Where Are They Buried? (65 page)

Later in the 1970s, Marvin struggled with substance abuse, his marriage disintegrated, and he fell deeply into debt. Marvin fled his demons rather than face them, but after a three-year,
self-imposed European exile, he seemed to have a new vitality and went back to the studio. His 1982 release
Midnight Love
, a modern quilt of electronic sounds woven through an oblique reggae beat, was hailed as a masterful comeback. Marvin won two Grammys for his efforts and the singles “Let’s Get It On” and “Sexual Healing” became radio standards.

Though Marvin’s professional life seemed to be back on track, his personal life was a runaway train; the IRS dogged him for back taxes, he succumbed to cocaine addiction, romantic relationships imploded, and he was becoming ridiculously paranoid. After a tempestuous tour following the
Midnight Love
album, Marvin retreated to the Los Angeles home that he’d bought for his parents. But Marvin and his father had never addressed their 25-year-old animosities, and now, living together but apart (Marvin spent his days alone in his room), their conflicted relationship worsened.

On April 1, 1984, after an argument and an altercation concerning Marvin Sr.’s inability to locate a letter from an insurance agency, the string finally broke. Without saying a word, Marvin Sr. entered his son’s room and shot him while he sat on his bed. Marvin Jr. slumped to the floor, his father fired again, and his wife, Alberta, screamed to the heavens for her son. Marvin Sr. then went outside, threw the gun onto the front lawn, and waited on the porch for the police. Later that afternoon, on the day before his 45th birthday, Marvin Gaye Jr. was pronounced dead.

After a service at which Stevie Wonder sang, Smokey Robinson spoke, and 10,000 people passed by his open casket, Marvin was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

Marvin Gay Sr. was arrested and stood trial for his son’s death, and Alberta promptly divorced him. At trial, photographs of Marvin Sr.’s body demonstrated that he’d been abused by his son and, after a no-contest plea of voluntary manslaughter, Marvin Sr. was sentenced to five years’ probation. Alberta died in 1987 of bone cancer. Marvin Sr. died of a stroke in 1998.

JANUARY 8, 1931 – OCTOBER 25, 1991

While most of his family members died at the hands of the Nazis, Wolfgang Grajonca was able to escape their grasp, and at twelve he landed in New York City. At the onset of the Korean War he was drafted into the Army and there he changed his name, Bill coming from the English equivalent of Wolfgang, and Graham being closest to Grajonca in the phonebook. Bill served
until 1953 and, after being awarded a Bronze Star for valor, was awarded United States citizenship.

After his discharge, Bill organized gigs for theater troupes, but when the members of one group were arrested for performing in a public park without a permit, Bill discovered his true organizational calling. In 1965 he arranged a benefit to raise the troupe’s bail money and, sensing a larger business opportunity, set to work organizing larger and more elaborate community events. Bill raced to provide legitimate venues for the performers in San Francisco’s strange, new counterculture scene. He eventually bought the Fillmore Auditorium and the hall quickly became the entertainment nexus for the burgeoning music scene. Charging nominal fees, Bill presented artists as varied as Miles Davis and Frank Zappa, and supported the entire culture by presenting performance artists, “acid tests,” and “love-ins.”

In 1968 Bill opened the Fillmore’s spin-off in New York City, the Fillmore East, and, with his bookend auditoriums, became the leading promoter of rock music, hosting hundreds of turbulent performances. A stickler for quality and detail, Bill invested heavily in sound and lighting, and the revolutionary music shows he presented became a yardstick against which all his competitors were measured.

As rock music’s popularity steamrolled worldwide, Bill led the movement with his shrewd business acumen. His production company, Bill Graham Presents, pioneered the rock concert as a social statement with events for charitable causes; he directed monstersized tours for super-sized groups, and he was the catalyst for the industry’s booming merchandise business. In short, Bill amassed an untold fortune from the flower power phenomenon and its progeny.

At 60, Bill died when the helicopter that was returning him from a Huey Lewis concert he’d promoted hit electrical lines and crashed near Vallejo, California. A week later, his company put on a massive free concert in his honor at the Polo Field in San
Francisco, a site of many past benefit concerts Bill had organized. The concert featured many acts that Bill had nurtured over the years and, in remembering him, Neil Young commented, “He always made all of us look good.”

Bill’s will specified that, upon his death, Bill Graham Presents was to be sold to fifteen of his long-term employees, and the promotion company still thrives today.

Bill was buried at Eternal Home Cemetery in Colma, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Eternal Home Cemetery is on the east side of El Camino Real, which is also Route 82. From I-380, it’s about four miles north or, from I-280, it’s about 1½ miles south. There are at least six cemeteries adjacent to one another in this area and Eternal Home seems to have budgeted the bare minimum for their sign, meaning it can be quite difficult to distinguish. Instead, look for Greenlawn Memorial Park. Eternal Home Cemetery is within the walled-in area across the street.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left, and park at the second circle. Bill’s grave is six rows from Route 82 and a dozen stones from the north wall.

In 1963 Jerry Garcia formed his first band, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, with some friends, including guitarist Bob Weir and keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. Neither Jerry nor anyone else could ever imagine the ultimate outcome of that modest inauguration. By 1965 bassist Phil Lesh and drummer Bill Kreutzmann had joined in the fun and, along with lyricist Robert Hunter, they took to calling themselves the Grateful Dead, a moniker based upon an old English fable Jerry had stumbled across in the dictionary about a reluctant corpse.

Just as the poets at coffee houses gave way to rock bands at dance halls, the Dead invented a spacy, extended performance style that made for perfect background music for the burgeoning, hippie counterculture of “acid tests” and free love. The band members soon moved into a communal house at 710 Ashbury St. in San Francisco and rose to the top of the heap of psychedelic bands. Though 1967 saw the release of their debut album,
The Grateful Dead
, it was on their fifth and sixth albums, both released in 1970, that the band really hit full stride. On
Workingman’s Dead
and
American Beauty
, the Grateful Dead created a watershed
in rock music history. The songs on these albums, most notably “Truckin’” and “Casey Jones,” exposed the band out to a much wider audience, while cuts like “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” and “Friend of the Devil” became cornerstones of the band’s performance-based career, inspiring a supremely “deadicated” cult following.

Despite tempting fate with both its name and its lifestyle, the band somehow managed, for the most part, to avoid the type of ugly incidents that plagued many of their rock and roll contemporaries. For the next quarter-century, with only occasional changes in the lineup, the group concentrated on their music and toured endlessly. In a sea of tie-dyed attire, enchanted “Deadhead” fans dutifully followed the band around the world, from Japan to Vermont to the pyramids in Egypt, though most ordinary folks who were out of the loop never quite understood all the hubbub. Jerry tried to sum it up for them in 1981, saying, “Our audience is like people who like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice, really like licorice.”

MAY 7, 1946 – MARCH 8, 1973

Bedecked in a leather jacket and bandana, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan was beside Jerry from the very beginning. It was through his persistence that their jug band became an electric rock and roll band, and it was his dusty voice that handled the lead in those earliest days. Pigpen later mostly stuck to the keyboards and harmonica, only occasionally fronting during live shows, and even less often in the studio. Pigpen also developed an intensive audience-interactive rap session that became a highlight of Dead shows.

By 1968 Pigpen had become unreliable due to severe health problems resulting from his intoxicating vices, and the band added another keyboardist, Tom Constanten, to help take up some of the slack. In the summer of 1971 Pigpen was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and, after detox, he never drank again. But the change did not come soon enough. Too ill to maintain the pace of touring, Pigpen retreated shortly after the Dead’s 1972 tour of Europe. His general health continued to decline, and finally Pigpen died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage.

At 26, Pigpen was buried at Alto Mesa Cemetery in Palo Alto, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 101, take the exit for San Antonio Road south and, after a quarter mile, turn right onto East Charleston Street. Stay on this road—you’ll notice after 1½ miles that its name changes to Arastradero Road—then, after another ¾ of a mile, the cemetery is on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and bear left after the office. Then make a hard right at the second opportunity and stop about three-quarters of the way down this drive. Ron’s flat marker is on the left, third row from the curb.

JULY 19, 1948 – JULY 23, 1980

In October of 1971, keyboardist Keith Godchaux joined the Dead after Pigpen’s original replacement, Tom Constanten, left. Two months later, Keith’s wife, Donna, joined the band as a vocalist. Though they remained aboard for more than seven years, which happened to be some of the band’s weakest years musically, they never quite seemed to fit. In February 1979 they agreed with the band that it might be best if they left, and they did.

Keith and Donna assembled a new act called the Heart of Gold but, after just a single concert, Keith was killed in a California car accident. At 32, Keith was cremated and his ashes scattered off the coast of Marin County.

OCTOBER 21, 1952 – JULY 26, 1990

Picking up where Pigpen and Keith left off in the revolving-door keyboard spot, Brent Mydland joined up in 1979 and remained with the Dead through the ’80s. In this period when the band became a full-blown cultural institution, Brent initially seemed a little overwhelmed, but he gained confidence after studio releases included some of his own songs, among them “Just a Little Light” and “Hell in a Bucket,” which he co-wrote with Bob Weir. Eventually Brent was singing lead and trading verses on a number of songs.

But after the 1990 summer tour, Brent was found dead at his home of an overdose of cocaine and morphine.

At 37, he was buried at Oakmont Memorial Park in Pleasant Hills, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 24, take the Pleasant Hill Road exit and follow it north for a mile to Reliez Valley Road. Turn left and, after three miles, Oakmont is on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, drive up the hill past the office, then, at the top of the hill, loop left around the Lesher mausoleum before the Garden of Meditation. Turn at the next right, go straight through the next intersection (the Garden of Hope will be in front of you), then bear left. After another hundred yards, stop at the “Always In Our Hearts” bench on the left in the Garden of Remembrance. Brent’s grave is in the row above this bench, eighteen markers to the left.

AUGUST 1, 1942 – AUGUST 15, 1995

In the spring of 1960, after just nine months of association, the Army and Jerry Garcia had had enough of each other, and the two parted ways. An aspiring musician, Jerry embarked on a hand-to-mouth existence with future Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, and the two lived out of their broken-down cars, which were stranded next to each other in a Palo Alto parking lot. To make ends meet in the barest way, Jerry was filling in at a music store and giving guitar lessons whenever he could find a willing victim. Eventually, however, after a few lean years that included gigs at pizza parlors, things started to fall into place. By 1965 Jerry was frontman of his Grateful Dead progeny and, as the house band for the “acid tests” of Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters” (later documented in a book by Tom Wolfe,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
), the band played what would be the soundtrack for everything ’60s, while Jerry himself came to be known as “Captain Trips,” the personification of all that was groovy.