Jerry Garcia And The Grateful Dead Essay examples -- essays research p

Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead 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... ...80, a year after leaving the band; and Brent Myland, of a morphine and cocaine overdose in 1990; never really took away from the Dead's momentum as a live act. After the 1986 summer shows with Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Garcia passed out at his home in San Rafael, California, and slipped into a diabetic coma. His body was not agreeing with all the years of road-life and drug abuse. When he came out of the coma the Dead made a tribute song to growing old gracefully and bravely, "Touch of Grey." Unfortunately, though, Garcia's health was going nowhere but downhill, and according to some people so was his drug problem. He collapsed from exhaustion in 1992, resulting in many cancellations in their tour that year. After his 1993 recovery, Garcia devoted himself to a regimen of diet and exercise. At first it worked and he wound up losing sixty pounds. There were other positive changes at work: He had become a father again in recent years and was spending more time as a parent, and in 1994 he entered into his third marriage, with filmmaker Deborah Koons. Plus, to the pleasure of numerous Deadheads