Requiem For The Dead

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By David Gates

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Jerry Garcia did his last recording session a month ago, on a Sunday in July. A week before, the Grateful Dead, Garcia's band for three decades, had just played what would be the last of their thousands of shows with him, at Soldier Field in Chicago, to a sellout crowd. The Dead hadn't played to an empty seat in years--that is, until the dancing started. In fact, they were probably the most popular concert attraction anywhere, ever. Those who were there say it wasn't their best show: the band sounded listless and Garcia forgot even more words than usual. Now, in the Marin County, Calif., home studio of the mandolinist David Grisman, an old friend he'd met in the parking lot at a bluegrass festival in 1963, he sang Jimmie Rodgers's "Blue Yodel No. 9"--Standin' on the corner, I didn't mean no harm/Along come a po-lice, he took me by the arm--for a Rodgers tribute album being put together by Bob Dylan. It took a few takes to nail the song, but that was to be expected. Garcia didn't look well, but he sounded fine--even pulled off the yodel. Who knew the guy could yodel?

The next day, Garcia checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., to try to deal with the heroin habit he'd been trying to deal with for years--that and his smoking and his eating. He had a million projects in mind, he'd gotten married for a third time just last year, the oldest of his four daughters was getting married next month--he was to give away the bride--and he wanted to be clean for the Dead's fall tour. He'd been busted in 1985 with coke and heroin. and his health had been intermittently lousy since 1986, when he came out of a diabetic coma so neurologieally scrambled he had to relearn guitar. In 1992, the Dead had to cancel tour dates when he collapsed from exhaustion. (For most celebrities, this is a euphemism. For Garcia, it meant exhaustion--though his obesity, enlarged heart and congested lungs cried out for more than a good night's sleep.) He stayed at the Betty Ford two weeks, then checked out. Aug. 1 was his 53rd birthday; friends say he didn't want to spend it in rehab.

A week later, he checked into a small private clinic, Marin County's Serenity Knolls; his doctor says he'd already detoxed, had turned the corner and "wanted to live." Two years before, Garcia had told a Bolling Stone interviewer he'd been scared into taking better care of himself. "I mean, it's a powerful incentive," he'd said, "the possibility that, hey, if you keep going the way you are, in two years you're going to be dead." Around 4 in the morning last Wednesday, Aug. 9, a Serenity Knolls counselor walked by and noticed Garcia had stopped snoring.

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Within an hour, news of his death, apparently from a heart attack, had gotten onto the Internet, the dimensionless digital commune where something like the anarchic spirit of the '60s counterculture now resides. (Stockbrokers also got early word; the news was flashed on the Dow Jones tape.) Unlike the Beatles, the Grateful Dead never truly crossed over into mainstream musical culture: their best-selling single, "A Touch of Grey" (1987), went only to No. 9, and you'll never hear "Dark Star" in an elevator--unless you've been taking something you shouldn't. Yet the avuncular-going-grandfatherly Garcia had gradually become as beloved a personage as the charming, changeable, sometimes overear-nest John Lennon. His thin, shaky voice suggested that you, too, could sing with a band if you loved doing it enough; his guitar-playing radiated joy and ease, without a trace of guitar-hero affectation; and his increasing portliness, a trial to Garcia himself, clearly gave others a sense of comfort. Sting, with whom he played shows in 1993, called him Father Christmas; fans compared him to everything from a teddy bear to the deity. "He went to great extremes to make everybody feel he was nothing special," says David Grisman. It's what made him so winning, even if it fooled no one.

By Wednesday afternoon, high-profile fans--Peter Jennings, Bill Walton, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy, Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, "Batman Forever" director Joel Schumacher, Al and Tipper Gore--were returning (or not returning) reporters' phone calls, and everyday folks were planning candlelight vigils in every city big enough to rate a Strawberries or a Record Town. To anyone who still thought the Dead's core audience was gray-pony tailed acid casualties driving VW buses with rusted rocker panels, the sudden surfacing of politicians, scientists and physicians must have come as a shock; a group of a dozen or so San Francisco lawyers jokingly calls itself the Deadhead Bar Association. A remarkable number of Dead-heads are in their teens and 20s--both rebels in search of the ultimate alternative band and well-adjusted members of families who'd gone to Dead concerts the way other families went to water parks. Some are even drug-free: the Wharf Rats, a Deadhead 12-step group, help each other resist the various temptations for sale in the parking lots at Dead shows.

By Thursday, there was a mad dash for the merchandise. In Chicago, one Tower Records sold out all its Dead and Garcia CDs; Marshall Field's moved 114 Garcia-designed ties in a day, and a health-food supermarket ran out of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream. Celebrity reactions ran true to form. Timothy Leary, now 69, called the Dead "the finest and largest disorganized religion in the world." Rush Limbaugh said something sounded fishy about Garcia's death, but it didn't matter because he was just "a dead doper." And President Clinton, in addition to some anti-drug remarks, told MTV that Garcia "had a great gift. And he even wound up putting out that line of ties. He had great ties. I would go around wearing Jerry Garcia ties and giving them away to people. So I was very sad when he died." R was generally conceded that this, at last, finally, was the end of the '60s. Garcia would have rolled his eyes at hearing himself called the Pied Piper of his generation--not just because it was trite but because it was laughable. "I feel like I'm sort of stumbling along," he once said of his performances, "and a lot of people are watching me or stumbling along with me or allowing me to stumble for them." And he grew wary of obsessive fans who microanalyzed his every word and gesture.

This summer, in fact, the intimacy between the Dead and the audience began turning to friction. The band got sick of out-of-control fan behavior--never had they seen so much gate-crashing and bottle-throwing--and distributed fliers threatening the ultimate reprisal. A Dead concert, they reminded fans, was not "a free-for-all party." No more "miracling"--begging free tickets by shouting out "I need a miracle!"--and no more kicking down fences. "A few more scenes like Sunday night," the flier concluded, "and we'll quite simply be unable to play . . . And when you hear somebody say 'F-- you, we'll do what we want,' remember something. That applies to us, too." One rumored response: a death threat against Garcia serious enough to call in the FBI.

Most Dead fans, of course, are sane enough to know the end of the '60s came in December '69--though they find that a poor excuse for giving up the spiritual well-being they feel listening to the silvery-toned meanderings of Garcia's guitar above a mutating keyboard landscape and chugging rhythm section. But Garcia's death is surely the end of the Grateful Dead. An online poll found 90 percent of respondents thought they should hang it up--but who knows better than the Dead themselves how unique and irreplaceable Garcia was? "There's a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes," said Bob Dylan in a faxed statement, "but he filled them all without being a member of any school."

This eclectic mix sounds pretty exotic, but it was commonplace among smart kids of Garcia's generation with bohemian leanings and an ear for music. Garcia's father, a big-band musician, named him after Jerome Kern; his grandparents tuned in the Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night. He read Mad magazine and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." He loved Chuck Berry. Somebody turned him on to Bill Monroe and the New Lost City Ramblers, and got him high on pot. He hung on every note of John Coltrane's 10-minute saxophone solos. He was an underachiever in school. There was one or two of him in every small town in America-- though since he grew up in San Francisco he could actually get City Lights books (such as Allen Ginsberg's "Howl") at the City Lights Bookstore, and hear Lawrenee Ferlinghetti read in person.

In 1959, he dropped out of school and joined the army to get away from his family. After nine months and a dishonorable discharge--too many AWOLs--he grew a goatee and started hanging around the folk-music scene in Palo Alto. There he met Robert Hunter, who was to be the Dead's lyrieist and his collaborator on such songs as "Truckin'" and "Uncle John's Band"; as Bob and Jerry they performed Kingston Trio songs. He soon took up Scruggs-style banjo; decades later he'd say that he'd like to play two days a week with the Dead, two days with the more conventional Jerry Garcia Band and two days with a bluegrass group. The other day he'd go to the movies.

The Grateful Dead evolved from a jug band including Garcia, Bob Weir and singer Ron (Pigpen) McKernan, remembered by Dead fans for his messianic live performances of "Turn On Your Lovelight." (He died of liver damage in 1973.) In 1964, Garcia and Weir switched to electric guitars and formed the Warlocks, a blues-based rock-and-roll bar band cranking it out five sets a night, six nights a week. That was before they took acid and met the novelist Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, his psychedelic entourage, including Kerouac's old sidekick Neal Cassady, acid chemist Owsley Stanley and Mountain Girl, later to become Garcia's second wife.

The Warlocks began playing at Kesey's Acid Tests, free-form parties at which guests and band alike dropped large doses of the then legal LSD-25. They changed their name--a "grateful dead" is a sub-genre of British ballad in which a human helps a ghost find peace--and opened up their music far beyond conventional song forms in somewhat the way Coltrane had done five years earlier. Garcia's solos went on and on: he'd play a phrase, repeat it, alter it, worry it like a cat with a mouse, revel in the sheer texture of feedback. He played with notes the way awestruck acid voyagers played with feathers, beads and kaleidoscopes. His guitar was the lead voice in an interactive ensemble, making it up as they went along. The analogy to the anarchic communal life to which their audiences aspired was obvious; so was the potential for self-indulgence. At their best, the Dead made that distinction meaningless.

But if the Dead blew minds with their mercurial inventiveness, they won hearts with their warmth and lack of pretension. Unlike Hendrix, Dylan or the Rolling Stones, they didn't traffic in anguish or anger; the melancholy of such songs as "Black Peter" or "It Must Have Been the Roses" was as bad as it got. No histrionics, no showbiz tricks to pump up a crowd; they may have bored audiences sometimes, but never manipulated them. And audiences repaid them with a loyalty that seemed, depending on where you sat, either familial or cultish. "We're not Jerry's Branch Davidians," says Charlie Zender, 81, a Harvard-educated atmospheric physicist from Boulder, Colo. But a number of Deadheads over the years became Tourheads, following the band from gig to gig on their own dime, peddling food, T shirts--or whatever-and conspicuously not getting a life.

Carolyn Ruff, a Washington Post news aide who'd been a Deadhead for seven years, published a piece shortly before Garcia died retailing horror stories of greed, low-level scares and acid dosings. "Every time there is a scare that the Dead may stop touring," she wrote, "I find myself worrying about the lost souls who know nothing else but the parallel world of the Grateful Dead." With Garcia gone, the day of reckoning has probably come. Stacia Butties, 20, a second-generation Deadhead from Carol Stream, III., is now following Phish, the young Boston-based band with a Dead-like following, and selling her homemade dresses at their shows. And she's got a life, thank you. "Some people go to college, some go to work," she says. "This is what I do for life. I like to see a new horizon every day, to see hope, to see new places."

Gen Xers like Buttles are presumed to have a punkish contempt for baby-boomer hippies like Garcia. In fact, the Dead's newest generation of fans is too young to care what any of that fuss was about. Such collaborations as that of Neil Young and Pearl Jam suggest a rapprochement between '60s rockers and musicians young enough to be their grandchildren; bands like Phish and Blues Traveler would have sounded out of place at the original Woodstock only because they play in tune. Generation X grew up on some of the coldest, most artificial music ever made--the clattering dance-pop of Madonna and Duran Duran--and both grunge and the Grateful Dead offered refuge. Matt Belkin, a 26-year-old mortgage broker from Boca Raton, Fla., finds no generation gap among Dead-heads. "If you're cool and 60 I'll hang out with you," he says. "If you're cool and 16 I'll hang out with you." But 20-year-old Rachel Baumann, also from Boca Raton and working toward a Ph.D. in child psychology, sees one difference. "Our group is more wholesome," she says. "The older generation is pretty fried." She's talking, of course, about the hard core: not the old Deadheads who've forgotten how many shows they've been to, but the ones who've kept count. When we asked Senator Leahy how many times he'd seen the Dead, he just said, "Never enough."

Jerry Garcia created and left behind a following most musicians only dream of: the young and the young at heart, hungry for authenticity, intelligent and forbearing, predisposed to be pleased and up for anything you could throw at them. The sort of people you'd expect, since any performer's audience is a mirror. The burnouts and bottle-throwers belonged, too, even though everybody wanted to cast them out: Garcia was the first to admit that something inside him craved his own undoing. But the few feral fans, like Garcia's own abused body, were finally a small part of the story. If Garcia didn't get his threescore and ten, he still made more music, touched more hearts and lifted more spirits than seemed humanly possible. At his small private funeral in California last Friday, Garcia's bandmates and buddies--Dylan, Kesey, Grisman, Bill Walton--played tunes, talked about him and gave him a standing O. And his wife wanted them to know he'd died with a smile on his face.

Still, excess remains a problem in Deaddom. Deadheads insist the band members have never promoted drug use. "I've listened to every single Grateful Dead song," says Mikey Dechiaro, 25, "and they never say, 'Eat a lot of mushrooms and drink a lot'." But much of the group's audience does just that. Says David Rosenbloom, director of the anti-drug group Join Together, "Grateful Dead concerts, where you can often get high simply by breathing, are part of the glamorization of the drug scene."

In the early '90s, the Drug Enforcement Administration made a highly publicized series of arrests at Dead shows. The arrests--and the harsh sentencing that followed-haven't deterred some Deadheads. Recently, fans have noticed a boom in the use of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, usually sucked out of a balloon. And Bob Williamson, 53, is also disturbed by the use of LSD: "It's gotten much more blatant, with people walking around saying, 'Dose me!'"

A more encouraging trend is the number of older fans, like Williamson, now attending shows clean and sober. An AA-style group, the Wharf Rats, offers recovering addicts at Dead shows what Caroline Thomas calls "a safe haven in a slippery environment." Garcia never made it to that haven, but the fact that he was in rehab suggests he was trying to get there. "You can get high on the music," Thomas insists. "It's the best kind of high." And Deadheads have tried them all.

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