Jerry Garcia was born 77 years ago today. Look back at our 1991 interview with the Grateful Dead frontman
Jerry Garcia of the Jerry Garcia Band performs at the Eel River in Garberville, California on August 10th, 1991.f there’s such a thing as a recession-proof band, the Grateful Dead must be it. While the rest of the music industry has suffered through one of its worst years ever — record sales have plummeted, and the bottom has virtually fallen out of the concert business — the Dead have trouped along, oblivious as ever to any trends, either economic or musical.
Garcia admits that these solo jaunts are often more entertaining than his work with the Dead, and one gets the feeling that if he felt he could easily extricate himself from the Dead and his attendant responsibilities, he might just do it. Still, when pressed, Garcia claimed the Dead take precedence. “It’s still fun to do,” he said. “I mean, even at its very worst, there’s still something special about it.
Yeah. Absolutely. You see, the way we work, we don’t actually have managers and stuff like that. We really manage ourselves. The band is the board of directors, and we have regular meetings with our lawyers and our accountants. And we’ve got it down to where it only takes about three or four hours, about every three weeks.
Well, Robert Hunter [Garcia’s lyricist] and I were living together then, so that made it real easy. Sheer proximity. See, the way Hunter and I work now is that we get together for like a week or two, and it’s like the classic songwriting thing. I bang away on a piano or a guitar, and I scat phrasing to him or lyrics, and he writes down ideas. And we try stuff.Oh, jeez, I’d love to. But it has to do with writing the stuff, and like I said, I’m about ready now to write a whole bunch of new stuff.
They had a memorial service for him, where his friends took his ashes out on surfboards — he was a surfer, you know — and they dunked his ashes in the ocean. And they had leis and flowers and all this beautiful stuff. His folks were there, and it was very lovely, and they were very satisfied. I mean, for me at this point, I’m just happy if someone dies with a minimum of pain and horror, if they don’t have to experience too much fear or anything.
My life would be miserable if I didn’t have those little chunks of Dylan Thomas and T.S. Eliot. I can’t even imagine life without that stuff. Those are the payoffs: the finest moments in music, the finest moments in movies. Great moments are part of what support you as an artist and a human. They’re part of what make you a human. What’s been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.
For me, in my life, all kinds of drugs have been useful to me, and they have also definitely been a hindrance to me. So, as far as I’m concerned, the results are not in. Psychedelics showed me a whole other universe, hundreds and millions of universes. So that was an incredibly positive experience. But on the other hand, I can’t take psychedelics and perform as a professional. I might go out onstage and say, “Hey, fuck this, I want to go chase butterflies!”Oh, yeah.
It’s a funny thing when you have kids. I just relate back to my own past, and I know I still basically feel like a kid, and I feel that anyone who looks like an adult is somebody older than me — although I’m actually older than them now. It’s a weird thing. My kids seem to be more mature and older than I am now somehow. They’ve gotten ahead of me somehow. But they’re very patient with me.Heather is twenty-seven. I mean, I have people in the audience now who are younger than she is.
She enlarged the world for me, just like the sailors did. I had another good teacher, Dwight Johnson. He’s the guy that turned me into a freak. He was my seventh-grade teacher, and he was a wild guy. He had an old MG TC, you know, beautiful, man. And he also had a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, the fastest-accelerating motorcycle at the time. And he was out there. He opened lots and lots of doors. He’s the guy that got me reading deeper than science fiction. He taught me that ideas are fun.
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