Remembering Jerry Garcia

Born to Ruth and Joe Garcia on Aug. 1, 1942, Jerry Garcia was able to conjure magic until the very end.

In fact, “Days Between” – a Garcia composition from the Grateful Dead‘s unfinished attempt at a final album – is as ghostly and moving as anything Jerry ever attempted.

“Achingly nostalgic, ‘Days Between’ evokes the past. The music climbs laboriously out of shadows, growing and peaking with each verse, only to fall back each time in hopeless resignation,” long-time Dead bandmate Phil Lesh wrote in his book Searching for the Sound. “I don’t know whether to weep with joy at the beauty of the vision or with sadness at the impassable chasm of time between the golden past and the often painful present.”

That painful present, in the years after Jerry Garcia’s sudden death on Aug. 9, 1995, is made a bit more bearable with the knowledge of what he accomplished along the way.

Called Jerome John Garcia as a kid in San Francisco, Jerry eventually filled many of the same ballrooms his father, a musician and bandleader, had performed in during Garcia’s youth. Joe Garcia drowned when the Dead legend was only a young boy, however, and his childhood was spent daydreaming, reading science fiction and drawing. His mother gave him an accordion for his birthday one year and Jerry threw an absolute fit until his mother agreed to trade the offending instrument for an acoustic guitar.

That was his ticket to a sweeping brand of pop-culture fame. Together with the Grateful Dead, he came to embody flowery ’60s idealism while blending in elements of the Beat Generation, rock and roll, the blues, jazz, American folklore, songs of drifters and dreamers, 17th century balladry and shamanic trance drumming. It was all there, wrapped up in a chaotic musical package. Some nights you got lucky, and it was the greatest show on Earth. Other nights, it was still pretty good.

A testament to that: Decades after his passing, Jerry Garcia’s music lives on. His former bandmates all continue to play with their own projects; others continue to cover Garcia’s music, applying his unique template to their own work. For a lot of musicians, Jerry’s music is akin to an instruction booklet – or at the very least, a great motivator.

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