Jerry Garcia: Read Excerpts From Unpublished Interviews
As anyone who ever spoke with Jerry Garcia knew, the late Grateful Dead leader was never less than honest and animated in conversation. That side of him emerges once again in Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews (Black Dog & Leventhal). Edited by Dennis McNally, the former Dead publicist and author of the Dead bio A Long, Strange Trip, the book is culled from interviews McNally conducted with Garcia between 1973 and 1989. Here are a few choice excerpts, along with audio clips of the same passages in Garcia’s own voice, drawn from the Jerry on Jerry audiobook.
On the Dead’s performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 — and how they wound up with some of the stage gear:
[The Who] smashing all their equipment. I mean, they did it so well. It looked so great. It was like, wow, that is beautiful. We went on. We played our little music. And it seemed so lame to me at the time. And [Jimi Hendrix] was also beautiful and incredible and sounded great and looked great. I loved both acts. I sat there gape-jawed. They were wonderful. I remember Phil’s bass got stolen in L.A. the day before we played.
We were always on the trip of free. In fact, we ended up taking all of the Fender amplifiers [used at Monterey], and they ended up at the [Potrero] Theatre on [Potrero] Hill. They are probably still there. We got ’em, man. We took those motherfuckers. We ransomed them. I mean, the thing was — like always — they [the Monterey Pop organizers] misrepresented to us what it was going to be like. And they didn’t put enough attention and energy into the free stage thing, and there were a lot of people outside who couldn’t get in. We were always in the middle of those kind of conflicts.
On the Dead’s early hassles onstage and how these experiences heightened their need for their own sound system:
There was a while there when every tour, our second set, the last half of our show, somebody would fuckin’ turn off the power, would shut us down. And we started to get fuckin’ pathological about it. You have no idea what it’s like … building up and all of a sudden the power is gone. Someplace in Ohio or some dumbshit college somewhere, and it just makes you crazy. It just made us furious. I mean, goddamn. It seemed like that never stopped happening for one year, maybe ’69 or ’70 or somewhere in there, right when college campuses were in their greatest upheaval. So everybody associated us, for some reason — I don’t know why, God knows we were never very political — but they associated us with danger, you know? As soon as they started seeing people freak out, you know, they thought, “Okay, that’s it. We’re not going to let this go any further.” Boom. Jesus Christ.