"Girls didn't have as much personal freedom as boys did," she remembers. 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. With the best of intentions and the best of relationships, things can go terribly wrong. Inside was Kesey's suicide note: "Ocean, ocean, I'll beat you in the end," it read. What the hell is going on? He loved to work. "I had never heard any of that before," she says. He could see the musical notes, he told her. The moment she hugged him, she felt a flash. [Laughs.] ", She addressed it head-on. 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. "They were talking about chord progressions and all this interesting stuff.". To ensure that the baby, named Solano in Spanish (which, laughs Garcia, means "sun porch" ) would have legal U.S. citizenship, Mountain Girl married a pretty blond Prankster named George Walker. I had f - - - - d up the sample and taken the thing out of commission for a day. She and Garcia lived off his $50 a week in gig money. The City of Springfield is installing a two-story, photorealistic painted mural of Ken Kesey downtown on the side of the Odd Fellows Building, current, Renowned author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey grew up in Springfield. And this is no ordinary late-night, East Bay, marijuana mind game. 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. Other Pranksters went back and forth to America, but without money or means Mountain Girl felt trapped in Mexico. "I'm not sorry about it particularly," she said. I wanted to sidestep that rock star wife thing as much as possible. [Laughs.]. But, she emphasizes, the gestalt of the Dead, that the whole was so much greater than the parts, kept her a believer. No Result . Finances were cleared up. One of her father's progenitors was Dr. Samuel Adams, a physician in General Burgoyne's army during the Revolutionary War. I walked over to look, amazed. "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. It was a toxic environment. "I was mortified," she says. Dawn was breaking as they arrived at a ranch in La Honda. She affected black turtlenecked sweaters and carried books of poetry. Like any other rock and roller, Jerry Garcia was under tremendous pressure to fool around. "Neal basically dropped me off there like fresh meat or something," she says. ", "Bill is a wonderful man," says Sunshine Kesey, who, with her halo of white-blond curls resembles her father, Ken Kesey. When they returned, Jerry's heroin use was getting so extreme even Mountain Girl was noticing it. "I cry when I see the bus now, are you kidding?" Tiffany joined the KLCC News team in 2007. She hallucinated "pyramids and parrots and lush jungle vegetation," she says. In early 1964, she met Neal Cassady, who introduced her to countercultural figure and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey. Or, as Kesey told Tom Wolfe: "Either you are on the bus or off the bus." "It wasn't (about) any one person," she says. Her function? "God knows what Jerry was doing when they were out on the road," she says. Its very small scale; its just a nod to her range of influence, and how many people idolize her. His eyes smiled. Six months later, Garcia had some dental work and got involved with pain relievers. "He'd fill it with music, drugs, girlfriends, whatever. [5] Kesey was arrested for marijuana possession in La Honda, in 1965 and fled to Mexico. Snacks, live music, wine, beer & giveaways! ", Still facing pot charges in San Francisco, she had to hitchhike up and down the coast for her court appearances, five hours each way. The court case turned into a high-profile free-for-all, with Koons Garcia's side claiming that Jerry had stopped loving Carolyn years before, that their marriage on New Year's Eve, 1981, was a sham and had been for tax purposes only and that in circumventing the legal system, their agreement was basically not worth the paper it was written on. It was warm," she recalls. "I just couldn't deal with it," Mountain Girl says. None. Caravans of Deadheads turned Jerry and Mountain Girl into godheads. "I was totally devastated," says Carolyn, now 76. I am also happy that we found companies that are privately owned and family run. that was it for him. 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. You could feel it. "Just about nothing. "He was crazy and he'd been to too many Dead shows," she says. For years, it felt like it was just this mournful periodthere was this malaise and everyone was just so bummed out. She quickly joined the inner circle of Pranksters and became romantically involved with Kesey, having a daughter together named Sunshine. With Sunshine slung to her hip, Mountain Girl fell into communal living again. "They gave you enough so that you were transported to the geometrical universe where everything was in squares and triangles," she says. Through her window she saw legions of young people with long hair and colorful pants, smoking, dancing, playing guitar. ", 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. At times, the emotional intensity is too much and it makes things difficult. "It was a very egalitarian moment a lot of sharing, a lot of caring," she says. 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. As the '80s approached, the whole Dead zeitgeist was getting way out of control. "As the new attraction, I was getting a lot of interest from the unattached males," Adams recalls. But she's come out ahead of the game. No matter how peeved you get with people, the bus always makes your heart jump. It hadn't been running for a very long time. 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. "I wanted to stay on the bus," she says. When you feel people reaching out to you with those psychic rubber bands, they want to grab you and hold you and get you. Theres a simplicity with the no-nonsense, real-deal, getto-the-good-music feel of the space. "You could come stay with me," he said. Mountain Girl and Jerry moved into an apartment of their own, and she got pregnant again. Inside her plant-filled home lined with scientific books on psilocybin and posters of the Grateful Dead, Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, legendary godmother of the hippie counterculture, Jerry's ex-wife, and mother of their two daughters, sits on a red leather couch dressed in a red shirt and purple pants. "I had to take responsibility for this child." Ingram, Erik. He was 53. Beatniks and folk musicians were flocking to the area, and Adams fell in love with the music scene. Joy and excitement; uncertainty and pain. "He wanted to do his work and be off in his head. The band is comprised of former members Bob Weir (guitar), Mickey Hart (drums) and Bill Kreutzmann (drums) and new additions John Mayer (guitar), Oteil Burbrdige (bass/drums) and Jeff Chimenti. [Laughs.]. He's not going to come back. he says to me, looking out, holding out some grimy bennies in his palm. They were monumental. The familys latest endeavor, in association with Holistic Industries, is the Garcia Hand Picked cannabis brand, which follows partnerships with Keen footwear and Tessemaes organic sauces. And then one day, he just kind of up and left. Bradley clutches my arm, massaging my knee and rubbing my ankle and chuckling to himself. 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. We did the best we could. "I was no longer in charge of my own destiny.". He had been in a coma. The bus, however, was in a hiccupy mood and would only get moving 25 miles an hour up the hill, choking and gasping, overloaded and full of very high Pranksters.". It was definitely a mild psychedelic experience with a lot of long, complex dreams, mostly about ancient ruined cities - Mayan - and jaguars. ", Garcia knew that as Jerry's wife and mother of two of his children, she was entitled to half of his estate under California law. Both felt the $5 million figure was fair, she said. Back when she was riding with the Hells Angels and tripping with the Dead, she was a teenager coming of age at a moment the whole world seemed to be coming apart. By the time Jerry Garcia met Carolyn Adams she was the iconic Mountain Girl - the outrageous, free-spirited teenaged Merry Prankster who captivated Tom Wolfe's imagination in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. She also says that she started putting on weight "out of self-defense. Jerry Garcia exclaimed. "Well," she asked him, "what are we going to do?". I absolutely love sativasI like getting stoned and then doing gardening work and stuff like that. 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. The free concert, scheduled for December 6, 1969, would include performances by the Dead, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, and the Rolling Stones. It's a piece of my childhood. "She is the real deal.". Mountain Girl and Garcia retreated to a secluded home in Stinson Beach, California, to raise their daughters. It was something we did amongst ourselves. 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. "I was glad he wasn't there," she says, "but I was a little hurt he didn't come to see me." All there was was Synanon, and I wasn't going to call them!" Tags Arts & Culture Springfield ken kesey Sunshine Kesey Road Trip Tiffany Eckert Tiffany joined the KLCC News team in 2007. If you were stupid, she'd tell you so. 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. After splitting with Walker, she took up with Jerry Garcia, but they did not marry for many years after. Jerry was never with another woman who matched him as elegantly as she did, with her kind of energy and intelligence. It was completely nuts. And his nuts were actually well-educated college students with athletic prowess mostly pretty, athletic people." How could you do that? The group, she realized, "was his version of the nuthouse. "It's one of those things you do in your early adulthood. "They pressured me to tell them where he was," she says. That is really something." I was just on board to do whatever.". They're like a couple of grumpy bears who just woke up in the spring. 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. She decided to take the wheel again. 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. From her parents, young Carolyn inherited an adoration of nature. 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