What needed to be done was to drive back the black and white and the separations between people and make a place where people could come together and have some joy and harmony without doctrine. I'd really kind of like to stay out of that discussion because we're good friends and she's a very private person. She was very bright, very fast. "You have to be a pretty big person to hold your own with Kesey and Garcia and their milieu. "I stayed up in Oregon much longer than I thought I should. We call them the "bears.' Ken Kesey was in a lot of trouble in 1965 with the authorities in San Mateo for a marijuana bust. "My father was not a person who was ambitious in a materialistic way," says Carolyn's brother, Gordon Adams, 57, who runs a computer help line for architects and designers in Seattle. A few of her friends acknowledge the incident as rumor but refuse to verify it as fact). Browse 85 sunshine kesey stock photos and images available, or start a new search to explore more stock photos and images. We want to work with folks who bring a very high level of quality and integrity.. Mountain Girl was equally defiant about their arrest. 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. She arrived in California, like many at the time, eager to bloom. Be the first to know about the Grateful Dead's exclusive limited-edition releases, breaking news on the band, community events, and so much more. The concert had been meant to revive the spirit of a generation. So not wanting to put dumb flourishes on his face or have Jerrys face on top of a pyramid or all these things that people have wanted to do. "She was Jerry's girlfriend. ", When I ask her how she felt about the name, she tells me she didn't like it because she didn't choose it. It was cozy enough, and I felt perfectly safe. Because for him it was a living fluid. We were there for 18 months. ", She addressed it head-on. It was a complicated situation but there's one thing that anyone close to the couple agrees upon: It was a very big love. After splitting with Walker, she took up with Jerry Garcia, but they did not marry for many years after. "I'm the illegitimate love . That's what a home is for. "He wanted to do his work and be off in his head. Their house was a living lab, a repository of bugs and plants. "Ken was upset that I hooked up with Jerry," she says. Until, in 1986, a phone call came telling her that Jerry was in Marin General Hospital in a diabetic coma and that he was not expected to live. I think its important for people to have an alternative to alcohol, an alternative to opiates. But they were reluctant to tell Mountain Girl, lest they hurt her. After 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. The resurgence of life. "She was fascinated with Jerry and the Dead's trip. But Jerry had up and died. It was definitely a mild psychedelic experience with a lot of long, complex dreams, mostly about ancient ruined cities - Mayan - and jaguars. Thats what motivates me to continue to do licensing, Jerry Garcias daughter Trixie reflects, as she discusses her familys recent business ventures. It seems like a logical fit. She received her diploma by mail. I went to the San Francisco Art Institute because my dad had a history there, and I was kind of looking for direction when I was younger. Carolyn's daughter Sunshine was born in a Manzanillo hospital where the water was turned off 12 hours a day. ", Today, 60 years since she took that ride with Neal Cassady, Mountain Girl is still forging her own path. "Now what will that do?" Weve met lots of people and toured lots of different places, and thought about many different ways to structure this. "I went down for a long time." The loss of his father was absolutely devastating for him as a little boy.". "I cry when I see the bus now, are you kidding?" The Altamont festival, meant to be a sort of "Woodstock West," was organized in their apartment. "You could tell the number of people was way exceeding the ability of anybody to deal with it." Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia were the stuff of hippie fairy tales, who dressed alike and thought alike and spoke as one person. "Garcia's Ex-Wife to Get $1.25 Million: 'Mountain Girl' had sued star's estate". My moms memoir has become my number-one focus over the past six months. "But Ken by that time was also aging, not too gracefully, and I don't drink. The intellectual climate at Kesey's was free of academic constraints," remembers Carolyn Garcia. He was 53. But she embraced it nonetheless. I also enjoy smoking weed around people who I dig. So when a guy named Bradley and his fast-talking friend Neal approached her at the caf and offered her a lift, she decided to see where the adventure would lead. It's so sad.". Daydreaming took me out the windows and into fresh, limitless landscapes and away from that tension of never quite fitting in, of the feeling of being odd and too smart.". Meanwhile, Koons Garcia's attorney, Paul Camera, has indicated that he will advise his client to appeal. 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. Even as a teenager dedicated to "experimentation," as Carolyn now puts it, she was a fairly daunting personality. He loved to work. Kesey dubbed them the Acid Tests. But Carolyn Garcia says, "nobody seemed to notice me for a second." by Petrus A. 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 could hear his voice and somebody else's voice," she tells me. But now that she'd fallen in love with Garcia, Kesey seemed to realize what he'd lost. 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. It was like opting to be an alien. "I was mortified," she says. "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. he asked me. I just ran my life that way and it mostly worked out.". When she stepped off the bus in October 1966 with her daughter, Sunshine, she recognized a familiar face. ", "The bus is the real talisman," said Kesey a few weeks later. Which is why I went and took it to court. A friend had smuggled him across the border to an undisclosed location in Mexico. Growing up, I went to the high school where 420 was coined [San Rafael High School], so theres that. I think I did a pretty good job. ", She's still a psychedelic priestess, though she's down to shrooming twice a year. But there was a part of Jerry's and my relationship that was unshatterable by any means that's persisted until today. After his death, Koons Garcia stopped the checks. [6], She had a relationship with another Prankster named George Walker, who would become her husband in 1966. "I always wanted to be a writer," she tells me with a sly smile. But from then on, Mountain Girl and Captain Trips were a pair. A month after the Grateful Dead's summer 1995 tour concluded, Garcia died at a rehabilitation facility in August 1995. This construct of human civilization is not the end all, be all. ", David Kushneris a long-time contributor to Rolling Stone. "She didn't say anything of any note except to acknowledge my presence. I think everybody had a crush on her.". Neither of us knew the language of sorting out your personal relationships," Carolyn says. In exchange for the cash, she gave up claim to the fruits of his talent, his real estate holdings and any future earnings. "It wasn't (about) any one person," she says. It was a minor note, although I suppose it wasn't minor for me at the time because I was young and attractive. Its nice to lose yourself in a piece of art. At home in Oregon, where she's down to shrooming twice a year. "It was awful," Mountain Girl says. Cassady had told Kesey that he met this girl who was a little wild, "like she was kind of a mountain girl," says Kesey. 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. Everyone would drink the LSD-spiked Kool-Aid and dance under the kaleidoscopic lights to their very own house band, the newly anointed Grateful Dead. As Mountain Girl, she fit right in with her new tribe eating acid, painting the bus, and, with her mechanical know-how, running the light-show projectors at the Pranksters' bacchanalian revivals. It was completely nuts. Tracks Listen Buy Opening Announcment Deep Elem Blues Until then, Mountain Girl had always considered their relationship to be "buddy-buddy." And that was a faith in the rightness of our relationship. In those early days, she didn't take special note of Garcia. The concert had been meant to revive the spirit of a generation. Koons Garcia and Weir took a portion of Garcia's ashes to India two weeks ago and spread them . 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 she wasn't looking for another man to step in. She studied journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has worked in a variety of media including television and daily print news. Mountain Girl believes he was still suffering from the trauma of seeing his father, Joe, drown on a fishing trip when he was 6. We did the best we could. At 710, Mountain Girl imposed order like a drill sergeant. And there it was. Occasionally, Mountain Girl would ferry the kids away to Oregon and once, during one long separation, took them all the way back East to be near her parents. Chips and Twinkies. In her senior year of high school, she got expelled for sneaking into the boys locker room to see their new Nautilus machine. (October 15, 1998). So yes, me and my sisters are working on getting those stories out of her tightly clenched fingers. The. Menu. My relationship with him had to do more with intellectual companionship rather than a physical relationship, which was really brief. Ratburgers.". And that was the end of the conversation. She uttered a huge sigh. With Sunshine slung to her hip, Mountain Girl fell into communal living. Instead, she entered into an affair with Ken Kesey, the famed novelist and leader of the Pranksters, with whom she eventually had a daughter. I was locked in. They ran a bar in San Francisco. 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. "Oh, I came from up on the mountain there," she said. I made a few phone calls and everybody said the same thing: "I don't know. In October 1966, with her visa up, she rode back to San Francisco with her baby and the Pranksters. In 1966, Kesey was still officially a fugitive. The Dead was scheduled as the final act, but the band never took the stage. I was floored. "Grateful Dead star's death leads to battle where it's GARCIA VS. GARCIA". "I'm standing there, it's like 6 in the morning," she recalls. "That was my golden destination.". It was never a mistake.". "Nobody can measure up," Mountain Girl says of Jerry. ", Carolyn was born on May 6, 1946. ", But Mountain Girl and Jerry remained intertwined through it all. "I haven't had another relationship really since then. From the Merry Pranksters to the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia's widow opens up about what the age of free love was really like. "Ooh, man," she told him, "there's something. When her boss found her slumped over her desk the next morning, he fired her. Over the summer, she took a waitressing job and put college on hold. Circling back to Jerry, over the past few years, The Days Between [the period between Garcias birth on August 1 and death on August 9] has become a significant event. "[1], In early 1964, she met Neal Cassady, who introduced her to Ken Kesey and his friends, one of whom gave her the name "Mountain Girl" because she was a "little bit wild. We cleaned our grass in an old aluminum colander, and stored the kilo of Acapulco gold in a kitchen cupboard. He is her "handmaiden.' Sunshine Kesey is one of renown author and merry maker, Ken Kesey's, children. But after spending a night in jail, she soon had another reason to weep. Under the isolation and pressures of the road, Jerry slipped into cocaine and heroin addiction. After an acid trip, it's always desirable to have a cozy warm spot to retreat to and sleep, even outdoors. 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. ", Cassady's car actually belonged to Kesey, who was living with his Prankster band up at La Honda in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But when choosing partners, products and people that are gonna go out there and represent Jerry, its important to pick the right people. "I was jealous of the freedom the boys seemed to have and I was always angling for another little slice of freedom. 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It was not a mistake. But she turned down their offer to become a member. And none of the Pranksters embodied that emerging spirit more than Mountain Girl. With steely determination, she continued her way across a wide expanse of unmown grass with Kesey's black spaniel Happy yapping at her heels. 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. I think I went for a lot of stuff. The others quickly took note of this dynamic new girl in their midst. His pedal steel and a chair the only furniture. "I had never heard any of that before," she says. Sunshine Kesey sits with her Grandmother, Geneva Jolley. She took them East. The wind blew the cottony clouds around in a brisk Oregon morning and Mountain Girl, oh-so-daintily for her bulk, padded across a slippery board laid to traverse a narrow creek. 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. At times, the emotional intensity is too much and it makes things difficult. "Well," he replied, "you must be Mountain Girl. "I'm so glad to see you!" I think that two people hiding out in the same family would have been even more difficult. She has won awards from Oregon Associated Press, PRNDI, and Education Writers Association. 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. Kesey dug how she spoke her mind, made him laugh, and dazzled him with beauty. Which was true. Last year, rapper Method Man launched TICAL flower and followed up recently with. Mountain Girl's bitterness, if she ever had any (and she denies that she ever did), probably dried up long ago. Carolyn Elizabeth Adams was born on May 6, 1946 in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she also grew up. His life as a fugitive seemed to be taking a toll on him, along with his seemingly unlimited intake of speed. "That was just a zap! Through our Discourse journalism, Insider seeks to explore and illuminate the days most fascinating issues and ideas. No Result . Kesey describes that first meeting with a literary allusion: "Vonnegut's phrase a "karass' comes to mind. 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. Had a quick mind - quick on the pickup with puns, jokes and comments. Carolyn is such a big, energetic person and you could see, even at 17, the frustration with the mildness in her family situation (along) with the kind of isolation she had and lack of involvement in rough and tumble life. Adams was offered a job in the Stanford cafeteria, but drawing on her knowledge of science she hustled one in the organic-chemistry lab instead. ", "I never met a woman with quite as much machismo as this girl had," marvels Scully. And in what medium do you prefer to work? "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. I was just on board to do whatever.". For MG, which is how her intimates shorten her name, the Pranksters were her college, the University of Fun. Caravans of Deadheads turned Jerry and Mountain Girl into godheads. Theres a simplicity with the no-nonsense, real-deal, getto-the-good-music feel of the space. 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. I just had to go with it. After. What was happening is that we were working on stuff together and collaborating on things and I was supporting him in a lot of the writing and the fiddling around and the taping and the filming you know. "I was no longer in charge of my own destiny.". Mountain Girl found the celebrated writer, who was 29, to be dynamic, intelligent, and playful. 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. 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