NONFICTION - Jan. 29, 1995

CAPTAIN TRIPS: A Biography of Jerry Garcia by Sandy Troy (Thunder’s Mouth Press: $22.95; 288 pp.) It would be nice to find a single quotation in “Captain Trips” that exemplifies the personality of Jerry Garcia, leader of the Grateful Dead, but it’s impossible to settle on just one. Is it the 22-year-old Garcia scolding Bob Weir, then a teen-ager and guitar novice, with cries of “chowderhead, knucklehead, idiot goon child!”? The much older Garcia, stirring from a three-day diabetic coma and seeing his hospital bed surrounded by well-wishers, dead-panning, “I’m not Beethoven”? The workaholic who daydreamed in 1991, “Ideally I’d have the Dead play two nights a week, play blue-grass two nights a week, play with my band two nights, and on the other day go to a movie”? That last remark is probably the most typical of Garcia, for although he comes across in this biography as simultaneously modest and self-assured, it is his dedication to music for which he will be remembered. Sandy Troy, a veteran of 200-plus Dead concerts and author of a previous book on the band, has written a workman-like biography, and if he hasn’t determined what makes Garcia tick, he has at least caught the flow of his life. Named after Jerome Kern by his clarinetist/barkeep father, Garcia grew up in San Francisco and environs with an interest in the visual arts, but his skill in music--any kind of music--proved undeniable. Garcia began with a passion for folk and bluegrass, but over the past 30 years has played all kinds of music (with and without the Dead), from country to pop, experimental to Broadway standard, psychedelic to straight-ahead rock, throughout his career bringing a new edge and voice to the tunes at hand. Troy recounts familiar Dead history--the acid trips, the busts, the albums, the deaths, the Heads, the progressive business deals--but what stands out in the book is Garcia’s absolute devotion to his craft; everything else, including family and friends, money and health, took a back seat. “Captain Trips” is a good initial foray into Garcia’s life but by no means definitive, and it says something about the guitarist, and the Dead as a group, that he actually deserves deeper treatment.