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"I can't remember anything like it," says Ken Kesey, the post-hipster novelist (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) and legendary ingester of psychedelic substances, who paints his old friend in heroic strokes. "Not Elvis, not John Lennon. The Beatles were great, but they were a studio band. And Elvis was great, but he was a good ole boy, not a revolutionary. Jerry has been a revolutionary, a warrior, as long as I've known him. He battled for the American soul, out there on the edge of a dangerous frontier--battling the forces of the Grinch, the forces of darkness. It was a typical old flower-child battle for the forces of good and mercy and gentleness and mischief. You can't work that frontier without getting into some danger now and then. The dire wolf finally got him."
Garcia's influence spanned generations and social strata. This veteran of the counterculture had plenty of friends in high places. Vice President Al Gore gave the Garcia gang a White House tour, and Tipper Gore hung out backstage at a Dead concert. Bill Weld, Massachusetts' Republican Governor, last week wore a black armband in memory of his favorite guitarist. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont was a fan and a friend; last summer Leahy invited the Dead to the Senate Dining Room, where the band met that noted groupie Strom Thurmond. "Boy, Ah heah you're a rock star," the orange-haired solon said, pulling Garcia out of his chair with a jerking handshake and a whap on the arm. According to an observer, Garcia was nonplussed. "Even back when I dropped acid," he remarked, "I never had an experience like that."
Though he often treated his body as a laboratory for exotic pharmacological experiments, Garcia was admired--with sensible reservations--by the nation's most famous noninhaler, Bill Clinton. In an MTV interview last week the President called him "a great talent." Referring to Garcia's heroin addiction, Clinton added, "He also had a terrible problem that was a legacy of the life he lived and the demons he dealt with . You don't have to have a destructive life-style to be a genius."
This is a lesson learned too late by many rock stars. They get high on the double dream of being a sensitive poet and a swaggering stud--Rimbaud and Rambo. Garcia, who was no friend of the Soloflex, nonetheless fitted the mold of iconoblaster. In his drug taking he was a role model to some, a sacrificial totem to others. Wasn't he killing himself to create more beautiful music? That music was often swell, and as leader of the most fan-friendly band in rock, Garcia was a sort of secular saint of pop culture. But he stuffed himself with seductive toxins--and the myth of the bohemian king--until he burst. His epitaph could be three words: Great. Full. Dead.
Jerome John Garcia was born in San Francisco to a Spanish immigrant jazz musician and a nurse; they named the boy for songwriter Jerome Kern. When Jerry was nine, Joe Garcia died in a fishing accident. "He watched his father drown," Kesey notes. "That has always been in his music--the darkness, the next life. It reaches out, squeezes your shoulder, holds you close, and gives you strength to go on when you're grieving."