Dark Star (46 page)

Vince Dibiase:
Jerry suddenly began making life very hard for me. He would give me impossible tasks to do at the computer. He was pressuring me a lot. My feeling is that he was being pressured to get rid of us. Before the spring tour, he got rid of Yen-Wei, who was his lifeline. Yen-Wei had revived him those two times back in '92 and '94. But Jerry was getting really intense, real snappish. His blood sugar level was running wild. He said to me once, “You know, you make a fucking lot of money. You make a lot of money for a pretty good job. You got a great job. What do you do?” I said to myself, “This is not him speaking.” He was paraphrasing what someone else said to him. I knew that. Because he never talked to me that way, ever.

Gloria Dibiase:
We loved Jerry. We worked for him around the clock. We were on call. Whenever he needed us, he'd call us up at all different times of the day and night. If we weren't there in the house, we'd rush right over to see him. We dedicated ourselves to him. We were with Jerry almost full-time. We stayed at his house from early in the morning until late in the evening until he told us, “Okay, you can go home.” Two or three days a week, we'd sleep at the house because he wanted us to stay there. He didn't want us to go home. He liked having us there.

Vince Dibiase:
We watched him go downhill. You know it when you see somebody every day. He aged so rapidly. He got grayer. He was not remembering. His face looked terrible. He was stooping more. He was tired more. He was really frustrated and so he was eating a lot more junk food and fatty food. He was smoking a lot. He was doing everything to excess. Extremely excessive.

Gloria Dibiase:
We started with him with Manasha taking care of Keelin. Taking care of the Palm Avenue house, odd jobs, errands, personal stuff for Jerry, the art business, and then we were doing everything for him in his home after Barbara left. He would tell us that he loved us and he appreciated all that we did for him and thank us. When I wasn't there to take care of Jerry because I had to go to New York to visit my family, my daughters would go up to his house and do what I did. Cook his food, make his juice, his salad, his grains, clean up the house, shop for his clothing, and do his laundry.

Vince and I were fired on Cinco de Mayo, '95. I was devastated because I loved Jerry very much and it hurt. I felt like I was his mother. He was like my son. My family life was suffering because I was putting a lot of time and attention into Jerry's life. So when we were fired, I cried and cried. We went to his lawyer's office. We were sitting there and he told us we were fired and then he handed us a piece of paper to sign. We would get severance pay, we didn't know how much, if we didn't talk about anything. If we never wrote a book and we handed over everything we had relating to Jerry.

Vince Dibiase:
No interviews. No talking about Jerry. Return every picture, every tape, every anything you have of Jerry's, and it was not a nondisclosure agreement. It was a confidentiality statement they wanted from us. It was not as though we had signed anything like that going in. This was taking our freedom of speech away.

Gloria Dibiase:
I tore mine up and threw it on his desk.

 

Dr. Randy Baker:
One of the problems in working with Jerry during this time was that I would come see him with the latest set of blood tests I had done and the tests would look awful. His blood sugar was really high and his cholesterol was high. He had all sorts of things out of balance and the average person who had those labs would be feeling awful. But Jerry would insist to me time and time again that he felt perfectly fine. I think he did feel fine. But I think it was because of his use of heroin. It numbed him and made him not in touch with his body.

One of the things that motivated him to finally address his health was that he started to have some tingling and numbness in his fingers that was interfering with his ability to play the guitar. I think that was directly related to his diabetes. His body was finally speaking to him in a language that he understood. “If you don't improve your health, you're not going to be able to play.” In the spring of '95, other people and I finally got through to Jerry. He really got the message then. It was decided that after the Grateful Dead's summer tour, he would do an intensive program to get off drugs and stop smoking and clean up his diet.

Sue Stephens:
Jerry would complain about having to play these big places where the kids were getting busted and he said that he didn't want to go out there and be a shill for the cops. It upset him. He would have preferred that they didn't have to go and play these same places over and over again. He did voice his concern that it had no dignity for him anymore. These places like Nassau Coliseum that were famous for busting people. Garcia would say, “God, you guys. Why do we have to go back there again? Are we broke?”

When he came back from a tour, he'd still be walking around with his shoulders up in that stance. “Waiting for the next thing to hit him,” as he would put it. In that sense, he would have to medicate himself. He was working. He was trapped in the routine of going from the gig to the hotel and it was not great. When he was up on the stage playing, he was safe. But he always did say that he wanted to work. He'd say, “I need to work.”

Bob Barsotti:
Everything was not cool in Grateful Dead land and I spent quite a bit of time talking to their manager about how tough it was going to be out on the road this summer. Things were going to be different in your parking lots this year than they were last year. Radically different. It was a cumulative effect of their success and the fact that there was so much money in the scene outside their gigs.

Because the segment of society who came to see them was pretty broad, you had a lot of people and made a lot of money. It was also vacation time. You go on vacation, you take a thousand dollars with you to spend. That's what people do when they're on vacation. These people were taking their vacations around these gigs. They were spending all of their disposable income in the parking lots. It became this economy and there was so much money involved. It was real easy to exist out there on nothing and it was real easy to take advantage of people and through that door came these masses of our society.

Part of the reason that the parking lot scene got so big was that the Dead worked often enough that in between shows, the hard-core Deadheads could survive until the next gig. The other thing was that the Dead would play three or four gigs in one town and then take a couple of days off and then do three or four gigs in another town. So it was real easy to follow them.

I'd talk to all these dreadlocked kids out in the parking lot and most of them had grown up in suburbia. Their parents were never home and they'd been neglected their whole lives and there was nothing to their suburban lives. They wanted to eschew all materialism and go on the road with their brothers and sisters and stay high all the time and fuck whenever they wanted and not worry about AIDS because Jah would provide. Over the years, I spent a lot of time in the parking lot. But in the last few years, it got to where I couldn't go out there anymore. It was such a low-life kind of scene that it made me too sad to be out there.

Robert Greenfield:
In June 1995, those on their way into the Bob Dylan/Grateful Dead show in Highgate, Vermont, had to make their way past unconscious fans sprawled in the dirt around tanks of nitrous gas. As Bob Dylan played before the Dead took the stage, ten thousand fans without tickets stormed the fences and tore them down, turning the concert into a “free event.” Five Porta-Johns actually in use at the time were knocked over. Many people were injured. Many more were drunk. Inside the venue, even as the Grateful Dead played, hundreds of people who had gotten too high to hear any form of music but their own lay passed out in the dirt.

Cassidy Law:
I hate labeling but on the summer tour, I definitely saw the difference between the people my age, which is twenty-five, and the younger ones, who just really didn't care about anyone or anything. They were not Deadheads. They just wanted to be there for the scene. They didn't care about going inside. They wanted a free ticket. Everybody that was high was trying to crash the gates to try to get in free.

Bob Barsotti:
I saw it coming. So I did double fences everywhere we went. I spent ungodly sums of money on police and security.

Gloria Dibiase:
It was a tour from hell. I called it the “hell-in-the-bucket tour.” So many bad things were happening all over. The last three months were really bad.

Bob Barsotti:
Jerry must have known about the scene outside the halls. He had to. He drove through it every night. But Jerry was a leader who refused to be a leader and that was a problem.

Chesley Millikin:
Going out with the Grateful Dead wasn't a lot of fun to Jerry anymore. He admitted that to me and it was less so on this last tour, “the tour from hell” as they referred to it. I think that really disturbed him. He was a very mellow man. He was strictly pacifistic. So for any kind of unruliness like that to come out, I can see him saying, “Fuck it.”

Robert Greenfield:
In their thirtieth year on the road, the Dead ran into more problems on July 2 in Noblesville, Indiana, at Deer Creek Amphitheater at what was meant to be a benefit concert for the Rex Foundation. Before the first of two scheduled shows began, a threat was made on Jerry's life. Security guards were moved from the perimeter of the venue to protect the stage. This left a large section of fence unguarded. In order to make it easier to protect Jerry, the house lights also remained on during the Dead's second set. This enabled one and all to clearly witness the unscheduled mayhem which then occurred.

Vince Dibiase:
We heard about the threat on Jerry's life. Supposedly, two guys were packing guns. The call came into the police department in Deer Creek. One guy called up and said, “Look, I can't live with this anymore. I know that these two guys are coming to the show with guns and they're looking for Jerry and they're going to shoot him.” The cops took it as a real threat. They did the gig with all the lights on. The front row was all undercover agents with their tie-dyes and bullet-proof vests on.

Sat Santokh Singh Khalsa:
Many years earlier, Jerry told me that he felt like people wanted to kill him because he didn't deserve to be doing what he was doing. He said he felt he was playing for his life and he said he felt that way for many years afterwards.

Vince Dibiase:
Jerry used to like to play games like people were chasing him or going to kill him. He had to play really good or else. He'd play games like that in his head. He liked to be scared. Because nobody could scare him in his whole circle. But he was really scared that night.

Cassidy Law:
Deer Creek has this parklike setting all around so it was really appealing for everyone to come and hang out. When we drove up there that night, we knew. We went, “Oh, boy. Fourth of July weekend.” People were definitely drinking and they had that really rowdy feeling about them. We were starting the show and all of a sudden, I looked over and there they were. Masses of them. Just masses of them rushing the doors and they broke through. They were tearing the gates off in the back. It was frightening. I was in this little tiny trailer right in the middle of it all and I went, “Okay, I'm gonna have faith here.” Everyone was going, “Lock down! Lock down! Don't leave.”

The band could actually see what was going on from the stage. They could see the dogs that the police around the facility used for security being let loose on people. You could hear the dogs barking and the whole thing was pretty scary. The kids who had broken in kept it up and kept it up. They kept fighting with the police. People were hurt because all of a sudden, they were crammed in front of the stage. We had to cancel the next show on the tour. We knew it had come to a point where something had to be said. We'd done lots of leaflets that we'd handed out before saying, “Hey, don't tread on us anymore.” In this one, we just really pinpointed it at them by saying, “This has gotta stop.” It went out a couple of days later.

Robert Greenfield:
Signed by Billy Kreutzmann, Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bobby Weir, and Vince Welnick, the letter sent out by the band read in part:

Don't you get it?

Over the past thirty years we've come up with the fewest possible rules to make the difficult act of bringing tons of people together work well....We've never had to cancel a show before because of you
.

Want to end the touring life of the Grateful Dead? Allow bottle-throwing gate crashers to keep on thinking they're cool anarchists instead of the creeps they are
....

… The spirit of the Grateful Dead is at stake and we'll do what we have to do to protect it. And when you hear somebody say, “Fuck you, we'll do what we want,” remember something:

That applies to us too
.

Three nights after Deer Creek, the Dead played at Riverport Amphitheater outside St. Louis. Grateful Dead fans without tickets trying to escape a rainstorm sought shelter on the second story of a pavilion at a nearby campground. When the structure collapsed, a hundred and fifty of them were injured, some critically. As the news media reported the story nationwide, St. Louis became yet another fire-scorched pit stop on the tour from hell. The Dead moved on to do the final shows of the tour in Chicago's Soldier Field, a concrete mausoleum far more suited for the Chicago Bears, the city's very own Monsters of the Midway.