Grateful Dead’s Garcia: A Glimpse of His Colorful Past and Our Future

While touring the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts--immersed in that area’s quaint and cultivated rusticity--my wife and I heard the news of Jerry Garcia’s death.

Garcia was the mainstay not only of one of the venerable bands of the 1960s, the Grateful Dead, but an inspiration to a continuing countercultural spirit. We called him “Jerry,” with the intimacy of friendship, even though we were far from being “Deadhead” devotees. Cristina and I realized that something more than a life had ended with his passing.

As we traveled onward through the loping hills covered in impenetrable green forests, we knew that we’d lost a part of ourselves in Jerry’s death. Without our realizing it, he had come to symbolize the adventurousness and constant seeking that was the true inner nature of our generation. Now all that was somehow transmuted into the rush of nature around us. Jerry was truly everywhere.

When we returned to our home in San Francisco, the spontaneous demonstrations of tribal sorrow were over. All we noticed in our Haight-Ashbury neighborhood were the inevitable memorial posters (and memorabilia merchandising). The death of Jerry Garcia seemed to have become just another musical figure who had finished his discography.

A few months later, it was announced that a book Jerry had been working on before his death was about to be published. Jerry had not been known as much of a writer. Guitar player, singer, band member, ice cream mascot, tie designer, songwriter even, but his cogent opinions on culture and society were always within the format of the interview or dialogue. Jerry had always been the most Socratic of rock stars. Questions elicited illuminating answers.

“Harrington Street” (Delacorte Press, $22.95) was being billed as “an anecdotal personal history,” a little book about his childhood. Without knowing much more than that, amused speculation ran over the possibilities. Did he only get to finish the first part of a complete autobiography? Was this intended as a children’s book? (A possibility, since his album with David Grisman of music for children had been released earlier in the year.) Was this going to be a real book or some patched-up exploitation?

When my copy of “Harrington Street” arrived, I was struck by the pandemonium of color throughout. Jerry had certainly gone crazy with a computer, I thought; almost all the images were the vivid distortions and abstractions of a computer-generated program. Jerry’s flair for color--which had shown up in the line of designer ties he marketed--was a dazzling display, with bold swirls of pastels and blends, chaotic abstractions, nervous drizzled lines, faces that were caricatures, people who were smudges and streaks.

At the same time, I was nonplused at the apparent meagerness of the text, which in total is hardly as long as this article. It is composed of apparently randomly gathered short reminiscences, and even shorter vignettes.

Jerry’s childhood was filled with the tragedies, comedies and preternatural events that all childhoods seem to encompass. With his father dead by drowning in 1947, 5-year-old Jerry and his brother, Tiff, were raised by his mother’s parents in a working-class neighborhood in San Francisco. The characters around him were vivid to the young Jerry and his quirky, conversational style of prose conveys some of the wonder of living at that time, in that place, with those people.

Jerry being Jerry Garcia, however, the reminiscences are tainted by the spectacle aura of celebrity. We indulge him for insight to his character, the music, his legacy to the culture. The flamboyant grandmother Tilly, Gibson Girl, radical union organizer; the parrot Loretta, survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; his discovery of the magical elements of fire while roasting marshmallows--these memories of his are only made memorable to us in their brief casual retelling because they are Jerry’s.

Ultimately, it is the fact of the book itself that has more impact.

Surprisingly, Jerry worked on the book “all the time, nearly every day,” according to his wife, Deborah Koons Garcia, in the preface. Although the individual sections are brief--a few paragraphs, or just a few sentences--Jerry’s writing process is illuminated by the inclusion of some of his original handwriting, distinctively lettered and laboriously worked over.

Notes and drafts intermingle with typeset copy and it’s easy to see how Jerry pressed hard against the paper with his brain to unlock the secrets of his childhood. Incidents appear in different versions, as his memory waxed and waned and his emphasis changed. Two stories were left unfinished at the time of his death and are included as third-person narratives.

Meeting with Deborah Garcia in their suburban Mill Valley home, I came to understand some of the reasons why “Harrington Street” was such an obsession for Jerry in the last year and a half of his life. It wasn’t because he was a writer. It was because he was an artist.

“People had always been bugging him to do a book,” she said, speaking from a large couch in their sunny living room. This was were Jerry had lived, and it was the epitome of middle-class comfort. “He was always getting offers to do an autobiography.” Deborah Garcia was a budding filmmaker and during one of her film projects, she and Jerry discussed an idea he had for a book.

“It intrigued him to do an autobiography that he could draw,” she said. “He’d never really done an art book before. He’d had some stuff published, but he never had anything to do with it.”

Jerry’s drawings and paintings had always been visibly part of the Grateful Dead mystique--playful and psychedelic. What captured his imagination was a backward look to his beginnings.

“He had a lot of affection for his childhood,” said Deborah Garcia, although he had reservations about some of the incidents he chose to write about. “All his memories seemed to be bummers, though [in his writing] they didn’t come out that way.”

“Harrington Street’s” reminiscences are filled with death, humiliation and fear. The book ends with the image of a very young Jerry being forced by “the girls up the street, mean girls . . . to stand on a box and take his pants down.”

But Jerry had this cosmic view of his memories.

“He thought they were funny. He liked them,” his wife said.

So he worked long and hard on “Harrington Street,” as an art work, and it was a revelation to me that this Deadhead icon, this Merry Prankster, this Mr. Natural visionary, was such a tech-head. That is, he reveled in computers and the brave new world of technology. His book was a reflection of his sophisticated knowledge.

“He always liked the latest and best toys,” said Deborah Garcia, “which was really fun.

“He had one of the very first computers that Apple did, and he kept updating it. A more powerful computer would come along and he would get that.”

She invited me to peek into a small room, to see what she was talking about. And there I was looking at Jerry’s nerve center. A Power PC 8100/80. Next to it was a Wacom tablet and scanner, which allowed him to draw images free-form and scan them directly into the computer. A Painter program gave him the palette to bathe the book in color.

I laughed a small laugh to myself. There it was: Jerry Garcia, nerd savant.

The book was just about done by the time Jerry died last August. All that remained was to flesh out the unfinished stories, work up a final design, include the drafts and alternate versions and add to the illustrations with samples of Jerry’s own calligraphy.

“Harrington Street” is out now, not more, not less, than what Jerry wanted it to be. For us, it’s a curious mingling of insight to his past, and a glimpse at art techniques of the future.

That Jerry. He’d always been one step ahead of us, first in consciousness, finally in visionary technology. No doubt he’s taken wing on what Milton called the “never-ending flight of future days.”