5/5/2023 0 Comments Grateful dead gifts![]() "Ooh, man," she told him, "there's something. 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. We cleaned our grass in an old aluminum colander, and stored the kilo of Acapulco gold in a kitchen cupboard. I jumped in to make a few dinners and keep the pantry stocked. The tiny kitchen downstairs was the crossroads, we jammed in there for morning cornflakes and conversation. His pedal steel and a chair the only furniture. Our room at the top of the stairs was small, a comforting retreat, with a huge flag covering one wall, and a window looking out over the weedy garden. Jerry and I were head over heels in love, and radiant with happiness. She and Garcia lived off his $50 a week in gig money. Their pad had become a hub for the burgeoning scene around the Dead's extended family of dealers and musicians and psychedelic poster artists. With Sunshine slung to her hip, Mountain Girl fell into communal living. 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. "You could come stay with me," he said.Ī never-before-seen photo of Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia, in front of their home in the Haight-Asbury in San Francisco.Īfter 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. "Well," she asked him, "what are we going to do?" I got a huge jolt, and I had a very vivid image of us being together." "That was just a zap! What the hell just happened? He put the mojo on me. "I was like, 'Whoa, that was a really electric moment!'" she recalls with a laugh. The moment she hugged him, she felt a flash. Like Mountain Girl, he was looking for family. Until then, she says, she had always considered their relationship to be "buddy-buddy." Garcia was married with a daughter of his own, but his wife had moved back to Palo Alto without him. "I'm so glad to see you!" Jerry Garcia exclaimed. ![]() When she stepped off the bus in October 1966 with her daughter, Sunshine, she recognized a familiar face. Instead, she entered into an affair with Ken Kesey, the famed novelist and leader of the Pranksters, with whom she eventually had a daughter.Īfter 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. "He was just the guitar player," she says. ![]() In those early days, she didn't take special note of Garcia. She was about to become the unlikely teenage matriarch for the counterculture's most celebrated influencers, the Merry Pranksters, who gave her a new name: Mountain Girl. "They were talking about chord progressions and all this interesting stuff."Īdams, who was 19 when she heard Garcia that day in 1964, was on the precipice of a stunning personal transformation. "I could hear his voice and somebody else's voice," she tells me. Garcia was taking guitar lessons at Dana Morgan's Music Store in Stanford, California, when she heard Jerry's voice coming from the next room. Carolyn Adams heard Jerry Garcia before she saw him.
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