", With Cassady behind the wheel, the Pranksters rode the bus down to Los Angeles for a series of Acid Tests. "I just said, 'I have no idea he disappeared.' But part of it was MG and the family and wanting to embrace that. The tiny kitchen downstairs was the crossroads, we jammed in there for morning cornflakes and conversation. He was clean out of necessity. "She didn't move into another woman's house," says Tangerine. But for Mountain Girl, it lives forever, an emblem of everything her generation believed in, and all that they achieved. Annabelle was in pre-school and Sunshine was in school. After a harrowing experience nursing the baby while on acid "it magnifies the suction sensation to the maximum, like whoa!" "That hating is a quick step away from death - that going through your life being resentful and hateful and nasty about others is going to destroy your life. It was all so incredible. ", Any hopes she had of a joyful reunion were dashed the moment they found Kesey. "It was the end of their chapter," Adams says, "and the beginning of mine." But at the same time, he had a family and was "very married, with the cutest three little kids you ever saw in your whole life. Our writers provide thought-provoking perspectives, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise. Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, former wife of late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, and her daughter with late author Ken Kesey, Sunshine Kesey, recent. It was like permission to make something new out of the old stuff, which the bus kind of represented. Led by Ken Kesey, the swashbuckling author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the communal crew of seekers and misfits road-tripped the USA in Furthur, experimenting with the sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll that would come to define their generation. We are on a rock hurtling through space, and its all amazing. The moment she hugged him, she felt a flash. Before we talk about more recent developments, can you share your thoughts on Port Chester, N.Y.s Garcias, which opened more than seven years ago? In those early days, she didn't take special note of Garcia. "My father was not a person who was ambitious in a materialistic way," says Carolyn's brother, Gordon Adams, 57, who runs a computer help line for architects and designers in Seattle. It was all over the newspapers, and it was a huge story, and we felt guilty at having called for this." Kesey had just been sentenced to six months on a work farm for marijuana possession, and the Pranksters were two days away from staging their biggest Acid Test yet. She has a garden, a greenhouse with a new outdoor shower, a painting/writing studio guest house, a hot tub, an aging BMW convertible and a split-log conservatory Burwell built where she grows redwood trees. Why, I take four or five to go to sleep!". ", David Kushneris a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. Top editors give you the stories you want delivered right to your inbox each weekday. "I accepted the position without really asking what it would be, because it was in a lab and I felt at home there. But Mountain Girl had been around long enough to know that, in the words painted on the Pranksters' bus, Nothing Lasts. Nearby, the CIA was conducting early experiments with LSD under the MK-Ultra program. "[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. Special Thanks to: Trixie Garcia, Annabelle Garcia, Heather Katz, Sunshine Kesey, Carolyn Adams Garcia, Keelin Garcia, Manasha Garcia, Coran Capshaw, Jonathan Blaufarb and Vivek Sridharan at Counsel, LLP, Elliot Groffman, Paul Gutman, Ira Friedman and David Keady At Carroll, Guido and Groffman, LLP, Mark Pinkus, Jeffrey Norman, David Lemieux, Steve Parish, Bill Orner, AND A VERY SPECIAL THANK . I used to do large paintings but storage got to be an issue. Compared to what the fans know and want to cultivate, Im no expert. "He wasn't super happy about it," she recalls. ", She addressed it head-on. Jerry Garcia exclaimed. But I was anti-cocaine," she says pausing. And Faye, his wife, was struggling with the whole thing. It's the price the individual pays for the overall benefit of the planet. [Laughs.] Until then, the strongest drug she'd ever had was coffee. We were very, very happy with each other. "He was not happy to see me," she says. Ken Kesey's ranch in La Honda, California, where Mountain Girl joined the Pranksters. She took command of the situation, telling them that they were now the only family she had. Beatniks and folk musicians were flocking to the area, and Adams fell in love with the music scene. Jerry was very jealous. ", It didn't help matters when Mountain Girl made an alarming discovery: She was pregnant. Countless companies vied for such a coveted collaboration. "It was awful," Mountain Girl says. He is her "handmaiden.' at Red Rocks Garcia's 75th Bday. Can you talk about that challenge? "I was a strong suit," she says. Not a subscriber? "You might say I was in denial," she says. What needed to be done was to drive back the black and white and the separations between people and make a place where people could come together and have some joy and harmony without doctrine. It was definitely a mild psychedelic experience with a lot of long, complex dreams, mostly about ancient ruined cities - Mayan - and jaguars. Through our Discourse journalism, Insider seeks to explore and illuminate the days most fascinating issues and ideas. Not at all. Jerry was married with a daughter of his own, but they had moved back to Palo Alto without him. "I stayed up in Oregon much longer than I thought I should. It sounds like all of these endeavors require a balance between your free-spirited nature and a need to focus on business matters. "Jerry decided to spend more time away from the house and in his studio. She reads on: The car is lurching and leaping up the mountain road with its hairpins and overhanging trees, shrieking around the blind curves and cliffs. "I'm so glad to see you!" Carolyn's daughter Sunshine was born in a Manzanillo hospital where the water was turned off 12 hours a day. The free concert, scheduled for December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California, would include performances by the Dead, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and the Rolling Stones. I mean, yuck! Carolyn Elizabeth Garcia (ne Adams; born May 7, 1946), also known as Mountain Girl, is an American Merry Prankster and the former wife of Jerry Garcia, the lead vocalist and guitar player with the American rock band, Grateful Dead. Garcia had indeed gone to live with a slender, intense and dark New York City film student named Deborah Koons whom he had met at a show in 1973 and who had hitched a ride back to New York City on the Dead's bus. "Jerry and I had our arguments, but it never led to anything good. They had not lived together for years, although once in a while they got together with the children during a holiday or when the Dead were in town playing a concert. The riotous paint job was murky and peeling, as if the bus had leprosy. It was a form of synesthesia: little notes with different little cartoon beings, each with its own personality. How long have you been thinking about a cannabis brand? She wrote about the ride, and reads it to me: Meanwhile, fumbling in his pocket, he produces a handful of pills, and an assortment of newspaper clippings and matches. "They're great together. "I didn't want any whinging. The battle between Mountain Girl and the woman some people secretly call "Dark Deborah" or the "Black Widow" has a long and difficult history going back more than 20 years. So Ive gotten much smaller. "I was like, 'Whoa, that was a really electric moment!'" "The moment we came back, Jerry was at my door to visit and within a month he was asking to move back in," says Mountain Girl. The seeds of hippiedom - question authority, love the one you're with, share and share alike - were fueled by marijuana and psychedelics and accompanied by the twang of guitars and banjos. "I'm standing there, it's like 6 in the morning," she recalls. "The job was to run the mass spectrometer on the night shift," she writes in her memoir. But as Jerry's addiction worsened, MG took the girls and moved to a farm in Oregon, where some of the other Pranksters had moved. Bob Campbell/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images. That was the world. I absolutely love sativasI like getting stoned and then doing gardening work and stuff like that. "My heart opened," she says. he asked me. In 1980, on New Year's Eve, they got married by a Buddhist monk backstage at a Dead concert. I look carefully and ask for a quarter of one. Because Jerry and I honorably tried to do a deal that covered everything, that made me happy. And more and more people were getting admitted to the hospital from bad drug reactions. "We mustered the instruments up on the roof thinking to lead a parade to the Cow Palace. "Someone got us all tickets and we dressed up to go. Even back in those pre-women's liberation days, Carolyn Adams was an in-your-face challenge for any male. Despite the free-love ethos of the Sixties, she could feel the tension her affair with Kesey generated in the group. (December 12, 1996). And her beauty. It would have been like a ballplayer missing a game. So I never really knew where she stood on anything. Special thanks to: Trixie Garcia, Annabelle Garcia, Tiff Garcia, Heather Katz, Sunshine Kesey, Carolyn Adams Garcia, Keelin Garcia, Manasha Garcia, Coran Capshaw, Jonathan Blaufarb and Vivek Sridharan at Councel, LLP, Elliot Groffman, Paul Gutman, Ira Friedman and Kelly Corson at Carroll, Guido and Groffman, LLP, Mark Pinkus, Nicholas Meriwether, Jeffrey Norman, David Lemieux, Steve Parish . Because for him it was a living fluid. Mountain Girl kept her gig as the projectionist, painting the walls with colors as the trippers danced to the Dead. No matter how peeved you get with people, the bus always makes your heart jump. "Garcia's Ex-Wife to Get $1.25 Million: 'Mountain Girl' had sued star's estate". And that was a faith in the rightness of our relationship. ", 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. We're lucky to have geniuses around giving us art." I should also point out that Im a huge cannabis fan. In 1993, Jerry Garcia asked Mountain Girl for a divorce. There are a lot of people like that. None. 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. It seems like theres often a charitable component. So I have a degree in painting from there, although its not super helpful in a lot of the business stuff that Ive come into, like negotiating contracts with huge companies. "You could buy bennies over the counter in Mexico, and I think he'd been doing more than his share," she says. Written in red paint, the front bumper proclaimed "CAUTION WEIRD LOAD. While that led to a lengthy period of cohabitation in which Carolyn Garcia played an integral role in her husband's recovery, they gradually drifted apart once more when Garcia began an extramarital relationship and fathered a child with Manasha Matheson. They separated in December 1966 and were divorced in 1978. Thats a whole thing that wasnt even acceptable in the fine art world like 20 years ago. "There were a lot of them around," she says. Their pad had become a hub for the burgeoning scene around the Dead's extended family of dealers and musicians and psychedelic poster artists. The family moved from house to house (Annabelle Garcia says that she went to no less than 13 schools, "just like an Army brat" ). "It wasn't (about) any one person," she says. He was losing me and Sunshine.". As the '80s approached, the whole Dead zeitgeist was getting way out of control. Garcia was married with a daughter of his own, but his wife had moved back to Palo Alto without him. But facing the judge, she was sharp enough to know who they were really after: Kesey. It was more than just hormones and the passion of new love that kept Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia together. Kesey didn't show up, even after the birth. The first time any of Kesey's literary mob ever saw Carolyn Adams, late of Hyde Park, N.Y., she was seated in a Palo Alto cafe, reading a book when Prankster and Beat icon Neal Cassady and a handsome young blond guy with a Beatle haircut named Bradley picked her up and invited her for a ride. I was flabbergasted. She sampled ibogaine, a powerful psychoactive being studied by the researchers she worked with. He had been in a coma. They ran a bar in San Francisco. The fight over his intellectual and real property continues. But, she emphasizes, the gestalt of the Dead, that the whole was so much greater than the parts, kept her a believer. The personal relationships within the band and their own personal relationships shattered under tremendous pressure. It was a complicated situation but there's one thing that anyone close to the couple agrees upon: It was a very big love. Their agrarian entourage includes a quartet of donkeys, a dozen sheep, two dogs (Chiquita, an ancient, deaf Border Collie mix and Penny, an apricot standard poodle) and two cats. Her parents, Ruth and Alfred, prized knowledge over material possessions and she grew up the tomboy little sister of two older brothers whose excellence in academics and athletics challenged and frustrated her. "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. My moms memoir has become my number-one focus over the past six months. But after spending a night in jail, she soon had another reason to weep. Meanwhile, Jerry would wander in and out of her life. The previously unreleased complete performance is mastered from John Cutler's original soundboard recordings. Jerry Garcia is just the latest celebrity to have his legacy immortalized in Colorado with a weed brand. "I love that bus! The Man Share Music Video for Dummy, Outline New LP, Joe Louis Walker: Scaling The Electric Fence. "Oh, I came from up on the mountain there," she said. Destination #1: SpringfieldWhen: Friday, 2/17/17Where: Washburne Caf, Springfield, ORWhat: KLCC Staff rolled into Springfield in their mobile studio to meet the public and learn more about the community. [Laughs.]. I know shes been working on her memoir. Mountain Girl believes he was still suffering from the trauma of seeing his father, Joe, drown on a fishing trip when he was 6. "It worked for me to have a different identity," she says. 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. Again, it was time to extricate herself and rescue her children.
