Jerry Garcia Biography

Jerry Garcia was the guitarist and acknowledged leader of the long-lived rock band The Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead was one of the original “jam bands,” famous for its lengthy live shows, with Jerry Garcia and his mates playing minutes-long (or hours-long) solos to crowds of fans known as Deadheads. Their first album, The Grateful Dead, was released in 1967. It was followed by Anthem of the Sun (1968) and many others, including American Beauty (1970, with the hit single “Truckin'”), Terrapin Station (1977) and the semi-comeback album In The Dark (1987, with the single “Touch of Grey”).

The Grateful Dead carried the hippie movement from the 1960s all the way through to the 1990s, with a few breaks along the way for rehabilitative drug treatments for Garcia and others; The New York Times once noted that “In the 1960’s, [Garcia] was known as Captain Trips, referring to his frequent use of LSD, and he struggled through the years with heroin addiction.”

An accomplished musician, Jerry Garcia also had a simultaneous solo career, straying from rock to dabble in folk and bluegrass music. He died of a heart attack while in the Serenity Knolls drug treatment center in Marin County, California in 1995.