The moment Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart crashed his car off a cliff and lived to tell the tale
Despite having been around for decades and being one of the best-selling bands of all time, the Grateful Dead continue to be impossible to define.
When the band originally came onto the scene, it was hard to sell them to listeners because their style of music was so unfounded. There was no constant factor that united the band, and instead, they were happy to embrace their haphazard nature, making great music in the process and putting on shows that completely defied anyone’s expectations.
Eventually, they found their crowd, and that crowd was a pretty good reflection of the band themselves. They were music-lovers, free-lovers, and frequent drug takers. Where the Grateful Dead went, acid seemed to follow closely behind, as people would take LSD and then listen to the band’s highly improvisational music, allowing it to drift them off to someplace much more peaceful.
Of course, while drugs followed the band like a shadow, so too did chaos. They were never far from some kind of story fodder, as every time they played a gig or headed on the road somewhere, they were met with some kind of encounter along the way. It’s funny the kind of things that happen to you when you’re a rockstar on LSD being followed by rock-lovers also on LSD.
For instance, Jerry Garcia was once fed a cake that he thought was pretty harmful, but was actually laced with LSD, all of which contributed to him having one of the most intense trips of his life. It was 800 hits to be exact, and even an acclaimed tripper like Garcia found it to be a bit too intense an experience.
“I’m looking at it, and looking at it, and looking at it. But it looks good! I’ll just take a little of the frosting here. I’ll just take a little snack,” he said, recalling trying the cake, “So I took this, and then someone comes in and says, ‘Yeah, we put about 800 hits of acid in that frosting.’ And I go, ‘D’oh, oh God, oh Jesus Christ, I’m going to be totally wiped out.’”
Garcia wasn’t the only member of the band who found themselves in trouble from time to time. For instance, the backup singer Donna Jean once recalled falling asleep and then waking up on stage… in the middle of a concert… underneath a piano. “I was so stoned during one of the Paris shows that I found myself under [husband] Keith’s piano,” she said, “And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is really fantastic music!’ Then, ‘Oh, my gosh, I sing with this band’ I don’t know how in the world I pressed through.”
It’s all well and good recounting old tales of life on the road and laughing them off, but there were some more serious situations band members found themselves in that could have resulted in something a lot worse than just a bad trip or gig (or both). Mickey Hart can attest to this, as one day, following a show in a club, he was driving home and drove his car off a cliff.
He went straight through a safety barrier and over the edge – a properly terrifying moment that could’ve easily been the end for him. Luckily, a tree jutting out from the slope stopped the car from falling all the way down, and he somehow lived to tell the tale. Still, it’s a sobering reminder that getting too swept up in the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle can sometimes land you in a right mess.
Luckily, his fellow bandmates were sympathetic. “I opened my eyes [in hospital] and Jerry was there: ‘You look like shit!’” recalled Hart.
