Jerry Garcia And The Rest Of

Jerry Garcia: And The Rest Of “The Grateful Dead” Essay, Research Paper

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 On

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