Garcia, Jerome John

▪ 1996

      ("JERRY"), U.S. musician (b. Aug. 1, 1942, San Francisco, Calif.—d. Aug. 9, 1995, Forest Knolls, Calif.), personified the hippie counterculture for three decades as the mellow leader of the rock band the Grateful Dead. Garcia was the singer, songwriter, and lead guitarist of the San Francisco-based group that emerged from the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic-drug-and-music scene in the mid-1960s. Known for his gentle, laid-back stage presence and soulful extended guitar improvisations, he became the portly patriarch of a devoted legion of nomadic fans called the Deadheads, who followed the band on tour in spirited makeshift communities. Garcia, whose father was a jazz musician, was raised amid a variety of musical influences, including folk, bluegrass, country, rock, and rhythm-and-blues. The band gained notoriety as the party band for Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, featuring revelers experimenting with the then-legal hallucinogen LSD, and fame for performing at such high-profile rock concerts as the Monterey (Calif.) Pop Festival in 1967 and Woodstock, N.Y., in 1969. Although the Grateful Dead regularly released albums, they made only one top-10 single. They became, however, one of the most successful touring bands in the nation, as much for the spectacle of their Deadhead entourage as for Garcia's marathon four-hour musical meanderings. Garcia and the band discovered newfound fame in the late 1980s, when baby-boomer nostalgia combined with a new generation of young fans to make the Grateful Dead more popular than ever before. Garcia was in ill health for the last decade of his life and had long struggled with heroin addiction. He died of a heart attack at a drug rehabilitation centre.

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