Essay/Term paper: Jerry garcia and the grateful dead

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Culture

Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead


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