Jerry Garcia comes to life in reporter’s old interview.
Exreporter digs up revealing interview with legendary musician
Alice Kahn has kept plenty of artifacts from her writing days, but admits she doesn’t know where most of them are anymore. Fan mail, including letters from readers during her days as a Chronicle columnist from 1985 to 1993, are in boxes, she says, somewhere in her basement.
“I thought that I would pull out the letters when I was blue, but it doesn’t work that way,” Kahn says.
But during a recent visit to her Berkeley hills home, Kahn revealed a cassette tape of her 1984 interview with Jerry Garcia. She remembers meeting the Grateful Dead guitarist at his home in San Rafael when he was 43 and she was 41 years old.
It’s a story she recounts for The Chronicle in time for the 17th annual Jerry Day, a holiday for Dead Heads to memorialize the guitarist who died on Aug. 9, 1995. This year on Sunday, Aug. 4, hundreds of fans are expected to gather at San Francisco’s McLaren Park for a concert featuring Melvin Seals and JGB, Stu Allen & Mars Hotel and other special guests to commemorate the contributions the guitarist made to music history.
But don’t expect to spot Kahn among the crowd. The 75yearold, who retired as an adult health nurse practitioner a few years ago, admits she was never a huge fan of the Dead, though she respected the Bay Area jam band’s musicianship and thought “Garcia was a genius.”
Kahn, who worked for the East Bay Express and San Jose Mercury News before concluding her journalism career at The Chronicle to go back to nursing, landed the interview for the nowdefunct West Magazine the year after she attended her first Grateful Dead concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley. She was a columnist for the East Bay Express at the time, invited by a loyal reader who had an extra ticket.
“It sounded like a great opportunity to make fun of hippies,” Kahn says.
In her 1984 review, she wrote about seeing “all varieties of hippiedelic experiences out in force,” and a level of tiedye “hot enough to burn your retina.” As for Garcia, she called him the “hippie abominable snowman.”
She says Garcia liked her take on the concert so much that a few months later, when he chose media outlets for interviews that year, Kahn says he turned down “The Today Show” and granted time with her. “I didn’t even ask for it,” Kahn says. It was an evening in the fall of ‘84 when Kahn was escorted to Garcia’s house by the band’s publicist, Dennis McNalley. She remembered Garcia
“I thought, ‘Oh no, is he going to be able to talk? Is he that out of it?’ He was quite a sight.” Alice Kahn, former S.F. Chronicle columnist
being very high; her years working as a nurse and caring for drug addicts made her aware of the signs.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, is he going to be able to talk? Is he that out of it?’ ” Kahn recalls. “He was quite a sight.”
Garcia went on to defy Kahn’s expectations by having a coherent hourlong conversation with her that night. The two spoke mostly about Garcia’s childhood, growing up in San Francisco and Palo Alto before settling in the North Bay, and, of course, music.
“I was prepared to support my music addiction, you know what I mean? If I had to pay for every bit of it, I’d gladly pay for it,” Garcia told Kahn. “For me, music is something I love. I never thought ever to make money out of it. What do I need money for? Really, I was living great without any money at all.”
Garcia on the sudden death of his father: “I couldn’t even stand to hear about it or anything like that until I was about 10 or 11. Although I can’t say I remember him, the effect it had on me was really ... it was really crushing.” On the first Ken Kesey Acid Test concert that the Grateful Dead played: “We cranked it up, you know … for about 10 minutes, we went completely hogbananaswild, and then we took everything down and packed it up and went home.”
On being considered a hippie: “I think of myself as a beatnik if I think of myself as anything. I still relate to that. For me the hardware is just part of the changing ... the parade of passing phenomena, you know?”
On being a San Franciscan: “That’s where I was born and that’s where I think I was formed mostly. I mean my opinions and my tastes ... I also then feel like, in a larger sense, I feel like a Bay Area person.” (Listen to the full interview online at datebook.sfchronicle.com)
Since the interview, Kahn went on to author four books — three collections of her newspaper columns and one novel. But she still remembers the pressure of landing that exclusive interview with Garcia and the stress surrounding it.
The West Magazine article, “Jerry Garcia and the Call of the Weird,” was published on Dec. 30, 1984. She was paid $1,200, which ended up going to McNalley after she crashed into his car as they were driving away from Garcia’s house.
Her story was reprinted in 2000’s “Grateful Dead Reader,” and excerpts from the interview were also featured in Blair Jackson’s 1999 book “Garcia: An American Life.” But until this year — which marks 24 years since Garcia’s death — much of the raw conversation had been stored away on the cassette, sitting in Kahn’s office. Unlike her other artifacts, Kahn always kept the tape close at hand because she “knew it was special,” and not just because of the rarity of the interview. The tape reminds Kahn of the wonderful conversation she had with Garcia about the music of their youth. She captured his love for Elvis, Little Richard and Chuck Berry, with Garcia’s enthusiasm for those artists audibly palpable on the cassette.
“I can still hear Jerry’s voice saying that was ‘the stuff. The real stuff,’ ” says Kahn.
Other memorable moments during the 60minute interview: