Jerry Garcia

Jerome John “Jerry” Garcia (August 1, 1942 – August 9, 1995) was the lead guitarist and vocalist of the rock band the Grateful Dead. The band amplified not only music but Garcia’s eclectic musicianship, his tendency to good cheer and general goodwill, his intelligence, willingness to speak his mind and libertarian attitude. He was an exemplar of the communitarian, drug-positive hippie sub-culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, a Mecca to millions of youthful seekers from across the modern world during the 1960s. The Grateful Dead’s thirty-year career was a cultural phenomenon, an enduring symbol of something called “peace and love.” News of his death merited a front-page article in the New York Times and President Clinton calling Garcia “an American icon.”

Early years

Garcia’s father moved from Spain to San Francisco; his mother was of Irish and Swedish lineage that had been in San Francisco since the mid-nineteenth century.[1] Garcia, named by his musician father after composer Jerome Kern, was born and raised in San Francisco and its environs. Despite the accidental amputation—by his brother Clifford Garcia (“Tiff”)—of his right middle finger just below the first knuckle at age nine during a family camping trip, Garcia taught himself the banjo and piano, moved on to the guitar, and eventually became a master of many stringed instruments. He witnessed the drowning death of his father at the age of 5. His mother assumed management of the bar that his father had established.

During his childhood Garcia was influenced by teachers to appreciate art, bohemian exuberance and, as he put it, “the intellectual world.” But by fifteen he joined a gang as a way to cope in a rough and tumble high school. He was passionate for folk, blues, rock, bluegrass and marijuana. He dropped out of high school, enlisted in the United States Army on April 12, 1960, and was stationed at San Francisco’s Presidio. He was discharged on December 14, 1960, after accruing two courts martial and eight AWOLs.

Fledgling Musical Efforts

After his discharge Garcia, David Nelson, and a poet named Robert Hunter teamed up to make music—later on, Hunter would become the main lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Garcia worked in a music store and taught acoustic guitar and banjo. Up to 1964 he sang and performed mainly bluegrass, old-time and folk music. His musical circle included Nick Gravenites, Pete Stampfel, Jorma Kaukonen, Janis Joplin, Paul Kantner and David Freiberg. They lived on the fringe of the Stanford University youth culture, sustained by the largesse of students and their well-to-do parents.

Garcia joined a jug band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, whose membership also included Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. In 1965, this group evolved into a rock band called the Warlocks. Garcia later said, “It was Pigpen’s idea; he wanted me to start up an electric blues band. And all of a sudden there were the Beatles, and that, wow, the Beatles, you know. Hard Day’s Night, the movie and everything. We thought, great, that really looks like fun. Theoretically it was a blues band, but the minute we got electric instruments it was a rock and roll band.” The band picked up a local following that attracted an acquaintance, Phil Lesh, to come from Berkeley to Palo Alto to listen and, soon thereafter, join the group. Later that year they adopted the name, The Grateful Dead. The name, Garcia said, popped out when he opened an Oxford Dictionary at Phil Lesh’s house. Another account has that it came out of the Egyptian Book of the Dead that Garcia was perusing at a public library: “We grateful dead salute you, O Osiris.”

The Acid Tests

The group lived for a time near Ken Kesey, founder of the Merry Pranksters, in Palo Alto. Relationships developed between. In 1963 Hunter and Kesey participated in government testing of mescaline and psilocybin and LSD at Stanford University, and by 1964 they obtained the drugs for their like-minded friends on the San Francisco peninsula, in San Francisco, in Berkeley and in Marin County. The following is edited from a Rolling Stone magazine interview with Garcia, conducted by Charles Reich and Jan Wenner in 1971.

The drugs impacted their approach to music. Garcia later recalled, “It changed everything. It freed me… The first time that music and LSD interacted in a way that came to life for us as a band was one day when we went out and got extremely high and went that night to a concert by the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Charlatans and whoever else down at the Family Dog. It was just really fine to see that whole scene—there was just nobody there but heads and this strange rock & roll music playing in this weird building. It was just what we wanted to see. We began to see that vision of a truly fantastic thing. It became clear to us that playing in bars was not going to allow us to expand into this new idea. And about that time the Acid Test was just starting to happen.”

The first “Acid Test” featured Garcia’s fledgling band, generous distribution of LSD to people taking it knowingly or unknowingly, strobe lights, filming and audio recording. “They had film and endless kind of weird tape recorder hookups and mystery speaker trips and all… just all sorts of really strange… it always seemed as though the equipment was able to respond in its own way. I mean it… there were always magical things happening. Voices coming out of things that weren’t plugged in and, God… it was just totally mind-boggling to wander around this maze of wires and stuff like that. Sometimes they were like writhing and squirming. That was the Acid Test, and the Acid Test was the prototype for our whole basic trip. But nothing has ever come up to the level of the way the Acid Test was. It’s just never been equaled, really. What happened was light shows and rock & roll came out of it, and that’s like the thing that we’ve seen go out [into the larger culture].”

The second Acid Test included Richard Alpert (a.k.a.Baba Ram Dass) and people from “the Berkeley psychedelic scene, which was pretty well developed by that time because of the Cabale coffeehouse in the old days, the mescaline scene and all that. Neal Cassady and Ann Murphy were there. Stewart Brand was there with his Indian stuff. He had this little slide show and recorded music, taped music, and he’d just show beautiful slides of Indian trips and Indian homes.”

The Rise and Fall of the Hippie Culture

The band’s home shifted between the Haight-Ashbury and Marin County, depending on the patience of their landlords. In 1967, Jerry Garcia lived at 710 Ashbury Street, San Francisco, in the heart of the Haight Ashbury district. “Our place got to be a center of energy and people were organizing activities. The Diggers, people trying to start spiritual movements, doing various benefits. There was a lot of motion, a lot of energy exchanged, and it was all very high in those days because at that time the Haight-Ashbury was a community. We had the Psychedelic Shop, the very first one, and that was news, and other people were starting to open stores and starting to get underway. Our whole scene [was] completely co-operative and entirely shared. We never structured our situation where anybody was getting any money. What we were doing was buying food, paying rent, stuff like that. That was our basic scene, and that’s basically how we still operate.”

The band played at the 1967 Human Be-In, which inaugurated the media-generated “Summer of Love.” It was here that the musical and philosophical aspect of the youth culture of the 1960s crystallized in San Francisco and within a short time self-destructed. In Garcia’s words, “It was just about that same time that people started to come to town to find out about the hippie scene, and that’s about what the hippie scene was—it was just a very small neighborhood affair when we were all working for each other’s benefit. Most of the people of the Haight-Ashbury scene were people who had been at San Francisco State and gotten into drugs and acid and stuff like that and were living out there experimenting with all the new things that they’d discovered. It was a very high, healthy kind of thing. There were no hard drugs, only pot and LSD.

“Then the big media flash came out. Time magazine guys came out and interviewed everybody and took photographs and made it news. The feedback from that killed the whole scene. We could no longer sustain the tiny trickle that was really supporting everybody. The whole theory in hip economics is essentially that you can have a small amount of money and move it around very fast and it would work out, but when you have thousands and thousands of people, it’s just too unwieldy. And all the attempts at free food and all that, certain people had to work too hard to justify it. At the early stages we were operating completely purely without anybody looking on, without anybody looking through the big window. We were going along really well. And then the crowds came in. All the people who were looking for something. The Hollywood people came. There was a whole new consciousness starting to happen and it was really working nice, but then the flood came and that was it.”

Garcia had a reputation during that period that he was the spiritual adviser to the community. He refutes it and credits the image to reference to him as “spiritual advisor” on the second Jefferson Airplane album, “Surrealistic Pillow.” He credited himself with being a “compulsive question answerer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m right or anything. That’s just one of the things I can do. It’s like having a trick memory. I can answer any question.”

The Grateful Dead’s Music and Philosophy

Garcia nonetheless was adept at turning the phrase in describing the ecstatic drug-music experience: “It was music I loved. That’s what it meant; I mean it didn’t mean anything—it meant have a good time, it meant rock & roll. I like the music; that was the thing. It was the background music for the events of my life. My theme music. Them rock & roll songs—that’s what was happening.”

The Acid Tests were a venue, or avenue, that transitioned the standard 3-minute rock song into a longer odyssey of sound: “Our trip with the Acid Test was to be able to play long and loud. We could play long and loud, as long and loud as we wanted and nobody would stop us.” The signature of Grateful Dead concerts was no play lists, lengthy improvisations resulting in continually re-inventing songs, and improvised segues. “We were improvising cosmically, because being high, each note is like a whole universe. And each silence. And the quality of the sound and the degree of emotional… when you’re playing and you’re high on acid in these scenes it is like the most important thing in the world. To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe.

“Our consciousness concerning music is opening up more, so the music is having more dimensions. We find a certain kind of feeling or a certain kind of rhythm and the whole place is like a sea and it goes boom… boom… boom. It’s like magic and it’s like that something you discover on LSD and you discover that another kind of sound will create a whole other reality. We’re just playing what’s there, is what it finally comes down to, because we’re not in a position to be deciding.”

When asked the source of his optimism, Garcia replied, “Music is a thing that has optimism built into it. Optimism is another way of saying ‘space.’ Music has infinite space. You can go as far into music as you can fill millions of lifetimes. Music is an infinite cylinder, it’s open-ended, it’s space. The form of music has infinite space as a part of it, and that, in itself, means that its momentum is essentially in that open place.

“The things we do depend so much upon the situation we’re in and upon a sort of a magic thing. We aren’t in such total control of our scene that we can say, ‘Tonight’s the night, it’s going to be magic tonight.’ We can only say we’re going to try it tonight. And whether it’s magic or not is something we can’t predict and nobody else can predict; and even when it’s over and done with, it’s one of those things where nobody’s really sure. It’s subtle and it’s elusive, but it’s real.

Another result of the Acid Tests was the integration of the performers and the audience. The Dead were the first rock band, to this writer’s knowledge, to wear street clothes while performing, breaking the barrier between stage and floor, and paradigmatic to generations of bands since. In Garcia’s words, “The unfortunate thing about the concert situation for us is the stage; and the audience has either a dance floor where they all sit down or seats where they all stand up. It’s too inflexible to allow something new to emerge.

“We never formulated it, it just was what was happening. We were doing the Acid Test, which was our first exposure to formlessness. Formlessness and chaos lead to new forms and new order. Closer, probably, to what the real order is. When you break down the old orders and the old forms and leave them broken and shattered, you suddenly find yourself a new space with new form and new order which are more like the way it is. More like the flow. And we just found ourselves in that place. We never decided on it, we never thought it out. None of it. This is a thing that we’ve observed. We’ve watched what happens.”

From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead “watched what happened” as they toured almost constantly, developing a fan base known as deadheads, renowned for their intensity of devotion. Some fans dedicated their lives to the band, following the Grateful Dead from concert to concert, making a living by selling handmade goods, arts, and crafts. The group and its community also pioneered the provision of hundreds of their taped concerts for free downloading off the Internet. “I think of the Grateful Dead as being a crossroads or a pointer sign, and what we’re pointing to is that there’s a lot of universe available, that there’s a whole lot of experience available over here.”

Music and Musicianship

The band’s first album, produced in 1966, was called “The Grateful Dead,” produced by Dave Hassinger who had engineered two Rolling Stones records that the band liked. It was “just simply what we were doing onstage. Basically that. Just rock & roll. We were playing all the places that were trying to become the Fillmore or trying to become the Avalon, as well as the Fillmore and the Avalon. And there were places down in L. A. that were trying to get started and places in San Diego.”

For the next couple of years they were “an experimental music group” but with their fifth album, “Workingman’s Dead” (1970) they felt “more like a good old band… That was really the result of hanging out with Crosby and those guys . . . just because they could sit down in any situation and pick up an acoustic guitar and it’s instant music, these beautiful vocal harmonies… I think that nothing really communicates like the human voice. It is really the ultimate instrument. I used to think of myself as a guitar player, but hearing singing, and seeing it up close, has made me want to sing a lot. It’s real satisfying to sing.” The Dead produced numerous records, reflecting working-class American cultural issues: romantic love, keeping a job, being down on one’s luck, breaking the law, staying out of jail, gambling, as well as reflections on life’s beauty and occasional transcendence.

Garcia’s mature guitar-playing melded elements from the various kinds of music that had enthralled him. Echoes of “hillbilly” and bluegrass playing (such as Arthur Smith and Doc Watson) could be heard. But the “roots music” behind hillbilly and bluegrass had its influence, too, and melodic riffs from Celtic fiddle jigs can be distinguished. There was also early rock (like Lonnie Mack, James Burton and Chuck Berry), contemporary blues (such as Freddie King and Lowell Fulson), country & western (such as Roy Nichols and Don Rich), and jazz (like Charlie Christian) to be heard in Garcia’s style. Garcia’s pedal steel guitar playing and his standard electric guitar work were influenced by Tom Blumley, of Buck Owens’s Buckaroos.

Garcia’s playing had a number of so-called “signatures” and, in his work through the years with the Grateful Dead, one of these was lead lines making much use of rhythmic triplets (examples include the songs “Good Morning Little School Girl,” “New Speedway Boogie,” “Brokedown Palace,” “Deal,” “Loser,” “China Cat Sunflower,” “That’s It For The Other One,” “U.S. Blues,” “Sugaree,” and “Don’t Ease Me In”).

Side projects

In addition to the Grateful Dead, Garcia had numerous side projects, the most notable being the Jerry Garcia Band. He was also involved with various acoustic projects such as Old and in the Way and other bluegrass bands, including collaborations with noted bluegrass mandolinist David Grisman (the documentary film “Grateful Dawg” chronicles the deep, long-term friendship between Garcia and Grisman). Other groups of which Garcia was a member at one time or another include the Black Mountain Boys [2], Legion of Mary [3], Reconstruction, and the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band. Jerry Garcia was also an appreciative fan of jazz artists and improvisation: he played with jazz keyboardists Merle Saunders and Howard Wales for many years in various groups and jam sessions, and he appeared on saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s 1988 album, “Virgin Beauty.”

Throughout the early 1970s, Garcia, bassist Phil Lesh, drummer Mickey Hart, and David Crosby collaborated intermittently with MIT-educated composer and biologist Ned Lagin on several projects in the realm of early electronica; these include the album “Seastones” and “L,” an unfinished dance work.

Garcia also lent pedal-steel guitar playing to fellow-San Francisco musicians New Riders of the Purple Sage from their initial dates in 1969 to October 1971, when increased commitments with the Dead forced him to opt out of the group. He appears as a band member on their self-titled debut album, released in 1971 and made several guest appearances on subsequent albums in addition to producing “Home, Home On The Road,” a 1974 live album by the band. He also contributed pedal steel guitar to the enduring hit “Teach Your Children” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, likely the most recognizable piece of music to feature the guitarist. Despite considering himself a novice on the pedal steel and having all but given up the instrument by 1973, he routinely ranked high in player polls. After a long lapse, he played it once more with Bob Dylan in 1987.

Having studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute, Garcia made a second career out of painting. A series of neckties based on those paintings has been quite lucrative. The popularity of the ties might be attributed to their wild patterns and bright colors. Even in 2005, ten years after Garcia’s death, new styles and designs continue to be sold at high-end men’s stores.

Garcia was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

Marriage, Family and Death

Jerry Garcia had one brother Clifford ‘Tiff’ Garcia; during his life, he married three times, and had four daughters: his first wife, Sara Ruppenthal Garcia, with whom he had a daughter, Heather; Carolyn ‘Mountain Girl’ Adams Garcia, with whom he had daughters Anabelle and Theresa; and Deborah Koons Garcia. Also, Jerry Garcia had a relationship with Manasha Matheson and had a fourth daughter with her, Keelin Garcia.

Jerry Garcia died on August 9, 1995, of a heart attack exacerbated by sleep apnea. Garcia, who struggled with tobacco and drug addiction (most notably heroin and cocaine) and sleep apnea for much of his adult life, was staying at the Serenity Knolls drug rehabilitation center in Forest Knolls, California at the time. Memorial services were held in Golden Gate Park on August 13, 1995. Along with the band members, his family and friends, thousands of fans were present, many singing and playing in drum circles.

Deborah Koons Garcia and Bob Weir, just after dawn on April 4, 1996, spread Garcia’s ashes on the Ganges River 155 miles north of New Delhi, the idea of which came to Weir in a dream.

Legacy

Rolling Stone named Garcia the 13th greatest guitarist of all time. [1]

In 1987, ice cream manufacturers Ben & Jerry's came out with Cherry Garcia, which is named after the guitarist and consists of "cherry ice cream with cherries and fudge flakes." It quickly became the most popular Ben & Jerry's flavor. For a month after Garcia's death, the ice cream was made black cherries as a way of mourning.

On July 21, 2005, the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission [2] passed a resolution to name the amphitheater in McLaren Park "The Jerry Garcia Amphitheater." The amphitheater is located in San Francisco's Excelsior District, where Garcia grew up. The first show to happen at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater was Jerry Day 2005 on August 7, 2005. Tiff Garcia was the first person to welcome the audience to the "Jerry Garcia Amphitheater." Jerry Day is an annual celebration of Garcia in his childhood neighborhood. The dedication ceremony (Jerry Day 2) on October 29, 2005 was officiated by mayor Gavin Newsom.

On August 9, 2005, the late D12 member rapper Proof released his first solo-album, called "Searching for Jerry Garcia" in honor of the late Grateful Dead member. Upon the release, Proof said: "He played every kind of music — he had jazz albums, classical albums, he went against the grain," Proof said. "He didn't care about the record sales ... I mean, his shows outsold his record sales. That almost don't make sense to me."

One of Garcia's legacies is the Jam band scene the Dead spawned. Phish, Umphrey's McGee and dozens of other groups not only play in the Dionysian spirit of the Dead, but keep the Deadhead spirit alive through shows that are, at their best, as much about community as they are about music.

On September 24, 2005, the Comes a Time: A Celebration of the Music & Spirit of Jerry Garcia tribute concert was held at the Hearst Greek Theatre in Berkeley, California. The Greek theater is an open air venue that hosted dozens of Jerry Garcia Band and Grateful Dead performances [3] The concert featured Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, Bruce Hornsby, Trey Anastasio (Phish), Warren Haynes (Government Mule), Jimmy Herring Allman Brothers Band), Michael Kang, Jay Lane, Jeff Chimenti (Ratdog), Mark Karan, Robin Sylvester, Kenny Brooks (Ratdog), Gloria Jones and Jackie LaBranch (Jerry Garcia Band). Two of Garcia's longtime bandmates and friends, Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter did not attend. Hunter, overcome by grief, submitted an elegy written in the style of the Duino Elegies which he had studied years before in the late 1980s. Phil Lesh stated that "my son went away to college and we had all kinds of family things going that week."[4]. Later Lesh commented somewhat bitterly on CBS 60 minutes, "He loved the drug more than he loved the music, more than he loved us."

Garcia’s ex-wives and band members have struggled over his legacy.

Discography

• Old and in the Way
  • Old and in the Way (album)|Old and in the Way - 1975 in music|1975
  • That High Lonesome Sound – 1996 in music|1996
  • Breakdown (Old and in the Way album)|Breakdown – 1997 in music|1997
• Garcia & Grisman
  • Garcia Grisman
  • Not for Kids Only
  • Shady Grove (Garcia & Grisman album)|Shady Grove
  • So What (Garcia & Grisman album)|So What
  • The Pizza Tapes (featuring Tony Rice) – 2000 in music|2000
  • Been All Around this World
  • Grateful Dawg (album)|Grateful Dawg
• Solo
  • Garcia (album)|Garcia - 1972 in music|1972
  • Compliments (Jerry Garcia album)|Compliments - 1974 in music|1974
  • Reflections (Jerry Garcia Album)|Reflections - 1976 in music|1976
• Jerry Garcia Band
  • Cats Under the Stars - 1978 in music|1978
  • Run for the Roses - 1982 in music|1982
  • Jerry Garcia Band (album)|Jerry Garcia Band - 1991 in music|1991
  • How Sweet it is (album)|How Sweet it is - 1997 in music|1997
  • Don't Let Go (album)|Don't Let Go - 2001 in music|2001
  • Shining Star (Jerry Garcia Band album)|Shining Star - 2001
  • After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80 - 2004 in music|2004
• Legion of Mary
  • The Jerry Garcia Collection, Vol 1: Legion of Mary - 2005 in music|2005
• Compilations
  • Garcia Plays Dylan - 2005 in music|2005
  • The Very Best of Jerry Garcia - 2006 in music|2006
• Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band
  • Almost Acoustic - 1988 in music|1988
• Pure Jerry Series - 2004 in music|2004-2005 in music|2005
  • Theatre 1839, July 29 & 30, 1977
  • Lunt-Fontanne, NYC, October 31, 1987
    • This album is one of 10 "live jam releases of this century" according to the August issue of Guitar One magazine.
  • Lunt-Fontanne, NYC, "Best of the Rest"
  • Keystone Berkeley, September 1, 1974
  • Merriweather Post Pavilion, September 1 & 2, 1989
  • Warner Theatre, March 18, 1978

See also

• Grateful Dead
• Legion of Mary (band)|Legion of Mary
• New Riders of the Purple Sage
• Old and in the Way|

| genre = Psychedelic rock
Rock music
Folk rock
Bluegrass | affiliation = Grateful Dead
Jefferson Starship
Legion of Mary (band)|Legion of Mary
Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions
The Warlocks
Mickey Hart and the Hartbeats
Jerry Garcia Band]]
Old and in the Way
Garcia & Grisman
Reconstruction_(band) | label = Rhino Records
Warner Bros.
[[Arista Records
Grateful Dead Records
Acoustic Disc | notable guitars = Guild Starfire
1957 Gibsons Les Pauls
Gold-top Les Paul with P-90
Gibson SGs
Fender Stratocaster "Alligator"
Doug Irwin Custom "Wolf"
Doug Irwin Custom "Tiger"
Doug Irwin Custom "Rosebud" | years = 1960 in music|1960 - 1995 in music|1995 | website = www.jerrysite.com }}

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Reich, Charles & Wenner, Jan. "Interview of the Rolling Stones" (1972). See <http://www.geocities.com/mnoferi/garcia.html

External links

• The Jerry Site
• Big Brother & The Holding Company Site
• Dead Lists home page
• http://jerrygarcia.com/
• http://jerryday.org
• http://jerrygarciaamphitheater.org
• http://www.jgamp.org
• http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000999900
• http://www.dead.net/
• GDRADIO.NET - Streaming Grateful Dead and more.
• http://arts.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/
• IMDB on "Grateful Dawg"
• Over 2800 Grateful Dead recordings available in streaming format
• Gratefuldeadbooks.com
• Rhino Entertainment - Rhino Records

{{Persondata{{Guitarist infobox | name = Jerry Garcia; alias = Captain Trips | born = August 1, 1942
San Francisco, California|San Francisco, California, U.S.A. | died = August 9, 1995
Lagunitas-Forest Knolls, California|Forest Knolls, California, United States of America|U.S.A.

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