ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 confronts Garcia’s descent into opiate addiction in songs expressing thoughts and feelings on the factors that dragged him down in the late 1970s and songs reflecting on his emergence from near-death experiences in the mid-1980s. Garcia used Robert Hunter’s oblique lyrics to help him grapple with his addictions, inner darkness, and relationships with women in “Fire on the Mountain,” “Comes a Time,” and “Althea,” delving into the roots of myth and tragic drama in the latter. Garcia’s addictive psychology and opiate abuse is compared with commentary by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincy, and William S. Burroughs. Garcia’s life in the narcotic netherworld is recounted through to his 1985 arrest, followed by a discussion of the intertextuality of “Black Muddy River” and the ironic metaphors of “Standing on the Moon” as products of his recovery from his 1986 coma.
