Jerry Garcia

Musician

• Born: August 1, 1942
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: August 9, 1995
• Place of death: Forest Knolls, California

American rock singer, guitarist, and songwriter

A founding member and leader of the iconic band the Grateful Dead, Garcia was a prolific artist on the 1960’s psychedelic countercultural scene, creating songs that captivated a legion of devout fans called Deadheads and inspiring artists in a variety of genres, including classical, jazz, folk, rock, and rap.

Member of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions; the Grateful Dead; the Jerry Garcia Band; New Riders of the Purple Sage; Legion of Mary; Old and in the Way

The Life

Jerome John Garcia was the second son of Joseph Garcia, a swing band leader turned bar owner, and Ruth Marie “Bobbie” Clifford, a nurse. Named after his mother’s favorite composer, Jerome Kern, Garcia took an early interest in rock and roll, blues, and folk music.

In 1947 Garcia lost the middle finger on his right hand while chopping wood with his brother, Clifford “Tiff” Garcia. Later that summer, his father drowned while fishing on a family vacation in Northern California. Trying to support her family, Garcia’s mother spent the majority of her time at the family’s tavern, Joe Garcia’s, and by the end of the year Jerry and Tiff had moved in with their maternal grandparents, who lived across the street from their home. Garcia viewed this separation as abandonment by his mother, and he developed a feeling of being unloved.

After remarrying for the second time in 1953, Bobbie moved the family twenty-five miles south of San Francisco to suburban Menlo Park. Regarded as highly intellectual, Garcia enrolled in the public school’s Fast Learner Program for eighth grade in the fall of 1955, but because of his aversion to test taking, he did not graduate until two years later. While at school, Garcia immersed himself in art, creating murals and sets for school plays, and literature, exploring the works of D. H. Lawrence.

In June, 1957, Garcia moved back to San Francisco to live with his grandparents. That August Bobbie gave him an accordion for his fifteenth birthday, which she allowed him to trade in for an electric guitar. Garcia used the time he spent as a dishwasher at Joe Garcia’s to learn, by ear, all the Chuck Berry songs he heard on the jukebox.

By the fall of 1957, when he entered Denman Junior High School in the Outer Mission District, Garcia was smoking cigarettes and marijuana. In 1958 he read Jack Kerouac’s beat tale On the Road (1957), a book that solidified his connection to the budding alternative beatnik counterculture. By the end of 1960, Garcia, dismissing attempts to conform, joined a band, the Chords, after his mother transferred him to another suburban school.

Later Garcia enlisted in the Army, and he was discharged after a few months. He moved in with friends in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University. While working the lights for a local theater production of Damn Yankees (1955) in March, 1961, he met future songwriting partner Robert Hunter. The two performed at local music spots, such as Kepler’s Books, where Garcia was first introduced to Ronald C. McKernan (“Pigpen”) and St. Michael’s Alley, where he met Phil Lesh. Garcia also met Sara Ruppenthal, a Stanford sophomore, at Kepler’s Books. The two married on April 25, 1963; in December, Ruppenthal gave birth to their daughter, Heather. Ruppenthal and Garcia divorced when Heather was three.

Aside from performing with Hunter, Garcia worked as an acoustic guitar and banjo instructor. On New Year’s Eve, 1963, he met Bob Weir. Weir and Pigpen would soon join Garcia in forming the jug band Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.

In 1964, a defining year in Garcia’s life, he tried the hallucinogenic drug LSD, legal at the time. In addition, the jug band transformed, with the addition of Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann, into the Warlocks. The Warlocks were aligned socially with Ken Kesey’s Merry Band of Pranksters, an antiestablishment group, and often performed at the group’s Acid Tests, where partyers knowingly or unknowingly ingested LSD. In 1965 the Warlocks changed their name to the Grateful Dead, and Garcia’s life as a highly successful musician and charismatic counterculture icon began. Garcia also became a father two more times: to Annabelle in 1970 and Theresa (“Trixie”) in 1974. Garcia and the girls’ mother, Carolyn Adams, nicknamed Mountain Girl by the Merry Pranksters, married in 1981.

Unfortunately, the following decades hosted mental and physical lows for Garcia. His mother, severely injured in an automobile accident in 1970, died a few weeks later. In 1986 Garcia slipped into a diabetic coma that lasted for five days. In 1993 he and Adams divorced; Garcia married Deborah Koons on Valentine’s Day, 1994. His involvement with drugs escalated to include opiates as well as cocaine, and his health quickly deteriorated. On August 8, 1995, Garcia admitted himself to Serenity Knolls, a rehabilitation center twenty miles north of San Francisco. On August 9, 1995, at 4:23 in the morning, Garcia died of a heart attack.

The Music

Garcia’s music mirrored the collective disenchantment members of the counterculture often found with notions of conformity inherent in American culture. Much more than arbitrary psychedelic experimentation, his songs represented highly constructed spaces where divergent musical techniques and society harmoniously collided. Believing that “art is not only something you do, but something you are as well,” Garcia used his own life experiences as a basis for his compositions. Captivated by classical, blues, folk, and rock music, Garcia played eclectic music that crossed racial and socioeconomic boundaries. Blending these styles and sounds into one fluidly composed musical arrangement, Garcia successfully broke established social customs and demonstrated how music and culture could embrace diversity and multiplicity.

“Scarlet Begonias.”One of five Garcia songs on the album Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel, “Scarlet Begonias” debuted live on March 23, 1974, at San Francisco’s Cow Palace. The song became a fan and band favorite because its complex composition and numerous instrumental solo sections provided for free-flowing improvisation. In live performances, “Scarlet Begonias” was frequently followed by “Fire on the Mountain,” and this combination was referred to as “Scarlet Fire.” The lyrics “Strangers stoppin’ strangers just to shake their hands” and “Everybody’s playin’ in the Heart of Gold Band,” which appear at the end of “Scarlet Begonias,” hold special meaning, affirming the intimate relationship between the fans and the band.

“Shakedown Street.”The title song to the Grateful Dead’s tenth album, “Shakedown Street,” was Garcia’s ode to disco. When the album was released in 1978, fans were wary, because disco was a divisive genre. While disco had legions of avid supporters, many others loathed the synthesized, repetitive nature of disco music. However, the band’s fans learned through the Grateful Dead’s live performances of it that the studio version of “Shakedown Street” was merely a launching pad for extended improvisation. “Shakedown Street” became synonymous with the area outside a performance venue where fans often doubled as vendors and sold an assortment of goods, ranging from T-shirts and food to drugs and drug paraphernalia.

“Touch of Grey.”First played live on September 15, 1982, “Touch of Grey” did not appear on an album until five years later, on 1987’s In the Dark. The lyrics were penned by Hunter, and Garcia composed for them an upbeat arrangement that caught notice. Released at a point when popular hit singles reigned, “Touch of Grey” brought mainstream mass-media attention to the country’s most successful and popular touring band. As the refrain’s lyrics shift from “I will survive” to “We will survive,” the song advocates personal and collective perseverance and triumph. The most successful mainstream Grateful Dead song, it listed on the Billboard Top 10. The band produced its only music video for “Touch of Grey,” and it aired as the culminating point on what MTV dubbed Day of the Dead. The song, however, divided the band’s fan base. Some delighted in the mainstream’s sudden interest in the band, while others felt the song paved the way for fair-weather fans who attended shows simply to hear one song, which, in traditional Grateful Dead form, was not played every night.

Musical Legacy

Garcia’s music, especially that written and produced for the Grateful Dead, helped many individuals find peace and happiness in an alienating world, giving a voice to and kinship for members of the counterculture. Even after Garcia’s death, people of various races, ages, genders, nationalities, and socioeconomic classes identified themselves as his fans. Rock-and-roll artists, rappers, and classical composers cite Garcia as an influential model. On September 29, 2005, ten years after his death, a group of such individuals came together in Berkeley, California, to celebrate Garcia’s life, influence, and legacy at the tribute concert, Comes a Time: A Celebration of the Music and Spirit of Jerry Garcia.

Principal Recordings

albums (solo or with various others):Hooteroll?, 1971 (with Howard Wales); New Riders of the Purple Sage, 1971; Garcia, 1972; Compliments of Garcia, 1974; Old and in the Way, 1975; Reflections, 1976; Cats Under the Stars, 1978 (with the Jerry Garcia Band); Run for the Roses, 1982; Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, 1999.

albums (with the Grateful Dead): The Grateful Dead, 1967; Anthem of the Sun, 1968; Aoxomoxoa, 1969; American Beauty, 1970; Workingman’s Dead, 1970; Wake of the Flood, 1973; Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel, 1974; Blues for Allah, 1975; Terrapin Station, 1977; Shakedown Street, 1978; Go to Heaven, 1980; In the Dark, 1987; Built to Last, 1989.

albums (with David Grisman): Garcia/Grisman, 1991; Not for Kids Only, 1993; Shady Grove, 1996; So What, 1998; The Pizza Tapes, 2000 (featuring Tony Rice); Grateful Dawg, 2001; Been All Around This World, 2004.

writings of interest:Harrington Street, 1995 (autobiography); Garcia: A Signpost to New Space, 2003 (memoir).

Bibliography

Dodd, David, and Diana Spaulding. The Grateful Dead Reader. London: Oxford University Press, 2001. A vault of Grateful Dead information, with interviews, articles, lyric interpretations, and show reviews.

Gans, David. Conversations with the Dead. New York: Routledge, 1991. A collection of interviews with band members, including Garcia. Gans, a musician and self-identified Deadhead, hosted the radio program “The Grateful Dead Hour.”

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Not Fade Away. New York: Avalon, 1995. A collection of fan stories and memories that were posted on the Internet in memory of Garcia immediately following his death. A key tool in examining the cultural impact of Garcia’s life as well as his musical legacy.

Garcia, Jerry. Harrington Street. New York: Delacorte Press, 1995. This is an autobiographical and anecdotal personal history by Garcia.

Garcia, Jerry, Charles Reich, and Jann Wenner. Garcia: The Rolling Stone Interview. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972. Detailed interview with Garcia during the Grateful Dead’s formative years.

Hunter, Robert. Box of Rain. New York: Penguin, 1993. A collection of song lyrics and stories regarding song origins.

Jackson, Blair. Garcia: An American Life. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. A detailed biography of Garcia written by an established rock journalist and longtime Grateful Dead reporter. Jackson blends interviews with Garcia that cover a thirty-year span with those of other band members, close friends, family members, and business associates for a humane portrait of Garcia.

McNally, Dennis. A Long Strange Trip. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Historiography of the Grateful Dead and individual members written by the band’s official historian and longtime publicist.