Rock icon's death marks end of era

photo of: Jerry Garcia performing with the Grateful Dead at Soldier Field on July 8, one of his final concerts.
By Greg Kot, Tribune Rock Critic
Chicago Tribune Article Thursday August 10, 1995.

The Dead's epic four-hour concerts were more like ritual celebrations, and although Garcia barely moved onstage barely even smiled, the all consuming "vibe" of breezy largely improvised music and uninhibited mirth experienced by millions of tie-dyed disciples would have been unimaginable without him.

When Garcia, 53, was found dead of a heart attack in his room Wednesday by a counselor at Serenity Knolls, a drug and alcohol treatment facility at Forest Knolls near San Francisco, the grief cut across generations.

Although the band's following multiplied in the last few years to include many fans who weren't even born when the Dead became the figure heads of San Francisco acid rock in the 1960s, the sextet's ongoing success outside mainstream society was an inspiration to many older listeners as well.

"Garcia is about the idea that middle age doesn't have to be a dead end," the band's biographer and publicist, Dennis McNally, said a few years ago. "That makes him a very reassuring figure for a lot of people."

Former Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten, a close friend of Garcia, told San Francisco's KCBS radio station "I'm probably like a lot of people entering the first waves of numbness. One thing about the band is that they are a time capsule from a Camelot-like era of the 1960s... and I think it is that magic that people were attracted to."

Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, a 50-year-old Republican and fan of the band said, "More than any one song it was just the consistently mellow approach they took to everything, life as well as music."

He called Garcia's death "a loss to both my generation and my children's."

Garcia had been in ill health for years, as drugs, lack of exercise and a poor diet took an increasingly debilitating toll. He survived a diabetic coma in 1986 and collapsed from exhaustion in

"I have a new respect for my own mortality -- again," he said in 1993, backstage at a concert in Las Vegas. He looked renewed, after shedding 60 pounds and adopting a more disciplined lifestyle. "We were burning out ... [but] our whole community has taken a jump toward reaffirmation, and we're kind of gearing up to make it to the millennium. That's our current goal."

But the guitarist was clearly struggling on stage this year at Soldier Field on July 8 and 9, Garcia's final concerts with the Dead. Although his guitar playing was still sharp, Garcia was even less animated than usual, and he frequently forgot or mumbled through lyrics of his best known songs.

McNally said he didn't know why Garcia was at the treatment center where he died.

"It was news to me," he said. "I thought he was going to Hawaii. Apparently he was paying in. creased attention to his health." McNally said he had seen Garcia recently, so he could not have been in the center for more than a couple of days.

The band has lost several members since forming as the Warlocks in 1964, including Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who died of alcoholism in 1973; former keyboardist Keith Godchaux, in a car crash in 1980; and keyboardist Brent Mydland, of a drug overdose in 1990.

Each time, the Dead pushed forward, but Garcia's death puts its future in serious doubt. Although band members always emphasized that they operated as a collective, Garcia was clearly its most visible and marketable symbol -- no other band member commanded a line of T-shirts, posters and dolls as Garcia did.

From the beginning, Garcia stood out because of his virtuosity as an instrumentalist. He picked up speed and dexterity by studying bluegrass banjo and applied it to electric guitar, creating one of the more distinctive styles of the acid-rock era.

The Dead recorded prolifically and toured extensively through the 1970s, building a strong, steady following of "Deadheads."

By the late '80s the Dead were a cultural phenomenon, better known for the party that followed them around the country than for the music they played, an amalgam of blues, rock and country informed by jazz improvisation and avant-garde experimentation.

It was an attitude summarized by Eric Rittenhause of California, who had attended nearly 300 Dead shows, outside one of the band's Indianapolis concerts a few years ago: "I don't always have a ticket, but I've developed a certain Zen attitude about this -- it's as good a show outside as it is inside."

In 1987, the single "Touch of Grey" became the band's first and only top-10 hit and attracted a new, young audience to its concerts, many drawn by the allure of a hippie culture that they knew only from books and movies.

Ironically, as the band members became more removed from the scene they helped create in the '60s --guitarist Bob Weir said he hadn't taken LSD since 1966 -- their audience became more determined to recapture it by dressing in Summer of love paisley and scarves.

But beyond the Halloween-hippie side show, the Dead remained a beacon of self sufficiency. Incorporating itself and doling out year-round salaries and benefits to a staff of 50, the band essentially created its own music industry. Studio records became more sporadic as the band increasingly put emphasis on its annual concert tours.

"A studio record is a lot like building a ship in a bottle," Garcia once said, "whereas playing live is like being a rowboat on an ocean."

Although the flow of new songs became a trickle, the band still drew on a repertoire of more than 200 tunes, any one of which could be played in myriad variations.

Rarely were the same songs played on successive nights, as the band strove to make each concert unique -- a rarity on the stadium touring circuit, where major acts such as Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones increasingly choreographed each moment on stage.

"We're a testament to a group of people who thought and behaved differently, who eschewed the normal way of doing things, the normal business ethics, and did it on our own successfully," road manager Cameron Sears once said. "I think our fans try to follow that example, but all too often they're judged as some freak show strictly on appearance."

Garcia described the band's audience as "respectful and forgiving."

"They like it when we exhibit humanness, when someone forgets the lyrics, or we blow an arrangement or start at the wrong tempo," he said. "They like the tension the music gets when we're not all in agreement."

"In that way, it's like a jazz audience. They're paying attention and they'll listen. This is the finest audience there is."

The Dead refused to pander to that audience, no matter how large the venue. In place of laser light shows, fancy staging or even droll between-songs commentary, the band merely offered six rumpled musicians engaging in free-flowing musical dialogue. Sometimes even diehard fans were driven off as the Dead went fishing aimlessly for cosmic inspiration.

"It's fun to have a part of each show absolutely unstructured," Garcia said. "Staleness is our enemy."

Increasingly, Garcia turned from his own well-worn songbook to those of other performers whom he admired, especially Bob Dylan. When he sang Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" a few years ago, after recovering from his collapse, he brought a special poignancy to the performance.

"Some of those songs, it just hits you...," he said of the Dylan tune. "But it's what made it a great song in the first place, no matter what happens in your life, because there's a part of your life in there. You're dying, everybody's dying, and at some point or another you have to face it."

Garcia is survived by his third wife, Deborah Koons Garcia, a Marin County filmmaker, and four daughters- Heather, 32, Annabelle, 25, Teresa, 21 and Keelin, 6.