Reading Notes: Henke 1991

Henke, James. 1991. The Rolling Stone Interview: Jerry
Garcia. Rolling Stone, October 31,
34-40, 103, 106, 108.

Two September 1991 afternoons, hotel room overlooking
Central Park.

July 1991 was release of JG DG, August 1991 was release of
double live JGB. Meantime, JGB was a stone-cold junkie, waiting in line for
methadone like everyone else.

“solo jaunts are often more entertaining than his work with
the Dead, and one gets the feeling that if he felt he could
easily extricate himself from the Dead and his attendant responsibilities, he
might just do it. Still, when pressed, Garcia claimed the Dead take
precedence. … We’ve all put so much of our lives into it by
now that it’s too late to do anything drastic” (Henke 1991, 37).

Two separate interview sessions September 1991 NYC. In a
family way with Manasha and Keelin.

“recent” meeting in which Garcia told the other band members
that he wasn’t having fun anymore, that he wasn’t
enjoying playing with the Dead. Garcia confirms this. “The band is the board of
directors, and we have regular meetings with our lawyers and our accountants.
And we’ve got it done to where it only takes about three or four hours, about
every three weeks. But anyway, the last couple of times, I’ve been there
screaming ‘Hey, you guys!’ Because there are times when you go onstage and it’s
just plain hard to do, and you start to wonder, ‘Well, why the fuck
are we doing this if it’s so hard?’”

“We’ve been running on
inertia for quite a long time. I mean, insofar as we have a huge
overhead, and we have a lot of people that we’re responsible for, who work for
us and so forth, we’re reluctant to do anything [38] to disturb that. We don’t
want to take people’s livelihoods away. But it’s us out there, you know. And in
order to keep doing it, it has to be fun” (Henke 1991, 37-38).

“we’re … going to have to construct
new enthusiasm for ourselves, because we’re getting a little burned out. We’re
a little crisp around the edges” (Henke 1991, 38).

They are trying to work up to taking a long break, a la
1974, “aiming for six months off the road” (Henke 1991, 38).

p. 38 Gar talks about how he dislikes trying to write songs.
“It’s like pulling teeth.”

They saw Brent’s death coming. “About six or eight months
earlier, he OD’d and had to go to the hospital, and they just saved his ass. …
I think there was a situation coming up where he was going to have to go to
jail. He was going to have to spend like three weeks in jail, for driving under
the influence or one of those things, and it’s like he was willing to die just
to avoid that. Brent was not a real happy person. And he wasn’t like a total
drug person. He was the kind of guy that went out [39] occasionally and binged.
And that’s probably what killed him” (Henke 1991, 38-39).

Getting older, people dying. Rick Griffin just died. “[F]or
me at this point, I’m just happy if someone dies with a minimum of pain and
horror” (Henke 1991, 39).

“I’m not a religious person” (Henke 1991, 39).

“The Grateful Dead is not
where you’re going to find comfort. In fact, if anything, you’ll
catch a lot of shit. And if you don’t get it from the band, you’ll get it from
the roadies. They’re merciless. They’ll just gnaw you like a dog. They’ll tear
your flesh off. They can be extremely painful” (Henke 1991, 39). Note that one
word from Garcia could have put a stop to that, but he didn’t roll that way.

“Brent had a deeply self-destructive [40] streak.” (Henke
1991, 39-40). Talks about Brent lacking in culture.

“My life would be miserable
if I didn’t have those little chunks of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot”
(Henke 1991, 40).

#drugs “I’ve been round and round with the drug thing.
People are always wanting me to take a stand on drugs, and I can’t. To me, it’s
so relativistic, and it’s also very personal. A person’s relationship to drugs
is like their relationship to sex. … For me, in my life, all kinds of drugs
have been useful to me, and they have also definitely been a hindrance to me.
So, as far as I’m concerned, the results are not in. Psychedelics
showed me a whole other universe, hundreds and millions of universes. So that
was an incredibly positive experience” (Henke 1991, 40).

Still dabble with mushrooms: “It’s one of those things where
every once in a while you want to blow out the pipes. For me, I just like to
know they’re available, just because I don’t think there’s anything else in
life apart from a near-death experience that shows you how extensive the mind
is” (Henke 1991, 40).

“as far as the drugs that are dead-enders, like cocaine and
heroin and so forth, if you could figure out how to do them without being
strung out on them, or without having them completely dominate your personality
… I mean, if drugs are making your decisions for you, they’re
no fucking good. I can say that unequivocally. If you’re far enough into
whatever your drug of choice is, then you are a slave to the drug, and the drug
isn’t doing you any good” (Henke 1991, 40).

“I’m an addictive-personality kind of person. … with drugs, the danger is that they run you. Your soul isn’t your own.
That’s the drug problem on a personal level” (Henke 1991, 40).

Says he was doing H on and off for 8 years.

Hard to quit H, but real problem now is smokes, that last
thing left. “My friends won’t let me take drugs anymore, and I don’t want to
scare people anymore. Plus, I definitely have no interest in being an addict”
(Henke 1991, 40).

“I still have that desire to change my consciousness, and in
the last four years I’ve gotten real seriously into scuba diving.” Also gives
him some physical exertion (Henke 1991, 40).

With Keelin “I have a little more time to actually be a
father. My other daughters have all been very good to me, insofar as they’ve
never blamed me for my absentee parenting. And it was tough for them, really,
because during the sixties and seventies, I was gone all the time. But they’ve
all grown up to be pretty decent people, and they still like me. We still talk.
But I never did get to spend a lot of time with them.” (Henke 1991, 40).

Garcia got together with Heather (daughter of Jerry and Sara
Katz) for 18 or 19 years at one point (Henke 1991, 103).

At this point, JG and MG are in the process of getting
divorced. “She’s real glad to get rid of me. We had a great time, a nice life
together, but we went past it. … We haven’t really lived together since the
70s” (Henke 1991, 103).

Joe died when Gar was 5. Joe played clarinet and other
woodwinds, in a big ol 40 piece jazz orchestra. “My father’s sister says he was
in a movie, some early talkie.” (Henke 1991, 103).

“I remember him playing me to sleep at night. I just barely
remember the sound of it” (Henke 1991, 103).

Jerry watched Joe go under and drown. “It was horrible. I
was just a little kid, and I didn’t really understand what was going on, but
then, of course, my life changed. “ (Henke 1991, 103).

Ruth was an RN, but after Joe died she took over his bar.
“He had this little bar right next door to the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific,
the merchant marine’s union, right at First and Harrison, in San Francisco. It
was a daytime bar, a working guy’s bar, so I grew up with all these guys who
were sailors. They went out and sailed to the Far East and the Persian Gulf,
the Philippines and all that, and they would come and hang out in the bar all
day long and talk to me when I was a kid. It was great fun for me. I mean,
that’s my background. I grew up in a bar. And that was back in the days when
the Orient was still the Orient, and it hadn’t been completely Americanized
yet. They’d bring back all these weird things. Like one guy had the world’s
largest collection of [106] photographs of square riggers” (Henke 1991, 103,
106).

His third grade teacher Miss Simon hipped him to the
possibility of being a creative type. “’You mean you can spend all day painting
pictures? Wow! What a great piece of news’.” (Henke 1991, 106).

Dwight Johnson was another teacher, “he’s the guy that
turned me into a freak” (Henke 1991, 106). He was a motor cycle guy, 7th grade
teacher.

Talks about liking Dylan songs:
“they speak to me emotionally on some level. Sometimes, I don’t even know why.
Like that song, Señor. There’s something creepy about that song, but it’s very
satisfying in a weird sort of way” (Henke 1991, 106). “This is talking about a
kind of desperation that everybody experiences” (Henke 1991, 108). Songs-S

More fun outside the Dead. “that’s always
dangling in front of me, the thing of, well, shit, if I was on my own, God, I
could … “ (Henke 1991, 108).

“Bruce, Branford, Rob
Wasserman and I have talked about putting something together. I had
this notion of putting together a band that had no material, that just got
onstage and blew. And maybe one of these days we’ll make that happen” (Henke
1991, 108). Him saying this is the verbal equivalent of gazing forlornly out
Grisman’s picture window.

Garcia listens to Django, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker,
Coltrane. “Michael Hedges is great. And my personal favorite lately is this guy
Frank Gambale, who’s been playing with Chick Corea for the past couple of
years” (Henke 1991, 108).

“Living Colour is a great band … Jane’s Addiction is another
band I like” (Henke 1991, 108).

“I feel like I’m a hundred
million years old” (Henke 1991, 108).

Why kids keep coming to see the Dead: “There must be a
dearth of fun out there in America. Or adventure. Maybe that’s it, maybe we’re
just one of the last adventures in America” (Henke 1991, 108).