Dark Star (44 page)

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
Jerry got us another house as an alternative because he wanted to get us a place to live. I tried to set up a lot of meetings between him and Keelin where I wouldn't be there but it never happened. It just never happened.

Dexter Johnson:
I went backstage to see Jerry and David Grisman at the Warfield in January '94. There were problems at this gig because both Jerry's and David's sound crews had come and neither of them wanted to bow out. Jerry just wanted to play and have a good time. After the first set, he was so pissed that he tore off his headphones. Then he walked straight off stage. Didn't look at the band or the audience or anyone standing backstage.

Downstairs, Jerry was walking back and forth and everybody was giving him room and he was literally steaming but nobody did anything. Finally, I went up and put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Jerry, what is it?” He said, “I can't hear anything. They pay good money for these shows and I can't fucking hear the guitar. Nobody can hear right. This isn't the way it's supposed to be.” I said, “If you think it's the pickup, maybe I can help.” I'm a guitar maker and he was like, “Yeah. Get the guitar to Dexter. This is lucky! We got Dexter.” He was happy.

So they were told to go get the guitar. Jerry went off to sit in the back room with David and I started waiting. After ten minutes, there was no guitar. I went up the stairs to the stage and there was one of his roadies with the guitar in his lap and a cigarette going and he'd put three new strings on it. I could have easily strung the guitar in moments. I said, “Oh, hey. I was going to work on the guitar for Jerry.” He said, “We got it covered, man.” And he just waved me away.

I went downstairs and I said, “David, they won't give me the guitar.” He said, “Did you tell Jerry?” I said, “I don't want to upset him again.” David turned around and went in the back and yelled, “Your fucking roadies! I've had it with them.” Jerry stood up. But he'd mellowed out somehow. He said, “Forget it. We'll just do the rest of the show and it'll be fine.” We told some stories and visited and laughed and he went out there and finished the show and played a great second half.

Later on, I was told that when I went up and put my hand on Jerry's shoulder and said, “What is it, man?” one of the big bodyguards who were at every door lunged towards me and said, “That guy shouldn't be talking to Jerry.” All these guys in the back room were playing cards during the show. They didn't even listen to the show. They were talking about meeting some broads later and playing cards. The whole thing saddened me. To me, it didn't seem like a fun place to be.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
Jerry went off and he filed for divorce at the end of '93 and he remarried about three weeks after our divorce was final. He had been making the rounds of his old girlfriends and I had never met Barbara before but I really liked her and enjoyed her. She seemed to be okay. But when he got together with Deborah, that was it for me. I said, “Oh, I can't do any more here.”

Rev. Matthew Fox:
It was Deborah who called me and she said that she and Jerry had read my book
Original Blessing
and were very turned on by it. I had to tell them that the pope was not too happy with what I was doing and they said, “Oh, great. An outlaw priest for an outlaw marriage.” I sat with them before the wedding. Jerry came late and he seemed very joyous, very happy. I was not a Deadhead but I was certainly charmed by him. He and Deborah were cooing and very loving together. I don't do windows and I don't do weddings but I was pleased to do this for them and in fact, I did get seats for a Dead show after the wedding. I very much liked the ritual aspect of it but would have liked to see it more organized.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
Jerry married her because she had this business sense. He was starting to like that in women and she was trying to do movies and he liked that artistic ability, too. They lived separately.

Gloria Dibiase:
After Jerry married, he continued to live by himself in his own house. That's the way he wanted it to be.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
I'd played them a twelfth-century version of “Ave Maria” that they'd liked very much and with all the talented people they knew, a friend of Jerry's, David Grisman, played it on the mandolin for the ceremony. When they came to me, I was a Dominican father but by the time I married them, I had become an Episcopalian. Not an Episcopalian priest so I had to have an Episcopalian priest assist me in the ceremony. Jerry was half an hour late for the wedding and very upset. His limo driver had not come and so he was a little frantic there for a while but once Steve Parish calmed him down, he was joyful again. I believe he was wearing a tux.

Vince Dibiase:
I had acute pancreatitis and I got snowed in in New York and Jerry wanted me to get him his wedding shoes. He said, “Vince, I want a pair of glove-leather soft shoes. No seams. Black.” There I was in eighteen inches of snow with acute pancreatitis but I finally found them and shipped them to him. They arrived on his wedding day. Those were the pair he wore. He had four other pairs of shoes that people had gotten him. Not even close. But I found them.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
The marriage was done in a small Episcopal chapel. Because it was to be kept secret from the press, it was a small, intimate ceremony, not very grand at all. After the ceremony, I actually did do a sermon in which I talked about the postmodern marriage. When it was all over, there was a reception at a club in Marin County.

Gloria Dibiase:
The reception was in Sausalito at a yacht club. All the details were kept secret until the day of the wedding and then we were told where to go. The whole band was there. David Grisman was there. Jerry seemed happy.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
After that, I didn't see him much except at Rex Foundation board meetings.

Hal Kant:
The structure of the Rex Foundation was my idea because for a lot of corporate and tax reasons, it was not appropriate for the Grateful Dead to give large sums of money directly to charity. The idea of the foundation was a mechanical concept. The idea of giving money was their idea. The band itself was always a minority on the board. They'd all have a lot of fun at those meetings because as I am the designated conservative in the Grateful Dead family, I was always questioning what they wanted and they were resisting what I wanted. Oddly enough, at the last meeting Jerry attended, we joined with each other on almost every item against everybody else. Trying to be more practical and I would say from his standpoint, a lot more conservative.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
I remember going to dinner with Deborah and Jerry after the wedding and he was just like a child. He had gotten a new telescope and he was so pleased to be setting it up and showing it to me. Like a four-year-old with a new toy. Then he took me over to his computer and showed me how to paint on it. I had never worked with anything like that before and he was delighted when I started getting into it. Really, the joyous childlike side of him was remarkable. Especially considering how much else was obviously at work in his life. I'm fifty-five. The childlike joy that he had at fifty-three was remarkable. We discussed many things at dinner, theology beyond Catholicism, and I realized that this man was a philosopher.

Gloria Dibiase:
Jerry needed a bigger place to live. He wanted four bedrooms and we looked at all these different places for five or six thousand dollars a month rent. They were beautiful places but we wanted to be a little bit more economical. This friend of mine, a real estate agent, said, “I want you to look at one more place.” It turned out to be this incredible house on Audrey Court in Tiburon. High on a hill. Beautiful view. You could see part of the Bay Bridge, San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tam. He was the king of the hill.

Vince Dibiase:
He said, “Take it and I'll look at it next week.” He did stuff like that all the time. We weren't buying the house. It was a rental but still, he did that all the time. He did that to me in the art business. I'd go and proof his art and do press checks and everything. He wouldn't come and do it so I would go up and do it for him. Then I would have to sit there holding my breath as he looked at it to let me know if he was going to accept the job or not. Usually, he did accept it.

Gloria Dibiase:
Jerry loved the house. He wanted to buy it later on. According to Jerry, Jerry and Deborah were going to move in together at some point, which they never did. She kept her house in Mill Valley. Then he wanted to buy this place because he loved it very much but he couldn't.

 

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
By this time, I think he wanted to be straight but he was traveling around with all these heavy suppliers and it was hard. When he'd been with Barbara, Barbara was glued, man. They were together all the time. Every time I saw her, they were together.

Bob Barsotti:
We were doing a Jerry Garcia Band date in Phoenix in May '94 and he was looking really really bad. It was our last date in this little swing of dates and he played the first set. He came off after about forty-five minutes and he went into his dressing room and he collapsed. Steve Parish went in and saw him and he said Jerry looked like he had when he went into his coma. The same look on his face and the pale skin. Steve said, “Bob, he has to go.” I said, “Let's send him to the hospital.” “No, he wants to fly home.” “Why don't you just take him to a hospital?” “No, no, no. He wants to fly home.” Steve had the pilot call every town on the way to make sure there was an ambulance number or a doctor on call there. They had a private jet so they flew him home and then it took a good day or two before he actually went to the doctor. He wouldn't go.

Vince Dibiase:
Gloria was at Jerry's house in Tiburon when he came home after walking off stage in Phoenix when he got sick. Gloria called me and said, “Vince, Jerry doesn't look good.” I remember going over there and he was wheezing badly while he was trying to breathe. We got Randy on the phone.

Dr. Randy Baker:
In the spring of 1994, he started developing problems again. He had a recurrence of his diabetes. And so I worked with him a lot in 1994 trying to help him handle his diabetes, working with medication and herbs and diet and lifestyle. I even created visualizations to help him with the diabetes.

Vince Dibiase:
The following day, he was supposed to go to Ireland with Deborah. She hadn't seen Jerry yet because she had not gone on that Jerry Garcia Band tour. I think she stayed to go to George Lucas's fiftieth birthday party, which really upset Jerry a lot because he wanted her on the tour with him. I said to him, “You're going to Europe tomorrow? How can you go to Europe tomorrow?” I said, “You're going to come home in a box if you go, man. Look at you.” He said, “No. I can't do it. I can't do it. I just can't do it.”

Deborah went off to Ireland. We moved in with him in Tiburon and we stayed there for at least four weeks, just Gloria and I. He wanted us there to monitor him, which worried the hell out of me because normally he never complained. He wouldn't say things like that so I knew he was sicker than anyone let on.

Gloria's a night owl. She and Jerry would often cross paths in the wee hours of the morning. One time she was in the middle of a project in the kitchen and Jerry walked in and said, “What are you doing up?” Gloria said, “What are you doing up!” It was like, “Wait a minute. You're the sick one, Jerry. We're supposed to be monitoring you.” He couldn't shut off. I think the use of drugs helped him shut it off. Because the creativity was there round the clock. It just kept on coming through him. It was almost a curse. And a blessing.

Bob Barsotti:
We had to cut back on Jerry Garcia Band shows because he wasn't capable of doing it anymore. We had to keep canceling shows and stopping tours because physically he wasn't able to do it. That was why he used to play twenty times a year at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco. The only place he could get it together physically to play with the Jerry Garcia Band was by getting in his car and driving for a half an hour to the Warfield. If he could do that, then he could play. But if it was any more than that, even like a San Jose gig or Santa Cruz, he couldn't deal with it. He didn't want to do it.

Yen-Wei Choong:
For almost one full year, he didn't get a treatment. I think in the fall, September '94, he was sick for some reason. Then Vince, his personal secretary, called me and asked me to go there to treat Jerry at the house. So I been treating them almost every week. Until February '95, that was last visit. For the whole winter, I've been treating them regular. Sometimes at Garcia's house, Tiburon. Sometimes at Deborah's house in Mill Valley. It varied.

Vince Dibiase:
Jerry had told me six months earlier that he'd met Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and that he'd agreed to do something with him. The idea of doing a Jerry Garcia-designed T-shirt for the Hudson River-keeper Project came down and Jerry was on tour. It came to deadline and I was getting a lot of trouble from other people around him who didn't want the project to happen. It came down to me actually giving them the okay to do it without Jerry's approval because we couldn't get through to him on the road. But if I didn't say yes on this one particular day, they were going to cancel the project and push it back at least two years. So I gave them an okay. Two days later when I finally got through to Jerry, he said, “I told you it was a done deal, didn't I?” There were people associated with his art business who were trying to stop this from happening in order to get me out of his art business. It was amazing because there was enough to go around. But they didn't see it that way.