Dark Star (28 page)

Pete Townshend:
With the Dead, it was all on stage. They were having a good time. They enjoyed one another's company. One of them might walk off halfway through and go chat with somebody. It was slow. It was easy. They were taking their time. They were being almost mystical about the process. They were not striving for success. There was no stress. There was no success ethic. They were moving like Gypsies across the planet and they just happened in that place. I always knew they would carry on until Jerry Garcia was old and gray.

John “Marmaduke” Dawson:
Jerry would insist on his right to do whatever he wanted. If Mountain Girl got on his case about the smack, she would have been out of there.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
A year went by and I was getting really tired of where we were living in Oregon. I packed everybody back in the VW van, rolled up the rug and put all the books in, and off I went back to the house in Stinson Beach. I'd been back about six weeks and there was a knock on the door and it was Jerry. He came in, looked around, and he said, “I'm moving back in.” And that was it. He moved back in. I guess he was tired of running around. I never did really find out what precipitated this but he moved back in and things went back to the way they were before and I was thrilled. I was so happy to see him. I was just ecstatic and the kids were ecstatic. At the time, Annabelle was seven and Trixie was three. We'd gotten him back. We'd gotten another go-round. Unfortunately, the day before he knocked on the door, I had sold the house. I'd made a deal with a guy the night before and then here came Jerry and he wanted to move back in. I said, “Well, sweetie, that's great but …” Instead, I moved us up to this beautiful house in Inverness with a pool. It was really neat. We moved out there and we went to Egypt. We took the Grateful Dead to Egypt.

Richard Loren:
The Dead went on hiatus. During that period of time, I got a chance to take a vacation. I went to Egypt for three weeks. I loved it. I came back and I said, “Jerry. God, Egypt was really fantastic.” I went back the next year. I was on a horse around the pyramid and I looked at the pyramid and I saw this stage. I said, “Wow, maybe the Dead could play here.” I looked at the Egyptian people. They smoked hash, they were high, they had this wonderful attitude about life not unlike the Deadheads. The place had an appeal that was absolutely timeless. I came back to Jerry and I said, “Let me lay this on you because I don't know if this is something you want to do.” When I said Egypt to Jerry, his ears perked up right away. He said, “We have to meet with the band.” We met with the band. They all said, “Yeah, let's do it man. Yeah, far out.” For the next year, I tried to put this thing together. I made three trips to Washington. Phil Lesh and Alan Trist came with me and we met the Egyptian ambassador. Later, we went to Cairo and met with the American ambassador to Egypt.

Alan Trist:
The key moment was when Phil, Richard Loren, and I had an audience with the Egyptian ambassador in Washington. He was the one who was going to say yes or no. He said to Phil, “Why do you want to do this?” Phil gave him a musician's answer. He said, “Over the years, we have learned that we play differently in different places. This is what interests us and we can't think of anywhere we would really like to hear how we would play more than at the Great Pyramid.”

Richard Loren:
We didn't announce it to the press until the night before we took off. We did a press conference and we were on the plane the next day. So nobody could cancel it. I was extremely careful because I didn't want this to be a drug bust setup for them. I had the assurances of the State Department that we weren't being set up there. So I felt comfortable going there and sure enough it was a great success. We played three nights in a row under a full moon in lunar eclipse.

Mickey Hart:
We said, “We could be a finger on the hand of peace.” This was during the whole Sadat thing. They were having peace talks and it was a time when we could have made a difference. We always wanted to go to the pyramids. It was a Grateful Dead fantasy right from the beginning. This just happened to be the time that the wheel came around in the revolver. And we wanted to take all of our family. The kids, the dogs, the cats. We wanted everybody to go to Egypt for a blast.

Sue Stephens:
Traveling with Jerry through Egypt was a kick. In Egypt, they called anybody with excess hair “The Moustache.” In Egypt, Jerry became “The Big Moustache.” He just had this presence. We were starting to call him the “Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah.” One of the ways that the Egyptians would inspect you was they would make you step out of your shoes and walk around your shoes and then put them back on. Maybe people smuggled stuff in their shoes over there. Poor Jerry. Everywhere we would go on these short little hops, they kept picking on “The Big Moustache.” They totally zeroed in on him. Not knowing who he was as far as a rock star or anything. He drew that kind of attention. He was just that kind of person. I think his molecules were more dense than most people's.

Ken Kesey:
They played for the smallest paying audience since the Acid Test. There were six hundred and ninety some people there who had paid. But they would take the spotlights and shine them out into the desert and there would be thousands and thousands of bedouins with camels. There was only a fence and then there was the Sahara Desert. The way the Nile Valley was, they could hear the concert all the way in Cairo.

It started off with Hamsa el-Din playing the oud. He had flown in twenty-four of his old schoolmates. They were blacker than a pair of binoculars and they wore these beautiful pastel djellabas and pastel turbans. Light light blue and light yellows and purples. I couldn't see their hands or their faces. All I could see were their eyes and teeth floating around out there. The Egyptians and the Saudis had come to hear rock 'n' roll and here were these black kids doing this little kid's dance. It was equivalent to “patty-cake, patty-cake.” As they worked it, Mickey Hart went out there and began to drum with them. They had tambourines and they were doing this little chant. Phil picked it up. Pretty soon, I heard Jerry pick up the lick on guitar. Gradually, all the Dead were playing this. Without a grinding of gears, those twenty-four dancing Sudanese began to fade back into these piles of equipment.

Without changing the beat or changing chords, the Dead went right into “I wanna tell you how it's gonna be …” I thought, “This is the way cultures really get to know each other. Not around the diplomatic table but through music. Taking a twelve-tone scale and a very complicated rhythm and working it right into Buddy Holly without a glitch.” It was the best show business I had ever seen in my life. Bar none. Just absolutely wonderful.

Richard Loren:
I was counting on that show to raise a half a million dollars to pay for the trip. We wanted to do a three album set. “The Grateful Dead in Egypt” with pictures and so on. It was going to be wonderful but what happened was that there wasn't a set out of the three sets that they did that they could even put together to make one album. It was so bad and there was a reason for that. Just before they left America, the piano tuner quit because the crew wouldn't let his family on stage during the show. In Egypt, we couldn't find a piano tuner in time and the piano kept going out of tune. It wasn't because of the King's Chamber or because they tried to do something special. Because of a stupid little thing like that, we lost a half a million dollars. If you don't think that had an effect on the Grateful Dead's finances over the next five years, it did.

Mickey Hart:
We were going to make a record, which never turned out. We were going to make a film, which never turned out. We were going to pay for it, which never happened. We ended up half a million dollars in debt.

Alan Trist:
If he could have, Jerry would have done more of this stuff. Having fun and doing all the interesting gigs. We wanted to play everywhere. The Egypt concerts brought up other fantasies: “Let's go and play in Israel. Let's go play in the Antarctic. Let's go and play Easter Island, India, everywhere. Let's go around the world and play in all the great spaces.” The difficulty of moving everything around was part of the problem. The other part was drugs. Because at this point, Jerry was moving into a definite needfulness. That was what withheld him from being able to do the things he really wanted to do.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
It was a terrific trip but Jerry was starting to chip on painkillers. John Kahn had broken his ankle and Jerry and John Kahn got into a thing with painkillers over there. All I knew was that Jerry was getting into taking downers of some sort. He was getting into downers and it was really hard for us because we didn't know what the hell was the matter with him. All I knew was that he seemed to be really depressed. To me, depression reads as unhappiness. To me, that meant he was unhappy with me. So I was constantly trying to compensate for all that and that was a lot of work. I started to get this really bad backache. In retrospect, I can see that I was carrying a huge load at this time. I had the kids. I had a business that was losing money and Jerry wasn't very supportive of me. I couldn't feel his support anymore for what I was doing and I suddenly realized I had to quit that business. I tried to find somebody to take it from me and failed and then I finally did find somebody.

By the time I did, Jerry was starting to get sick. He was starting to become a junkie. I didn't know what that was. I just knew that it was bad and that it was wrong and I couldn't deal with it. None of this language about recovery had yet been invented. No one knew a darned thing about it. As far as I was concerned, I was out there all by myself on the North Pole with it. Basically, I just told him that it was over. Until he got straightened out, I didn't want him to come back to the house. It was not a good scene. Because he couldn't understand why I had suddenly turned on him like that. I said, “Look, man. If this is what you're going to do, I don't want any part of it. I can't have any part of it.”

In retrospect, it was the biggest mistake I ever made. I wasn't at fault but I didn't know that then. So I took it really hard when he didn't bounce back. That was really a tough time. Just to get away, I went off to the East Coast. But I remember the appalling sadness that we all felt.

 

Hal Kant:
You have to distinguish the band from the individuals. They all treated their finances differently. Jerry treated his as though he really didn't care about what he was making. As long as he had his per diem and he could create, he was happy.

Richard Loren:
So now we were in debt. We had a bank loan we had to pay, we were in debt from the movie, we were in debt from Egypt. I had to work the next four or five years as a manager trying to get them solvent. I never had the luxury of being with a wealthy Grateful Dead. Before '72, they'd had nothing. They had just been a working man's band. Now they knew what the taste of a new car was. They knew what the taste of owning a home was. A new guitar. Now they had a taste for money. Plus there was the introduction of heroin.

Tom Davis:
I'd first met Jerry in 1971 when I wandered backstage at Winterland at a benefit for the Sufi dancers. I had this beautiful girl on my arm and we'd been taking barbiturates and LSD and the crowd just parted for us and we walked right through doorways and upstairs. I got right behind Jerry's amp and it looked like a joint that he was smoking. I took a huge hit off of it and smoked the whole thing till I discovered it was a Pall Mall cigarette. I had no business being there at all but nobody kicked me off until the show was over. I just smoked his cigarette and he let me sort of drool on the amplifier which at that time had tie dye on it.

In 1978, I was doing
Saturday Night Live
in New York and I asked Lorne Michaels to book the Grateful Dead. He did not want the Grateful Dead on the show because they were not hip enough. I literally got on my knees and begged, “Please, do me one favor and let the Grateful Dead play. Please, please.” And he said, “All right, all right.” They ended up playing “Casey Jones.” I remember the director put an ‘X' on the floor and said, “Jerry, this is Dave the director. Where are you going to be when you're playing like that?” Jerry said, “I don't know.” “You've got to tell me where you're going to be or you're not going to be in the picture.” Jerry said, “I don't care.” At that point, Jerry was ready to walk. He was pissed but they did the show. NBC came very close to getting their entire staff doped that day. Their coffee machine came very close to getting dosed.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
I met Jerry in '78 in Chicago on Mickey Mouse's fiftieth birthday. I was going to Shimer College in Illinois. My friends at college mentioned to me that they had bought Jerry a pumpkin the year earlier when he played in the Chicago area and inside the pumpkin, they had written a note that said, “Manasha says hi!” I didn't even know that they had done this. I'd actually had a dream about Jerry a few nights before he played on
Saturday Night Live
, which was November 12. I had dreamed that he had done the peace sign and when he was on
Saturday Night Live
at the end of their last song, he did do the peace sign so I was amazed.

My friend and I went to the concert that weekend in the Uptown Theatre in Chicago. I thought it would be a good idea to do a pumpkin again. My friend was into topographical maps and I found a spot on the map called Terrapin Ridge and there was a train station that ran through it. It's the highest point in Illinois. So I had a copy of the map and I put it inside this pumpkin and I carved the pumpkin in a hotel. I went to the show and that was November 17, 1978. I went up to the front and I gave Jerry the pumpkin. He had just come on stage. He hadn't started playing yet. He took the pumpkin from me and said, “Thank you,” and he was really delighted.