"His glasses were broken and he had a couple of (bruises) where people might have punched him. We weren't exactly a coven, we weren't a cult but we did seem to be involved with each other before we even met each other." She quickly joined the inner circle of Pranksters and became romantically involved with Kesey, having a daughter together named Sunshine. "I had never heard any of that before," she says. But facing the judge, she was sharp enough to know who they were really after: Kesey. Ingram, Erik. ", She's still a psychedelic priestess, though she's down to shrooming twice a year. I was obliged to hang onto Bradley. Countless companies vied for such a coveted collaboration. "I had been taking birth-control pills, but then I ran out, and we were up there on the mountain, you know what I mean? ", It was her first glimpse of Furthur, the bus Kesey and the Pranksters had just driven to and from the World's Fair in New York, becoming poster children for the promise and perils of life, liberty, and LSD. "My heart opened," she says. She was, she recalls, "a beatnik." The quote from Trixie in Long Strange Trip about her "knowing not to . "I suppose I would have been pretty good pickings for a cult," she laughs. We are on this planet to live, not to die.". The legend crumbled. Meals got planned; bathrooms were cleaned. It was such a special thing," she says. [5] Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession in La Honda, in 1965 and fled to Mexico. Mountain Girl found the celebrated writer, who was 29, to be dynamic, intelligent, and playful. In 1980, on New Year's Eve, they got married by a Buddhist monk backstage at a Dead concert. A natural athlete, Carolyn tried out for girls basketball but ran into trouble with her gym teacher who, she says, "was not my admirer. I had three old couch pillows and my sleeping bag, with a tarp tacked up overhead for the few rain or fog drips that penetrated the treetops. If Mountain Girl wanted to come, she better hitchhike down to LA fast, before they split. "The moment we came back, Jerry was at my door to visit and within a month he was asking to move back in," says Mountain Girl. Theyre super high-end, creative, productive business people. "I was mortified," she says. "He was not happy to see me," she says. at Red Rocks Garcia's 75th Bday. I was flabbergasted. 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", But at La Honda and in other communities around the country, a new movement was taking place. No money, hardly any clothes, and no real concept of what was coming. "As the new attraction, I was getting a lot of interest from the unattached males," Adams recalls. I mean, there were no "scenes.' Mountain Girl and Garcia divorced in 1993. I made a few phone calls and everybody said the same thing: "I don't know. Its very small scale; its just a nod to her range of influence, and how many people idolize her. But God, if somebody didn't cook, do you know what they would eat? The engine had been cannibalized for parts for Furthur II, the "new bus" that Kesey was taking on what fellow Prankster Kenneth Babbs was calling the Grand Furthur Tour to the Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. That's what a home is for. I did try to run their sound board for a while, but I wasn't good at it. "Now she's with this guy who is a perfect match," says Tangerine. But, says Gordon "Dass" Adams, Carolyn Garcia's oldest brother, "Jerry was a lousy husband.". 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. "I just couldn't deal with it," Mountain Girl says. "I began to realize the dangers of celebrity that had to do with the Grateful Dead attracting a lot of people to themselves who were unconventional. "He went with it," she says, "and made sure that I had a place to sleep and food to eat. A friend had smuggled him across the border to an undisclosed location in Mexico. "Well," she asked him, "what are we going to do?". It seems like a logical fit. Kesey describes that first meeting with a literary allusion: "Vonnegut's phrase a "karass' comes to mind. From the Merry Pranksters to the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia's widow opens up about what the age of free love was really like. By then she was five months pregnant. Mountain Girl had to "marry" her fellow Prankster George Walker to get the birth certificate. In a loosely autobiographical screenplay he wrote called "Over the Border," he rhapsodizes about "her big brown eyes made even bigger by the electricity of the warm autumn night with the stars above and her man beside her. We often thought of ourselves as a karass. It was all over the newspapers, and it was a huge story, and we felt guilty at having called for this." None of the various women and children in his life could dispute that. In October 1966, with her visa up, she rode back to San Francisco with her baby and the Pranksters. It seems like theres often a charitable component. The personal relationships within the band and their own personal relationships shattered under tremendous pressure. She affected black turtlenecked sweaters and carried books of poetry. Jerry was a right person, too, but unfortunately, he was stuck and trapped in a circumstance he didn't want to be in. Neither of us knew the language of sorting out your personal relationships," Carolyn says. 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. He was living in a cheap motel in the beachfront town of Mazatln, conferring with his lawyer and looking jittery, skinny, and paranoid. There was a gentleness and a simplicity about him. 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.". Before Garcia died of a heart attack in a dry-out facility in Forest Knolls on Aug. 9, 1995, he'd already paid Mountain Girl their agreed-upon $20,883 per month for a period of 18 months. Mom escaped. It's a piece of my childhood. During this period, he rekindled his relationship with Koons, who had been largely out of his life since the late 1970s; they would ultimately marry in February 1994. The first in a series of archive releases celebrating the run of Jerry Garcia shows on Broadway in Oct/Nov 1987. I could go in there, but I didn't like it. When she stepped off the bus in October 1966 with her daughter, Sunshine, she recognized a familiar face. Three others died at Altamont that day, including a fan who took too much LSD and drowned in an irrigation ditch. She was broke. A large mandala is painted on the living-room floor. But part of it was MG and the family and wanting to embrace that. Instead, it brought the year and the decade to a dark and violent end. "The band got to be very big and very much the nexus and focus of hundreds and thousands of people. The bassist Phil Lesh considered Mountain Girl "the Prankster Queen," as he wrote in his memoir. 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. Through her window she saw legions of young people with long hair and colorful pants, smoking, dancing, playing guitar. (Kesey had been a participant in 1959). The group, she realized, "was his version of the nuthouse. "He knew it was going to cause trouble." "They were talking about chord progressions and all this interesting stuff.". "She is the real deal.". The free concert, scheduled for December 6, 1969, would include performances by the Dead, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and the Rolling Stones. "I didn't want to compete for attention," admits Mountain Girl. "Things changed," she says. Jerry was never with another woman who matched him as elegantly as she did, with her kind of energy and intelligence. 21 aot 2022. in Divertissement, musik. But she wasn't looking for another man to step in. When you feel people reaching out to you with those psychic rubber bands, they want to grab you and hold you and get you. Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, former wife of late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, and her daughter with late author Ken Kesey, Sunshine Kesey, recent. It was like, Eww, thats folk art, what are you doing? But now theres a whole scene and a ton of people who are into it, and I think its beautiful. God, I was so thrilled. Despite the new light in her life, a darkness set in. The tiny kitchen downstairs was the crossroads, we jammed in there for morning cornflakes and conversation. The middle is a lousy place to sit. In that the guy gets this beautiful woman and wants to keep her all to himself and he doesn't care if she changes, and one day looks around and wonders why she changed.". "I could hear his voice and somebody else's voice," she tells me. ", It didn't help matters when Mountain Girl made an alarming discovery: She was pregnant. Bill is finally the right person for my mom. Inside her plant-filled home lined with scientific books on psilocybin and posters of the Grateful Dead, Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, legendary godmother of the hippie counterculture, Jerry's ex-wife, and mother of their two daughters, sits on a red leather couch dressed in a red shirt and purple pants. But she embraced it nonetheless. "She was Jerry's girlfriend. And now, The Bus was retired. Jerry Garcia exclaimed. Like any other rock and roller, Jerry Garcia was under tremendous pressure to fool around. ", David Kushneris a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. She also says that she started putting on weight "out of self-defense. ", But as much as the Chief held the power in the Pranksters' fold, Mountain Girl maintained her own. 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. Meanwhile, Jerry would wander in and out of her life. Circling back to Jerry, over the past few years, The Days Between [the period between Garcias birth on August 1 and death on August 9] has become a significant event. I look carefully and ask for a quarter of one. Mountain Girl and Garcia retreated to a secluded home in Stinson Beach, California, to raise their daughters. Sunshine was about two or three months old and she was in this little basket. Tidak ada hasil . I believe growers are artists and they need good management. Mountain Girl cherished the quiet moments with Garcia in their room, nursing Sunshine in bed as he noodled her favorite tune, "Viola Lee Blues," on his guitar. And then this sort of unusual set of circumstances occurred whereby Jerry " Her conversation tails off into an uncomfortable silence. Inside was Kesey's suicide note: "Ocean, ocean, I'll beat you in the end," it read. Somehow, however, Garcia and Mountain Girl established a life, albeit one that was quite unconventional by Leave It To Beaver standards. My relationship with him had to do more with intellectual companionship rather than a physical relationship, which was really brief. In her senior year of high school, she got expelled for sneaking into the boys locker room to see their new Nautilus machine. I was very much in love with Jerry's music and supported it, but our personal relationship was sort of outside that. Tracks Listen Buy How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) Stop That Train While that led to a lengthy period of cohabitation in which Carolyn Garcia played an integral role in her husband's recovery, they gradually drifted apart once more when Garcia began an extramarital relationship and fathered a child with Manasha Matheson. ", Her parents didn't know she was pregnant, so she was stuck with the Pranksters. mixer. It was not to be. "Jerry and I had a fortunate relationship. Garcia was married with a daughter of his own, but his wife had moved back to Palo Alto without him. "[4] Journalist Tom Wolfe described his first impression of a teenage Adams as "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 paintbrush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed it blond in Mexico. Her function? They spent all the time in Jerry's room being in love. And there it was. The court case turned into a high-profile free-for-all, with Koons Garcia's side claiming that Jerry had stopped loving Carolyn years before, that their marriage on New Year's Eve, 1981, was a sham and had been for tax purposes only and that in circumventing the legal system, their agreement was basically not worth the paper it was written on. I think I went for a lot of stuff. The others quickly took note of this dynamic new girl in their midst. "I never did any therapy about it, but I've read all the books.". I don't know if she was threatened by me. So yes, me and my sisters are working on getting those stories out of her tightly clenched fingers. His pedal steel and a chair the only furniture. With an entomologist for a dad and a botanical illustrator for a mother, Adams had grown up a brainy bug-lover with a mind for science and a passion for nature. And they had the smallest room in the house at that point. Eight months pregnant, Mountain Girl stepped off the Dead's helicopter at Altamont just in time to see Mick Jagger get punched in the head by a concertgoer. The future Mrs. Garcia was taking guitar lessons at Dana Morgan's Music Store in Stanford, California, when she heard Jerry's voice coming from the next room. "He was just the guitar player," she says. Also, at the end of the day, the whole world is a mystery. A framed photo of Kesey juggling apples hangs on a bright red wall. In my case, with a powerful talent like Jerry and this tremendous culture-changing thing he'd found to do, it was a tough place to try to carry on a relationship. She was caught napping each time. I decided not to do much. For Carolyn Adams, the trip to wonderland started when a famously Mad Hatter offered her a ride. She studied journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has worked in a variety of media including television and daily print news. Everybody was attached to it.". As far as I know, it went boom! Destination #1: SpringfieldWhen: Friday, 2/17/17Where: Washburne Caf, Springfield, ORWhat: KLCC Staff rolled into Springfield in their mobile studio to meet the public and learn more about the community. Mountain Girl's bitterness, if she ever had any (and she denies that she ever did), probably dried up long ago. It was cozy enough, and I felt perfectly safe. After. "You could tell the number of people was way exceeding the ability of anybody to deal with it." "I just said, 'I have no idea he disappeared.' While she was fast approaching her due date, Kesey was off dealing with his lawyers. ", Carolyn was born on May 6, 1946. Thats something I learned from my parents.