Jerry Garcia was born 66 years ago this month, and died 13 years ago, in August 1995, just days after his birthday.
Garcia’s death hit me hard. I was 31 years old, a junior business development executive at News Corporation in New York, about to head out with my boss for a lunch with someone long since forgotten – when a colleague told me the news and sent me reeling. Sitting moments later in a trendy downtown restaurant picking at my plate of fancy greens, I was torn between the suit-and-tie-wearing businessperson I was trying to become and the carefree tie-dyed Deadhead I had been.
Garcia’s death sealed the deal and made it clear there was no going back. As the blah-blah-blah of business and the clinking of cutlery on fine china carried on about me, I tried hard not to cry.
I never met Garcia – although when I was 19 I could have sworn that he had winked and pointed his guitar right at me while I danced in the front row during a particularly solid jam that was tearing the roof off of Madison Square Garden. So what was it about this disheveled San Francisco guitarist and his band of rag-tag associates known as the Grateful Dead that caused such devotion in me and in others? What could we – eventually millions of us, from all walks of life – hear in Jerry and the band that some people never got and most musicians never came close to attaining?
Certainly part of it was his musicianship. Garcia’s insatiable curiosity and open-mindedness led him to explore and excel at a multitude of musical genres – from bluegrass guitar and banjo with Old & In The Way; to sweet pedal-steel country rock with the New Riders of the Purple Sage; to funk and blues and soul with Merl Saunders and others; to his own earnest interpretations of Motown and Dylan with his Jerry Garcia Band.
And of course there were the Grateful Dead, with their enduring original compositions, their admiring cover versions of songs by artists such as Howlin’ Wolf and Johnny Cash and Dylan again, and their acid-laced, lengthy improvisational jams that percolated along determinedly and sometimes careened haphazardly toward some unknown destination, rivalling their jazz predecessors such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker – jams that spiralled along until one of the members of the band pulled a rabbit out of the hat and somehow managed to bring things full-circle, or maybe at times failing to do so and crashing and burning instead into a smouldering heap of ash – but nevertheless all the better for the trying.
Maybe it was their ethos – the Grateful Dead understood community, and user participation, long before these things became buzzwords of the internet era. Their openness to taping and trading concert recordings anticipated the era of file sharing by decades. Sharing and collaboration were how they operated in their music and in their life. From their first hippy days living together in the Haight to their later years running one of the biggest rock-and-roll businesses around, the Dead remained true to their core principles. And the Grateful Dead community was like a carnival rolling down the interstate into towns all over America, year after year, bringing along with it the same friendly, familiar faces – and anyone could join simply for the price of a ticket.
Jerry Garcia was the reluctant figurehead of it all. Accorded near-diety status by so many, he was in truth a humble intellectual – freely experimenting with music and art and, yes, with drugs but remaining ever self-effacing and non-political. Garcia never used his stature to try to lead or to influence, unless it was showing the way to more great music and good times. He let his guitar, and his sweet and soulful singing, speak for him.
In Garcia I felt I had found integrity – a hero to admire, a person who did things in his own natural manner and somehow achieved excellence, satisfaction and success without compromise. Who could be a better model than that?
There was much truth in this, but sadly there was a dark side too. Garcia succumbed at age 53 to the toll of years of self-abuse – chain smoking, obesity leading to diabetes and ultimately to two diabetic comas that almost took him even sooner. And despite his hippy advocacy of the mind-expanding potential of hallucinogens and other drugs, his great talent and tremendous intellect was eventually addled by a sad addiction to smoking heroin which in later years caused him to sometimes even need to be reminded what song he was playing. He was found dead of a heart attack on the floor of a drug rehabilitation center on that day I headed off to my fancy business lunch.
We all have our demons and sometimes they kill us. Those of us who loved Jerry Garcia are lucky, though, that he lived in an era when everything could be recorded – and the Dead were the ultimate open-source archivists. Today we have a collection of many thousands of hours of Garcia’s exquisite live performances. And for those of us who loved him, his soul lives in those recorded notes.
As Bob Dylan said at the time of Garcia’s death: "There's no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player. I don't think eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great - much more than a superb musician with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal. To me he wasn't only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he'll ever know. There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There's no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep."
A quarter of a century after Garcia winked at me at Madison Square Garden, I’m still listening. I don’t wear tie-dye much anymore, but I am running my own business, doing my own thing – and I hardly ever wear a suit. Maybe a little something of Garcia rubbed off on me after all.
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