Jerry Garcia: Funeral for a Friend
On Aug. 9, 1995, Jerry Garcia died in his sleep at Serenity Knolls drug treatment center, in the Marin County community of Forest Knolls, north of San Francisco. He was 53. In addition to his wife, Deborah Koons Garcia, Jerry Garcia is survived by four daughters: Heather, 32, Annabelle, 25, Teresa, 21, and Keelin, 7.
A preliminary coroner’s report concluded that Garcia died of natural causes, and Grateful Dead spokesman Dennis McNally specified the cause as a heart attack. But it was the continuing battle to end his heroin addiction that brought Garcia to Serenity Knolls less than two days before his death. He was found in bed by a counselor at the center; subsequently a staff nurse and Marin County paramedics administered CPR but failed to revive him. A long-term drug problem had debilitated Garcia, who also suffered from diabetes and heart problems in recent years. Still, he struggled to stay clean. Doctors at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic’s detox unit had also been treating him for several years, and he had entered the Betty Ford Center, in Rancho Mirage, Calif., after the July 9 conclusion of the band’s tour. According to Koons Garcia, he left that facility two weeks shy of the scheduled one-month stay.
For Jerry Garcia and, perhaps, the Grateful Dead, the last musical note came July 9 at Chicago’s Soldier Field, the final stop on a problem-plagued summer tour. Whether the band will continue to carry the torch remains unclear. Garcia’s passing could presage the end of the Grateful Dead, although the band has withstood several tragedies, including the deaths of keyboardists Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, in 1973, and Brent Mydland, in 1990. The band held a meeting Aug. 14, according to longtime Dead spokesman Dennis McNally; it announced only that its fall tour would be canceled. On the night of Aug. 9, Dead guitarist Bob Weir went ahead with a scheduled solo show at the Casino Ballroom, in Hampton Beach, N.H., where Deadheads massed in the parking lot before, during and after the show. “If our dear, departed friend proved anything to us,” Weir told the capacity crowd, “he proved that great music can make sad times better.”
A private funeral was held for family and friends Aug. 11 at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere, an upscale suburb on a peninsula just north of San Francisco. McNally said that the church was chosen for its size and availability, not to invoke “St. Stephen,” one of the Grateful Dead’s most popular songs. At 3 p.m. vans shuttled more than 200 mourners from a parking lot in nearby Tiburon to Belvedere. “They kept the location so secret that even the people who were going didn’t know where it was,” says attendee Joel Selvin, who has covered the Grateful Dead for 25 years as a pop-music critic at the San Francisco Chronicle.
The service began at 4 p.m. In attendance were band members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Vince Welnick, as well as Garcia’s widow, Deborah Koons Garcia. Garcia, dressed in a black T-shirt, sweat pants and a windbreaker, was displayed in an open casket. The Rev. Matthew Fox officiated. Fox, an Episcopal minister, married Garcia and Koons on Valentine’s Day 1994, in Sausalito, Calif.
While the general mood at the funeral was solemn, there were moments of irreverence and laughter. Author Ken Kesey, whose LSD-fueled Acid Tests provided an early inspiration and audience for the Dead’s music, told the crowd, “This guy is going to kick our asses if we get up there and we haven’t carried the torches.” Kreutzmann capped off his humorous comments by adding dismissively, “Anyway, funerals are for people, not spirits.”
Others in attendance included Bob Dylan, Bruce Hornsby, basketball legend Bill Walton and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Hunter read a 58-line poem titled “An Elegy for Jerry,” which ended: “So I’ll just say I love you/Which I never said before/And let it go at that old friend/The rest you may ignore.”
As the word of Garcia’s death spread in the days before the funeral, the public mourned as though a president had passed away. The Internet and commercial computer networks were flooded with fans’ online reminiscences and eulogies. Spontaneous memorial services and impromptu wakes sprang up in dozens of cities around the U.S. Over the course of a week, the informal Garcia tributes around San Francisco took on increasingly messianic tones. By early afternoon on Wednesday, Aug. 9, hundreds of well-wishers had begun gathering at the northeast corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, the intersection irrevocably associated with the birth of the 1960s counterculture. That evening, a crowd of nearly 2,000 mourners headed for the Polo Field the site of a Dead performance at the Human Be-In 28 years ago where they kneeled at a makeshift shrine and danced into the night to bootleg tapes of Grateful Dead concerts.
At 710 Ashbury St., a homeless fan named Johnny, wearing dark glasses and a cast on his right arm, watched over the three-story Victorian-style row house where the members of the Grateful Dead first lived together, “just to make sure no one walks away with a railing or something,” he says.
On Thursday afternoon in Golden Gate Park, the constant beat of a drum circle mesmerized a group of dancers, who invariably danced the loose-limbed shimmy shake traditionally reserved for Dead concerts. Fans of all stripes comforted each other, as when a twenty-something Hare Krishna approached a quiet group of mourners who were genuflecting before a shrine built atop a traffic pylon. “I just want you guys to know that Jerry’s going to have a good death,” he said. “He once met with our leader.”
“Whatever you believe, man,” responded a reclining young woman in a granny dress without ever averting her gaze from a framed photo of Garcia that leaned on the shrine.
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