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This article is reprinted without permission from the magazine
NEW YORKER.....11 October 93.  If you have problems with reading
copyrighted material  illegally presented....then perhaps it might
be better to stop reading here....although you would miss a pretty
mainstream/cerebral interview that is interesting.......


STILL TRUCKIN'

How did Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead become the top concert
draw in America? For a start, they discovered the benefits of
interactive rock long ago, and have kept up a dialogue with
Deadheads everywhere eversince. And for Garcia, it's still all about
having fun.

BY BILL BARICH

     HERE is Jerry Garcia, the rock star in middle age. He has always
been our most improbable pop-culture idol, somebody to whom the
playing matters more than the posing. At fifty-one, a halo of gray
hair fringing his head and his  gray-white beard indifferently
trimmed,  he resembles the proverbial unmade  bed. The merest of
filaments divides  the man from the performer. His clothing onstage
is his clothing offstage Ñ  a T-shirt, baggy sweatpants, and a pair 
of sneakers. The absence of style is a style itself and suggests an
inability  to abide by anybody else's rules. He's the rebellious child
grown up, not so  much above his youthful audience  as insistently a
part of it. In refusing  to be adulated, he inspires a kind of love.
Hunched over his guitar and scarcely moving a muscle, he becomes  a
larger instrument through which  the music travels. While the crowd 
focusses on the notes that drift from  his fingers into the air, he
does his best to disappear.
	     In a sense, Garcia is defying gravity.  Nobody else in the history
of rock and roll has ever watched his popularity advance on an
exponential curve with each  passing year. Until recently, with the
repackaging of such geriatric rockers as Aerosmith and Rod Stewart,
most performers could be counted on to go down in flames before
their fortieth  birthdayÑbetter to burn out than to rust, as Neil
Young once put it. Garcia himself upheld the old tradition by nearly
self-destructing a couple of times.  When he turned fifty last year, 
he weighed almost three hundred pounds, smoked three packs a day,
survived on junk food, never exercised (he  needed a roadie to carry
his attache  case), and had a serious drug problem.  He appeared to be
headed for an early  grave, but he had the good luck to collapse
instead.  Forced to confront his  mortality, he changed his ways,
adopting a vegetarian diet, cutting down on cigarettes, taking long
walks, swallowing vitamins in megadoses, and even hiring  a
personal trainer to tone a body that had given new meaning to the
concept of shapelessness.
     I caught up with Garcia shortly after he launched his recovery
program. Like  most veterans of Haight-Ashbury in its prime, I felt a
special kinship with him  and wondered how he was weathering  his
transformation into an American icon. For aeons, his band, the
Grateful Dead, have had their headquarters in  Marin County, where I
live, so I phoned the office and arranged a meeting backstage at the
Oakland Coliseum  before a concert.
     Garcia is a native San Franciscan.  He is the second of two sons,
and his father, Joe, a musician who had led both a Dixieland band and
a forty-piece  orchestra, named him in honor of Jerome Kern. Joe
Garcia liked to flyfish, and on a camping trip one spring  he was
swept to his death by a raging  river. Jerry, who was five at the
time, witnessed the drowning. In its aftermath, his maternal
grandparents, who  lived in the blue-collar Excelsior District, took
him in. He was a sickly, asthmatic child with a rich fantasy life.
Although he was given piano lessons,  he did poorly at them and
showed no special aptitude for music. He preferred  to read,
immersing himself in E.C.  Comics and the sci-fi novels of Ray 
Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he also drew and painted in
his sketchbooks.
     His mother, Ruth, reclaimed him when he was ten. She owned a
sailors'  bar and hotel downtown, and Jerry became its mascot. He
had already developed a knack for independence, roaming the
Excelsior while his grandparents  were at their jobs, and he liked to
hang  around the bar, later describing it as "romantic and totally
fun." School bored him. Homework was a dumb idea, he believed, and
he had to repeat the eighth grade, because he wouldn't do any. In an
auspicious conjunction of the planets, the onset of his adolescence 
coincided with the birth of rock and  roll. He was particularly fond
of Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Little Richard,  and Buddy Holly. For
his fifteenth birthday, in 1957, he asked his mom for an electric
guitar like the ones he'd seen in pawnshop windows. She must have
had a nose for trouble, I thought, because she gave him an accordion 
instead.

     NOTES from Oakland on a mild December evening: The Coliseum, a 
cavernous, echoing concrete structure, has the architectural
distinction of a  bunker.  About fifteen thousand Deadheads, a sellout
crowd, were waiting behind sawhorse barricades in the parking  lot
when I arrived. I had assumed that there would be a rousing party
going  on backstage, but the Dead are so old  and have done so much
partying that now they hole up in separate dressing rooms and
conserve their energy before  a show. Roadies were taking orders 
for dinners, which the band members  would eat between sets, and
were moving equipment around. One roadie  had the task of caring for
Garcia's  custom-built guitar, which is the near-equivalent of a
Stradivarius. It's called the Tiger, because the luthier who made
itÑDoug Irwin, of Santa  RosaÑinlaid a tiger of brass and
mother-of-pearl in the guitar's ebony face. Wherever the Dead go,
the Tiger goes, too. They tour three times a year for three to four
weeks at a time, and often bring their families. For the last couple
of years, they have been the highest-grossing concert act in the
business, with last year's receipts amounting to more than thirty-
two million dollars.
     Garcia was in his dressing room, sitting on a couch before a
pickedover tray of fruit. When I walked in,  he rose to greet me. Up
close, he was much bigger than I had expectedÑbroad-shouldered,
- and with an aura of physical power. He looked both fit  and alert.
Some musicians extend a hand delicately, as if it were a baby bird
about to be  crushed, but Garcia's grip was  firm and strong. It spoke
of his unguardedness. The tip of one finger on his right hand was
missing, chopped off by his brother in a woodcutting accident when
they were  boys.
     Garcia's eyes were merry  behind tinted glasses. He sat down
again and leaned forward, eager to start. He's a wonderful talker, in
fact, and  converses in much the same way that he plays, constantly 
improvising and letting his thoughts lead where they  may. There's
an intensity that comes off him in ripples  when he's enjoying
himself, and it doesn't seem to matter who or what the source of his 
pleasure is. If he were to formulate a philosophy, it could probably
be boiled down to this: If it's not fun, don't do it. He had performed
thousands of concerts, and yet he was truly looking forward to
another one. In an ideal world,  he said, he'd be playing somewhere
six  nights a weekÑtwice with the Dead, twice with the Jerry Garcia
Band, a  small group meant for more intimate  venues, and twice
with an acoustic  group on his five-string banjo.
     Before Garcia turned to rock full-time, he fronted a jug band,
Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. In  some respects, he finds
acoustic music more challenging to play. He had recently made an
acoustic album with the mandolinist David Grisman, and he was
pleased that it had been nominated for a Grammy. He and Grisman
have been collaborators since they met at a bluegrass festival in
1964. A lot of Garcia's friends are old friends, people  he's known for
twenty or thirty years.
     I complimented Garcia on the album, and it seemed to unsettle
him a bit; I'd heard that he was his own severest cr
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itic.
ÒThat makes me feel good about myself," he said, with a shrug, as if
he were  not yet convinced of his talent.
     Among the tasty things about the album, I went on, was the
variety of its  selectionsÑHoagy Carmichael's "Rockin' Chair," Irving
Berlin's "Russian Lullaby," B. B. King's "The Thrill Is Gone."
     Garcia allowed that he liked music of  every kind and delighted in
experimenting. He mentioned that he had once sat in with Ornette
Coleman, the jazz master, at a recording session.
     "How was that?" I asked.
     He laughed. "Like filling in the  spaces in a Jackson Pollock
painting!  Ornette's such a sweet man, though. He  gave me a lot of
help."
     The curtain was about to go up, and Garcia needed some time to
get ready  mentally. He still has bouts of stagefright. To relieve
them, he uses a mental trick that he learned in the nineteensixties,
when any food or drink around  was liable to be dosed with
psychedelics.  Once, at the Avalon Ballroom, he saw an enticing
chocolate cake backstage, but he was sure that somebody had 
doctored it, so he contented  himself with a lick of frosting  rather
than a slice. The cake's  baker soon turned up and  announced that the
frosting  had seven hundred hits of STP in it. Sinking, Garcia  went
on a very bad trip indeed. He imagined that some  Mafia hit men were
in the crowd, waiting to kill him.  The only way he could survive, he
thought, was to be  humble and play for mercy for his life. ÒAnd it
worked!"  he exclaimed, laughing again.  ÒI'm still alive!"
     I stayed around for the concert. The atmosphere was festive, and
the audience was  batting balloons back and  forth. Oddly, I didn't
smell  any marijuanaÑa scent that,  along with the refractory odor 
of patchouli oil, had characterized the Dead concerts I used to go to
at the fabled  Fillmore Auditorium.  Some  people were obviously
stoned,  but they'd done their smoking in private. The average 
Deadhead is often portrayed as a glassy-eyed, long-haired  wretch in
a tie-dyed T-shirt, but I didn't see many of those types. The fans 
were mostly middle-class white people in their twenties and
thirties. They had the look of yuppies masquerading as hippies for a
night, eager to bask in the recollected glow of the sixties.
     When the band came out, the Coliseum seemed to levitate for a
second or two. The music kicked in, and the Deadheads started
dancing. They danced right through both sets, on the floor or by their
seats, for three straight hours, as if they'd been drilled. It was 
pretty strange, really. At the Fillmore, none of us had known what
we were doing, and our evenings had often been as amorphous as the
pulsating blobs in a light show. The Dead in middle age were a
curious sight, tooÑordinary  guys, graying, and miles removed from 
any glitter. I could have been watching myself onstage, but that was
always part of the band's appeal for my generation: we were them,
and they were us. For the young people around me, I guessed,  the
show must have had the texture of a fantasy in which their parents
actually listened to them and understood their deepest secrets.
     The bond between the Dead and the Deadheads was extraordinary.
Garcia would tell me on another occasion that the band consciously
aimed for such a target. He felt that it happened at about forty per
cent of their concerts but they could never will it into being. 
Hearing his lovely, bell-clear notes again, I was heartened to think
that the Dead were still in search of the miraculous, chasing after
those moments when your flesh pops with goose bumps and the hair
stands up on your head.  What the band created for thelr fans was a
benign environment where a person could be loose, liberated, free
from inhibitions, and without any fearÑ fifteen thousand happy
dancers, and no violence anywhere. The band took all the risks.

     How the Dead, once nearly buried, have ascended: Early in their 
career, Garcia and company endured the usual music-industry scams
and ripoffs, and they decided to take control of their destiny. Their
first four albums had not sold well, leaving them in debt to their
label, Warner Brothers, but they recouped with two straight hits in
1970, "Workingman's Dead" and  "American Beauty," which were both 
primarily acoustic and were distinguished  by the richness of the
songs and the band's clean, crisp playing. That same year, they
acquired a small shingled house on a suburban block in Marin to serve
as their offices and began handling their own business affairs. In 
1972, they tipped off their fans to their  new free-form operation by
inserting  an apparently harmless message in the  liner notes of a
live album recorded on  tour in Europe. ÒDEAD FREAKS UNITE! Ò the
message read. "Who are you? Where  are you? How are you? Send us
your name and address and we'll keep you  informed."
     With one gesture, the Dead eliminated the barriers between
themselves and their audience, and established a direct flow of
communication.  Although the Dead Freaks turned into  numberless
Deadheads and came to require elaborate attentions (there  are
ninety thousand Deadheads on the American mailing list and twenty 
thousand on the European list), the  band's offices have remained in
the same  little house.  It's as if the Dead were superstitious about
tampering with the magic, and so booking agents, publicity people,
and accountants are all crammed in like family. The Dead still meet
about once a month in a boardroom to discuss their projects.
Initially, the meetings were free-for-alls, Garcia says, but
somebody dug up a copy of  "Robert's Rules of Order," and they riffed
on it until they had devised their own warped version of
parliamentary  procedure.
     I stopped by the house shortly after the Coliseum show, walking
in through the back door, as I'd been instructed,  because anyone who
uses the front door is presumed to be an unwanted visitor.  The
universe that the Dead have evolved, a parallel reality that permits
them to function, is built on such fine  points. In the old days, for
instance, itwas virtually impossible to apply for a  job with them,
but if you were to wander in and start doing something valuable they
might hire you. Many staffers have been with them for ages, and they 
are very well paid. The band even floats them loans to buy homes and
cars. The prevailing staff attitude seems to be a  hybrid strain of
hippie good vibes and nontoxic American capitalism. As Garcia  once
said to me, the Dead are a rock band that disguises itself as a
California  corporation.
     Garcia came in at noon, by way of the  back door. Fresh from a
session with his trainer, he claimed, only halfjokingly,  that the
unfamiliar oxygen racing through his system had granted him a weird 
new aerobic high. "Weird" is a favorable adjective with him. He uses
it often to  describe experiences he has enjoyed. If an experience is
really weird, it gets elevated to the status of "fat trip." A fat trip 
is anything that pleasantly rearranges the brain cells  Ñ  say, 
bumping into Charlie Mingus drinking Martinis from a thermos in a
Manhattan park, or  landing in the same  Amsterdam hotel as 
William Burroughs, or going up the Nile on a boat after a gig at the 
Great Pyramid.
     We settled into a funky room off the kitchen that could not 
technically be described as decorated,  and I asked Garcia about his
accordion.
     "Oh, it was a beauty!" he said. In the heat of conversation,  his
voice rises, and he  grins with the relish of a man who's sinking  his
teeth into a steak  that he shouldn't be  eating. "It was a Neapolitan
job. My mother bought it from a  sailor at the bar. A little later, I got
a  Danelectro guitar and  a Fender amp. I taught myself to play, and
pretty soon I was fluid in a primitive  way. I picked up a trick or two
from my cousin DannyÑhe knew some rhythm  and bluesÑbut the
most important thing I learned was that it was O.K. to improvise.
ÒHey, man, you can make it  up as you go along!Ó In high school, I fell
in with some other mu
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siciansÑ  beatnik types, the pot smokers.  My
only other option was to join the beer drinkers, but they got into
fights. I kept getting into trouble anyway, so my mother finally
moved us out of the city to Cazadero."
     Cazadero is in the coastal redwoods of Sonoma County. It's a
wicked spot for a teen-age exile, a damp, spooky resort town that is
deserted for nine  months of the year. "I hated it there,"  Garcia went
on. "I had to ride a bus thirty miles to Analy High, in Sebastopol. I
played my first gig at Analy.  We had a five-piece comboÑa piano, 
two saxes, a bass, and my guitar. We won a contest and got to record
a song.  We did Bill Doggett's 'Raunchy,' but it didn't turn out very
well. Things in  Cazadero got so bad that I enlisted in the Army. I
wound up in a thirty-man  company at Fort Winfield Scott, at the 
Presidio, right back in San Francisco.  That company was choice!  We
did lots  of ceremonies, stuff like flag-raising.  The guys rotated
from the city to Korea and Japan. I started going out at night to see
my friends, you know, and I didn't always make it back in time for
work. I was piling up the AWOLs, and the commander was worried
that I'd queer the deal for the other guys.  So he called me in and
asked me,  'Garcia, how'd you like to be a civilian  again?'
     "In all, I did about eight months in the service. After that, I went
to the Art Institute in San Francisco for  a bit, to study painting. I
wasn't playing  guitar so muchÑI'd picked up the five-string banjo in
the Army. I listened to records, slowed them down with a finger, and
learned the tunings  note by note. By then, I was getting pretty
serious about musicÑespecially  about bluegrass. In the early
sixties, a  friend of mine and I toured the bluegrass festivals in the
Midwest. We had a  tape recorder and sometimes got to jam.  We met
all the greatsÑBill Monroe,  Reno and Smiley, and the Kentucky 
Colonels.
     "When I got back, we formed our jug band. Bobby Weir was in it,
and so was Pigpen"ÑRon McKernan. "Pig was our front man. He was a
natural, an old soul. The rest of us were loose wigs,  but Pig had it
together. He knew instinctively how to work a crowd. We  did gigs
around Palo Alto and Stanford University. I made a little money
giving lessons, but we were usually broke. For a while, I lived in my
car in a vacant lot in East Palo Alto. That's where I met Hunter."
Robert Hunter, the main lyricist for the Dead, is another of Garcia's 
old friends. "He was living in his car, too. He had these cans of
pineapple in  his trunkÑI don't know where he got themÑand I had
some boxes of plastic forks, so we'd meet every morning for 
breakfast and use my forks to eat his pineapple.
     "It was an exciting time. I'm a cinephile, and I remember going to
see a Richard Lester film one nightÑ'A  Hard Day's Night'Ñand being
blown away by the Beatles. 'Hey!' I said to myself 'This is gonna be
fun!' The Beatles took rock music into a new realm and  raised it to
an art form. Dylan, tooÑ he's a genius. It wasn't long before the jug
band became an electric band,  the Warlocks. We recruited Billy
Kreutzman as our drummer. He'd been working at the post office. I
didn't think bass guitar was important, but the first guy  we had was
pretty bad, so we brought in Phil Lesh.  Lesh was this wonderful, 
serious, arrogant youth, a composer of modernist music. He only
played the trumpet then, but he had perfect  pitch.
     "The Warlocks worked the lounge circuit in bars on the Peninsula.
We did pop covers, mostly, except for the last setÑthen we got
weird and jammed.  Our big break was getting involved with Ken
Kesey and his bunch. They invited  us out to La Honda. We brought our 
gear and played for about twenty minutes. Crash!  Bang!  It was like
the war in Grenada, man! We were weirder than can be, and they
loved it. When Kesey started putting on the Acid Tests, in 1965, we
became their house band, the  Grateful Dead. Sometimes we played 
for hours and were brilliant. Sometimes we had to be dragged
onstage and only lasted for three minutes. The really neat thing was
that we didn't have to be  responsible."

DEADHEADS are everywhere at present. For the band, they are a 
blessing and a curse. Their fealty translates into huge profits, but
they also imply an unwanted responsibility. Sometimes they make a
prisoner of Garcia.  He can't wander about in Marin County  or
anywhere else the way he once  did. When the Deadhead phenomenon 
began to snowball, five or six years ago, he was concerned about its
cultlike implications and tried to sabotage it by being nonresponsive
and pretending that it didn't exist, but since then  he has seen that
it's too directionless to amount to a serious threat. He accepts it as
a logical consequence of the Dead's tribal impulse. Besides,
Deadheads are quick to be critical, he says,  whenever the band is
lazy, sloppy, dull, or just plain bad. Still, he isn't  entirely
comfortable with them, and  never speaks a word from the stage, 
because he's afraid of how it might be interpreted.
     Garcia puzzles over the Deadheads.  He is trapped inside their
obsession  and can only probe at it from the inside.  He thinks that
the band affords its  followers "a tear in reality"Ña brief vacation
from the mundane. The Dead  design their shows and their music to 
be ambiguous and open-ended, he says;  they intend an evening to be
both reactive and interactive. A Deadhead  gets to join in on an
experiment that  may or may not be going anywhere  in particular,
and such an opportunity  is rare in American life. The Deadhead
world is multireferential and feeds on itself. A fan's capital is
measured by his or her involvement with the  band over time, by the
number of shows attended and the amount of trivia digested.
     And there's a lot of trivia. For example, a computer whiz kid in
New Hampshire publishes an annual journal called _DeadBase_ that
attempts to quantify the entire experience of being a Deadhead.
According to a survey in _DeadBase '91_, the average Deadhead had
attended seventy-five Dead  concerts in his or her lifetime and had
spent $1,571.40 on band-related  activities such as travel,  lodging,
and blank tapes  during the past year. _DeadBase '91_ catalogued
every song that the band had  played on tour, clocking  each different
version. "Picasso Moon" had lasted  for six minutes and seventeen
seconds in Orlando,  but it had gone on for  seven minutes and three 
seconds in Sacramento.  In  a section called "Feedback," the
Deadheads rated such items as the security force and the
concessions at each concert venue.  The worst security was in  St.
Louis, they maintained, while the best venders were in Essen,
Germany.  They voted on the most improved song ("Picasso  Moon")
and on the song they'd heard quite enough of ("Throwing Stones"), and
they  offered some suggestions for locales for future showsÑthe
Grand Ole Opry, Easter Island, and Intercourse,  Pennsylvania.
     Nostalgia is built into the Deadhead system. A new convert has
always missed the golden age and can only sample its essence by
listening to a veteran's tales and tapes. Deadheads also get to trade
war stories. As Garcia  puts it, "they sit around and tell how they
went to a show once and got stranded in Bumfuck, Idaho." Some 
DeadheadsÑa minorityÑinclude hallucinogens in the formula, even
though the band discourages drug use at concerts. Garcia savored his
sixties incarnation as Captain Trips, but he  would never suggest
that anybody imitate him. (His last transcendental acid trip was in
the sixties, at Olompali  Ranch, in Novato. He developed
threehundred-and-sixty-degree vision, died a  few thousand times,
and saw the word  "All" float into the sky before he turned  into a
field of wheat and heard "Bringing In the Sheaves" as a coda. "I think
I unravelled every strand of DNA in my  body," he says. "I felt both
full and empty. I hardly spoke a word for two months, but it was
worth it.")  According to a story in USA Today, undercover agents
from the Drug Enforcement Admin
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istration have lately been
infiltrating  Deadhead throngs and busting people who are selling
LSD, and as many as two thousand DeadheadsÑmost of  them young,
white, and maleÑare currently serving severe prison terms, of up to
forty years. Here lies the unwanted  responsibility. It's as if by
virtue of having been around when the LSD genie escaped from its
bottle Garcia and the Dead were somehow expected to coax it back
in.

     AWAY from the spotlight, Garcia leads a simple life. If he has any 
taste for possessions, he keeps it hidden.  He has been a creature of
the road for so long that he's never had much of a home. After the
recent breakup of  his second marriage, his house in San  Rafael
went on the marketÑit made  the newspapers when a real-estate
agent fell into the swimming poolÑand he  now rents a furnished
condo in Marin.  It's an unfancy place, but he likes it for the view of
San Francisco Bay, and  also because his four daughters livenearby
and he hopes to stay in closer  touch with them than he used to. The 
eldest, Heather, is twenty-nine and  plays first violin in the
Redwood Symphony Orchestra, and the youngest,  KeelinÑher name is
IrishÑis just five.  "They've been very generous to me,"  he told me,
with true apprcciation.  "I've been mostly an absentee parent,  after
all."
     Garcia has had to grow up in public, and he can be genuinely
troubled by what he regards as his personal failings.  The guilt
comes from his upbringing as a Roman Catholic, he thinks. He talks
readily about his early religious  training, and how the Church, with 
its mysticism and its hierarchical  structure, influenced his view of
the world. There is a story he tells about how he fudged his First
Communion.  He had no sins to confess, so he made some up and lied
to a priest. Then the lie became a sin, and existence took on
complications: he wasn't in a state of grace anymore. Catholicism 
planted a dissonance in him, he believes, by rubbing against his
grain.  "Maybe it's good to have something  big that's beyond you," he
says philosophically. ÒAll that magic and mojo  power.  Sin becomes
ever so much morejuicy!"
     It can take Garcia all day to get out of his apartment. Always the
last to bed,  he is slow to get going in the morning and can spend
hours puttering. He may start by listening to some music, anything
from Haydn string quartets to the Butthole Surfers. He has always
been an avid reader, and currently champions the books of Terence
McKenna, an  amateur anthropologist and a psychedelic explorer. He
may decide to fiddle with his Macintosh and generate some 
computer art, or open a sketch pad and begin to draw.
     It's suprising what a good draftsman Garcia is. The best of his
drawings are witty, spare, and whimsical. They're  very different
from his guitar playingÑ  not so rigorous or so practiced. As a
guitarist, he labors to make his playing look so easy. He never gets
caught being showy or calling attention to his technical mastery.
What you hear sometimes in a trademark Garcia solo is a plangent
kind of longing,  a striving after an unattainable perfection.
     One evening, I went over to his apartment for dinner. We had some 
Chinese food cooked without any oil and, to prevent an overdose of
health, some good champagne. After eating,  we watched "Naked
Lunch" on a laser disk. Garcia is a big fan of Burroughs;  he considers
the writer a paragon of  weirdness. Midway through the film, a loud
snoring noise interrupted the clacking mandibles on the soundtrack. I 
looked over, and Garcia was dozing,  even though we'd been chatting
a few  seconds before. He kept sawing logs for about five minutes
and then woke  abruptly, as bright and as cheery as ever. Falling
asleep like that was a habit of his, he said. He couldÑand frequently
didÑtake a catnap anywhere, in  public or in private. There was
something revealing about the sudden sleep.  He put out so much
energy all the time that he was bound to run low every now and then.
It seemed that for him the existential dilemma would always be the
same: How could you get to the edge of things without going over 
the edge?

     THE last time I saw Garcia, the Dead were reluctantly in
rehearsal Ñ they _hate_ to rehearseÑfor a  summer tour. Garcia's
mood was still jolly. He was sticking to his fitness program and was
eager for more oxygen,  not less. He and Robert Hunter had  written a
couple of new songs that were as good, he said, as anything else 
they'd composed in a long time. (In _DeadBase '91_ the fans had
strongly  agreed that "the Dead should write  more new material.")
The future was opening up before him, and he had the optimistic
manner of somebody who has started dreaming again in  middle age.
     In the end, it seemed to me, the Dead's success isn't really so
mysterious.  They work hard and enjoy what they  are doing. They
never underestimate their fans, and give them full value for the
dollar. People are delighted to go to a concert and return home
knowing that they got more than their money's worth. The Dead are
intentionally responding to the need for joy, celebration, and ritual,
and they have struck a nerve.
     The next major bit of fun in store for Garcia was a scuba-diving
trip. He dashes off to Hawaii whenever he has a few free days in his
busy schedule.  "Diving takes up a lot of the space that drugs used
to," he told me. "It's an active, physical form of meditation. I  could
never do a sitting meditation,  like the BuddhistsÑI'm way too
restless. In the water, you're weightless.  It's so silentÑyou're like a
thought.  When I begin to relax, the songs start happening in my
head." A descent into the ocean, he went on, was similar to a dive
through the layers of human consciousness: "You see the obvious 
stuff first, like the beautifully colored  fish. Then maybe you notice
a peculiar lichen on some coral, and then you  notice something else.
You learn reflexively, always taking in information.  Once I get
going, I might fin around for a couple of miles. It's an ecstatic
experience, really.  I love it almost as much as I love the music." 
 


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