fuckyesgratefuldead:

This piece is 15 years old but a must-read.  Thanks for the link.

Here’s a highlight but there’s a lot more:

This guy was a self-educated, full-blown intellectual who was dedicating his life to making music.

There was no place for somebody like Jerry to go at that point. No one who wasn’t alive in the early sixties can imagine what show business was like. It was completely straight. It was all, you know, The Ed Sullivan Show. There was no Dylan yet. So there was not much Jerry could do.

I don’t think people understand that Jerry didn’t have to take LSD to become Jerry. This guy was fully formed by the time he got himself thrown out of the army. And everybody who met him knew this. When [Grateful Dead bassist] Phil Lesh met Jerry, he said, “I don’t like him. He’s too powerful.” Jerry had so much charisma. People always looked at him. They always wanted to hang out with him.

A story I really like from that era is told by Sandy Rothman, a bluegrass musician who played with Jerry. Jerry was working at Dana Morgan Music, and a guy came into the music store, took a guitar off the wall and just started playing really fast and furious. Then all of a sudden he stopped. He put the guitar back on the wall and Jerry said, “What’s the matter, man? Run out of talent?” He had this cutting edge. He was a very sardonic guy. Poked fun at every thing. Saw through it all.

Gans: Yet the public image of Jerry Garcia is this easygoing, soulful, gentle and generous man.

  Greenfield: To the outside world, Jerry was the Dead. Everybody knew he was the leader. But he didn’t want to be the leader. And that’s where the famous Grateful Dead way of making decisions came about: “If everybody doesn’t want to do it, we’re not going to do it.” But the reason they got to that concept wasn’t so much the hippie social experiment but the fact that Jerry, the one guy who ran the show, who knew more about business than anybody, refused to make decisions on his own.

  Marmaduke [John Dawson] of the New Riders of the Purple Sage said something I thought was hysterical: “Every hippie had to talk to Jerry. They either had a trip they wanted to lay on him or a trip they needed him to explain.” And Jerry would do it. He would talk to a kid with long hair from Indiana with no shoes, even though there were twelve lawyers in the other room who needed to know if he was going to sign a record deal. There’s something sweet about that. This guy was very democratic, with a small “d.” He was not your typical rock star.