That was sort of my style, to ask the really tough questions right away.". As the Dead began putting out records and touring, Mountain Girl, who had a child to raise, began feeling the strain. Her legend leaps off the pages of books, in the annals of the Grateful Dead in her role as Jerry Garcia's consort and then wife for nearly 30 years and in the transcripts of a high profile trial last winter which pitted her against Garcia's widow, Deborah Koons Garcia, in a Marin County courtroom. But to her, it didn't feel like the same party anymore. The first time Mountain Girl climbed onto the mythic bus, she was 18. "She came and stayed with me," says Goldie Rush, who was living in Greenbrae at the time, right behind the hospital. That played itself out for a while. ", Flush with cash, she bought a white Honda 50 scooter and took to riding up and down the coast. "We were delighted. They would go and do these long, drawn-out scenes at the studio that would go on for weeks, where nobody slept and they'd stay up. Kesey dubbed them the Acid Tests. Occasionally, Mountain Girl would ferry the kids away to Oregon and once, during one long separation, took them all the way back East to be near her parents. "I suppose I would have been pretty good pickings for a cult," she laughs. One must brace against the turns to avoid sliding into the driver. I absolutely love sativasI like getting stoned and then doing gardening work and stuff like that. "Ooh man," she told him, "there's something. Doyle, Jim. Joy and excitement; uncertainty and pain. "I didn't want any whinging. So that kind of separated me. They were a team. "The Beatles came to the old Cow Palace down in the mudflat south of San Francisco," she reads. ", David Kushneris a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. Kesey wasn't dead. "The band got to be very big and very much the nexus and focus of hundreds and thousands of people. She spent every minute she could out of doors, exploring the local terrain and, she writes, "imagining myself running long distance over the old Mohawk trail or hunting deer or making the clothes and foods of the Indians." She decided to take the wheel again. It was a form of synesthesia: little notes with different little cartoon beings, each with its own personality. Carolyn Garcia's monthly payments, at this point, are still suspended. "I was mind-boggled and yet, there it was, happening inside my head." As Mountain Girl, she fit right in with her new tribe eating acid, painting the bus, and, with her mechanical know-how, running the light-show projectors at the Pranksters' bacchanalian revivals. "I was like, whoa, that was a really electric moment!" I'd really kind of like to stay out of that discussion because we're good friends and she's a very private person. "Bill serves her. ", The closer she grew to Jerry, the further she drifted from Kesey. When Thompson and the Hells Angels showed up for parties, Mountain Girl was soon giving them rides on the back of their own Harleys. ", Kesey was, she says, "attractive and very engaging. Instead, it brought the year and the decade to a dark and violent end. Trixie and her reclusive. To what extent do you currently explore your own creative expressions? As a result, the prevailing narrative of Mountain Girl in the popular imagination reads like a comic-book male fantasy: saucy, sexy, sassy, "swinging into every situation like on a vine," as Wolfe wrote, "like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.". There was a Free Clinic for those who were sick, and a Free Store for those in need of basic necessities, and there was music everywhere. At times, the emotional intensity is too much and it makes things difficult. I was just on board to do whatever.". The City of Springfield is installing a two-story, photorealistic painted mural of Ken Kesey downtown on the side of the Odd Fellows Building, current, Renowned author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey grew up in Springfield. "Jerry decided to spend more time away from the house and in his studio. God, I was so thrilled. I wanted to sidestep that rock star wife thing as much as possible. Mountain Girl was equally defiant about their arrest. "He'd fill it with music, drugs, girlfriends, whatever. Happy the dog, her head splotched with a huge drop of blue paint, flushed a covey of peacocks which rose above the trees and the parked bus, scattering rainbow feathers and squawking bloody murder. I made a few phone calls and everybody said the same thing: "I don't know. "That left a giant hole in his personality he was constantly trying to fill," she says. Like Mountain Girl, he was looking for family. "I couldn't freak freely and stay up all night and run up and down the ladders," she says. The quote from Trixie in Long Strange Trip about her "knowing not to . And her beauty. And Faye, his wife, was struggling with the whole thing. Sunshine Kesey is known for Move Me Brightly: Celebrating Jerry Garcia's 70th Birthday (2013). Nobody can measure up. Two years later, she got the dreaded call: Garcia had died of a heart attack at a drug-treatment facility. But part of it was MG and the family and wanting to embrace that. Complete independence. But they were reluctant to tell Mountain Girl, lest they hurt her. My relationship with him had to do more with intellectual companionship rather than a physical relationship, which was really brief. When her boss found her slumped over her desk the next morning, he fired her. But I went because I thought Bradley was cute and here is this older guy with him who was kinda weird. This is a 3 CD set of music from the two October 28, 1987 shows, featuring the acoustic set from the matinee show and the acoustic and electric sets from the evening show. Through her window she saw legions of young people with long hair and colorful pants, smoking, dancing, playing guitar. When the Summer of Love devolved into a plague of bad drug trips and homeless teenagers, Mountain Girl and Garcia set out to restore new life to the countercultural movement to which they had helped give birth. He stole her white Alfa Romeo and drove it into a ditch; he papered the town of Stinson Beach with bad checks and told people that she would pay his bills and he let the air out of the tires of her VW van. She'd fled her hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York, to become the unlikely teenage matriarch for the counterculture's most celebrated influencers, the Merry Pranksters. GarciaLive Volume 19: October 31st, 1992 Oakland Coliseum Arena showcases Garcia's return to the stage with the Jerry Garcia Band following a second major health crisis. Their adventures, as immortalized in Tom Wolfe's seminal book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," inspired legions of young people eager to break the shackles of the 1950s and embark on a new age of personal freedom. "He was crazy and he'd been to too many Dead shows," she says. But she embraced it nonetheless. You can't do drugs when you're in a coma.". People were just sleeping on the street in their shorts in the San Francisco fog, and getting terribly chilled. Cassady had told Kesey that he met this girl who was a little wild, "like she was kind of a mountain girl," says Kesey. It was warm," she recalls. That was his happiest space. "I was glad he wasn't there," she says, "but I was a little hurt he didn't come to see me." The seeds of hippiedom - question authority, love the one you're with, share and share alike - were fueled by marijuana and psychedelics and accompanied by the twang of guitars and banjos. I dont need to come in there and tell Peter Shapiro how to interpret Jerry Garcias vibe. I think that two people hiding out in the same family would have been even more difficult. "We felt guilty at having called for this." With bright blue eyes, blond curly hair, and a wrestler's build, the famous young novelist glowed with authority and mischief. "He was kind of a wreck. ", But as much as the Chief held the power in the Pranksters' fold, Mountain Girl maintained her own. We're sitting around the kitchen table in the main farmhouse of the sprawling, rustic ranch where Ken Kesey lived from 1972 until his death in 2001 at age 66. "She's a person possessed of spirit and weight, will and energy," says Jon McIntire, the Dead's manager from 1968 to 1990. When her youngest brother, Don, offered her a ride to California, she took it. Inside was Kesey's suicide note: "Ocean, ocean, I'll beat you in the end," it read. Having it be so intimate and humble is totally cool. What the hell just happened? "You could come stay with me," he said. So I faded out of that position. After moving in with Garcia, Mountain Girl became the "den mother," as she puts it, of the Grateful Dead: cooking, cleaning, rustling them out the door on time. Jerry and Carolyn Garcia divorced in 1994[1] but remained friends until his death. But she wasn't looking for another man to step in. ", She's still a psychedelic priestess, though she's down to shrooming twice a year. I want to be lighting fires with a flint and steel! so did Carolyn Garcia, with Sunshine, her baby daughter with . Faye, Kesey's wife and the mother of their three young children, barely talked to her. His eyes smiled. But as Jerry's addiction worsened, MG took the girls and moved to a farm in Oregon, where some of the other Pranksters had moved. She had $600 in her pocket and she was 17 years old. "I was sitting on the ground, and all of a sudden the redwood needles started to rearrange themselves. We call them the "bears.' Dean Budnick on December 2, 2020 Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, Sunshine Kesey, Trixie Garcia and Annabelle Garcia "I sincerely believe that the more people that we can expose to Jerry's. Soon after they coupled up, Mountain Girl moved with the baby into 710 Ashbury, the Dead's commune in the Haight, coincidentally on the day that Tangerine moved out. All there was was Synanon, and I wasn't going to call them!" Adams, who was 19 when she heard Garcia that day in 1964, was on the precipice of a stunning personal transformation. It was never a mistake.". Meals got planned; bathrooms were cleaned. But I went for it. As Wolfe first described her, she was: "A tall girl, big and beautiful with dark brown hair falling down to her shoulders except that the lower two-thirds of her falling hair looks like a paint brush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed it blond in Mexico.". For MG, which is how her intimates shorten her name, the Pranksters were her college, the University of Fun. That was home for me, I made that abundantly clear." The battle between Mountain Girl and the woman some people secretly call "Dark Deborah" or the "Black Widow" has a long and difficult history going back more than 20 years. She'd also just lost her job, and was going broke. "I always wanted to be a writer," she tells me with a sly smile. He put the mojo on me. "Things changed," she says. "His glasses were broken and he had a couple of (bruises) where people might have punched him. She refused to rat her hair or wear makeup. ", "I never spoke with her about any of it until after the fact," said Sue Swanson. A few days later, Adams rode her white Honda 50 back to La Honda for Kesey's party, where she accepted his holy sacrament: LSD. Adams felt, as she puts it, "in a juvenile state of admiration for a good writer, for a famous person who is now taking me into his scene.". "He was very connected in the world of literature and we were constantly being visited by graduate students or writers or people doing interviews. Its a place for people to get together and still be able to connect with Jerry. She was still dropping acid before the shows, albeit in smaller doses. No Result . Mountain Girl believes he was still suffering from the trauma of seeing his father, Joe, drown on a fishing trip when he was 6. Looking back on it, Adams realized that Cassady was handing her over to the Chief, along with the drugs. Learn how and when to remove this template message, Mountain Girl: Her tale begins in Hyde Park, "Mountain Girl's heartbreaking memoir: An icon of the Sixties opens up about Jerry Garcia, Ken Kesey, and what the age of free love was really like", Women's Visionary Congress speaker biographies, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carolyn_Garcia&oldid=1135994138, This page was last edited on 28 January 2023, at 03:21. It was more than just hormones and the passion of new love that kept Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia together. I couldn't understand why I was born a girl. Jerry Garcia [Laughs.]. At times, as she puts it, it was a "horrible story" one that's much starker and scarier than suggested in Wolfe's book. While life at home was an intellectual paradise, school was quite another matter. Because for him it was a living fluid. What needed to be done was to drive back the black and white and the separations between people and make a place where people could come together and have some joy and harmony without doctrine. No Result . He was living in a cheap motel in the beachfront town of Mazatln, conferring with his lawyer and looking jittery, skinny, and paranoid. When it comes to celebrity branding or whatever you want to call it, Paul Newman created a great model to work from in terms of contributing to charity. "You could come stay with me," he said. Someone had alerted the police that America's Most Wanted Acid Preacher was up on the roof getting high with a girl. "Old-time farmers used manure, compost, bird shit, etc. Eventually, rejection by her peers got easier to handle. But unbeknownst to the guys, she was taking notes. ", One night in San Francisco, four months after the Beatles show, Kesey and Mountain Girl were up on the roof of a home in Telegraph Hill, smoking a joint. As far as I know, it went boom! I was way upset. "I felt bad when it was taken down into the woods and abandoned. Mountain Girl and Jerry moved into an apartment of their own, and she got pregnant again.