For Carolyn Adams, the trip to wonderland started when a famously Mad Hatter offered her a ride. Nobody can measure up. "I was a total tomboy. "I had a personal myth about independence that was getting shattered," she says. "She didn't say anything of any note except to acknowledge my presence. "Everybody loved it that those guys were back together again," says Rush. 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. that was it for him. "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. When you hear a pitch, to what extent can you be swayed by someone who has a deep and personal connection to your fathers music? "Now she's with this guy who is a perfect match," says Tangerine. A A. Carolyn Garcia's monthly payments, at this point, are still suspended. In 1959, Kesey had been a volunteer in a C.I.A.-sponsored LSD experiment at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park. We're lucky to have geniuses around giving us art." I walked over to look, amazed. The Oregon connection centered her and gave her the strength to go on. "They pressured me to tell them where he was," she says. ("I was taking just enough to get my job done," she says.) As the Dead began putting out records and touring, Mountain Girl, who had a child to raise, began feeling the strain. Koons Garcia and Weir took a portion of Garcia's ashes to India two weeks ago and spread them . Her entomologist father was 40. Mountain Girl (Carolyn Elizabeth Garcia) with her three daughters, Sunshine Kesey,(daughter of Ken Kesey), Theresa Adams "Trixie" Garcia, Annabelle Walker Garcia. By clicking Sign up, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider I think that two people hiding out in the same family would have been even more difficult. "There are things that can happen to people. Tracks Listen Buy How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) Stop That Train Chuck dan Sue Kesey mengharapkan sekitar 5. I think everybody had a crush on her.". Trixie and her reclusive. Mountain Girl sued to get the money owned her. Rock Scully's girlfriend of the time, Valerie Ann Steinbrecher, who still is called "Tangerine," remembers watching Carolyn Adams and an unbearded Jerry Garcia literally fall in love on the spot: "The first time I saw Mountain Girl was at this gig at S.F. ", The closer she grew to Jerry, the further she drifted from Kesey. Sunshine Kesey is known for Move Me Brightly: Celebrating Jerry Garcia's 70th Birthday (2013). It would prove to be a pivotal moment in the history of the counterculture. And her beauty. In exchange for the cash, she gave up claim to the fruits of his talent, his real estate holdings and any future earnings. For MG, which is how her intimates shorten her name, the Pranksters were her college, the University of Fun. MG cherished the quiet moments with Jerry in their room, nursing Sunshine in bed as he noodled her favorite tune, "Viola Lee Blues," on his guitar. "Of course, I was totally in denial about this. The tiny kitchen downstairs was the crossroads, we jammed in there for morning cornflakes and conversation. REVIEWS. Eventually, the rest of the Pranksters loaded themselves onto Furthur and trekked down to Manzanillo, where they lived in a small rancho with a red and white checkerboard roof. Three others died at Altamont that day, including a fan who took too much LSD and drowned in an irrigation ditch. His eyes smiled. I understood men at that point." He was losing me and Sunshine.". But God, if somebody didn't cook, do you know what they would eat? "And I was like, 'Oh, my God!' I just didn't want to compete anymore. The bare-bones feel of the bar was definitely pulling from the Garcia familys past. And I was like: What a bunch of baloney. At 710, Mountain Girl imposed order like a drill sergeant. as well as other partner offers and accept our, Joe Rosenthal/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images. But I was anti-cocaine," she says pausing. He did not want to share that information or even have to dig into all that information. "You could buy bennies over the counter in Mexico, and I think he'd been doing more than his share," she says. "It was not a fun trip, let's put it that way." "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? Mountain Girl, second wife of Jerry Garcia, holds her daughter, Sunshine, backstage at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Then all of a sudden, the older guy's pulling these clippings out of his wallet and he's a Kerouac character. Its a place for people to get together and still be able to connect with Jerry. Having it be so intimate and humble is totally cool. Theyre like musicians; they just need assistance. Jerry was never with another woman who matched him as elegantly as she did, with her kind of energy and intelligence. How could you do that? Like her, he was looking for family. I jumped in to make a few dinners and keep the pantry stocked. 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. Mountain Girl gave Garcia enough latitude for him to play music, get involved with other women, and eventually, fall into the trap of what she calls "the white drugs" - cocaine and heroin. Shes @bluebelle42 on Instagram. Mountain Girl, eight months pregnant, hitchhiked to get groceries. That was home for me, I made that abundantly clear." So too, she thought, were Kesey and the Pranksters. Finances were cleared up. "We didn't have the education that modern America has now to help us talk about our roles. "I was glad he wasn't there," she says, "but I was a little hurt he didn't come to see me." Before the lawyer finally disappeared, Mountain Girl shooed him off her front porch with a small child's broom, smacking him over the head. Palo Alto in the early 1960s was a dynamic crucible of the radical changes to come. The gray-haired woman, who bears a striking resemblance to Jerry, is his 45-year-old daughter, Trixie. I fear she did most of the adapting.". It was not to be. "It was written all over his face. Many of the compounds she was analyzing came from the psych department, where novelist Kesey was a volunteer guinea pig, tripping his brains out on the still-legal precursors to lysergic acid diethylamide, aka LSD. But she embraced it nonetheless. In the course of a few months, some 100,000 young people from all over the world descended on Haight-Ashbury to get high and make love and protest the war. Growing up, I went to the high school where 420 was coined [San Rafael High School], so theres that. Thats a whole thing that wasnt even acceptable in the fine art world like 20 years ago. But as Garcia's addiction worsened, Mountain Girl took their daughters and moved to a farm in Oregon, where some of the other Pranksters had moved. That was my big goal as a child. And his nuts were actually well-educated college students with athletic prowess mostly pretty, athletic people." Tom Wolfe's New York magazine pieces may have put her on the map, but she says, "I really didn't have an attachment to a personal image. Mountain Girl had to "marry" her fellow Prankster George Walker to get the birth certificate. "I could hear his voice and somebody else's voice," she tells me. We are on this planet to live, not to die.". ", Mountain Girl and Jerry divorced in 1993. "She ended up being responsible (if that concept is even thinkable in this context) for mixing the multiple mutable audio loops connecting every part of the space with every other. Sunshine Becker (born Sunshine Flower Garcia on July 1, 1972) is an American singer who performed backing vocals for the band Furthur. I want to carry a knife! There wasn't a whole lot I could do to go chasing around worrying to see what had happened to Jerry. However out of step she had felt among the kids back home, she now found her place among the generation's leading artists, writers, and radicals: Timothy Leary ("I thought he was kind of an actor he was busy playing a role"), Albert Hoffmann, the chemist who discovered LSD ("a saint and a mystic, and a gay man, just a sweetheart"), Hunter S. Thompson ("an important guy for the country"). She was still dropping acid before the shows, albeit in smaller doses. But they wanted to do something to make things better, to restore new life to the countercultural movement to which they had helped give birth. "[1], In early 1964, she met Neal Cassady, who introduced her to Ken Kesey and his friends, one of whom gave her the name "Mountain Girl" because she was a "little bit wild. "He knew it was going to cause trouble." She was about to become the unlikely teenage matriarch for the counterculture's most celebrated influencers, the Merry Pranksters, who gave her a new name: Mountain Girl. Mountain Girl and Garcia retreated to a secluded home in Stinson Beach, California, to raise their daughters. My sister Anabelle has a popular Instagram handle, and she loves sharing her art. With the New York trip done, he was planning what he called a "Prankster Farewell Party," a send-off for those who now had to return to their jobs and lives. She refused to rat her hair or wear makeup. Ive been trying to find a partner for five or six years. ", "I never met a woman with quite as much machismo as this girl had," marvels Scully. It was like opting to be an alien. It was a complicated situation but there's one thing that anyone close to the couple agrees upon: It was a very big love. But she wasn't looking for another man to step in. Kesey describes that first meeting with a literary allusion: "Vonnegut's phrase a "karass' comes to mind. Garcia and Adams separated in 1975 after he began a relationship with filmmaker Deborah Koons. "He was aware of all this extra stuff going on in the music," she says, "which is one of the reasons it had so much power to move people. Photo: Gene Anthony: 1966 "Later MG told me that when she met Jerry," remembers McIntire, "she recognized in him that his music was the stuff of greatness. "Jerry loved his work," says Garcia in retrospect. She realigns her shoulders and runs her large hands through a luxuriant mop of silver and black hair. Top editors give you the stories you want delivered right to your inbox each weekday. A long, strange trip led Mountain Girl to Kesey's final home. In 1966, Kesey was still officially a fugitive. It's so sad.". But when choosing partners, products and people that are gonna go out there and represent Jerry, its important to pick the right people. What she didn't realize, until Neal had peeled off the road and started driving the wrong way down a railroad track, was that he was none other than Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's 1967 Beat classic "On the Road.". another Prankster, Mike Hagen, asked her. "Ooh man," she told him, "there's something. That was what was available, & it is still the best. GarciaLive Volume 17 showcases highlights from three stand-out shows captured in the Jerry Garcia Band's native Northern California. It was a minor note, although I suppose it wasn't minor for me at the time because I was young and attractive. The week after the Trips Festival, on January 31, 1966, Furthur was found abandoned on a cliffside road, high above the crashing shore of Eureka. ", But as much as the Chief held the power in the Pranksters' fold, Mountain Girl maintained her own. The Dead was scheduled as the final act, but the band never took the stage. "There were always girls coming out of the woodwork," says Mountain Girl. Inside was Kesey's suicide note: "Ocean, ocean, I'll beat you in the end," it read. "The job was to run the mass spectrometer on the night shift," she writes in her memoir. Carolyn Adams is very proud of her family history. Which was true. Nothing Lasts didn't last. Were real people. 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. "Hitchhiked up I-5, pregnant with no money whatsoever, begging cups of coffee off of people." Our writers provide thought-provoking perspectives, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise. "I'm not weeping with remorse.". Sunshine Kesey, who grew up in the Garcia home, and Garcia's manager, Steve Parish, attended as well. (December 12, 1996). Instead, she entered into an affair with Ken Kesey, the famed novelist and leader of the Pranksters, with whom she eventually had a daughter. she realized she needed to make a change. 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. She'd hitched a ride out west with her older brother, Don, determined to leave square old Poughkeepsie far in the rearview. "I couldn't freak freely and stay up all night and run up and down the ladders," she says. Suddenly, as Kesey and Mountain Girl were sharing the joint, they found themselves surrounded by a phalanx of cops. she says with a big bright grin. Even back in those pre-women's liberation days, Carolyn Adams was an in-your-face challenge for any male. And that was a faith in the rightness of our relationship. "You could come stay with me," he said. Jerry promised that they would get a house together. But she turned down their offer to become a member. With the best of intentions and the best of relationships, things can go terribly wrong. Until then, Mountain Girl had always considered their relationship to be "buddy-buddy." [6], She had a relationship with another Prankster named George Walker, who would become her husband in 1966. "Neal basically dropped me off like fresh meat," she recalls. He certainly had me buffaloed on the dishwashing thing. "They're great together. They wound up at Kesey's spread at 5 in the morning. she recalls with a laugh. Transferred from the original analog reels and fastidiously mastered for release, these recordings exhibit some minor lapses in fidelity which can be expected due to age and circumstance. She and Jerry lived off his $50 a week in gig money. They didn't have kids and it looked like they were having some fun. But Mountain Girl had been around long enough to know that, in the words painted on the Pranksters' bus, Nothing Lasts. None of the various women and children in his life could dispute that. By then she was five months pregnant. Jerry didn't really do a lot of maintenance. We had so much fun on that bus. ", David Kushneris a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. As it was, he always knew he could come home and there would always be a place for him, no matter how weird it got out there. And Mountain Girl wasn't sure how she felt about it. Both of them could be among the most open people I've ever run across.". Then came the Summer of Love. ", The trial was "an unexpected development," she says, as she sits in her rural kitchen. Adams, who was 19 when she heard Garcia that day in 1964, was on the precipice of a stunning personal transformation. Someone had alerted the police that America's Most Wanted Acid Preacher was up on the roof getting high with a girl. They helped organize the Altamont festival, a sort of "Woodstock West." And that level of his dedication really fired everybody. By the time Jerry Garcia met Carolyn Adams she was the iconic Mountain Girl - the outrageous, free-spirited teenaged Merry Prankster who captivated Tom Wolfe's imagination in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 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. "I was like, 'Whoa, that was a really electric moment!'" "Grateful Dead star's death leads to battle where it's GARCIA VS. GARCIA". The dealers were out there spreading bad, bad shit, telling them it was LSD, and it would be some nasty tranq from the nuthouse.". "I was more than seven months pregnant and I didn't have shit. ", Her mother, a botanist and a school teacher, "abhorred gender classification," says Garcia. After a trial noted for the animosity between the two warring sides and full disclosure of the Garcias' private life and Jerry Garcia's assets - the very things he wished to avoid - the judge decided in Carolyn Garcia's favor. So Garcias Hand Picked means that we are actually in there tasting and trying these products. But now that she'd fallen in love with Garcia, Kesey seemed to realize what he'd lost. Annabelle remembers encountering a junkie shooting up on their doorstep. He put the mojo on me. It was warm," she recalls. What the hell just happened? And there it was. Jerry Garcia exclaimed. ULASAN. I still enjoy making art as part of my range of hobbies and skills. Says Rock Scully, the Dead's road manager for many years, "Jerry Garcia was married to his guitar and the muse and his human relationships suffered for it. ", Today, 60 years since she took that ride with Neal Cassady, Mountain Girl is still forging her own path. "But Ken by that time was also aging, not too gracefully, and I don't drink. After marrying "partly for tax purposes and partly out of a fond flickering of a once-bright romance"[8][1] in late 1981, this arrangement persisted until Garcia entered a diabetic coma in 1986. We partnered with Keen to do a line of shoes, and they have been supporting HeadCount through the Vote Love campaign, which is a get-out-the-vote campaign that were also working on. I believe growers are artists and they need good management. It was really hard and frightening for her. She was judge and jury in those days. The Days Between is obviously based off a song, and the fans took it over after Jerry died. I went to the San Francisco Art Institute because my dad had a history there, and I was kind of looking for direction when I was younger. Art Frisch/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images, Bill Owens/20th Century Fox/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. We are on a rock hurtling through space, and its all amazing. "Ooh, man," she told him, "there's something. There was no uncertainty about that.". Part of that was the elasticity of the relationship and how it could adapt to stuff. Thats also important. "I didn't want any whinging. "The co-dependence book was real big in our house," laughs Annabelle Garcia, who inherited her father's fey sense of humor. It was a tremendously exhilarating, positive experience about relating to everything around you. Adams Garcia, a large woman with long, graying hair and no makeup, a former Merry Prankster who had two daughters with Jerry Garcia and another named Sunshine with Ken Kesey, undoubtedly. 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. But I went for it. Ken (Kesey) could have made yard art out of it. "It'll ruin my calluses if I do the dishes,' he told me. When you feel people reaching out to you with those psychic rubber bands, they want to grab you and hold you and get you. I couldn't believe it. Mountain Girl had seen the Dead in its earlier incarnations, but she didn't take special note of Jerry. He could see the musical notes, he told her. "I suppose I would have been pretty good pickings for a cult," she laughs. What the hell just happened? ", It was August 31, 1965, and everyone piled into Furthur, the painted school bus that would soon become one of the most renowned icons of the Sixties. With steely determination, she continued her way across a wide expanse of unmown grass with Kesey's black spaniel Happy yapping at her heels. 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