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Then he tells the story about the night Jerry Garcia died. He's told it before, but he tells it well and this time with a detail I hadn't heard before. That night—August 8 into 9, 1995—the Dead were between tours and Weir and his band RatDog were staying in the small resort town of Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, preparing to play a show the next day. Sometime in the early-morning hours, Weir had a dream. He was playing in a funky music club, wandering around backstage between sets. On a shelf, he found a can of what he knew, in the way you know things in dreams, was invisible paint:

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Then Garcia arrived. “He was looking really splendid. His hair was black again. He was tall. And he had a velour cape on.” Weir tried to show Garcia his invisible paint, but his friend was preoccupied. “He had a real sort of intense look in his eye. He looked straight at me, and then through me”—and here he adds the new part—“and then he stepped into me.”

When he woke, he learned that Garcia, who had checked into a rehab facility for another try at kicking his heroin addiction, had died of a heart attack at about the same time he had his dream.

“So Jerry came to me pretty directly that night,” he says.

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