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Except for painting, which he loved and worked at until his death, Garcia found any studies intolerable. He didn't bother finishing high school, enlisting in the Army at 17. Eight AWOLs and two courts-martial later, he was back on the San Francisco streets and hooked up with Robert Hunter, a coffeehouse habitua and, within a few years, the lyricist for Garcia's songs. He also met Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann, who would become the Dead stalwarts on rhythm guitar and drums. They formed a jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, and when they went electric in 1965--Bob Dylan having proved it was permissible for folkies to get plugged--they changed their name to the Warlocks. The year after, they were the Grateful Dead, from a folktale cycle about a reluctant corpse.
At first the Dead was simply the nth band in San Francisco's rock scene. But the group could write catchy songs with irony and sidewise angst--jingles for jangled nerves. Ripple, Sugar Magnolia, Uncle John's Band, lots of others offer sophisticated pleasures in a simple form. (Other pieces, played in eccentric signatures, are closer to cool jazz.) To the lyrics Garcia lent humanity with his frail tenor. "His voice was a picture of the American past," says singer-composer Elvis Costello. "You could call it sepia-tinted. It's like one of those great old Civil War pictures that is so sharp it shocks you how much detail it holds, yet at the same time it's not in color." As for Garcia's guitar playing, Costello says it "wasn't a question of virtuosity for its own sake, dazzling with millions of notes. It had a lovely tone and touch, and even when he played steel guitar, he added his personality and humor to it."
But mere musicianship doesn't make a band a legend. The Dead had this: Like no other group in the era of megamoney rock, Garcia's gang fused with its fondest listeners. In 1965 the group's first fan club, with all of three members, called itself the Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion--a name that the Dead gratefully took as the title of the first song on its first album. Over time, Deadheads improvised their own vocabulary, infrastructure and code of honor. Mythologist Joseph Campbell said they were the most recently developed tribe on the planet.
Sometimes the tribe acts like Attila's. Last month violence erupted in Indianapolis, Indiana, when ticketless Heads stormed a fence around the venue. A few old hands say the culture has become more dissolute and meanspirited. But for every thug, there are a dozen Deadheads ripe for a religious experience. Hey, everyone has to believe in something. And in this woozy age--when the spiritual and the secular often blend, and born-again Christians are rivaled in fervor by devotees of Elvis, Mr. Spock and Crow T. Robot--it was no surprise to see signs announcing that JERRY IS GOD.
One group of fans, the Church of Unlimited Devotion, had members, known as "Spinners," who performed dervish maneuvers at Dead shows, took vows of celibacy and purported to worship Garcia as a divinity. He tepidly indulged the Spinners, once telling Magical Blend magazine, "I'll put up with it until they come for me with the cross and nails."