Jerry Garcia

• 1. Introduction

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  Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, left behind roughly 15,000 hours of recorded guitar work. That estimate comes from the Bay Area guitarist Henry Kaiser, who calls Garcia the most recorded guitarist in history. Kaiser counts more than 2,200 Grateful Dead concerts and 1,000 Jerry Garcia Band concerts captured on tape, along with numerous studio sessions.

  Garcia himself disavowed the role of band leader. Many people saw him in exactly that role anyway.

  What shaped a musician who became so central to a band built on improvisation? Why did a man devoted to making things up as he went find ordinary life and his own body so hard to manage? And what happened to the objects and the name he left behind? The answers begin in a San Francisco neighborhood, long before any of this.

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• 2. Before the Dead

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  Jerome John Garcia was born in the Excelsior District of San Francisco on the 1st of August 1942. His parents named him after the composer Jerome Kern. His father, Jose Ramon "Joe" Garcia, was a retired professional musician. His father's relatives had immigrated from Spain in 1919 and often sang together at reunions. His mother, Ruth Marie "Bobbie" Garcia, enjoyed the piano, and Jerry took piano lessons for much of his childhood.

  In 1946, when Jerry was four, his brother cut off two-thirds of his right middle finger in a wood splitting accident. The family was vacationing in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Garcia later admitted he used the missing finger to his advantage, showing it off to other children in the neighborhood.

  Less than a year later, Jose Garcia slipped while fishing in the Trinity River near Arcata and drowned. Jerry claimed he saw it happen. Dennis McNally, author of A Long Strange Trip, argues the memory formed from hearing others retell the story. Blair Jackson, who wrote Garcia: An American Life, notes that a local newspaper account never placed Jerry at the scene.

  After the drowning, Ruth bought out her husband's partner and ran the family bar full-time. She sent Jerry and his older brother Clifford, nicknamed Tiff, to live with her parents, Tillie and William Clifford. They stayed for five years. At Monroe Elementary School, a third grade teacher encouraged Jerry's artistic side. Through her, he said, he learned that "being a creative person was a viable possibility in life." Around then he started on the banjo, his first stringed instrument.

  In 1953, Ruth married Wally Matusiewicz, and the family moved to Menlo Park to leave a rough neighborhood behind. There Clifford introduced his brother to rhythm and blues, including Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, B. B. King and Hank Ballard. Clifford would memorize the vocals on his favorite songs and make Jerry learn the harmony parts. Garcia later credited that routine for much of his early ear training.

  Garcia also studied at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute. His teacher there, the artist Wally Hedrick, urged him to draw and paint. Hedrick also handed him the fiction of Jack Kerouac, whom Garcia later named as a major influence.

  On his fifteenth birthday, Garcia's mother bought him an accordion, and he was bitterly disappointed. He had been captivated by Chuck Berry, Elmore James and Bo Diddley, and he wanted an electric guitar. After some pleading, she swapped the accordion at a pawnshop for a Danelectro and a small amplifier. His stepfather helped tune it to an unusual open tuning.

  At Balboa High School in 1958, Garcia kept getting into trouble for skipping class and fighting. In 1959 his mother moved the family to Cazadero in Sonoma County, 90 miles north of San Francisco. Garcia had to ride a bus 30 miles to Analy High School in Sebastopol. There he joined a band called the Chords. The group won a contest, and its prize was recording a song, so it chose "Raunchy" by Bill Justis.

  In 1960, Garcia stole his mother's car and was offered the Army as an alternative to prison. He trained at Fort Ord and was then posted to Fort Winfield Scott in the Presidio of San Francisco. He spent most of his time at leisure, missing roll call and piling up counts of being AWOL. The Army gave him a general discharge on the 14th of December 1960.

  On the 20th of February 1961, Garcia got into a car with Lee Adams, the driver and house manager of a rooming house near Stanford called the Chateau. Also aboard were Paul Speegle, a sixteen-year-old artist, and Alan Trist. Adams was speeding at around 90 miles an hour past the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital when he hit a curve and struck a guard rail. The car rolled. Garcia was thrown through the windshield into a field with such force that he came out of his shoes. He had no memory of it. He escaped with a broken collarbone. Adams suffered abdominal injuries, Trist fractured his spine, and Speegle died.

  Garcia later said: "That's where my life began. Before then I was always living at less than capacity. I was idling. That was the slingshot for the rest of my life. It was like a second chance. Then I got serious." He took up the guitar in earnest, which meant giving up drawing and painting.

  In April 1961, Garcia met Robert Hunter, who would become a lifelong friend and the lyricist for most of Garcia's songs. They played the South Bay and San Francisco scenes together, sometimes at Menlo Park's Kepler's Books. Their first concert paid five dollars each. With David Nelson, they also played in the Wildwood Boys and the Hart Valley Drifters.

  In 1962, at a party in Menlo Park's bohemian Perry Lane neighborhood, where the author Ken Kesey lived, Garcia met Phil Lesh. Lesh later wrote that Garcia reminded him of pictures of Claude Debussy, with his "dark, curly hair, goatee, Impressionist eyes." At another party, in Palo Alto, Lesh proposed recording Garcia for the Berkeley radio station KPFA. They used an old Wollensak tape recorder and captured songs including "Matty Groves" and "The Long Black Veil." The tapes became a 90-minute broadcast titled "The Long Black Veil and Other Ballads: An Evening with Jerry Garcia."

  Garcia soon taught acoustic guitar and banjo. One student, Bob Matthews, later engineered many Grateful Dead albums. On New Year's Eve 1963, Matthews introduced Garcia to his friend Bob Weir. From 1962 to 1964, Garcia mostly played bluegrass, old-time and folk music, including with the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers. Then he, Weir and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan formed a jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions.

  Garcia first took LSD in 1964. Asked later how it changed him, he said: "Well, it changed everything." It freed him, he explained, because he suddenly saw that his "little attempt at having a straight life" was "really a fiction."

  In 1965 the jug band became the Warlocks, with Phil Lesh on bass after Dana Morgan, Jr. and Bill Kreutzmann on percussion. Then the band learned that another group already used the name. Garcia opened a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary and landed on the entry for "Grateful dead." It defined the term as a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who had arranged the burial as an act of charity. Garcia recalled: "I didn't like it really, I just found it to be really powerful." Weir and Kreutzmann hated it. Still, the name spread by word of mouth and quickly became official.

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• 3. The Sound

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  In a 1993 interview with Rolling Stone, Garcia said: "my own preferences are for improvisation, for making it up as I go along. The idea of picking, of eliminating possibilities by deciding, that's difficult for me." Improvising, he believed, took stress out of his playing. It let him make spur-of-the-moment choices he would never have made on purpose. The habit traced back to the Acid Tests, where the music was exploration rather than the performance of a finished song.

  Between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead played 2,314 shows, and Garcia toured almost constantly with them. Breaks came only when exhaustion or health problems intervened, often tied to his drug use. The band's fame arguably rested on never playing a song the same way twice.

  Bob Weir was Garcia's compass when the music grew tangled. Garcia said it could throw him to bridge everything going on rhythmically, with two drums and Phil Lesh's inventive bass. Weir's ability to solve that problem, he said, was extraordinary. "Harmonically, I take a lot of my solo cues from Bob," Garcia added.

  Describing his own soloing, Garcia said, "With most solos, I tend to play something that phrases the way the melody does." His phrases might be denser or differently weighted, but they landed in the same places as the melody. He also wrote songs, including "Uncle John's Band," "Dark Star," "Franklin's Tower" and "Scarlet Begonias."

  Garcia's playing drew on nearly everything he had heard. Bluegrass echoes came from Arthur Smith and Doc Watson. Early rock came through Lonnie Mack, James Burton and Chuck Berry. Freddie King and Lowell Fulson supplied blues, Roy Nichols and Don Rich supplied country, and Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt supplied jazz. As an improviser, he counted John Coltrane among his greatest influences.

  Garcia described his style as descended from "barroom rock and roll, country guitar." One recurring signature was the lead line built on rhythmic triplets, heard in songs such as "Sugaree" and "Don't Ease Me In."

  Don Rich played in Buck Owens's band, the Buckaroos. So did the pedal steel player Tom Brumley, and Brumley shaped how Garcia approached that instrument.

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• 4. Side Roads

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  Garcia played on more than 50 studio albums by other artists, in styles from bluegrass and reggae to gospel and electronic music. Jefferson Airplane even listed him as their "spiritual advisor" on Surrealistic Pillow. Others who sought him out included Tom Fogerty, David Bromberg, Peter Rowan, Warren Zevon, Country Joe McDonald and Bob Dylan.

  From 1969 until October 1971, Garcia played pedal steel with New Riders of the Purple Sage, which he co-founded with John Dawson and David Nelson. Growing commitments with the Dead forced him out. He later produced their 1974 live album, Home, Home on the Road.

  His pedal steel also reached far larger audiences. He played on "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, from the 1970 album Deja Vu. In exchange, the group gave the Grateful Dead harmony lessons while they recorded Workingman's Dead. He added steel licks to Brewer and Shipley's 1970 album Tarkio and to Crosby and Nash's "Southbound Train." Garcia considered himself a novice on the instrument, yet he routinely ranked high in player polls. In the summer of 1987, after a long lapse, he played it again at several Dead concerts with Bob Dylan.

  Jazz pulled him just as hard. For years he played in groups and jam sessions with the keyboardists Merl Saunders and Howard Wales. In 1988 he appeared on Ornette Coleman's album Virgin Beauty. His work with Saunders and Muruga Booker on Blues From the Rainforest launched the Rainforest Band. Acoustic projects included Old & In the Way and a long partnership with the mandolinist David Grisman, chronicled in the documentary Grateful Dawg.

  In the early 1970s, Garcia, Lesh, Mickey Hart and David Crosby joined the composer and biologist Ned Lagin on early ambient music, including the album Seastones. In 1970, Garcia also contributed to the soundtrack of the film Zabriskie Point.

  In 1988, Garcia played the "Soviet American Peace Walk" concert at the band shell in Golden Gate Park, which drew 25,000 people. Afterward he, Mickey Hart and Steve Parish received a police escort to a Grateful Dead show across the bay. He also played a benefit for the peace activist Brian Willson, who lost both legs below the knee blocking a train. His last studio work came in 1995, on three tracks of Blue Incantation by the guitarist Sanjay Mishra.

  In the late 1980s, Garcia began a second career in the visual arts, producing drawings, etchings and watercolors. The Weir Gallery in Berkeley represented him from 1989 to 1996. Its owner, Roberta Weir, who is unrelated to bandmate Bob Weir, sponsored his first solo show in 1990. She also prepared blank etching plates for him to draw on, and they passed back and forth in stacks backstage at Dead shows.

  Garcia was an early adopter of digital art media and carried small notebooks for pen and ink sketches on tour. His designs were printed on men's neckties made by Stonehenge Ltd. and Mulberry Neckware. The art later spread to hotel rooms, wet suits, silk scarves and wool rugs.

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• 5. Wolf and Tiger

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  In late 1972, Garcia paid $850 for the first guitar built by the Alembic luthier Doug Irwin, a model called Eagle. He was so impressed that he commissioned a custom instrument of his own. That guitar, Wolf, took its name from a sticker Garcia added below the tailpiece. It arrived in May 1973 and cost $1,500, an extremely high price for the era.

  Wolf had an ebony fingerboard, ivory inlays and fret markers of sterling silver. Its body was western maple around a core of purpleheart. Two interchangeable plates let Garcia configure it for single coils or humbuckers. When he asked Irwin for a second custom guitar, his only instruction was "Don't hold back."

  During the Dead's 1974 European tour, Wolf was dropped several times, and one drop cracked the headstock. It went back to Irwin for repairs. Through the long absence, Garcia mostly played Travis Bean guitars. Irwin delivered the restored Wolf on the 28th of September 1977, with the sticker now inlaid and a bypassable effects loop added.

  The second Irwin guitar, Tiger, arrived in the summer of 1979. It was named for the inlay on its preamp cover. Garcia first used it at the Oakland Auditorium Arena on the 4th of August 1979, and it stayed his principal guitar for eleven years. Its top layer was cocobolo, over maple stripe, vermilion and flame maple.

  In 1990, Irwin finished a fourth guitar, Rosebud, which cost $11,000. Its inlay showed a dancing skeleton holding a rose. It carried a Roland GK-2 pickup wired to a rack synthesizer, which fed a Korg M1R for the MIDI effects heard on the Dead's Without a Net.

  The Dead began using McIntosh Labs amplifiers in the mid-1960s, at the insistence and expense of the sound technician and LSD chemist Owsley Stanley. Garcia's own McIntosh MC 2300 gained a Budweiser Budman sticker in 1974. The amp is the longest continuously used piece of gear in Grateful Dead history. At a Sotheby's auction on the 14th of October 2021, the Budman sold for $378,000. His last stage rack sold for $226,800.

  In 1993, the carpenter and aspiring luthier Stephen Cripe built Garcia a speculative guitar, Lightning Bolt, named for its inlay. Cripe built it from guesswork after studying photographs of Tiger. Garcia began playing it exclusively. In April 1995, Cripe delivered a backup, Top Hat, which Garcia bought for $6,500. It was the first guitar Cripe ever sold.

  On the 9th of July 1995, Garcia played Tiger during "Box of Rain," the last song of his final Grateful Dead performance, at Soldier Field in Chicago. After his death, his will left his guitars to Doug Irwin, who had built them. The surviving Dead members considered them band property, and a lawsuit followed. Irwin won in 2001. A traffic accident in 1998 had nearly left him destitute, so he put the guitars up for auction.

  On the 8th of May 2002, at Studio 54 in New York City, Tiger sold for $957,500 and Wolf for $789,500. Together they brought $1.74 million, a new world record. Tiger went to the Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay. Wolf went to the collector Daniel Pritzker, who sold it again in May 2017 and gave the proceeds to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Brian Halligan won the bidding at $1.9 million.

  For most of 2019, both guitars hung in the Play it Loud exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the 23rd of June 2019, John Mayer played Wolf with Dead & Company at Citi Field. In March 2026, Tiger sold at auction for $9,500,000, or $11,560,000 with fees.

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• 6. Love and Marriage

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  Garcia met his first wife, Sara Ruppenthal, in 1963, while she worked at a coffee house where he, Hunter and Nelson regularly performed. They married on the 23rd of April 1963. Their daughter Heather was born on the 8th of December that year. They divorced in 1967.

  In late 1966, Carolyn Adams, a Merry Prankster known as Mountain Girl, moved into 710 Ashbury with Garcia, bringing her daughter Sunshine, whose father was Ken Kesey. They lived there together until 1975. Adams gave birth to Garcia's daughters Annabelle on the 2nd of February 1970 and Theresa, called Trixie, on the 21st of September 1974.

  In August 1970, Garcia's mother was hurt in a car crash near Twin Peaks in San Francisco. He was recording American Beauty at the time and often left the sessions to visit her with his brother Clifford. She died on the 28th of September 1970.

  During a March 1973 Dead engagement at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, Garcia met Deborah Koons, an aspiring filmmaker from a wealthy Cincinnati family. Their relationship began in mid-1974. In late 1975, he left Adams for Koons. When that ended in 1977, he and Adams briefly reunited, but she disliked his persistent drug use. In 1978 she moved the children to the Eugene, Oregon area, near Kesey.

  Around 1980-81, Garcia had an affair with Amy Moore, a Kentucky-born member of the extended Dead family. It inspired the Garcia-Hunter song "Run for the Roses." On the 31st of December 1981, Garcia and Adams married, largely for tax reasons. She stayed in Oregon while he lived near the band's offices in San Rafael. They divorced in 1994. By Garcia's own account in 1991, they had not really lived together since the Seventies.

  In the autumn of 1978, Garcia befriended Manasha Matheson, an artist and music fan. Nine years later, during the Dead's spring 1987 tour in Hartford, Connecticut, they became a couple. Their daughter Keelin was born on the 20th of December 1987. On the 17th of August 1990, they married in a spiritual ceremony at their San Anselmo home. In 1991, Garcia said he was delighted to find time to "actually be a father." He dedicated his first art book, Paintings, Drawings and Sketches, "For Manasha, with love, Jerry."

  In January 1993, Barbara Meier, called Brigid, a girlfriend from the early 1960s, returned to his life. She said he called her the love of his life and proposed during a Hawaiian vacation. The affair broke up his family life with Matheson and Keelin. Forty-five days in, on tour in Chicago, Garcia ended it after Meier confronted him about his drug use.

  In spring 1993, he renewed his acquaintance with Deborah Koons. They married on the 14th of February 1994 in Sausalito, California. At his funeral the next year, Koons declared that she had been the love of his life. Meier and Ruppenthal, both present, exclaimed at the same moment, "He said that to me!"

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• 7. Body and Excess

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  On the 2nd of October 1967, police raided 710 Ashbury Street after a tip-off. Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Pigpen McKernan were arrested on marijuana charges that were later dropped. Garcia was not arrested. The next year, his picture appeared in a campaign commercial for Richard Nixon.

  In January 1970, after the band flew to New Orleans from Hawaii, police raided its hotel rooms. About fifteen people were arrested, including road crew and management. Garcia arrived later and escaped arrest. So did Tom Constanten, who avoided all drugs as a Scientologist, and McKernan, who preferred alcohol.

  According to Bill Kreutzmann, the band's cocaine use accelerated through the early 1970s. Garcia used heroin in 1974, probably during the second European tour. During the 1975 hiatus, he was introduced to a smokeable form called Persian Base. The stress of making The Grateful Dead Movie and the collapse of the band's independent record labels deepened his dependence.

  By 1978, the band's chemistry was, in the source's words, "cracking and crumbling." Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux left in February 1979, and Brent Mydland joined that year. Arena touring made the early 1980s commercially strong, but the payroll was large and Garcia's habit reportedly cost $700 a day. He took on a frenetic run of solo shows, including short acoustic duo concerts with bassist John Kahn that were widely rumored to feed both men's addictions. In 1984, the group dismissed Rock Scully, a housemate and manager, for enabling Garcia's addictions and allegedly embezzling the Garcia Band's profits.

  By 1983, Garcia sometimes looked disengaged onstage, and shows grew inconsistent. Heavy smoking had damaged his voice, and he had gained considerable weight. By 1984, he often rested his chin on the microphone while performing.

  In January 1985, the band staged an intervention. Given a choice between the band and the drugs, Garcia agreed to enter a rehabilitation center in Oakland. On the 19th of January, before the program started, he was arrested for possession in Golden Gate Park and entered a drug diversion program. With help from his housemate Nora Sage, he tapered his use through 1985. By spring 1986, he was fully abstinent.

  On the 10th of July 1986, weakened by dehydration, poor eating and a recent relapse on the band's first stadium tour, Garcia fell into a diabetic coma. He woke five days later. He recalled: "My main experience was one of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic, space-ship vehicle with insectoid presences." He had to relearn the guitar and other basic skills. Within a handful of months, he was playing again. In 1987 the band released In the Dark, its best-selling studio album.

  In July 1990, Brent Mydland died of a speedball overdose. Garcia believed the band's chemistry would never be the same. Vince Welnick and Bruce Hornsby joined on keyboards. By 1991 Garcia was exhausted from five straight years of touring and wanted a break, but management pressure kept the shows coming. He relapsed into heroin. After the last show of that tour, in Denver, the band confronted him again. He told Phil Lesh he would attend a methadone clinic and clean up in his own way.

  After the 1992 summer tour, Garcia fell ill again. Manasha Garcia nursed him and assembled a team that included the acupuncturist Yen Wei Choong and the physician Randy Baker. The Dead canceled their fall tour to give him time. He cut back on cigarettes, lost weight and became a vegetarian.

  His condition still declined through 1993 and 1994, and he turned to narcotics again to dull the pain. In July 1995, he checked into the Betty Ford Center, but stayed only two weeks. Then he entered the Serenity Knolls treatment center in Forest Knolls, California.

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• 8. After Garcia

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  Garcia died in his room at Serenity Knolls on the 9th of August 1995. The cause was a heart attack, likely linked to diabetes and a poor diet. He had also struggled for years with weight, sleep apnea, heavy smoking and drug addiction. Phil Lesh said: "I was struck numb. I had lost my oldest surviving friend, my brother."

  The funeral took place on the 12th of August at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Belvedere. Guests included the family, the surviving Dead members, Bill Walton and Bob Dylan. On the 13th of August, about 25,000 people filled the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park for a city-sanctioned memorial. Mourners left flowers and gifts, and a bagpiper played "Amazing Grace." In the Haight, someone reportedly tied a single white rose to a tree near the Dead's old house.

  On the morning of the 4th of April 1996, after a total lunar eclipse, Weir and Deborah Koons, with Sanjay Mishra, scattered half of the ashes into the Ganges at Rishikesh, India. The rest went into San Francisco Bay.

  Garcia had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Dead in 1994. He skipped the ceremony, so the band jokingly carried out a cardboard cutout of him. In 1987, Vermont's Ben & Jerry's had introduced Cherry Garcia, the first ice cream flavor dedicated to a musician.

  In November 1995, astronomers Simon Radford and Ed Olszewski named an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter after him. Tom Gehrels, who discovered it in 1985, had never named it. In 1998 a newly found species of roach was named Cryptocercus garciai. In 2000, NBC aired the animated sitcom God, the Devil and Bob, whose God character was based on Garcia's appearance. Religious groups objected, and the show was canceled after four episodes.

  Rolling Stone ranked him 13th among the greatest guitarists in 2003, then 46th in 2015 and 34th in 2023. In 2015, Hunter and Garcia entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Trixie Garcia accepted on her father's behalf. That year Manasha and Keelin Garcia launched the Jerry Garcia Foundation, which supports artistic, environmental and humanitarian causes.

  On the 21st of July 2005, San Francisco's Recreation and Park Commission named an amphitheater in McLaren Park the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater. It sits in the Excelsior District, where he grew up. On the 29th of October 2005, Mayor Gavin Newsom officiated at the dedication. In 2010, the Santa Barbara Bowl opened Jerry Garcia Glen, with a statue of his right hand along the walk to the venue.

  Tributes have continued. Seattle's Soundgarden recorded an instrumental called "Jerry Garcia's Finger." In 2017, the off-Broadway musical Red Roses, Green Gold, built on the songs of Garcia and Hunter, played at the Minetta Lane Theatre. On the 18th of November 2021, it was announced that Jonah Hill would play Garcia in a Grateful Dead biopic directed by Martin Scorsese for Apple TV+.

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