"I listened to American Beauty last night for the first time in ten years," Sting tells Garcia as the two men relax one evening in the bar of the Four Seasons Ritz Carlton Hotel in Chicago. "It was quite good. I liked 'Friend of the Devil.' And 'Box of Rain.'" For his part, Garcia, after a stunning jam with Sting's group during sound check at Soldier Field two days later, asks a bystander the title of one of the songs the band had played ("Walking on the Moon") and which album it was on.

Garcia -- whom Sting has genially dubbed Father Christmas -- has taken to joining Sting onstage during his sets, adding his characteristically spidery guitar lines to a moody medley of "Tea in the Sahara" and "Consider Me Gone" on the first two Chicago dates. "Sting's an A-list guy," Garcia says before one of the shows. "Everybody knows he's a wonderful musician and a truly fine person, too. It's nice that we get to meet him, hang out with him a little bit and sort of . . . network a little with him. We share interests, and I think there's stuff that we could do together in the hypothetical future that would be fun for him and for us -- and possibly good for other things, too."

The hypothetical future: Now fifty-one, battling diabetes and other health problems, Garcia still looks unstintingly ahead. In conversation he is a marvel, bouncing associatively from topic to topic, sharing his amiable intelligence as if it were a gift, in love with good talk. Childlike in his curiosity and enthusiasm, he has more projects going -- and more different types of projects -- than most musicians half his age. The Dead are planning to record a new studio album, their first since Built to Last in 1989, for release next spring. As the band's summer tour crosses the country, a collection of Garcia's artwork -- pen-and-ink drawings, watercolors, computer-generated images -- has accompanied it, with gallery displays in the various cities the Dead have visited.

An album of traditional children's songs, Not for Kids Only, with mandolinist David Grisman is set to appear in September on Grisman's label, Acoustic Disc. For a collaboration with the Redwood Symphony, with which his eldest daughter plays violin, Garcia is commissioning works for orchestra and guitar. Of course, the Jerry Garcia Band is a going concern, with an East Coast tour planned for November. And Garcia also hopes at some point to pull together another band, featuring Edie Brickell on vocals, for shows of entirely improvised music and lyrics.

"I had this idea of putting together a band that didn't have any material, nothing worked out -- just the extreme version," he says. "Edie's actually prepared to do this. I've talked to her about it. She's even ready to have people in the audience say, 'I want you to use these words' or, 'I want you to make this the subject of the song.'"

Clearly, this is not a man who has run out of either energy, ideas or passion. But Garcia's collapse from exhaustion in August of '92 -- and the consequent cancellation of a number of Dead shows -- raised the specter of the diabetic coma that had nearly taken his life in 1986. Now he is back and leading the Dead through some of their best shows in years. He is also trying to change his life -- cutting down on cigarettes, eating better, exercising some -- motivated by his desire, eventually, to do everything. "I feel that I can honestly contribute something," he says. And as you'll see, he's looking ahead well into the next century.

Everyone knows about the origins of the Grateful Dead. What about your own musical beginnings?

Music was something I was not good at -- I took lessons on the piano forever, for maybe eight years -- my mom made me. None of it sank in. I never did learn how to sight-read for the piano -- I bluffed my way through.

I was attracted to music very early on, but it never occurred to me it was something to do -- in the sense that when I grow up I'm going to be a musician -- although I knew that my father had been a musician.

You never had thoughts along those lines?

Not ever. Not once.

Still?

[Laughs] Really, still, in a way. It's like I'm still sort of surprised by it. My older brother was a big influence -- he was like four years older than me, so I listened to the music he listened to.

What kind of stuff?

He was into very early rock & roll and rhythm & blues. I remember, like, the Crows, you know, "Gee." Very early, before it actually started to become rock & roll. That tune, "Gee," was sort of the borderline. It was basically black music, the early doo-wop groups. I love that stuff. Hank Ballard and the Midnighters were a big early influence for me. My brother would learn the tunes, we would try to sing them, and he would make me learn harmony parts. In a way I learned a lot of my ear training from my older brother.

What about bluegrass? When did you come to that?

My grandmother was a big Grand Ole Opry fan. Now this is in San Francisco, a long way from Tennessee, but they used to have the Opry on the radio every Saturday night all over the United States. My grandmother listened to it religiously. I probably heard Bill Monroe hundreds of times without knowing who it was. When I got turned on to bluegrass in about 1960, the first time I really heard it, it was like "Whoa, what is this music?" The banjo just . . . it just made me crazy. It was like the way rock & roll affected me when I was fifteen. When I was fifteen, I fell madly in love with rock & roll. Chuck Berry was happening big, Elvis Presley -- not so much Elvis Presley, but I really liked Gene Vincent, you know, the other rock guys, the guys that played guitar good: Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley. And at that time, the R&B stations still were playing stuff like Lightnin' Hopkins and Frankie Lee Sims, these funky blues guys. Jimmy McCracklin, the Chicago-style blues guys, the T-Bone Walker-influenced guys, that older style, pre-B.B. King stuff. Jimmy Reed -- Jimmy Reed actually had hits back in those days. You listen to that, and it's so funky. It's just a beautiful sound, but I had no idea how to go about learning it.

When I first heard electric guitar, when I was fifteen, that's what I wanted to play. I petitioned my mom to get me one, so she finally did for my birthday. Actually, she got me an accordion, and I went nuts -- Aggghhh, no, no, no! I railed and raved, and she finally turned it in, and I got a pawnshop electric guitar and an amplifier. I was just beside myself with joy.

I started banging away on it without having the slightest idea of . . . anything. I didn't know how to tune it up, I had no idea. My stepfather tuned it in some kind of weird way, like an open chord. I thought: "Well, that's the way it's tuned. OK." I played it that way for about a year before I finally ran into some kid at school who actually could play a little. He showed me a few basic chords, and that was it. I never took any lessons. I don't even think there was anybody teaching around the Bay area. I mean electric guitar was like from Mars, you know. You didn't see 'em even.

During this time, too, I was going to the art institute on Saturdays and summer sessions -- they had this program for high-school kids. So I was picking up that head. This was also when the beatniks were happening in San Francisco, so I was, like, in that culture. I was a high-school kid and a wanna-be beatnik! Rock & roll at that time was not respectable. I mean, beatniks didn't like rock & roll.

Because they were more literary or something?

They liked . . . jazz [laughs]. You know: "Jazz, man. Dig it." Rock & roll wasn't cool, but I loved rock & roll. I used to have these fantasies about "I want rock & roll to be like respectable music." I wanted it to be like art.

You consciously thought that?

Oh, yeah, even back then. I used to try to think of ways to make that work I wanted to do something that fit in with the art institute, that kind of self-conscious art -- "art" as opposed to "popular culture." Back then, they didn't even talk about popular culture -- I mean, rock & roll was so not legit, you know. It was completely out of the picture. I don't know what they thought it was, like white-trash music or kids' music.

The Beats, though, not only played a role in opposing the dominant culture of the '50s, but they helped in the transition from the '50s to the '60s, as you did with Ken Kesey and the acid tests and all that.

Well, it was very resonant for me. The arts school I went to was in North Beach, and in those days the old Coexistence Bagel Shop was open and the Place, notorious beatnik places where these guys -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth -- would get up and read their poetry. As soon as On the Road came out, I read it and fell in love with it, the adventure, the romance of it, everything.

You've said that one of the reasons for the traveling culture surrounding the Grateful Dead is that it offers the possibility for the same kind of adventure that On the Road represents.

I think it does. It is this time-frame's version of the archetypal American adventure. It used to be that you could run away and join the circus, say, or ride the freight trains.

One of the things that was fun about the early hippie scene was, all of a sudden all those people were around and you could meet them. I mean, Neal Cassady, meeting him was tremendously thrilling. He was a huge influence on me in ways I can't really describe.

Like an attitude or . . .

Yeah, lots of things, though, kind of musical things in a way -- rhythm, you know, motion, timing. I mean Neal was a master of timing. He was like a twelfth-dimensional Lenny Bruce in a way, some kind of cross between a great stand-up comedian like Lenny Bruce and somebody like Buster Keaton. He had this great combination of physical poetry and an incredible mind. He was a model for the idea that a person can become art by himself, that you don't necessarily even need a forum.

Did you ever get to meet Lenny Bruce?

Yeah, very briefly. I worked for a secretary transcribing tapes of his performances for his trials. I learned so much about Lenny Bruce's mind, because sometimes he was so methed out that he would condense like a paragraph into one word. This is after he stopped doing routines -- he would just sit down and blow. He'd have like a Newsweek or a Time magazine, and he'd thumb through them, and whenever something caught his eye, he would just start riffing. I used to have to try to find the Newsweek . . . you know, go to the library -- and sometimes it was so amazingly far-out, the way he would condense the whole sense of an article. I wasn't close to him at all, but I did meet him some. A remarkable person.

When the Dead started out, did you have a sense that it would last this long?

We had big ideas. I mean, as far as we were concerned, we were going to be the next Beatles or something -- we were on a trip, definitely. We had enough of that kind of crazy faith in ourselves.

We were always motivated by the possibility that we could have fun, big fun. I was reacting in a way, to my bluegrass background, which was maybe a little overserious. I was up for the idea of breaking out. You know -- "Give me that electric guitar -- fuckin' A!" When we were in the Warlocks, the first time we played in public, we had a huge crowd of people from the local high school, and they went fuckin' nuts! The next time we played, it was packed to the rafters. It was a pizza place. We said: "Hey, can we play in here on Wednesday night? We won't bother anybody. Just let us set up in the corner." It was pandemonium, immediately.

I don't remember ever thinking, "Now, am I going to be doing this in twenty years?" But it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be doing it. And as things went on, we went past my own personal -- what? -- goals, visions, my own imagining, "This is how far we could go." So we're way over in the land of pure gravy, so to speak -- pure gold. Now it's like stuff that I might idly have wished for one day in 1957 is coming up.

With your health problems, were you concerned that you might never get to do all the things you've been talking about wanting to do?

Absolutely. I was getting to the place where I had a hard time playing a show. I was in terrible fucking shape. I mean I was just exhausted, totally exhausted. I could barely walk up a flight of stairs without panting and wheezing. I just let my physical self slide as far as I possibly could.

Did you deny to yourself what was happening?

Oh, yeah, because I'm basically a lazy fuck. Things have to get to the point where they're screaming before I'll do anything. I could see it coming, and I kept saying to myself: "Well, as soon as I get myself together, I'm going to start working out. I'm going on that diet." Quit smoking -- ayiiiiii [waves lit cigarette].

In a way I was lucky, insofar as I had an iron constitution. But time naturally gets you, and finally your body just doesn't spring back the way it did. I think it had to get as bad as it did before I would get serious about it. I mean, it's a powerful incentive, the possibility that, hey, if you keep going the way you are, in two years you're going to be dead.

But I definitely have a component in my personality which is not exactly self-destructive, but it's certainly ornery. There's a part of me that has a bad attitude. It's like "Fuck you," you know? [Laughs] "Try to get healthy" -- "Fuck you, man." And I mean, part of this whole process has been coming to terms with my bad-attitude self, trying to figure out "What does this part of me want?"

What is that about?

I don't know what it comes from. I've always clung to it, see, because I felt it's part of what makes me me. Being anarchic, having that anarchist streak, serves me on other levels -- artistically, certainly. So I don't want to eliminate that aspect of my personality. But I see that on some levels it's working against me.

They're gifts, some of these aspects of your personality. They're helpful and useful and powerful, but they also have this other side. They're indiscriminate. They don't make judgments.

What about in terms of the Dead? Were there times when the band was discouraged about its future?

Well, there were times when we were really in chaotic spaces, but I don't think we've ever been totally discouraged. It just has never happened. There have been times everybody was off on their own trip to the extent that we barely communicated with each other. But it's pulses, you know? And right now everybody's relating pretty nicely to each other, and everybody's feeling very good, too. There's a kind of healthy glow through the whole Grateful Dead scene. We're gearing up for the millennium.

Oh, yeah? What's the plan?

Well, our plan is to get through the millennium [laughs]. Apart from that, it's totally amorphous.

Historically, turns of the century have been really intriguing times. Does that date hold any real significance for you?

No, the date that holds significance for me is 2012. That's [writer and self-described expert in "the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation"] Terence McKenna's alpha moment, which is where the universe undergoes its most extraordinary transformations. He talks about these cycles, exponential cycles in which, in each epic, more happens than in all previous time. Like he talks about novelty, the insertion of novelty into the time track. His first example of novelty is, say, the appearance of life. So the universe goes along, brrrrmmmmm, then all of a sudden, life appears: bing! So that's something new.

Then the next novelty is, like, vertebrates. Then the next novelty might be language -- that sort of thing. They're transformations of a huge kind, gains in consciousness. So he's got us, like, in the last forty-year cycle now -- it's running down, we're definitely tightening up -- and during this period, more will happen than has happened in all previous time. This is going to peak in 2012. He's got a specific date for it, too -- maybe December some time, I don't remember. But that moment, at the last 135th of a second or something like that, something like forty of these transformations will happen. Like immortality, you know [laughs]. It's an incredibly wonderful and totally transformational view of the universe. I love it, personally. It's my favorite ontoloy, my favorite endgame. It's much, much more visionary and sumptuous than . . . like, say, Christ is coming back [laughs]. "Oh, swell. That would be fun." McKenna's version is much more incredible.

Are you concerned about what you'd leave behind?

No. I'm hoping to leave a clean field -- nothing, not a thing. I'm hoping they burn it all with me. I don't feel like there's this body of work that must exist. I'd just as soon take it all with me. There's enough stuff -- who needs the clutter, you know? I'd rather have my immortality here while I'm alive. I don't care if it lasts beyond me at all. I'd just as soon it didn't.

Maybe it will just scorch in 2012.

Yeah, I'm hoping that the transformations will make all that -- everything -- irrelevant. We'll all just go to the next universe as pure thought forms -- wowwwnnnng. Yeah.

Excerpted from RS 664, September 2, 1993