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.