Jerome John Garcia has been continually referred to as the backbone of the Grateful Dead. Born to a nurse named Ruth and a swing musician named Jose in August 1942, Garcia was named after Jerome Kern, the Tin Pan Alley composer.
At four years old, Garcia lost his middle finger from his right hand when his older brother chopped it off with an axe while the boys were splitting wood.
In 1957 Garcia received his first guitar for his fifteenth birthday, just as
rock and roll was gaining popularity. Garcia began taking classes for painting at a nearby college while he played guitar in his free time. Garcia played a little country,jazz, folk and blues.
Garcia dropped out of high school in 1960 and enlisted in the Army. Garcia
was still spending his hours at his leisure, picking up the acoustic guitar
at this time. Garcia was discharged from the Army after accruing 2 court
marshals and 8 AWOLs, so he headed back home. For a while, Garcia and a poet named Robert Hunter teamed up to create some music. Later, Hunter would become the main lyricist for the Grateful Dead.
Garcia spent time in Dana Morgan's Music store and bought a banjo from a
teenage employee named Bill Kreutzmann. It wasn't long before Garcia was
employed at the store and performing in a number of bluegrass bands.
Out of the group that started hanging out at Dana Morgan's Bob Weir, Bob Matthews, Marshall Leicster, Tom Stone and Pig Pen formed the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a bluegrass band. With constant urging from Pig Pen, Mother McCree's kept progressing towards going electric, beginning with the formation of the Warlocks, and then the Grateful Dead.
In the mid sixties, the Dead became an integral part of the multi-media
extravaganzas, the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests. Garcia met Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams at an acid test and the two were a couple for a number of years. The whole lot of them, the Grateful Dead moved to 710 Ashbury
where they were fully enveloped in the scene and their music really evolved
into what it is today.
"The Acid Tests meant to do away with old forms, with old ideas, try something new... There were no sets. Sometimes we'd get up and play for two hours, three hours; sometimes we'd play for ten minutes and all freak out and split. We'd just do it however it would happen. It wasn't a gig, it was the Acid Tests, where anything was okay. Thousands of people, man, all helplessly stoned, all finding themselves in a roomful of other thousands of people, none of whom any of them were afraid of. It was magic- far-out, beautiful magic."
This page was last modified on 4/16/98
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