Kristy McDonald/AP
I wrote this in 1995, shortly after Garcia’s death on August 9. It was published originally in The Absolute Sound, September 1995. It has been lightly updated as of August 9, 2020, the 25th anniversary of his death.
The first time I took Jerry Garcia’s picture, he smiled at me, just long enough for me to get the shot, and then he kept on playing. It was 1986, I was 22, and it seemed so kind of him to acknowledge me at all.
The second time, in 1989, he smiled again, stepped to the microphone to sing, and forgot the line. He looked at me again, and we both laughed. He shook his head — “Same old Jerry!” — and he got the next line right. The song was “Jack Straw.” He had played it about a zillion times.
I never did meet Garcia in person, though I chatted him up on the phone once. Even so, I spent countless hours with him. He was a gentle soul, ugly at first, but then attractive like a stuffed bear, and one of the most unpretentious people I have ever known or known about.
In the Grateful Dead, where he was unquestionably first among equals, he didn’t stand in the center of the stage; rather he left that spot to rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, manifestly the more theatrical of the two. Even in the Jerry Garcia Band, nobody was center-stage; Garcia himself stood all the way to the right.
When asked about his legacy, Garcia replied, “I’m hoping to leave a clean field — nothing, not a thing. I’m hoping they burn it all with me… I’d rather have my immortality here while I’m alive. I don’t care if it lasts beyond me at all. I’d just as soon it didn’t.” In some ways, even after the Dead became the largest-grossing band in the United States for several years, even after their payroll comprised more people than any other rock band, Garcia seemed amazed and amused that anyone would show up to see him play at all. It’s not that he had no ego; this was a man who had earned millions of dollars and the praise of Bob Dylan and Branford Marsalis. Rather, it turned out that he was just like most of us, believing, to some extent, that we’re just one fake away from having our covers blown.
* * *
I saw the Grateful Dead 151 times, dragged to my first show by college friends in 1983, when the Dead were anything but mainstream, when most Deadheads were still hippies and freaks, and when tickets could be had for $12 at the box office the day of the show. I was amazed by Garcia, the most oddly riveting person I have ever seen. He seldom moved more than a few steps at a time on stage, and I can count on one hand the number of times I heard him say anything into a microphone that was not the lyric of a song (or at least what he thought was the lyric to a song — he was notorious for forgetting the words). But it is not hard to see why he attracted such attention.
He was, in friend and publicist Dennis McNally’s elegant words, “authentically charismatic.” My friends and I spent hours staring at him, from the second row and from the nosebleed seats of scores of cookie-cutter hockey arenas. There was a joyfulness about his playing — on good nights music seemed to flow through him from a spiritual place, as if he was some kind of divine conduit rather than just a musician.
Chords from his guitar shimmered with an undisturbed liquid purity that other guitarists have never captured. He played notes that seemed to dance on a fragile layer of breath, notes that were almost human in their yin and yang, both sturdy and vulnerable, spinning and spiraling around each other as they bounced around a space arbitrarily defined by the walls of an arena, slippery silvery threads of music, the voice of the spirit stopping by for a few moments, the most familiar sounds in the universe and at the same instant ephemeral and unknowable. Like all great musicians, his tone is identifiable in just a few notes, though he was known, of course, for splaying, even self-indulgent solos. In an interview I read some years back, Garcia said that to him, playing the guitar was like untangling a series of little knots. You don’t quit until the chain is restored, unbroken.
In Jerry Garcia’s playing was something essentially playful, and from this we all have inferred, I think correctly, that he was essentially playful too. In Amir Bar-Lev’s 2017 movie, “Long Strange Trip,” Garcia is shown in the 1960s asking of any potential undertaking, “Will it be fun?” The day he died, a guy in Golden Gate Park said he felt like Peter Pan had died, that the part of him that was a child had lost something very important. I know exactly how he felt. He died when I was 31, but it was not until a year later that I finally wept, not only for losing the man himself, but for acknowledging to myself, if a little late, that childhood, and the purity of its delights, had reached their end.
Wavy Gravy, one of Kesey’s legendary Pranksters, said that Garcia was a “bodhisattva” — in Buddhism, one who neglects his own pursuit of nirvana so others may pursue theirs. Few who heard what Garcia had to say would dare deny the essential spirituality of his playing.
If Garcia’s playing was spiritual, Grateful Dead concerts in their gestalt reflected that spirit, from the holy to the impish. “Shows” (every Deadhead called them “shows,” as in “Have a good show, man”) were gatherings of misfits and miscreants — people who had unshakable faith that life was — just had to be — about more than day-to-day sameness. I’ve always found it quaint that in the real world, “SSDD” stands for the vaguely amusing but cynical “same shit, different day,” while Deadheads know SSDD as shorthand for “Sunshine Daydream,” the epilogue to the frolicking and joyful “Sugar Magnolia.”
Like the whimsical and carefree moments of Garcia’s playing, Dead shows attracted the court jesters of society, kind and clever and thoughtful scalawags and pixies and nixes who, without spite, regularly thumbed their noses at society. It was all a big harmless inside joke, a convention for those who saw the foolishness of it all — and what a fantasy-come-true that we were part of it! Jerry Garcia rose from a homely high-school dropout with only nine fingers, discharged dishonorably from the Army, to become the star of the show. He was the ultimate misfit, an illegitimate child of a naive and charming and slightly dishonest society, and he whispered to us that if he could be a part of it, everyone else could too.
It didn’t hurt, of course, that there seemed to be an almost tangible magic about him, an elfin contentment that he imparted to throngs who grew so attached they traded stories and speculations about his hobbies, his food (chocolate cake was said to be his favorite — no surprise there), and, often, the color of his t-shirt at the show a couple of days ago. “Trouble ahead, Jerry in red,” read a bumper sticker of the time.
Whatever else he was, Jerry Garcia was not God (though if it came to a race, he had Clapton — who was called “God” in a memorable splinter of 1960s graffiti — beat by spiritual light years). Garcia was all too human, and his untimely death at just 53 years old is sufficient proof of that. He had immense failings related to drugs and his weight, both of which have been amply chronicled elsewhere. Those told-you-so obituaries are nauseating with their spiteful schadenfreude tones, as if a guy by virtue of his popularity should bear responsibility for others’ failings, as if managing one’s own demons is not adequate punishment for the sin of being human.
More to the point of his own shortcomings, however, his singing and, recently, his playing, were at times well past sloppy — an anomalous development in a band whose shows had become increasingly homogenized. It’s true, as Garcia said a few times, that the worst nights were finally competent. But it’s also true that the best nights were rarely transcendent, as they often were a decade or two ago. Time, indeed, was having its merciless way with him.
* * *
Jerry Garcia was not a particularly talented singer, at least in any technical sense. He couldn’t hit the high notes, in part due to decades of cigarettes, and the low notes were usually barely audible. But talent shows up in many costumes, and Garcia was as expressive as any singer I’ve ever heard, conveying pages of emotion in lyrics he liked. I could always tell when he had suddenly discovered new meaning in a song he had been singing for years, the way he leaned on a word or phrase and then grinned to himself.
Nobody would call me a sap, but I got teary the first time I heard him sing a 1989 tune, “Standing on the Moon,” a ballad about a man watching humanity do itself in, but longing for companionship, even if the tradeoff might leave him complicit in some of the senseless cruelty.
Standing on the moon, where talk is cheap and vision true,
Standing on the moon, but I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco on a back porch in July,
Just looking up to heaven at this crescent in the sky.
Standing on the moon with nothing left to do
A lovely view of heaven, but I’d rather be with you,
Be with you.
The yearning in his voice was palpable.
* * *
There was something quintessentially American about Jerry Garcia, an implicit belief, at least in the early stages of his career, that everything could be improved by one willing to tinker in his woodshed. His mind was incandescent, perennially open; he would become excited about music, of course (he said he would always return to Charlie Parker when he was feeling down or needed inspiration), but also his painting, friends, books and especially ideas of almost any kind. If he didn’t play music, he probably would have spent his time reading science fiction and making silly doodles that some marketing genius would turn into a line of neckties.
Despite the ghoulish band name, chosen at random in a legendary moment when he picked a word from a dictionary, Garcia’s songs were joyful, even when they wrestled with hard truths. Mostly, though, he wrote beautiful melodies, a few of which have undeniably become part of the canon of American music. “Friend of the Devil” is part of the American fabric as much as anything by Gershwin or Sondheim or Foster or Guthrie, and most of America’s best songwriters couldn’t match the range or the sheer Americana of the best songs Garcia wrote with his lyricist partner, Robert Hunter. “Standing on the Moon” and “Stella Blue” are evocative ballads. “Wharf Rat” is a universal story-song, in which the teller realizes that he’s not far removed from the wino to whom he lends a dime down by the docks of the city. “Loser,” Deal,” and “Brown-Eyed Women” are unmistakably songs of the West, though they are immediately identifiable as Grateful Dead songs, not country songs.
Songs like “Bertha” and “Touch of Grey,” their only top-ten hit, feel so simple and natural it seemed like they could have been written by children — it was in their very simplicity and ingenuousness that they were unusual. My friend and Garcia biographer Blair Jackson has aptly described “Ripple” as an exercise in “Taoist simplicity.” (Robert Hunter said that he wrote the lyric in twenty minutes, on a Retsina-soaked summer afternoon in London. Though it has taken on many meanings, it seems clear that the lyric of “Ripple” addresses the challenges of living the artistic or literary life, grappling with the uncertainties of whether one’s creations truly enhance the world.)
Who knows where “Bird Song” and “Ramble on Rose” and “Tennessee Jed” came from, except that they were quintessentially and uniquely Grateful Dead. The rhythms of those songs and many others have a fractured quality, like a carnival piano player who is just slightly drunk. Though their chord structures are conventional, their melodies feel simultaneously unfamiliar and timeless. It is next to impossible to imagine anyone else writing these charming, cockeyed tunes that owed their melodies, Garcia once said, “to all of American music, I guess.”
* * *
Going to see the Grateful Dead was like taking a fishing trip, a friend of mine remarked just before our last shows, in St. Louis, in July. He and I don’t fish, but we packed the car each summer, left our jobs (and in his case, wife and infant daughter), and just took off to wherever the Dead would be. For many of us who have always felt our life philosophies were safely apart from the mainstream, the Dead were, as Blair Jackson said, “an oasis in the desert of American lameness.” Following the Dead was one of the last real adventures in America — Garcia said it was today’s version of riding the rails — and in undertaking it, I think we shared something with the anti-hero protagonists of his songs.
As public as the Grateful Dead became since the late Eighties, the experience was still intensely personal for me, and for most people I know. The difference since that time, of course, is that everybody started paying attention to Jerry Garcia — witness the fascination with the Sixties as a “retro” curiosity, and the media circus surrounding his death.
In truth he was not universally liked. Critics, including the influential Dave Marsh, thought Jerry Garcia and the Dead bogus. Their records were generally uninspired, and their live shows, which rose and fell on improvisation, were often undisciplined. But musicians spoke of a different side of him. Upon his death, Bob Dylan said that Garcia had been like a big brother to him, and once made the brilliant remark that Garcia could always find the song in Dylan’s songs. The list of his collaborations is pages long, and includes recording stints with the likes of Ornette Coleman, Carlos Santana, and Rubén Blades. The Dead had played several times with Branford Marsalis, and he and Garcia had formed a mutual admiration club since their first collaboration — a totally unrehearsed show in New York on March 29, 1990 that I attended alone, after a friend had to cancel at the last minute. That night contained some of the most joyfully creative improvisational music I’ve ever heard.
Most critics who write about the Grateful Dead’s music have an axe to grind: either they are unrepentant Deadheads, blind to (usually) Garcia’s limits, or they just hated the Dead, finding them sloppy, out-of-tune poseurs. Most of those critics seem to hate the throngs of hippies that followed the band, rather than the music itself. How, after all, can one really hate “Uncle John’s Band”? At any rate, it’s pointless to try to convince people that they should love the music you love, and it’s impossible to convey the experience of the Grateful Dead to someone who was never there — or who was there and didn’t like it.
In a 1988 interview, Garcia talked about Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the singer who served as the band’s frontman in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and who died in 1973:
It’s hard for me to say what it was about him that people really loved. But they loved him a lot. I know *I* loved him a lot, and I couldn’t begin to tell you why. He was a lovable person. Really, it hasn’t felt quite right since Pigpen’s been gone, but on the other hand he’s always been around a little, too. He hasn’t been entirely gone. He’s right around. I don’t know … You had to *be there* for him.”
* * *
I didn’t go to the last Grateful Dead show, which was, oddly enough, in Chicago, where I live, on July 9. I’ve never much had the stomach for the big stadiums, and the July 8 and 9 shows were in Soldier Field, which holds about 65,000 people. But when Jerry Garcia died a month later, on August 9, I wish I had gone.
I heard the show wasn’t very good, but that wasn’t a surprise. Summer Tour ’95 had been plagued by fan stupidity — an incident in Indianapolis in which a thousand ticketless fools crashed a gate drew national attention — and bad luck of near-biblical stature, like people who were hit by lightning and a campground building that collapsed, injuring over a hundred. And frankly, the reaction that my friend and I had to shows we saw in St. Louis, on July 5 and 6, was that Garcia wasn’t much interested in playing anyway. It was like he was already beginning to contemplate checking out.
But it’s hard for me to imagine that in a few months I won’t be in another anonymous arena strangely personalized by the Grateful Dead, rising to my feet in anticipation just after the house lights have gone down and the muted purple stage lights have come up, seeing the fat guy with the guitar walking his strange misfit walk onto the stage, in front of the red lights of the amplifiers, occasionally offering as much as a hand-wave, the most perfunctory acknowledgment of the crowd who came to share his gift and to have their spirits renewed. I’ll be standing there again, guessing with strangers around me what song he’s going to play, and I’ll be surprised and amazed by the best version of the world-weary “Mississippi Half-Step” I’ve ever heard, catching fire at the end in a flurry of spinning streams of glistening guitar notes.
The second set will begin, as it did every five or six times, with the bouncy “Scarlet Begonias,” a song so full of delight that it actually seems to smile at you. I’ll look around as the lights dance slowly and elegantly through the crowd, and I’ll see the innocent joy on faces young and old, grizzled and beautiful — all, for a mere instant, aware of the infinite possibility for goodness in the world and alignment in the universe.
I’m incredibly sad that I’ll never take my children to see that kind, mesmerizing fat man with the guitar, and that new students at the school where I work won’t rush to me, knowing something vague about my Deadhead past, saying that their lives have been changed by seeing the Grateful Dead. I want to hear the soothing chords and Garcia’s world-worn vocal of the ultimate encore song, “Brokedown Palace” — a tale of a lover who must, alas, be getting on his way — as I sway, moved almost literally by the music itself, intensely alive, and already looking to the next time I can forget everything except the potential for untainted, naive enchantment in people.
As an Internet bon mot among Deadheads puts it: “If you’re ever feeling sad, remember: The earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and you managed to live at the same as Jerry Garcia.” I am seldom at a loss for words, but I have none to express the joy I feel knowing that I was a part of this astonishing, all-too-short, impossible journey in history. I always knew that Garcia knew truths that few others knew, and in some odd, inexplicable way, he communicated those truths while remaining just as unknowable as he always was, just as real and just as inaccessible and just as mysterious.
I’m dubious that God has ever spoken to me, but if he did, Garcia was the vessel he chose. I miss him profoundly.