Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson

Author:Blair Jackson [Jackson, Blair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101664063
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2008-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Beneath the Sweet Calm Face of the Sea

erry and Mountain Girl’s second baby girl, Theresa (aka Trixie), was born in September 1974 while the Grateful Dead were on tour in Europe. This should have been a cause for grand celebration, but by the fall of 1974, the pair’s relationship had deteriorated considerably and Jerry was spending more and more time out of the house, mostly working on one musical project after another. M.G. knew that Jerry had been unfaithful to her at different times during the previous couple of years—“catting around,” she calls it—but she chalked that up partly to the vicissitudes of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. And most of Garcia’s romantic conquests weren’t relationships per se.

Still, M.G. says, “He was sleeping and eating and changing his clothes at home; hanging out for a few hours during the day. That was his routine. It was comfortable and easy. I didn’t expect him to take out the garbage. And he was great with the kids. He would hang out with them. He used to sing to them. I remember he worked out ‘Russian Lullaby’ in front of them.”

Around the time of the Europe tour, however, “I knew something was wrong because he started being brief with me,” M.G. says, “and then he’d come home and say some of the weirdest shit—anti-family things like, ‘Having a family is probably going to ruin my artistic career.’ He didn’t mean it; he was just trying it out. He’d make these weird statements and then he’d watch me to see what I said. So I’d either refute it or be so startled by it I’d be undone by it.”

What M.G. didn’t know was that Jerry was falling in love with another woman, an aspiring filmmaker named Deborah Koons. She was a few years younger than Jerry, the daughter of wealthy Cincinnati professionals—John Fletcher Koons III was a successful businessman and his wife, Patricia Boyle, was a lawyer. Deborah’s grandfather, John Koons Jr., had made his fortune heading the local Burger Brewing Company and a Pepsi bottling concern, and he was also active in various civic affairs. In 1949 the Koons family was listed in Cincinnati’s Blue Book social register for the first time. Deborah, her brother, John, and sister, Christina, were brought up in one of the city’s toniest neighborhoods. She attended private schools, and after graduating from Hillsdale prep school she went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1967 to 1971, majoring in radio-TV-film. Early on she had set her sights on a career in filmmaking.

She first saw the Dead in the late ’60s and didn’t like them. But in March 1973 she attended a concert at the Nassau Coliseum and, after that show, “someone suggested that I ride back to Manhattan with the band and crew on their bus, and so I got on and sat next to Jerry and we had a conversation and struck up kind of a friendship. I mentioned that I was leaving

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