Fuck Your Brother.” And I was good at it. I was the best there was. But Garcia, that was another story. My first public meeting with Jerry after this happened was at the Grateful Dead house at Fifth and Lincoln. Jerry said, “Rack, you should have been on the last tour!” With the most enthusiasm he could muster, he described to an old friend everything that had blown his mind about that tour. He said nothing about the money. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

All the lawyers went out to a restaurant and made a deal. They came back and I said, “Jerry, it was nice seeing you.” He said, “It was nice seeing you and I'll see ya.” The other people in the room, McIntire and some of the equipment guys and some of the other guys in the band, were fucking livid. But no one even said, “You fucking dog.”

The day after Rex Jackson died, I met privately with Jerry Garcia in a restaurant in Tam Junction directly over the spot where Jackson had gone off the road and died. Jerry and I talked and I told him what my realities were. During that lunch, Jerry said, “I don't blame you. I don't blame you one bit. I've checked out everything that went on around the time of that meeting. We were definitely set up. I don't know if I would have done what you did. But I wouldn't have done nothing, that's for sure. As far as I can see, it was a mass freakout.”

I didn't pay them back. Not a fucking penny. We'd made a deal to buy me out for seven hundred and fifty grand. So this was one third of what I was supposed to get by legitimate contract.

Peter Barsotti:
The bottom line was that if one guy didn't want to do something, they wouldn't do it. That was the Dead principle. It was very unnerving because you could say, “Man, we can do this. We could do this. We could do this.” One guy would say, “I don't wanna.” This huge beautiful plan. One guy saying, “I don't wanna,” and that was the end of it. You'd resent it and really feel frustrated. But if you thought about it, that was the reason they could exist. That was the only way they could possibly go on as a group.

Alan Trist:
Quite honestly, I think Jerry always felt that at some level there was enough justice in what Ron did for him to forgive it. It wasn't that it was cool but it was like Jerry wasn't going to be all that upset about it. At some level, he understood it. I never heard any acrimony from Jerry about it. For Jerry, it was over with. He was willing to move forward. Others felt differently, though.

Richard Loren:
After Ron Rakow left, it started to become more and more difficult for Jerry to keep all his things together. With Jerry, the group came first. Jerry was always looking for somebody else to take the lead. No matter what it was, Jerry never ever wanted to be the leader of anything. That was why he never spoke on stage. He told me one time, “I was on acid once and I had this vision of speaking on stage and it made me feel like Hitler.” Or words to that effect. He never wanted to tell people what to do.

Ken Kesey:
Jerry never let anybody pin him down. Drove women nuts. Drove the whole Grateful Dead spectrum nuts. They wanted him to be pin-downable. You'd never see Jerry take a strong political stance. Because he knew that once he did, they'd have a bead on him. Even if the stance he had taken was correct. That had nothing to do with surviving as an artist and providing what he'd really promised as an artist. Like the Beatles sang, “You've got to hide your love away.”

Hal Kant:
The Grateful Dead always had a huge overhead because they couldn't have been more generous with employees and they always had a huge number of people on the payroll. By '73, they were worn out from touring but they also didn't know what kind of direction they wanted their music to take. They felt that time off would be a revitalizer. They were going to work on their individual projects and sort of reenergize and come back.

Owsley Stanley:
At one point, we had three staging crews out on the road, building and tearing down stages. It was exactly what I had warned them about but I got the blame for it in the end. It just fell apart. No one could sustain it. That was when they went off on sabbatical for a year.

Hal Kant:
I wasn't physically there but I heard that during the Dead hiatus, Jerry couldn't go a night without playing. If one of his other bands wasn't gigging, he'd go down to a bar and play.

 

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
I actually got a toke on Jerry's dragon one day. This was probably around '75. He was chasing the dragon down a piece of aluminum foil. Because that was what he did. He never shot it. He would have never been a shooting junkie. He would have harmed himself in any other kind of way but I don't think he would have stuck a needle in. I said, “Can I check some of this out?” He was not willing to share it or talk about it. It was just, “This is what I'm doing. If you want to have something to do with it, I'll give you a hit because you're here and I'm about to do it. I'm not going to stop because you're in front of me. I'm going to do it and if you want a hit, then fine.” But he wasn't particularly volunteering it.

Elanna Wyn-ellis:
At the Keystone years ago was where I first noticed him doing it but I didn't understand. I said, “What are you doing, Jerry?” He looked at me and he said, “You're just like Marmaduke. You want to know everything.” Instantly, he regretted being snappy. He said to me, “This is what I'm doing,” and he showed me.

Richard Loren:
It got brought to us in 1976 and I'll never forget the first time it came. This brown powder. People were saying how wonderful this stuff was. You just smoked it. It was not really heroin. It was Persian opium. People said, “Hey man, let's try it. Whew. This is great.” I'll never forget telling Jerry, “Jerry. This stuff is great but I'm going to wait till I'm fifty-five years old. When my bones start to creak and things start to hurt, maybe that's the time for it. But I don't want to get strung out on this now.” It was very seductive. So I stayed away from it. I never really got into it. But Jerry did. The guy could never say no. He had what I would call an addictive personality. Whether it was sugar or cigarettes or coffee or whatever, it was very difficult for him to say no. His thing was, “If you're not having fun, don't do it.” Besides music, fun to him was cigarettes, pot, coffee, cocaine. If he had a weakness, that was it. He was human, after all. For all his other incredible traits, this was his weakness.

Owsley Stanley:
Garcia started in '75 or '76. Someone gave him what he was told was opium to smoke and it wasn't. It was ninety-five percent pure heroin base, so-called Persian. I don't think he knew what it was that he was getting. Garcia smoked the stuff thinking it was a very pure form of Persian opium. The thing about heroin when it's smoked is that the material condenses in the lungs in a sort of tar that is soluble and the body slowly absorbs it. So it's like sticking a needle in your vein with a drip. A constant supply. People who shoot up heroin, the body metabolizes it and it's gone. When you smoke it, the stuff builds up in your system to a high level and stays there continuously for as much as seventy-two to ninety-six hours. The result is that many people become hopelessly addicted on just one smoke. Let alone two or three smokes.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
I had a couple pokes. I didn't like it. I got uncomfortable. You know how junkies shoot up and then go puke? I felt like that the whole time. I tried to go to sleep and there were ugly pictures in my head. Like those recurrent dreams that you have after you've had too much to drink at night. That loop is a bad loop. It's not a fun loop. Something's bothering you and you keep on thinking that you're working it out and you're not. That was what smack did for me.

Owsley Stanley:
Within a week or so, he was addicted. He liked it. I had conversations with him when he was off it and he said, “I really like what it does.” I said, “From the outside, you're not really a very interesting guy to be around when you're on it. You're really an unpleasant person to be around.” He said, “That may be so but I like what it does. I like the hallucinations. I like whatever it shows me.” I don't think he understood the depth of the changes that occurred in his personality when he was using. Just by looking at him from fifty feet away, I could tell. Simply by the way he stood and held himself and the expression on his face.

Laird Grant:
He was snorting smack. I guess he tried shooting it for a while but it was not his thing. I don't think he had the veins for it and he wasn't one of those kind of people. He wasn't into the mystique of the whole operation more than to get high. The ritual of shooting up is like being addicted to firing up that cigarette and puffing on it. When I found out that he was doing it, we had some very heated words on that. He was saying that it was cool and he could handle it and I said, “That's what they all say. Look at it on down the line, man.” I said to him, “What happened with pot?” He said, “That's not good enough, man. It fucks with my throat. I can't sing on it.” When I was seventeen or eighteen, I was into shooting up heroin. Next to good sex, it's probably one of the most incredible experiences in the world. But sex doesn't kill you. Unless you have a heart attack. Whereas kicking that gong … pretty soon, the gong's going to kick you.

Owsley Stanley:
He wouldn't talk to me when he was doing it. He would turn in the hall and go the other way and say, “I'm busy. Don't come in here now.” Or he'd have Parish bar the door. As he grew older and got into heroin and other things which make you very egocentric, Jerry had a tendency to use his power more. Parish became his roadie. Parish was very much someone born in the year of the tiger. The kind of guy who liked wielding that power and being physically imposing.

Jerilyn Lee Brandelius:
The Dead and the Who played together in the Oakland Coliseum in October 1976. This was after they came back from their hiatus. On the second day, they opened the show. We were sitting in the dressing room during the break. Pete Townshend came in and he said to Garcia, “I've seen you play three sets and I'm wondering how you figure out what you're going to play. Because it doesn't seem to me like you have a list or anything like that. We've been playing the same set on the entire tour. The same songs.” Jerry said, “Gee, man. I don't know. I never really thought about it. We just kinda get up there and do it.” Pete said, “Wow, that's incredible. That's just amazing.”

A couple weeks after this conversation, we were on the road somewhere and Weir said, “I've been thinking about what Pete Townshend said. I think we should make up a set list.” The guys went, “Ahh, Weir. Stuff it.” He was going, “No, no, no. I think we should have one.” So they said, “Okay, Bob. Make up a set list, we'll play it.” They made up this list of songs and they went out there and started playing. They were playing along and they came to a point where Weir was supposed to know the list. They turned to look at him. Weir looked back at them and they all stopped playing. They just stopped. Because they didn't know what they were supposed to play next.