The curious case of Jerry Garcia’s missing toilet
We all lose or misplace things occasionally, maybe your car keys, a pair of socks, or even your spectacles if you are particularly forgetful. However, it is difficult to envision anybody except the Grateful Dead songwriter Jerry Garcia losing his own lavatory. Admittedly, for a man who so regularly experimented with altering his own brain, a toilet is probably not the only thing Garcia lost during his stint on planet Earth, but the fact that his toilet went missing years after his death makes the tale all the more bizarre.
For the uninitiated few among you, Jerry Garcia was the driving force behind one of the most revolutionary groups of the 1960s: Grateful Dead. Forged by a mutual love of LSD and experimenting with a variety of mind-altering chemicals, the group first came together in California back in 1965, forever changing the lineage of American rock music in the process. Alongside legions of ‘Deadheads’, Garcia helped to pioneer the influence of psychedelic substances on rock and roll music, and they were a regular fixture of his private life, too.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Jerry Garcia’s life was punctuated by a deluge of bizarre tales and unbelievable events. From his all-encompassing obsession with the idea of intergalactic life to his endless support of Polish avant-garde cinema, the life of the Grateful Dead songwriter was multifaceted, to say the least. Indeed, it was this unique existence and mindset that made Garcia and the Dead so appealing to thousands of fans around the globe.
Every successful artist has their own obsessive fans, but fans of the Grateful Dead take that obsession to entirely new peaks. Deadheads are often renowned for their unparalleled dedication to the band, as noted by the endless deluge of live bootlegs and cassette tapes produced by the fandom. Almost every concert the band ever performed has been meticulously recorded, documented, and discussed by the army of Deadheads, each desperate to hold on to a piece of their favourite band, however trivial it might seem to outsiders.
One of the strangest instances of Deadhead obsession boiling over concerns Jerry Garcia and a salmon-pink toilet. You see, after the unfortunate death of the songwriter in 1995, his home in Marin County, San Francisco, was sold to a man named Henry Koltys for $1.39 million. Almost immediately, Koltys saw an opportunity to sell off various fixtures and fittings from the house, including the toilet, to fans of Garcia and the Grateful Dead.
Initially, Koltys planned to auction off Garcia’s lavatory for charity, but the sale was blocked by a lawsuit from a friend of Garcia’s, who purchased the house from Koltys. So, for a number of years, Koltys’ own home in San Francisco was filled with various household items once owned by the Grateful Dead songwriter. That was until 2006, when he finally sold the porcelain throne to an online casino, Golden Palace, who reportedly wanted to use it in a marketing campaign.
The toilet never made it to the Canadian casino, which had forked over $2,550 for it. As it was waiting to be transported, along with various other bathroom items purchased by the casino, including a bidet, the salmon pink toilet was swiped by thieves. Although the casino offered a $250 reward for its return, the mysterious toilet was never recovered, and nearly two decades later, its whereabouts remain unknown.
Whether the toilet was snatched by some opportunistic – and fairly gross – Deadheads or simply a passer-by who was taken with its striking pink colour scheme, we will probably never know. This strange tale does add credence to the fact that, even in death, Jerry Garcia never stopped producing a wealth of bizarre and unbelievable tales of a life well lived.
