Authors: Robert Greenfield
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I often think that everything after '86 was a total gift because Jerry came so close to dying so many times when he was in the hospital. There was one crisis after another. The outpouring when he went into the coma was pretty major. Everybody noticed and it raised the interest level tremendously in the Dead. I think it multiplied their business by about a factor of ten.
Len Dell'amico:
They had fulfilled their contract with Arista with
In the Dark
. Clive Davis had been after them. Jerry treated Clive with great respect but he referred to all people in the record industry as “weasels.” Starting in '85, I began going to all the Grateful Dead board meetings because I was now in the circle and I would hang out. Davis wanted them to re-up and sign a new contract and they were like, “All we've got to do is deliver this album and we're out of the contract. Do we want to sign a new one? He wants to make a long-term deal. Obviously, the smart thing to do is to be free of any contract. Have a hit album and cash in.” So then they were like, “Ah, we don't want to talk to them about it.” Davis wanted to meet with them personally and they went, “You tell Davis that if he'll come to Front Street and meet with all of us by himself, we'll meet with him.” They were all going, “He's not going to do it,” and I was hearing, “It's done.” All he had to do was have the nerve to walk into a room with these guys and he was made. He did that and it was. He outbid everybody for
So Far
. Now they were in business together on this video.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
It was so cool because suddenly they had a hit record. When they began to notice that the ball was rolling, they jumped on it very strongly. They did “Touch of Grey” and then they started getting into the videos. Jerry just loved doing those. That was a big challenge for him and he got to hire his friend Gary Gutierrez to do them. We adored Gary Gutierrez and they worked together really really well and were very simpatico. Jerry was excited about these projects and spent a lot of time plotting them out, making sure that everything went right.
Gary Gutierrez:
Jerry sent me the album or at least most of the songs and asked me for my take on what would be a cool video. I listened to it and I called Jerry back and I said, “âTouch of Grey' is the hit on this album.” He said, “Yeah. That sounds cool. If you have an idea.” I said, “It's about surviving and going on, no matter what. So what if we made these full-sized skeletons of you guys and at some live concert, we build a rigging over the stage so we can puppet them like marionettes and then at some point they would transform into the real band to do the last verse and chorus.” He said, “That sounds cool.” Then he started laughing. He just couldn't get over the idea because it was so weird. “You mean, like each band member would have a skeleton of themself? I got these puppeteers backstage to a concert and they watched the band. They watched their basic attitude and their posture and their little ticks. Then we went to Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey and we built this big scaffolding up over the stage. The puppeteers sat up in that scaffolding and they each had a little monitor focused on their puppet. After the concert, they asked the crowd to stay and be a part of the making of this video. Most of the twenty thousand people stayed. They reacted to the skeletons being puppeted on stage to the playback of “Touch of Grey” as if they were the real band. They thought it was hilarious.
The skeletons were full size. We bought anatomical medical skeletons from a medical supply company and then the puppeteers reconstructed the skeletons so they had the same height and body posture of each band member and we got duplicate clothes. Without moving anything, the band members then took the same marks on the stage so we could dissolve between one and the other. Jerry hung out for a long time watching that night because he was interested in the process.
When I finished “Touch of Grey,” I showed it to them while they were rehearsing with Bob Dylan at Front Street. They were really tickled. The video itself got one of the biggest test scores ever on MTV and it was the only one of their videos that got much air play. Primarily because it was the only real hit. The song was the great thing. It was one of those anthems that people could relate to. It had a great feeling about it and I recognized that instantly. I really love the moment in the video when the skeletons come to life and Jerry shakes his head the way he does and says, “I will survive.” That shot is a classic image of Jerry.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
It was really the first time that they had tried anything quite so radical. Then they went on and did “West L.A. Fadeaway.” That was a lot of fun and they did the “Hell in a Bucket” video. It was play for them. It was like, “Finally we're getting to the point where we can actually play with this stuff,” and that felt really good to the band members. Jerry loved it.
Len Dell'amico:
When he was with Mountain Girl and doing well healthwise, I was a regular at their house. I'd go to dinner up there and we'd go to movies and we watched a couple of Super Bowls together and worked on projects.
Sandy Rothman:
I was still in my homeless-with-a-car mode and Jerry knew that. At some point when I was hanging out at his house one day, he said, “Why don't you just stay here?” which was typical of Jerry in those days. So I moved into a spare bedroom that Mountain Girl had there. This was after they'd moved to their big spread in San Rafael with the swimming pool, the last place they had together. Basically, I lived up there for a couple of months and my room was right across the hall from Jerry's room. Whenever we were sleeping, we were about ten feet apart so I became rather intimately acquainted with his sleep habits. Also from hanging out in the main room, where he had these two great big leather recliner chairs. We would sit there watching movies and talking and listening to music and he would nod out a lot and I wondered if it was drug-related. After I had been staying there for a while and I saw his sleep habits, I realized this was common among people with apnea. Such people catch their sleep when they can because the apnea pattern is that you wake yourself up by your own suffocation. You close off your own glottis. I'd hear him doing this constantly at night while he was trying to sleep. He would wake himself up. Usually, he would turn the light on and read and smoke in bed. All his books had long cigarette burns on them.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Actually, I can blame myself a little bit for that. I was smoking at that time myself. There was some stress. I was smoking Camel Lights or something like that for a couple of years and Jerry filched a couple of cigarettes from me. Actually, I think Willie Legate gave him his first cigarette after he got out of the hospital. Willie came over to visit and sat down and smoked a cigarette and Jerry said, “Gee, man, can I have one of those?” Rather reluctantly, Willie gave him one. I don't think you could change him. Even with a life-threatening illness, he was going to be who he was. He did it his way.
Sandy Rothman:
Jerry had a side to him that he tried really hard to develop: This very honest hardworking guy with a family life. He tried this with Sara and it didn't work all that well for him. But he was suited for it schedulewise. He liked to get to gigs early but when he was done, he was ready to get out of there, go back home, watch TV. He might paint or get stoned or whatever but he'd go to bed and then Jerry was always up in the morning. I have always been a lifelong late-night person but Jerry was not. If I wanted to catch him over at the Front Street studio, the best time was always about ten or eleven in the morning. He was there. When I was staying at the house, I would often go out with him because I'd get up early too sometimes just to do whatever he was doing. I ran up to George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch studio with him. He wanted to show me around and he was real proud of knowing the whole layout up there. Mostly, I would sleep much later than him. I would get up and he would already be napping in the front room in the big leather recliner with the TV on.
Justin Kreutzmann:
He liked Scorsese movies. He loved
Apocalypse Now
. We had great discussions about Francis Coppola's
Dracula
and he'd talk about how the good parts were great because they were the parts in the book that were great. But then when the book gave up on its narrative, that was also when the movie fell flat. Which was neat because when am I ever going to read
Dracula
?
Sage Scully:
We decided to go see the movie Rain Man and it was Trixie, a friend of hers, Jerry, and myself. We got in the car and it was pouring down rain. We drove out there and smoked a joint and I was kind of paranoid about his driving because it was the first time he'd ever driven the car with me in it. It was right when he got that big black BMW that he loved so much. We got there, finally found a parking spot, got in line, and Jerry had forgotten to bring money. Actually, I think he was searching around in his pockets and he pulled out a twenty and the manager let us in for free anyway. There were no seats left inside so we had to walk all the way up to the front row and we sat down and we had people come up to get autographs. The movie started and he fell asleep and started snoring so loud that I lost it and started to laugh hysterically. He snored through the entire
Rain Man
.
Sandy Rothman:
He was an excessive person but he also thought excessively. Jerry couldn't turn himself off. I'm not a God person but if you want to look at it from the strictly spiritual point of view, why did anybody give him sleep apnea to wake him up every fifteen minutes? It was his brain and at that point, it was also his body. Because he was so heavy, it was hard for him to lie back. A hospital bed would have been small change for him to buy. It would have been a lot easier for him because he could have napped much more comfortably. Instead, he had his recliner in the front room.
Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
We started taking family vacations together and that was wonderful. During this period of recuperation, we went to Hawaii. Up to this point, we had never taken a vacation. There was always work. They always had a show to go to or a record to work on. For Jerry, playing with all those different bands, there was certainly no time for vacations. We went to Hawaii and we loved it so much. There was a cockroach in our room that scared the hell out of both of us. As soon as we'd turn out the light, this cockroach would start to fly around the room and bang into things. Jerry said, “What's that? What's that?” He'd hit at it and turn the light on and the cockroach would immediately dive behind the bed. He'd rip the bed out of the wall and take his briefcase and try to smash it with his briefcase, chasing this cockroach all over the room.
He went out on his first dive and he loved it so much and I couldn't do it. Literally, I have claustrophobia. I had a panic attack and they went off merrily diving. He took Annabelle and Trixie and they dove down and they saw all sorts of wonderful things and I was absolutely unable to get it together to go down there so they left me behind and I was furious. I think it would have helped if I'd had a different instructor but the instructors were all focused on Jerry.
I was cooking and I was cleaning, same old stuff, and my feet hurt and I was a little bit crabby but I really really really loved it. And he blossomed. He adored it. He went out and got a vicious sunburn and had a great dear time. We shopped for Hawaiian shirts and we did all that silly stuff you were supposed to do. We had drinks with parasols in them, ate great seafood, and met a bunch of really nice Hawaiian guys who were dive people and Jerry just fell in love with diving. For him it was the other world. We went home and we said, “We're going to go again.” So we did. We turned right around and came back a couple of months later and did it again and went over three or four times.
Laird Grant:
Jerry was feeling bad about not coming up to see me at my house so he sent me a ticket to go diving with him in Hawaii. I went over there and Jerry said, “Hey, man. We'll go to the shop and have the guy take you out and certify you. I'll cover it.” I said, “God, Jerry. That costs thousands of dollars.” He said, “So what, man? If you want to do it, go do it and then you and I can go down to a hundred feet and fuck around with stuff in the dark.” I said, “Fuck you, Garcia. I ain't going on no night dive.” He said, “Oh yeah, you are, man. I'm going to pay for your diving so I'm going to get you down there at night.”
Len Dell'amico:
Nineteen eighty-seven is a book all by itself. Touring with Bob Dylan. For me, it reached biblical proportions. Ninety thousand people. Daytime shows with screens the size of my house. It literally took an eighty-ton crane to put the show in place. I was at the board meeting at Front Street where they were saying, “Who should we tour with in the summer of '87?” Dylan's name was thrown out there. By me actually, and they picked it up and ran with it. I'd always been a Dylan-phile. I noticed that Jerry did Dylan material so as soon as I was a friend of Jerry's, I started asking him about Dylan and he was a little reticent. He didn't really want to talk to me about Bob. He said, “We talk on the phone.” I said, “What's he like?” “He's a great guy.” I said, “What do you do together?” Jerry said, “We were playing in New York and he called me up at the hotel. He came over in his van and picked me up at the hotel and we drove around the city all night. He showed me places that he thought were cool and we talked all night.”
While Jerry and I were editing one of those Dead video projects in '81, Dylan was on his Christian tour. On that tour he was abandoned by the press and the media. I wasn't eager to go see this material. I was at Garcia's house working on the video when Rock Scully came in and said, “Jerry, I hear that Dylan's playing at the Warfield and it's not even a quarter sold out.” Jerry stopped and he said, “Yeah?” Scully went, “Yeah. You don't want to see it or anything?” Jerry said, “I want to play. I want to go down there and play.” Scully was like, “Oh, okay.” It was very clear to me that Jerry was going to make a statement. There was a little discussion there about, “Do you know what Bob's into now?” Jerry said, “Aah. Fuck that. I'm there.” He was saying, “I want to be there. I want to help.” That showed me something about solidarity and about stars not being in that world of their own image.