"Our audience is like people who like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but people who like licorice really like licorice."—Jerry Garcia. December 10. 1981, to Geraldo Rivera on NBC's 20/20 news magazine.
That statement from Jerry captures the essence of the deadhead phenomenon, which still lives on, fourteen years after his death. In Jerry Garcia: a Biography, Jacqueline Edmonson (Associate Professor of Education at Pennsylvania State University, and author of previous biographies of Jesse Owens, Condoleezza Rice, and the tennis-playing Williams sisters), provides an authoritative and well-researched look at the life of the beloved guitarist.
The subject doesn't seem to fit the mold of Edmonson's other biographical efforts. Maybe she is a deadhead. The other offerings in the Greenwood Biographies series are an eclectic mix. Previous subjects include, Yo-Yo Ma, Nancy Pelosi, Nelson Mandela, Sacagawea, and Johnny Depp. Jerry Garcia? Why not.
The Making of Jerry Garcia
Jerry's ancestors were from Spain. Jerry grew up around San Francisco during the 50's and 60's. Music was a part of everyday life around the Garcia household, although musicianship was only occasionally a pursuit of family members. Jerry and his brother took piano lesson at an early age, but Jerry wasn't too keen on it. His mother bought him an accordion, but he wasn't too keen on that either. What he really wanted was a guitar. His mother relented to letting him trade the accordion for a guitar and amp at a pawnshop.
As Jerry got older he hung out a cool places in Palo Alto, where he talked music and philosophy with people he met. The book moves along at a brisk pace covering this time in his life. Jerry meets the other musician's who he joined up with to form the Warlocks, a band that initially gained notoriety playing at Ken Keysey's acid test parties. The Warlocks evolved into The Grateful Dead.
A Man Driven by His Music
Jerry Garcia was a prolific performer and recorder of music. He practiced a lot too. Most people know Garcia from his career-long work with the Dead, but there was a lot more to Jerry's music. He performed solo, and sat in with other musician's during their recording sessions. Jerry did a lot of guitar work on Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow album and he played the steel guitar solo in the middle of the Crosby, Stills, and Nash recording of "Teach your Children."
From being a founder of New Riders of the Purple Sage, doing his own thing as Jerry Garcia, or in The Jerry Garcia Band, to his collaboration with David Grisman in the bluegrass band Old and In the Way, it seems like Jerry was always playing something somewhere.
The Grateful Dead's evolution into a super group requiring an income of $500,000 a month just to keep the band members and their employees afloat is amply documented—along with Jerry's dissatisfaction with the pressure of having to play so many gigs to keep things from falling apart. Jerry felt like people depended on him, and he didn't want to let anyone down.
The Unraveling of Jerry Garcia
Despite the problems he had with taking care of his health (he was a diabetic) and drug abuse, his dedication to excellence and creativity in music should stand as an inspiration to musicians everywhere. Unfortunately, predictably even, his career was cut short. His recurring problem with heroin, a lack of diabetic-appropriate eating habits, and little exercise (with only occasional periods of clean, healthy living) lead to heart disease and eventually death by heart attack at age 53.
The goal of the Greenwood series is to provide full-length biographies for student use. This explains why the book reads almost like a thesis. The writing is dry, bordering on boring—especially at the beginning. However, it livens up as it goes. Jerry was such an engaging and likable character, it's hard to write anything about him that isn't interesting.
References
Edmonson, Jacqueline. Jerry Garcia: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009.
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