Scully Rock - Living with the Dead: twenty years on the bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead

No way could we have done this book ourselves. So heres to the people who made us look good: the hardworking people, the salt of the earth, our wives, ex-wives, friends, and people we talked into stuff.

May the sublime tintinnabulation of temple bells and the ululations of a thousand Tuareg tribeswomen ring in your minds eye while you read your names, elevated ones! You, Tony Secunda, out of whose fitful head like Athena from the head of Zeus this book first sprang. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest; Hannah Williams who tirelessly transcribed our interviews; Blair Jackson who read and annotated the manuscript (and saved us from innumerable embarrassments); and, editrice divina, Coco Dalton, whose celestial ear made us sing where previously we only mumbled.

Several drumrolls and the blowing of rams horns, please! For Sam Cutler, Dan Healy, Betty Matthews Cantor Jackson, Gary Jackson, Bob Matthews, Mountain Girl, Ron Rakow, Danny Rifkin, Nicki Scully, Tangerine Steinbrecker, Sue Swanson, and Bob Weir, who gave freely of their knowledge (and opinions!).

Sleighbells and tin whistles begin your tumult! For David Gans, Dan Levy, Mike Mattil, Jeffrey Nonvalk, Richard Sassin, John Scott, Frankie Secunda, Alan Trist, Brian Williams, and Ken Zeiger who skillfully led us through the labyrinths of arcana and the deserts of solecism.

And last but not least, greetings to you, O great pharaoh, our editor, Michael Pietsch, who had the wisdom and foresight to sign us up and must many times thereafter have asked himself, What hath I wrought? but continued politely to ask When do you think I might see something?

SHORTLY AFTER WE began writing this book in 1992, I ran into Jerry in San Rafael. When I told him I was working on a book about my life with the Dead he paused for a moment, made a quizzical face, and shrugged: Hell, just tell the truth, man and dont be too hard on me.

Im sorry Jerry never got to read the book (it had just been finished at the time he died) because I thought of it as a long affectionate letter to him in the same way Robert Hunters lyrics were often personal messages to Garcia, saying in all those poignant songs the things he could never say to his face.

The day Jerry died, Deadheads danced in Haight-Ashbury, Wall Street closed early, and people wept openly in the street. Newscasters, comparing his death to that of Lennon and Elvis, said his passing marked the end of an era for which he had become the last great symbol. Jerry would have been bewildered at being made a symbol for anything.

It was his fierce belief in the group spirit, the group mind even, that imbued the Dead with their aura of collective ecstasy. It was typical of Jerrys generosity of spirit to make it seem as if the whole band possessed qualities that were really his alone. But in the end he identified so absolutely with the Grateful Dead he ended up trapped inside it.

However much he would have protested, Jerry was the heart and soul and magic of the Grateful Dead and in the end that was too much of a burden for him to bear. It was already getting too much for him at the time I left the band in 1985. Ten years later, it killed him.

Jerry was the Grateful Dead not because he was the bands unofficial leader or its icon, but because of his noble spirit and stupefying resilience. However low we had sunk the night before, he would always come at the new day with an entirely unwarranted optimism.

Jerry had a nature so endlessly curious he could, at a moments notice, take off down any new road, just to see what happened. His innate graciousness extended to practically anyone. So open and vulnerable was he that those who thought they were acting in his best interests began shielding him from new people and new experiences. It was a final irony that his boundless enthusiasms resulted in his being isolated from almost everyone. He hated the fame that had made him into a sacred monster.

When I stopped using heroin ten years ago I assumed it was only a matter of time before Jerry quit, and when I saw those mysterious pictures of him scuba diving surrounded by tropical fish I thought, Hes in his own element at last. He had solved Keseys riddle by finding a way to inhabit his own hallucinations without drugs. This was the new Jerry and all was well at last. But it was not to be. Jerry, its true, did try a number of times to kick his habit. He died trying.

I think for Jerry drugs were a way of reconciling his contradictions. He was a nest of paradoxes: outgoing recluse, gullible hipster, ironic Utopian, self-effacing star. His attempt to hold any number of irreconcilable ideas in his head at once was reflected in the way he played guitar. His lightning fingering and chronic piling up of notes was an attempt to include everything. The flash of the spirit that unites was all that mattered to him, the moment-to-moment flow between the band and the audience, energy shifting through different forms in the twinkling of an eye.

He was an oddity in the narcissistic world of rock n roll: a true beatnik who cared nothing for his image, a bashful lead singer, an introvert with such debilitating stage fright he was unable to eat anything before going on stage.

Considering the dancing Day of the Dead skeletons and skulls that inevitably pursued the Grateful Dead, its odd that Jerry was so superstitious about death. He would never say the word or allow himself to be photographed in front of a tombstone, and was always pained when promoters came up with graveyard scenes to advertise the band.

When Pigpen died, Jerry and I went to his funeral together. Lying in an open casket in his blue-jean jacket covered with his pins and buttons, Pig looked a lot better than he had in some time. But Jerry was appalled. Dont ever let that happen to me, he said as we walked away from the coffin. There are just two things I want you to promise me: Dont ever find me in the back of a record store signing records and dont bury me in an open casket.

Whatever paradise hes transported to I hope it includes sunfish and coral reefs, and that in that liquid alchemy all the paradoxical elements in his nature transform themselves into something rich and strange. And, Jerry, if youre listening, Ill meet you at the Jubilee. I wish youd held those cards, man you had us all beat.

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