Word: garcias
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...