Editor’s note: The following is Part II of a piece on Jerry Garcia, published by Eric Francis on Friday, July 29, 2005 as part of Planet Waves Astrology News. It is now part of the Planet Waves archives, containing thousands of articles and horoscopes written by Eric over the last decade. It is only available to subscribers. Part III of Don’t Thank Me. Thank Jerry will be published at 6 pm EST Sunday.
IT’S DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE that Jerry, who would have been 63 next week, has been gone 10 years, and that the band itself started (as the Warlocks) 40 years ago.
Garcia died of heart failure in a drug treatment facility shortly after his 53rd birthday. Had he been on a cardiac ward, he might have survived; he really needed bypass surgery, because (according to biographer Blair Jackson’s reporting) two arteries leading to his heart were blocked 85%. But apparently that never occurred to him or anyone around him, and if it did, no action was taken. But it’s not like Garcia liked doctors, or cooperated with the efforts of his friends to help him. And I had a Leo friend who died of heart failure at 53 because he refused to do what the cardiologist said, on the grounds that the guy was overweight.
Everyone thought Garcia’s problem was drugs, which was true, to an extent. But drugs always obscure something deeper. Part of that something deeper was heart disease, and part of it was the incredible pressure of being Jerry Garcia. He was basically a mellow, easygoing San Francisco guy who didn’t like conflict and was interested in little other than music. Being Jerry meant not only being a musician, but also being a social icon on a level that even few rocks stars must endure; as well as a media figure, statesman and businessman when he would have been just as happy playing little clubs (which he did a lot of, with many side projects, right to the end of his life). As the crown jewel of a multimillion-dollar touring enterprise that employed dozens of people, he was the spiritual and musical center of a vast, traveling community that everyone knew could not go on without him.
It seems he felt trapped: he could not escape that role, and the resulting pressures (financial and otherwise), so he kept resorting to heroin to make the struggle go away for a while. He also smoked cocaine — a drug that seems to have done the most damage to the Grateful Dead and its organization, though several of its members also suffered from severe alcoholism. Repeatedly starting and stopping drugs took a serious toll on Garcia’s body. And his biographer, Blair Jackson, says he smoked between 40 and 60 cigarettes a day, despite having bronchitis and diabetes. I’ve seen him walk on to the stage many times trailing a thick plume of cigarette smoke behind him, as if he’d smoked the whole thing in one bite.
And, smoke and all, when he got on stage with the Grateful Dead, there could be no doubt he belonged there.
No matter what he struggled with, I still consider him one of my heroes. A person is not their problems, and more than anything, Garcia wanted to give us music — and that is what he did, in an incredible, decades-long outpouring of love. And he kept his sense of humor. One of my favorite stories is officially unverified, but I’ll tell it anyway. He was sitting alone at breakfast in the hotel dining room when a Deadhead came up to him and said, “Jerry Garcia! This is the greatest moment of my life.”
Says Jerry: “Well, I hope it gets better from here.”
He grew up in a household where music was a tradition; his father was a professional musician, so he was infused with show tunes and traditional American music from his first moments. Weekend family gatherings would transition from spontaneous musical events to intense, articulate political discussions. His mother was a classical pianist who could perform Chopin. Yes, this sounds exactly like the spawning ground.
The first instrument Garcia mastered was banjo, and he was said to be a titan at the regimented, fast, and precise playing that traditional bluegrass demands. (Some of his banjo playing is preserved in recordings of a band called Old & In the Way, though he says he was past his prime by the early 70s when that was recorded. Still, it’s well worth tracking down for the band’s renditions of some great old traditional tunes and excellent playing.) He also tried mandolin, dobro, fiddle and autoharp before getting seriously into guitar.
The style he developed was relentlessly unique. His leads would fade to the background when other musicians or vocalists were doing their bit, and then blaze to the open when it was time. He would pluck sounds out of thin air and weave them into the intricate rhythms of melodies that would live once and then disappear back into the ethers.
Reading Blair Jackson’s biography Garcia: An American Life, two stories to me say Jerry Garcia more than any others. First, there’s the story of a record set called the Anthology of American Folk Music, which collected dozens of folk tunes recorded between the 20s and the 50s that were originally released as 78s.
Garcia’s lyricist and longtime friend Robert Hunter tells the story.
“Back in 1961 there was only one copy around our scene, belonging to Grace Marie Haddie. The six-disc boxed collection was too expensive for guitar-playing hobos like me and Garcia, even if we had a record player, or a place to keep a record player. Grace Marie had a job and an apartment and a record player. We would visit her apartment constantly with hungry ears. When she was at work, we’d jimmy the lock to her apartment door or crawl through the window if the latch was open. Had to hear those records.”
Then there was the story of what happened when, some years later, checks started coming in — royalty checks, money from gigs, whatever. He would throw the envelopes, unopened, in the glove box of his old car. Just like that. One day a friend found them there.
What these two stories have in common is music; in other words, you don’t need money. It is not surprising, given his particular values, that Garcia was the one who decided it was just fine that Deadheads were taping shows and trading the tapes. In Deadhead culture, there was and still is a tradition of giving the recordings away, or trading for blanks or copies of other shows, which is something I’ve been the beneficiary of many times and never seen violated once. Still, the Dick’s Picks series of live concerts produced and sold as CDs by the Dead organization sells wildly despite the countless bootlegs in circulation.
And as for the gig itself, why play a one-hour show when you can play a four-hour show?
If you want to know why you can just write to Planet Waves and ask for a free subscription if you need one, or email the newsletter to your friends — don’t thank me; thank Jerry.
Well, for that, and a lot else besides.