It was near the close of 1965 when the members of The Grateful Dead trod the boards for the first time, at an Acid Test in San Jose, one of a series of parties organised by author and advocate for mind expansion, Ken Kesey. Part of a motley crew of countercultural figures, Kesey, alongside The Merry Pranksters and chemists such as Owsley Stanley, were united in their goal – collective trip action. As a founding member of The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia – along with band members like Bob Weir and Phil Lesh – had a ringside seat.
As far as genesis stories go, it’s a pretty good one. But how, exactly, did Jerry Garcia emerge from this primordial psychedelic soup, to take such a curious place within both the American cultural ferment, and the American collective psyche? While the other members of The Grateful Dead are iconic in their own way – Bob Weir’s good graces; Pigpen’s ribaldry; Phil Lesh’s professorial curiosity – Garcia looms large in the American consciousness as both as a totemic figure, a kind of universal signifier of psychedelic disreality, and an everyday, meandering folk presence, dedicated to the art of American folk and blues in its myriad, ever-mobile forms.
Garcia’s relationship to the mythology that surrounded his presence in the world seemed complex. He had more than a tinge of the avuncular about him, and that disarmed some, who expected a spun-out wizard – maybe it was the Captain Trips caricature of Garcia that took people there, that classic image of him with the American flag top hat. He was impish, a joker, for sure (those YouTube compilations of him laughing in interviews are both hilarious and slightly disturbing). He was also an intermittently great guitarist and a perfectly functional singer. Hearing him play on any of the many live sets floating around the Deadhead universe, there are moments of golden luxuriance, and equally, moments of longueurs. He took you there, but not always. And yet most every Dead album and live recording has proof plenty of his mercurial talent.
Perhaps it was the unexpected moments of humility, not always expected from members of a group of such cultural import, that grounded Garcia and got people on board with this idea of him as an American icon – or an icon of a historical America, one that no longer exists, that only shone through a few bristling, hypercreative decades, before neoliberalism and the lassitude it wreaks on populations took over. Garcia’s humble observations about himself are refreshingly candid: as he told Mary Eisenhart in 1987, “You know yourself for the asshole you are; you know yourself for the person who makes mistakes, and that’s capable of being really stupid, and doing stupid things.”
By then – less than a decade out from his death, and in his third decade of creative exploration – he seemed wearied of the mythology that accrues around any popular figure. “I don’t know who you’d have to be to believe that kind of stuff about yourself, to believe that you were someone special.” There’s a sense he’d genuinely bristle at being thought of as any kind of folk hero or icon, and that dissolution into the group entity that was The Grateful Dead was his ideal situation; it’s that organisation and the richness of the music it made, and the doggedly persistent counterculture it carried, that was Garcia’s lifeblood.
That counterculture was surprisingly large, though; Deadheads are legion. And they’re passionate. Perhaps Garcia became a folk hero for many, though, simply because he was a conduit, of sorts, to another kind of mythology, the deep archives of American folk song and blues, both through the songs that The Grateful Dead disinterred from history and made their own – like “I Know You Rider”, “It Hurts Me Too” – and the material they wrote in the shadow of those histories. Garcia and the Dead were also generous collectors of the music of their times, taking on Dylan, Bonnie Dobson’s “Morning Dew”, Hank Williams, Kris Kristofferson, John Phillips, Merle Haggard.
Conduit, maybe, but not steward. Garcia never quite felt like an overlording scholar of the music that he came to represent for some people, at least in its revivified form via the electrification and amplification of rock. That’s not to say he didn’t listen and study carefully, but Garcia seemed just as interested in transmutation – the alchemical moment and all its potential. When his playing was at its best, it grabbed hold of the improvisation that was latent in folk song, or that underscored the blues and its time signatures that moved like breathing, and stretched that out to a near-eternity.
Time signatures that moved like breathing… Perhaps Garcia became a folk hero because, even as the Dead became both stadium veterans and travelling circus, there was something in his playing and his presence that communicated, still, at a human scale. The impish grin gave it away; here was someone who was having as good a time as he could, bringing you along for the ride with his trusted bandmates. That capacity to communicate to ‘the many’ as though each was ‘the one’ didn’t seem forced – it was simply part of the complex psychological make-up of a complex person.
There’s proof plenty of the impact that Garcia, and the Grateful Dead, had on popular culture of the late twentieth century, and our current times. All you have to do is look at the artists who populate the 2016 Day Of The Dead tribute, to see their reach: The War On Drugs; Lee Ranaldo; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy; Anohni; The National; Lucinda Williams… But there’s something remarkably everyday about the Dead, too. Obviously, if you’re a sworn Deadhead, probably having travelled the breadth of the land to see them live, they’re part of the fabric of your being.
But there’s also a sense in which the Dead’s music transcended even this and just became a viable byword for the folk song of America. Their songs have settled into people’s lives in myriad ways, and Garcia’s presence is the key signifier of their curious everydayness; that mischievous, smiling visage, and its hard-won wisdoms, stand in for both a belief in possibility, and perhaps paradoxically, exists in the group mind as a signifier of some collectively held belief in experience beyond the everyday: the arcane, the alchemical, the surreal, the psychedelic. Garcia is all that – the everyday and the far, far elsewhere – all at once.