Toking in front of the TV, Jerry said, “You see the trouble they go through just for us?” With the salad, she dished up steak, corn on the cob and muffins while stirring the dinner conversation like it was another pot on the stove.Īfter dinner we watched a documentary about smuggling grass from Mexico, mostly via light planes making drops over the border. Mountain Girl’s daughters-Sunshine, about 10, by Ken Kesey, and Annabelle, about 6, by Jerry-chirped like birds flying around their mother while she threw together a salad on a counter dividing the kitchen from the dinning room. He was talking about his first solo album, Garcia, which had just been released. “I used the advance from my album for a down payment on this place,” Jerry said. The fabled profits of rock ‘n’ roll had yet to filter into his pockets. That’s the image which helped make the Dead the workingman’s band, class-conscious philosophers of the egalitarian lifestyle. The picture of Jerry carried in my mental wallet will always show him going onstage with rumpled baggy jeans, a beer-belly bulge over his belt, a worn blue T-shirt with a hole in the armpit, mussed-up hair and a shaggy black beard with a piece of white lint caught in it. That’s one of the things that I always liked about Jerry, his personification of the common slob. The gardener was Mountain Girl, Jerry’s old lady, long famous in the Dope Revolution via her legendary roamings with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. His grounds were overgrown, an exotic garden of dazzling greenery. Jerry didn’t own a palace, but he had a nice view. The road Jerry lived on ran down the slope, straight through the middle of town, across Highway 1 and right out to the rocky beach and the Pacific Ocean. A few radar domes, long cyclone fences and lots of official-looking KEEP OUT signs. Jerry lived on the ocean slope of Mount Tamalpais, his property abutting the government reservation that covered most of the summit. I got into my Hertz and headed across the Golden Gate, taking the Highway 1 roller coaster to Stinson Beach. The county was so far out that probably the Dead could’ve run for something. The heads were beginning to run the local governments, young professionals with beards, the drug culture flexing muscle at the ballot box. Marin had turned into America’s hippest suburb, with a cocktail in one hand and a joint in the other. Jerry was living out at Stinson Beach in Marin County. Jerry was in touch with the cosmic consciousness. He wasn’t a pretty boy, but he had a kind of papal charisma. People’d come up to him for answers whether he had them or not. Adrift in acid, lost in smoke, floating paranoid through the ether, they all counted on Jerry to lead the way. It was this kind of awareness that put Jerry in command of the Dead even though he didn’t want the responsibility. No matter how stoned we got, Jerry was always alert. Jerry had been the easiest for me to get to know among the Dead, acid’s house band, the resident musicians of Haight-Ashbury, even before the hippies moved in, one of the founding pillars of flower power. I’d met Jerry a couple of years earlier, and we’d been rapping ever since in hotel suites, dressing rooms, recording studios, Chinese restaurants, all the places where rock ‘n’ roll people got their buzz off one another. I’d like the perspective of getting somebody else’s angle on me.” I’d like to read what I say in their words. The writers sit down and we talk and they tape what I say and then when I go to read what they’ve written, it’s all me talking. “That’s the drag about getting interviewed. “I hope you’re not gonna bring a tape recorder,” Jerry added. Why don’t you come out to my house for dinner? “Let’s do an interview,” he said in the control booth at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco.
I didn’t have the faintest idea which magazine would want a story about Jerry.
There had never been a major magazine piece about him. Jerry Garcia wanted me to write a story about him. On the occasion of Jerry’s birthday August 1 and the anniversary of his death August 9, we’re republishing it below. That interview wasn’t published until January, 2001, when it hit the pages of High Times magazine. Legendary rock journalist Al Aronowitz interviewed Jerry Garcia (1942-1995) in 1972.
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