sunshine kesey garcia

She eschewed the fashion pursuits of the time. Other Pranksters went back and forth to America, but without money or means Mountain Girl felt trapped in Mexico. A long, strange trip led Mountain Girl to Kesey's final home. Somehow she and Garcia remained intertwined through it all. Photo: Gene Anthony: 1966 "It was a very egalitarian moment a lot of sharing, a lot of caring," she says. I used to do large paintings but storage got to be an issue. "I was a strong suit," she says. 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. It was like, Eww, thats folk art, what are you doing? But now theres a whole scene and a ton of people who are into it, and I think its beautiful. But, for me, its kind of like a meditative practice. But as the Dead began putting out records, Garcia spent most of the time on tour. If Mountain Girl wanted to come, she better hitchhike down to LA fast, before they split. Until then, the strongest drug she'd ever had was coffee. Not at all. "I'm so glad to see you!" Annabelle was in pre-school and Sunshine was in school. Menu. The bassist Phil Lesh considered Mountain Girl "the Prankster Queen," as he wrote in his memoir. She was broke. Had a quick mind - quick on the pickup with puns, jokes and comments. I want to carry a knife! She decided to take the wheel again. "You have to be a pretty big person to hold your own with Kesey and Garcia and their milieu. Her eyes well with tears. Ken Kesey's girlfriend Mountain Girl holds her baby daughter Sunshine. "Marijuana is an ancient plant, cultivated for centuries all over the world for rope & papermaking, for its oil, resin, & seeds," she writes in her memoir. I think that its very important for her voice to be in the mix and very important that she is able to share how these different events unfoldedthe way she remembers them. He had dumped all of his belongings in the Garcia driveway, including a box with a cat in it. Inside was Kesey's suicide note: "Ocean, ocean, I'll beat you in the end," it read. The band came back from Woodstock in August 1969 "looking like they'd been in a war zone," she says. Mountain Girl and Garcia divorced in 1993. Sunshine Kesey is one of renown author and merry maker, Ken Kesey's, children. He is her "handmaiden.' After marrying "partly for tax purposes and partly out of a fond flickering of a once-bright romance"[8][1] in late 1981, this arrangement persisted until Garcia entered a diabetic coma in 1986. Thats also important. In her senior year of high school, she got expelled for sneaking into the boys locker room to see their new Nautilus machine. Says Rock Scully, the Dead's road manager for many years, "Jerry Garcia was married to his guitar and the muse and his human relationships suffered for it. "I was very upset," she recalls. Kesey didn't show up, even after the birth. ", It was August 31, 1965, and everyone piled into Furthur, the painted school bus that would soon become one of the most renowned icons of the Sixties. Tracks Listen Buy Opening Announcment Deep Elem Blues Sunshine Kesey, who grew up in the Garcia home, and Garcia's manager, Steve Parish, attended as well. They wound up at Kesey's spread at 5 in the morning. In 1980, on New Year's Eve, they got married by a Buddhist monk backstage at a Dead concert. For Carolyn Adams, it was her second brush with genius. ", She's still a psychedelic priestess, though she's down to shrooming twice a year. And this is no ordinary late-night, East Bay, marijuana mind game. "We were trying to do an end run on the legal system and get the ball around to the other side of the court without having to engage a whole lot of people in the process. ", "MG put up with a lot of shit for a lot of years," says Goldie Rush. "I wanted to stay with my Prankster buddies. Tracks Listen Buy How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) Stop That Train In 1975, when Theresa Garcia was not even a year old, Jerry disappeared. MG, as her family and friends call her, is finally ready to be the author of her own story. "Now she's with this guy who is a perfect match," says Tangerine. I'll go through with my heels at your hungry ribs.". I think that two people hiding out in the same family would have been even more difficult. 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. I know shes been working on her memoir. Compared to what the fans know and want to cultivate, Im no expert. But much of that time, Jerry was on tour. Top editors give you the stories you want delivered right to your inbox each weekday. And that was the end of the conversation. The first in a series of archive releases celebrating the run of Jerry Garcia shows on Broadway in Oct/Nov 1987. 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. At times, the emotional intensity is too much and it makes things difficult. It kept him very up. Again, it was time to extricate herself and rescue her children. I had a new baby. Because for him, it was a living fluid.". "He was kind of a wreck. But who is this woman who attracted Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, two of the most powerful influences on the popular culture in the past three decades? The quote from Trixie in Long Strange Trip about her "knowing not to . It was completely nuts. Read more Discourse stories here. You can't do drugs when you're in a coma.". ", At the same time, she says, "it was joyous.". I was hallucinating. Through our Discourse journalism, Insider seeks to explore and illuminate the days most fascinating issues and ideas. I just ran my life that way and it mostly worked out.". Theres so much scrutiny and I just wanna enjoy it. Kesey seemed weary, a cruise director at the end of a long and tiring voyage. The moment she hugged him, she felt a flash. The machine was down. "The Beatles came to the old Cow Palace down in the mudflat south of San Francisco," she reads. But, says Gordon "Dass" Adams, Carolyn Garcia's oldest brother, "Jerry was a lousy husband.". We are on this planet to live, not to die.". "He wasn't super happy about it," she recalls. "Later MG told me that when she met Jerry," remembers McIntire, "she recognized in him that his music was the stuff of greatness. I should also point out that Im a huge cannabis fan. It was the honorable thing to do and it should be honored. It was like opting to be an alien. Along with the stories she told me over hours of interviews, it's a monumental lost chapter of American literature a funny, vivid, heartbreaking account of an indelible time and place, as told by the woman at the center of the wildness. Today, Carolyn Adams Walker Garcia is 51 years old. It seems like a logical fit. When I met Kesey and the Pranksters, I had that understanding immediately - that these guys were going to be my friends for a very long time. She'd hitched a ride out west with her older brother, Don, determined to leave square old Poughkeepsie far in the rearview. While that led to a lengthy period of cohabitation in which Carolyn Garcia played an integral role in her husband's recovery, they gradually drifted apart once more when Garcia began an extramarital relationship and fathered a child with Manasha Matheson. Mountain Girl kept her gig as the projectionist, painting the walls with colors as the trippers danced to the Dead. I know they had a big love with one another. He had been in a coma. Sunshine Kesey, Self: Move Me Brightly: Celebrating Jerry Garcia's 70th Birthday. He could see the musical notes, he told her. And then one day, he just kind of up and left. In October 1966, with her visa up, she rode back to San Francisco with her baby and the Pranksters. I never socialized with the fan base or anything like that. "You could tell the number of people was way exceeding the ability of anybody to deal with it." "As the new attraction, I was getting a lot of interest from the unattached males," Adams recalls. Bradley clutches my arm, massaging my knee and rubbing my ankle and chuckling to himself. Then all of a sudden, the older guy's pulling these clippings out of his wallet and he's a Kerouac character. Jerry was very jealous. Chips and Twinkies. Konser Grateful Dead di Oregon pada tahun 1972 menyelamatkan produk susu keluarga Kesey dan menjadi legenda kontra. Ratburgers.". It was warm," she recalls. "I was more than seven months pregnant and I didn't have shit. None of the various women and children in his life could dispute that. Jerry and Carolyn Garcia divorced in 1994[1] but remained friends until his death. "Garcia's Ex-Wife to Get $1.25 Million: 'Mountain Girl' had sued star's estate". "I had a personal myth about independence that was getting shattered," she says. Getting on it was a liberating feeling. 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 didn't want to compete for attention," admits Mountain Girl. After a harrowing experience nursing the baby while on acid "it magnifies the suction sensation to the maximum, like whoa!" One thing that I wanted to do was fight against the stereotypes of the longhaired stoner and the dirty hippie. My very best friend is a high-functioning lawyer whos also a pot smoker. Thats what motivates me to continue to do licensing, Jerry Garcias daughter Trixie reflects, as she discusses her familys recent business ventures. I would question every single thing. Why, I take four or five to go to sleep!". 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). ", But at La Honda and in other communities around the country, a new movement was taking place. 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. She wasn't a judgmental kind of person, she was just brutally frank. I just had to go with it. The joy started to end around 1974, when the Grateful Dead decided to take a break. She named her baby girl Sunshine Kesey. There was a Free Clinic for those who were sick, and a Free Store for those in need of basic necessities, and there was music everywhere. If you were stupid, she'd tell you so. Kesey (left) with Neal Cassady, who introduced him to Mountain Girl when she was 19. Read more Discourse stories here. But Mountain Girl had been around long enough to know that, in the words painted on the Pranksters' bus, Nothing Lasts. "Well," she asked him, "what are we going to do?". People were just sleeping on the street in their shorts in the San Francisco fog, and getting terribly chilled. You know. ", And so Mountain Girl became a handmaiden to genius, a term she calls "horrible, but true." The acid tests were a series of psychedelic parties held in, KLCC's Tiffany Eckert sits down with Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia and George "Hardly Visible" Walker to talk about their experiences as Merry Pranksters, A New Ken Kesey Mural to be Painted on the Odd Fellows Building in Springfield, Acid Test Anniversary Reunites Merry Pranksters In Eugene, Merry Pranksters Swap Stories; Extended Interview With Mountain Girl and George Walker. In 1993, Jerry Garcia asked Mountain Girl for a divorce. It was a minor note, although I suppose it wasn't minor for me at the time because I was young and attractive. Mountain Girl found the celebrated writer, who was 29, to be dynamic, intelligent, and playful. The bus is rusted and broken down. ", But, laughs Scully, "Nobody ever saw her and Jerry because they never came out of their room. The future Mrs. 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. "He was crazy and he'd been to too many Dead shows," she says. So Garcias Hand Picked means that we are actually in there tasting and trying these products. Finances were cleared up. One thing that he did not want was any disclosure. She has no regrets. Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia were the stuff of hippie fairy tales, who dressed alike and thought alike and spoke as one person. A framed photo of Kesey juggling apples hangs on a bright red wall. "She never defined it as shit. When they returned, Jerry's heroin use was getting so extreme even Mountain Girl was noticing it. "They're great together. Thats something I learned from my parents. He came and went for the next year." After a trial noted for the animosity between the two warring sides and full disclosure of the Garcias' private life and Jerry Garcia's assets - the very things he wished to avoid - the judge decided in Carolyn Garcia's favor. A few of her friends acknowledge the incident as rumor but refuse to verify it as fact). "I was a total tomboy. His life as a fugitive seemed to be taking a toll on him, along with his seemingly unlimited intake of speed. Cassady, she learned, had come across her at the caf while he was making a drug run to pick up the amphetamine pills Kesey needed to stay alert. That was his happiest space. [3] She got a job at Stanford University, working for Carl Djerassi in the organic chemistry lab analyzing psychiatric drugs, and she was eventually fired for "dipping into the experimental psychedelic chemicals she was analyzing. Because for him it was a living fluid. The Dead was scheduled as the final act, but the band never took the stage. Our writers provide thought-provoking perspectives, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise. What is your perspective on how it has evolved? That was home for me, I made that abundantly clear." ", David Kushneris a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. "I had disempowered myself by joining this group," she says. Ken Kesey was in a lot of trouble in 1965 with the authorities in San Mateo for a marijuana bust. 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. Six months later, Garcia had some dental work and got involved with pain relievers. After his death, Koons Garcia stopped the checks. She was amazingly beautiful. For a long time, Mountain Girl clung to her anonymity. Mom escaped. As the Stones launched into "Sympathy for the Devil," Mountain Girl heard a gunshot and took cover in the back of a tour bus. There were daisies growing up through the floor boards. "She had the ability to meld her energy with the energy of others to do more than what one person could do by themselves. I think I did a pretty good job. ", 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. What the hell just happened? She and Jerry lived off his $50 a week in gig money. I could go in there, but I didn't like it. It was before the age of security gates, and all sorts of bizarre hangers-on started planting themselves in the Garcia parking area. "She didn't move into another woman's house," says Tangerine. Once you've had a little kid, it's very difficult to focus on being a P.A. But she didn't have the money for another one, and she was almost entirely reliant on Kesey, who wanted her to keep the child. So I faded out of that position. "He'd fill it with music, drugs, girlfriends, whatever. But Ive gotten more confident as far as using my creative impulses or intuition to help guide the look and feel of some of the brand licenses and products. The middle is a lousy place to sit. She just gave Jerry a lot of slack. "Well," she asked him, "what are we going to do?". ", Carolyn was born on May 6, 1946. "Things changed," she says. They had not lived together for years, although once in a while they got together with the children during a holiday or when the Dead were in town playing a concert. "It took the edge off me, to be carrying a kid," she says. Nobody can measure up. "Cassady was on a speed run, looking for bennies," Garcia remembers. The fairy tale soured. Instead, he decided to hide it. It was the summer of 1963. ", When she broke the news to Kesey, he seemed nervous. GarciaLive Volume 17 showcases highlights from three stand-out shows captured in the Jerry Garcia Band's native Northern California. 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. "I had never heard any of that before," she says. Despite the free-love ethos of the Sixties, she could feel the tension her affair with Kesey generated in the group. At the police station, speaking with a reporter, Kesey suggested that he was being persecuted for his role in the counterculture. And they had the smallest room in the house at that point. "I cry when I see the bus now, are you kidding?" "I was mortified," she says. Meanwhile, Mountain Girl took her three girls to Oregon. ", Her parents didn't know she was pregnant, so she was stuck with the Pranksters. Before we talk about more recent developments, can you share your thoughts on Port Chester, N.Y.s Garcias, which opened more than seven years ago? I fear she did most of the adapting.". The loss of his father was absolutely devastating for him as a little boy. Courtesy Sunshine Kesey 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. "I'm not sorry about it particularly," she said. 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. As most suspected, it was yet another prank. But she turned down their offer to become a member. Before the lawyer finally disappeared, Mountain Girl shooed him off her front porch with a small child's broom, smacking him over the head. The seeds she'd helped sow were beginning to bloom. 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. 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. Thats a whole thing that wasnt even acceptable in the fine art world like 20 years ago. 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. She had intelligence, joie de vivre and a directness that is really remarkable. The Altamont festival, meant to be a sort of "Woodstock West," was organized in their apartment. She was living near Stanford, hired by then-department head Carl Djerassi to work the night shift at the mass spectrometer in the university's organic chemistry lab. She wrote about the ride, and reads it to me: Meanwhile, fumbling in his pocket, he produces a handful of pills, and an assortment of newspaper clippings and matches. What the hell is going on? I was very much in love with Jerry's music and supported it, but our personal relationship was sort of outside that. "That's the coolest thing I ever saw. I was floored. Initially. "Where did you come from?" "I really would have liked to have gone," she says, "but I didn't have any way to go.". Thirty years ago, in the dawning of psychedelia, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, that tatterdemalion pre-hippie/post-Beat caravansary of performers, musicians, poets, magicians, gypsies, tramps and fools crammed into their gaily-painted 1939 International-Harvester, and drove their way into the American consciousness on the rollicking prose of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. What other considerations are important to you when selecting a partner? Theyre like musicians; they just need assistance.
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