Reading Notes: Jackson and Gans 2015

Jackson, Blair
and David Gans. 2015. This Is All a Dream
We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead. Flatiron Books.

Blair Jackson and David Gans, like Dennis McNally and David Browne
earlier in my reading year, exceed my very high expectations. I don’t generally
do book reviews, and won’t here, either, but I did want to spotlight just how
foundational these guys have been in helping us understand the Grateful Dead’s
world just a little bit more.

Jackson and Gans are to writing about the Grateful Dead as,
say, TC is to the band’s music. I mean that as a compliment of utmost
seriousness. In thinking about Garcia’s musical life, I consider the players, those
musicians who shared a stage or room with Jerry, to stand at the closest, inner
ring of the social Garciaverse. TC was around 14 months and made an essential
contribution to the Dead’s most essential music, Live/Dead (1969). You can’t understand the Dead if you don’t
understand TC.

Same goes for Jackson and Gans with respect to the written
word (to say nothing of Gans’s many contributions via the radio and otherwise).
But it’s more than just the authenticity and aesthetic – we would have been
lost without them. From the second half of the 1970s forward, as the Dead grew
more insular, Jackson and Gans became increasingly central informational nodes
linking the goings on in Marin to the wider world, sometimes even all the way
out to far-flung Contra Costa County. J Through inter alia Dennis Erokan’s Bay Area Music (BAM), they brought us the little
tidbits of gossip and the long form journalism. Jackson and Gans were the indispensable
Deadhead journos in an era before the internet, when information was scarce. In
1981, they teamed up to interview the band and BAM covered Garcia across two
issues,[i]
as Adam Block had done a few years before.[ii]
Blair and and Regan McMahon launched the fanzine the Golden Road (1984-1993) not long after, and with it helped define
what such a publication can be, marrying art, erudition, great writing and lots
of substance to the Deadhead experience. Gans’s first book, 1985’s Playing In The Band: An Oral and Visual
Portrait of the Grateful Dead was the first of several to decode and
re-encode the whole trip.

I won’t narrate the rest of their story, but it underscores
the creative efflorescence that the Dead tapped into and nurtured. Many
talented people engaged many acts of genuine human creation around the whole
scene, and the many wonderful writers and journalists certainly took, and
continue to take, pride of place in my own text-centric little world. The
semicentennial of 2015 was such a bounty of books, for example, that I am only
now finishing up some transcriptions, first of Dennis McNally’s shimmering
personal text-collage Jerry on Jerry,
then of Browne’s rather stunning chronological retiling, reshuffling the deck
and turning up aces, abundant fresh thoughts and material to consider.

In This Is All a Dream
We Dreamed (TIAADWD), Jackson and Gans amaze me once again. I once briefly
praised their work (with Steve Silberman) in curating the Dead’s 1999
retrospective boxset So Many Roads, including the controversial
(among picky Deadheads) but, IMO, correct choice to edit the 7/9/95 version of
the titular swansong. The 2009 Let It Rock release of November
17-18, 1975 exemplifies their contributions to the Garciaverse: stellar music
that is well-chosen, skillfully curated, sounding fat and fine from Betty’s
tapes and including Gans’s excellent liner notes, featuring the rare chance to read
drummer Ron Tutt’s take on the Nicky Hopkins-era Garcia Band. I could go on and
on.

I think Corry
praised TIAADWD as oral history, and, as always, I can only second Corry’s
emotion. Communing with Jackson and Gans found me dusting off Greenfield (1996)
and realizing that, not only have I never annotated it, but most every page
either tells me something that I didn’t know or tells me where I learned
something that I do. Listening notes TBD. Talk is beautifully rich, and when it
is thoughtful, well-considered, skillfully engaged and curated, manuscripting it
reveals facets that may not become visible in similar material, but sourced
from the human brain via fingers to text. Jackson and Gans have done lots of
interviews, they live and breathe the substance and have come to master the
various media in which they work, and it all comes together in a book that will
remain an essential resource in any self-respecting Deadhead’s library. If you
haven’t, yet, you should go buy it.

Various annotations and reading notes below the fold.

12/31/63 is the ur-moment

JG 12/31/63: “Living in poverty on the Peninsula, he
devoted most of his waking hours to mastering the guitar so he could dabble in
old-time country music”.[i]
#why

#musics blues JG and Pig liked the “Chess Records stuff
– Chicago blues like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, and people like Jimmy Reed,
Chuck Berry.”[ii]

#musics blues Junior Walker and the All Stars instrumental
“Cleo’s Back” – [iii]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fixgjav4vFc
(1965) – amazing just how much the Warlocks sound like this, with a little less
swang.

song-“Kaw-Liga” – QMS guys rehearsed this playing
cowboys & Indians with the GD, planned to tie them up on stage and play
this tune.[iv]

Olompali, JG calls it “site of the only Indian battle
ever fought in California”.[v]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Olompali
NB accent Battle of Olómpali.
“ opposing forces met at
Rancho Olompali, granted to Coast Miwok chief Camilo Ynitia in 1843. More
notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olumpali,_California : “Olumpali (also, Olompalis) is a
former settlement in Marin County, California.[1] It was located 6 miles (9.7
km) south of Petaluma.[1] Its site now lies within the Olompali State Historic
Park. The name comes from the Coast Miwok language and likely means
“southern village” or “southern people”.[2][3] The Coast
Miwok had inhabited a site within the State Historic Park continuously from as
early as 6000 BCE.[3] Olompali had been a main center in 1200, and might have
been the largest native village in Marin County.[2]” For 1834-ff the
Rancho period see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Olompali “ Rancho Olompali was a
8,877-acre (35.92 km²) Mexican land grant in present-day Marin County, California given in 1834 xxx
another place it says 1843 xxx  by
governor Manuel Micheltorena to Camilo
Ynitia, son of a Coast Miwok chief.^[1]
Camilo was the only Native American on the northern frontier of Alta
California to secure and keep a large land grant for his tribe.^[8]
The first of two adobes on the site was the home of the hoipu, or head
man, of Olómpali and the father of Camilo Ynitia, who was to be the last hoipu
of the village. It is disputed whether the first adobe was dismantled to
provide bricks for Camilo’s adobe at about 1837. The second adobe is the only
adobe home in Marin county;

v-Carousel JONATHAN RIESTER: “On January 17, 1968, we
did a gig at the Carousel Ballroom. Nobody got paid; that was the war chest.
From that day on we went after getting the Carousel Ballroom, and the deal was
the Dead would own 10 percent, as would the Airplane”.[vi]

v-Carousel JON MciNTIRE: “What was clear from the
outset was that Ron Rakow had signed
a lease that was totally untenable. On the other hand, I’m not sure we would’ve
gotten the Carousel without him. The landlord of the Carousel was Irish, lived
in Dublin, and owned ballrooms all over Ireland. He had his representative in
San Francisco- also Irish-who actually ran the place. He used to come around to
these gigs we put on and there would be all sorts of outrageous behavior going
on. It was just bedlam! It was like Babylon! He was a little uptight at first,
but after a while he’d just come in, take a look around, and then get drunk and
kind of smile. The place could actually have made it if [we’d] had a better
deal. I can’t remember what it was, but it was something like 10 percent of the
door with a guarantee of $5,000 a week. It was expensive, but then again, this
was one of the busiest corners in San Francisco back then. At either the second
or third show, we had so few people show up that instead of charging admission,
we went around Haight Street passing out tickets, and then when people got
there we gave them II free food and free ice cream. Free everything. We turned
it into a party. That was Rakow’s idea; I thought it was wonderful.”[vii]

v-Carousel McIntire: “We had a great love for this
place and gave our lives to it for a period of time. Everyone did. Everyone
cared a lot about each other, and the care was genuine and it showed.”[viii]

#Pigpen, per JG: “He was like gravity. Hells Angels
would sit around his room fucked up on acid and Pigpen would be taking care of
them. It was so great. Pigpen was like a warm fire, a cozy fire.”[ix]

“The Eleven” per JG “We used to do these
revolving patterns against each other where we would play 11 against 33. So one
part of the band [107] was playing a big thing that revolved in 33 beats, or 66
beats, and the other part of the band would be tying that into the 11 figure. That’s
what made those things sound like “Whoa-what the hell is going on?”
It was thrilling, but we used to rehearse a lot to get that effect. It sounded
like chaos, but it was in reality hard rehearsal.”[x]
Tempo Études

#drugs Rosie on cocaine: “The nature of its influence
on people’s attitudes and personalities, when they are doing a lot of it,
exacerbated the separation and changed people. It got worse in the early
seventies. It’s not that the women weren’t doing coke, too. The whole scene was
coked out.”[xi]

Rock on The Firing: “I was against it, but Jerry put it
to me as the manager to do it.”[xii]
#personality moral cowardice The Firing 1968, pp. 114-118.

JG on Firing, baroque complexity a la Aoxomoxoa and
#Hartbeats “we were off on a false note. We were doing something that
wasn’t really natural. We were doing music that was self-consciously weird.”[xiii]
Weir: “We were all listening to a lot of North Indian classical music at
the time, so we were borrowing from their rhythmic structures a lot; or the
drums would follow the lead line and we did a lot of odd time signatures,
placing them against each other. It was really heavy, mental stuff, real
precise and real structured. That’s part of what made it ultimately kind of
limiting.”[xiv]

8/1/69 when they played the Bear’s Lair, JG suggested the
name “The Murdering Punks”, which is some NRPS shtick that would come
up again ca. 8/7/69.[xv]
NB Manson murders around that time. Nelson on NRPS, 8/1/69 “The guy wanted
to call it Jerry Garcia and Friends, which Jerry hated, of course. ‘I’m a sideman!’ he’d say.”[xvi]

NRPS, why Mickey Hart? “I wanted to learn about country
and western music”.[xvii]

#error: Rhoney says Jerry never met Mick Jagger, but there
is video of them on the helipad in Sausalito interacting.[xviii]

#Altamont, JG: “It was something very heavy for us to
see what we had initiated by just, on a good day back in ’65, goin’ to the
Panhandle and settin’ up and playin’ for free – we saw it turn into that. It
wasn’t lost on us, man.”[xix]
#chiaroscuro

Rosie McGee thought Sam
“Cutler was part of the
Pleasure Crew, which was a bunch of guys who hung out together. They’d travel
with the band, or show up. It was obvious when I visited a couple of them that
money wasn’t an issue.”[xx]

Sam Cutler Institutionalization: “Garcia was
particularly interested, when we first chatted, in how the Rolling Stones
organized things – how they ran their office, how did they do the bank
accounts, who could sign checks.”[xxi]

Lenny Hart pp.
140-147.

At the time of Lenny’s arrival [ca. May 1969], Rock says
“I was already talking with Clive
Davis” of Columbia Records.[xxii]
#record companies

per Rock, 10/31/69 Lenny has them sign papers, which nobody
read, and they turned out to extend the WB contract another three years.[xxiii]
#record companies

Jonathan Riester: “The band was always wishy-washy.
That was one of Garcia’s bad character defects. He
would go with the flow.”[xxiv]
#personality

Gail Hellund: “Jerry did Zabriskie Point, and they were
going to buy their first house with the check from that. Mountain Girl would
call them every day: “That check come yet?” She had a house she
wanted to buy, and she was anxious to get it. Every morning I would go to the
post office and pick up the Grateful Dead’s mail. I was not allowed to open
it-I just put it on Lenny’s desk. I saw the check from Warner
Bros.-“Jerome J. Garcia”- put it on Lenny’s desk,”[xxv]
but Lenny stole it and that’s how he got caught. GOTs at the center!

Rock, on post-Lenny: “Mickey was distraught beyond belief. He [eventually] quit because
he couldn’t face it.”[xxvi]

Sam Cutler, per Gail H: “Sam Cutler was there. He
wasn’t pressuring anybody except Jerry; that’s the only person you had to
pressure in those days.”[xxvii]
“Sam’s a hustler.”[xxviii]

#why Bob Weir 1970: “It bugs you if you are playing
music the best you can play it and not many people are listening. And just
because you’re a performer, a performer wants people to listen.”[xxix]

Miles Davis: “Jerry Garcia and I hit it off great,
talking about music –what they liked and what I liked – and I think we all
learned something. Jerry Garcia loved jazz and I found out that he loved my
music and had been listening to it for a long time.”[xxx]
#musics

jazz is diachronic –successive soli—while the GD can often
be synchronic in which, as Phil says, “everybody’s playing their
improvisations at the same time”.[xxxi]
#musics

GD-Europe per Nelson, ca 1970 Cutler was trying to set up a
Europe tour – the GD, NRPS, JA etc. going over on a big ocean liner. Had
meetings at Jerry’s in Larkspur, talked about passport photos etc. The Canadian
train trip replaced this.[xxxii]

Bob in 1970 describes a good jam that left Garcia “more grin than beard – which is unusual.”[xxxiii]
Classic.

#fatemusic JG on the GD, speaking 1970: “A long time
ago, we were sort of incidental music at the celebration of life.”[xxxiv]
This is from Flash #0 on a 747 – see http://deadsources.blogspot.com/2013/12/october-1970-jerry-garcia-interview.html.
Continues: “Which was super cool. Now, however, we’re in the position of
being rock and roll stars, which is not anywhere near so cool and takes a lot
more from you… You’re playing music, you’re up, you’re excited, you’re on,
you leave the stage … and there’s a backstage full of drifting shadow forms and
peculiar show-biz vampires” [LIA’s transcription]. #burden

Merl was “still wearing shined shoes and these 300
dollar sweaters” when he started playing with Jerry. First started with
Jerry and Vitt and Merl, organ and bass pedals. “About thirty people each
Monday or Tuesday would come to hear us.”[xxxv]
Not sure how to interpret – I thought crowds started before Merl, drove Howard
away, in fact.

rh on writing Deal and Loser: “both written about 7
o’clock one morning when we were all living in Novato. … I was chipper and
feeling wonderful, and I dashed those two songs off. Garcia got up a little
later and he was reading the newspaper at the breakfast table and I laid these
two lyrics on him.”[xxxvi]
#adayinthelife

BK on Keith: “He was so inventive—he played some jazz
stuff and free music that was just incredible. He had a heart of music.”[xxxvii]
When KG came in, no other tryouts. KG as musician, doing “those little
Floyd Cramer trills on the country tunes”, per Gary Lambert.[xxxviii]

November ’71: Atlanta no good, lots of uptight cops in a big
municipal building. ABQ “was a nice trip. In fact, they want us to do a
gig and have the sociology department of the University of New Mexico come and
observe it, and also the police, to see how we handle a crowd.”[xxxix]

McIntire on DJG: “Donna Jean was adored by everyone.
She was a musician, so she got treated better than any woman who has ever been
in the Grateful Dead scene. She was treated as a goddess. Everyone was looking
out for her and helping her. No one would be mean to Donna Jean.”[xl]

Donna Jean on BK’s drumming: “he played like a
dancer”.[xli]

#record company Steve Brown: “Rakow was able to
convince Jerry that this was a good idea, and Jerry was able to subsequently
sell it to the band”.[xlii]

Steve Brown recounts GDR era, “being out in the front
office and hearing Jerry in the kitchen playing”. #adayinthelife “One
day David Bromberg showed up and the
two of them went for a whole afternoon just playing together and
laughing.”[xliii]

Rock on losing Pig: “I’d never seen Jerry more unhappy,
ever. God, he was devastated.”[xliv]
#death

214 ff some stuff on Cutler. R Loren says shrewd, ambitious,
self-aggrandizing. RL says Cutler was getting an agent’s commission, so pushing
big gigs. “He took it too far, and eventually they let him go.”[xlv]
I do not feel like I know what caused Cutler’s departure. Was there a zero-sum
influence game between Rakow and Cutler?

#record company, Steve Brown: “We put all the time and
effort into making the whole thing [WOTF] as good as we could make it and then
– BANG! About a week after it came out, bootlegs started to show up. Goddamn
bootlegs!”[xlvi]
“We didn’t really have any idea how to deal with it, so we did what most
regular companies would do: we called up the FBI! … The FBI found out that it
was the mob working out of New Jersey.“[xlvii]

#record company Steve Brown: “The shock to us was that
no sooner had we gone independent than we became highly vulnerable, and we
didn’t have the kind of protections that big record companies have … We were,
unfortunately, little and very fuck-withable.”[xlviii]

Steve Brown on Garcia’s musicality: “Jerry would often
use visual identification with the sounds he was trying to describes, and they
were an interesting insight into how he ‘saw’ music. Sometimes he would
actually draw it – he would have a celeste with this lines going out to these
sparks and stars – he wanted it to burst. ‘That’s like a carousel sound.’ ‘That
should sound like it’s a cold place on Saturn, very cold and hard.’ Weird
stuff.”[xlix]
#sounds

Recording Mars Hotel, per Steve Brown: “It was a
congenial scene. Everybody was still healthy enough. There wasn’t that much
cocaine around; it wasn’t that abusive a scene. Mostly it was smoking dope and
Jerry and his Tia Marias – coffee with Kahlua.”[l]
#alcohol #drugs

The Phil & Ned sets “visited many challenging and
highly unconventional spaces in the realm between music and noise.”[li]
#musics Jerry Moore on Seastones:
“Maybe they were looking to baffle people. I guess it’s music, but it
doesn’t partake of most of the requirements. It didn’t have a melody. It didn’t
have a beat. It didn’t have a theme of any sort.”[lii]

art vs. commerce: Ned
Lagin was told to stop making the GD too weird. “There was a real
desire for the long stuff to get shorter and the short stuff to get more
popular.”[liii]

E74 #drugs, per Ned. Lots of cocaine. Phil didn’t do
cocaine, not sure about Weir, but Phil and Ned were also doing LSD. He implies
everyone else doing lots of coke. Meeting in London “we all agreed to
flush our stashes. We all dutifully did – with, as it turns out, the exception
of Jerry.”[liv]

Phil Lesh on #drugs: “Cocaine … makes me evil and makes
me hate music.”[lv]

JG 1974 on hiatus. “Our whole development has been
‘going along with the changes.’ … just not thinking about it, or not making
conscious decisions about what we were doing, we ended up in that place of
stadiums, coliseums, large civic buildings, high ticket prices, enormous
overhead …”[lvi]
#fatemusic #institutionalization

#togotigi Garcia 1975: “We’ve been a group in the most
real sense for ten years with zero breaks. We’ve gotten so into functioning as
a gestalt personality, at times it’s all the same person. It’s the Grateful
Dead, whatever that is. … it’s time to go out and do our own things. Because
the Dead incorporates the musical viewpoint that it’s none of us particularly.
We each have our own particular interests, and what we can agree to do together
is something different than we would do individually.”[lvii]

Weir #togotigi 1976: “Branching off into separate bands
was an extremely healthy step for all of us. We were suffering from being
inbred [recall Croz: variety], and the only way to deal with this was for each
member to go out and seek a new endeavor.”[lviii]

p. 241 sounds like Steve Brown has more tapes of BFA
sessions at Ace’s. “Van Morrison
came up and hung out a few times; that was neat.”[lix]
As closely as they passed, I know of no Garcia-Van direct encounters.

January 1976 DJG we were all hanging out in Stinson,
“so the proximity probably influenced us joining that band. Garcia was at
our house all the time and we would take out old gospel records and listen to
them for days and days, and decide which ones we wanted to do.”[lx]
She elaborates on what they were after with the super slow stuff. JGB

#record company “Ron Rakow tried many different avenues
to raise funds for the various projects –even borrowing
money from a network of drug smugglers at one point [JGMF: tell me
more!] – but in May 1976″ he cut himself a check and bailed, leaving the
GD “once again in desperate financial straits.”[lxi]

Rakow blames failure on The Movie: “Until the movie
broke us, Grateful Dead Records made a lot of bread.”[lxii]
Steve Brown confirms that The Movie was costing a lot.

Dave Parker: Rakow “walked away with the money, which
the majority of the band felt he wasn’t entitled to. Garcia felt that he was.
Garcia was basically on his side at first,” eventually came ’round.[lxiii]
Jerilyn on Rakow: “it was Jerry’s decision to let him get away with it,
because he felt like it was more trouble than it was worth”.[lxiv]
Steve Brown: after Rakow ripped them off on Jerry’s watch, “Jerry had the
mark on his forehead for a while there. You could see him wearing
it. … they had been kind of pushing the way they wanted
things.”[lxv]
#1976 guilt

The Movie: “It became Jerry’s personal project,”
Dennis McNally says, “so nobody was going to interfere with it. On the
other hand, he almost had to steal money from the Grateful Dead to get it done.
And there’s Rakow, who’s Jerry’s guy, and Rakow burns everybody. It’s a sort of
a perfect storm of negativity, and what does Jerry do? He starts
self-medicating” with heroin.[lxvi]
The Movie bound up with the Rakow ripoff, #drugs.

JG on Keith, 1981: “Keith had a thing with the piano
that was truly remarkable. You could play him a record of something he’d never
been exposed to stylistically, like Professor Longhair, and a minute later he’d
have the whole idiom.”[lxvii]
Really reinforces the idea of KG as a piano savant.

#GD vs. solo: JG in 1979: “in the GD, things work
dynamically. They aren’t a result of somebody’s point of view made into policy;
rather they’re the other way around. Things happen, and we try to figure out
what they were. … Any idea has to make allowances for what everybody believes.
… “What’s interesting about the GD is that we don’t
share a common point of view about anything.”[lxviii]

Garcia, undated: “We’ve learned to go with the flow;
there’s always something going on that’s worth the hassle and all the bullshit.
… It’s an experiment, and it’s only pure fortune
that’s taken us this far, and that fortune has a lot to do with
taking chances. We abandoned the whole concept of a game plan early on. As soon
as things started happening better than we could plan, we decided to trust that
instead.”[lxix]
#fatemusic

#houses Garcia at Hepburn Heights by late 1980, 11/16/80
Dylan sit in.[lxx]

#drugs heroin comfort JG 1987 interview: “Maybe it was
the thing of being able to distance myself a little from the world.”[lxxi]

#coma, Len Dell’amico says “God bless Merl. … Merl’s
the guy who took it on himself. That wasn’t anyone else. Merl had faith.”[lxxii]
#1986

Annabelle says he started with #banjo when he started
playing again post-#coma.[lxxiii]
#1986

Len Dell’amico says of #Bob
Dylan and JG “I got the sense from Jerry that the two of them had a
closer relationship than has been revealed by either one. Because once I got
him talking, it was clear they had talked on the phone a lot and they had spent
time together in New York with [the Dead] played in New York. Bob had even
given him a tour of New York City in his van. I think that was somewhere
between ’78 and the Christian tour in 1980.”[lxxiv]
Valuable new info on JG and Zimm!

Weir on song-“Frankie Lee And Judas Priest”: JG
had been “trying to get [Dylan] to do it [in ’87], because he loved that
song.” “Each new line was a shining new gem”.[lxxv]

#charisma Garcia “dominated every room he was in”.[lxxvi]
#personality

Dennis on post-coma: “Jerry was healthy, happy to be
alive, happy to be playing music again … 87 was just a really sweet year in
that way”[lxxvii]

JG ’87, could video replace live? “The audience
requires the band, the band requires the audience … anything short of live
performances is short of live performances.”[lxxviii]
#why

JG ’87 “As far as I can tell, we’re at the cul-de-sac,
the end of popular music success. It doesn’t mean there’s no place to go from
here. But now we have to be creative on this level as well, and invent where
we’re going to go.”[lxxix]
#burden it’s hard to invent new forms, institutions are costly to build, they
stuck with the tried & true and it ground him up (or whatever).

Broadway ’87 covered Jackson and Gans 2015, 344-345. Bob
Barsotti: “Ticket sales broke Yul Brynner’s record with The Kind and I for first-day sales on
Broadway in 1964. It was broken again later by Andrew Lloyd Webber with the Phantom of the Opera, but Jerry held the
record for a while.”[lxxx]

#business Parish was conscious of Graham having to make it
special, so as not to offend John (but Scher got mad anyway).[lxxxi]

Len Dell’amico has Jerry clean on 12/31/87.[lxxxii]
No #drugs.

GD 1989 nitrous oxide stuff out east was actually an organized crime operation, shows with hundreds of tanks –
“at five bucks a balloon, somebody’s making millions of dollars”
(Cameron Sears).[lxxxiii]

So puzzling to me why GD went away from ITD approach for
BTL.[lxxxiv]
No one can quite explain how it happened.

Mickey Hart,
Garcia said in discussing Weir’s “Victim Or The Crime”, “holds
down the strangeness corner.”[lxxxv]
That’s part of what makes NRPS so surprising – it calls for being so straight!
On the other hand, he was a regimental drummer or whatever.

NB how much Garcia loves strangeness: “It’s like having
a monster brother that you lock up in the attic. It’s like a relative that you
– ‘God, I hope nobody comes over when he’s eating.’”[lxxxvi]
LOL

Cameron Sears: Garcia was most affected by Brent’s death.
Dell’amico concurs: “It was clear to me that Garcia was hit harder than
the others.”[lxxxvii]
#death

#burden Cameron Sears that after Brent died the GD
“should have canceled the tour and taken as much time as they needed. I
think ultimately it was the family pressure. You’ve got at least fifty people
who were dependent” on the Dead continuing.[lxxxviii]

Dennis: “My theory was that Jerry to some extent took
responsibility for Brent’s death. He recognized that the internal dynamics of
the GD – the way the treated each other as human beings—was a fraud, was
non-supportive, non-anything that any human being would want to be a part
of.”[lxxxix]
#death

#death Brent, per Dennis: “Being ‘manly men’, they
wouldn’t talk about it, they wouldn’t confront it, they just tried to put themselves
in total denial … It was almost archetypal, the way they failed to deal with
what had just happened to them. I think Jerry knew this, whether he wanted to
admit it out loud or not, and it put him in a bad place, and you can hear it in his guitar playing for the rest of his life.“[xc]
#personality #1990s

Garcia and Phil came to Bruce H at Concord Pavilion, 8/5/90,
to ask him to join the GD.[xci]
Bruce discusses trying to break up the codified formula, to little avail.[xcii]

Weir 1991 on GD: “We have all the dynamics of a
family.”[xciii]
JG 1991 “My relationship with the GD family is way closer than anything
I’ve got with any of my blood relatives.”[xciv]
#brotherhood

Len Dell’amico says they had a good run after coma.
“Brent died and then a year later Bill [Graham] died, and I don’t think
Jerry could shoulder it. It was staggering. It was like a fighter getting
hit.”[xcv]
#death #1990s #oscuro Bill Graham

Len Dell’amico says JG was talking as early as spring 1991
about getting out of stadiums, etc.[xcvi]
burnout #1991

#1990s Silberman: “Towards the end, Garcia’s weathered
quality became part of the plot.”[xcvii]
great line

by-mid 1994, fans are getting word “about the obvious
recurrence of Garcia’s drug issues, manifested by an alarming
listlessness and lack of focus onstage.” Also suffering carpal
tunnel (1993ff).[xcviii]
#drugs #health

Vinnie on #drugs: “Jerry talked about his drug thing
very little, and the only time he tried to explain it to me, he was trying to
describe his relationship with [heroin] and how he was what he called a
“maintenance user”.[xcix]
This is not as farfetched as it sounds. As narrated in Escohotado’s magisterial
Historia General de las Drogas,[c]
the “maintenance user” is probably the modal –most commonly
occurring– type of drug user throughout human history. This is the town grocer
who takes a nip of cough syrup, the codeine giving him a sense of pleasant calm
as he goes about his business.

Vinnie on #drugs #1990s “It was becoming apparent … —
about halfway through my tenure – when it was pretty much out of the closet and
it was pretty obvious that he was going to do what he was going to do. Better
blatant than latent, though he never did the shit in front of you. He didn’t do
it to party, … he just did enough to make himself feel ‘normal’.”[ci]

Vinnie on #drugs #1990s: “He could be playing and nod
out and then he’d wake up and find himself still playing.”[cii]
[NB BJ said JG was nodding 9/2/94?]

Hornsby, sitting in Giants Stadium 1994: “it was just
horrifically bad. They all knew it, the [band members] were bummed and
embarrassed … a sea of mediocrity on the bandstand.”[ciii]
#GD #1990s

Hornsby, on ca. 1994: “no one seemed to be able to
reach Garcia”.[civ]

#1990s JG #drugs, per Cameron Sears: “We did confront
him. We did have a lot of meetings internally. People were genuinely concerned
from a personal perspective for him and the music was not what people felt it
should be, so there were a lot of things being discussed. But the X-factor in
the whole thing was really Jerry’s reaction to it and what he wanted to do.
Because at the end of the day it was his life to live how he chose.”[cv]

Cameron Sears on JG 1990s drugs and health: “Nobody
wants to be told they can’t do something ever again. And he had multiple sets
of things where he was being told that. ‘You need to lose forty pounds. You
can’t smoke. You can’t eat this. You have to exercise.’ At a certain point
you’re kind of like, ‘Fuck this.’”[cvi]

#1990s Jan Simmons on how hard it was seeing JG in
“such poor health that it was hard for him to walk up and down the stage
stairs”.[cvii]

1990s 1994 GD attempt studio work, JG grumpy. Bralove:
” He’d come late; he might be pissed off”.[cviii]

#1995 Tour From Hell, Dennis says JG “was in alarming
health”.[cix]
Blood sugar over 200. #health

Steve Marcus: “When he was clean, he was so wonderful
to be around. And he would be backstage in the hospitality area, where Joe
Schmo could come in with a sticker [backstage pass], and he was open to
everybody. When he started using again,” he would hide in his dressing
room.[cx]

Steve Marcus on summer ’95: “he was
pale, like a ghost, in horrible, horrible shape. He always walked
around with his briefcase; it was practically handcuffed to him. He would just
get out of the van, go to his dressing room, disappear, and then twenty minutes
before the show would start, he would go up to his cubicle on stage and nobody
would see him, you know?”[cxi]

Allan Arkush: “his life became a burden”.[cxii]
#burden

Cameron Sears says his decision to go to Betty Ford was
quite unprecedented.[cxiii]

8/8/95 Cameron Sears saw JG “pulling out of the Wendy’s
drive-thru where he was getting, presumably, a chocolate shake, French fries,
and a cheeseburger, as he was wont to do”.[cxiv]
#health

The Movie: per film editor Susan Crutcher, they had 100,000 of
film from seven cameras, sync’d with an SMPTE time code system, and it took to
five months just to get everything in sync.[cxv]

The Movie Susan Crutcher was a film editor working with
Jerry in the editing room, sometimes “criticizing the music in a gentle but
honest way”. Four Hells Angels were sitting behind them just watching, and
at one point one of the Angels taps Jerry on the shoulder and asks “Who is
that bitch?” Jerry vouched for her, and she’d never again fear a movie
producer, having had four Hells Angels in her editing room.[cxvi]
#Hells Angels

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