On this day in history The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia was born
nypost.comSan Francisco on this day in history, Aug. 1, 1942. Garcia is best known as the prolific songwriter, lead guitarist and most visible face of The Grateful Dead.
The band grew out of the West Coast counterculture of the 1960s to become a formidable touring act for 30 years.The band defied music-industry convention that demanded clipped three-minute records for airplay and retail sales. “The Grateful Dead did not play in sets; no eight numbers to a set, then a twenty-five-minute break, and so on, four or five sets and then the close-out,” Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” his seminal 1968 literary nonfiction book that captured the hallucinogenic haze of California counterculture. “The Dead might play one number for five minutes or thirty minutes,” Wolfe wrote. “Who kept time?
Who could keep time, with history cut up in slices? The Dead could get just as stoned as anyone else.”Garcia died in 1995, days after turning 53, following several years of battling health and addiction problems.
Garcia’s image remains closely aligned with the late-1960s San Francisco music scene and with the upheaval in American society that consumed the era.
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