He was a lucky man. Although his band, the Grateful Dead, had only one Top 40 hit in 30 years, there was that matter, the way he saw it, of having survived for three decades in a hit-today, gone-tomorrow business. The Dead not only survived, but thrived, by recognizing their strength—live shows—and building a fan base of die-hard Deadheads that spans generations. He made millions, not only from the band but from merchandising and his artwork. He even had an ice-cream flavor and a couple of hotel suites named after him.
His name was Jerry Garcia. Soon after the Grateful Dead emerged out of the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury scene in the '60s, he was Captain Trips, whose music and musings helped guide legions of fans of psychedelic rock. Later, as he began to gray, he was Uncle Jerry, the gentle heart and soul of a group that single-handedly kept the ideals of the '60s alive.
And when, in the '80s, drugs began to take their toll, and his and his band's lives were in danger, he was the uncle who had everyone worried.
Not him, though. He was Mr. Lucky.
We were talking once about his having made a good living while avoiding normal, 9-to-5 life.
"What could be better?" he asked, issuing a delighted, cartoon chuckle. "I feel I scored real well on that level. It's not that we're exceptionally gifted or anything. We may have been exceptionally lucky. Even that I'm not so sure about. But we have been exceptionally determined.
"I also feel that in terms of being a practical model, we haven't done anything exceptional. Anybody who can imagine themselves doing something better than what they're doing should just go ahead and do it. Have no fear of failure, and just go for it."
Those who saw beyond the stereotypical notions of Deadheads as dervish-dancing, time-warped hippies and of the Dead as a retro-acid-rock band heard their dedication to American roots music—to learning it, expanding on it, and spreading it. They heard, in Jerry Garcia, an ingenious, fluidly expressive, folk-and blues-rooted guitarist with a knack for jazz-like improvisation.
Tell him that, and he'd laugh. He'd be happy being remembered as "a competent player," he once said.
But tell him that one of the great appeals of the Dead was their willingness to take risks, never doing a song the same way twice, and his eyes brightened as he nodded and picked up your thought: "And we'll continue to take them. That's who we are. We're also an illustration that you can go through life that way and it'll work. It might be bumpy, but it's never boring."
Jerry Garcia had always been identified with his hometown. The day after his death, his wife of 18 months, filmmaker Deborah Garcia asked that he be remembered as "a true San Franciscan." Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle's famous columnist, who had known Garcia for nearly 30 years, continued in that vein. Garcia was, Caen wrote, "a San Franciscan—fifth generation on his mother's side. His grandmother, Tillie, helped found the laundry workers' union and Jerry was so proud of her...Jerry's dad, Joe Garcia, played reeds in a swing band at the old El Patio and other places where the Dead later played. Joe ran a bar called José's at First and Harrison, too, so Jerry was solidly grounded in local lore."
Although he had musical roots, Jerry—named Jerome, after Show Boat composer Jerome Kern—never got to know his father. José Ramon Garcia, who came to San Francisco in 1919 from La Corñuna, Spain, and whose family wealth allowed him to pursue music, played clarinet in Dixieland combos. In the '30s, José was leading big bands and orchestras when he met Ruth Clifford, an opera-loving nurse of Irish and Swedish descent whose family had arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush of the late 1840s.
Soon after they wed, in 1934, José gave up music and bought the Four Hundred Club, a downtown bar. The couple had their first baby, Clifford, in 1937; on Aug. 1, 1942, Jerome John completed the family.
Jerry was only 4 when an accident occurred that would make his future career as a guitarist even less likely. On a trip to the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco, he was helping his brother split wood for a fire when Clifford chopped off half of the middle finger of Jerry's right hand.
A year later, the family was shaken by a much more serious tragedy. On a camping trip, José, wading in a river to go fly-fishing, slipped and was swept away by a strong current. "I was there on the shore," Garcia would recall later in Rolling Stone. "I actually watched him go under. It was horrible. I was just a little kid, and I didn't really understand what was going on. But then, of course, my life changed."
Sent by his overburdened mother, who now ran the Four Hundred Club alone, to live nearby with her parents, Jerry got his first taste of independence—or, at least, freedom from discipline. He became, says his brother Clifford "Tiff" Garcia, now 57 and director of fulfillment for the Grateful Dead's merchandising operation, "a tough little kid." Once, when a policeman grabbed the pair after they had set off a powerful M-80 firecracker, wrecking a barber pole, Jerry started kicking the officer. "He was only 8," says Tiff, still amazed. Rebellion became a constant in Garcia's life: A few years later, he flunked eighth grade for refusing to do homework. Later still, he would join the Army and get discharged early—but honorably. "They didn't say that I was pathologically antiauthoritarian," he recalled, "but I guess that was out of kindness."
Luckily, there was a new musical sound tailor-made to match Garcia's mood: rock and roll. By his early teens—when he moved back with his mother, who had remarried—Jerry was singing doowop for fun with Clifford and collecting Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly records. The next step was obvious: He desperately wanted an electric guitar. Instead, for his 15th birthday, he got...an accordion. He later recalled his reaction: "Arrggghh, no, no, no! I railed and raved, and [my mother] finally turned it in, and I got a pawnshop electric guitar and an amplifier. I was just beside myself with joy."
The tough kid became a tough teenager. "Either you were a hoodlum," he reasoned, "or you were a puddle on the sidewalk." When his mother tried to rein him in by moving to Cazadero, a small town north of San Francisco, Jerry responded, at 17, by dropping out of high school and enlisting in the Army. He hoped, he told me, "to get away from everything...to see the world." He was bounced nine months later: "I started screwing around and got a lot of court-martials, but didn't make any enemies."
At that point, a school friend introduced him to Robert Hunter, who'd just finished a stint with the National Guard. The pair had a lot in common. For starters, they both liked music, and they were both living in their cars. They began playing together, and more than 30 years later Hunter is still the Grateful Dead's principal lyricist.
But it was still only 1960. In the five years before the Dead would be born, Garcia worked odd jobs as he both studied and taught music. Sometimes he performed in clubs with musician Sarah Ruppenthal; they married in May 1963 and had a daughter, Heather, that December.
Slowly, Garcia noticed a scene building in the Bay Area rooted in local clubs and around college campuses. He began bumping into Jorma Kaukonen and Paul Kantner, who would eventually wind up in Jefferson Airplane. "We all played the same clubs," said Jerry. "There was pot there and you could get high. Right around '64, all of a sudden, Bam! There was LSD. Before, it was something you read about in The Doors of Perception."
For Garcia, taking the hallucinogenic drug was far more interesting. In '64, the year of Beatlemania and A Hard Day's Night, LSD was not yet illegal. "All you have to do is take this little pill, and it's a different world," he said, recalling his amazement. "As far as I was concerned, it was tremendously liberating."
LSD seemed liberating then; years later, drugs would play a much more serious and sinister role in Garcia's life, and his death.
Garcia had by 1964 added banjo to his repertoire and was playing with folk groups like the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters and Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, the first direct predecessor of the Grateful Dead. Bob Weir, a fresh-faced high schooler, played guitar while long-haired, head-banded, moustachioed Ron McKernan, better known as "Pigpen," played harmonica.
The Uptown Jug Champions lost four members, added drummer Bill Kreutzmann and, later, bassist Phil Lesh, and became the Warlocks. Inspired by Bob Dylan's electrification of folk in 1965 and by the Beatles, Garcia and his partners began to rock. They began to get two kinds of gigs: straight nightclubs and the Acid Tests, a series of loose, public, LSD-soaked parties being staged by novelist Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, who traveled in a bus with a destination sign that read, simply, FURTHUR.
That sounded fine to the Warlocks.
"We were interested in getting crazy," said Garcia. "That's why we went with the Acid Tests." At the shows, Kesey dressed as Captain America, strobe lights flashed, and ecstatic dancers smeared Day-Glo paint on anyone who passed. "We weren't the headliners; the event was, and anything that happened was a part of it."
In San Francisco most of the band—newly christened the Grateful Dead, after Garcia picked the words off a page in a dictionary—moved into a Victorian house at 710 Ashbury St. They lived communally each drawing $5 a week from a general fund. Somewhere along the way, Garcia had split with Sarah and begun living with Carolyn Adams, an Acid Test regular known as Mountain Girl; she became his second wife, and they had two daughters, Annabelle, now 25, and Teresa, 21. For the rest of his life, Garcia would recall the '60s with unabashed affection. Thanks to the summers of love, he said, "the age-old questions—Who am I? What am I doing? What's all this about?—had more light focused on them."
The '60s were, literally and figuratively, a high point for the band.
Busted, down on Bourbon Street
Set up, like a bowlin' pin
Knocked down, it gets to wearin' thin,
They just won't let you be.
("Truckin' " by Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh
The Grateful Dead could have done without much of the '70s. The decade began with two of their finest albums, Workingman 's Dead and American Beauty, and the band discovered and cultivated the Deadhead following that would become a traveling community, a vast base of support that kept the Dead alive.
But take 1970—please. All of the Dead, except Pigpen and Tom Constanten, got busted for possession of a Haight Street litany of offerings—grass, acid and amphetamines—in New Orleans. They claimed they had been set up. After much publicity and anxiety, the charges were dismissed.
Take 1971 too. Mickey Hart had earlier joined the band as a second drummer. His father, Lenny, came aboard as manager, telling the Dead that he was a man of God and could help them to "fill the vessel." Instead, he stole $70,000—and disappeared. Caught that July, he was sentenced to six months in jail for embezzling. Distraught, Mickey Hart temporarily left the band.
Ah, but the year wasn't all bad. The group inserted the following message in a liner note for its live album Grateful Dead: "DEAD FREAKS UNITE! Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we'll keep you informed." From those words did a mighty movement bloom. Today an estimated 100,000 American Deadheads, plus another 20,000 overseas, stay in touch through fanzines, newsletters and, increasingly, the Internet. They trade tapes from the Dead's live shows (unlike most bands, the Dead provide facilities so fans can make quality recordings); speak their own language (a tour hotel might be called the Jerryiott; a rich kid who dresses like a down-at-the-heels Deadhead is a Trustafarian); plaster their cars with bumper stickers (HAVE A JERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY BOB WEIR) and pride themselves on a sense of extended family.
Following the Dead, Garcia once said, "is this time frame's version of the archetypal American adventure. It used to be that you could run away and join the circus, say, or ride the freight trains." The late myth master Joseph Campbell likened the Deadheads to a newly evolved tribe: By their tie-dyed T-shirts, ye shall know them.
But much of that would come later. Through the early '70s, the Dead continued to stumble—and fall. In 1973 Pigpen died of liver failure attributed to alcoholism. Soon after, rattled and exhausted, the band quit touring for nearly two years.
I wanna know if...Jerry really does heroin. Those are pretty old rumors. And I'd like to know when the last time they did acid was, because a lot of their audience still does it.
—A Deadhead from Santa Cruz, Calif., at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco in 1983
No one in the band was talking about it, but the Deadhead was right about Jerry Garcia.
On the surface, Garcia seemed fine as the '80s dawned and the Dead observed their 15th year together. I met with the band in Boulder, Colo., for a magazine article, and Garcia, sitting on his bed in a room at the Holiday Inn, spoke with his usual mix of humility and humor about the Dead and various side projects. He'd recently created music and sound effects for a number of films, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a couple of Roger Corman flicks, as well as The Grateful Dead, a 1977 documentary of the Dead concert experience.
I asked about the role of drugs in the band, given its past reputation. "I think as far as the band is concerned, the fundamental thing we're doing is being a band," he said. "We're not selling drugs or promoting drugs. The fact that we all take drugs isn't even true. And nobody takes drugs regularly.
"When we were really identified with drugs, Pigpen never took any. So it's always been part true and part false. Drugs are just a reality of American life."
Maybe so. But by the mid '80s, hard drugs had become a day-to-day reality in Garcia's life. The notion of mind exploration had been replaced with the simple, pathetic need for a fix: He was addicted to heroin and cocaine. "He got so trashed out for the last few years that he just wasn't really playing," Dan Healy, the band's sound engineer, said at the time. "Having him not give a s-t, that was devastating." John Barlow, another Dead lyricist, says that by the mid '80s, he "was very afraid that Garcia was going to die. In fact, I'd reached a point where I just figured it was a matter of time before I'd turn on my radio and hear 'Jerry Garcia, famous in the '60s, has died.' "
Early in 1985, members of the band went to his house in Marin County and confronted him, telling him he was killing himself and that he would have to choose between drugs and the band. A contrite Garcia promised to seek help.
Before he found it, though, he was arrested. One night in January 1985, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, he was sitting in his BMW when a policeman, noticing that the car appeared to have a lapsed registration, approached. Garcia seemed to be trying to hide something between the front seats; and when the officer investigated he found, in Garcia's briefcase, 23 packages of heroin and cocaine. Garcia got off light and entered a drug treatment and counseling program.
Afterward he spoke of his weaknesses, of living "a life of benign neglect." As he put it, "I'm the sort of person that will just keep going along until something stops me." He was never "an overdose kind of junkie," he said, describing his use of heroin as off and on. But, he said, "there was something there for me...maybe it was the thing of being able to distance myself a little from the world."
Back on the road in 1986, Garcia, feeling tired, nonetheless enjoyed sharing the stage with Bob Dylan and with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers until something stopped him. After the tour, he recalled, he simply felt tired. One day he said, "I couldn't move anymore, so I sat down."
A week later, Garcia woke up. He was in a hospital, surrounded by band and family members. He learned that he had been in a diabetic coma.
Uncertain, at age 44, about his command of memory, physical coordination and his ability to play guitar again, Garcia went through three months of relearning music with his friend, keyboard player Merl Saunders. And Jerry delighted in the outpouring of affection and advice from Deadheads. "The fans," he said, "put life into me."
In some 28 years of recording, Jerry Garcia issued at least 26 albums (including live sets and compilations) with the Grateful Dead and another dozen or so on his own or with folk, rock and bluegrass ensembles. He made the Top 40 once, in 1987, with the song "Touch of Grey."
We will get by
We will get by
We will get by
We will survive.
("Touch of Grey" by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia)
Garcia was well aware of mortality. Looking old before his time, he told a TV news reporter in 1988, after recovering from his coma, "You could go at any moment, so you might as well try and cram as much as you can possibly get into your life."
But he was doing too much cramming. In 1990, the band weathered the drug-related death of Brent Mydland, a keyboard player who joined in 1979 and came to do much of their singing and songwriting. The Dead rolled on, replacing Mydland and continuing to sell out enough concerts to rank them among the top touring acts, in terms of revenue, year after year. In 1991 they played 79 dates and became the top-grossing band in the land.
In 1992, the toll came due. Garcia collapsed from exhaustion. He could barely walk up a flight of stairs without falling over, he said. He had simply let himself go. The band had to cancel a tour while Garcia caught his breath. He vowed to change his ways and seemed to be making progress—physically and psychologically.
He lost 60 pounds and married his longtime girlfriend, the former Deborah Koons. By now the father of four—he had daughter Keelin with Manasha Matheson in 1987—Garcia admitted that, being away on tour or lost in drugs, he had been a lousy dad, and he began trying to straighten out. "With my older kids I was pretty much an absentee parent, a mediocre father at best," he said. "But they still seem to like me. With Keelin, I'm able to get more quality time in." (That may have been true, but his older children didn't necessarily forget the years he had ignored them. "He may have been a genius," said Annabelle 25, at her father's private funeral service, "but he was a s-tty father." Later, before 25,000 fans at a memorial service for Garcia in Golden Gate Park four days after his death, she thanked his fans: "We love each and every one of you because you put us through college and we didn't have to work at Dairy Queen.")
When Garcia died, there were rumors that he had again slipped back into drugs. He had entered the Betty Ford Center in July but checked himself out before his program was completed. When he died, on Aug. 9 of a heart attack at age 53, he was at Serenity Knolls, a drug-treatment center north of San Francisco.
Ironically, with Garcia's death, a remnant of the Summer of Love reemerged in San Francisco. The people who loved him and the Dead felt a need to come to his hometown. In the hours and days after his passing, they flocked into his city, into the Haight-Ashbury, convening at the local Ben & Jerry's ice-cream parlor, part of the chain that for almost a decade has featured a flavor called Cherry Garcia. (Part of the profits go to the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation, which makes small block grants to numerous grassroots projects. Beneficiaries range from handicapped athletes to struggling classical composers). Many of the fans made the two-block trek up Ashbury to 710, where the Dead used to live.
"I always loved that place," Garcia once told me. On the occasion of the band's 15th anniversary, I'd visited the house and reported to Garcia that the family residing there included a 15-year-old Deadhead. "Good vibes!" he exclaimed with a laugh.
Now, visitors have set up minishrines on the front porch and on the sidewalk, and they take photographs of each other on the wooden steps.
One pilgrim pats another on the back as he leaves. "It's tough, man," he says, "but it was a good ride."
Doug Quails, 37, wearing his "Tour '89" T-shirt, identifies himself and his buddy Rick Milson, 43, as firefighters from Apple Valley, near San Bernardino in Southern California. Yes, they say, they're Deadheads. "We came here to pay tribute to a guy we followed for years," says Milson.
Three women, all in their early 20s, sit around a tree in front of the house. They decline to give their names, but one of them says she's 23, is from "everywhere," and has gone virtually everywhere to see the Dead—she has attended 239 concerts, exactly. She is here, she says, to be with her family—meaning, of course, the Dead family.
When she was born, the Dead were 7 years and 10 albums old. What drew her to them? "Their music's all very personal, and there's a lot of magic involved," she says. She has little interest in contemporary bands—even those, like Phish, the Spin Doctors and the Dave Matthews Band—that have been likened to the Dead in musical style and community spirit.
"Nothing like Jerry," she says. "The whole band, they're all great musicians, but Jerry's guitar and his voice are just totally in here"—she points to her heart—"forever."
Neither she nor any others who have come to this place choose to fault Garcia for his use of drugs. "When you have something as positive and high as Jerry's music," says one of the women, "everything in life has balance, so the opposite of that is gonna be something low and dark."
It is Saturday, three days since his death. That evening I go to Sweetwater, a rootsy nightclub in Mill Valley, in Marin County, to hear the Annie Sampson Band. Annie is a longtime friend, and the next morning she calls to say that Bob Weir, Garcia's bandmate and friend, had come to visit, backstage, during the second set.
On the day Jerry died, Weir seemed composed before the television cameras, saying how much the world would miss his friend. That Sunday, at the memorial in Golden Gate Park, his voice, indeed his whole body, would quiver as he called on the crowd to take some of the joy Jerry Garcia had provided and to reflect it back to him: 50,000 arms waved at the sky.
But on Saturday night Weir slipped into the Sweetwater and stayed in the basement, away from a house packed with people who would want to embrace him. He was content to hear, through the walls, the sound of Annie singing an R&B version of an old song by a mutual friend, Bob Dylan.
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you...
Strike another match, go start anew
It's all over now, Baby Blue...
It was the solace of rhvthm. And blues.
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