Jerry Garcia Born: Grateful Dead's Architect Arrives

Jerry Garcia didn't want to be a rock star. He wanted to play bluegrass, old-time string music, and folk songs. The Grateful Dead was supposed to be a house band for Ken Kesey's Acid Tests in the mid-1960s, communal LSD parties where the music was part of the experience rather than the point. Garcia ended up fronting the most devoted touring machine in rock history, a band that played nearly 2,400 concerts over three decades to a fan base that followed them from city to city. Born in San Francisco on August 1, 1942, Garcia lost part of his right middle finger in a childhood woodchopping accident and his father, a musician and bar owner, drowned in a fishing accident when Garcia was five. He grew up listening to his grandmother's country and western records and taught himself guitar as a teenager. He was briefly in the Army, dishonorably discharged after going AWOL multiple times. He co-founded the Grateful Dead in 1965 with Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan. The band's music defied categorization: psychedelic rock, blues, country, jazz, and folk woven together in improvisational performances that could last four hours. No two shows were the same. Fans began recording concerts, and rather than suppress the practice, the Dead embraced it, designating taping sections at shows. The archive of live recordings eventually numbered over 2,000 shows. The band's studio albums, including American Beauty and Workingman's Dead, were acclaimed, but the Dead were fundamentally a live act. The Deadhead community that grew around them was part cult, part counterculture, part traveling circus. Fans sold food and crafts in parking lots before shows, creating temporary economies. Garcia struggled with heroin addiction for much of his adult life. He was diabetic and overweight. He fell into a diabetic coma in 1986 that nearly killed him and emerged with a renewed commitment to music but not to sobriety. He checked into the Serenity Knolls treatment center in Marin County in August 1995. He died there of a heart attack on August 9, at 53.