Dark Star (49 page)

Alan Trist:
I went to the office as people were collecting and there were film crews on the corners outside. Inside, there was a lot of hugging and the kind of humor that occurs when people have been in that place of expectancy. It was not black humor but it was close to that. A lot of very funny things were said which were essentially tender loving reminiscences of Jerry.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
I supplied them with a list of churches and then band members went out and looked at them. St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Tiburon was the one they felt good about right away in terms of the feeling and the acoustics and it was only then they realized that not only was “St. Stephen” the name of one of their early songs but that they had also either played or recorded there very early in their careers. So the synchronicity was amazing.

John Perry Barlow:
In a way, he was already dead. That was what I was getting at back in Hepburn Heights when I told him I wanted him to actually be certifiable so that we could mourn him. Because he was as dead as anybody ever needed to get. But you also saw life. Garcia was alive. There was nobody who was more alive. Nobody.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
There was a wake the night before where the body was laid out in a funeral home. It was very small.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
The wake was in a funeral parlor in San Anselmo on Miracle Mile. The casket was open and he looked good. He did look good. I can't say he died with a terrific smile on his face. But he looked good. The band was there and it was nice. Just immediate family and band members. A lot of people offered me condolences on my loss. It was their loss, too. It was a greater loss for them than it was to me. After the wake, there was a party at Phil's house. Phil didn't go to the wake but he had a party. I got to regroup with band members and all the people in their families. It was like a party time for me. Not in terms of having fun but like an activity. I had to be there. I had to go there. I had to go see Mountain Girl to talk to her. She wasn't invited to the funeral.

Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia:
I didn't go to the funeral but I went to the church where they had Jerry's body laid out and it was astonishing. He had a nice little smile on his face. There were no flowers. My feeling about it was that I had no privacy. God, there were so many people around. Flanking the coffin were the four elders of the church. Steve Parish and the pallbearers were there and they all had suits on and I don't think I'd ever seen them in suits before. They were all looking really serious.

Stacy Kreutzmann:
Before the funeral started, it was so eerie. Because for thirty years, we were always saying, “Is Jerry here yet? Is he ready to go?” So I kept looking over my shoulder. “Is the limo here yet? I think we're running late. Shouldn't it be starting now?” It felt like everyone was waiting for Jerry to get there. It was so eerie to realize that he was not coming to the show. This wasn't a gig. That was not what it was about. We were in church.

Manasha Matheson Garcia:
I would have liked to have said good-bye to Jerry at the funeral but we weren't permitted to attend. Jerry wasn't big on funerals. We went to Bill Graham's funeral together. He didn't like a big funeral. He said, “Don't do this for me.” He asked me not to. And the idea of an open casket was not his idea. I called people in the office to try and stop this but it did no good.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
I myself am accustomed to seeing the body at a funeral and therefore I did not think very much about it. It seemed to provide people with a chance to say good-bye to him. There was a line of people who came up to do so before the service and then another line of people once it was over.

Rock Scully:
At Pigpen's funeral, Garcia saw the open casket and he was like, “Don't let them do that to me.” That was what they did to him, too. Oh, well. At that point, he didn't care anymore.

Sage Scully:
I didn't like the open casket at all. It didn't seem to be him and it didn't seem to be something he would want. I've heard Annabelle say that was something he always said he didn't want.

Sue Swanson:
They could have done a little better job with the lips. His lips were a little light. They could have put a little lipstick on them but I guess they didn't want to do that. His glasses were down on his nose. Steve Parish said that he'd seen him look a lot worse.

David Graham:
He looked really confused in the open casket. He just had this look on his face of perplexity. It was weird.

Cassidy Law:
He looked so polished. I just wanted to go tousle the hair and move his glasses and it wasn't him. But at least he looked very peaceful. That was the main thing. He just looked peaceful.

Stacy Kreutzmann:
I touched him in the casket. We couldn't help it. We all had to touch him. I wanted it to go on because when everyone started laughing and telling stories about him, it was like he was there for a moment. It was like, “Can we just hold this forever? Let's not lose it.”

David Grisman:
He had his glasses on and he was dressed like he always was dressed with one of those black jackets on. I put one of my picks in his pocket.

Sue Swanson:
He just looked dead. But he looked at peace. I didn't want to feel him all cold and dead but I patted his chest. I loved him.

Gloria Dibiase:
I was raised Sicilian Catholic. I must see the dead body in order to say good-bye. I must put something in the casket. I put this beautiful smoky quartz crystal heart in the casket, I kissed him on the forehead, I touched his hand, and said, “Good-bye, Jerry.”

Sandy Rothman:
I put my hand on his heart and on his forehead and I touched his hands a lot and I just felt like I would as soon be where he was. I didn't want to die but I felt so emptied out. I actually went through a moment of slight hilarity where I thought he was going to sit up because it was Jerry's kind of humor to think that way. The thought went through my mind, “It's the first time I've ever seen him not participate in something.” Actually, one of the times I touched his hand, his arm moved. Not by reflex. It just shifted by my touch.

Gary Gutierrez:
When I walked up to Jerry to say good-bye, it was weird. It must be an illusion when you look at someone who you're used to seeing life in and then you see them so frozen but there was this little blip of a moment, a trick of the eye, where it looked like he was almost going to say something. After the funeral, Mickey Hart came up to me and he said, “The weirdest thing, man, was when I went up to Jerry's coffin. I looked at him and it looked like he was almost going to speak. Like he was almost going to say something.” I said, “I had exactly the same feeling.”

Bob Barsotti:
To be honest, he looked pretty happy. He wasn't there anymore. That was the thing. He wasn't there anymore and you went, “Okay, right. He's gone and there's his body and we can lay that to rest.”

Sage Scully:
The funeral was one irony after the next. The church had these big stained-glass windows on the side. I saw the new Grateful Dead
Hundred Year Hall
CD and it looked like the same windows on the front cover. Each one of the windows had actual figures in it that were almost Gothic looking. They were like medieval knights. I drank something that Ken Kesey gave me and everything was kind of a little smushed for me. It was like a wedding. That was what I thought.

David Graham:
The funny thing is that every time I talk about it, I say “the wedding.” That's probably the best way really to describe it. It was very similar.

Nicki Scully:
Fortunately for me, I ran into Kesey in the parking lot and he gave me something to drink. Was it orange juice? It was nectar. It was nectar befitting of the crossing. It was the most delicious psychedelic syrup I've ever sipped.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
When I was making preparations for my part of the funeral, I was very much aware that I would have Buddhists there as well as angry Christians as well as nonbelievers and so I talked about Otto Rank, who said that healing can take place through psychology in a one-to-one situation, through the work of the artist, and on a mass level through a prophet. I said that Jerry had confused the issue because he was an artist who had affected the masses like a prophet.

Sue Swanson:
Sitting directly behind me was Bob Dylan. The first guy who got up was the priest and he was doing the rote stuff. It was nice but it was rote. Behind me was Bob Dylan and at one point, it was like a Dali painting. Things just kind of started to melt in front of my eyes and I thought to myself, “Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Mr. Dylan? That when you are lying there that these are the words they're going to be speaking about you?” I don't know whether he was thinking it or whether I was thinking it. But it certainly was apropos for him. I had to blink a couple times to focus again.

David Grisman:
I played at the funeral. I played at his wedding and at his funeral. Me and my guitarist, Enrique Coria. We played “Shalom Aleichem” and “Amazing Grace.” Deborah asked me to play and that was tough. That was real tough. It was just a hard emotional thing to do. Not the playing itself but how to do the right thing.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
Deborah did organize the funeral service itself. We had certain people designated to speak and then we opened it up and let anyone get up there to talk. I think there was a feeling of general release. Steve Parish spoke. And then Hunter, who read a poem he had written at like three in the morning which was very moving.

Clifford “Tiff” Garcia:
They asked me if I wanted to speak and I said, “I don't know. I may or I may not.” At the time, I really didn't feel like speaking. For one thing, I had to take a leak real bad and it was like, “Mm, how much longer is this going to take?” We were standing outside for a long time before it started and I was a little nervous so I didn't. After Hunter did his thing and Weir did his thing, I didn't want to get into it. It was just too late. If I would have said something right away, it would have been fine but I just thought, “M-yeah, it's enough.”

Gary Gutierrez:
Probably the highlight for me was Steve Parish. He stood up and his manner was strong voiced and direct and it was just a kind of unabashedly masculine way of saying good-bye. To see that coming from such a big guy with such a strong voice was very touching. Because he sort of spoke for the workingman. He said that Jerry really understood and knew the workingman and respected the workingman and that was what had meant a lot to him. He'd felt well treated by him. When he was finished, there was a big ovation.

Alan Trist:
I was particularly taken with Steve Parish's remarks. They were some of the most soulful things I've ever heard in my life. For somebody who had been so close to Jerry for so long, the eloquence of Steve's remarks was just superb. If there was ever a natural-born poet who emerged in response to the occasion, it was Steve Parish at that moment. And then of course there was Hunter. Hunter has got a hell of a voice and he got up there in the nave of this huge resounding place and he brought the muse down. He physically pulled down the muse with his hands and with his voice. It was a bardic performance that put me back a couple of thousand years to when that was commonplace in the courts of kings. He was totally right-on.

Robert Greenfield:
Delivering “An Elegy for Jerry,” which was widely disseminated after the funeral, Robert Hunter concluded by saying of his old friend and songwriting partner:

David Graham:
When Steve Parish spoke, that was from the heart. That was beautiful and I thought what Hunter said was beautiful. I was the one who was bold enough to go talk after Hunter because nobody could stand up after his thing. I went up there and said, “This is the way I feel about it.” Because everybody was pretending to be sharing in Jerry's spirit. My feeling is that the spirit within him just went into his kids who were sitting there. I didn't want them to be lost in the shuffle. The isolation that I was thrust into after my dad died was something that I knew they were going through.

Rev. Matthew Fox:
Jerry's daughter made the comment about his having been a shitty father. In the context of the funeral, everyone laughed.

Bob Barsotti:
Some people gasped and some people laughed. If you knew her, you laughed and if you knew Jerry, you laughed. If you were Jerry's friend, you'd have laughed at that.

Robert Greenfield:
Aside from Robert Hunter's elegy, perhaps the single most widely reported comment to come out of Jerry Garcia's funeral was made by his daughter, Annabelle. Of her late father, Annabelle Garcia said, “He may have been a genius but he was a shitty father.” Most of those who were at the funeral that day understood the special relationship that had always existed between the two.

Cassidy Law:
Annabelle and Jerry are very much alike. I remember them together at the Warfield in 1980. Annabelle was probably only about eleven years and she and Jerry were hanging out in those little hallways and the dynamic between those two was amazing. They just beamed together. It was like they didn't even have to say anything to each other. They just knew what was coming next in that real dry humor and wit they both had. Was he a shitty father to her? I don't think so as far as one-on-one treating her shitty. As far as losing contact or maybe just not being there when he could have and should have, yeah. He was starting to flunk out there. They had their times and then it just kept tapering off and he was going back into his sheltered world again. Which was too bad because I think that was really a huge part of his life that he was missing.