Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia was victorious in her lawsuit against the estate of her late ex-husband, Jerry Garcia. Following the guitarist's death in August 1995, Garcia's widow and third wife, Deborah Koons Garcia, had stopped making the payments that Garcia had agreed to in a very short agreement he and Carolyn wrote themselves and signed in 1993. The judge in Marin County agreed with Carolyn's position and ordered the estate to perform on the contract and reimburse all of Mountain Girl's legal expenses in the case.
MG asked me if I'd like to interview her for the Grateful Dead Hour. The following is a complete transcript of that conversation. -- D.G.
Garcia: I just want to get some stuff out there because
we've had all this publicity from the trial, and it's, like,
confusing, at best.
First of all, I want people to know that I brought suit against the
estate -- most people don't understand that -- because the agreement
that Jerry and I had was not being honored by the estate. And the
only way I could get them to honor it was to go through this process
-- which, by the way, I had no idea about when I went into it. I was
naive. I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know it was
going to turn into this media circus.
Gans: Did you have any control over whether it was going to be
on Court TV?
Garcia: No. I did not know it was going to be on Court TV
until I walked in there the first day of the trial.
Gans: How weird that the parties to a suit wouldn't have any
ability to...
Garcia: Well, apparently it's a first amendment thing. Court
TV has fought this out, and they've got every attorney in the United
States on their side [laughs]. And that's it, you know? You
can't fight them. They are City Hall.
Gans: In the sense that trials are supposed to be a matter of
public record, it's really only a virtual extension of that, I
suppose, to make it available on a cable channel. Since any of us
could go in and take a seat in the courtroom and watch it, I'm sure
their theory is that "All we're doing is facilitating the open
courtroom."
Garcia: That's exactly it. It's more than a theory, that's
their practice. They have insisted upon their right to do so and,
basically, the judicial system in the country has rolled over and
said okay, rather than get into a projected fight about it. Yes,
people have a right to see what's going on in a public courtroom.
And... if you're going to have a closed hearing or in chambers, that
stuff is not going to be on TV. But they just keep the camera running
the whole time that you're in there, and at first, it's a tremendous
distraction to be on camera. But then it becomes a part of the
struggle to keep focused in the courtroom is to deal with the guy
over there recording your expressions and your voice for the whole
thing. I did not anticipate any of that. My attorney, bless his
heart, didn't tell me that this was going to happen. He did mention
it in passing a couple of days before the thing, but it wasn't said
in such a way that I locked onto it as an issue that might come up.
So it was a bit of a shock. And also, the way the courtroom was set
up, I was sitting on the opposite side of the room from the camera
with the kids in the gallery behind me. The opposition was sitting
right under the camera, so it was kind of one-sided coverage.
Gans: Your troupe was frequently on camera, and Deborah
[Koons Garcia] was never on camera.
Garcia: Yeah.
Gans: And [Estate attorney Paul] Camera was viewed
from a sort of reverse three-quarter angle.
Garcia: Right. And I asked the people of Court TV why they
chose that position.
Marin County has a very unique courthouse that was designed by Frank
Lloyd Wright; it was one of his last projects. The rooms are round.
Weird things happen in round rooms. If you're in there for long
enough, you feel like you're in a spaceship, for starters. A round
room with no windows, with these weird, round lighting fixtures up
above it that kind of flickered off and on eerily -- you know, they
would come and go. I think that everything for this courthouse has to
be custom-made, because nothing is regular. There's no square things,
except for the doors themselves. Everything else is rounded.
And the sound -- the whole center of the room is a dead spot. When
you say something, it's like it just goes into empty space and
nothing comes back. So, it's very quiet in there, except for right
around the outer edge, where there's kind of a sibilant hissing going
on. I told my kids to stay out of that outer ring of seats, because
the energy out there was... terrible.
Gans: Plus, I think sound, if you say something there, it kind
of travels around the perimeter of the room and doesn't go into the
middle.
Garcia: It doesn't seem to go across the middle very well,
either.
Gans: Seems like, uh, eavesdropping possibilities.
Garcia: So, basically, the attorneys were sort of shouting to
make themselves be heard, and then right in the middle of the thing,
my attorney got a horrible case of laryngitis...
Gans: Boy, did he ever!
Garcia: He sounded like he was drowning as he was talking.
That was some of our most important arguments and testimony, too, so
it was hard to make anything out of it.
Gans: Let's backtrack a little bit.
I'm sort of uncomfortable with the whole nature of this thing having
been made public, and I can't imagine that it was a thrill to you
that that was going to happen, either. But since it all became
tremendously public, a huge amount of stuff that was the subject of
rumors for years in Grateful Dead land suddenly became a matter of
public record. That must have been kind of bizarre for you.
Garcia: Well, it's like having a hold of something that's out
of control. I remember one time I had a calf that grew and got big,
and it was time to load it in the truck and move it, and I got a rope
around its neck and then I foolishly held the other end of the rope.
It yanked me down the road on my face [laughs]. You know, and
it was kind of like that. There's a time when you know you really
should be letting go of it at this point, but you can't 'cause you're
going to lose the whole thing. It got into that juggernaut aspect,
especially with the media thing that was going on out in the hall. So
you come out of this courtroom and there's five reporters wantin' to
talk to you about it as well. Plus, I had the girls [daughters
Sunshine Kesey, Annabelle Garcia and Theresa Garcia] with me, and
they were not unwilling to talk, and so this whole thing turned into
sort of affair of rumors and innuendo flashing back and forth between
the print reporters and the TV camera and what was going on in the
courtroom. I began to feel really, really trapped by it. By about the
third day, I could see that this thing was completely out of my
control. I just had to cross my fingers and hope for the best.
Gans: You could have made the decision not to talk. You must
have weighed that issue very carefully before deciding to go ahead
and be part of the public spectacle, as well.
Garcia: Well, going into the thing, I didn't imagine that it
would be like this. I imagined something a lot more discreet and
discretionary -- not that the public would be excluded, but that
there wasn't... I never thought there was going to be a TV camera in
the courtroom or that the college professors, the law professors from
Harvard, were going to have a symposium about what had just
happened on Court TV, or that people were going to be discussing my
case in faraway places. That certainly never occurred to me, and it's
amusing, but I must say I haven't looked at any of that footage. I
have not looked at myself on TV. I haven't seen any of it. My
attorney wisely commanded me to have a media blackout during the
period of the trial, just so I could get some sleep.
There's something so strange about being in court and having
somebody... first, asking you questions in a sort of negative way.
[You're] defending yourself, basically, and then, that
becomes part of your inner dialogue with yourself. And it's a
semantic game. What you say may hang you, and so you have to watch
every word you say. It's paying so much attention in the moment that
you get really tired. But then it enters your dream life and you
dream about it all night long. And you wake up the next day and you
have to go to court, you've been dreaming all night long, and it's a
terrible merry-go-round. And even when it was over, it was still
going on inside of me for two or three weeks afterward. It's only now
that I can say that I'm dreaming about something else besides being
in court.
Gans: I have Court TV here on my cable system, and I found it,
of course, very compelling stuff, even though it was incredibly
tedious. There's something about... it's people that you know and you
care about, and it's a story that's important to you. And even though
it's playing out at the stately pace of a glacier marching to the
sea, it's still something you sort of can't avoid paying attention
to.
As things went by, it seemed that Court TV began with very little
knowledge beyond the initial complaints, whatever the initial court
documents were. And their coverage seemed to become much more
sympathetic to your side as things went by when some of the experts
began to ask what seemed like obvious questions to people like me,
like "Why is this case happening this way?" and "Why are these things
in doubt?" and "Why is the estate's attorney being so violent in his
accusations and stuff here?" It seemed like the more the Court TV
people found out about you, for example, and the more about the
situation... I mean, I had the opportunity to give a little
background to one of the reporters of Court TV, and she seemed to be
completely clueless as to what was going on until she heard from
people like me.
Garcia: Right. And the cluelessness of the media is, I think,
partly a function of age. They're all pretty young, they're all from
the East Coast, and they really had not done any homework as far as
what the case consisted of and who the characters were. So they were
entirely dependent upon what they found out during the course of the
case. The video crew that Court TV sends out is just a local crew;
they contract for that, so the camera people were just really nice
young people with a contract to produce the video. They did have a
reporter or two standing by who was paying attention to what was
happening on their feed and commenting and doing the updates and so
on. I realized that this was just grist for their mill, but I think I
realized that kind of late in the game. Up to that point, I tried to
fill them in a little bit on the background. When they came and asked
me questions, I told 'em what I thought and I gave them some history.
So I felt like I kind of helped bring 'em along into some of the
answers about our life story as it was.
But I think that the case itself was just based on my need to resolve
this issue about the marital settlement agreement that Jerry and I
made in 1993. It was a lot of money, but it was a lot of money over
time. And it was the agreement that we made, and he was honoring it
before he died, and both of us had gone on to other relationships,
kind of happily, and there was never any question about it during the
period that he was still alive. But when he passed away, his estate
and his executors ended the contract unilaterally. And that was what
my case was about: to have it ratified in court.
The reason that Jerry and I made an agreement outside of the legal
system was because we were afraid of just this kind of stuff. Neither
of us wanted to go to court; we didn't want to submit ourselves to
scrutiny. What I didn't know before I went to court was that there's
a divorce industry, a civil justice industry in this country. And
it's got a lot of people that make their living performing services
for people that are undergoing these kinds of disputes -- over
marriage, over property, over finances, over agreements that were
made and broken, relationships gone bad. There's a whole culture
there that I was blissfully unaware of until I got into the
courtroom. And some of it has a pretty negative aspect. There's a
tremendous amount of money involved, and everything -- the
courthouse, the bailiffs, the judges, the attorneys... I'd been
unaware of this, but there's a lot of people they call. There were
these two guys brought into our case called "forensic accountants,"
which I was told we had to have.
Gans: I loved that -- it reminded me of a Saturday Night
Live thing.
Garcia: Well. I think Saturday Night Live should do a
skit about it, because it's the funniest thing in the world! The
forensic accountants are paid for their testimony. And the judge, of
course, has seen these guys lots of times before. Every time a
divorce case comes to court, each side will hire one of these guys to
present their side of the financial picture. And so you get a very
wide range from these two characters. They are looking at the same
sets of figures related to money and assets and so on, and they come
up with totally different conclusions, depending on who they're
working for. And then they give these logical-sounding arguments...
It was hilarious! I had no idea that these people existed, but the
really horrific part of this was that not only do they exist, but
they're making huge amounts of money off of it -- thousands of
dollars per case and hundreds and hundreds of dollars per hour. And
it was very difficult to sit in the courtroom and know that the clock
is ticking. You're looking at your watch; the meter's running.
Everybody in the courtroom is making an hourly except for me
[laughs]. I'm paying for a good deal of it, and the estate is
paying for a good deal of it, and it's just the process that's so
expensive. Just the financial part of it is so expensive that I
really recommend that anybody out there that's contemplating anything
like this think twice! Try to make your deals outside of the
courtroom. Don't get in there unless you absolutely have to.
Gans: Conversely, though, it could be said that if you had had
an attorney enshrining your agreement in proper language, the
ambiguities that gave rise to some of the controversy would never
have happened.
Garcia: That's true. And there was quite a bit of work being
done on that during the intervening time... Jerry and I signed our
agreement, and then there was going to be a further contract that
settled those ambiguities, but that didn't get finalized.
Gans: Was there any reason given when your payments were cut
off?
Garcia: No. Not that I know of.
Gans: And it emerged in the course of the coverage that the
estate had to cut off a number of things, like Theresa's car payments
and things like that.
Garcia: Right, and I think that there's always a period of
readjustment when somebody passes away that's got a substantial
estate. One of the problems was that Jerry had a lot of claimants,
and some of the claims were, I think, specious. It was unfortunate
that everybody sort of rushed in there with claims, and it made it
look a lot worse than it was. Basically, Jerry's estate is going to
have quite a bit of value over time, and I don't think that taking an
adversarial attitude toward the people that were Jerry's close
associates and friends during his lifetime is a very good way to go
with settling some of this stuff. The adversarial attitude is really
expensive.
And I'd just like to point out that Jerry himself was a collaborator;
he did all his work in concert with other people. I think that the
estate made an error in sort of like shutting everything off and not
wanting to negotiate with people. I think that that's changing..
Gans: It seems pretty clear from what I heard of the decision,
that the court very much agreed with you about that: Jerry was
honoring his word to you, and he had performed consistently on that
contract, and it didn't seem to make any sense for the estate to
decide that it was not a valid contract.
Garcia: Right. The judge found for every single one of our
points and actually even awarded us attorneys' fees and costs. So,
that's like a full victory. It's unfortunate that it happened at all,
but it also put me through a number of changes that I think I
wouldn't have gone through. I mean, I might have just retired up to
Oregon and never paid any attention to any of this stuff again if
this hadn't happened. So, frankly, in my heart, I have a good deal of
gratitude to the estate for making me jump through all these hoops,
because it's changed me. It's made me a different person. I'm a lot
more alert and aware, and I've had to go back through all my old
papers and documents and filing cabinets and boxes full of mementos
and so on for the document searches that led up to this trial for the
deposition period and the fact-finding period. It forced me to
reassess who I was and who we were and what our relationship was all
about and our family history, and go through all the old photos... It
was an incredible process. It really took me about a year to do this.
I've only just now started to put that stuff away again.
Gans: Did you get to talk about what you thought was important
when you were on the stand?
Garcia: Only marginally. Unfortunately, my period on the stand
was mostly taken up with answering the questions of the estate's
attorney, and he, uh, you know, he was trying to win, and he was
trying to get me flustered and, basically, undermine anything I said.
It's like being stuck with the vice principal you can't stand for
weeks on end in his office. You know, just being grilled over
and over about minutia and detail of your life until pretty soon, you
don't want to say anything at all, 'cause the minute you say
anything, the guy's going to jump all over you. It's a struggle to
present yourself in that kind of an atmosphere. It's very, very
difficult, because you get so caught up in resistance to the process
that you forget to make your own points about the case you're
presenting. And sometimes, you have to wait five days to get your
chance to say anything, and people can get up on the stand and say
anything they want about you. (She takes a breath.) And you have to
keep your mouth shut for four or five days until it's your turn.
Gans: Were there times when you wanted to stand up and shout
out in the courtroom?
Garcia: Well, the thought crosses your mind, but it's
impossible. You can't do that stuff in the courtroom. You've got to
keep your outer person and your inner person in pretty good control.
I liken it to rolling rocks up a hill, and sometimes the hill gets
really steep, and the rock's extra, extra heavy, any you've gotta
just keep going a little step at a time. And you don't even get a
chance to look at the size of the hill ahead of you; you've gotta
just keep rolling, you know? And you roll and you roll and roll, and
finally, all of a sudden, one day, it's over, and the judge made the
decision. I don't think I was looking ahead that much to the
decision. I was just glad it was over. And I was fully prepared to
lose. There was no way I could go into that thing and not be fully
prepared to lose.
Gans: That would've been a very expensive proposition.
Garcia: Oh, yes! That in itself would have cost me a lot.
I was prepared to lose. I had sort of mentally run myself through
what would happen if I'd lose everything: "Well, I've got just enough
money in the bank to pay the attorneys, go away and do other things
and try to make some money and carry on with life."
You know, it makes you count all your blessings, every one, and we've
been incredibly blessed in the finest sense of the word. We've been
unbelievably lucky, the Garcia family, and amazing things have
happened, and the more I thought in that vein, the happier I felt.
And it made me realize that win, lose or draw, things are the way
they have been. History is what it is. Lots of cool stuff has already
gone down, and I don't have to feel bad about a thing. So, I think
the mental preparation that I did to go into this court case was
fabulous. It was like writin' a master's thesis...
Gans: Wow.
Garcia: And it's left me a different person. I'm a lot more
careful about what I say. (She starts to laugh.) For instance, the
English language takes on a whole new shading once you've been
through four weeks of court testimony. You watch what you say, and
you consider the meaning and the thrust of your words and the
possible interpretations of 'em before you say 'em. That takes time,
but you can get up to speed with that. It's fascinating to me to have
gone through it and have won, and I'm grateful to the judge. But at
the same time, I also feel that there is this tremendous interest
from the news media, everything from People magazine to "Hard Copy"
was hammering on our door. And we really turned down most of it. Some
of them have gone ahead and done their own programming from the Court
TV footage, but just the whole idea of having that family history
aired out for the grist of the big commercial mill of news, of news
coverage, it's very distasteful to me. And there's really no place
for me there. I'm not comfortable with that. And it was hard to get
everybody to shut up. That was very difficult to do.
Gans: And the media have to distill this stuff down into
facile, clever little headlines and short captions and things. To
those of us who are more involved in the culture from which this
thing came, knowing the immense complexities of it and knowing the
richness of the characters involved, it was really infuriating to see
these little one-paragraph blurbs in the mainstream media where it
was boiled down to two, you know, jealous women fighting for
dominance in the memory of Jerry... I mean, they oversimplified it
and made it into a cartoon.
Garcia: Well, they focused on that, and that was unfortunate.
It was also unfortunate that they were able to get anything out of me
about it at all, because, you know, I sort of fell into with them
there for a minute, and I was sorry later. They focused on that
because that was newsworthy. And despite all the other newsworthy
aspects of this, that was the one they decided to play up.
Gans: It's sexier than contract law.
Garcia: Exactly. It gave them something to chew on, and they
milked it. I felt milked after that. They stopped calling about four
days after the judgment came in -- that was it. It ended, and I was
so relieved that they stopped.
I just felt that there was a lot of potential for abuse there. When
some crazy celebrity status gets you into the news, it's very hard to
get back out again and go back and hide some more, but I'm doing
that. And I want to be in control of those things -- I don't want
that stuff to control me or my life. I didn't like it that the news
media chose the feud aspect to sell their documentaries or whatever
the heck they were doing, or the newspapers.
Gans: Even though you were, more or less, the sympathetic
character in that presentation.
Garcia: But I didn't set out to make myself a sympathetic
character. I just was me. They drew their own conclusions from it. I
think that whatever happened is what happened, and I'm so relieved
that that part of it is over, and I'm refusing to do any more about
it. I'm talking to you about it today because I want to sort of clear
up in anybody's mind just what was that that just happened, and is
there going to be any good to come out of it. Well, the good that I'd
like to have come out of it is, you know, dear people, don't enter
the court of law naively. Go in there and see what's going on. If
you're going to file suit against somebody, or you're going to take
somebody to court or do any of these things, you'd really better know
what the moral and ethical consequences of that are -- and also the
financial ones, because it's staggering! And if you walk into
this thing without knowing what you're doing, you run the risk of
hurting a lot of your personal relationships and damaging your inner
self. It's very hard, and there's a lot of people who make their
living in that world. They're rats, and they're sort of living in
this world of conflict.
Gans: Let's talk a little bit about the way other people got
thrust into that. I'm thinking of watching employees and partners and
friends -- Sue Stephens, Phil Lesh, Steve Parish -- thrust into the
middle of this thing. That must have been a horribly uncomfortable
position for each of them as individuals, and probably for you, too,
watching them have to do it.
Garcia: Well, I didn't call any of them. My side didn't call
any witnesses -- I was the only witness for my side, except for the
forensic accountant. It was really tough. I felt terrible for Sue,
'cause she's such a sweet person and completely innocent of any real
connection to it at all.
Gans: And yet, when she was on the stand, there was this big
thing made of a conversation you'd had with her, where you had
advised her to shred --
Garcia: Oh, right. Well, I think I might've said something
about that, because basically, when we were doing the fact-finding
part of this case -- it's called the discovery process -- and a
tremendous number of documents appeared from our attorney's filing
cabinet. This has been our tax attorney for the last 20 years, and
all this stuff came out on the table. Well, I thought that stuff was
covered by attorney-client privilege. It was all his notes and his
little diagrams and handwritten stuff, and anybody can look at that
and draw whatever conclusions they want from it. In other words,
there's no explanations that go with these things. They're just an
attorney's notes to himself, based on conversations he had. A lot of
the stuff was undated. Some went all the way back to the mid-'70s...
Shoot, you know -- what are you going to do with all this stuff?
These are things that should not have been in there, that should have
been long gone.
I think I did say something to Sue about the number of documents that
had been produced, that I had no knowledge of or understanding of or
connection with, that were being used to create a scenario where I
cheated and lied and somehow defrauded Jerry over a period of time,
which was complete baloney! And yet, this attorney was able to
somehow string together a story based on these notes from our tax
attorney's filing cabinet, going way back in time. And that was very
distressing to me, 'cause there's nothing you can do about that. If
somebody wants to build a case against you out of these fragments,
that's what they do. That's how they make their living. It's horrible
to be the target of something like that.
Gans: So much of the proceedings and the commentary on Court
TV seemed to be proceeding from this notion that there was this
bizarre marriage between you and Jerry. And it wasn't 'til Steve
Parish was on the stand that anybody cut straight through all the BS
and said, "This is not a conventional society of people we were part
of." I mean, Steve hit the stand and sort of just exploded that whole
point of view; it seemed like the first moment of real clarity in the
proceeding, in which it was understood that it wasn't an unusual
thing for people to be in committed, long-term relationships and yet
not living in the same house, or that the life of a famous musician
who spent more than half his time on the road would not conform to
the ordinary contour of a middle-class life.
Garcia: Right. The concept that there's sort of middle-class
ideal we have to conform to to be legally married -- that's not true,
and a lot of celebrity relationships, of entertainers and so on, they
have more than one home, and wifey and family lives over here in
Rhode Island and the celebrity lives in LA, because that's the way it
is. And that's often just a fact of life, and that can be held
against you in a divorce case if you have separate residences. And
unfortunately, that came up and they made it a big part of their
case.
Gans: Well, isn't it ironic, though, and did it ever come out
in court that the last Mrs. Garcia had a separate home from her late
husband?
Garcia: Yes, it did. That was asked and answered a couple of
times and that's -- again, that's typical. And I don't think that
anybody should make too much of it, because that's kind of just the
way things worked. [Jerry] liked to have a private place to
go to that was his. I think that, at the same time, he wanted to have
his friends around him.
You know the whole period where my kids were little, there was a lot
of weirdness going on in California around the Grateful Dead scene.
There was a lot of very strange people who thought nothing of
dropping by the house at four a.m. to seek admittance or to seek your
opinion on some wild topic or other, and would knock on the door. I
totally couldn't stand that. I became security-conscious.
We had a couple of incidents that led up to my getting very nervous
about living in Marin County. Everybody knew where we lived, and it
was very difficult to maintain the premises in a secure fashion,
because there was that whole big anxiety out there about Jerry. I
couldn't deal with it after a while. It was too hard to deal with
around the kids, and it became very necessary to seek sort of a
retreat position for them when they were young, so that they wouldn't
be into that thing of, if they wanted to go somewhere, call a limo. I
can't stand that. That's not me. If they want to go somewhere, they
can ride their bike, you know? They're kids. And that was the essence
of most of my decisions about that stuff -- how to make it right for
them. Jerry had his chosen path with the Grateful Dead. Hell nor high
water was going to shake him loose from that. So nothing could make
that stop happening; it had a life and an energy of its own.
Sometimes I even felt crushed by that, like my needs and desires were
infinitesimal compared to what the Grateful Dead or the public needed
from Jerry or from the band, and so our lives were just lived in the
corners and edges of all that. And it just ate up everything. Of
course, we were all willing participants in that in the beginning.
That is what we were trying to do, but once it reached a juggernaut
status in the '70s, that became a real problem as far as how to live
and how to live well and how to live ethically.
Neither Jerry nor I came from wealthy backgrounds. I think that he
enjoyed his wealth more than I did. I kind of had an ethical problem,
a moral problem with having too much money. When we finally did have
a bunch of problems, it just created a bunch of conflict for me. And
also, as a parent, it created quite a bit of conflict.
Gans: Now, I see Jerry as a guy whose public image and, at
least, one of his internal images, was as a boundlessly generous man
who was generous with his time, and later with his material stuff,
and yet I also, in the last years in particular, saw that there was
another side to that and another inner guy that was weary of that
entire thing, like really bone-weary of it. I saw him do incredibly
rude things to people who attempted to enter his sphere at unwelcome
times. It gave me some insights into what it cost him to be that
guy.
Garcia: I think that's true -- I really didn't see much of
that rude guy. I know Jerry had a lot of facets to his personality.
He definitely saved some of them just for his family, and some of
them were for his very public aspects. He was rude so rarely in my
presence that I really don't recall anything like that, so you must
have seen something I never saw.
Gans: [laughs]
Garcia: But, you know, he was obviously struggling with a lot
of his own personal problems, and his solution to some of that stuff
was to close himself off from everybody for periods of time. That was
really hard on the kids. They didn't understand that. Really, in
retrospect now, I can look back at that and see that that was a
hurdle that he set up that we should have been able to cross.
Gans: If you wanted to get to him --
Garcia: Well, we did want to, but the whole thing was kind of
fear-inspiring. I think that if we had tried harder or had more
encouragement, maybe things wouldn't have gotten as bad as they
did.
Gans: You mean he did want you to leap over the moat.
Garcia: That's my guess now, but you know, hindsight is
20/20...
Gans: And there were a lot of people getting a lot of mixed
signals ...
Garcia: Yes.
Gans: ... not knowing who to help over and who not to.
Garcia: And it's very confusing when you've got so many people
invested in his ability to play and go out on the road and do shows.
To have your life accounted for a year ahead of time in the bookings
-- they booked these shows a year ahead of time. For old radical
hippies like ourselves to have to be somewhere on day X at
hour Y... it's terrible! You hate that! And I think that's what Jerry
hated more than anything was the commitment of his time to stuff that
he couldn't -- you know, at a certain point, you can't control it any
more.
Gans: But that was true of a traveling musician in 1967. It
wasn't quite as long term as...
Garcia: No. You would make gigs a month in advance back
then.
Gans: Well, certainly by the mid-'70s, it was more long-range
than that.
Garcia: No. No, no, no. The stuff fell together, you know?
Stuff would come together, sometimes it would fall apart. It was
shifting and changing all the time.
Gans: So when did it become --
Garcia: When it went mega... the mega-tours, I think... plus
booking and touring all got a lot more locked down when they started
working just for two or three different people, for Monarch and
Cellar Door and BGP and so on. Those things were, you know,
everything sort of got graven in stone. We became the establishment.
And then everybody started taking shots at us. We were the people
taking shots at the establishment for a really long time, and then
that turned over. And that was a scary process, to become the
musical establishment. I mean, ewwww! (She laughs.) How did
that happen? This was the truly down side of success, and I
feel bad for the band members, because they really got caught up in
that. And I think it hurt everybody, because we had a lot of fun back
when things were loose and came and went and things fell together and
fell apart. It was no big deal. Suddenly, it all became such a big
deal, and that's hard to live with.
Gans: I saw some of that being, as I am, a sort of emblematic
Deadhead. I found in my dealings with the band that sometimes I would
find myself forced to carry the baggage of thousands of Deadheads
that took the band so seriously, and to whom the Grateful Dead was
the single most important thing going. And it sort of became hard
sometimes to deal with the band, because, you know, I became one of
the point men for the invasion of their privacy and the loss of their
autonomy.
Garcia: This is the importancy dialogue that we've all had a
lot. It was so important to people to go to these shows. And
the band recognized that and understood it innately. They understood
it way back at the beginning, how important it was. We knew that. We
knew it was important to people, because it was that break-out thing,
the change in space, that change of mental space. And then there was
the healing aspect that came along with it, and people would go to
the shows for healing, for the uplift, for whatever that big cookie
was that you would come away with that would put the big smile on
your face. That was generated not just by the music, but also by the
event. But I think it was, in large part, from the music.
Gans: Well, without the music, it wouldn't have become --
Garcia: -- it wouldn't have become an event, and that magical
thing -- it just became so overwhelmingly positive and such a force
of positiveness.
Gans: And then it became a burden.
Garcia: Well, at times, yeah. Terribly so. But the fact that
it was a burden is no excuse for anything. I think that it's on
everybody to stay polite and be excellent to each other. It's still
part of the deal. Just because you're famous and a celebrity doesn't
mean you have to turn into an angry person, even though sometimes it
makes you angry.
My feeling about the importance of the Grateful Dead hasn't changed.
It's still really important. And it's really important that people
remember about what it was like before this band happened in this
country. It was kind of grim.
I remember the first show we went and did in Chicago, and it was
like, the late '60s, and there had been riots and the Chicago
Seven... And every person backstage that wasn't one of us was a cop!
There was 150 armed cops backstage! They were not even out in the
audience -- they were watchin' us! And the feeling that you
got from that... you get so mad, because the attitude, and
it's that attitude of "These people must be controlled." You know,
that controlling attitude -- that's still alive and well in this
country, and it's flourishing and passing new laws every day. And
it's up to people that know better and that have seen the importance
of being aware and being alert to that sort of thing to keep it
going.
Gans: I still can't get over how that happened in the '60s,
when it became public common general knowledge that people were
having fun with LSD. And that the natural course of authoritarian
America was to, without any legislative due process, simply make it
illegal.
Garcia: And then they've gone and made everything illegal. I
mean, is there something now that isn't illegal?
Gans: Sex and coffee.
Garcia: Well, the stuff that grows hair is now
over-the-counter. They've decided that's okay. That's about the only
thing that hasn't become more illegal. I think a lot of that is a
control issue for pharmaceutical companies who've worked very, very
hard to keep things illegal so they can sell Prozac.
Gans: Hmmm...
Garcia: I really think that there's a powerful pharmaceutical
lobby at work. Also, the tobacco and alcohol industries refuse to
allow marijuana to become legal. We used to think that marijuana was
going to become legal next year, no problem, it's going to happen.
And then, everybody kind of went to sleep about it.
Gans: Yeah.
Garcia: Now, it's going to be a terribly difficult fight, and
it's up to voting citizens of conscience to stand up and speak their
piece about it and say how they truly feel. This is the democratic
process. Unfortunately, it feels really dangerous when you're doing
that. And I just want to say that anybody who can do that has got my
support.
***
Gans: Do you have any ideas about how the Grateful Dead
community can continue to do the important thing in the absence of
the band touring?
Garcia: Oh, I think there's a good deal of connectivity in the
Grateful Dead community without the band. I think the online stuff
has been tremendous, and Bob Hunter's done an incredible job of sort
of revealing his personal self in his journal on dead.net.
I think there's a lot of different places for some of that
communicative energy to go. I feel bad that the events aren't going
to be there. I miss the events; I'm an events junkie. I love
events.
Gans: I guess that's what I was asking: Is there a way we can
create an event that approximates that feeling of safety, importancy
and healing like we were talking about? The most important feature of
the Grateful Dead concert that I would tell a civilian was, "You're
in the safest place on earth." And at its best -- it felt that way no
matter where we were -- the Grateful Dead concert was a "time-out"
space, as Bill Graham put it.
Garcia: Yeah, it was safe. Statistically, I think that could
be shown, too. But I don't know -- I don't know what's going to
become of that. I know that Deadheads are going to other bands -- of
course, they should. The Furthur Festival is going to go back out
this coming summer. The Furthur Festival was kind of hard for me. (A
short laugh) I missed somebody during that.
Gans: Hmmm.
Garcia: It was bittersweet. I think a lot of people felt that
way. I don't know what's going to grow up; I don't even know if it
should. I'm uncertain as to what to say to that question. But I think
we have to find the events that speak to our own hearts, whether it's
church or community action or the folk music scene or hip-hop --
whatever it is that makes you feel good. But that connectivity at
Grateful Dead concerts -- I feel that it's not lost. I think people
that have found each other have found each other for good. It's not
going to go away.
Gans: Yeah. I don't think the friendships are going to end,
and I don't think that the valuable things we can do for each other
will stop happening. We've just lost our principal excuse for
gathering.
Garcia: Right. The attractant seems to have faded. You know,
I'm a big proponent of rave scenes, myself, mainly because I love
that loud, fast music, and quadraphonic, and get in there and there's
a light show. But the fact that there's no bands at rave scenes --
it's all recorded music -- well, it's kind of interesting. There's no
celebrity; there's no waiting for the guys to come on or go off. So,
it's a lot less personal, but the good energy is there. I mean, you
can have a good time at a taped party without live musicians. Sorry,
musicians -- I don't mean to make it sound like... I'm going to catch
fire for that one, I know. But...
Gans: Well, as a person who's both -- who does the Grateful
Dead DJ thing at the Fillmore and a guy who plays in a band --
I see both sides of that argument. I see the up side of what you're
talking about with it being pre-recorded music, and I also see
there's something you get when there's live musicians onstage that
you can't get otherwise. And in doing the Fillmore parties that Dick
Latvala and I do, and all these other guys who are doing the local
little clubs and stuff, the challenge is to have any sort of
spontaneity at all when what you're doing is presenting a sequence of
pre-recorded tunes. I do that by not planning ahead too much. We
bring a stack of things we might play in a given evening, and then we
let the event dictate to us as much as possible.
Garcia: Uh-huh. And you also know your medium really well. You
know what you've got in the stack; you know the different vibes are
that you've got recordings of that you can throw on in a second.
Gans: Well, sure, but that's as much an opportunity to
manipulate as it is to respond...
Garcia: Well, I think that's valuable.
Gans: ...the trick is to respond...
Garcia: ...and keep it open...
Gans: ...rather than attempt to force it --
Garcia: I think that overly controlling people should try to
stay out of it. One of the biggest problems the Grateful Dead have
had over the years is getting next to overly controlling influences
and... and becoming controlling themselves. I think that looseness
and spontaneity go hand-in-hand with fun, and --
Gans: There's the Prankster ethic in a nutshell. [both
laugh]
Garcia: -- and it's important to focus on fun. I know there's
a huge number of young Deadheads that I haven't met who have tasted
the fun, and I encourage them all to pursue that as a lifetime thing.
But everybody's got to be kind to each other, and don't have too many
big expectations for the remainder of the band to pull anything out
of their hat right now. There's a process going on. I don't know what
it is; they're all in a state of change, and I think they're a bunch
of tired puppies, too. They gave and gave, and uh... it's going to be
interesting to see... how the rest of their lives are led. The
Grateful Dead was one of those things that was greater than the sum
of its parts. Self-conscious as it was, there was that tremendous
unconscious side that the reckoning still hasn't been made for all
the things that have happened because of the Grateful Dead. We don't
even know what's been set in motion. And I'm watching; I'm paying
attention.
Gans: In a very real sense, each of us had both the power and
the obligation to manifest the Grateful Dead spirit as we see fit,
and that there never really has been a central dogma to which we must
adhere. And each one of us, no matter how far-flung we are, really
does have the power to keep the Grateful Dead alive, in a way.
Garcia: I think we all have the ability to keep the good
spirit alive. And that's about all you can do. It's guys like you who
have the killer tape library that can come up with the gems from the
past. That's been pretty meaningful to me. And I'm very happy that
that can happen, because it's, you know... I listen to that stuff and
it's -- it's deep, and it matters a lot. And it's really weird to
have that be shared with so many people, but that's just the way it
is, now. I'm grateful that they recorded everything. I hope everybody
buys the stuff and keeps dead.net
going and encourages what's left of the organization to keep it
together, keep the faith. I think everybody needs a lot of
encouragement right now about the whole thing. Life is a confusing
place, post-band.
Gans: Well, like Bob Hunter said through Mickey, "We'll know
the next step when it comes."
Garcia: Yeah! And I know that there's a lot of intelligence at
work in this situation. And I think that whatever happens is going to
be manifest some time soon.