("I was taking just enough to get my job done," she says.) So I faded out of that position. "It's a perilous society if you don't look a certain way," he said. Sunshine was about two or three months old and she was in this little basket. ", Her parents didn't know she was pregnant, so she was stuck with the Pranksters. They were going to look for Kesey. Please enjoy this full-length feature from our October/November Issue. 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. ", One night in San Francisco, four months after the Beatles show, Kesey and Mountain Girl were up on the roof of a home in Telegraph Hill, smoking a joint. And that was a faith in the rightness of our relationship. Mountain Girl cherished the quiet moments with Garcia in their room, nursing Sunshine in bed as he noodled her favorite tune, "Viola Lee Blues," on his guitar. Somehow, however, Garcia and Mountain Girl established a life, albeit one that was quite unconventional by Leave It To Beaver standards. Tracks Festival Fever K.C. But God, if somebody didn't cook, do you know what they would eat? And these were Cocaine Katies? The Bus, with "Furthur" written like a title across the top. Mountain Girl found the celebrated writer, who was 29, to be dynamic, intelligent, and playful. "He was kind of a wreck. What the hell is going on? He was one of these people where the first time you see him, he's kind of personable, and then the next time, he's starting to disintegrate.". The paint is faded. The week after the Trips Festival, on January 31, 1966, Furthur was found abandoned on a cliffside road, high above the crashing shore of Eureka. Eight months pregnant, Mountain Girl stepped off the Dead's helicopter at Altamont just in time to see Mick Jagger get punched in the head by a concertgoer. None of the various women and children in his life could dispute that. I painted that bus! But the event ended in tragedy when a member of the Hells Angels, the notorious biker gang who were hired to provide security, stabbed a concertgoer to death at the foot of the stage. She studied journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has worked in a variety of media including television and daily print news. [6], She had a relationship with another Prankster named George Walker, who would become her husband in 1966. He returned to the United States and, just nights after being sentenced to six months in the San Mateo County Jail, he was arrested again, this time with Adams, while smoking marijuana on the rooftop of Stewart Brand's home on Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. People were just sleeping on the street in their shorts in the San Francisco fog, and getting terribly chilled. He loved to work. "I haven't had another relationship really since then. Certainly, for my own peace of mind, I cant work with anyone who thinks my dad was a deity or something. His eyes smiled. That was my big goal as a child. And boy, do I run from that stuff. Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go. Movies. Beatniks and folk musicians were flocking to the area, and Adams fell in love with the music scene. So I will say that sampling the product is a huge perk of the gig for me. Konser Grateful Dead di Oregon pada tahun 1972 menyelamatkan produk susu keluarga Kesey dan menjadi legenda kontra. Eventually, the rest of the Pranksters loaded themselves onto Furthur and trekked down to Manzanillo, where they lived in a small rancho with a red and white checkerboard roof. Weve met lots of people and toured lots of different places, and thought about many different ways to structure this. It's a familiar story from a revelatory point of view: her own. ", But Mountain Girl and Jerry remained intertwined through it all. Learn how and when to remove this template message, Mountain Girl: Her tale begins in Hyde Park, "Mountain Girl's heartbreaking memoir: An icon of the Sixties opens up about Jerry Garcia, Ken Kesey, and what the age of free love was really like", Women's Visionary Congress speaker biographies, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carolyn_Garcia&oldid=1135994138, This page was last edited on 28 January 2023, at 03:21. Jerry Garcia exclaimed. "I ran home to mother for the first time in my life," she says. Complete independence. But facing the judge, she was sharp enough to know who they were really after: Kesey. ", "MG put up with a lot of shit for a lot of years," says Goldie Rush. "They were talking about chord progressions and all this interesting stuff.". Happy the dog, her head splotched with a huge drop of blue paint, flushed a covey of peacocks which rose above the trees and the parked bus, scattering rainbow feathers and squawking bloody murder. What the hell just happened? Bill is finally the right person for my mom. Jerry Garcia "It was fall. "You could tell the number of people was way exceeding the ability of anybody to deal with it." ", David Kushneris a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. Browse 85 sunshine kesey stock photos and images available, or start a new search to explore more stock photos and images. And no one defined the scene more than the Dead, whose gigs in the meadow in Golden Gate Park were becoming more and more crowded. "He'd fill it with music, drugs, girlfriends, whatever. "I stayed up in Oregon much longer than I thought I should. 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. With Jerry at her side, Mountain Girl was at the center of it all, counting Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin among her growing family of friends. With steely determination, she continued her way across a wide expanse of unmown grass with Kesey's black spaniel Happy yapping at her heels. Back when she was riding with the Hells Angels and tripping with the Dead, she was a teenager coming of age at a moment the whole world seemed to be coming apart. Mountain Girl believes he was still suffering from the trauma of seeing his father, Joe, drown on a fishing trip when he was 6. Now 76, with shoulder-length gray hair and black-framed glasses, she's reading me an excerpt from her unpublished memoir, which she just dug out of an old brown box. Art Frisch/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images, Bill Owens/20th Century Fox/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. She named her baby girl Sunshine Kesey. I appreciate whats going on with the Alex Grey scene and these shamanistic visionary artists. When they returned, Jerry's heroin use was getting so extreme even Mountain Girl was noticing it. "I was glad he wasn't there," she says, "but I was a little hurt he didn't come to see me." Part of that was the elasticity of the relationship and how it could adapt to stuff. Before Garcia died of a heart attack in a dry-out facility in Forest Knolls on Aug. 9, 1995, he'd already paid Mountain Girl their agreed-upon $20,883 per month for a period of 18 months. Thats what motivates me to continue to do licensing, Jerry Garcias daughter Trixie reflects, as she discusses her familys recent business ventures. "They were a gang of brutes who beat up each other for fun," she says with a smile, "but they were nice to me. She'd hitched a ride out west with her older brother, Don, determined to leave square old Poughkeepsie far in the rearview. He left a third of his estate to his wife of three months, Deborah Koons Garcia, but had a herd of creditors in his wake (including Mountain Girl) and the value of his estate in dispute. "He knew it was going to cause trouble." Mountain Girl believes he was still suffering from the trauma of seeing his father, Joe, drown on a fishing trip when he was 6. By the time Jerry Garcia met Carolyn Adams she was the iconic Mountain Girl - the outrageous, free-spirited teenaged Merry Prankster who captivated Tom Wolfe's imagination in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. We were very, very happy with each other. Meanwhile, Jerry would wander in and out of her life. All Carolyn Garcia ever wanted was a family with her children and Jerry Garcia. Adams, who was 19 when she heard Garcia that day in 1964, was on the precipice of a stunning personal transformation. Top editors give you the stories you want delivered right to your inbox each weekday. "I always get emotional about the old bus. We cleaned our grass in an old aluminum colander, and stored the kilo of Acapulco gold in a kitchen cupboard. "You might say I was in denial," she says. "I had never heard any of that before," she says. Which is why I went and took it to court. Evangeline Gomorrah Let It Rock That Lucky Old Sun Tangled Up In Blue I'll Take A Melody They Love Each Other Get Out Of My Life Woman Run For The Roses Stop That Train Mission In The Rain My Sisters And Brothers Deal The Harder They Come Waiting For A Miracle I Shall Be Released Think I Hope It Won't Be This Way, Always Don't Let Go Evangeline That was his happiest space. The bassist Phil Lesh considered Mountain Girl "the Prankster Queen," as he wrote in his memoir. Ratburgers.". Adams felt, as she puts it, "in a juvenile state of admiration for a good writer, for a famous person who is now taking me into his scene.". ", "Jerry had told me what he wanted me to do," says Jon McIntire. Mountain Girl would ride Rush's bike over a rutted short cut to the hospital and sit by Jerry's bed, willing him to live. Its nice to lose yourself in a piece of art. To ensure that the baby, named Solano in Spanish (which, laughs Garcia, means "sun porch" ) would have legal U.S. citizenship, Mountain Girl married a pretty blond Prankster named George Walker. "Bill serves her. At Jerry's funeral, Annabelle, his older daughter with Mountain Girl, said, "He was a great musician and a shitty father." "Crazy," she recalls. He certainly had me buffaloed on the dishwashing thing. "You could come stay with me," he said. Even as a teenager dedicated to "experimentation," as Carolyn now puts it, she was a fairly daunting personality. There was no uncertainty about that.". ", Cassady roused the owner of the bus and the ranch, the man he called the Chief: Ken Kesey. Kesey describes that first meeting with a literary allusion: "Vonnegut's phrase a "karass' comes to mind. Inside her plant-filled home lined with scientific books on psilocybin and posters of the Grateful Dead, Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, legendary godmother of the hippie counterculture, Jerry's ex-wife, and mother of their two daughters, sits on a red leather couch dressed in a red shirt and purple pants. "I wasn't a hundred percent Ken's girlfriend," she says. Looming out of the deep shadows across the yard was an enormous painted bus, dim and bulbous and mysterious as Moby Dick. Meanwhile, Koons Garcia's attorney, Paul Camera, has indicated that he will advise his client to appeal. she recalls with a laugh. That is really something." As most suspected, it was yet another prank. "It was too much travel." I had a new baby. "We felt guilty at having called for this." He had dumped all of his belongings in the Garcia driveway, including a box with a cat in it. When her youngest brother, Don, offered her a ride to California, she took it. "Everybody loved it that those guys were back together again," says Rush. Following Jerry Garcia's death, Carolyn Garcia was involved in litigation to obtain payments as per their divorce settlement agreement, ultimately agreeing to a $1,250,000 settlement to avoid further legal costs. "She was Jerry's girlfriend. There were daisies growing up through the floor boards. [Laughs.] Garcia was married with a daughter of his own, but his wife had moved back to Palo Alto without him. She quit LSD, but she fell into a postpartum depression as her reality came into focus. She was judge and jury in those days. Rock Scully's girlfriend of the time, Valerie Ann Steinbrecher, who still is called "Tangerine," remembers watching Carolyn Adams and an unbearded Jerry Garcia literally fall in love on the spot: "The first time I saw Mountain Girl was at this gig at S.F. Her legend leaps off the pages of books, in the annals of the Grateful Dead in her role as Jerry Garcia's consort and then wife for nearly 30 years and in the transcripts of a high profile trial last winter which pitted her against Garcia's widow, Deborah Koons Garcia, in a Marin County courtroom. "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. They ran a bar in San Francisco. But, she emphasizes, the gestalt of the Dead, that the whole was so much greater than the parts, kept her a believer. ", "School," writes Garcia in the beginnings of what may become her memoirs, "was an inner battleground. I say that after talking to so many Deadheads, who have testified to me that the Grateful Dead changed their lives.. She uttered a huge sigh. At the time, Kesey, the Pranksters and The Bus had just come back from their cross-country hegira; Wolfe had written the pieces for New York magazine that eventually became his bestselling book; Kesey was orchestrating the Acid Test concert/psychedelic experiences and the house band was the budding Grateful Dead (formerly the Warlocks) featuring a half Irish, half Spanish banjo/guitar whiz named Jerry Garcia. She took command of the situation, telling them that they were now the only family she had. She and Garcia lived off his $50 a week in gig money. Cassady had told Kesey that he met this girl who was a little wild, "like she was kind of a mountain girl," says Kesey. ", Flush with cash, she bought a white Honda 50 scooter and took to riding up and down the coast. "I went down for a long time." I walked over to look, amazed. After moving in with Garcia, Mountain Girl became the "den mother," as she puts it, of the Grateful Dead: cooking, cleaning, rustling them out the door on time. It would prove to be a pivotal moment in the history of the counterculture. "His whole thing was to drive to San Francisco, play a gig, go home, go to sleep, get up, have breakfast, drive to San Francisco, play a gig. If you were behaving badly, she'd tell you that, too. This construct of human civilization is not the end all, be all. I just ran my life that way and it mostly worked out.". I love making art but I dont anticipate making art shows or anything like that happen. Deborah Koons Garcia declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a written statement, she said "we did not want this case to go to trial, but we have a duty to protect the Estate," adding that the "alleged agreement was for an amount which exceeded Jerry's net worth at the time, which was clearly unfair.". My relationship with him had to do more with intellectual companionship rather than a physical relationship, which was really brief. It happened in the summer of 1964 at St. Michael's Caf in Palo Alto, California. "Ooh man," she told him, "there's something. She was amazingly beautiful. "After he had left and moved in with Deborah. 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. I was locked in. She was pregnant by Kesey, 11 years her senior, who was married with kids. "I love that bus! Kesey dubbed them the Acid Tests. A 6-CD box set featuring two complete, previously unreleased performances from the Jerry Garcia Band and Bob Weir & Rob Wasserman recorded September 5th, 1989 in Hartford, CT and September 6th, 1989 in Uniondale, NY. I believe growers are artists and they need good management. But basically, she was assigned to the traditional women's stuff of keeping a home, albeit a very large and unruly one. Eventually, Kesey and his rag-tag band returned to the States, Mountain Girl and the baby in tow, to produce the final of the Acid Tests, the combination concert-performance-mass LSD trip (often courtesy of Owsley Stanley, who provided the psychedelics and was the money behind the house band, the Grateful Dead). "He wasn't super happy about it," she recalls. "Jerry and I had a fortunate relationship. I was just on board to do whatever.". "Oh, I came from up on the mountain there," she said. It felt as though the scene she had helped create was starting to lose its luster, the summer of love devolving into something chaotic and ugly. She'd gotten to know Jerry a little better, having spent a cold night in the bus platonically huddling between him and Pigpen, the Dead's keyboardist, for warmth. Top editors give you the stories you want delivered right to your inbox each weekday. Two years later, she got the dreaded call: Garcia had died of a heart attack at a drug-treatment facility. Independence. Until, in 1986, a phone call came telling her that Jerry was in Marin General Hospital in a diabetic coma and that he was not expected to live. Carolyn Adams is very proud of her family history. "Someone got us all tickets and we dressed up to go. "I could hear his voice and somebody else's voice," she tells me. Were real people. For the Acid Test at San Francisco State, the Pranksters set up in the gym while Kesey sat in the broadcast booth of the college radio station and taunted the authorities. The legend crumbled. Its part of what I want to share with othersthat whole inner freedom and expansiveness. It's a clear, cold afternoon in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, and Mountain Girl, dressed in a black parka and jeans, is sharing a joint with her three grown daughters. Tags Arts & Culture Springfield ken kesey Sunshine Kesey Road Trip Tiffany Eckert Tiffany joined the KLCC News team in 2007. "I always wanted to be a writer," she tells me with a sly smile. 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