Garcia, Jerry: 1942-1995: Musician

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Jerry Garcia: 1942-1995: Musician

When Jerry Garcia died on August 9, 1995, at the age of 53, there was an outpouring of grief from longtime fans of the Grateful Dead. David Gates wrote in Newsweek, "If Garcia didn't get his threescore and ten, he still made more music, touched more hearts and lifted more spirits than seemed humanly possible." Although the band had never won mainstream success, a hardcore following known as "Deadheads" helped to make the group one of the top ten grossing concert bands during the late 1980s and early 1990s. While many fans referred to Garcia as the band's leader, he continually dismissed his leadership role.

Traded in Accordion for Guitar

Jerome John Garcia was born in Children's Hospital in San Francisco on August 1, 1942. His grandfather, Manuel Garcia, was an electrician who had immigrated from La Coruña, Spain, to San Francisco after World War I. His father, Jose "Joe" Garcia, was a bandleader, and had married Ruth Marie Clifford, his second wife, in 1935. "Jerry" Garcia, the second of two boys, had been named after his father's favorite composer, Jerome Kern. Both of his parents were also musicians; his father was a clarinetist, his mother a pianist. Joe Garcia owned a saloon and boarding house near the waterfront, and the family was prosperous for the first several years of Jerry Garcia's life.

The family's fortunes changed abruptly when Joe Garcia drowned on a fishing trip in northern California, leaving his wife to operate the family's saloon. For the next several years, Jerry Garcia and his brother Clifford moved back and forth between their mother's home and that of their grandparents, Tillie and Bill Clifford. Several months after his father's death, Garcia lost the top two joints of the middle finger on his right hand while helping his grandfather chop wood. He also had asthma, which often forced him to remain in bed, where he watched television and read comics like Tales From the Crypt. When his family moved to Menlo Park, 25 miles from San Francisco, Garcia started listening to KWBR, a rhythm and blues station, and developed a love of music.

When Garcia turned 15, his mother gave him a Neapolitan accordion for his birthday. He convinced her to trade it for a Danelectro guitar that he had seen in a pawnshop window. He had taken piano lessons earlier, but had shown little interest in formal training; now he practiced all the time. He attended Denman Junior High School and Balboa High School, and worked at his family's saloon washing dishes and stocking supplies in his spare time. He also enrolled in an art class at the California School of Fine Arts (later San Francisco Art Institute) on weekends. His teacher, Wally Hedrick, was instrumental in introducing him to the city's bohemian scene. Garcia was soon familiar with beatnik hangouts like the Coexistence Bagel Shop, where he saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti read, and City Lights Bookstore, where he bought a copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

At a Glance . . .

Born Jerome John Garcia on August 1, 1942, in San Francisco, CA; died on August 9, 1995, in San Francisco, CA; son of Jose (a bandleader) and Ruth Marie (a nurse; maiden name, Clifford) Garcia; married Sarah Ruppenthal (divorced); married Carolyn Adams (divorced); married Deborah Koons; children: Heather (first marriage), Annabelle and Teresa (second marriage), Keelin (mother, Manasha Matheson).

Career: Began playing guitar at age 15; joined a variety of bands, early 1960s; formed electric blues band, the Warlocks, 1965; co-founded Grateful Dead, 1965-95; recorded first solo album, Garcia, 1971; performed and recorded with New Riders of the Purple Sage and Old and In the Way, early-to-mid 1970s; recorded Reflections, 1976; toured with Jerry Garcia Band, 1970s-90s; recorded with David Grisman, 1990s; performed last show with Grateful Dead, July 9, 1995.

Developed Love of Folk Music

In 1959 Garcia and his family moved to Cazadero, 80 miles north of San Francisco, and he joined a band called the Chords at Sebastopol's Analy High School. His mother had hoped the move would improve Garcia's performance in school, but it didn't. After an arrest for stealing his mother's car, he was left with two choices: a sentence in jail or a stint in the army. He chose the army, and after basic training at Fort Ord near Monterey, California, he was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. During that time Garcia continued to play guitar and developed a love of folk music, a craze which was then sweeping the United States. As with school, however, Garcia got in trouble for being absent without official leave (AWOL) and was given a general discharge from the army in 1961. "They didn't say that I was pathologically antiauthoritarian," Garcia told Ben Fong-Torres in People, "but I guess that was out of kindness."

After his discharge Garcia moved to East Palo Alto, where he became involved with a bohemian crowd. He was in a car accident in 1961 with several friends and, while his injuries were minor, he was deeply affected by the death of his friend Paul Speegle in the accident. "He would still be undisciplined," wrote Dennis McNally in Long Strange Trip, "but now he would become obsessive. The guitar would become an extension of his hands, ears, and mind, and for years few would remember him without an instrument in his hands." In 1961 he also met Robert Hunter, a lifelong friend and future co-writer. They performed for a short time as Bob and Jerry, playing folksongs they had learned from the Anthology of American Folk Music. By 1962 Garcia had also learned the banjo, and he joined a number of bands including the Hart Valley Drifters and the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers.

Garcia married Sarah Ruppenthal in May of 1963, and they had a daughter, Heather. By 1964 he had formed the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions with two future Grateful Dead members. Ron McKernan, nicknamed Pigpen after a character in the Peanuts comic strip, played harmonica and sang, while Bob Weir played a washtub bass and jug. At McKernan's insistence, Garcia and Weir would switch to electric guitars the following year and the band, re-christened as the Warlocks, specialized in electric blues. Bassist Phil Lesh and drummer Bill Kreutzman also joined, and the band performed at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests in 1965-66.

Settled in San Francisco

After learning that another band was also called the Warlocks, the group changed its name. A number of names had been suggested when Garcia picked up a dictionary, opened it, and singled out the phrase "grateful dead." The name would stick for the next 30 years. Garcia left his wife and child when he moved into the band's communal house at 710 Asbury Street in San Francisco. There, Carolyn Adams, known as Mountain Girl, joined him and the couple eventually married and had two children, Annabelle and Teresa. Over the next two years, the band developed a reputation in San Francisco, performing frequently at the Avalon Ballroom and at the Fillmore. In 1967 the band recorded its self-titled debut for Warner Records.

Garcia's views about music evolved rapidly during this time period, primarily due to his first experience with LSD in April of 1965 when the drug was still legal. While Garcia would later have multiple problems due to heroin addiction, he believed his early experiences with marijuana and hallucinogenics were mind expanding. "All you have to do is take this little pill, and it's a different world," he told Fong-Torres. "As far as I was concerned, it was tremendously liberating."

In 1970 Garcia and Hunter's songwriting matured on two of the Grateful Dead's most enduring albums, Workingman's Dead and American Beauty. A number of Garcia/Hunter songs—"Uncle John's Band," "Ripple," "Casey Jones," and "Friend of the Devil"—remained staples in the band's repertoire for the remainder of its career. "Workingman's Dead remains the crucial studio work in the band's entire oeuvre," wrote Joel Selvin and Gary Graff in Music Hound Folk. McNally wrote of American Beauty, "The songs were not only exquisite, their performances were illuminated by an inner light born of sorrow." Some observers believed that Garcia's emotional vocals on the latter album reflected his response to his mother's death in 1970.

Life With the Grateful Dead

For the next 25 years, much of Garcia's life would revolve around his membership in the Grateful Dead. The band toured frequently, sometimes playing more than 100 shows a year, and continued to record a steady stream of albums. Garcia, however, always remained involved in various musical side projects. In the early 1970s he played banjo in the group Old and in the Way with Peter Rowan and David Grisman, and steel guitar with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. He recorded his first solo album, Garcia, in 1971, and when the Grateful Dead wasn't touring, he performed with the Jerry Garcia Band. In 1972 the Grateful Dead left Warner Brothers and issued its own albums for several years, and then took an 18-month hiatus from 1974-76. In the late 1970s the Grateful Dead signed to Arista and recorded Terrapin Station, Shakedown Street, and Go To Heaven, and in 1978 they traveled to Egypt to perform near the Great Pyramids during a lunar eclipse.

During the 1980s a number of bad habits began to catch up with Garcia. "Hard drugs had become a day-to-day reality in Garcia's life," wrote Fong-Torres of People Magazine, who added that "the notion of mind exploration had been replaced with the simple, pathetic need for a fix." Members of the Grateful Dead confronted their lead guitarist at his house about his drug use in 1984, and he agreed to seek help. In January of 1985, while Garcia was on his way to a clinic, a police officer found heroin and cocaine in his BMW. Garcia appeared in court a month later and was assigned to counseling. By the summer of 1986, he was clean of drugs, but he continued to have health problems and feel sluggish; in August of 1986 he went into a diabetic coma. "I started feeling like the vegetable kingdom was speaking to me," he was quoted in Long Strange Trip. "It was communicating in comic dialect in iambic pentameter."

After a close call with death, Garcia was forced to relearn his motor coordination, including his guitar skills. By the fall of 1986, he had returned to touring with the Jerry Garcia Band and by December he was performing with the Grateful Dead. During the summer of 1987, the Grateful Dead released its first studio album in seven years, In the Dark, and was surprised when "Touch of Gray," a new song off the album by Hunter and Garcia, reached number nine on Billboard. The band went onto film a video for "Touch of Gray" that went into heavy rotation on Music Television (MTV), sparking a whole new generation of fans for the music of Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Garcia also began a relationship with Manasha Matheson, and they had a daughter, Keelin.

Inducted Into Hall of Fame

During the 1990s Garcia experienced several artistic triumphs. He attended numerous sessions at David Grisman's basement studio, resulting in several highly regarded acoustic albums. In 1994 the Grateful Dead was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On Valentine's Day Garcia married Deborah Koons, an old friend and filmmaker. Despite his successes, Garcia continued to battle both health and drug problems.

In 1992 Garcia collapsed from exhaustion. "His weight had ballooned, and he had no energy," McNally wrote. "On tour he would ask people to carry his rather light briefcase up the stage stairs for him." In 1995 he checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, California, but left after two weeks to celebrate his 53rd birthday. A week later he entered a private clinic in San Francisco. At around four A.M. on August 9th, a security guard noticed that Garcia had stopped snoring. He was pronounced dead, and the cause of death was listed as a heart attack.

Garcia's legacy, like that of John Lennon or Elvis, is difficult to assess because it has continued to grow after the musician's death. In San Francisco the mayor flew a tie-die flag at half-mast, and vigils were held in cities throughout the United States. Bob Dylan, Ornette Coleman, and President Clinton paid tribute to Garcia. Grateful Dead Productions continued to release live recordings from the vault, and Grisman's Acoustic Disc label issued several posthumous albums along with a film titled Grateful Dawg. "Because he saw life as a long jam session leading to harmony or anarchy, he died—long after he might have, long before he should have," wrote Richard Corliss in Time. "But as a force for good music and good vibes, Garcia can go to heaven and keep on truckin'. Like the song says, he will survive."