In 1985, Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia was busted for freebasing cocaine in a parked BMW. The next year, Captain Trips lapsed into a diabetic coma.
When Garcia regained consciousness, he glanced around trying to remember who he was. His first words? "I'm not Beethoven."
[Garcia wasn't the only one tripping. "I had a cat sitting on my belly," Dead lyricist Robert Hunter once said of the genesis of 'China Cat Sunflower,' "and was in a rather hypersensitive state, and I followed this cat out to -- I believe it was Neptune -- and there were rainbows across Neptune, and cats marching across the rainbow..." And Phil Lesh? While testifying in court over Garcia's will he confessed that he had spent the past 30 years in "one big, smoky haze."]
["A word of warning to postal customers," Jay Leno once joked. "Don't lick the new Jerry Garcia stamp!"]
Sources
M. Moser, Rock Stars Do the Dumbest Things; David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, p. 24
