Original subtitles

♪ Well, I know you rider

♪ Gonna miss me when

Lesh: I did not want to take a break.

I was so into it, and it was just developing,

and it was getting better and better and better,

and I was having the time of my life.

♪ Gonna miss me

My fear was, once we took a break,

it might not come back together again.

And the Grateful Dead is the best thing that ever happened to me

until I met my wife.

And I did not want to let it go.

Not even for a minute.

Huh?

Lesh: From 1967 on, it was constant.

We averaged 80 shows a year, on the road.

I guess people were just getting tired.

Well, what happened was that everybody sort of went their...

Their separate ways to let things cool out.

Never waste a drop.

Weir: And that period of rest

really kind of saved us.

It's not just momentary fatigue that you're running down,

and you look back on your lifestyle,

and you can pretty clearly see what's been doing it to you,

then prudence decrees that you're gonna have to alter your lifestyle,

or you're not gonna make it very far.

I don't think that I can really fairly expect

to live for a long time if I'm on the road

six months out of the year.

That's hard on you.

When the Grateful Dead took a break,

we didn't stop for a second.

Not me and Jerry. We just went right into the Garcia band.

We kept going.

♪ Later on, the bottom dropped out ♪

♪ I became withdrawn

♪ The only thing I knew how to do ♪

♪ Was to keep on keepin' on like a bird that flew ♪

♪ Tangled up in blue

Parish: We were playing nightclubs night after night.

Putting all our energy into it.

You see, Jerry just wanted to be a guitar player.

He wanted to play as much as he could.

So we never stopped for one second.

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen and the Deadheads of the world,

the Grateful Dead!

Weir: When we came back together,

everybody had a bigger bag of tricks

to bring back to the fold.

And that was really a golden era for us.

You could pretty much walk into a show

and expect that we were going to achieve liftoff.

We were... We were pretty damn reliable.

♪ Oh, go

♪ Go, Johnny, go

♪ Go

♪ Go, Johnny, go

♪ Go go go

♪ Go, Johnny, go

♪ Go, Johnny, go

♪ Go

♪ Johnny B. Goode

Lesh: That period, the late '70s,

were extraordinarily productive,

and some of the most popular shows

that we've ever played are from that period.

At the same time,

something wasn't right.

That's just from my perspective.

But something fundamental...

There was a... There was a kind of hole

in the whole thing somehow.

Barlow: We did do the Egypt thing,

which I think was a huge,

huge thing for creating a sense

of solidarity and mystical purpose

for just about everybody.

But, oh God, it was just...

There was all manner of wickedness.

♪ Long distance runner

♪ What you holdin' out for?

Parish: As darker drugs moved into the scene,

it became more about trying to protect your brothers

from falling too deep into things that you knew about.

I was a streetwise kid,

and I knew everything that happened

when you fucked around with heroin.

But Jerry, he got caught up in it.

♪ The more that you give, the more it will take ♪

♪ To the thin line beyond which you really can't fake ♪

♪ Fire, fire on the mountain

♪ Fire, fire on the mountain

♪ Fire

Parish: Jerry was the epitome of the Grateful Dead,

the heart and soul of it.

He was responsible for being the guy

to keep this whole machination that we have built goin'.

And it's hard to live up to that.

The drugs that go along with being that person

are not conducive to health and life.

Barlow: You know, we were asking ourselves

to maintain a kind of creative openness

and leaning-into-it-ness...

and passion and all that stuff.

As we got older, it just got harder.

And it was all kind of gathering ourselves up

for what was gonna be...

What turned out to be our...

You know, our big decade,

which was the '80s, going into the nineties.

I hope there are people watching this documentary

who don't know the Dead

or are just being introduced to the Dead.

And I think you're gonna ask me

about some... I don't know...

What you're gonna ask me about, but...

Prankster: Tonight's acid test will remain in part

from its paralysis voyage into the void

for the remainder of the night.

That's right. Just a...

- Hey, Bear. - Get off the stage, will you?

What's that?

Al Franken: Are you gonna have,

like, an animated Jerry over your shoulder

going like, "Oh, I wouldn't do that"?

Is that like an idea you can put in the movie?

I'm not a Grateful Dead scholar.

I'm a Grateful Dead fan.

You know...

I'm a Deadhead.

We caught up with the band

in Hartford, Connecticut,

and their fans called the Deadheads.

Perhaps as important as the Dead themselves...

The Deadheads.

Self-described Deadheads

who are undoubtedly the most enthusiastic cult...

Male reporter: Deadheads... A faithful following

that comes here again and again for the music,

but at the same time a whole lot more.

Man: Yep. They're Deadheads.

McNally: In, uh, 1984,

I became the Grateful Dead's publicist.

We'll start in about 15 minutes.

I got hired because the receptionist said, "You know,

"the media calls, and nobody calls them back,

and they yell at me, and I don't like it."

And Garcia said, "Ah, get McNally to do it. He knows that shit."

By the middle 1980s,

the people of my generation,

all these people are now in their middle 30s.

They have careers.

Some of them are in the media.

They not only know about the Grateful Dead,

they want to cover the Grateful Dead,

and they want to do it positively.

So they're gonna send a camera.

The Grateful Dead are one of the...

The press would arrive.

They would be assaulted by this incredible scene...

...and suddenly the story became

not the band but Deadheads.

And everybody had the same question.

Man: Okay, what is it about the Grateful Dead?

What is it about the Grateful Dead that brings you here?

Woman: Why are you a Deadhead?

Why am I a Deadhead?

Wow. What is this for? Is this, like,

just for your own personal satisfaction,

or is this like...

Wow, that's weird. Wow. Do you, like... Is this fun?

Box slate.

Back to the Grateful Dead.

In the 1980s, I had retired,

and I wanted to write a book.

And so for two years

I took this tape recorder out

and started to do these interviews.

Joe Smith on tape: Jerry, thank you for this.

- You know I'm doing this book. - Garcia: Yeah.

And you're a very key player in it,

so I if you got a few minutes

- I'd just like to talk. - Absolutely, man.

You know, I, I have such a fond feeling for you guys.

Smith: Well, this is years later, you know,

and all the venom

that had been taken out of the relationship...

Smith: Why is it that this one aggregation,

this one combination,

can continue to do it 23, 24 years later

with audiences that weren't alive the first time around.

- Right. - What is it that you guys got?

I haven't the slightest idea, Joe.

It is one of the great phenomenons

of the entertainment world.

I think now, during the eighties,

the Grateful Dead kind of represents something

like hopping railroads, you know what I mean?

- Yeah. - Some... Something like that,

or being on the road like Kerouac.

- Yeah, yeah. - It... it...

But you can't do those types of things anymore,

but you can be a Deadhead.

You can get in your van

and go with the other Deadheads

across the United States.

"Now, that looks like fun," you know?

You have your war stories, you know?

- Yeah. - Stories about the time

that you were driving through Des Plains

in the middle of the night, got four flat tires,

and some farmer helped you out

and put you up and...

I think that's

what motivates the audience now...

The spirit of being able to go out

and have an adventure in America at large,

you know what I mean?

Woman: We're here.

We were chasing your ass all the way across country.

Man: We've been chasing you from fucking Nebraska.

Garcia: The whole thing is that Deadheads

have a certain sense of adventure,

and it's tough to come by adventure

in this new, lame America.

Male reporter: Roll over, Boogaloo Shrimp.

That's the First Lady Nancy Reagan

trying out some break dance steps today

on a visit to a New York rehab home for teens.

Now she ready to slip on some tie-dye

and go to a Dead concert.

McNally: Ronald Reagan is president in the eighties,

and the great reaction had begun.

As a matter of fact, I have here...

The reaction against the sixties.

...District Attorney of Alameda County.

It concerns a dance...

Ronald Reagan ran as governor

and as president against the sixties,

and it worked.

Three rock and roll bands

were in the center of the gymnasium

playing simultaneously all during the dance.

And all during the dance,

movies were shown on two screens

at the opposite ends of the gymnasium.

These movies were the only lights in the gym proper.

They consisted of color sequences

that gave the appearance of different-colored liquid

spreading across the screen,

followed by shots of men and women on occasion,

shots where the men and women's nude torsos,

on occasion,

and persons twisted and gyrated

in provocative and sensual fashion.

- ♪ When I married me a bad girl... ♪ - The young...

McNally: A certain proportion of Americans

say "No, we don't think so,"

and run away to join the circus

and follow the Grateful Dead.

♪ Never even put a stew bone in the pot ♪

♪ She's on the road again

♪ Sure as you're born

♪ Catch a policeman on the road again ♪

♪ She's on the road again

♪ Sure as you're born

The whole world that, you know,

kind of, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation

had risen up against,

was still kind of there, you know,

pressing everybody, but in new forms.

But when you went to a Grateful Dead show...

you would glimpse over a kind of horizon

of, uh, you know, American crap

that was usually all you got to see.

♪ Come on, pretty mama

♪ Let's get on the road again ♪

McNally: It wasn't for everybody, you know.

It was an acquired taste.

♪ Catch a policeman on the road again ♪

In the early 1980s,

the Grateful Dead were still very much

an underground phenomenon.

Deadheads became Deadheads by being mentored.

You'd have an elder sibling or friend,

and he would turn you on to the Dead.

I had friends who would give me acid

and then play Aoxomoxoa.

Aoxomoxoa: it's a palindrome.

One of their most wild experimental albums.

And then I had another friend

who would play me Europe '72.

And I remember listening to the transition

where out of the chaos

condenses "The Morning Dew."

And so that sort of beguiled me enough

to go to my first show.

Whoo!

Steve Silberman: And I remember,

like, 20 minutes into this show,

I'm hearing this incredible improvisation

on electric bass

played through quadraphonic speakers

and Phil moving notes around

in three dimensions through the audience.

Like, I had never seen anybody do that.

And I remember thinking, like, My God,

this is, like, the best music I've ever heard in my life.

This is for me.

I want to see this as much as I can.

♪ Sometimes we live in no particular way ♪

♪ But our own

And so I basically started going

to see them whenever I could.

♪ Sometimes we visit your country ♪

♪ And live in your home

♪ Sometimes we ride on your horses ♪

♪ Sometimes we walk alone

♪ Sometimes the songs that we hear ♪

♪ Are just songs of our own

♪ Wake up to find out...

Silberman: You know, I was surrounded

by this incredibly complicated

and incredibly well established social structure.

♪ It's speeches, it's homeland and... ♪

The physical layout of a Grateful Dead show

was like a mandala with different regions.

And if you look at a mandala

in traditional Tibetan Buddhism,

there are, like, these different sectors

of the mandala.

You know, here are the angry gods,

here are the people suffering.

Grateful Dead shows were like a mandala.

You know, people knew where they would sit.

There would be, you know, the Phil zone people out here

and then the Jerry side people over here.

There would be the deaf zone

where people would be holding balloons

that vibrated with the music because they could not hear.

But, by holding the balloons,

they could literally sense the vibrations of the music.

And they would dance,

and there would be a live sign language interpreter

providing interpretation of the lyrics.

There was, you know, a whole crew of Wharf Rats,

who were people following the 12-step path,

who would have meetings during the set breaks.

Spinners would be out in the hall, you know,

having literally religious experiences

because they thought Garcia was a prophet,

and they'd be bowing down.

Or there were tapers.

They would, you know,

go there with all their gear and set up their gear.

♪ The wind in the willow's playing "Tea For Two" ♪

♪ The sky was yellow, and the sun was blue ♪

♪ Strangers stopping strangers ♪

♪ Just to shake their hand

♪ Everybody's playing

♪ In the heart of gold band, heart of gold band ♪

When I first started going to Dead shows,

they didn't yet have explicit permission from the band,

so it was still in a sense a form of bootlegging.

Weir: Portable recording equipment

was getting pretty good.

And people started showing up at our shows

with expensive equipment...

Nice microphones, all that kind of stuff...

Recording the shows,

and the record company wanted to, you know,

"We gotta shut that down," uh, you know,

"because those people are gonna record your shows,

and then they're not gonna buy our records."

We were confronted with two options:

we can either be cops, or we can let 'em in.

We didn't want to be cops.

Whoo!

♪ Shakin' on Shakedown Street ♪

♪ Used to be the heart of town ♪

How do you feel about people taping Grateful Dead concerts

and trading the tapes?

Garcia: Hey, when I'm done with it,

if somebody can find use for our music

after it's been performed, fine with me.

As it turns out, we get credit

for all kinds of visionary business practices

and stuff like that.

We were just doing the easiest thing.

In fact, what happened was,

this was the greatest promo tool

in the history of music.

You give away your music... Your recorded music,

and you make your money on selling tickets.

♪ Maybe you had too much too fast ♪

And since every show is different,

you could record every show,

and you still wouldn't have heard it all,

and you'd still want to go to that next show.

♪ Maybe you had too much too fast ♪

We doubled or tripled our audience. Why?

Largely because of taping.

Yow!

My generation got into it mainly through tapes.

The core of the canon reached people

through this hand-traded stuff.

If this plays, it's a miracle.

I went to boarding school.

You know, we were in a place

where there wasn't much else to do

besides, you know, sit around

and listen to music and talk.

You start to discover that some people,

the older people, have, you know,

100, 150, 200 Grateful Dead tapes.

Well, you listen to one,

and you begin to understand what's going on in that tape,

and you become interested in it.

You listen to it over and over again.

And then you get another one,

and you begin to learn what's going on in that one,

and you begin to understand the language of that one.

Play.

And, you know, over time...

you build up this collection,

and you listen to them enough

so that you begin to see an arrangement in a sequence

and a narrative of the band's performances

as are represented by these tapes,

which, you know, are little snapshots

from each year, each tour.

To start with, you know, you're not really aware

of one year being different from another,

but after a while, you begin to say "Oh, you know,

1971 sounds like this."

1973 sounds like this.

Later, you learn that there was variation

even within that year, within that week, within each night.

I think that's part of the appeal.

You start to understand what's going on in the music.

You hear the patterns.

You hear the deviations from the patterns.

The differences between recordings

makes it seems alive.

♪ Dancin' in the street

♪ Dance in Chicago

You're really hearing

how each, you know, musical performance

represents an evolution

or devolution of the band over time.

♪ Dancin', dancin'

♪ Dancin' in the streets

♪ Dancin', dancin'

♪ dancin' in the streets

For the discerning Deadhead,

it's sort of an endlessly fascinating body of work

to say this one... This one's good in this way,

and this one's not good in this way.

You know, this one...

This one's really good, and this is why.

There's a central irony to the whole thing,

which is the band that was sort of most dedicated

to the ephemeral experience of playing live,

performing something once in a certain way,

is the band that's been sort of

most obsessively recorded and catalogued in history.

You know, I never had a great collection.

In fact, some of the people

that had the great collections,

I mean, they were...

They were weird, you know?

Al Franken: You know, I mean,

I've listened to a million "Althea" s.

Now I very much focus on, like,

what year when an "Althea" was played.

The "Althea," uh,

from, I think it's May, 1980,

Nassau Coliseum,

to me is, like, the most hair-raising solo.

My God, that solo is unbelievable.

It was so unbelievably great.

You tell me... You...

Hampton is one of your favorites, right?

So I listened to the "Althea" from that,

and that has the flavor of that one,

but it ain't that one.

- Did you listen to it? - Amir Bar Lev: Yeah.

- Am I right? - Yeah.

Only Deadheads would, like, talk like that.

Silberman: Believe me, after you'd heard

150 versions of a particular song,

you'd have a kind of platonic form of the leads,

or whatever, like, in your head.

And then Jerry would play something slightly better.

So I would have to sort of negotiate with myself.

It would be like, "Well, I saw the last six shows,

so do I really need to see the next two?" you know.

But inevitably I would end up, like, hearing

about what they'd played on the night that I didn't go,

and I'd be like, "Fuck."

The Dead had a way

of sort of frustrating your attempts

to moderate the obsession.

You guys got any extra tickets for tonight?

- I don't have any extra ones... - Come on.

- ...for tonight myself. - You don't?

But I'm sure they'll be around.

- You goin'? - Oh, of course we're goin'.

All right. You go last night?

Oh, yeah.

Boy, that was a good jam, wasn't it?

Man: Where'd you guys come from?

Rhode Island.

All the way from Rhode Island to see the Dead.

Took us a week to get here.

We had a hell of a time, man.

Two months to get back home.

I left last week, and it took six days to get here.

It was pretty fun on the way.

Spent Christmas in Arcata.

Anything within 600 miles is automatic.

You can make that in one night

and still make it to work in the morning.

Last night was my 45th show this year.

I make almost all the shows of the year.

I drive that big Ford.

And you guys, uh, off the record,

are welcome to smoke a joint with us.

But I really need a miracle for tonight,

you know, like, I'd like to be holdin' a ticket.

You know what I mean? I really would.

♪ I need a miracle every day

Got any tickets?

♪ It takes dynamite to get me up ♪

Help me, please!

♪ Too much of everything is just enough ♪

♪ One more thing I just got to say ♪

♪ I need a miracle every day

You know, I started going to see them in 1984,

and I remember at that point, they still...

Still were a strange,

forgotten, almost sixties cult

that was sort of shambling around America

pretty much ignored by the culture at large.

It was a pretty intense, small scene.

It was overwhelming, and it was kind of scary.

We were 15.

You know, I was sort of a clean-cut kid,

and it was not a clean-cut scene necessarily.

What'cha need?

The sense of menace was always there.

Which I didn't quite understand myself.

You know, the bikers that would go,

rough guys, there were drunks.

I didn't, kind of, get that part.

Fuck off, you.

Franken: You know, I'm a very,

you know, gentle person.

Nick Paumgarten: And sometimes it was just a madhouse.

So that... that aspect of it just frightened me.

I remember, sort of,

survival was sort of the thing

when I went to shows...

Surviving the crowds and the bathroom lines.

Franken: I couldn't go

to the bathroom there.

And, I remember, like, Deadheads

who were barefoot going in

to go the bathroom,

and I was, like, going like...

I can't handle that.

Man: Thank you. Thank you very much.

- Thank you. - Welcome in, folks.

Walk, walk, walk. Don't run, don't run!

- Walk. - Here you go.

Paumgarten: It was not like, you know,

being a middle-aged guy

going to see a show with your seat number

and showing up and maybe getting an IPA

and being shown to your seat

and sitting there and being like, "Oh,

this is a nice presentation of decent music."

It was... It was... It was an adventure.

♪ Well, I was feelin'

♪ So bad now

♪ Asked my family doctor 'bout what I had done ♪

♪ I said now, Doctor

♪ Doctor

♪ Mr. M.D.

♪ Doctor

♪ Ow, can you tell me

♪ Doctor

♪ What's ailing me

♪ Doctor

♪ He said Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ Yeah, yeah

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪

♪ All you need

♪ All you really need

♪ Is good lovin'

♪ Because you got to have lovin' ♪

Weir: And as the years went by...

♪ Well, you got to have lovin' ♪

we just got better at it.

♪ A little bit of lovin'

♪ Good lovin'

And then,

when Brent started playing with us,

we had three really good, strong singers.

We could really knock it out of the park

with our choral vocals.

♪ Don't you want your daddy

♪ To be all right?

Paumgarten: After Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux

left the band,

they brought in Brent Mydland,

who was a fabulous keyboard player

and a wonderful singer, actually.

He really revitalized the backup singing for the band

and gave it some muscle, made the sound bigger.

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪

♪ All you need

You know, and it seemed like,

for a while, that they were feeling it.

♪ Is good lovin'

♪ Well, you got to have lovin' ♪

♪ Good lovin'

♪ And you gotta have lovin'

♪ Good lovin'

♪ Oh, a little good lovin'

♪ Good lovin'

Get it on!

♪ Good lovin'

♪ Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme some lovin' ♪

♪ Ah, you gotta have lovin'

♪ Good lovin'

♪ Gimme, gimme, gimme some lovin' ♪

- ♪ Good lovin' - ♪ Ah

Silberman: There was something

that was uncanny

about the wave form of a Grateful Dead show.

- ♪ Got to have lovin' - ♪ Good lovin'

You know, there were two sets.

The first set was usually more contained musically.

There would be more kind of

chorus, verse, you know, structure of the songs.

But then, in the second set,

almost anything could happen.

There would be a period in the second set

where you would be actually brought back

to the very elemental essence of music

by the drums and space sections.

Percussive rhythms from the jungle...

or from the desert in the Middle East.

Hart: The idea is to take the audience

on a trip, you know, on a journey.

If you asked me what business I was in,

I would say transportation.

We're in the transportation business.

Silberman: I think that what made Grateful Dead music

so appealing for people who were tripping

was that it was a way of having experiences

that were almost a primordial initiation.

Like in cultures where

young men would be taken away from their parents,

often by a Shaman.

You know, they would have to spend,

like, three days in the wilderness, fasting,

learning that the world was serious

instead of superficial.

Learning that things like life and death were real.

Becoming an adult.

It's not to say that, you know,

people couldn't enjoy Dead shows while they were sober,

but for people who, you know,

were taking psychedelics like me,

which I did hundreds of times at Dead shows,

it was an absolutely exquisite opportunity

to explore this rich

musical tradition

that they were sort of serving up,

you know, nightly,

in this incredibly well architected form.

And then you'd be returned to the, kind of, human world

through the ballads that Jerry would sing.

Like, Jerry would often come out of space

with "Stella Blue."

It was as if he had found a place to stand

in the middle of the universe

where he could look at everything outside of him

and utter something meaningful about it.

♪ All the years combine

♪ They melt into a dream

♪ A broken angel sings

You know, a very common experience about psychedelics

is that you feel like you're on the verge

of sort of cracking the cosmic koan

or getting the cosmic joke or something.

And then it would slip away.

♪ It all rolls into one

And, I think the lyrics kind of flirted with that...

♪ And nothing...

where they would, you know, almost hand you something

that sounded like the big answer,

but then it was, you know, ever so slightly slippery.

♪ There's nothing you can hold ♪

♪ For very long

Paumgarten: The lyrics for me...

The good ones...

They do hang around like scraps of important poetry.

♪ Stella Blue

There's something ingenious about Hunter

where the lyrics all have these level

of involving the listener in whatever story's being told.

♪ Stella Blue

Robert Hunter was a very subtle lyricist.

Trist: He was part of the Grateful Dead

because he was creating the words they sang.

Always referring back to those roots

that we shared in the early sixties.

McNally: Hunter was Jerry's partner on every level.

They were close enough. They went back far enough

that Hunter could be the source of words

and Jerry could be comfortable singing them.

Garcia: I can't get on stage and sing a song

that doesn't have some emotional reality for me.

Hunter is very good about writing into my beliefs.

You know?

He... He understands the way I think.

Silberman: His lyrics seem to come

out of a much older world

than they literally came out of.

♪ In the timbers to Fennario

♪ The wolves are running round ♪

It was like those songs came

from some kind of subterranean old, weird America.

♪ I beg of you, don't murder me ♪

One that had important information in it.

♪ Please don't murder me

That you would kind of have to

live your way up to understanding.

Weir: Hunter's got his own window

into what those songs are about,

what they mean to him.

He's notoriously reclusive,

uh, so I doubt that he would be willing

to sit for an interview, but he might.

I could call him and... Or text him or something.

If you can get him to talk, it'd be interesting to see.

I think a lot of times, people want to know

what he meant by this or that line.

No artist wants to sit there

and explain why he did what he did.

It's sort of counter

to the whole point of doing something artistic.

Well, it is fun

to learn how songs are written, right?

I guess.

Generally speaking, when I listen to a song,

you know, I don't ponder.

"What was he trying to get at here?"

I always do that.

I always try to figure out

what the words mean... What do they mean?

What's...

But it takes all kinds right?

Mm-hmm.

But he knows we're coming, right?

Bar Lev: No, he does not.

Ah, okay.

You know, Robert Hunter was a very elusive person.

He did not like photographs circulating of him.

He wouldn't even appear in public for many years

because he wanted to retain his anonymity.

Hunter would just kind of appear,

or he would disappear whenever he wanted to.

That's who the guy is.

And that's why his lyrics suggest...

"I'm anywhere you want me to be.

You can't catch me."

This is a man who will pull out a gun and shoot you

if you start, you know, analyzing his lyrics.

He will not answer questions like that.

No, you can't exp... Nobody w...

Well, I can't explain his songs, no.

McNally: He won't do it, nor should he.

If he did, the illusion would be gone,

and that ain't no fun, you know?

Silberman: His lyrics were not easily cast

into some narrow range of meaning.

You know, it's like,

I love the lyric to "Dark Star,"

even though it's one of the most...

You know, you can't explain what it means.

Well, let's see.

Dark star crashes,

pouring its light into the ashes.

Reason tatters.

The forces tear loose from the axis.

Uh, searchlight casting for faults

in the clouds of delusion.

Shall we go, you and I,

while we can,

through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

What is unclear about that?

I mean, it says what it means.

♪ Dark star crashes

♪ Pouring its light

♪ Through ashes

♪ Reason...

Godchaux: The lyrics are worded in such a way

that anybody who hears a Grateful Dead song

can interpret it

so that it becomes meaningful

to their own life.

It is so personal

to each and every person who listens to it,

it belongs to you, honey.

It's yours.

♪ Shall we go

♪ You and I, while we can?

And that's the key,

and that's the genius

of the Hunter/Garcia collaboration.

♪ The transitive nightfall of diamonds ♪

Silberman: Both Robert Hunter's

and John Barlow's best lyrics did that.

Those songs would become, like, good, wise advisors

that you could take with you through decades of life.

Come right here, and it's all about this:

"See ya at the next show."

When this one's over,

we're not going anywhere but to the next show.

Man: And how long are you gonna keep doing this?

Like the band does another 20 years,

I'll do another 20 years.

Silberman: It was really profound

to keep coming back over the years

because you would see people, you know, get older.

Eventually they'd be coming with their spouse

and maybe their kids.

Eventually they'd be getting gray hair.

It's like we would all be growing old together

in this place that kept recreating itself

in a way that was both reassuringly familiar

and excitingly new every time.

I think, for a lot of people,

Grateful Dead shows were experiences of renewal

in the same way that it would be

within a...

An established, uh, religion.

♪ I wanna tell you how it's gonna be ♪

♪ You're gonna give your love to me ♪

♪ I want to love you night and day ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ Not fade away

Lesh: It is more like a ritual than a concert.

Everybody's ecstatic together.

I always said,

every place we play is church.

That says it in a nutshell.

Barlow: You know, there really was

a holy thing that happened there.

There's no question.

But it wasn't coming from Garcia.

It wasn't coming from the stage, actually.

It wasn't coming from any particular place.

It never does.

We realized that we had to be really very careful...

because if the Grateful Dead

was going to form a religion

beyond just having a religious-like thing

that was following it around...

it would constrain our ability

to get into the future properly.

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ Mmm-bop, bop, bop-bop

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ Mmm-bop, bop, bop-bop

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ Mmm-bop, bop, bop-bop

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know our love will not fade away ♪

See, for the first 18 years or so,

I had a lot of doubts about the Grateful Dead.

I thought maybe this is really a bad thing to be doing,

you know, this could be, like, really pernicious.

Reporter: Because you were aware of it.

Because I was aware of the power.

If I had started to think about controlling that power,

it would be like, perilously close to fascism.

And, so I did a lot of things to sabotage it.

It's like, "Fuck that, you know?

"I'm not going to go along with this.

I don't want to be a part of this."

I mean, it's the thing of it.

You don't want to be the king, you know?

You don't want to be the president.

You don't fuckin' want that.

I mean, nobody wants... Nobody should have that.

♪ Fare you well, my honey, oh ♪

♪ Fare you well

♪ My only true one

♪ All the birds that were singing ♪

♪ Have flown

♪ Except you alone

Steve Silberman: Jerry once said something like

"I live in a world without a Grateful Dead"

because, he didn't have some group that was, you know,

that he could go see

that would lift the burdens of his life.

You know, he was the guy

who was lifting everybody else's burdens

without even trying.

And he couldn't do it for himself, clearly,

because meanwhile, he's going back to his house

and smoking heroin all day.

Nick Paumgarten: By the time I came on the scene

in the mid-eighties,

Garcia was probably at his unhealthiest, you know,

up until, basically, when he died.

♪ In my time

I feel like the extent to which

he allowed himself to fall to pieces,

there was some element of the canny artist in that.

I mean, this is me projecting onto him entirely.

Maybe it's giving him too much credit,

but it suited the music that he was performing

when he was shrouded in death

because a lot of Garcia's music is about death.

That's an appeal of the man

that you have to discover over time.

You don't see it immediately

because of the way he presents historically

as this sort of big, happy, hippie icon.

You get to know,

if you listen to the music,

that actually he's a deliverer

of dark news, you know?

That's where you really begin to take him seriously.

♪ Fare you well, fare you well ♪

♪ I love you more than words can tell ♪

♪ Listen to the river sing sweet songs ♪

♪ To rock my soul

♪ Listen to the river sing sweet songs ♪

♪ To rock my soul

This is where I'm working

on archiving a bunch of Jerry's stuff.

This is my endless project.

You know, I was always expecting when I...

When I would listen to the Grateful Dead music,

there was gonna be some, like, overt message, you know?

Something there, like, oh, that's it.

But I can't tell exactly

where the magic is in... in these things.

You know, but there's definitely

something special going on.

This is a great reel from a press release.

Back here I have a couple of, um, like, family shots.

There's Jerry.

This is... This is the daughter picture.

He's holding his wallet.

I'm probably hitting him up for money.

Um, this is in Hawaii.

He looks pretty frickin' happy, to me.

This is actually at Ken Kesey's house.

Me and Jerry in '86.

My mom, Mountain Girl, took this picture.

Growing up in the Grateful Dead,

I never got to experience the show

as a fan did, you know?

So, it didn't make sense to me

why all these people have this, um,

deep, deep connection to my dad

that I sometimes felt like I had to compete with.

You know, they toured a lot,

and it was really hard for him, you know,

spending that much time on the road.

And we gave him, you know,

he got his space when he came home.

I would just sit, you know,

and hang out next to him while he played his scales.

And we'd watch TV shows together.

And weird movies, you know.

Twilight Zone stuff.

Shall we put the heart in now?

Yes.

Ludwig.

Here's some old, uh,

sketches of little Frankensteins.

Frankenstein was a recurring character for him.

Um, you know, Jerry loved horror movies

and stuff like that, so...

The Frankenstein,

the harmless little companion that you create

that ends up dominating your whole world.

Work.

He was exhausted.

I'm exhausted. I must get sleep.

Work, finish, then sleep.

The Grateful Dead thing had gotten so big

where you're kind of, you know,

working just to keep it going at a certain point.

Not that, you know,

not saying it should have ended or anything, but...

I wish that, uh,

he would've just got some fucking rest, you know?

Dennis McNally: Summer of '86,

we played two concerts in Washington, D.C.

It was over a hundred degrees,

and Jerry was out there for three hours a day,

and he got dehydrated.

And about three days later,

he went into a diabetic coma.

Garcia: I just laid down one day and didn't get up.

During the time I was actually in a coma,

my main experience is a kind of tremendous struggle

in a kind of a futuristic,

sort of spaceship-y kind of vehicle

with some kind of insectoid presences.

Prankster: The acid test is everywhere in this spaceship,

everywhere you are, you're all on...

Garcia: Kind of like invisible time travelers from the future

looking at me, you know.

I had this image of myself...

I love death.

...as these little hunks of protoplasm

that were stuck together kind of like stamps

with perforations between 'em.

And they were a gift.

They were these kind of, like, message units

or message carriers,

and I thought they were, like,

kind of like my bloodstream.

And that was my image of my physical self.

I came out of my coma...

feeling fragile...

but I'm not afraid of death.

It made it easier for me to focus on the things

that I really wanted to accomplish.

It had that kind of attention-getting, you know,

the thing of you could go at any moment.

You never know, you know,

so you might as well just try to crowd

as much as you can possibility get into your life.

This week, the Grateful Dead released

their first studio album in seven years,

In The Dark, over which

their so-called Deadhead fans are delirious.

They always love it when I don't die.

I always get a lot of mileage out of that.

Reporter: The Grateful Dead are very much alive and well.

Their last album, Into The Dark,

was their best selling ever.

Their single, "Touch of Grey,"

became their first top-40 hit.

♪ I will get by

The Dead racked up over $26 million in ticket sales.

Woman: ...one of the highest earners

in the entertainment business last year.

The band's music makes millions.

There's an ice cream named after their leader.

The Dead is even on the internet.

♪ I will survive

McNally: In 1987,

we finally have a radio hit.

With "Touch of Grey" in the top ten,

tens of thousands of people just heard it on the radio,

and they went, "Oh, I want to go to that show,"

and, of course, they can't get in

'cause it's already sold out.

So they go down anyway,

and they find a party the likes of which

no 19-year-old ever walks away from.

And we go from having a thousand people

on the outside of our show,

uh, to 5,000.

And that simply overloaded the environment.

♪ I will get by

Mickey Hart: It got so, so popular,

so powerful a draw,

that the biggest places were too small,

even the stadiums.

Playing to the stadiums

were akin to playing in the studio

because the people were all there...

There were 60,000 people there...

But it was basically...

You didn't have any touch with those people.

They're hundreds of feet away from you.

Phil Lesh: In the stadiums,

you're gonna have no contact with your audience.

It's just not possible.

You know, it's just a sea of faces about this big

and waving arms.

Man: Has success spoiled the Dead?

- Yeah. - Bob Weir: Yeah.

Sam Cutler: I came back to America

after 30 years away.

I was absolutely gobsmacked

by the influence of the Grateful Dead

and how it spread all over the United States.

And then this is what the mainstream culture

does, you know?

It neuters things

and declaws things, you know,

by absorbing them, you know.

They kinda love you to death.

Paumgarten: The scene kept evolving.

They attracted a new legion of fans.

And they became popular and accepted,

and you found out that, you know,

Peter Jennings went to shows

and Senator Leahy was a Deadhead,

and the Grateful Dead, God bless 'em,

were fine with that.

I found it affirming,

the fact that it was a big tent.

It wasn't just a bunch of hippie chicks

or prep school Deadheads or spinners.

They were open to all kinds of people.

That was always part of it.

Garcia: Events have carried us this far.

You know what I mean?

And that seems to work pretty good

when we sort of take a hands-off approach,

you know, kind of let things happen.

So we'll see where this gets us

'cause right now we're in motion.

We're on our way somewhere.

It's hard to tell where.

Cutler: What's interesting to me

is the reaction of the Deadheads.

When the Grateful Dead became locked

into playing huge stadiums,

I mean, the Deadheads picked up

on the original ethos of the Grateful Dead,

their inherently anarchic tendencies.

And all of a sudden,

it was like they'd been stalked

by 50,000 lunatics.

Lesh: We should've known that something was coming

when we realized that a lot of times

there were more people outside the shows

partying and trying to find a way in for free

than there were inside.

♪ I spent a little time on the mountain ♪

♪ Spent a little time on the hill ♪

♪ I heard some say

♪ "Better run away"

♪ Others say "Better stand still" ♪

Hart: It got so chaotic,

you couldn't take it out of the bag.

We wanted to make a statement saying that:

"You guys got to police yourselves," you know?

You gotta be good neighbors, you don't want to...

You can't be pee on the lawns and everything.

You have to respect people.

McNally: What we were trying to do

was simply preserve our ability to do a show

under conditions in which you had far too many people

saying "Oh, I'm just here for the party,

even if I can't get into the show."

And it's all too much.

Jerry Garcia did not bargain to be the mayor

of a traveling counter-cultural town.

Listen, please, because this is serious.

McNally: And so I'd get the band members

to record these letters.

...so at our sold-out shows, if you don't have a ticket,

- please don't come. - Got any extra tickets?

- Lesh: We really mean this. - Just one ticket.

Jerry just couldn't bring himself to do one of those.

Uh, but Phil didn't mind.

Folks who run this shop,

I need it starting to be shut down now.

Lesh: We wrote more than one open letter to Deadheads.

The area around every Grateful Dead concert

is subject to the local legal system.

- But it did nothing. - Deadhead: Come on.

It's a joke.

Deadheads are a determined bunch, though,

you know, uh, not much for listening to rules.

When they were younger guys,

first startin' out on this thing,

they decided just, "Okay,

"the rules aren't cuttin' it for me.

"Society's typical way of dealing with things isn't cuttin' it for me,

and I want to follow my intuition."

I'm coming in, brother.

I'm coming in.

I got you.

Female Deadhead: They cut loose.

By doing that,

their music has grown

into this blossoming monster, you know?

So we do the same thing,

and they do the same thing.

The Dead's fans have always been

among the mellowest on a music scene,

but lately they've been having some problems.

Reporter: Charges against Deadheads ranging

from public lewdness and disturbing the peace

to using and selling drugs.

Hart: It was a scary thing,

because you don't want to wake up in the morning

finding people are in jail, or deaths.

I said, "Oh man, this is dangerous."

You know, we'll be responsible

for things that we can't control

or that they can't control, and it'll get out of hand.

♪ One way or another

♪ One way or another

♪ One way or another

♪ This darkness got to give

McNally: Many of the people without tickets

have no responsibility or obligation to our scene.

It's up to you as Deadheads to educate these people

and to pressure them into acting like Deadheads

instead of maniacs.

They can only get away with this crap

if you let them.

If you're not part of the solution,

you're part of the problem.

Yeah, don't you do that.

The spirit of the Grateful Dead is at stake,

and we'll do what we have to do...

- Yeah. - ...to protect it.

Yeah. I mean, the whole point with the Grateful Dead

was we didn't tell anybody, you know, to do nothin',

you know?

Just the idea is repellent.

The idea that we're gonna now

start telling people how to behave.

I mean, we're not the government, you know?

We're just musicians,

and it's enough to try to control...

McNally: The main thing

was getting Jerry to co-sign the message.

But he was such an anti-authoritarian.

He was just said, "Get somebody else to do it."

Man: Well, Phil said that he would like Deadheads

to not bring hard drugs around the Dead.

How do you feel about that?

I think drugs are really a personal thing,

and anybody... everybody has the right to take 'em...

- Mm-hmm. - ...as far as I'm concerned.

- Yeah. - And in my world,

everything is legal, you know,

and everybody can do whatever they want,

and, I mean, I...

John Barlow: Jerry did not do messages.

Period. End of story.

Man: Is there anything that you feel Deadheads can do

to help out the Grateful Dead?

Garcia: Yeah, they can keep having fun.

I mean, there was certainly an underlying message

that was about thinking for yourself.

Ignore alien orders.

Steve Parish: Jerry never liked to talk to the audience

'cause he realized that they hung on his every word.

Everybody in the audience would think

that Jerry was there to play to them that night.

And he was. He tried to.

He liked to have the lights up a little bit

so he could see the faces of the audience.

- He drew off of them. - ♪ Drifting and dreaming

You gotta remember,

when you start with the early days...

you couldn't tell the difference

between the stage and the audience.

It was just an extension of that.

But as time went on,

Jerry became this icon to people.

And that became impossible.

Weir: I had a tough time

walking the streets of any town we were in.

Jerry couldn't do it, flat couldn't.

He was stuck in a hotel room wherever we went.

He couldn't go out.

And there were people

scaling the walls of the hotel

trying to get at him.

That just drove him nuts.

Trixie: I spent a lot of time on stage

staring at the audience

and just wondering what they're seeing,

why are they so enraptured?

But I remember, um,

just knowing that I shouldn't go out

and mingle with the Deadheads.

There had already been

kind of certain breaches of personal space.

I think Jerry was already a little freaked out

about the weird, um, things

that people were projecting on him.

♪ Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a tune ♪

♪ Something to make us all happy ♪

♪ Do anything

♪ Take us out of this gloom

♪ Sing a song, play guitar

♪ Make it snappy

♪ You are the one...

Weir: We were just beset by people

who had just gone off into this imaginary world...

♪ You break, you break down in tears ♪

...to the point where Jerry was basically

a messiah figure.

♪ ...a straight mind you had

♪ Wouldn't have known you

♪ All these years

Woman: How do you feel about the fact

that you enjoy such a divine-like status

in the eyes of so many of your fans?

I mean, yeah, but I don't think

anybody takes it that seriously,

- you know what I mean? - You might be surprised.

Well...

Then I'll... I'll put up with it

until they come for me with the cross and nails.

You know?

One of the things that upsets me

about what happened with Jerry in the nineties

was how isolated he was

in the middle of this incredible community.

And I think he was really suffering,

particularly after Brent Mydland died.

It was obvious that Jerry and Brent

really had some kind of very deep

and mutually, uh, enriching connection.

Weir: After Brent died from heroin overdose,

the music kind of sagged a little bit.

I think Jerry... the... the fact

that he was kind of shut in by circumstance,

and you add on top of that the band is not what it was...

well, that's a little...

That's a place where the plot sort of turns a little bit,

and, uh, and he started looking for a way to get out.

♪ I'd rather be in some dark hollow ♪

♪ Where the sun don't ever shine ♪

♪ Then to be

♪ In some big city

♪ In a small room

♪ With you upon my mind

Brigid Meier: April, 1990...

I get a letter from Jerry.

I haven't seen him, really,

for 28 years.

And he said, "I'll always love you."

Okay.

What am I supposed to do with that?

Then, a year later,

there was a note from Dennis McNally,

their publicist,

the designated liaison.

And he said, "Call me.

Jerry would like to see you."

But, I mean,

he was living with somebody else,

had a child with someone else.

In order to have a conversation,

we had to couch it as an interview.

Garcia: I mean, you really sort of started me going.

You bought me that guitar, you know?

You're partly responsible!

So I took a tape recorder and did an interview.

Yeah.

It goes by fast.

The last fifteen years has been furious.

I'm sorry to hear that.

We never decided to go somewhere

or to become something, you know what I mean?

Yeah, it's funny... It's funny... it's...

At some point or another,

after I got out of the hospital,

when I had my coma and all that,

somewhere in there I... I... I kind of...

I have this memory now...

I don't know where it came from...

That's like as though you and I

had continued with our lives together somehow

and had a whole alternate life,

you know what I mean? But it's like...

I mean, it was incredibly awkward.

He says, "You know,

there's a part of me that is still in love with you."

still is very much in love with you, you know?

Still, always.

It's a little scary.

McNally: She interviewed him

for an article that would appear in Tricycle.

It was the Buddhist magazine.

I arranged it.

She was Buddhist,

and he was curious about it.

McNally was actually the mastermind.

I don't know if that's entirely a story I want to tell.

Uh, suffice it to say...

He did all he could to facilitate this.

There was something there.

Both of them felt it.

It became like a military operation

to extricate Jerry and get me in there.

And eventually he went to Hawaii with Brigid.

I didn't know what we were doing.

I had no idea what we were doing

until about day 3.

We... We started scuba diving.

I'd never done it before,

and he was...

masterful.

He was an extraordinary diver.

Bill Kreutzmann: Jerry and I started diving,

I think back in '86.

You couldn't keep us out of the water.

He loved diving.

He loved the ocean,

and and used to do this thing with his hands

so it looked like a squid, right?

Like that.

And fuckin'... out of nowhere

all these fish would come around.

You know, it was like, he had this attraction.

Whether it was fish, audience, whatever, you know,

He always had this way of attracting things.

We liked to dive

because it has a sense of freedom

that I don't know where else you could get that.

Here was this beautiful buffer, the ocean,

that kept all that outside shit away.

You didn't have to sign autographs

or any of that crap.

Meier: So he turned me on to that world of his.

And I loved it.

I loved it.

At one point,

we're tired after diving and hanging out.

He just looks at me, and he said...

"Would you marry me?"

I said, "Yeah, okay."

So I didn't know what we were doing until that moment.

Then he got on the phone.

He calls Hunter, and he calls everybody.

He says, "We're getting married."

And he's all excited, and he's all happy.

It's like, "Okay, what do we gotta do?"

Acupuncture.

Quit smoking.

Exercise.

Walk around the lake every day.

We... We started working on Bowflexes.

We had a trainer, personal trainer.

Suddenly he feels creative

and he wants to start writing songs.

Hey.

Get in there, fellers.

Meier: And it's like, "Hunter, come on over."

They wrote six songs.

I mean, it was just this amazing eruption of energy.

Okay, I'm ready.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Meier: There was this feeling.

It was real.

I wasn't the only one who felt it. They felt it.

It was like, we're back.

We're back to those days

when we used to pick you up from high school

and drive around,

and we were all together, and it was all new,

and it was all fresh, and it was all...

alive.

McNally: Reconnecting with someone after 30 years...

there's no way that you can't feel, you know,

in some weird way that you're young again.

Hunter certainly thought so.

He wrote "The Days Between" about just that.

It's the last Hunter-Garcia masterpiece.

It's about looking back on your youth

and seeing your whole life

that has passed in the interval,

and that's... That's "The Days Between."

It's your life.

♪ Walked upon a mountaintop

♪ Walked barefoot through the snow ♪

♪ Gave the best we had to give ♪

♪ How much we'll never know

♪ Never know

It wasn't me.

It was...

He got in touch with a part of him.

I was just a catalyst, okay?

But he...

I think he had been suffering for a long time

under the weight and responsibility

of this behemoth.

I mean, at one point... I can... I remember him.

We're in the kitchen, we're talking,

and he said, "You know,

"I'd like to just live on the ice cream money.

"You know, I could do that.

I could just live on that and say the hell with this."

And, I said, "Well, why don't you?"

"Oh, man, come on,

"do you know how many people are depending

on this show going down the road?"

And I understood in that moment.

It was a machine by then.

It wasn't just a bunch of guys

getting together and making music.

This enormous community was demanding

that he be the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia.

Where's the freedom in that?

McNally: The Grateful Dead became a weight.

By the Grateful Dead, I do not mean the six guys,

I mean the phenomenon.

He had fifty people, including me,

whose paycheck he was in charge of.

And their families.

And a million people who demanded that he play

eighty nights a year for their happiness factor.

And it was a weight.

It was a responsibility.

This was a guy who didn't want responsibility.

So he self-medicated

and had been doing so for a very long time.

Meier: I can remember a really chilling moment.

I'm backstage and I'm sitting on the black equipment boxes.

And the doctor is telling me,

yeah, Jerry's using again.

Suddenly, it's all too obvious.

He's been out of it,

and he's been unpleasant to be around.

And then the road manager, he's saying,

"You know... you know, Jerry's cool,

he's cool, he can handle this."

I said, "Well why don't... Why doesn't he go into rehab?"

"It's cool, he's gonna kick. He always does,

and just, just hang in there with it."

"Why don't we just do an intervention?"

"Don't say anything.

"This is the Grateful Dead, man.

"We gotta keep this show goin'.

We gotta keep goin'."

Cutler: The secret of longevity in the music business

is to get away from it. Alright?

You gotta leave it man. Fuck off.

Learn how to be a deep sea fisherman.

Go SCUBA diving. Whatever it is.

Snow skiing. Become, and be, something completely else.

For somebody like Garcia, I mean, that's the only way to survive.

Lesh: We had staff that, you know,

depended on us for their living.

And we convinced ourselves that we owed it

to our employees to keep going.

Right or wrong.

I could wish that we'd thought more about Jerry.

And, uh...

So, yeah. That's a...

That's a tender place.

Meier: So, after the show,

we go back to the hotel room.

I say, "I just want you to know

"that I know that you're using,

"and that's fine, that's okay, that's cool.

"You do what you wanna do, I don't... I'm not gonna try and stop you.

"I just really don't want any secrets between us.

You know, I just don't want any secrets."

And he looked at me, and the room got cold,

and he says...

"I think it's time for you to go now."

And he said, "You know, I can't thank you enough,

but this isn't gonna work."

The band left,

and then I left for the airport.

I never saw him again.

That was that.

McNally: Have you ever had a friend who was addicted?

Until they decide that that's what they want,

everything you can say is just gonna go

in one ear and out the other.

It's not like the band didn't talk to him.

It's not like the band... The band didn't, you know,

stage periodic, you know, big throw down interventions.

That's the way it was.

Parish: He was my boss, and my friend,

and somebody that I wanted to protect from harm.

But could I help him save himself from his own self?

I always thought of Jerry as a strong guy.

I remember one time when a guy came bolting out of the audience

so quick before I could get to him,

and he was zeroed in on grabbin' Jerry to hug him.

A lot of time people would just want to

jump up there and hug 'em, you know while he's playin'...

It's awkward. And Jerry took his guitar,

and point foremost, bang that guy

right in the solar plexus and didn't miss a note,

and knocked him into my arms.

I said, well there, you know, you see it.

He was strong, you know.

And, I didn't ever think

that he would get deteriorated in that way.

Kreutzmann: I always thought we were gonna be able

to get through to Jerry,

that we were gonna be able to help get him into treatment.

We had seen Jerry clean up and...

We've all racked our brains.

...and be in great shape.

What could we have done differently?

I had faith that Jerry would come back around.

The only thing we could have done was to have taken a break.

Another break.

You know, and I would've- I would've-

I would've been okay with it this time.

But I never thought that if we did take a break

that Jerry would stop.

He would just go out with the Jerry Garcia Band

and keep going.

Trixie: Jerry was a very strong individual.

Hart: Jerry Garcia was a lot of great things.

You didn't tell Jerry what to do.

He was a really cool guy.

You know, until he killed himself.

Yeah, until he killed himself.

That's really what happened.

Barlow: I remember toward the end of the fateful last tour,...

they were playing Meadowlands in New Jersey.

And I turned around,

and there's Garcia looking all white.

You know, everything's, like, his beard, his face,

his skin is, like, he's-he's kind of like

a luminous white figure,

already kind of angelic.

And I think he'd just had enough.

Cutler: Garcia was suffering, being in the Grateful Dead.

I don't think that it was the dream

that he, you know, wanted realized.

The Grateful Dead had become

a hugely successful rock and roll band,

and in the process, of course,

they lost certain things.

Paumgarten: You see people cheering

even when they should be crying.

Either because the performance is very poor

or because the song is-is, you know, is a dirge.

♪ Yesterday I begged you

♪ Before I hit the ground

Paumgarten: He's singing about his own death,

looking like he's about to die.

♪ All I leave behind me

♪ Is only what I found

Paumgarten: When I was younger,

it made the music more interesting for me.

But by '95,

it was a depressing and pretty intense experience.

You know, he had something in him

that embraced his own self-destruction.

Garcia: I feel that my real responsibility

is to the audience in the now, you know?

There was a conscious decision in my life

to be involved in something that was flowing,

and dynamic, and living...

and not so solid that you couldn't tear it down.

Something that had a life of its own

and I was just a part of it.

McNally: Monuments are an attempt to subvert death.

To transcend death.

To make a monument of something freezes it forever.

That is exactly opposite what Jerry wanted.

From the very beginning, Jerry wanted to do something

in real time

and to touch people's hearts.

He wanted to make the Grateful Dead

as open-ended as possible.

Garcia: For me it has a lot to do with

getting out of the way, you know what I mean?

At some point I decided not to be "me"

and to be "they."

When it's something more than my own little self.

That's it, that's the goal.

McNally: In the last year and a half, two year of his life,

when the diabetes was playing havoc with his moods,

I knew he didn't want to do interviews,

and so I didn't ask him.

But six months before he died,

I got a request, and I took one look

and I went "This he's going to want to do."

Garcia: My mother, I think, must of taken me to see it.

McNally: The interview was for a show on the American Movie Channel

called "The Movie That Changed My Life."

Garcia: You know I had my head down

and I cried and except occasionally

I would glimpse the screen and go, "Oh, ah!"

He immediately just sat down

and said, "Oh yeah!"

And started talking for half an hour.

Garcia: That whole business evoked something.

It like, touched something, you know what I mean?

Something... I don't know what.

Something very strong.

It might have been the- the thing of

a dead thing brought to life.

Frankenstein's Monster, after all,

is a drive to reanimate or to...

To produce life.

Dr. Frankenstein: It's alive.

Garcia: And it hit me in that archetypal center.

Dr. Frankenstein: It's alive!

You know like, vaboom, you know?

Dong, you know?

♪ Death don't

♪ Have no mercy

♪ In this land

Garcia: But, really it's workin'.

The Grateful Dead is this living, breathing thing.

♪ Death don't

It's not up to us to define it.

♪ Have no mercy

Or to enclose it in any way.

♪ In this land

It's whatever it is.

♪ In this land

I think that's one of the parts of its magic.

The effect seems to be not defining it

is that it becomes everything.

Woman: Nancy Smith and Ed Rooney were the two winners,

but we're gonna break in and break format,

- um, for a moment here. - Man: Yes.

Woman: We just got some real bad news.

Reporter: Okay, that's fantastic.

- Thank you. - You're welcome.

My pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

Male reporter: Could I take a few quick photos?

Oh, god, if you have to.

Male Reporter 2: It's incredibly tragic,

and it's a little frustrating right now

because we don't know anything more than the fact

that Jerry Garcia has died.

He was found dead a couple of hours ago.

Male Reporter 3: There's no easy way to break this news to you,

but it's true, the unthinkable,

and the inevitable has happened,

and Jerry's gone.

Male Reporter 4: ...Grateful Dead died earlier this morning

in California, of an apparent heart attack.

Male Reporter 5: He's said to have died with a smile on his face.

Garcia: Well, thanks a lot, you guys, I certainly enjoyed it.

Woman: Thank you.

♪ Fare you well, my honey

♪ Fare you well, my only true one ♪

♪ All the birds that were singing ♪

♪ Are flown

♪ Except you alone

Man: Hi. Bob would like to make a brief statement,

and please, no questions.

♪ Going to leave this brokedown palace ♪

Well, I guess some sad news has come our way.

This morning, Jerry Garcia,

our friend and my brother,

passed away.

And I guess not much can be said about that,

except that we also have to remember

that his life was a...

far more a blessing for all of us.

And I think we should, perhaps, if we're gonna

dwell on anything, dwell on that.

Thank you.

♪ In a bed, in a bed

♪ By the waterside I will lay my head ♪

♪ Listen to the river sing sweet songs ♪

♪ To rock my soul

Weir: Jerry wasn't interested in building something

that will stand the test of time.

But I-I don't think that what we see

as time can put an end to what we had.

I think it was, is, and will be there.

Those moments were more alive

than-than anything that a heart pumps out.

That's what we were living for.

And that was what we were trying to coax through

on any given night on stage.

That was the fun.

That was the fun he was talking about.

That's eternity.

♪ River gonna take me

♪ Sing me sweet and sleepy

♪ Sing me sweet and sleepy

♪ All the way back back home

♪ It's a far gone lullaby

♪ Sung many years ago

♪ Mama, Mama, many worlds I've come ♪

♪ Since I first left home

♪ Going home, going home

♪ By the waterside I will rest my bones ♪

♪ Listen to the river sing sweet songs ♪

♪ To rock my soul

Garcia: I'm real happy with the Grateful Dead.

I'm real happy with it.

What I'm hopin' is to be able to

see some way of extending this idea beyond ourselves.

You know what I mean? I wanna be feeling

that this idea can continue without us.

It doesn't have to be the Grateful Dead,

but something, you know?

Kerouac's books opened up doors for me that...

That put me in this life, you know?

I would like to do that for somebody else,

you know what I mean?

And then it will be there for anybody

who's got the spirit to go for it.

♪ Fare you well, fare you well ♪

♪ I love you more than words can tell ♪

♪ Listen to the river sing sweet songs ♪

♪ To rock my soul

♪ Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo ♪

♪ Doo doo-doo-doo, doo-doo doo-doo ♪

♪ Doo-doo-doo

♪ Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo

♪ Doo doo-doo-doo

♪ Doo-doo doo-doo

♪ Doo-doo do doo-doo-doo

♪ Doo-doo doo-doo

♪ If my words did glow ♪

♪ With the gold of sunshine ♪

♪ And my tunes were played ♪

♪ On the harp unstrung ♪

♪ Would you hear my voice ♪

♪ Come through the music? ♪

♪ Would you hold it near ♪

♪ Let there be songs

♪ To fill the air

♪ Ripple in still water ♪

♪ When there is no pebble tossed ♪

♪ Nor wind to blow

♪ Reach out your hand ♪

♪ That path is for

♪ Your steps alone

♪ Ripple in still water ♪

♪ When there is no pebble tossed ♪

♪ Nor wind to blow

♪ You who choose

♪ To lead must follow ♪

♪ But if you fall

♪ You fall alone

♪ If you should stand ♪

♪ Then who's to guide you? ♪

♪ If I knew the way

♪ I would take you home ♪

♪ La-da-da-da

♪ La-da-da-da-da-da

♪ Da-da-da, da-da

♪ Da-da, da-da-da

♪ Da-da-da-da

♪ Da-da-da-da-da-da

♪ Da-da-da-da

♪ Da-da da-da da

Thanks a lot.

See you in a little while.

♪ I wanna tell you how it's gonna be ♪

♪ You're gonna give your love to me ♪

♪ I wanna love you night and day ♪

♪ You know my love will not fade away ♪

♪ You know my love will not fade away ♪

♪ Not fade away

♪ My love is bigger than a Cadillac ♪

♪ I try to show you but you drive me back ♪

♪ Your love for me has got to be real ♪

♪ You're gonna know just how I feel ♪

♪ Our love is real, not fade away ♪

♪ Not fade away