The life of the Dead

Over the years, did you often find yourself getting just entirely fed up with all the confusion, the actual process of getting things done? Your accounts of some of the Dead's business meetings make them sound just chaotic as all hell.

Of course, about once a week. The whole point is, if you want a crisp organization, try a leader-dominated, vertically integrated setup, but that's not the way the Dead worked. Every band member undoubtedly felt the same way at one time or another, except maybe Jerry, 'cause Jerry set that tone. He did not want it to be organized. He wanted to trust that anarchy -- no given leader, whoever felt strongest would lead at a given moment -- he wanted to trust that that could work, and it did work. He said once in an interview, "It's not like G.E., but it works and we have a lot more fun."

You refer to the band members as emotional cowards. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Well, you know, again, Jerry set a certain tone. He did not want to be responsible for running things. And when you run things in a business organization, which, among other things, the Grateful Dead was, that generally means that you hire and you fire. And while hiring is fun -- that's welcoming in -- firing is very painful.

There were times -- looked at objectively and from the outside -- perhaps there were people who should have been removed long before they were. There were a couple of moments when the Grateful Dead finally made a decision that so-and-so just wasn't working anymore. And, you know, they said, "OK," and they turned to the manager and said, "You do it." That's what I'm talking about. They deflected. They didn't want to cope with that. But the band members read every word of this book and they saw that account and I didn't hear any argument from them.

They took a lot of drugs, especially LSD. You don't hide that fact in the book.

You know, we live in an era in which all drugs are equally evil, and that's not so. At the very least let's make intelligent distinctions. If you can find me somebody who's died from marijuana, if you find someone who's become addicted to LSD, show me that person. It's not appropriate to describe it in those terms. I've seen as much drug abuse and drug damage as anybody needs to. I don't advocate them, but I do wish that we'd stop the bullshit of seeing them all as being equally evil, and start talking about them intelligently.

To what degree do you think taking acid spurred the Dead's creativity and to what degree was it a drain on their energies, both intellectual and emotional?

As far as LSD goes, I don't know about any drain during their period of intense LSD use, which was primarily very early on in their career -- we're talking about a few years in the '60s; it's not like Jerry Garcia, or anybody, was taking LSD in the '90s. It's a physically depleting thing. It's definitely an intensification of your reality and as such it's definitely got a physical consequence to it. As a result, people don't take acid night after night; it won't work night after night that way.

What it did for them most remarkably and most importantly -- in the Acid Test period, which, by the way, was two months -- was redirect their notion of what they were up to, and it made them understand that the audience was not separate from them, but was part of their experience, that they were partners. And that, in fact, the Grateful Dead was not six guys on stage, but everybody in the room and the instruments and the sound system.

You think it strengthened their emphasis on inclusiveness?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, if I can generalize, and it's dangerous about LSD because everybody experiences it differently, but one of the common conclusions people come to is a sense of the oneness of all life. That's a fairly common reaction ... It worked in a performance setting because it destroyed the notion that "We're the band, we entertain, we stand up here, and you are cows with wallets and you absorb what we give you as musicians."

And what they decided was that there was loop of energy -- it starts from the string and goes through the sound system and out into the audience and comes back -- which is why they were notoriously a wonderful band live, frequently magical live, but in the studio without that feedback they were so-so. To quote Mickey Hart, "We're not in the entertainment business, we're in the transportation business: we move minds." It's a good line and it's accurate.

You delve into the psychology and emotional life of Jerry Garcia considerably more than you do any of the other band members. Would you have done that if he were still alive?

That's a good question. Possibly not. The point is that Jerry Garcia was the largest personality on that stage. If you had somebody from Mars come down and walk into the room where all the Grateful Dead were sitting, they would see that Garcia was a slightly larger-than-life personality and he was charismatic. He refused to lead, but by some peculiar gravitational example.

But in the end, yes, you're probably right. Because he died, that did end the Grateful Dead, the Grateful Dead as a touring band. And that obviously had a consequence to my writing.

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