Courtesy of Len Dell'Amico.
Audio By Carbonatix
There’s a story in Len Dell’Amico’s new memoir Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead that might rattle your $80 Dead & Company Online Ceramics tie-dye if you’re still clinging to the “peace and love” image of the Dead.
Dell’Amico was the band’s go-to visual storyteller from 1980 to 1991, directing iconic concert films such as Dead Ahead and So Far, as well as numerous full concert videos from their stadium tours. He was more than just a hired hand during the band’s wildly successful MTV years. His lens captured the band’s evolution at a crucial cultural crossroads for The Dead, and his close relationship with Garcia granted him unparalleled access to moments both on and offstage.
It starts in San Rafael, March 1989. Dell’Amico pulled into the Grateful Dead office lot to meet up with Garcia for a movie night. They were heading to the Northpoint Theater in San Francisco to catch a rerelease of Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen. “We pulled into the lot simultaneously, greeting each other with masculine, cheerful fanboy behavior,” Len writes. “We were on an adventure to see a truly great motion picture.”
Garcia was a true lover of cinema, hyping up the movie to Dell’Amico. He was in good spirits and offered to drive. But before they hit the road, he popped the trunk of his BMW to load in some CDs. That’s when Dell’Amico caught sight of something that triggered what he calls a “jolt of cognitive dissonance”: two black assault rifles with ammo magazines attached lying haphazardly in the trunk.
It made no sense. Jerry Garcia? What? Dell’Amico thought. He writes:
Peering into the trunk, I put on my best casual demeanor and asked Garcia, pointing at the assault rifles, “Uh, what are these?” He paused from his CD loading and looked up. “Oh, those are AK-47s, semiautomatic,” he said as if he were describing butterfly nets or fishing rods. In those days, that was the gun you wanted to have in case you suddenly decided to join a mercenary army and go kill people. The version most popular today is the AR-15, a weapon of war.
Dell’Amico, still stunned, asked if they were planning to rob a bank on the way to the movie. Garcia laughed and said, “Oh yeah, Parish told me that they’re gonna be illegal soon in California, so I told him to get me a few.”
Parish is Steve “Big Steve” Parish, a stalwart of the Grateful Dead’s road crew since 1969. Parish was a trusted friend of Garcia’s who eventually managed the Jerry Garcia Band and stood as best man at Garcia’s wedding. These days, he hosts The Big Steve Hour on SiriusXM’s Grateful Dead channel, sharing insider stories from life traveling around the world with the Grateful Dead.
The memoir doesn’t elaborate on the provenance of the weapons, or make clear how often Garcia made it an habit to drive around the Bay Area with guns stashed in trunk. Hopefully they found their way into a locker, or at least a safer place than the trunk of a BMW parked in a city street or garage.
The very fact Garcia and other members of the Grateful Dead were into guns isn’t exactly the peace and love San Francisco hippie flower child mythology you imagine watching those vintage Summer of Love PBS specials.
But it tracks. Jerry Garcia did, after all, hate the word “counterculture” with a passion.
It’s an unmistakable part of their sound, those freedom-loving cosmic cowboy anthems like “I Know You Rider,” “Mexicali Blues,” and “Big River.”
But also, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the band spent considerable time at Mickey Hart’s ranch in Novato, California, immersing themselves in rural life: riding horses, shooting guns, and embracing the ruggedness of the countryside as they crafted new songs.
Jerry Garcia also briefly served in the Army. He was no stranger to firearms. Sam Cutler, the band’s tour manager, recalled Garcia engaging in target practice around 1970 with him and Ray Slade. At one point, the band even planned to feature a photograph of themselves brandishing pistols on the back cover of American Beauty. Lyricist Robert Hunter famously vetoed it, explaining:
“These were incendiary and revolutionary times… I wanted us to counter the rousing violence of that time.”
There’s also that legendary image of Garcia in a poncho gripping a rifle, displaying questionable trigger discipline, and a photo of Pigpen brandishing an automatic weapon. And consider Garcia’s line from “Loser”: “If I had a gun for every ace I have drawn, I could arm a town the size of Abilene.” This frontier spirit seeped into their music, deeply influencing albums like Workingman’s Dead and songs such as “Dire Wolf,” “Cumberland Blues,” and “Friend of the Devil,” blending psychedelic roots with authentic Americana.
As Dell’Amico reminds himself in Friend Of The Devil, “I was not in New York anymore. Gun ownership in California was common, if not the norm.” He recalls a time Bill Kreutzmann, drummer for the Dead, once asked if he wanted to see his guns while high on LSD. Bill pulled out a box with “three handguns, describing their attributes,” and when asked if they were loaded, replied with the classic gun guy line: “Well, they wouldn’t be much good if they weren’t, would they?”
Touché, Bill. Touché.
Also on the subject of the Grateful Dead and firearms, Kreutzmann recounted a harrowing moment in his 2014 memoir, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead. He described a near miss during a shooting session at Mickey Hart’s ranch:
“One time, Bob Weir was up on a hill taking shots and didn’t realize I was downrange. I was nearly hit. It was a stark reminder that LSD and firearms don’t mix.”
Yikes. But is it much of a surprise for a band that hung out with the Hell’s Angels and Hunter Thompson in the Haight-Ashbury glory days?
See? Paradoxes were always The Dead’s whole bag.
But here’s where the chapter in Dell’Amico’s new book really opens up into something more profound than just a little old fashion 2nd Amendment cognitive dissonance.
Look, while the guns in Jerry Garcia’s trunk were surprising, but the drive into The City for the movie cracked Dell’Amico’s entire understanding of Garcia wide-open.
On the way to see Lawrence of Arabia, Garcia gets a call from another band member on a primitive car phone. Someone in the Dead’s organization might be stealing. Could be someone in ticketing, merch, or maybe even a recording engineer. Whoever it was, the numbers didn’t add up. The math wasn’t mathing. Dell’Amico listens as Garcia processes the situation with the detachment of a benevolent Zen uncle.
Courtesy Len Dell'Amico
“So do you not have enough money? Are you making enough money?” Garcia asks the caller, assumed to be another member of the Grateful Dead, almost like a therapist.
The caller says yes. “Well okay, good… so am I…” Garcia pauses, then says, “No, we’re not going to fire him.”
Why not, the caller objected. “If we fire him, he will be let loose on the world… We can’t take responsibility for inflicting him on everybody else…”
Garcia wasn’t being flippant. It was Garcia being Garcia, completely cool-headed and accommodating, with a sense of humor about the life path he found himself on. “He’s not equipped to take care of himself,” Dell’Amico says he heard Garcia explain. “There aren’t any rules… We hired him, we created him, he’s one of us.”
That moment breaks something crystallizes for Dell’Amico.
“I was suddenly transfixed by this conversation,” he writes. “It’s so foreign to me, the idea that a business owner, when faced with the idea of theft… would just shrug it off, disinterested in justice or proof, and play it for laughs instead.”
What he realizes is that Garcia wasn’t an owner in the capitalist sense, like a shareholder or equity stakeholder. Rather, he was a tribal elder, or a sort of spiritual custodian. Not interested in control or punishment, but in communal care, even when that care was ethically messy and completely unbusinesslike. He internalized how much power this Grateful Dead thing had over other people’s lives, and his responsibility in creating that.
In Dell’Amico’s words:
“He was actually quite serious and wise in his kind of way. He made it possible that he was one of us… invoking the ancient tribal stance of solidarity first, and also the Christian code of empathy for the weakest among us… Essentially the opposite of the idea that Garcia was the owner of a business… I was ashamed because I had resisted this understanding of Garcia… It was not a strategy to engage their fans… it was at the core of who Garcia really was.”
AK-47s were in the trunk, along with a deep compassion for someone who might be stealing from the band.
That’s the duality of The Dead and their counterculture flavor of Americana licorice.
That’s Jerry for you.
Len Dell’Amico’s Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead is now available on Amazon or wherever you buy books.