Home Before Daylight: My Life on the Road with the Grateful Dead by Parish Steve & Layden Joe

Author:Parish, Steve & Layden, Joe [Parish, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312303532
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2004-10-01T05:00:00+00:00

I don’t mean to imply that there weren’t risks involved with the way the rest of us lived, that simply because we avoided heroin we weren’t tempting fate on a daily basis. We were. But everyone draws his own line in the sand, and mine was drawn right in front of heroin. The fact is, the people in our circle who seemed to suffer the most damage were those hopelessly drawn to one of three particular drugs: heroin, cocaine, and alcohol.

That’s right—good ol’ American-as-apple-pie booze. Most of the guys on the crew weren’t real big on drinking, for reasons both practical and aesthetic. For one thing, you just couldn’t work as hard as we worked if you were drinking. Setup was generally the sober part of the day for us anyway, although on occasion we’d break to have a joint, to take the edge off a bit. But that was about it. There was no throwing back shots of Jack Daniels while setting up scaffolding—the work was too hard, the consequences too severe. We were climbing and working, and we depended on each other not only to make the show a success, but to make the job safe. The truth of the matter was, in our line of work almost any drug was safer than alcohol. Nothing impaired like drinking. And pills seemed to go hand in hand with liquor, resulting in a colossally fucked-up stagehand who was a mortal threat to himself and those with whom he worked. We had a few of those people on the crew over the years, but they were quickly culled from our ranks.

At that time, drinking wasn’t big among the band members, either, with one tragic exception: Pigpen McKernan. Everyone close to Pigpen did their best to help him curb his drinking. They’d even dose him on occasion because there was a theory floating around back then that LSD could help cure alcoholism. I developed a friendship with Pigpen in part because he trusted me; he knew I disliked the practice of dosing, that I didn’t believe in hitting people with something they didn’t expect and probably didn’t want. So whenever Pigpen asked for a glass of water or a soda when he was on stage, he knew I’d give it to him straight and clean. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to help Pigpen, or that I was averse to trying offbeat methods to beat addiction. I just thought the cure had to come from within. Pigpen made a few half-hearted attempts to cut back, but he never seriously embraced recovery. He went to doctors and sought treatment for his physical ailments, but he needed help of a more spiritual and emotional nature. He knew it, too. He knew he had a problem, and yet he rejected the idea of attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or anything like that.

Personally, I was somewhat mystified by Pigpen’s dependency. I never really understood the appeal of alcohol. As a kid my idea of drinking was to take a bottle of vodka and down it like a soda.

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