", Any hopes she had of a joyful reunion were dashed the moment they found Kesey. "Someone got us all tickets and we dressed up to go. She tried to get in the door but a tree had grown up and blocked her passage. They just fell in love. Tags Arts & Culture Springfield ken kesey Sunshine Kesey Road Trip Tiffany Eckert Tiffany joined the KLCC News team in 2007. "I wasn't a hundred percent Ken's girlfriend," she says. The tiny sink was a hazard zone. When Thompson and the Hells Angels showed up for parties, Mountain Girl was soon giving them rides on the back of their own Harleys. But now that she'd fallen in love with Garcia, Kesey seemed to realize what he'd lost. But for Mountain Girl, it lives forever, an emblem of everything her generation believed in, and all that they achieved. Instead, he decided to hide it. "They were talking about chord progressions and all this interesting stuff.". "I knew he could pay it and that he would get total control of his own business and that I wouldn't ever have to know anything about anything. ", But as much as the Chief held the power in the Pranksters' fold, Mountain Girl maintained her own. His smile looms like a half moon that spins along with us through the trees. I think its important for people to have an alternative to alcohol, an alternative to opiates. There were people everywhere looking for anything, looking for a place to lie down. That was his happiest space. They traveled as a couple, for instance, when the Dead went off to Egypt to play at the Pyramids in 1978. Trixie and her reclusive. ", "Jerry and MG were absolutely a blessing to hang out around," says McIntire. "I felt bad when it was taken down into the woods and abandoned. But Jerry had up and died. Then all of a sudden, the older guy's pulling these clippings out of his wallet and he's a Kerouac character. ", "If you're involved with somebody with a talent like Jerry's, the richness of his gift to everybody was so powerful, you have to give them a lot of latitude to express that gift," she says in retrospect. Mountain Girl gave Garcia enough latitude for him to play music, get involved with other women, and eventually, fall into the trap of what she calls "the white drugs" - cocaine and heroin. In a loosely autobiographical screenplay he wrote called "Over the Border," he rhapsodizes about "her big brown eyes made even bigger by the electricity of the warm autumn night with the stars above and her man beside her. Carolyn Adams heard Jerry Garcia before she saw him. 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. So I will say that sampling the product is a huge perk of the gig for me. But basically, she was assigned to the traditional women's stuff of keeping a home, albeit a very large and unruly one. "I wasn't quite as daredevil as I had been. It was completely nuts. She arrived in California, like many at the time, eager to bloom. I am quite certain that it was a comfort to him as well as to me. "He was aware of all this extra stuff going on in the music," she says, "which is one of the reasons it had so much power to move people. In the course of a few months, some 100,000 young people from all over the world descended on Haight-Ashbury to get high and make love and protest the war. Mountain Girl, Sunshine Kesey, Trixie Garcia, and Annabelle Garcia #Garcia75th : Jay Blakesberg Photography "You could buy bennies over the counter in Mexico, and I think he'd been doing more than his share," she says. ", Jerry never said a word, said Mountain Girl. He loved to engage all sorts of people in all sorts of conversation and brief relationships. . She was still dropping acid before the shows, albeit in smaller doses. People were just sleeping on the street in their shorts in the San Francisco fog, and getting terribly chilled. There were daisies growing up through the floor boards. KLCC Staff visits Springfield 2-17-17KLCC Celebrates 50 years with a series of visits to our outlying communities. When her youngest brother, Don, offered her a ride to California, she took it. "He'd fill it with music, drugs, girlfriends, whatever. Palo Alto in the early 1960s was a dynamic crucible of the radical changes to come. She was judge and jury in those days. Her eyes well with tears. He could see the musical notes, he told her. The father of Mountain Girl's baby was now a fugitive. That she was 18, unmarried and pregnant with Kesey's child didn't really register until the birth was upon her. But she's come out ahead of the game. We were there for 18 months. I actually call her and harass her about it pretty often. "We were delighted. A buxom, big-boned woman wearing green velvet pull-on pants, a shapeless black wool sweater and a voluminously floppy, long black coat, Mountain Girl is a force of nature - difficult to ignore when she's under sail. Today, Carolyn Adams Walker Garcia is 51 years old. After his death, Koons Garcia stopped the checks. Or, as Kesey told Tom Wolfe: "Either you are on the bus or off the bus." "I was taught every plant name as we passed it on a hike," she says. "I slept with some of the other Pranksters from time to time." How could you do that? "I could hear his voice and somebody else's voice," she tells me. Mountain Girl walked around it, peering in the windows. 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. It would prove to be a pivotal moment in the history of the counterculture. [2] Shortly after she was expelled from high school, she traveled to Palo Alto, California in 1963 with her older brother, Don. They were monumental. In 1980, on New Year's Eve, they got married by a Buddhist monk backstage at a Dead concert. So Ive gotten much smaller. She moved to Europe with a boyfriend for a year but wrote to Garcia. [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. She wrote one of the first books on marijuana farming, "The Primo Plant: Growing Sinsemilla Marijuana," back in 1977. She eschewed the fashion pursuits of the time. Today, vestiges of the slender, heart-stoppingly beautiful girl-woman who caught Kesey's eye in 1964 remain - the fierce intelligence, the take-control bossy stick, the intellectual acuity, the ability to cut through a morass of pretense to the heart of the matter, the boisterousness, the guilelessness, the curiosity, the laughter. She hallucinated "pyramids and parrots and lush jungle vegetation," she says. 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. I was not seeking the spotlight. Under the isolation and pressures of the road, he slipped into cocaine and heroin addiction. The free concert, scheduled for December 6, 1969, at the Altamont Speedway in Northern California, would include performances by the Dead, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and the Rolling Stones. 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 just had to go with it. I still enjoy making art as part of my range of hobbies and skills. "It was awful," Mountain Girl says. And that was a faith in the rightness of our relationship. "I went down for a long time." 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. It was this concentration on the domestic side which certainly was not intentional on my part. 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. "He just disappeared. It was the honorable thing to do and it should be honored. By clicking Sign up, you agree to receive marketing emails from Insider I had no idea what he was doing. Readers have been afforded plenty of accounts of riding shotgun with Cassady, but never from the perspective of a hitchhiking woman. "She was fascinated with Jerry and the Dead's trip. She refused to rat her hair or wear makeup. "Ooh, man," she told him, "there's something. "We thought we had everything settled and that I was going to go up to Oregon and raise dahlias have some goldfish or something that would keep me happy. That was sort of my style, to ask the really tough questions right away.". She was pregnant by Kesey, 11 years her senior, who was married with kids. ", But she "wasn't happy about the (female stuff). The intellectual climate at Kesey's was free of academic constraints," remembers Carolyn Garcia. "I just said, 'I have no idea he disappeared.' ", One night in San Francisco, four months after the Beatles show, Kesey and Mountain Girl were up on the roof of a home in Telegraph Hill, smoking a joint. Bradley clutches my arm, massaging my knee and rubbing my ankle and chuckling to himself. "There were always girls coming out of the woodwork," says Mountain Girl. I was just on board to do whatever.". Written in red paint, the front bumper proclaimed "CAUTION WEIRD LOAD. Kesey dug how she spoke her mind, made him laugh, and dazzled him with beauty. In 1959, Kesey had been a volunteer in a C.I.A.-sponsored LSD experiment at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park. So yes, me and my sisters are working on getting those stories out of her tightly clenched fingers. The Altamont festival, meant to be a sort of "Woodstock West," was organized in their apartment. Meals got planned; bathrooms were cleaned. Ken (Kesey) could have made yard art out of it. Until then, she says, she had always considered their relationship to be "buddy-buddy." "They were a couple. Our writers provide thought-provoking perspectives, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise. The week after the Trips Festival, on January 31, 1966, Furthur was found abandoned on a cliffside road, high above the crashing shore of Eureka. What the hell just happened? Says Kesey: "There was never a question that she would not have the baby, gosh, no. I say that after talking to so many Deadheads, who have testified to me that the Grateful Dead changed their lives.. It was the summer of 1963. Inside was Kesey's suicide note: "Ocean, ocean, I'll beat you in the end," it read. That would have been a sin. He stood there eyeing her up her long dark hair, her big bright smile the latest Alice to have fallen through the rabbit hole. But God, if somebody didn't cook, do you know what they would eat? But I was anti-cocaine," she says pausing. "I had disempowered myself by joining this group," she says. "It was fall. I watched MG and Jerry connect. A A. MG cherished the quiet moments with Jerry in their room, nursing Sunshine in bed as he noodled her favorite tune, "Viola Lee Blues," on his guitar. Retired Prankster Lee Quanstrom, a Santa Cruz-based journalist, has vivid memories of Mountain Girl. ", But, laughs Scully, "Nobody ever saw her and Jerry because they never came out of their room. "I went down for a long time." "It wasn't (about) any one person," she says. All of Jerrys kids are artists in one way or another. Snacks, live music, wine, beer & giveaways! 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. ", Flush with cash, she bought a white Honda 50 scooter and took to riding up and down the coast. ", She and Kesey were "mutually attracted." Kesey seemed weary, a cruise director at the end of a long and tiring voyage. "Nobody can measure up," Mountain Girl says of Jerry. 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. Getting on it was a liberating feeling. 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. In my case, with a powerful talent like Jerry and this tremendous culture-changing thing he'd found to do, it was a tough place to try to carry on a relationship. Pretty much all at once. Both of them could be among the most open people I've ever run across.". For KLCC, Tiffany reports on health care, social justice and local/regional news. "Cassady was on a speed run, looking for bennies," Garcia remembers. To what extent do you currently explore your own creative expressions? It was cozy enough, and I felt perfectly safe. We're lucky to have geniuses around giving us art." Obviously, were not huge, but it would be nice to do something like that one day. They produced two daughters. Everybody was attached to it.". So Garcias Hand Picked means that we are actually in there tasting and trying these products. Sunshine Kesey is one of renown author and merry maker, Ken Kesey's, children. I appreciate whats going on with the Alex Grey scene and these shamanistic visionary artists. When the Summer of Love devolved into a plague of bad drug trips and homeless teenagers, Mountain Girl and Garcia set out to restore new life to the countercultural movement to which they had helped give birth. Dean Budnick on December 2, 2020 Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, Sunshine Kesey, Trixie Garcia and Annabelle Garcia "I sincerely believe that the more people that we can expose to Jerry's. Adams Garcia, a large woman with long, graying hair and no makeup, a former Merry Prankster who had two daughters with Jerry Garcia and another named Sunshine with Ken Kesey, undoubtedly. 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