Jerry Garcia: The Rolling Stone Interview
WHEN THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE Forbes recently published its annual list of the forty highest-paid entertainers in the world, the Grateful Dead — those outlaws of the music industry — ranked number 29, with an estimated annual income of $12.5 million.
Money is hardly the primary measure one would select to evaluate the success of the Grateful Dead’s vision. But it is indicative of the fact that after decades of touring with a consistency and success unmatched by any other band, the Grateful Dead have a relationship with the Deadheads — the fans who follow the band with a near-religious fervor — that is unique in the history of rock & roll. On the eve of the release of their twenty-second album, Built to Last, the Grateful Dead stand as an American dynasty like no other.
Formed in San Francisco in 1965 as the Warlocks by guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, drummer Bill Kreutzmann and the late keyboardist, harmonica player and vocalist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the band made its debut in July of that year. Changing its name to the Grateful Dead (taken from an Egyptian prayer that Garcia discovered by chance in a dictionary), the group performed at — and became closely associated with — the Acid Tests, a series of public LSD parties and multimedia experiments staged by author Ken Kesey before the drug was outlawed. And it was LSD chemist Owsley “Bear” Stanley who became the band’s patron, bankrolling the Dead during their infancy and designing their original state-of-the-art sound systems.
Paradoxically, it was the conscious attempts at formlessness and chaos that characterized the Acid Tests that gave shape and direction to the Grateful Dead (which has grown to include keyboardist Brent Mydland and percussionist Mickey Hart). In the literally thousands of performances that the band has given since then, the Grateful Dead have never walked onstage with a set list. The process of discovery and a complete dedication to being of the moment — which the band traces to the beat writers of the Fifties, whom the members of the group cite above any musical influence as their mentors — define the inner workings of the Grateful Dead.
Deadheads, who make up the outer workings of the Grateful Dead community, are no less of an anachronism: The band’s die-hard following comes closer to being a cultural phenomenon than a concert audience. In the post-Reagan era, when the tenor and issues of the late Sixties have been relegated to the position of a brief moment of insanity in the nation’s recent history, the spiritual ethos of that time and the legacy of the Acid Tests still find expression in the hundreds of thousands of tie-dyed Deadheads who follow the members of the band on their concert treks across the country, trading time, money and outside commitments to whirl like entranced dervishes at the last remaining outpost of the counterculture.
Performing live has always been the focus of the Grateful Dead, and until the 1987 platinum album In the Dark produced the single “Touch of Grey,” the band had never had a Top Ten hit. But today the Grateful Dead find themselves more popular than ever, creating a new set of problems that Garcia terms “oversuccess.” The cult of Deadheads has grown so large that the Dead have been forced by many arenas to ask the fans who follow them and camp out wherever the band plays to stay home unless they have tickets. This is a particularly thorny problem for a group that has always striven to avoid the conventions of the music business and considers its fans as much a part of the Dead community as the band members themselves.
The rebirth of the Grateful Dead coincides with that of their lead guitarist and reluctant figurehead, Jerry Garcia. After a diabetic coma that put him in the hospital in July 1986 and a period spent shaking a heroin and cocaine habit, Garcia — who admits to having “vacillated furiously” for most of his career about whether or not he wanted to be involved in the Grateful Dead — has regained his stride, touring and recording with his own group when the Dead are off the road. With the release of Built to Last, Garcia agreed to sit down at the Dead’s recording studio on Front Street, in the San Francisco suburb of San Rafael, and take stock of where the Grateful Dead’s decision to take their own road nearly twenty-five years ago has ultimately led.
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