But for Mountain Girl, it lives forever, an emblem of everything her generation believed in, and all that they achieved. I made a few phone calls and everybody said the same thing: "I don't know. But facing the judge, she was sharp enough to know who they were really after: Kesey. "Crazy," she recalls. ", Kesey was, she says, "attractive and very engaging. Kesey dug how she spoke her mind, made him laugh, and dazzled him with beauty. The whole vibe of the Capitol is amazing and authentic. She has won awards from Oregon Associated Press, PRNDI, and Education Writers Association. Mountain Girl had seen the Dead in its earlier incarnations, but she didn't take special note of Jerry. He was a pro. He put the mojo on me. I could go in there, but I didn't like it. "I was very upset," she recalls. He was living in a cheap motel in the beachfront town of Mazatln, conferring with his lawyer and looking jittery, skinny, and paranoid. Mountain Girl and Jerry moved into an apartment of their own, and she got pregnant again. It was a form of synesthesia: little notes with different little cartoon beings, each with its own personality. [1] Despite her maiden name, Garcia, she is not related to Jerry Garcia, an incorrect assumption made by some because of her involvement with Furthur, a post-Garcia incarnation of the Grateful Dead. "I was no longer in charge of my own destiny.". I was obliged to hang onto Bradley. "I was more than seven months pregnant and I didn't have shit. 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. It's the price the individual pays for the overall benefit of the planet. It kept him very up. "He knew it was going to cause trouble." "She's a person possessed of spirit and weight, will and energy," says Jon McIntire, the Dead's manager from 1968 to 1990. I am also happy that we found companies that are privately owned and family run. And he hadn't been supporting her and their child. Tracks Festival Fever K.C. ", It was not difficult to get Mountain Girl away from Kesey, says McIntire. God, I was so thrilled. She moved to Europe with a boyfriend for a year but wrote to Garcia. This year it also served as a major platform for charitable endeavors. When she came to the one on the door that read "Nothing Lasts," she stopped in her tracks. And that level of his dedication really fired everybody. All of Jerrys kids are artists in one way or another. She opted out of the Grateful Dead scene for the sake of her three little girls, Sunshine Kesey, her daughter with Ken Kesey, and Annabelle and Theresa Garcia, her children with Jerry Garcia. And there were dogs and Pranksters, the bus and a whole huge scene all around them. ", One day, when she was up in San Francisco, her attorney got a call. Part of that was the elasticity of the relationship and how it could adapt to stuff. The decision on Holistic Industries as its official cultivation and distribution collaborator was up to the Garcia Family his daughters, Trixie Garcia, Annabelle Garcia, Sunshine Kesey and Heather Katz and Tiff Garcia's estate (Jerry's brother who passed away in 2017). 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.". After leaving Kesey in Mexico, where he was hiding out to avoid US drug charges, Mountain Girl returned to San Francisco with a newborn and an uncertain future. "I didn't want to compete for attention," admits Mountain Girl. Growing up, I went to the high school where 420 was coined [San Rafael High School], so theres that. (December 12, 1996). "The Beatles came to the old Cow Palace down in the mudflat south of San Francisco," she reads. Their pad had become a hub for the burgeoning scene around the Dead's extended family of dealers and musicians and psychedelic poster artists. "I just couldn't deal with it," Mountain Girl says. Neither of us knew the language of sorting out your personal relationships," Carolyn says. Bill is finally the right person for my mom. "[4] Journalist Tom Wolfe described his first impression of a teenage Adams as "a tall girl, big and beautiful with dark brown hair falling down to her shoulders except that the lower two-thirds of her falling hair looks like a paintbrush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed it blond in Mexico. "I was sitting on the ground, and all of a sudden the redwood needles started to rearrange themselves. 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. 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 Left to moulder in the weeds. Sunshine Kesey, Self: Move Me Brightly: Celebrating Jerry Garcia's 70th Birthday. 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. "I was mortified," she says. She gave birth in the charity ward of a Mexican hospital in May 1966. "That was my golden destination.". "Garcia's Ex-Wife to Get $1.25 Million: 'Mountain Girl' had sued star's estate". Despite the new light in her life, a darkness set in. It can be nice, but I should also point out that it has definitely worked against some people. Those two are the biggest people in every way - big souls, big hearts, big egos, big personalities. The tiny kitchen downstairs was the crossroads, we jammed in there for morning cornflakes and conversation. at Red Rocks Garcia's 75th Bday. It's a familiar story from a revelatory point of view: her own. By the time she returned, her confidence was at an all-time high.She had had an opportunity to develop her own talents, including a gift for writing, in a brief sojourn at an eastern college. "You have to be a pretty big person to hold your own with Kesey and Garcia and their milieu. 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. 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. The family moved from house to house (Annabelle Garcia says that she went to no less than 13 schools, "just like an Army brat" ). "The price is very high and the price is personal relationships and time away from the family.". I actually call her and harass her about it pretty often. "They were a gang of brutes who beat up each other for fun," she says with a smile, "but they were nice to me. I had three old couch pillows and my sleeping bag, with a tarp tacked up overhead for the few rain or fog drips that penetrated the treetops. Caravans of Deadheads turned Jerry and Mountain Girl into godheads. Under the isolation and pressures of the road, Jerry slipped into cocaine and heroin addiction. "Things changed," she says. "Mountain Girl taught me this years ago," says Rock Scully. It hadn't been running for a very long time. He certainly had me buffaloed on the dishwashing thing. She and Garcia lived off his $50 a week in gig money. It was a minor note, although I suppose it wasn't minor for me at the time because I was young and attractive. The intellectual climate at Kesey's was free of academic constraints," remembers Carolyn Garcia. The machine was down. Both of them could be among the most open people I've ever run across.". But Mountain Girl had been around long enough to know that, in the words painted on the Pranksters' bus, Nothing Lasts. [Laughs.]. [11][12] She formerly served on the board of the Women's Visionary Council. Mountain Girl kept her gig as the projectionist, painting the walls with colors as the trippers danced to the Dead. Countless companies vied for such a coveted collaboration. "Jerry decided to spend more time away from the house and in his studio. Even as a teenager dedicated to "experimentation," as Carolyn now puts it, she was a fairly daunting personality. "He was crazy and he'd been to too many Dead shows," she says. I mean, yuck! All Carolyn Garcia ever wanted was a family with her children and Jerry Garcia. By the time she walked into the Dead's kitchen, Mountain Girl had attained iconic status, although it was not her way to pay any attention to it. Sunshine Kesey is one of renown author and merry maker, Ken Kesey's, children. Tom Wolfe's New York magazine pieces may have put her on the map, but she says, "I really didn't have an attachment to a personal image. "I was totally devastated," she says. So not wanting to put dumb flourishes on his face or have Jerrys face on top of a pyramid or all these things that people have wanted to do. 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. "She had the ability to meld her energy with the energy of others to do more than what one person could do by themselves. Garcia and Adams separated in 1975 after he began a relationship with filmmaker Deborah Koons. It's sad to see it crumble away. One must brace against the turns to avoid sliding into the driver. Bob Campbell/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images. I want to be lighting fires with a flint and steel! His pedal steel and a chair the only furniture. By then she was five months pregnant. Mountain Girl is so awesome, I would love to read her memoir or autobiography. "It's one of those things you do in your early adulthood. One of their cats was killed. Adams, who was 19 when she heard Garcia that day in 1964, was on the precipice of a stunning personal transformation. 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 . "It wasn't (about) any one person," she says. The Mountain Girl-Jerry Garcia relationship was fraught with enough drama and see-sawing emotion to resemble a hippie soap opera. Dawn was breaking as they arrived at a ranch in La Honda. Kesey (left) with Neal Cassady, who introduced him to Mountain Girl when she was 19. She studied journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has worked in a variety of media including television and daily print news. What the hell is going on? Joy and excitement; uncertainty and pain. Somehow she and Garcia remained intertwined through it all. Jerry was never with another woman who matched him as elegantly as she did, with her kind of energy and intelligence. Tracks Listen Buy Opening Announcment Deep Elem Blues With an entomologist for a dad and a botanical illustrator for a mother, Adams had grown up a brainy bug-lover with a mind for science and a passion for nature. I still enjoy making art as part of my range of hobbies and skills. The City of Springfield is installing a two-story, photorealistic painted mural of Ken Kesey downtown on the side of the Odd Fellows Building, current, Renowned author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey grew up in Springfield. And frankly, I'm glad we didn't, because I think if we'd fought it out too much, we would have lost each other. I was flabbergasted. I am quite certain that it was a comfort to him as well as to me. The band, which was making waves in the Haight but hadn't yet recorded an album, shared a rambling Victorian on 710 Ashbury Street in San Francisco. ", The trial was "an unexpected development," she says, as she sits in her rural kitchen. She wasn't a judgmental kind of person, she was just brutally frank. Their pad had become a hub for the burgeoning scene around the Dead's extended family of dealers and musicians and psychedelic poster artists. Her function? 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 . Person to hold your own with Kesey and Garcia remained intertwined through it all it had been... People I 've ever run across. `` a form of synesthesia: little notes with different little cartoon,! Big person to hold your own with Kesey and Garcia and Adams separated in 1975 after began. Across. `` whole huge scene all around them & # x27 ; s 70th Birthday neither us. 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