Dark Star:
An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia
By Robert Greenfield
Morrow, 374 pages, $22
Harrington Street
By Jerry Garcia
Delacorte Press, 76 pages, $15.95
Jerry Garcia apparently never was big on introspection, at least for public consumption. Pushed by publishers to write an autobiography, the Grateful Dead guitarist finally agreed only to a funky tome of childhood recollections about life on San Francisco’s Harrington Street, profusely illustrated with his handwritten prose notes, sketches and exuberant computer art work.
Published posthumously last November and recently reissued–in honor of the singer’s August birthday, according to Delacorte–with a new book jacket picturing a smiling Garcia rather than his art, the slim volume includes memories of marshmallow roasts and anecdotes about his ancestors and his grandparents’ parrot, Loretta, who lived with the family in their small stucco house at 87 Harrington St.
Jerry and his older brother, Clifford, known as Tiff, lived most of their childhoods on Harrington Street with their grandparents, an arrangement that began, Garcia wrote, “during the devastating emotional aftermath of my father’s accidental death by drowning in 1947.”
Garcia did not elaborate on the impact his father’s death had on his 5-year-old psyche. (Joe Garcia, a musician and bar owner, apparently succumbed to an undertow while fishing). Tiff, speaking of the incident in the biography “Dark Star,” recalled that his own childhood ended abruptly with his father’s death; at 10, he was expected to be “the man” in the family.
“But not Jerry,” claimed Tiff, who works for the Grateful Dead’s merchandising operation. “Jerry was coddled totally and he got everything he wanted from my mom until he left home and went into the Army.”
Garcia, of course, might remember things differently–about his supposed coddling or any of the scores of other episodes candidly recalled by nearly 70 friends, employees, former girlfriends and three ex-wives in “Dark Star.” But while interviewees’ memories of Garcia are obviously subjective, most paint a surprisingly consistent picture of a legendary musician whose offstage life left something to be desired.
Garcia, as these folks tell it, fell in love quickly and bailed out of relationships just as quickly, moving on to the next romance with little or no explanation to the women and children he left behind. A musician who avidly sought success and reserved his strongest emotions for his music, he was repelled by Deadheads’ desire to see him as some sort of prophet. And while his affable demeanor reminded some of a beneficent Buddha, his earthly appetites were extreme and often self-destructive.
Like many oral biographies, “Dark Star” can be confusing in its lack of historical context, though the behind-the-scenes anecdotes are often interesting and sometimes sadly appalling. Brief descriptions of interviewees are included in a guide to the speakers at the back of the book, but it’s left to the reader to figure out how big a part these people played in Garcia’s life. And while author Robert Greenfield writes that it is not his intention to analyze or summarize Garcia’s life, he can’t resist doing a bit of mythologizing.
“Like one selected by the gods from on high to be tested from birth, Jerry was first marked by his own brother,” Greenfield gushes, describing the childhood accident in which Tiff chopped off part of one of Jerry’s fingers with an ax during an ill-advised game of chicken. “From the grievous yet sacred wound, this guitar hero drew greater strength.”
Maybe. But Garcia’s vaunted powers, unfortunately, seemed to fail him repeatedly when it came to mustering the emotional strength and maturity to deal responsibly with women and drugs.
“One day he just left and I never knew what happened to him,” recalled Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, Garcia’s second wife and the mother of two of his four children by three women. Apparently such behavior was typical for Garcia, who reportedly once made Grateful Dead singer Donna Godchaux pack up the clothes of a woman he was living with but had tired of and drive the hapless dumpee to the airport while he laid low.
“Whoever he was connected with in his primary relationship, he was always sneaking around to take drugs or be with another woman,” said Sara Ruppenthal Garcia, his first wife. “I don’t know why. . . . He didn’t talk about his internal crises or his emotional process. Really, I don’t think anybody could have stayed married to this person.”
Garcia’s rock-star status allowed him to always have someone on the payroll to deal with most of the messes he left behind. But nobody but Garcia could deal with his escalating drug problem, though worried friends urged him to clean up his act. Unfortunately, some, such as former Dead manager Rock Scully, were heavy heroin users themselves at the time, which didn’t help.
Though Garcia got off heroin for a period after lapsing into a near-fatal diabetic coma in 1986, all too soon he was addicted again to a variety of opiates. In one particularly pathetic episode, Greenfield writes, a dazed-looking Garcia appeared on stage for a sound check sporting a disposable plastic shower cap on his head–“his standard gear for keeping his hair away from the flame as he lit the pipe and/or chased the dragon on the road.”
Sara Ruppenthal Garcia speculates that Garcia’s longtime drug addiction was a wounded soul’s means of avoiding emotional pain; Mountain Girl Garcia believes that the drugs allowed Garcia to spend as much time as possible in a “waking dream state” where he “got his inspiration and his energy and his life lessons.”
At the time of his death in August of 1995, Garcia had completed two weeks of detox treatments at the Betty Ford Center and had checked into another rehab center, Serenity Knolls. Death was attributed to coronary artery disease exacerbated by diabetes. There were only slight traces of heroin in his system.
