Len Dell’Amico, the Grateful Dead’s longtime videographer, writes about his friendship with Jerry Garcia in a new memoir that portrays the charismatic guitarist as a Christ-like figure who achieved great wealth and fame and yet lived like a Zen monk, disdaining the trappings of rock stardom.
In “Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead” Dell’Amico describes the band’s concerts as “fundamentally a spiritual experience, more like going to church than any other musical act I have ever worked with.”
In that framing, Garcia is seen as the de facto leader not only of the Grateful Dead, but also as a kind of high priest — no pun intended — of what Dell’Amico calls “a spiritual movement” with Deadhead followers as its tie-dyed congregation.
Admiring Garcia’s wisdom, intelligence and kindness, Dell’Amico describes his friend as “the closest thing I have to a mentor,” adding, “He’s not a Christian, but he follows the guidelines of Jesus.”
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A New Yorker, Dell’Amico began working for the band in 1980, at the top of the MTV decade, the heyday of rock videos and concert films. Already a hot young director who had worked with top acts like the Neville Brothers and the Meters, he was hired by Garcia at a backstage meeting in a dressing room choked with pot and cigarette smoke before a show at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco. In an interview this week over coffee in a San Rafael café, the 74-year-old Fairfax resident described the scenario as “New York techno nerd goes right into the center of a completely weird subcultural phenomenon.”
Dell’Amico wasn’t a Deadhead before coming out to Marin County and going to work for the band, but he and Garcia shared a love of movies and filmmaking that helped cement their friendship and professional partnership.
“Any movie that I brought up he had seen and had an opinion about,” he said. “He knew about filmmaking.”
It was also what Dell’Amico describes in his book as Garcia’s “positive spiritual essence” that set him apart from all the other musicians he’d ever worked with.
As an example of Garcia’s empathetic and forgiving nature, Dell’Amico tells a story about overhearing a phone call between him and a fellow band member who wanted to fire an employee suspected of stealing from the band.
Garcia opposed the firing, reminding his bandmate that they both had plenty of money, so why cast out a member of the Grateful Dead family who obviously needed it more than they did.
“In that moment, I had a revelation,” Dell’Amico writes. “He (Garcia) was not playing it for laughs. He was actually quite serious, reminding his friend in the gentlest way 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, teaching that we must take care of each other first and foremost.”
‘The Zen of Jerry’
In a chapter titled “The Zen of Jerry,” Dell’Amico describes Garcia’s ascetic lifestyle during the time the rock icon was living downstairs from his manager in a house in the Hepburn Heights neighborhood of San Rafael, overlooking the San Pablo Bay. As Garcia showed him around his lived-in digs, Dell’Amico took a casual glance inside his walk-in closet and was surprised by the humbleness of his wardrobe. The opposite of a flashy rock star, the rich and famous guitarist had a handful of dark-colored T-shirts, some long-sleeve plaid flannel shirts and a few pairs of pants, all on hangers.
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“And that was it,” he writes, noting that the cramped apartment reminded him of a college dorm room. “So, the guy at the very center of this operation that generated huge amounts of money didn’t actually care at all about money.”
Uncomfortable with his celebrity, Garcia was loathe to accept the privileges that often came with it. Dell’Amico writes about going out to dinner with him at a pricey restaurant. At the end of the meal, the manager came out to tell him to put his credit card away, that it would be on the house. Garcia politely declined, saying he had plenty of money to pay the bill and suggested that the restaurant give a free dinner to someone who normally couldn’t afford to eat there. From his working-class upbringing, he understood the real reason behind the special treatment, and he wasn’t going along with it.
“I’ve never seen anything like that, where he confronted what was happening straight on,” Dell’Amico said. “It was like what you really want is for me to come back so people will say they saw me here.”
Guns and roses
While Garcia and the band symbolized peace and love ethos of the ’60s, they were not without their quirks and contradictions. Dell’Amico was shocked when Garcia popped open the trunk of his BMW one day, revealing a couple of AK-47 assault rifles and ammo magazines lying haphazardly among his collection of CDs. He casually explained that he had his roadie buy the semi-automatic weapons for target practice before they became illegal in California.
“He was nonchalant about it,” Dell’Amico said, “but I had to recover and say to myself, ‘Len, you’re not in Kansas anymore.’ It’s funny, but I think the guys in the band were more like pirates than hippies.”
Aside from random things like assault rifles, Garcia had few extravagances, the exceptions being his big, luxurious, top-of-the line BMW, and, notoriously, his drugs.
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After hearing gossip that his friend was suffering from a serious addiction that was worrying his family, bandmates and associates, Dell’Amico decided to ask him directly about it.
Garcia was remarkably open with him, explaining that he was getting high on what he called “Persian smoking powder,” a combination of heroin and cocaine. When Dell’Amico pressed for details, Garcia brought out his pipe and paraphernalia, his “works,” and demonstrated how it was done, lighting the pipe and inhaling the smoke right in front of him, even offering him a hit, which Dell’Amico politely declined.
“He was open with me because I asked him about it, and most people don’t do that,” he said. “But I had to. I needed to know because he was my friend.”
In July 1986, Garcia was hospitalized after falling into a diabetic coma that nearly killed him. After three weeks, he regained consciousness and underwent extensive rehabilitation, including relearning how to play guitar. Dell’Amico happened to be in the hospital room when Garcia’s wife, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, the mother of two of his daughters, brought an acoustic guitar to his bedside for the first time.
“He was like, ‘What’s this?’” Dell’Amico remembered. “Somebody must have told him, ‘By the way, you’re one of the greatest guitar players in the world.’ Really? Somebody show me.”
That somebody turned out to be keyboardist Merl Saunders, who patiently worked with him as he regained his extraordinary skills and the distinctive, lyrical style that made him one of the few instantly recognizable guitarists in rock.
In all the time he knew him, right up until his death in 1995, Dell’Amico says he never heard Garcia complain, even under the pressures of tour after exhausting tour, playing impersonal sports stadiums all over the country, not because he enjoyed it, but because it was the most lucrative way to support the Grateful Dead organization and its family of employees, who depended on him for their livelihood.
Not a diva
“I’ve been around a lot of stars, and some of them are divas, but he never complained about anything. Ever,” Dell’Amico said.
With one exception. As the writer of such classic Grateful songs as “Ripple,” “Terrapin Station” and “Stella Blue” with lyricist Robert Hunter, the only thing he resented, he told Dell’Amico, was that he was never given enough recognition as a songwriter.
Over the course of 11 years, until he stopped working for the band in 1991, Dell’Amico collaborated with Garcia on numerous projects, including “So Far,” a bestselling, award-winning home video released in 1997 that took three and a half years to finish.
They also produced the first national pay-per-view broadcast: a Grateful Dead show from Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1980, as well as two music videos, “Hell in a Bucket” and “Throwing Stones,” both singles from the band’s hit album “In the Dark,” recorded live at the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium in 1987.
During his decade-long tenure with the Dead, Dell’Amico recorded 60 concerts in high-end, multi-camera video shoots.
“The proudest things in my life are those 60 shows I put in the vault,” he said. “They’ll be there forever.”
After surviving the coma, Garcia tried to clean up his act, but a lifetime of smoking, bad diet, struggles with obesity and drug addiction had taken their toll. On Aug. 9, 1995, eight days after his 53rd birthday, he died of a heart attack in his sleep at Serenity Knolls, a treatment center not far from the San Geronimo Valley camp where the Grateful Dead lived in 1966, when they were young and just getting started as a band.
Thirty-five years after his decade with the Dead, Dell’Amico continues to work as a freelance screenwriter, producer and director with an interest in the environment and sustainability. His 2011 feature film, the dark comedy “Welcome to Dopeland,” is available on streaming platforms.
He says he wrote his memoir in gratitude for everything Garcia taught him in his short but full life. While he feels his friend’s loss to this day, he refuses to think of his death as tragic, as it has often been portrayed.
“People die all the time and it is not necessarily a tragedy,” he said. “Jerry was not a tragic figure. He was full of humor and life.”
• Details: Len Dell’Amico will discuss “Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead” (Weldon Owen, April 15, $35 hardcover) with Blair Jackson at 6 p.m. April 11 at Book Passage at 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. in Corte Madera. Admission is free. More information at bookpassage.com.
Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net