"I had never heard any of that before," she says. 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. We also partnered with Tessemaes, which is an eco-conscious salad dressing company. "She didn't say anything of any note except to acknowledge my presence. Had a quick mind - quick on the pickup with puns, jokes and comments. By clicking Sign up, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider "They pressured me to tell them where he was," she says. 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 always get emotional about the old bus. ", It was her first glimpse of Furthur, the bus Kesey and the Pranksters had just driven to and from the World's Fair in New York, becoming poster children for the promise and perils of life, liberty, and LSD. The resurgence of life. I was floored. Although Garcia and Adams reconciled after the dissolution of his relationship with Koons in 1977, they stopped cohabiting a year later (save for occasional holiday reunions) due to the guitarist's heroin and cocaine addictions. I appreciate whats going on with the Alex Grey scene and these shamanistic visionary artists. I think that two people hiding out in the same family would have been even more difficult. I rebelled against the Grateful Dead as a teenager. She decided to take the wheel again. The dealers were out there spreading bad, bad shit, telling them it was LSD, and it would be some nasty tranq from the nuthouse.". During this period, he rekindled his relationship with Koons, who had been largely out of his life since the late 1970s; they would ultimately marry in February 1994. ", She addressed it head-on. Mountain Girl, eight months pregnant, hitchhiked to get groceries. Photo: Gene Anthony: 1966 Lihat Semua Hasil . Mountain Girl believes he was still suffering from the trauma of seeing his father, Joe, drown on a fishing trip when he was 6. My relationship with him had to do more with intellectual companionship rather than a physical relationship, which was really brief. "I went down for a long time." With Sunshine slung to her hip, Mountain Girl fell into communal living again. KLCCs Tiffany Eckert speaks to Sunshine Kesey, daughter of Ken Kesey, about their family life, Keseys wrestling start at Springfield High School and his indelible mark on a generation. As it was, he always knew he could come home and there would always be a place for him, no matter how weird it got out there. "You could come stay with me," he said. In exchange for the cash, she gave up claim to the fruits of his talent, his real estate holdings and any future earnings. "It was written all over his face. "Of course, I was totally in denial about this. He was losing me and Sunshine.". What she didn't realize, until Neal had peeled off the road and started driving the wrong way down a railroad track, was that he was none other than Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Jack Kerouac's 1967 Beat classic "On the Road.". "It was not a fun trip, let's put it that way." But Mountain Girl had been around long enough to know that, in the words painted on the Pranksters' bus, Nothing Lasts. "It took the edge off me, to be carrying a kid," she says. 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. "We were delighted. But for Mountain Girl, it lives forever, an emblem of everything her generation believed in, and all that they achieved. 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. 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 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. "I was devastated," she says. 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. After his death, Koons Garcia stopped the checks. But there was one glaring problem. "Ken was upset that I hooked up with Jerry," she says. But she felt as if he'd scored Kesey something else as well: this plucky 19-year-old from Poughkeepsie. ", One day, when she was up in San Francisco, her attorney got a call. In that the guy gets this beautiful woman and wants to keep her all to himself and he doesn't care if she changes, and one day looks around and wonders why she changed.". The concert had been meant to revive the spirit of a generation. ", It didn't help matters when Mountain Girl made an alarming discovery: She was pregnant. Despite the new light in her life, a darkness set in. "They were talking about chord progressions and all this interesting stuff.". But I was anti-cocaine," she says pausing. "You know, we lost him out of our family. She got a lot more happiness than anyone else in Grateful Dead Land.". Mountain Girl sued to get the money owned her. Sunshine Kesey and Annabel Garcia live nearby, not far from their mom. By then, things at their Stinson Beach aerie, Sans Souci, on a ridge high above the beach, had gotten pretty weird. ", David Kushneris a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. She just gave Jerry a lot of slack. Her function? "She was Jerry's girlfriend. ", "Bill is a wonderful man," says Sunshine Kesey, who, with her halo of white-blond curls resembles her father, Ken Kesey. He had dumped all of his belongings in the Garcia driveway, including a box with a cat in it. "Crazy," she recalls. A large mandala is painted on the living-room floor. My attention would get distracted and I would miss a cue and Pigpen (McKernan, the Dead's late organist) would be up there pointing to his microphone and be really mad at me. she says with a big bright grin. "I would go over from time to time and hang out," she says. ", Mountain Girl and Jerry divorced in 1993. "He was not happy to see me," she says. Mountain Girl is so awesome, I would love to read her memoir or autobiography. "I accepted the position without really asking what it would be, because it was in a lab and I felt at home there. "She ended up being responsible (if that concept is even thinkable in this context) for mixing the multiple mutable audio loops connecting every part of the space with every other. 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. "When you're in a car driving across the plains of Kansas from one gig to the next and you're lucky enough to be in the same car with Jerry and MG, the details they would notice about everything, the joy they would take in life, would sweep you along. ", But Mountain Girl and Jerry remained intertwined through it all. I say that after talking to so many Deadheads, who have testified to me that the Grateful Dead changed their lives.. She arrived in California, like many at the time, eager to bloom. That was sort of my style, to ask the really tough questions right away.". The city recently commissioned a two-story, photo-realistic mural to honor their, This Halloween marks an auspicious occasion: the 50th anniversary of the Acid Test Graduation. It was never a mistake.". "And then all of a sudden it was too much. I'd really kind of like to stay out of that discussion because we're good friends and she's a very private person. Mountain Girl's bitterness, if she ever had any (and she denies that she ever did), probably dried up long ago. They were moving around, and I go, 'Oh, isn't that cute?'" He had been in a coma. I was just on board to do whatever.". Late one night, alone in the Stanford lab, she decided to try some other interesting stuff. I mean, yuck! Jerry was a right person, too, but unfortunately, he was stuck and trapped in a circumstance he didn't want to be in. And then this sort of unusual set of circumstances occurred whereby Jerry " Her conversation tails off into an uncomfortable silence. It's sad to see it crumble away. Things weren't supposed to work out this way. [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. "Not just a little upset. "It worked for me to have a different identity," she says. They rebooted their commune around him, reassuming their established roles. When she stepped off the bus in October 1966 with her daughter, Sunshine, she recognized a familiar face. Theres so much scrutiny and I just wanna enjoy it. She craved acceptance but couldn't seem to fit in. "I slept with some of the other Pranksters from time to time." Carolyn "went to war with her" and eventually, the gym teacher saw to it that she was expelled only six weeks before graduation. Theres a high level of quality and integrity there, which is so important when we think about licensing something. We often thought of ourselves as a karass. Getting into the cannabis industry was something I was determined to do. While living together over the next decade, they raised Sunshine along with their two daughters. Sunshine Kesey is one of renown author and merry maker, Ken Kesey's, children. Adams was 19, dark-haired, big-eyed, and broken-hearted, consoling herself over a double espresso and ice cream after her boyfriend had abruptly split town. When it appeared that he would survive, she and the girls moved in with him in San Rafael and for six months, she had the family life she had always wanted. With Sunshine slung to her hip, Mountain Girl fell into communal living. Billed as the Trips Festival, the immersive, three-day event would draw more than 10,000 people to revel in the city's underground art scene, from light-show artists and experimental theater troupes to bands like the Dead, which gave its first major performance in San Francisco. "Hitchhiked up I-5, pregnant with no money whatsoever, begging cups of coffee off of people." "Grateful Dead star's death leads to battle where it's GARCIA VS. GARCIA". Also, at the end of the day, the whole world is a mystery. That she was 18, unmarried and pregnant with Kesey's child didn't really register until the birth was upon her. I couldn't believe it. The mythology of the time, and the dynamic young woman at the heart of it, was written mostly by men Wolfe, Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady all of whom. She wasn't a judgmental kind of person, she was just brutally frank. A A. "I was a total tomboy. What the hell is going on? "She came and stayed with me," says Goldie Rush, who was living in Greenbrae at the time, right behind the hospital. When her youngest brother, Don, offered her a ride to California, she took it. The real story of Mountain Girl, as I've learned after months of talking to her, is far more complex. He played to her all night. "You could tell the number of people was way exceeding the ability of anybody to deal with it." Sunshine Kesey, daughter of Mountain Girl and Ken Kesey, also recalls Garcia as an extremely laid-back father figure during the years she and her mother lived with him. She had $600 in her pocket and she was 17 years old. Why, I take four or five to go to sleep!". 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 never socialized with the fan base or anything like that. "I was more than seven months pregnant and I didn't have shit. "He was just the guitar player," she says. But they wanted to do something to make things better, to restore new life to the countercultural movement to which they had helped give birth. 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. We want to work with folks who bring a very high level of quality and integrity.. The others quickly took note of this dynamic new girl in their midst. She received her diploma by mail. "There were always girls coming out of the woodwork," says Mountain Girl. Sunshine Kesey, Self: Move Me Brightly: Celebrating Jerry Garcia's 70th Birthday. 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. "She's a person possessed of spirit and weight, will and energy," says Jon McIntire, the Dead's manager from 1968 to 1990. The riotous paint job was murky and peeling, as if the bus had leprosy. The tiny sink was a hazard zone. From the Merry Pranksters to the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia's widow opens up about what the age of free love was really like. So we found some awesome partners. "Well," she asked him, "what are we going to do?". How could you do that? And in what medium do you prefer to work? It is to Pleasant Hill that Carolyn Garcia retreated many years ago, during her nearly three decade liaison and marriage to Jerry Garcia - the totemic Captain Trips, guitar-genius/linchpin of the Grateful Dead - when the druggy Deadhead scene got too weird and dangerous. Sunshine Kesey, who grew up in the Garcia home, and Garcia's manager, Steve Parish, attended as well. 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