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Essay on Jerry Garcia And The Grateful Dead

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Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead

Jerome John Garcia was born in 1942, in San Francisco's Mission District.
His father, a spanish immigrant named Jose "Joe" Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland bandleader in the thirties, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while on a fishing trip, Garcia saw his father swept to his death by a California river. After his father's death, Garcia spent a few years living with his mother's parents, in one of San Francisco's working-class districts. His grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts on Saturday nights, and …show more content…

He was also working part-time at Dana Morgan's Music Store, where he met several of the musicians who would eventually dominate the San Francisco music scene. In
1963 Garcia formed a jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. Its lineup included a young folk guitarist named Bob Weir and a blues lover, Ron McKernan, known to his friends as "Pigpen" for his often disorderly appearance. The group played a mix of blues, country, and folk, and Pigpen became the frontman, singing Jimmy Reed and Lightnin' Hopkins tunes.

Then in February 1964, the Beatles made their historic appearance on The
Ed Sullivan Show, and virtually overnight, youth culture was imbued with a new spirit and sense of identity. Gracia understood the group's promise after seeing its first film, A Hard Day's Night.

As a result, the folky purism of Mother McCree's all-acoustic form began to seem rather limited and uninteresting to Garcia and many of the other band members, and before long the ensemble was transformed into the Warlocks. A few dropped out, but they were soon joined by two more; Bill Kreutzmann, and
Phil Lesh.

It was around this time that Garcia and some of the group's other members also began an experiment with drugs that would change the nature of the band's story. Certainly this wasn't the first time drugs had been used in music for artistic expression or had

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