Dark Star (36 page)

Nicki Scully:
Bob Dylan was doing his “You Got to Serve Somebody” tour and he was playing the Warfield and it was not selling well. Bill Graham got this bright idea that if he got Jerry to play with him, he'd fill the house. So he called up and got me on the phone and said, “Will you go down and ask Jerry if he wants to play with Bob Dylan?” I got really excited and I ran down the stairs and I said, “Jerry, do you want to play with Bob Dylan?” And Jerry said, “Who wants to know?” I said, “Bill's on the phone. He wants to know if …” He said, “Is it Bill or is it Bob who wants me to come play?” I went up and I asked Bill and Bill said, “Bob.” I went down and told Jerry and he said, “Yeah.” Parish showed up with his guitar that night at the show and Dylan's people were like, “What the hell's going on?” Jerry showed up and got this whole sort of nothing vibe from Dylan and his people. The show sold out and Jerry played in the background but it was done and it worked. Jerry got home and he said to me, “Dylan didn't know I was coming.” I went, “Oh, shit.” I felt like the scum of the earth. Like I was going to be on his shit list forever. Then he said to me, “But it was worth it. Because it has always been my dream.”

Len Dell'amico:
What I saw in '87 was that Dylan loved being in the setting. He had a bodyguard but by the time he'd come to the door at Front Street by himself, he was the most ethereal presence I ever experienced. He loved it. He'd come in there and the crew would go, “Hey, Bob” and then turn their backs on him. The Grateful Dead crew was just perfect for that. He was treated just like anybody else and maybe that was where that pedal-to-the-metal thing started because when they were rehearsing, everybody knew something big was coming. When they went out on the road that summer, Dylan had trouble with the Dead because compared to his garage bands, the Dead were like an orchestra and so I think he was very intimidated. When they rehearsed, it was looser but once they got on with the shows, it was probably hard for Dylan to go out in front of seventy and eighty thousand fans who were there for the Dead and then try to fit his thing into this wall of sound.

Justin Kreutzmann:
At the end of a show, we'd always rush to the vans because we wanted to beat the audience out. We were out by like six seconds after the encore tune and usually we'd get into two vans and we'd have a police escort, which everyone was really embarrassed about because we never needed it to drive through these little backroads districts. As we'd go through these little towns, Garcia would always laugh with Weir and say, “With the police pulling up and the sirens going off, you can almost hear people flushing their drugs down the toilet.” Then they'd get to the hotel. In the early days. Weir's room always doubled as the party suite. Sometimes Jerry would come in and be really social. He'd sit on the floor with his shoes off and rap with the girls about stuff and we'd drink some champagne. I remember this one girl sitting there. She must have been sixteen or seventeen from either North or South Carolina and she was pretty. Because to enter the Weir ranks and inner sanctum, you had to be pretty good-looking. Jerry said, “Okay, I'm going to tell you this story. But I'm going to need fifteen minutes to collect my thoughts and then I won't be able to speak to you for five minutes after I've told you the importance of the story.” She was like, “What?” Then he went into this thing and I was thinking, “I wish I had a tape recorder for this.” Because it was just so him and it was so cool and it made so much sense. If you ever detected any cockiness in Jerry, it was always so hidden in humor. Like when he and I would be watching MTV, it'd be funny listening to him comment on those guitar players. This was in the eighties when heavy metal was totally all you saw on MTV and he was like, “I don't get it. God, it's just so mindless.”

 

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
And so, the old familiar friends came back to grace or curse him as you will and Jerry started to use again. All his friends were really worried about him but Jerry was very good at hiding what he did.

Sandy Rothman:
At that time, I didn't know about the heroin. I wasn't aware of it.

David Nelson:
Jerry and Sandy Rothman and I and John Kahn had just played together and we were in the back room and we'd done four or five traditional songs, old-timey stuff and some bluegrass. Bill Graham came in and he was raving. “That was great,” he said. “I could see where the roots of your music and the Grateful Dead music come from.” Jerry was going, “That's right, Bill.” Bill said, “This is such a thing. I've got to take this somewhere. I've got to put this on somewhere. But I don't know where. I need an idea.” Jerry went, “Uh, take it to Broadway, Bill.” And we all went, “Yeah. Right.” It was just a joke. And Bill went,
“Broadway!”
He left the room and the next thing I knew we were booked to do eighteen shows at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. They all sold out as soon as they went on sale. They sold out in a matter of hours.

Bob Barsotti:
The Nederlanders took out a full-page in
Variety
congratulating the Jerry Garcia Band on having the biggest first day of sales in the history of Broadway, a record which was broken about six months later by
Phantom of the Opera
. Prior to Jerry, it was a record that had been in place for many years.

David Nelson:
It was like a drug being on Broadway. I mean, how were you going to say no to that, man?

Sandy Rothman:
It was an incredible dream. I will always consider that to be certainly a pinnacle of anything I ever did in music. It was simply incredible. Jerry was in heaven but that tour worked him way too hard. Setting it up the way he did where he was opening for himself was about the hardest thing there is to do.

David Nelson:
Those matinee shows were really work for Jerry. We'd have to put him to sleep up there in the upper dressing room which had been Vivien Leigh and then Mary Martin's dressing room. On those matinee days, he'd have to take a little nap.

Sandy Rothman:
He was playing in two bands. The tour's name was
Jerry Garcia, Acoustic and Electric
. We'd play acoustic for at least forty-five minutes. Then he'd take a break. Go up, eat, whatever, and then come back with the electric band and play a blockbuster. Jerry was in heaven but in an overarching sense. It was heaven but it was really hard. We also did rehearsals. Oftentimes, there were sound checks every day. In fact, some of those sound checks were better than the shows. Jerry was probably in that theater from one or two in the afternoon till after midnight.

Bob Barsotti:
The first night, Jerry was sitting up in the balcony and they were doing some sound checking and lighting checks and he was just sitting up in the balcony doodling. The fire marshal was a young guy. After about two minutes, I realized he was a Deadhead. So I said, “Why don't we go upstairs and I'll introduce you to Jerry.” This guy went, “Oh. Jerry's here?” I took him up to the balcony. “Jerry, I want to introduce you to the fire marshal.” “How're you doing?” Jerry was shaking his hand and being really friendly and the fire marshal was about ready to fall over. By the time we were done, he'd approved every one of the innovations I'd come up with. “Oh, dancing in the lobby? No problem. Speaker cables across the floor? Just make sure they're taped down.” All these things that had never happened before in a theater in New York were happening and it was simply because this guy had gotten to meet Jerry. Later that night, I came back to Jerry and I said, “Jerry, you wouldn't believe what you did for my meeting with that guy.” And he went, “Oh, I could tell.” He absolutely knew what I was doing by introducing him to the guy.

Sandy Rothman:
Jerry had so much self-vision that he could sometimes caricature his own caricature. When we were playing those Broadway gigs, Steve Parish would come up to get us ready to go on and say, “Okay, ten minutes.” And Garcia'd say, “Yeah yeah yeah” and we'd all be ready and all tuned up. And there would be Garcia smoking a couple more cigarettes, eating some cheese or something, and it would be time to go on. It would be past time to go on. Parish would come back. Now, in my world of music playing, you don't do that. When it's time to go on, you're out there. But the rock world and the Grateful Dead world is different. Jerry and Parish would play-act this thing and I'm sure it had happened a lot in Dead scenes. Parish would go up to him, “Come on, come on. It's time to go.” Some days, Jerry would go and be sprightly about it. Then there were a couple of times when he would play-act this thing like he was being led off to a dungeon. Jerry would bow his head down really low and droop his arms down primate-style. Parish would have his guitar and Jerry would just be this limp doll and Parish would be pulling the edge of his coat collar. Garcia would play it to the hilt. He'd say, “Okay, Steve. Yeah, yeah, sure, man. Yeah yeah yeah, I'll go. I'll go …” He would have us all in stitches.

Bob Barsotti:
There was a set of people who were there every night and then there were people who came in shifts. The great one was standing out in front of the theater and seeing these three young guys come walking up from the subway. They all had gym bags and they all started taking their suits off and stuffing the coats into the gym bags and pulling out their tie-dyed shirts and putting them on. Then they went in with their T-shirts over their slacks and their hard shoes. It was really a trip. Those shows added a dimension to Jerry that hadn't been there before. He'd done Old and In the Way and he'd done the New Riders but they were all club things. By going on Broadway, he put this certain stamp of class on rock 'n' roll that had never happened before. He didn't even have to change what he was doing to do it. He got to be himself and go to Broadway.

 

Gloria Dibiase:
Jerry and MG moved into a big house in the hills of San Rafael where they lived together for a while and then they split up. Jerry bought a house in the Dominican College area of San Rafael where he lived by himself. Around that time, I met Manasha on a bus on my way to a Dead show at the Oakland Coliseum. She was very friendly and pleasant. Weeks later, we met again at the health food store next to the hologram gallery I was managing. When she told me that she was pregnant with Jerry's baby, I was floored. I almost fainted. It was so mind-boggling to me.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
I found out that I was going to have a baby. Jerry was really thrilled. He was happy that I was going to have the baby. He offered to rent us a house and I didn't act on it right away because I felt kind of odd about it. So I stayed here and there while I was pregnant and then towards the end of my pregnancy, I finally said, “Yeah. Okay.” Keelin was born in San Anselmo at the end of '87. Actually, her due date was Christmas. Jerry wanted to move into our house that he was renting for us. I gave it a lot of thought and I thought it might be better if we had a separate place because it was a small place and I thought he needed his privacy somewhat. He seemed to need a lot of solitude. So he didn't move in. Even though he had maintained that he didn't have a relationship with Carolyn all through that time, he enjoyed being with his two older children because he hadn't had the time to do that before. I thought that was good for him and I didn't really want to disrupt that. So I said, “Why don't you stay there and see how things work out?”

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Jerry never really wanted to marry anyone. He claimed he was not the marrying type. In terms of Manasha, she was somebody for him to go visit, somebody to surprise. Then she had a little girl and I think that was attractive for him. He really enjoyed that little girl. Our kids were older. Annabelle had moved off to Alaska. Trixie had moved into a place in Oakland so she could go to college over in the East Bay. They were each off on their own trip and he just didn't seem all that interested in what they were doing. For him, the magic was in this relationship with that little girl and there was nothing I could do about those things so I just let go. That was extremely hard to do but it did get done.

Vince Dibiase:
At the shows, one night you'd see MG. One night, you'd see Manasha.

Len Dell'amico:
In '87, we were mixing
So Far
. When we shot the Dead doing “Throwing Stones” in Marin Civic Auditorium for it, one of the drummers did some upchuck thing they'd never done before. Garcia looked up and gave this big grin. They went into this big instrumental and Jerry was grinning and looking all around and Bobby was singing these incredible lyrics and Jerry just screamed out, “Yeah!” into the mike, which was something he never did. The picture was all cut and we were in final mix on it and Jerry went, “Of course we've got to take out that ‘Yeah!'” He wanted it out because it was not music. He was a purist and they were all always that way. No artifice. I was crushed. What the fans were dying to see was the expression of real emotion and it was real. Why would you ever want to take it out? I thought he was pulling my leg. I said, “You can't do this to me.” When Arista showed it in theaters in premieres, they had audiences full of Deadheads. In one theater in L.A. when they showed it, the Deadheads made the person in charge of the tape deck play that section over and over again.

Bob Barsotti:
This was in '87 right after they'd hit it really big. Right at that point in his career, Jerry was healthy and he was clear and he was playing his ass off, doing some of his best music, I think. Really, really challenging stuff and he was getting offers from everybody all over the place. All the great musicians in the world wanted to do stuff with him and he lined up this improvisational tour that he was going to do with Edie Brickell and Bruce Hornsby and Branford Marsalis and a really great drummer and a bass player. They were going to go into theaters and walk out on stage and talk to the audience for a few minutes about subject matter. “Okay, we need some subject matter for the songs tonight and we need some general direction on what you'd like to hear and in which direction we should go.” They would get some feedback from the audience and Edie would write down some subject stuff and then they'd just try playing for a couple of hours and see what happened. All improv. Jerry's people got all the managers to agree to the deal. Then his girlfriend, Manasha, accused him of wanting to do it because he was having an affair with Edie Brickell. That was why he wanted to do this whole thing and how dare he get into this project and blah de blah de blah and she put all this pressure on Jerry until he bailed. I don't believe he was having an affair with Edie Brickell. He just loved to play music with her because she was a great improvisational musician. Only she was a singer and she could sing lyrics improvisationally, making them up as she went along. That was the kind of thing that Jerry was all for. But he didn't have it in him to stand up and say, “This is what I want to do.” Instead, he just escaped further into his trip. I could see that each time one of these great projects slipped away, so would he. It happened over a couple of years and it was sad.