| Jerry Garcia: And The Rest Of “The Grateful Dead” Essay, Research Paper
Jerome John Garcia was born in 1942, in San Francisco’s
Mission District. His father, a spanish immigrant named Jose
“Joe”
Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland bandleader in the
thirties, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway
composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while on a fishing
trip, Garcia saw his father swept to his death by a California river.
After his father’s death, Garcia spent a few years living with
his mother’s parents, in one of San Francisco’s working-class
districts. His grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville’s
Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts on Saturday nights, and it was in
those hours, Garcia would later say, that he developed his
fondness
for country-music forms-particularly the deft , blues-inflected
mandolin playing and mournful, high-lonesome vocal style of Bill
Monroe, the principal founder of bluegrass. When Garcia was ten,
his mother, Ruth, brought him to live with her at a sailor’s hotel and
bar that she ran near the city’s waterfront. He spent much of his
time
there listening to the drunks’, fanciful stories; or sitting alone
reading
Disney and horror comics and pouring through science-fiction
novels.
When Garcia was fifteen, his older brother Tiff – who years
earlier had accidentally chopped off Jerry’s right-hand middle
finger
while the two were chopping wood – introduced him to early rock
&
roll and rhythm & blues music. Garcia was quickly drawn to the
music’s funky rhythms and wild textures, but what attracted him
the
most were the sounds that came from the guitar; especially the
bluesy “melifluousness” of players such as; T-bone Walker and
Chuck Berry. It was something he said that he had never heard
before. Garcia wanted to learn how to make those same sounds
he went straight to his mother and told her that he wanted an
electric
guitar for his next birthday.
During this same period, the beat period was going into full
swing in the Bay Area, and it held great predominance at the
North
Beach arts school where Garcia attended and at the city’s
coffeehouses, where he had heard poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti
and Kenneth Rexroth read their best works.
By the early Sixties, Garcia was living in Palo Alto,
California,
hanging out and playing in the folk-music clubs around Stanford
University. He was also working part-time at Dana Morgan’s
Music
Store, where he met several of the musicians who would
eventually
dominate the San Francisco music scene. In 1963 Garcia formed
a
jug band, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Its lineup
included a young folk guitarist named Bob Weir and a blues lover,
Ron McKernan, known to his friends as “Pigpen” for his often
disorderly appearance. The group played a mix of blues, country,
and folk, and Pigpen became the frontman, singing Jimmy Reed
and
Lightnin’ Hopkins tunes.
Then in February 1964, the Beatles made their historic
appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and virtually overnight,
youth
culture was imbued with a new spirit and sense of identity. Gracia
understood the group’s promise after seeing its first film, A Hard
Day’s Night.
As a result, the folky purism of Mother McCree’s all-acoustic
form began to seem rather limited and uninteresting to Garcia and
many of the other band members, and before long the ensemble
was
transformed into the Warlocks. A few dropped out, but they were
soon joined by two more; Bill Kreutzmann, and Phil Lesh.
It was around this time that Garcia and some of the group’s
other members also began an experiment with drugs that would
change the nature of the band’s story. Certainly this wasn’t the first
time drugs had been used in music for artistic expression or had
found their way into an American cultural movement. Many jazz
and
blues artists had been smoking marijuana and using various
narcotics
to intensify their music making for several decades, and in the
Fifties
the Beats had extolled marijuana as an assertion of their non-
conformism. But the drugs that began cropping up in the youth
and
music scenes in the mid-Sixties were of a much different. more
exotic type. Veterans Hospital near Stanford University had been
running experiments on LSD, a drug that induced hallucinations in
those who ingested it and that, for many, also inspired something
remarkably close to the patterns of a religious experience. Among
those taking these drugs was Garcia future songwriting partner
Robert Hunter. Another that later joined the band was Ken
Kersey,
author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a
Great
Notion. Kersey had been working on an idea about group LSD
experiments and had started a loosely knit gang of artists, called
the
Merry Pranksters, dedicated to this adventure. This group included
several rebels including Garcia’s future wife, Carolyn Adams.
These Acid Tests became the model for what would shortly
become known as the Greatful Dead trip. In the years that
followed,
the Dead would never really abandon the philosophy of the Acid
Tests. Right until the end, the band would encourage the sense of
fellowship that came from and fueled the music.
Throughout all the public scrutiny it was still the Greatful
Dead who became known as the “people’s band” ; the band that
cared about the following it played to and that often staged benefits
or free shows for the common good. Long after the Haight’s
moment
had passed, it would be the Greatful Dead, and the Dead alone,
that
would still display the ideals of fraternity and compassion which
most other Sixties-bred groups had long ago relinquished and
many
rock artists did not use in favor of more incisive ideals.
The San Francicso scene was remarkable while it lasted, but
it
could not endure forever. Its reputation as a youth haven hurt it
and
because of this the Haight was soon overrun with overrun with
runaways and the sort of health and shelter problems that a
community of mainly white, middle-class expatriates had never
had
to face before. In addition, the widespread use of LSD was
turning
out to be a little less ideal than some people actually expected.
There were nights where on such bad “trips” that the emergency
room could not hold all of them. By the middle of 1967, a season
known as the Summer of Love, the Haight had started to turn ugly.
There were bad drugs on the street, there were rapes and murders,
and there were enough unknown newcomers that arrived in the
neighborhood without any means of support and they were
expecting
the scene to feed and nurture them. Garcia and the Dead had seen
the trouble coming and tried to prompt the city to prepare for it.
Not
long after, the Dead left the Haight for individual residences in
Marion County, north of San Francisco.
By 1970, the idealism surrounding the Bay Area music scene,
and much of the couterculture, had largely evaporated. The drug
scene had turned fearful; much of the wild dream of a Woodstock
generation, bound together, first by the Manson Family murders, in
the summer of 1969, and then, a few months later, by a tragic and
brutal event at the Altamont Speedway, just outside of San
Francisco. The occasion was a free concert featuring the Rolling
Stones. Following either the example or the suggestion of the
Grateful Dead, the Stones hired the Hell’s Angels as a security
force.
It proved to be a day of horrific violence. The Angels battered
numerous people, usually for no reason, and in the evening, as the
Stones performed, the bikers stabbed a black guy to death in front
of
the stage.
The record the band followed with, Workingman’s Dead, was
the Dead’s response to that period. The album was a statement
about the changing and badly corrupt sense of community in
America. the next album American Beauty, made it plain and
apparent that they were not breaking up even though the first
album
put doubts in the minds of fans, called Deadheads.
It was the sort of standard fan club pitch that countless pop
acts
had indulged in before, but what it set in motion for the Dead
would
prove remarkable: the biggest sustained fan reaction in pop- music
history, even bigger than the Beatles. Clearly the group had a
devoted and far- flung following that, more than anything else,
simply wanted to see the Gratful Dead live. One of the slogans of
the time was “There’s nothing like a Grateful Dead show,” and this
claim was very much justified. On those nights when the band was
performing, propelled by the double drumming of Mickey Hart and
Bill Kreutzmann, and the dizzying melodic joining of Garcia’s
gutiar
along with Weir’s, and then Lesh’s bass; the Grateful Dead’s
imagination proved matchless.
It was this dedication to live performances, and a penchant
for
near-incessant touring, that formed the groundwork for the Dead’s
extraordinary success during the last twenty years or so. Even a
costly attempt at starting the bands own record company in the
early
Seventies plus the death of three consecutive keyboardists;
McKernan, of alcohol-induced cirrhosis of the liver, in 1973; Keith
Godchaux, in a car accident, in 1980, a year after leaving the band;
and Brent Myland, of a morphine and cocaine overdose in 1990;
never really took away from the Dead’s momentum as a live act.
After the 1986 summer shows with Bob Dylan and Tom Petty
and the Heartbreakers, Garcia passed out at his home in San
Rafael,
California, and slipped into a diabetic coma. His body was not
agreeing with all the years of road-life and drug abuse. When he
came out of the coma the Dead made a tribute song to growing old
gracefully and bravely, “Touch of Grey.”
Unfortunately, though, Garcia’s health was going nowhere
but
downhill, and according to some people so was his drug problem.
He collapsed from exhaustion in 1992, resulting in many
cancellations in their tour that year. After his 1993 recovery,
Garcia
devoted himself to a regimen of diet and exercise. At first it
worked
and he wound up losing sixty pounds. There were other positive
changes at work: He had become a father again in recent years and
was spending more time as a parent, and in 1994 he entered into
his
third marriage, with filmmaker Deborah Koons. Plus, to the
pleasure
of numerous Deadheads
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