Carolyn Garcia

Bill Kreutzman said it later, New York was like a pickpocketing dragon, capable of burning you and swallowing you whole, but it also was a really exciting place to come and play, so different from anything we had been exposed to growing up in Palo Alto or even living in San Francisco.

Mountain Girl, who'd never spent a night in a big city, stayed at the Chelsea Hotel and couldn't believe it.

Charmingly seedy.

She'd grown up in the suburbs and spent the last few years in the California woods, but This was a different planet.

Fair was that person.

According to Mountain Girl in a 2022 interview, Stanley was trying to manage them, making them live on nothing but acid and steak.

Owsley thought about sound.

the way religious mystics thought about God.

Not past a certain scale.

Not when the bills come due every month and 75 tons of equipment need to move from city to city and crew members need paychecks and there's no one around to tell everyone why suffering for purity matters more than eating regular meals.

Mountain Girl said prison changed him in that 2022 interview.

He came back different.

Hunter would be downstairs writing.

Mountain Girl, Carolyn Garcia, later described what those months were like.

Hunter was up 24 hours a day, chain-smoking, and he'd come down in the morning and he'd have a stack of songs.

Not lyrics, songs.

and she is doing it because somebody has to, and because she can.

Her name was Carolyn Adams, and everyone called her Mountain Girl.

She had come from a town on the Hudson, and she had been thrown out of school just weeks before she was meant to graduate, for something small and defiant.

and she had pointed herself west and not looked back she was young when she got to california and almost at once she became a kind of centre of gravity in the new scene the it girl of the whole psychedelic underground though that phrase makes her sound decorative and she was anything but She was tall and sharp-tongued and unafraid.

Two nights.

For smoking marijuana on the roof of Stuart Brand's home in San Francisco alongside a fellow prankster named Carolyn Adams.

He just couldn't help himself.

And just to highlight how unconventional his domestic life was, he later fathered a daughter named Sunshine with Carolyn Adams.

And his wife, Faye, was completely supportive and accepting of this arrangement.

It was a very different way of living.

These were not helpless people, but they also couldn't leave.

Mountain Girl saw both sides at once.

At the acid tests, she'd watch Bear push that metal chair across a wooden floor for hours, making the most horrible screeching and scraping, driving everybody up the wall.

She called it an incredible exhibition of making other people uncomfortable.

Garcia disagreed.

He said Bear was just completely freaked out in his own body, not trying to torment anyone.

Mountain Girl pushed back.

She'd watched him a really long time.

His friends were worried.

Mountain Girl was worried.

Hunter was worried enough to fly out on tour with Garcia in late 1984, hoping to reach him.

He failed.

Into the lion's den, we boldly entered, steeled to the deed to be done.

He listened, anger slowly relanding.

Mountain Girl had organized it.

She'd spent four or five days making calls using a phony name, checking out treatment programs and what they cost.

Next time I went down, someone came in and said they'd just picked the name Grateful Dead.

I think it was Mountain Girl-

Uh-huh

... came in and said that.

He w- it was, it was his time, you know, where he did the, his stuff.

And Mountain Girl was down.

We rented a house in LA, which is another story that's incredible.

But anyway, we rented a house in Beverly Hills, and we had a beautiful house.

And Garcia promised Mountain Girl he was gonna come up to the gig in, uh, San Francisco and fly back on the last flight, which is 11:30 at night, and he'd be home that night.

So they drew straws.

There was four bands, the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

So there are f- five sets in w- in an evening's performance, five one-hour sets.