BACK FROM THE DEAD

When Jerry Garcia woke up in a Marin County hospital last summer after three days in a diabetic coma, no one was more surprised than he. He had gone from feeling a little lousy a couple of days after a July 7 Grateful Dead concert to waking up full of tubes and i.v.’s in a roomful of people including his wife, Carolyn, members of the band and his longtime friend and lyricist, Robert Hunter.

Garcia squinted up at their blurry, worried faces and tried to remember how to talk. After several minutes, he managed to coordinate mouth and voice enough to say: “I’m not Beethoven.”

Those words were the first confirmation that Garcia was functional--that his wits and wit were intact. There was profound relief in the room, but . . . what did he mean?

“I heard about that,” Garcia said recently. “I don’t remember saying it. I think what I meant was that I may not be great, but I’m alive. I woke up with these tubes everywhere, and it was like as soon as I could make myself comprehensible, I wanted to make that point. But I think I was really thinking of Mozart--somebody who was more of a flash . . . .”

Garcia chuckled. It was a mirthful, slightly wacko giggle--kind of a cross between Ed Wynn and Jerry Lewis. And it was the laugh of a man unabashedly happy to be among the living. “Grateful Not to Be Dead,” as last summer’s headlines went.

He sat, incongruously enough, in a ‘40s-esque hotel lobby across the street from Lafayette Park in the Wilshire District, smoking Pall Malls. Garcia looked like some kind of time-tripping intruder in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. The cigarettes were the only hints of chemical abuse in the life of a man long identified with, um, chemicals.

In 1984, Garcia was arrested in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with a briefcase containing heroin and cocaine. He later went through a drug rehabilitation program and shook his habit. Ironically, it was afterward that diabetes stole on to the scene, resulting in his collapse and two weeks on a dialysis machine.

“It changed me,” Garcia now said simply.

Indeed it has.

Always a private person, Garcia had become rather reclusive in the ‘80s, keeping company only with close friends. He is now, say those who know him, comparatively gregarious, approachable and warm.

Garcia downplayed the trauma of his illness, but was surprisingly open in discussing it.

“I’m definitely a different person than I was before,” he said. “I came out a little scrambled; being in a coma is a weird thing. It was as though all my information and my memories had been dumped into the random access tank and stirred up.

“So there was a lot of fishing around. I still do it, sometimes. I have to fish for words or concepts; things that used to come real fast. I haven’t been able to find any huge open holes, though, so I don’t think there’s anything permanent involved.”

Except a changed attitude?

“It was one of those things that, especially at my age, was a reminder of my own mortality,” acknowledged Garcia, 44. “Like, hey, you could die . The most surprising thing was the way it crept up on me. I didn’t really feel like I was sick at all.”

Garcia and the Grateful Dead (who complete a three-night stand at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre tonight) hold a special, if quirky, place in pop music history. For the last 22 years they have been immersed in some kind of serendipitous musical experiment. It has been an experiment built on spontaneity, unrehearsed licks and intuitive music-making--the kind usually found among veteran jazz groups.

They have not been alone in this adventure, either. Since the late ‘60s, an indefatigable bunch of tie-dyed kids (who never seem to age much) have attached themselves to the Dead. These Deadheads have supported the group through thick and thin and, in fact, have landed the Grateful Dead among the country’s top-grossing concert bands of recent years.

The Deadheads have been joined, notably in the ‘80s, by increasing numbers of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s. Most amazing, the Grateful Dead survives outside the music industry--despite a series of albums that are uneven and problematic, by the band’s own description.

Things are now definitely looking up. There is a new album coming and the group is, say longtime observers, playing powerfully. Garcia certainly looked better during the interview--chunky instead of carrying the enormous girth of recent years--and was downright ebullient at times. He was even cheered by the unusually gray L.A. skies, remarking on the “San Francisco weather.”

If there are any “permanent holes” in his memory or thinking ability, they were not apparent in conversation--and certainly not in his performing. Two solo shows at the Wiltern Theatre last month with his Jerry Garcia Band found the Santa Claus-like figure on stage in rare form. Garcia’s lyrical guitar chirped and soared with perceptibly more zest than in the last couple of years; his voice was stronger and more expressive than in some time. And the Grateful Dead’s return-to-life concert last December in Oakland was, by all accounts, memorable.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Garcia recalled with a smile. “It was great to be able to play again. And the Grateful Dead is like nothing else. You never know whether you can do it or not; you can’t rehearse for it. Only doing it makes you able to do it. It was the longest, I think, that we’d ever completely laid off, but it worked out pretty well. The first night (guitarist Bob) Weir forgot maybe 80% of the lyrics, but the next couple of nights were great. I feel like the band is playing great now; I’ve certainly been enjoying it.”

He shook his head.

“When I was in the hospital, the thing I found myself thinking most was, ‘Boy, when I get out of here, I’m going to play as much as I possibly can.’ I mean, I’d rather be doing anything than lie in a hospital.”

Now there is much to do.

The Dead just put the finishing touches on their first LP since 1980. “In the Dark,” due by late spring, was recorded mostly live in the Marin County Civic Auditorium (with no audience) in February. There is also a video (working title: “So Far”)--an hourlong “seamless” work of music and “potent” imagery, Garcia said--due at the same time as the LP.

Garcia has also taken up bluegrass picking again (a la “Old and in the Way,” an album he did with David Grisman in the mid-’70s), and has lately been appearing around the Bay Area in a group with Dead drummer Mickey Hart and African musician Olatunji.

Garcia and Tom Davis of “Saturday Night Live” have just co-written a script of Vonnegut’s first novel, “The Sirens of Titan.” Garcia bought the rights to the novel years ago in an effort to “protect it as much as anything else, because I loved the book so much.”

And there has also been a lot of talk about the Dead doing live appearances with some guy named Dylan.

“That’s in the realm of high probability,” Garcia said. “We had two rehearsal periods with Dylan, and we’re planning on two more.

“I think that we’d all like to do something that none of us have done before. We’re not that thrilled about doing just our stuff. We love Dylan’s tunes, but we know that he’s

burned out on them to some extent. So the thing is really finding the material that we can all enjoy playing, and that the audience can dig.”

At one of the early rehearsals, Dylan and the Dead sang the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man.”

“There started to be a certain chemistry there that was like something . . . else . It wasn’t us, and it wasn’t him. It was all of us together, and it was just starting to become something. If we all like it, then we’ll probably do some shows. We’re sort of keeping the doors open. We don’t want to corner Dylan into anything, and I’m sure he has his own rate that he wants to work at.”

Garcia and the Dead have long played Dylan songs. Garcia recently brought “Simple Twist of Fate” into the repertoire of the Garcia Band, and Weir has lately taken a fancy to “Desolation Row.” The songs, like many of the Dead’s own songs written by Garcia and Hunter, or Weir and lyricist John Barlow, are lyrically dense and rife with allegorical tales of chance and irony.

The new Dead album, Garcia said, is “really good.” This is quite an endorsement, given the band’s admitted difficulty with capturing itself on record. The songs are reportedly their strongest in years (they’ve had seven years to learn them). There are some provocative lyrics, which might come as a shock to those who still think of the Dead as stuck in ‘60s psychedelia.

“We’ve always wanted to get some of that live spark on a studio record, which we’ve never been very good at,” Garcia said with a laugh. “And the video, well, it’s another one of those things--a Grateful Dead effort at describing the indescribable. . . . God, we might saturate our limited market.”

That limited market, which goes to great lengths to hear Garcia and company play, might have an especially great length to travel soon--farther, even, than when the band played outside the Pyramids of Egypt to raise money for blind children. The Grateful Dead seem headed for China.

“Well, we’re trying,” said Garcia, whose group annually performs concerts in observance of Chinese New Year. “We’re trying to score goodie points wherever we can, and if they’ll let us in, we’ll go. I think it would be great, to drag a bunch of Deadheads to China.”

Meanwhile, Garcia remains close to home, with wife and three kids--writing songs with Hunter, listening to his collection of rare Billie Holiday records, Charlie Parker (“I listen to him like I go for a drink of water”), Los Lobos, and his favorite composer, “Charlie” Ives. His health habits, he allowed, have improved--but are still not perfect.

“I feel pretty good. I should take better care of myself, generally speaking. Plus I’ve got the kids, and they’re on my back all the time. I think I’m slowly improving, and I’m having fun playing. That’s for sure.

“And,” added Jerry Garcia, “I have no desire to be sick for the rest of my life.”