Drummer Hart even dosed his Arabian white horse regularly with the daily drug of choice. ‘Everybody’s walking around stoned, and the chicks are naked. Reagan was ‘the man who embodied everything the Dead despised about the straight world’, Browne writes.Ī DJ for radio station KMPX in San Francisco went out to the ranch to interview the band and the scene blew his mind. When Governor Ronald Reagan came on the tube, ‘they took aim at Reagan’s image and let loose…they fired off about three hundred times.
Seen backstage at the Mountain Aire Music Festival in 1987 in Calavaras, California., Garcia died of a heart attack in 1995 at 53 after struggling with a cocaine and heroin addiction for years, the band was finished Their drug-fueled antics at drummer Mickey Hart’s ranch included dragging a television set - still plugged in with a long entension cord - outside and set it up in a dry creek bed. They fled the Haight for Marin County, to escape the drug busts. The Grateful Dead evolved out of that disparate band of musicians who learned to jam together in a garage. When Garcia joined a garage band in the mid-Sixties in the Haight, acid-laced Kool Aid was served at every session. Grant became the band’s first roadie and Jerry’s close friend. Garcia sat on his chest and smeared lipstick on his face while another kid tried to pull Grant’s pants off. Grant first met Garcia when the future rock star jumped him on the way to school. Garcia once described himself as ‘a hoodlum,’ growing up in Menlo Park. We’d take ‘em and drop em’,' Grant told the author. ‘He’d have ten or twelve different colored pills in his hand. The prankster fun evolved into Garcia bringing and popping pills, probably skimmed from someone’s parents' bathroom. He went along with the idea but checked himself out. ‘He was also spending more time in the studio bathroom’. 'More troubling was the impact of his addiction on the band’s music’. ‘His hair was longer and stringier (and weirder - when he wore it in pigtails),' writes the author. So he fell further into ‘speed balling,' shooting up cocaine He said, ‘There’s nothing fun to do anymore’.
He drooled on his microphone, fought nodding off and didn't know where he was in a song and just hummed along.Īccording to Browne, driving home from the studio one day in 1980, ‘Garcia gazed out the window and talked about how many of his good times were over. ‘He was sometimes so incapacitated he couldn't function,’ writes Kreutzmann in his book. Garcia said, ‘Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.'īut even Garcia got bored with licorice and turned to drugs to alleviate his boredom. The standing joke was: ‘What does a Deadhead say when the drugs wear off? ‘This music sucks.’ The band was viewed by some critics as musically indulgent with a less than crisp sense of timing, songs going on too long, singing out of key and missing notes altogether, Browne writes. He died the following year at age 27 of complications from alcohol abuse Pig Pen McKernan and his mess in the tour bus Copenhagen April 1972.
Garcia was paid $125,000 by Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for the use of ‘Cherry Garcia’.'Pigpen' McKernan lived up to his name but he died at 27 of alcohol abuse.
Drummer Bill Kreutzmann was considered the best looking of the group and got all the girls.'Everybody’s walking around stoned, and the chicks are naked.He was so incapacitated he couldn't function, nodding off and forgetting where he was in a song, forced to hum along.Garcia began popping pills as a teenager and quickly advanced to acid-laced Kool Aid and then speedballs.Two new books reveals the angst and the antics of Grateful Dead rockers over their 30-years on the road.
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EXCLUSIVE: How Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia was so stoned on heroin he drooled on his mic, drummer Bill Kreutzmann slept with 13 groupies in one night and the rockers fired 300 shots at Ronald Reagan on the TV screen, reveal new books